hand, was a verbal jouster who liked to go at it, which played to my available senses. When he first came to us, he kept to himself—who wouldn’t with strangers? He grunted when spoken to, but that was the same as most teenaged boys I’d been around. As soon as he began opening up, his attitude got under Patrick’s skin, but it didn’t bother me, though I’ll admit I never saw his grimaces or gestures. He started calling me Cowboy Bob, but that didn’t get a rise out of me. “Watch out for my shit-kickers,” I told him, smiling and raising my boot. “They have a mind of their own.”
After a couple of months, I could tell I unsettled his preconceptions. I wasn’t a threat, for one thing, or an authority figure. Yet I wasn’t a kid either. I had a marginal status of my own. And I was a reporter—he respected that. He started saying I had mad skills getting around. “That shit’s harder than being black,” he admitted.
“What color are you again?” I said.
He didn’t respond right away. Then he said, “People see you. You got that white cracker thing going even if you can’t see it. It’s like a virus, the way it spreads. Gets in everything.” He could be perceptive and articulate that way. All year, in his school essays, I tried to help him draw that out, when he would let me.
Devon had been with other families before he lived with us. His mom had been sent to minimum security at Chino for identity theft, and she had two more years to serve. He hated but had never known his father—a white guy who’d screwed his mom and left them both. About a year and a half ago, when he was a skinny fifteen-year-old, he’d tried to take on a football linesman at school who had called his mom a whore. The white kid beat the shit out of Devon, giving him a black eye and a bruised rib. But it was Devon who got busted. A blunt—a cigar hollowed out and filled with weed—fell out of his shirt pocket during the fight. Those few grams on school grounds, his testy demeanor, and a host of priors sent him to Juvenile Camp for six months.
When he came to us, he was transferred to Monterey High, a continuation school. In the second semester—the recent spring—an English teacher found that if he let Devon read about rebels and strife, he’d stop challenging everything under the sun and focus on the readings, which sparked other kids’ interest. Devon devoured The Autobiography of Malcolm X, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and On the Road. I listen to books all the time. When I was a kid, cassette tapes from the library saved me—mysteries at first and then anything I could find, as long as it had a story that took me places. Sometimes Devon and I would sit and talk—“choppin’ it up,” he called it. We’d start with whatever he was reading and end up arguing about politics or race or religion. He began to figure out how to come around the other side of an argument instead of attacking full tilt all the time. But when he got backed into a corner, he liked the shock of a personal affront. “You are one well-read exaddict,” he told me once, “if you count shit like books on tape.”
Those quips pissed off a lot of people, but they made me smile. They endeared him to me, and I often found myself wanting to protect him—tough as he pretended to be—from Patrick’s quick tongue and oddball needs.
Still standing in the doorway with my hand on Isa’s hip, I heard from the kitchen the crisp sound of a page turning. Patrick sometimes read at the kitchen table, arcane books about outlandish thefts from archaeological sites or the battle to secure the border. But if he was reading now, I knew it was for effect: Was it to piss off Devon? Or to feign indifference to my touching his wife? Or to hide his anger at Isa?
I swept my hand up to Isa’s back just before she pulled away and I was left standing alone, without Charlie or my hat.
“It’ll be good to get out of L.A.,” Patrick said from the kitchen table. He probably had his back turned, his head in the book. “You’ll learn something about yourself.”
“Right,” Devon scoffed. “From adults like you.”
“Don’t push me, boy,” Patrick said evenly.
“Don’t call me ‘boy’!” Devon said slowly, mimicking Patrick’s tone.
They had never come to blows, but they’d blustered plenty lately.
“Stop it, you two,” Isa said.
Patrick turned another page. “You’re still a boy,” he said dismissively, “whether you like it or not.”
“Kevin,” Isa said, “come look.”
“Like I can see.”
“You know what I mean,” she said lightly, trying to distract everyone, I knew. That was one of her blessings: her generous spirit, the way she tried to bring us all together.
I walked across the linoleum toward my room.
“Stop!” Patrick called.
The stiff toe of my boot struck, not hard but squarely, against something heavy. Thank goodness for my dumb-ass boots, I thought. My foot didn’t hurt at all.
Devon laughed.
“What the hell!” Patrick said. His chair scraped on the floor. “I bet you chipped it.”
I leaned down, reaching. It was a massive box of some kind. Almost up to my waist. Wooden. With carved patterns on the side.
“Look at that smudge from your boot,” Patrick said.
“What is it?” I said.
“A coffin,” Devon said sarcastically. “He wants to take this dog to Florida.”
“Look at the carvings!” Patrick said. “One of a kind. Hand-carved maple. Her dad said he wants something different. Not those ready-made boxes that cost a mint and have shiny handles.” He spoke rapidly, the excitement real.
“Kevin,” she said, “don’t you think it’s morbid to take it to Daddy?”
I crouched and felt along one side: varnish or lacquer made the surface slick and smooth. My fingers traced a raised cross with intricate embedded patterns of lines and angles. Its juncture was encircled by a halo. Along the edges of the cross, the wood was chiseled away like little waves.
“Wow,” I said.
“How much did it cost?” Isa asked. “You promised not to use the credit card anymore.”
“That’s the beauty,” Patrick said. “His estate will pay for it. We’re going to make money on this baby. We can’t lose.”
Beyond the cross, I touched a horizontal figure carved in relief, wings outstretched, feet protruding from a flowing frock, a long trumpet from its mouth. “An angel,” I said. I brought my fingers over her slowly, across the feathers of her wings and the folds of her frock. Her hair blew back as if in a breeze. Her eyes laughed, her cheeks full from puffing the trumpet. I liked that; she felt alive.
“I’m going to sell them to funeral parlors,” he said. “People are going to love these babies. And I’ve got the sole franchise.”
My fingers came across Ray’s small hands; he was feeling the casket too. I thought about his mother, gone less than a year: Had he seen her in a coffin? As I gripped his hand softly, he pulled away like in the game we sometimes played—grabbing hands at the kitchen table. Or was he upset? I couldn’t tell.
“What’s inside?” Ray said.
Patrick ignored him. “What do you think, Kevin?” He wanted my approval.
Past the angel, there was a second cross. Symmetrical. An angel in the center, with an ornate cross on either side of her. “Where’d you get it?” I asked.
“An old carpenter in the San Gabriel Mountains. You should’ve seen all the coffins he had lying around. Like a museum. And sculptures and weird old things. He even had bones.”
“Stop it!” Isa said. “You’re not selling bones again.”
“It won’t open,” Ray said.
“There’s two latches,”