LITMIR.BIZ

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if you liked them.”

      “I’m sure I would.”

      “Yeah, you would. She had angel hands. That’s what our pastor said. Her pies and cookies were good enough for the folks up in heaven.” For a moment a glacier seemed to spread up her neck, freezing her face. Then she blinked and said, “Sit down, why don’t you?”

      We each took an end of the sofa. She handed me my iced tea. It looked like a urine sample.

      “That was how this whole—” She shook her head. “You know, the Global Village thing. When it started. We didn’t know what it was. But all the kids at her school were going crazy for it, so of course she wanted to join too. And pretty soon she’d found this, this—”

      “Community?”

      “Yeah, this Global Village community of people who like to bake. Bakersfield, that’s what they call themselves. And they’d, you know, they’d talk about which brand of flour was best, and they’d trade recipes, and I don’t know what all. And at first we thought it was great. I mean, it wasn’t like Hazel had ever been real popular. You look the way she did, you’re never going to get to be a cheerleader or Homecoming Queen. I know, I was the same.”

      “You’re being very hard—”

      She shook her head. “I’m telling you the truth, is all.”

      The dog whined and jumped up suddenly, its front paws on her knees.

      “Yes, baby, you know who we’re talking about, don’t you? Come on, then. Come to Momma.” She patted her lap. The dog clambered up and lay there, shivering and whimpering. She stroked it abstractedly, as if she were smoothing the wrinkles out of a sheet.

      “And she was always kind of shy, too”—looking down at the dog—“wasn’t she? So when she was growing up, she never had a whole lot of friends. And then suddenly, wham, seemed like she did. I have to go, Mom, she’d say. I’m telling Becky how to make raspberry muffins. Didn’t matter Becky was some place the other side of the country. They were still friends.”

      She glanced curiously at me, as if she thought I might disagree.

      “Yes, of course,” I said.

      “But then she went off to college. It was OK to begin with. I mean, she was homesick, but you expect that, don’t you? Then for a while there she seemed real excited, a little bit hyper, you know what I mean? Everything was great, she loved the school, loved her professors. Maybe too much. This one guy, he’s just a plain old-fashioned radical, he gets her involved with these people call themselves Native American Indians. Oh Lonelies or something-or-other. Mike says, they’re no more Native American Indians than you or me, they’re just trying to get their hands on some of our hard-earned taxes. But you figure everyone goes through stuff like that when they’re young, don’t you? So we thought she’d grow out of it.”

      She looked at me for corroboration, for reassurance that they hadn’t done the wrong thing. I nodded.

      “But then, her sophomore year, she comes home for Thanksgiving, and she’s like this.” She flattened her cheeks between thumb and forefinger. “Like she’d gotten sick, and it was eating her up inside. After that, it just got worse and worse.”

      She shook her head. The flesh around her eyes was puffy. The dog whined again and licked her hand. Now that she was starting to unburden herself, you could feel the energy building in her, like water suddenly released into a pipe.

      “And I said to her, What is it, honey? Some boy treating you bad? And she says, I’m OK. And I say, No, you’re not. I can see that. Come on, you can tell your Mom. And she goes, I’m all right, OK? Real ratty. I never heard her like that before.”

      “But this wasn’t the people on Bakersfield?”

      “No, no, she’d gotten into another . . . what they call a dark community.” She paused, trying to get her voice under control. Suddenly the tears started to come. “If she’d just have told me, I could have done something. Hired someone to protect her. Take those guys down. I’d have sold the house if I had to. But I just didn’t know.”

      She frisked herself, patting at sleeves and pockets. Finally she pulled a balled-up tissue from her cuff and blew her nose heavily.

      “How could you?” I said. “Isn’t that the problem with these dark communities? There’s no way of finding out who they are?”

      But her own train of thought was too powerful to be derailed. “You show them to me, give me a gun, I’ll pull the trigger myself,” she said. “What they did . . . I just can’t believe there’s people would do that. Not to an innocent kid. Tell her she’s special. Ask her to join this, like this exclusive club. And then, when she’s in, and she can’t get out again, just . . . Just . . . The things they said to her. You’re stupid. You’re ugly. Who you think is ever going to want to do it with you?”

      A double shock: the words themselves and hearing her repeat them to someone she’d met fifteen minutes before. She must have felt it too, because her shoulders collapsed suddenly, and she dropped her face into her hands and started to howl. The dog leapt to safety. I suddenly found myself sliding along the sofa to put an arm round her. She leaned against me, pushing her head close to my nose. The familiar smell of loneliness and neglect—dirty hair and clothes; stale scent not quite hiding the lardy reek of unwashed skin—was so strong that I had to breathe through my mouth to avoid it. I caught a glimpse of my newly-polished brown shoes gleaming up at me from the blue shag carpet and thought, What the hell am I doing here?

      “I never told anyone that before,” she said. “I don’t know why. It just kinda—”

      I held her closer. “And this was after she became involved with the Ohlone? Who just happened to be campaigning against Global Village at the time?”

      She nodded. “And you know what he said . . . the head guy . . . Evan Bone? He said . . . He said . . .” She exhaled unsteadily, then pulled away from me. “I’ll show you.”

      Below the TV was a flat-pack cupboard. She opened it and drew out a wallet folder. It took her a few seconds to find what she was looking for.

      “Here,” she said, handing it to me.

      It was a cutting from the local paper. The headline was: Evan Bone: “Tragic Hazel Just One of Thousands.” Most of the story I knew already. The thunderbolt came at the end:

      “At a press conference yesterday to announce plans for a new state-of-the-art extension to the Global Village headquarters, Evan Bone was asked what he would say to the family of Hazel Voss. He replied, ‘That’s not why we’re here.’ When the reporter repeated her question, he shrugged and said, ‘Global Village has 1.6 billion members. Statistically, you’d expect a few of them to take their own lives every year.’”

      She was watching for my reaction. Nothing I could say would be equal to the task, so I just raised my eyebrows and pursed my lips.

      “Course, later on, he tried to wriggle out of it,” she said.

      “Unfortunate choice of words. Taken out of context.”

      She nodded. “And that sort of covered it up. Made everyone forget. That’s why I been praying someone like you would come along. To write something. Show people what kind of a guy he really is. And then maybe they’ll stop using Global Village. Make him wish he’d never said that. That’s what I’m hoping, anyways.”

      I re-read the cutting. How to respond without either being dismissive or raising false hopes?

      “Well,” I said finally, “you’re right, it’s ugly stuff. The man is obviously a deeply unpleasant piece of work. But the problem is, if that were enough to destroy him, this would have done it, wouldn’t it? In his world, I suspect, being an unpleasant piece of work is the norm. They probably vie among themselves for the distinction of being the unpleasantest. So we’d need more. The smoking gun, the bloody fingerprints. Evidence that he’d actually

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