Garden Lakes Read online

  Charlie surrendered to his assignment and attacked the story not from the human-interest angle—he canceled his scheduled follow-ups with Heather’s teachers and classmates and gave up trying to contact her parents—but in pursuit of the truth. Heather Lambert should’ve been dreaming of endless summer days at the community pool, splashing in the tepid water with her friends, dreading the return to school as the calendar turned from June to July to August. Instead, a wealthy farmer enjoyed the protection of lax prosecution of ambiguous immigration laws (these were the precise words he was able to extract from a prosecutor downtown and ran as a pull quote in his first piece on the Lambert case). Charlie hammered away at the farmer, who engaged a law firm to bother the Tab with threatening letters alleging libel, but the Tab’s circulation had increased as a result of Charlie’s investigation, giving him implicit carte blanche to carry on.

  Soon, the farmer began to lose accounts, and his lawyers squawked to the other papers and the local television stations that a junior reporter at a local newspaper was ruining a man’s livelihood. The same lawyers protested that the illegal alien had been captured and was being extradited, that justice had been served, which, true or not, didn’t quell the outrage toward the farmer, who stood in front of the TV cameras and sheepishly declared that the accused had never worked for him in any capacity and, further, that the accused had stolen the vehicle from the fleet of cars he kept on the farm. The farmer’s admission gave Charlie another angle to pursue, and he uncovered that many of the day laborers at the farm were illegal aliens paid in cash. Worse, the illegals were part of a network of laborers whose availability was brokered by a set of individuals who had infiltrated the Hispanic populations around Phoenix. Charlie spent a fruitless few weeks trying to unmask the identities of these brokers, and his editor relegated him to the opinion page because he didn’t possess all the facts. By the time his name was known around town, the farmer had been forced into bankruptcy and Heather’s law, making the hiring of illegal aliens punishable by jail for each offense, had been swiftly enacted. And not long after that the receptionist at the Tab called out that Darrell Torrence was on the phone for him.

  “How did they catch Derek Green?” Richter asked.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said, waving the twenty at the waitress. “Before my time.”

  “They dealt harshly with him,” Richter said.

  “Yeah, they don’t like it when you falsify your sources,” Charlie said.

  The waitress finally confiscated the check and the twenty.

  “Rumor has it old Duke was so mad he called every paper within a four-state radius and told them not to hire Green.”

  “Doubt it,” Charlie said. A smear of white glinted under the arc lights outside the window, and Charlie leaped out of the booth, breezing past the waitress and out into the crisp evening air. What he had hoped was Charlotte’s Volkswagen Passat was in reality a Honda Civic. It made a U-turn in the coffee shop parking lot and cut into the flow of traffic streaming down Central Avenue.

  Chapter Three

  Though few students would become Garden Lakes fellows, most would pass through its gates as freshmen during the freshman retreat. Garden Lakes itself was in the town of Maricopa, which was far enough south of Phoenix to be in another county, Pinal, which confused the average Phoenician, since the metro Phoenix area was known colloquially as Maricopa County. The gates were the only enhancement to the property that had been paid for by the school, the result of some minor vandalism by marauding boondockers committed during the interim between the stall of the development’s building phase and the donation of the property to Randolph by Mr. McCloud, a Randolph graduate and federally indicted land developer whose business had been seized by the government. The bus charged through the gates, opened earlier for the Randolph Mothers’ Guild, who were putting the finishing touches on the dining hall for that night’s dinner, and whizzed past the only green grass in the whole development, fed by an underground sprinkler system, the palm-tree-studded median separating the channels that allowed cars in and out. The development beyond the palms lay before us like a desert playground. Father Vidoni turned right onto Garden Lakes Parkway, the circular drive that traversed the development, the red and white shell crawling toward the encampment at the western edge of Garden Lakes.

  The eastern portion of the development lay unfinished. From above, Garden Lakes looked like a sophisticated crop circle, composed of two paved roads—an outer and inner loop—with a wide river of dirt flowing between the loops, the brick community center bridging the two loops at their southernmost convex. The man-made lake at the center of the development yawned like an open maw that had only its top teeth—the twelve houses that constituted Garden Lakes to date, six on either side of the community center.

  A dust devil kicked up and danced along the dry lake bed, petering out near the plug of dirt and rock left of center, the island meant for residents to swim out to, which had occurred exactly once, during a family day for the home builder’s employees. Garden Lake had brimmed shore to shore with sparkling water that afternoon. Afterward, the ever-evaporating pool reminded everyone involved with the project of the promises a master-planned community could offer, among them safety in an insecure and increasingly violent world, but also an oasis away from the demands that the world could make and that eventually condemned Garden Lakes to abandonment and despair, the liquid heart of Mr. McCloud’s dream drying up permanently under the blistering sun.

  Mr. McCloud was steadfast in the face of prison time, which he served after a year and a half of raging against what he came to recognize was the only mortal battle that couldn’t be won: arbitrariness with unlimited reserves of cash and power. He had, however, made a provision for his most cherished property. Anticipating the crush of the government’s fist, he’d deeded Garden Lakes to Randolph as a charitable gift, to be used by the school as it deemed appropriate.

  When the livid government trustee took steps to reacquire the property he argued rightfully belonged to taxpayers, Randolph announced the Garden Lakes fellows program, a leadership camp for juniors. The fellows would be sequestered at Garden Lakes with two faculty members and a supporting cast of sophomores, who would work in the dining hall and assist the faculty members while the fellows worked their project: the drywalling of a house framed by a local home-building company, the labor and framing materials gifted by the home builder. Even though the Garden Lakes program featured academic instruction—a philosophy seminar and a class on grammar and written communication—skeptics argued Garden Lakes was institutionalized slave labor, that Randolph had designs on selling the development for a profit upon its completion—or worse, giving the development back to Mr. McCloud, who would in turn sell it; but over the years, Garden Lakes had become a model for similar programs. (Word reached Randolph that the program had a papal blessing.) In addition, college recruiters who washed up on Randolph’s academic shores were curious about which boys were Garden Lakes fellows, causing the sophomore subscription rate to double, each sophomore hoping his volunteered labor would win him a fellowship as a junior.

  Father Vidoni honked the horn to announce their arrival. Two eager sophomores whose mothers had brought them directly saluted the bus from the shade of the palm tree waving like a flag from the island, which over the years had been weathered into a dirt cone. A yellow spray of desert dandelion had grown over a squiggle of desert lily, giving the dry lake’s lip a mustard-colored mustache. The sophomores jumped over the flowers, dust stirring in their footprints as they made their way to the bus.

  To the left lay the sophomore housing; the fellow housing ran in the other direction. The housing was separated by a state-of-the-art dining hall slash classroom slash auditorium slash chapel (slash dance hall for the Singles’ Retreat), the building originally constructed as an elementary school for the someday students of Garden Lakes. As the new owners of the development, Randolph gutted the elementary school, customizing it to meet the needs of a desert
renewal center. A blanket of prickly pear and barrel cactus, fit snug around a stand of saguaro, encircled the community center, designed to keep out desert predators.

  Though no street signs were posted in the development—the reflective green and white totem marking Garden Lakes Parkway had been stolen by the boondockers, who, by now, were in their early thirties—the plans filed with the city called for streets named Palomino Drive, Rockridge Way, Whispering Wind Road, Evening Glow Street, and Lakeland Avenue. Over the years, however, the fellows had rechristened the streets of Garden Lakes: High Street (juniors), Low Street (sophomores); Upper Parkway, Lower Parkway; East Street and West Street. Randolph finally chose Regis and Loyola, easy identifiers correlating to the buildings back on campus where the juniors and sophomores kept their lockers. Each completed house at Garden Lakes had been numbered in honor of a previous class. We numbered our remodel 1959 Regis Street as a tribute to Kevin Randolph, the last Randolph descendant to graduate. Word was Kevin Randolph himself would be attending Open House, the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of our fellowship.

  Out the window, beyond the community center and past the outer loop, we saw the Grove, the mountain range of dirt and gravel dumped long ago for the landscaping to be done at Garden Lakes, mounds of limestone, pitchstone, basalt, quartzite, sandstone, dolomite, slate, and shale now overrun with weeds and desert critter tracks.

  Hands, who would one day lead his family’s sixth-generation brewery to ruin, and Figs, who would later succeed in covering up an embezzlement at his firm, had started the rumor that they’d occupy the first house on Regis Street. While this house was the oldest house in the development, it was also the model home built to lure in potential homeowners and had been outfitted with the extras that the other houses lacked: wallpaper, designer faucets, dark-stained wood cabinets (as opposed to the plywood cabinets painted white in the houses by the fellows), wood-slat blinds (not white or crème-colored aluminum), Saltillo floor tile (the other houses had thin, playroom-style carpet, linoleum in the kitchen), and a working electric garage door. All the houses had been furnished by Furniture America, whose president was a Randolph alum. Hands and Figs knew they would be booted down to one of the other houses, as the two model homes were restricted to faculty, but this being Mr. Malagon’s first year, and Mr. Malagon being an iconoclast, they thought they had a shot of nonchalantly moving in, bumping Malagon, whose mysterious exit from Garden Lakes no one would ever be able to forgive, down the street. It was this arrogance masked as innocence that galled the rest of us. Hands and Figs knew it profited more times than not (though Mr. Malagon wouldn’t be suckered out of the model home).

  The bus gasped as Father Vidoni brought the vehicle to a stop in front of the junior abodes. The ride from Randolph had been a long one—not mileage-wise, but encapsulated-in-sweat-and-farts-and-BO-wise. Mr. Hancock, whose departure from Garden Lakes would send us to our doom, refused to let the windows down during freeway travel, citing the noise level as his reason, reminding us that he didn’t need to have a reason.

  The floorboard was warmed from travel, and we did our best to form a single-file line and disembark patiently, Mr. Hancock stationed at the back of the bus, with Mr. Malagon up near the finish line, low-fiving us as our duffel bags pulled us out the glass accordion bus doors. We gathered in a semicircle in the street. The sun blasted light through the windows of the framed and stuccoed house that stood along the avenue. The supply shed that housed all the necessary implements rose out of the cul-de-sac, a mistress of hard labors to come.

  “Okay, you boys,” Mr. Hancock said, “you know the drill. Sleeping arrangements are of your own choosing. There will be no switching houses, so choose prudently. Mr. Malagon and I will take up in the faculty residences.” A glimpse between them implied they’d worked out in advance who would live on which side. “Dinner with Mr. McCloud is at five p.m. Mr. Malagon?”

  Mr. Hancock had evidently meant to call Mr. Malagon to step back onto the bus, but Mr. Malagon took the question to mean did he have anything to say, and told us, “No fucking around now,” a phrase of endearment he’d uttered many times in his class, permitting us to use the same type of language as long as we used it in a clever fashion, never out of anger and never toward one another, and Mr. Hancock’s face drained of color.

  Mr. Malagon reboarded the bus, standing in the stairwell as the bus pulled forward a short distance, then stopped to let off the sophomores, who milled about tentatively. Mr. Hancock and Mr. Malagon’s arrival on Loyola Street was hailed by the sophomores who had not been allowed to ride the bus but had been brought by their mothers, who were unwilling to let their sons off until Mr. Hancock and Mr. Malagon arrived; these mothers—who, for either personal or political or financial reasons, were not part of the Mothers’ Guild—waited with the agenda of introducing themselves to the faculty members for the express purpose of Making an Impression on behalf of their sons, who would soon be eligible for consideration for the fellowship.

  Mr. Hancock and Mr. Malagon greeted the eager mothers, Mr. Malagon subjecting their sons to random bag checks before allowing them to settle into any one of the four-bedroom houses they desired, the houses farthest from the faculty residence filling up first.

  The juniors quickly lost interest in the Loyola Street goings-on. The memory of having stood on that side was too fresh for some, who worried about their worthiness for duty on Regis Street. It was one thing, as a sophomore, to work in the kitchen and in the laundry, studying the assigned texts in the afternoon and before bed, but it was another thing to be charged with the responsibilities of a fellow, the failure of such endeavors to be known ever after; and even if they were completed—and they were never not completed—generations of fellows and alums would submit your contribution to scrutiny, sure to find fault somewhere within the walls of your achievement.

  There had been much talk on the bus about possible roommate combinations, incorporating such factors as who was known to be a slob, who was a neatnik, who was most likely to hog the common area, who took long showers, who might spend the bulk of his free time in his room (complete with innuendo as to what he would be doing in his room), and a top-to-bottom scorecard of everyone’s BO, provided by Hands and Figs, who both scored counterintuitively low on the scale.

  Certain implicit truths had to be factored in once we were faced with the actual decision, the problem much like the problems that confounded those of us who had participated in SAT prep and the mock SAT taken one temptingly beautiful spring Saturday:

  There are five three-bedroom houses and twelve students who must live (peacefully and harmoniously) in said houses for forty days and forty nights. The following statements, however, apply:

  1. Q and Assburn cannot be in the same house.

  2. Hands and Figs must be in the same house.

  3. No one wants to live with Roger.

  4. Sprocket must live in the house with wheelchair access.

  5. Warren and Lindy don’t care which house they live in.

  6. Smurf (secretly) does not want to live with Sprocket.

  These complications were ingrained in everyone’s minds, having lived with the various prejudices for what felt like forever, so we assembled in our respective houses as if we were coming home from a long day of work at the mill. Lindy joined Figs and Hands in the house next to Mr. Malagon; Assburn and Roger and Smurf took up in the house next to them. Their neighbors were Warren and Sprocket and me. Q was our lone neighbor for the moment; the final two fellows—Tony “the Terminator” Watson and Jimbo Jergens—would presumably arrive with their mothers and the rest of the Randolph Mothers’ Guild.

  A tornado of engine noise rumbled as the first of what would be six weekly grocery deliveries arrived, the truck’s logo artfully spelling out the last name (in curlicues) of the grocery magnate whose son was a freshman at Randolph, the donation an obvious appeal for consideration of his son’s unofficial application to become a Garden Lakes fellow a couple of years hence. Previou
sly, Garden Lakes had relied on one of the faculty members to make grocery trips into town with one of the Jeeps belonging to the property, towing along a couple of sophomores as cart pushers and bag handlers. This proved a burden on the faculty member who stayed behind, though, since the fellows and sophomores alike could smell when they had the upper hand, even if they were unsure how to exercise this transitory rise to power. Occasionally, someone would sacrifice himself, generating a distraction while others raided the dining hall or sneaked out into the desert with a bottle they’d succeeded in smuggling into Garden Lakes.

  Mr. Hancock advised the driver that the loading dock was best accessed from the outer loop, the driver and his passenger intrigued by the petite, neatly coiffed mothers and their imported cars. Mr. Malagon yelled that he would meet the truck around, leaving Mr. Hancock to fend for himself among the genuflecting mothers.

  One by one the cars on Loyola Street vanished, the bus giving a final honk as it rattled through the gates, the good-bye carrying through the window Q had thrown open to aerate his stale room. He shook out the dark blue comforter donated by Furniture America and folded it, sliding it under his bed.

  Smurf, who would one day successfully slander a female colleague at his family’s corporation with whom he’d been cheating on his wife, appeared in the doorway, his arm behind his back. “Guess what I found taped under the sink in the bathroom?”

  “What?” Q asked, annoyed.

  Smurf brandished a tattered copy of Penthouse magazine, fanning the worn pages for effect.

  “I didn’t hear you knock,” Q said.

  “Roger is in our bathroom, so I used yours,” Smurf said. He looked both ways down the hall, a time-honored move known more formally by its nickname, the Randolph Backcheck, and asked Q if he remembered the week Figs was absent from school, his family’s impromptu vacation.