Sandy notices Erica’s stare and Tashi’s discomfort under it, and says, “Last week I made a connection with my supplier at Monsanto San Gabriel, and I was tracking back home with about three gallons of MDMA on the passenger seat, when I ran into a Highway Patrol spot-check point—”
“Jesus, Sandy!” Erica purses her mouth.
“I know. It was one of those mechanical checks, to make sure all my track points were functional, which they were. But meanwhile one of the Chippies walks over to me and looks in, right at the container. He says, ‘What’s that?’”
“Sandy!” Erica cries, scolding him for getting into such a situation.
“Well, what could I do? I told him it was olive oil.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I said I worked for a Greek restaurant in Laguna and that this was a whole lot of olive oil. And there was so much of it there, he couldn’t imagine that it would be anything illegal! So he just nodded and let me go.”
“Sandy, sometimes I can’t believe you.”
Tash agrees. “You should be more careful. What if he had asked to taste it?”
After Sandy and Erica have left to get back to work, Tash operates on a circuit board and shakes his head, recalling Sandy’s tale. Sandy’s dealing is getting a little crazier all the time. For a while there he was talking about making a bundle, investing it, and retiring. He might have, too; but then his father’s liver failed after a lifetime of abuse, and since then Sandy has been paying for regeneration treatments in Dallas, Mexico City, Toronto, Miami Beach.… Radically expensive stuff, and Sandy’s been pushing hard for almost a year now, about to untrack under the stresses of his schedule. Only his closest friends know why; everyone else assumes it’s just Sandy’s manic personality, magnified by the effects of his products. Well, that might be part of it, actually. A tough situation.
Tash sighs. Sandy, Jim. Abe too. Everyone in the machine. Even if you aren’t you are.
18
After a morning’s work at the church, Lucy McPherson tracks under the Newport Freeway and into the depths of Santa Ana. Poor city. More than half of it is under the upper level of the freeway triangle, and the ground level, under a sky of concrete, has inevitably gone to slums. Lucy looks nervously through the windshield at the shadowy, paper-filled streets; she doesn’t much trust the people who live down here.
She certainly doesn’t approve of the woman she’s been called to help. Her name is Anastasia, she’s about twenty years old, Mexican-American, and she has two small children, although she’s never been married. She lives in a run-down old applex under the upper mall at Tustin and 4th.
There’s a sidewalk that crosses a dirty astroturf lawn to the front door of the beige stucco building; some fierce and unkempt young men are sitting on the lawn on both sides of the sidewalk. Lucy grits her teeth, leaves her car and walks past them, enters the smelly, olive-green hallway of the complex. Walking down it she can barely see a thing. Knock on the battered door.
“Hello, Anastasia!” Lucy’s social mask is solid, and she projects all the sympathetic friendliness she can muster, which is a very considerable amount indeed. Although she can’t help but note the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, the heaps of soiled laundry on the bed filling the bedroom nook. Anastasia’s hair is oily and uncombed, and apparently the babe has scratched her cheek.
“Lucy, thank God you’re here. I gotta go out and get some groceries or we’ll starve! Baby’s asleep and Ralph’s watching TV. I’ll just be a few minutes.”
“Okay,” Lucy says, but adds firmly, “I absolutely have to leave before eleven, I’ve got business I can’t miss.”
“Okay, sure. That won’t be a problem.” Out the door flies Anastasia, without brushing her hair.
Lucy hopes she’ll come back on time; once she was stuck here for an entire day, and it’s made her distrustful. In fact she didn’t mention that her crucial business was a meeting with Reverend Strong, for fear that Anastasia wouldn’t consider it important enough to return. She heaves a deep sigh. Some of these good works are really a pain.
Dishes washed, some of the laundry washed in the sink and hung up over the shower curtain rod to dry—not a laundromat within two miles, Anastasia has said—and Lucy sits down with Ralph, a passive six-year-old. She tries to teach him to read, using the only book in the house, a Reader’s Digest Condensed Books for Children. Ralph stumbles over the first sentence and turns the page to the scratch-’n’-sniff pads that illustrate, or enscentify, the story. As usual, she ends up reading to him. How do you teach someone to read? She points to each word as she reads it. They go through the alphabet letter by letter. Ralph gets bored and cries to have the video wall put back on. Lucy, irritated, resists. Ralph screams.
Lucy thinks, I’m too old for this. Is this really the Lord’s work? Baby-sitting? Does Anastasia regard it as such? Quite a few of Lucy’s friends feel that they’re being taken advantage of in this program of theirs, aiding young women who appear to be joining the church only to get free help. Well, if it’s true, Lucy thinks, it still represents a chance to change people’s minds, over time, perhaps. And if not… well…
She can talk to Anastasia about coming to Bible class when she returns. Speaking of which—it’s 11:30. Lucy begins to get annoyed. By noon she’s really angry.
Anastasia returns at 12:20, just as Lucy has settled down for an all-day rip-off. Stiffly Lucy reminds Anastasia that she had an appointment at eleven. Anastasia, already upset at something else, begins to cry. They put the meager supply of groceries into the filthy refrigerator: tortillas, soy hamburger, beans, Coke. Pampers into the bathroom. Anastasia has no money left, the utilities bill is overdue, Ralph has outgrown his shoes… Lucy gives her fifty dollars, they end up both in tears as she leaves.
Tracking away she can barely see. She just isn’t a social worker, she hasn’t got the mentality, the ability to distance herself. The people she helps become like family, and it’s painful and frightening to see what sordid lives some people lead in this day and age. And so few of them Christian. No help for them from anywhere, not even faith in God. Reverend Strong has clipped a newspaper article that says that only 2 percent of Orange County residents are churchgoing Christians anymore, and he’s stuck it to the office bulletin board as a sort of challenge; but Lucy has to sit at her desk and look at it all day as she works, and given everything else she has to face, she finds it depressing indeed.
Reverend Strong is finishing lunch at the vicarage when she arrives, and he understands about her missing the meeting. “I figured it was Anastasia,” he says with a cynical laugh. Lucy isn’t yet to the point where she finds it funny. They go into the office and discuss the various works at hand.
Reverend Strong is a nice enough man, but sadly—tragically—his wife was killed in a bomb explosion while they were on a mission to Panama, and Lucy feels that the experience gave him a secret dislike for the poor. He tries to control it, but he can’t, not really. And so he is surprisingly, almost shockingly, cynical about most of their good works programs, and he is prone to oblique and confused outbursts in his sermons, against sloth, ambition, political struggle. It leaves most of the congregation confused, but Lucy is sure she understands what is going on. It’s the explanation for his frequent return to the parable of the talents. Some people are given only one talent, and instead of working with it they try to steal from the man given the ten talents.… Really, the more he harps on it, the more Lucy begins to wonder if the parable of the talents wasn’t a bit of a mistake on God’s part. In any case, she has the constant problem of getting the reverend’s approval for the works that the church obviously has to undertake, in the poorer parts of the community.…