Criminal Carma

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

It was a bright, breezy three-quarters of a mile from the snack stand to the pier where the Ferris wheel was revolving slowly against the backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains. I took the hint and didn’t ask Mary anything else about herself. As a reward, she gave me the Cliffs Notes version of her life story.

She was twenty-four, a Gemini born in May 1971, as I was stumbling through the second semester of my drug-blurred freshman year at Hazel-wood High School. She grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bath tract house in Anaheim half a mile from Disneyland. Her mother, like mine, was an alcoholic. Her father was a mindless Catholic churchgoer who beat her when she started getting interested in boys. She ran away from home in her early teens and had always been with older men, starting with a thirty-year-old pot dealer when she was fourteen. After that it was a little vague. She had traveled, worked at different things. She had quit drugs and alcohol two years earlier when she got interested in Eastern religion, gone back to school fifteen months before, in the fall of 1994, after passing the GED test.

Her personality, which she complimented me by displaying freely, was a blend of sunny optimism, fatalistic cynicism, and fierce self-determination. She was intellectually ambitious, though not terribly well informed. She was a bit of a snob about some things, little-girl curious about others.

As we walked down the sloping causeway onto the Santa Monica pier, she let me take her hand, which made me ridiculously happy. When we came to the amusement rides, I impressed not just her but myself and the concessionaire by slamming the big wooden mallet down hard enough to ring the bell atop the thirty-foot tower of the high striker. Mary clapped and laughed, and the concessionaire made a “Well, what do you know about that?” face.

I am six-two and weigh about 175 pounds, which makes me look skinny. But I am a lot stronger than I look, and years in construction taught me a thing or two about leverage and swinging hammers.

I don’t know if she was doing it to mess with me or not, but Mary said she wanted a popsicle. So I bought her a cylinder of cherry ice. She licked it contentedly as we waited in the line for the Ferris wheel. When she put it in her mouth the first time to suck on it, she looked up frankly into my eyes, saw some of what was going on there, and then burst out laughing, bending over and slapping her thigh with her free hand, leaving a red mark.

“Naughty boy,” she said.

“What do you expect after all that talk about tantra?” I said, my face the color of the popsicle.

“It’s okay,” she said, still laughing, reaching out to punch my arm. “I know how you guys are.”

When we made it to the front of the line, a five-foot-tall carnie with four-foot-long arms took our tickets and opened the gate on our seat.

“Here we go,” Mary said, excited.

We sat down side by side and I put my arm around her, cupping her bare shoulder with my right hand. We were facing northwest, toward Malibu. When the huge wheel lurched into motion, carrying us back and up, the sea-bright world expanded swiftly around us, getting vaster and grander as we came up to and over the exhilarating top, then shrinking again as we sailed downward, then expanding again, wider and brighter and bluer, the Channel Islands swimming into view, misty and green, as we were lifted skyward again. Round and round we went, half a dozen times, then stopped at the very top, 120 feet above the water, as the carnie began unloading and reloading the cars.

“Wow!” Mary said. “This is beautiful. What islands are those?”

“The closest one is Santa Cruz. The one beyond that is Santa Rosa.”

“How far away are they?”

“Sixty or seventy miles.”

“Awesome!”

“Look back this way,” I said, turning to the south. “That’s Catalina. The island beyond it is San Clemente.”

“Cool! I love Catalina. Saul and I used to go there for the weekend.”

“Who is Saul?”

“He’s the man I was with for a couple of years, until he died last year. Let’s not talk about him.”

“All right.”

The wheel jerked forward as the carnie brought another car to the loading platform.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” Mary said, her voice quiet and close to me in the infinite space of the heavens. “It was a cool idea.”

Her eyes were liquid and sleepy. I leaned over and kissed her, feeling her soft lips for the first time. She rewarded me for my good idea by kissing me back. She kept her mouth closed, but she put her hand on the back of my head. When I put my hand on her breast, feeling her hard nipple press against the center of my palm, she pulled away.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Why not?” I begged.

“I’m going through a lot of changes right now,” she said sincerely. “I feel like my body is the only thing I have control over, and that’s important to me. I don’t want to do it with every guy that comes along. Baba has been after me since I moved in to do tantra with him, but I feel stronger when I say no.”

“You mean you aren’t sleeping with him?” I said, and I guess my voice gave me away.

“Does it matter that much to you?” she said softly.

“Yes.”

“You’re awful sensitive for a criminal.” Her eyes were sparkling. “I think it’s sweet.”

She put her lips to mine and her cherry-flavored tongue went briefly but generously into my mouth. After a blissful moment, I pulled away.

“Was he bothering you today?”

“I don’t know. He walked in on me while I was taking a shower, but he said he didn’t mean to.”

“He meant to,” I said, and the wheel lurched, lowering us toward earth.

“You don’t know that. He’s good guy in a lot of ways. He’s taught me tons about Vedanta, and he lets me stay there rent-free. He does a lot of good in the community.” She paused and matter-of-factly put a barrier between us: “I may end up doing tantra with him. I haven’t decided yet. He has a way of looking at me that makes me feel really amazing. Maybe I could find God that way, you know?”

“Come on, Mary. You know the guy is off the reservation.”

“I’m still making up my mind,” she said firmly. “I have to make my own decision about him. If he pushes me too hard, I’ll leave. But in the meantime, as long as I am staying with him, I owe him some loyalty. Who knows? Maybe all this stuff that seems bad is just a test of faith.”

She was groping for integrity and a worldview of her own, separate from that of the men who desired her. At the same time she may have been rationalizing a little bit, because the ashram was a good deal for her and she wanted to keep staying there.

The wheel jerked into motion once more, bellying out and dropping us back down to the loading platform.

“I just don’t want him to do to you what he has done to those other girls,” I said.

“He won’t,” she said. “Let’s not argue about it. We’re having a fun day at the beach. Let’s just enjoy ourselves.” She reached over and took my hand as we walked back along the pier toward the shore. But her hand felt cool and impersonal, more casual than intimate.