Trapped

Kelly looks at her fingernails. “You’re going to ground me, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I better go to my room,” she says, and flounces away, as if it’s fun to be grounded. As if being grounded was her idea.

She stops on the stairway, looking back at me in the kitchen.

“Don’t worry, okay?” she says. “There’s just totally no reason to worry about me.”

But there is. Big-time. And, as it turns out, for a much bigger reason than I ever imagined.

3. Man Of Steel

The thing about a turkey buzzard is that it looks really ugly perched on a branch or hopping around next to roadkill. Looks less like a bird, more like feathered hyena with hunched shoulders and a hooked nose. But let the ungainly critter soar and it becomes unspeakably beautiful, rising on big and glorious wings. What an amazing transformation, from a hideous bag of cackling bones to an elegant dark angel, circling in the noonday sun.

Ricky Lang envies the buzzard. He’s sprawled on the trunk lid of his BMW 760i, the twelve-cylinder sedan, staring up into the blinding blue sky. What he wants, what he really and truly wants at this very moment is to be that buzzard. Riding the updraft without effort, just the slightest wind-ripple of white feathers marking the edge of his great black wings. White feathers like daubs of ceremonial paint. Not as valuable or potent as eagle feathers, he’ll grant you that, but Ricky prefers the buzzard to the eagle because buzzards love to fly for the sake of flying.

Oh, baby, how they love to soar on the blurry heat rising from the vast casino parking lot. They soar over the malls and highways, anywhere there’s an updraft. Of course buzzards keep their eyes peeled for food, for something newly dead, that’s what they do, how they survive. But it isn’t just hunger that motivates the birds. Ricky has seen scores of turkey buzzards far out into the Florida Bay, circling miles from shore. Soaring like that, over water, a buzzard takes its chances. If it has to rest in the water it will be unable to launch itself back into the air. Feathers soaked, it will drown. Yet still it soars in dangerous places.

There’s only one explanation for such behavior. The big ugly bird soars in dangerous places because doing so makes it beautiful.

When the heat on the trunk lid finally becomes unbearable, Ricky Lang heaves himself upright. Five feet ten inches of hard muscle, small, fierce brown eyes flecked with gold, and the rolling, pigeon-toed gait of a sailor. Not that he’s ever been to sea, not really. Airboats don’t count—an airboat is more like skidding a slick car around a soft, watery track. Got the slightly bowed legs from his dad. That and hands like ten-pound hammers. First time Ricky ever saw the movie Superman he had to talk back to the screen because white-bread Clark Kent wasn’t the Man of Steel, no way. Tito Lang was the Man of Steel, everybody knew that! Fists like steel, head like steel, nobody messed with Tito, back in the day.

Ricky, five years old, assumed Superman was stealing from his father. Thirty years later, the Tito of today—that doesn’t bear thinking about, it makes his head hurt. More like the Man of Mush than the Man of Steel. Brain gone soft, pickled with swamp whiskey, and his trembling hands formed into weak arthritic claws that can’t manage his own zipper.

Thinking about his dad, Ricky clenches his fists so hard that his ragged fingernails draw blood. Feels good, the pain, keeps him focused. Unlike his father, Ricky doesn’t drink swamp whiskey, or any form of alcohol. He gets drunk on other things, on liquors that form in his own brain.

Fear of the dead, rage at the living. That’s what keeps his heart beating. Lately he’s learned to sip at the rage, make it last. For instance today he’s been enjoying a prolonged confrontation with casino security. Started at, what, eight in the morning, and it’s nearly one o’clock in the afternoon, so he’s had it going for five hours, on and off. A marvel of sustain. He loves the push and pull of it, the way he makes the security guards all jumpy and sweaty. Their eyes bugging when they see him approaching the main entrance. Hurried yaps into their handheld radios, looking for guidance, calling in the reinforcements. They’re afraid of him and that makes it sweet, because he can savor their fear and use it to organize his own thoughts.

Being in charge of his own thoughts is very important to Ricky. That when he says jump, his thoughts say how high? Because his thoughts have been all over the place lately, bouncing around in his skull like speeding pinballs. Each bounce inside his head resonates all the way to the balls of his feet, and makes him feel like he can leap buildings in a single bound.

As Ricky approaches the entrance, shrugging his big shoulders like a linebacker, a size-large dude in a lime-green blazer hurries out to intercept him.

“Am I a bird or a plane?” he asks before the guard can speak. “You decide.”

The guard glances nervously at a charter bus unloading senior citizens. All those soft, Q-tip heads bobbing slightly as they head for the bingo halls and the slot machines.

“Sir, I told you, sir. You are not permitted access.”

“Bird or a plane?”

“Sir, you are not permitted access to the casino or the casino grounds. You must exit the parking lot.”

Ricky grins, passes his hand through the thick bangs of his Moe Howard hair. “Dude? I own this parking lot.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” The guard is blocking his way, but not yet willing to lay hands on him.

“I own the casino,” Ricky reminds him. “You get that?”

“I don’t know who actually owns the casino, sir. I only know that you are not permitted to enter the premises.”

“That was my rule,” Ricky says, pretending to be reasonable. “I made the rule, I can break it.”

The guard grimaces, eyes swiveling for the reinforcements that haven’t yet arrived. Nobody likes dealing with Ricky Lang, they’re slow-footing it.

“Tribal council makes the rules, sir,” the guard responds rather plaintively. “Members of the tribe are not permitted in the casino.”

Ricky doing a two-step dance with the man, trying to get an angle on the entrance. “I am the tribe,” Ricky says. “I’m the sachem, the chief, the boss. This casino exists because of me.”

The guard reaches out, places a tentative hand on the center of Ricky’s chest.

“Sir, please.”

Ricky looks down at the hand, amazed, and becomes very still.

“I know who you are, Mr. Lang,” says the guard, as if desperate for him to understand. “Tribal council says you can’t come in, you can’t come in.”

Ricky selects one of the guard’s fingers, breaks it with a twitch of his fist. Before the man can fully react to the convulsion of pain, Ricky rolls him across the pavement, where he flops, moaning, at the feet of the seniors entering the casino.

“Help!” a Q-tip screams, an elderly woman, or maybe it’s an old man, hard to tell when they get that age. “Indians!”

Ricky laughs all the way back to his BMW. Indians, what a riot. The old lady probably thought she was about to be scalped. As sachem of the Nakosha, an elected office that made him both chief and high priest, he could have explained that traditional warriors did not take scalps. Never had. Scalps were taken by white soldiers, as souvenirs and to collect bounties. Nakosha warriors took noses—the nose was the seat of dignity—and threaded them into battle necklaces. Some warriors used knives to harvest the noses, others used their teeth. If it ever comes to that, Ricky decides he’ll go with the knife.

4. The Sacred Rights Of Momhood

Okay, putting your ear to your daughter’s door doesn’t look good, I’ll admit it. But Kelly is in her room for about ten minutes—door locked, of course—when her latest ringtone starts blasting away. Something from Snow Patrol, who are actually sort of cute. Anyway, I hear the cell go off, my mom-antenna reminds me of the Seth problem. As in who-is-Seth-and-how-did-he-get-in-Kelly’s-life without-me-ever-hearing-his-name, let alone any sort of description or explanation?

Very clever way my daughter has of not answering a simple question: she volunteers for punishment and then disappears into her room, locking the door.

The mysterious Seth, the young man with the motorcycle, that’s probably him on the phone right now. And since Kelly has refused to give me any details, it’s within my rights, the sacred rights of motherhood, to determine who this kid is—all that stuff about how the boy really wanted her to wear a helmet sounds bogus to me. Besides, he was the one driving like a lunatic, right?

Try as I might, I can’t hear a thing. They must be whispering to each other. What I want to know—is he in her class, is he older, what? All I caught was a glimpse, but come to think of it, the minimum age to legally carry a passenger in New York is seventeen. So he’s at least a year ahead of Kelly, maybe more.

Finally I work up the courage and knock.

“Kel?” I ask through the closed door. “We have to talk. Who is this boy? Does he go to your school? Do I know his parents?”

After a slight delay she calls out, “It’s late, Mom.”

I picture her hand cupped over the phone, her eyes rolling.

“It’s nine o’clock,” I remind her. “Since when is that late?”

“I’m really tired, Mom. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? I’ll tell you all about it, honest.”

She’s so polite that it isn’t in me to argue. And once again she’s right—by morning I’ll be thinking much more clearly. Not only less freaked about the whole scene, but also less likely to be manipulated into, say, letting her self-select her punishment.

Maybe grounded isn’t the right call. Maybe what Kelly needs is a few months volunteering at an E.R. Let her see what happens to kids who risk their lives on a dare, or for the fun of it. Get her pushing wheelchairs, changing drool cups, all that good stuff. I picture a light going off over her head, an epiphany, how fragile life is. Kelly giving me a big hug, saying, Mom, you were right! I have to be careful!