Men Are Trouble | Page 7

could hear her breath caressing the microphone. "The devils come. That's the whole point."
Someone said something to her and she muted the speaker. But I knew she could still hear me. "That's sad, Rashmi. But I guess that's the way it had to be."
Then she hung up.
The mom was relieved that Rashmi was all right, furious that she was with Christers. So what? I'd found the girl: case closed. Only Najma Jones begged me to help her connect with her daughter. She was already into me for twenty bucks plus expenses, but for another five I said I'd try to get her away from the church long enough for them to talk. I was on my way over when the searchlet I'd attached to the Jones account turned up the hit at Grayle's Shoes. I was grateful for the reprieve, even more pleased when the salesbot identified Rashmi from her pix. As did the waitress at Maison Diana.
And the clerk at the Comfort Inn.
3
Ronald Reagan Elementary had been recently renovated, no doubt by a squad of janitor bots. The brick faade had been cleaned and repointed; the long row of windows gleamed like teeth. The asphalt playground had been ripped up and resurfaced with safe-t-mat, the metal swingsets swapped for gaudy towers and crawl tubes and slides and balance beams and decks. The chain link fences had been replaced by redwood lattice through which twined honeysuckle and clematis. There was a boxwood maze next to the swimming pool that shimmered, blue as a dream. Nothing was too good for the little girls -- our hope for the future.
There was no room in the rack jammed with bikes and scooters and goboards, so I leaned my bike against a nearby cherry tree. The very youngest girls had come out for first recess. I paused behind the tree for a moment to let their whoops and shrieks and laughter bubble over me. My business didn't take me to schools very often; I couldn't remember when I had last seen so many girls in one place. They were black and white and yellow and brown, mostly dressed like janes you might see anywhere. But there were more than a few whose clothes proclaimed their mothers' lifestyles. Tommys in hunter camo and chaste Christers, twists in chains and spray-on, clumps of sisters wearing the uniforms of a group marriage, a couple of furries and one girl wearing a body suit that looked just like bot skin. As I lingered there, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the shade of a tree. I had no idea who these tiny creatures were. They went to this well-kept school, led more or less normal lives. I grew up in the wild times, when everything was falling apart. At that moment, I realized that they were as far removed from me as I was from the grannies. I would always watch them from a distance.
Just inside the fence, two sisters in green-striped shirtwaists and green knee socks were turning a rope for a ponytailed jumper who was executing nimble criss-crosses. The turners chanted,
"Down in the valley where the green grass grows,
there sits Stacy pretty as a rose!
She sings, she sings, she sings so sweet,
Then along comes Chantall to kiss her on the cheek!"
Another jumper joined her in the middle, matching her step for step, her dark hair flying. The chant continued,
"How many kisses does she get?
One, two, three, four, five ..."
The two jumpers pecked at each other in the air to the count of ten without missing a beat. Then Ponytail skipped out and the turners began the chant over again for the dark-haired girl. Ponytail bent over for a moment to catch her breath; when she straightened, she noticed me.
"Hey you, behind the tree." She shaded her eyes with a hand. "You hiding?"
I stepped into the open. "No."
"This is our school, you know." The girl set one foot behind the other and then spun a hundred and eighty degrees to point at the door to the school. "You supposed to sign in at the office."
"I'd better take care of that then."
As I passed through the gate into the playground, a few of the girls stopped playing and stared. This was all the audience Ponytail needed. "You someone's mom?"
"No."
"Don't you have a job?" She fell into step beside me.
"I do."
"What is it?"
"I can't tell you."
She dashed ahead to block my path. "Probably because it's a pretend job."
Two of her sisters in green-striped shirtwaists scrambled to back her up.
"When we grow up," one of them announced, "we're going to have real jobs."
"Like a doctor," the other said. "Or a lion tamer."
Other girls were joining us. "I want to drive a truck," said a tommy. "Big, big truck." She specified the size of her rig with