And the big rock of poverty that dropped into the national pond spread other ugly ripples. The FBI estimated twenty-four thousand violent gangs. Prisons were overcrowded to the bursting point, their population over two million, with millions more ex-cons and parolees also on society’s fringes.
The total might not add up to twenty million, but it was a hell of a lot of people. How many more were that one short step away, who weren’t showing up on any economic-indicator charts? Outwardly doing all right-but in fear of losing their jobs, facing power bills that suddenly tripled and surging gasoline prices that hammered commuters and other escalating expenses, unable to afford health insurance and knowing that a sickness or injury would wipe them out. Literally a paycheck or two away from losing everything. If you went another rung down the socioeconomic ladder, you were talking people who worked for minimum wage, who would never own a house, who were condemned to a semi-desperate life with the talons of drugs and crime clawing at their children.
When Monks was growing up, the lucky kids had a chance at college. Others went into jobs in factories or the trades, not glamorous, but stable and adequately providing. If you were responsible, you could live decently, buy a home, and hope that your children would have it better-the American dream. His own father had been a laborer, and his mother, a grade school teacher. He had been one of those lucky kids.
Now that was pretty much gone. Lucky was more and more equivalent with affluent, and for the others, that stable life was edging closer to extinction all the time.
For all of Freeboot’s madness, he had pinpointed a major weakness that had crept into society over the past couple of decades-a huge mass of rage and desperation. Monks thought of it in terms of basic chemistry. If you put water in a pot and turned up the heat and pressure, the molecules got more and more agitated until they finally boiled over.
It had been eerie, watching Freeboot’s words come out of a stranger’s mouth. But the really surprising thing, Monks realized, was that he was not really surprised. The three months of constant worrying and looking over his shoulder had been building, not receding.
He had been waiting for something.
25
Sara’s antiquated hot tub dated back twenty-some years, to when she and her coke-dealer ex-boyfriend had first lived here. It was an indulgence, even a caricature of California decadence, but nice for chilly nights and watching the ocean, calm and starlit, or ominous under an incoming wall of fog, or wild with a storm.
“It’s just a word-of-mouth thing, don’t you think?” she said. She was leaning back, water up to her chin, calves draped across Monks’s thighs. Her hair was a damp, dark cloud. “What that homeless guy was saying, that sounded like Freeboot? Something that gets passed around between street people. Maybe Freeboot wasn’t even the first one who made it up.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I can understand why it upsets you, but-I think you’re seeing Indians behind every tree.”
Monks realized that she was working to soothe him, as she often did. He caressed the back of her knee appreciatively.
“You didn’t know you were taking on a full-time job, trying to keep me calm,” he said.
“Listen to you-finding something else to feel guilty about.”
“What do you mean, something else?”
“All kinds of things. Thinking Glenn inherited your bad side.”
“I don’t exactly think that,” Monks said. But it brought back the unhappy memory of his conversation with Shrinkwrap at the camp.
“But you’re afraid of it. Every parent is-the honest ones, anyway. You think I don’t worry that Lia grew up like me? Sex, drugs, hooking up with a guy who ran her life?”
“You turned it around,” he said. “So will she.”
This time it was Sara who looked distracted by her own thoughts. She had been a good girl, the pride of her blue-collar family, attending UC Berkeley on a full scholarship. Then, home for the summer before her senior year, she’d started living with the area’s ranking coke dealer, a man almost ten years older. She never went back to school. For a while, they’d lived the high life. But the drug business started changing, with rougher competition moving in and her boyfriend getting paranoid and erratic.
Then she got pregnant. Ostensibly, it was unplanned, but on some level she understood that it was a desperate move to ground herself. She had quit the drugs, leveraged her ex out of the house, and borne Lia-and then started to face the reality of paying for a child and a life. An uncle in the construction business had hired her to do book work. She had started cleaning job sites for extra cash, picked up skills quickly, and eventually parlayed them into the novelty of an all-female crew, backed by a reputation for quality work.
But she alluded to times, during those intervening years, of bad relationships, lapses back into drug use, and almost abandoning herself to the downhill crash of that earlier life that she had barely pulled out of.
“She’ll find her own way,” Sara finally agreed. “You ready for a refill?”
“Sure.” Monks drained the bit of vodka left in his glass and handed it to her.
She went to the kitchen and came back a minute later, carrying the full glasses like a waitress, except that she was naked and dripping wet. Monks watched her the entire time. He loved to look at her-her smooth olive skin, dark-nippled breasts soft and etched with the lines of mothering, lush black V disappearing between her thighs. Although he had witnessed many births, he would clasp her slim hips and touch the soft petals of her labia in near disbelief that a child could have passed through. The older he got, the more fascinated he became by the beauty and resilience of women.
She knew it, and took her time getting back into the tub.
“You feel guilty about us, too,” she said.
Monks started to deny it. But, like most of her insights, it bore truth.
“There’s a part of me that says I don’t deserve anything this good.”
“Maybe it’s an Irish-versus-Italian deal,” she said. “You brood about things forever. We just do them, then we scream at each other, or go to confession, and it’s over.”
“I don’t think it’s that cut and dried.”
“Okay, it never is. But-I don’t know exactly how to put this. You’re a tough guy in some ways, but you’ve never really gotten down.”
“Gotten down?”
“Compromised yourself, to get what you wanted.”
“I’ve done plenty I’m not proud of,” Monks said.
“I mean really down and dirty, hon. Like, there were a couple of times I blew guys for coke.” She watched his face. “Shocks you, huh?” she said.
“A little,” he admitted, annoyed with himself for his prudishness.
But she seemed amused. “It helps you learn to get over things. You realize it’s not the end of the world. So what about fucking in a hot tub? Does that slam you with extra guilt?”
Monks slid his hand up the inside of her thighs to their wet, furry juncture. She closed her eyes and scooted her rump forward, pressing into him.
“Sometimes guilt makes things sweeter,” he said. “Any mick can tell you that.”
It was the strangest apartment building that Monks had ever been in, an old brick tenement hung with laundry, but the front walls were missing, so he could see right into the rooms. He was talking with a pixie-ish young woman, standing where the doorway would have been. She was pretty, her skin very pale, her hair orange.