remembered seeing some construction in that direction when I parked. It made no impression. There’s always construction on government property. Campaign donors and relatives of elected officials have to make a living.
“There’s a lot of mud over there because I heard they accidentally cut into a water pipe,” another girl said.
It made perfect sense. But so what? What did somebody jack-hammering through a buried water pipe do to get these kids worked up over an urban folktale? There had to be something else. I scrounged around for a thread in what they were saying.
Frankie isn’t in a secret escape tunnel, seemed to be it. Which left the question, Then where is Frankie? A question about the possible futures of young women already off to a bad start.
“Maybe this Frankie really did okay and has a job up in Sacramento repairing computers for the state legislature by now,” I suggested. “What do you think?”
And it worked, sort of. One by one they advanced theories about where Frankie might be, doing what. The room has a pull-down map of the United States, which I pulled down so we could locate Frankie in cities all over the U.S. even though the map only has forty-eight states. We made a chart of jobs, job training, predicted income. At the break the kids went outside to smoke and play with Brontë as usual. I went to the office and asked for the record of a girl named Frankie Lopez. To my surprise, there was one.
Francesca Maria Elena Lopez had been in juvy several times, her last stay five years in the past, for prostitution. She was then fourteen. The ID photo clipped to her file showed a scrawny, big-eyed kid snarling at the camera. And failing to hide that hurt, lost look you invariably see in baby hookers. I can’t stand that look. It makes me think about killing adults who use children for sex. And then about going to prison like David, breaking my father’s heart. Unpleasant thoughts.
According to the record, Frankie Lopez served out her time and was released to the custody of juvenile court, which probably meant she was placed in foster care. The social worker, a Glenda Martin, had referred the girl to a family counseling center, but there was no follow-up on whether she ever went there. The juvenile probation officer had also contributed no paper to the file. Frankie Lopez, for all practical purposes, was just gone.
I didn’t tell the kids any of this. Confidentiality rules prevent any discussion of cases, but that wasn’t why. Something had happened to upset the girls, make them jittery as a herd rather than as individuals. Telling them about Frankie’s file wasn’t going to produce the explanation I wanted. Only their trust would do that.
After the break I talked about marriage and divorce rates even though nobody had read the chapter. They took notes as I drove home the fact that every woman must have a marketable skill, married or not. My mother and Carter Upchurch had told me the same thing. “You must be able to get a job and make money, just in case something happens to your husband.” All little girls are told that. It made me wonder why I needed a Ph.D. to say the same thing.
When the class was over three of the girls somberly approached my desk. Two of them petted Brontë while the third handed me a postcard.
“I got a library book outta the library this morning,” she said, watching me. “This book.”
It was a copy of Jane Eyre, not a big seller at juvenile detention centers.
“An interesting book,” I plugged. “About an orphan girl who has a rough childhood and later falls madly in love with a man who has a terrible secret. But she doesn’t let him—”
“That was in it,” she interrupted as the other two, and Brontë, looked at me expectantly.
I read the postcard, which had a photograph of tulips in a public park on the front. It had been mailed years ago, shortly after Frankie’s discharge. It had been mailed from Albany, New York, to a Bugsy Sneller at the detention center’s address. The message just said, It’s working out great! For sure! But you can’t write to me or anything. Okay? The bottom was a tangle of Xs and Os followed by Frankie. The I was dotted with a heart.
“Frankie Lopez?” I asked.
They all nodded.
“So who is Bugsy Sneller?”
They all shrugged.
“I’d like to keep this until next Tuesday and think about it, if that’s all right. It’s so interesting, isn’t it?”
Nods, big smiles of relief. They wanted me to take this voice from a past similar to their own. Take it away until they could revise their folktale. By next Tuesday it would be done. There would be new stories about Frankie Lopez, stories accepted as gospel, as if they had always been.
The clerical staff was gone when I left, so I couldn’t check the file on Bugsy Sneller. But at least I knew what was spooking the kids. The postcard, no matter who really wrote it, meant to them that their legend hadn’t died after all. And somehow that was scarier than starving to death in a tunnel. I realized how bad a real future could look to kids who didn’t have any future. It made me sick.
And tired. After feeding Brontë in the truck and grabbing a curried tofu salad for myself at a health food grocery, I went to the beach. Brontë chased a tennis ball for fifteen minutes and then I stretched out on my beach towel for a nap. San Diego’s beaches aren’t crowded at dinnertime in September, and the summer lifeguards are gone. But it didn’t matter. I could have been snoozing under a blanket of loose twenty dollar bills and no one would have come within six yards. Watchful Doberman eyes made sure of that.
An hour later I had more energy. A good thing, since I was about to hit Roxie Bouchie’s Thursday night line-dancing class at Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro. I was going to ask Rox to do a psychiatric evaluation on Muffin Crandall. She’d do it; I already knew that. But I’d have to pay for the favor by learning the Tennessee Stomp or something. Rox had been at me to learn line-dancing since I discovered her secret two months after our first meeting. The secret is that on Thursday nights Roxie Bouchie assumes an alternate identity—The Only Black Woman in North America Who Knows All the Words to Every Song Recorded by Garth Brooks. I had resisted her suggestions about the line-dancing classes, but curiosity about Muffin Crandall was pushing me over the edge. I hoped Rox wouldn’t expect me to have bought cowboy boots for my first lesson.
Chapter Five
As a rule, bars give me a headache. The music is usually little more than synthesized pounding, and I am always uncomfortable when total strangers sidle up to tell me they haven’t seen me in here before. I mean, what do you say? “That’s because I haven’t been in here before?” The linguistic rules of bars are not rational. I can’t cope.
But Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro, usually just called Auntie’s, isn’t like that. The music is recognizable as music and everybody assumes they’ve seen you before even if they haven’t. A laid-back gay hangout, Auntie’s still serves regular drinks although now practically everybody orders imported water. Non-carbonated, because nobody wants to burp while waltzing to Patsy Cline singing “I Fall to Pieces.” And everybody dances at Auntie’s. The two-step is everything. At Auntie’s the only rule is that if you’re not in a full-body cast you’re expected to dance at least once with anybody who asks.
When Brontë and I arrived, Rox was out on the dance floor already, wearing a spectacular purple-fringed blouse with a vest in gold and white patchwork brocades. I recognized the brocades from a set of upholstery samples BB the Punk had scored from one of his many contacts in the decorating industry. BB could turn practically anything into haute couture, and Rox was his favorite model. A guy in a Stetson leaned over the dance floor rail to tell me proudly that BB was also designing the costumes for Auntie’s competitive line-dance team. For an upcoming tournament the team would be in sequined ecru peasant shirts with Levi’s hand-dyed a particularly difficult shade of malachite green. A Celtic theme. Matching green Irish caps, also sequined, and homespun vests featuring lavish embroidery in Celtic motifs. But with Rox as trainer, Auntie’s team could win wearing baggy boxer shorts, right?