Born Savages - Cora Brent Page 0,15

her arm. He knows something is wrong with her, something much worse than what’s usually wrong with her. It seems as if she is decaying into the folds of her Chanel pantsuit.

She shakes off the gloom, pats his hand and smiles another terrible smile. Her voice is a tuneless singsong. “It’s so perfect that August moved the children out there. It’s a magical place for children. I’m glad he remembers that. You will see, Oscar.”

Oscar has only a vague idea what’s she’s talking about. His adopted mother, Mina, is a Savage. Oscar knows that when he mentions this fact to other Americans they will usually understand what he means. Mina was never an actress though. She never did much at all except frolic with rich, abusive men and impulsively adopt a child. The Savages were a legendary Hollywood family, although they’ve been cursed by scandal and heartbreak for decades. Oscar has never met any of them. They don’t even really matter to him.

But now he is caught up in Mina’s latest odyssey. They will be flying to Arizona, to the old film ranch in the desert that was Mina’s childhood paradise. Mina apparently plans for them to remain there for some time, in the place where her brother’s family lives.

Oscar objects to it all, but only in silence. He’s not a child for fuck’s sake. He’s a month past his seventeenth birthday and capable as any man. Usually if bullshit even comes sniffing in his direction he smacks it back with two mighty fists. And this is major bullshit, this bizarre trek to another continent, to a lost era.

He could easily have scoffed at Mina and refused her pleas when she made her announcement two days ago in the bleak confines of the headmaster’s office. She wouldn’t have known what to do if he had.

“Oscar! We are going home! Back to America. You will meet your cousins!”

Home?

America?

Cousins?

These concepts are all strange to him. The headmaster did nothing to dissuade Mina. He was apparently tired of dealing with the parade of heartbroken girls that the charismatic Oscar Savage left in his wake wherever he walked.

Mina had always seemed to hate America. How many times had she insisted to Oscar that the whole nation was nothing but a cauldron of scandal, gossip, and narcissism? Oscar didn’t exactly believe that was true. Mina assumes the world of cutthroat celebrities is universal; that it exists in Pocatello, Idaho in the exact same form as it is exists in Beverly Hills.

Oscar could have dug his heels into European soil and refused to leave. Mina would not have known how to force him. But he didn’t have the heart to refuse her. No matter how careless of a mother she was, she was the only one he had. He could tell immediately that she was sick. He still didn’t know whether it was mental or physical, but she needed him. So Oscar quietly, if resentfully, packed his things and followed his mother out of the Scottish countryside.

Tentatively, Oscar asks if they might remain in New York for a short time but Mina wearily reminds him that their posh traveling arrangements are the result of a favor that is nearly at an end. She will not consider a commercial flight. Moreover, her brother is expecting her out in Arizona. His entire family is expecting her, expecting both of them. According to Mina these Savage people are overjoyed at the prospect of finally meeting a long lost cousin. Oscar thinks about that and pictures them; a herd of displaced socialites squatting in the desert dust and clutching designer bags as their flawless faces expectantly scan the sky.

The flight to Phoenix takes five hours. Oscar looks down into the wide expanse of his country. From the air it appears largely unpopulated. Every once in a while there will be a flash of metal in the sunlight, a hint at a pocket of humanity. They fly over interminable brown mountains that give way to a wide valley. It is a riot of beige neighborhoods riddled with aqua-colored dots that Oscar figures are swimming pools. It looks nothing like the place Mina described.

There is a car waiting, of course. On the ground, Phoenix is a maze of concrete and asphalt that shimmers in the heat. Soon the city gives way to sprawling residential stucco in various shades of taupe. Finally, the long stretch of suburbia ends and they are careening through a cactus-riddled landscape ringed by distant brown mountains.

Oscar grows uneasy