ACT I: THE HOOD
The kids awoke excited that Friday, July 31—a big day. They'd get to dress up and take a bus trip with Mom. If they were good, maybe they'd get to rob a bank and ditch the cops.
Marcia, 15, was a runaway living at the 10-bedroom rental on East First Street in Aberdeen, where the heavy, baby-faced woman who rented the place had befriended her. Marcia called her Mom. The run-down home was a maze of old sofas, 14 beanbag chairs, two dozen assorted tables, a dozen beds and mattresses on the floor, with pillows, pictures, and knickknacks everywhere. At times, up to 10 homeless kids lived there. Many were like Marcia. Her family had moved from the Seattle area to a rural community along the south beaches of Grays Harbor County, and she never made the switch to small-town life. But she had learned how to escape it by drinking and using methamphetamine. She may have resorted to theft as well. Someone recently had stolen two guns from her mom and stepdad's place at the beach. The weapons would become a key to both the success and failure of her big adventure that Friday.
Patty, also 15, was also a runaway—from tiny Moclips, on the north beaches. The youngest of five kids, she sometimes stayed with other relatives in nearby Taholah, where fishing and poverty dominate—it was famous for a highway advisory sign that read, "Taholah, End of the Road"—and where she got busted for dope. She couldn't see much of a future from the vantage point of the Indian reservation, but in her wanderings into Hoquiam and Aberdeen she found a friend at the old house on East First. The woman there welcomed strays, many of whom she met at a teen dance club she operated briefly downtown. There was little for a teen to do around the economically and atmospherically overcast Harbor: Aberdeen, Hoquiam, and the mill town of Cosmopolis, a Bermuda Triangle for the wood-products industry. The empty storefronts, fallen brick buildings, and vacant streets of once vital towns were among the depressing inspirations that led the late rock star, Aberdeen-raised Kurt Cobain, to pen his most popular, and desperate, tunes before inviting suicide. But for the moment, Marcia and Patty were surviving, thanks to the woman they called Mom.
Tiffany, 14, called the woman Mom, too—for real. She was the woman's birth daughter. The two-story blue-and-white Victorian that had unofficially become a haven for Aberdeen's teen runaways was in fact Tiffany's new home. She and Mom moved in two months earlier. Like Patty and Marcia, she too was from a divorced family; her dad had split with her mom and now lived in California with her brother and her grandparents. But Tiffany wasn't without "relatives"—she had lots of other brothers and sisters, as Mom called them, wandering in off the street. Strangers moved in and out or just flopped overnight in one of the upstairs bedrooms. They lolled around on the old couches while Mom scared up a bite to eat in the funky kitchen. A few did drugs as they listened to music, or watched TV or a video—one in particular, a dubbed copy of a film called Set It Off. As in: Set the guns off.
The three toughened girls—one had shaved her head—watched the video endlessly. It stars Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett, Vivica Fox, and Kimberly Elise as members of a black, four-girl robbery team in Los Angeles. They're poor, smoke a little dope, work as janitors, and feel wronged by society and murderous LA cops. Rash and vengeful, they resort to armed robbery. "Ain't nobody gonna get hurt, that's why this is the perfect crime. . . . " says Frankie, Fox's character. "We just takin' away from the system, it's fucking us all anyway." As upbeat music roars, they take over banks, waving guns, counting down the seconds, stuffing cash in garbage bags, making a clean getaway, celebrating: "$12,000 in 60 seconds!"
It was exciting and fun. The destitute, angry, younger white girls on East First could have seen themselves in Takashi Bufford's story despite its ultimate cautionary message that crime is no solution. But maybe Mom got them past that bromide. The girls would later say that after some screenings, Mom would give them a quiz: What did Cleo do wrong there? She took her eyes off the customers! Missteps like that could spoil a good Friday field trip.
Also rising anxiously that morning was Amber Wood, 20, who had moved in a month earlier. Her parents owned the headstone engraving company just down the street, but they'd had a falling out with Amber after she tried to pass a check forged from their business. It wasn't her first: She was arrested five times in 1997 for bad checks, forgery, and theft. A chunky young woman—5-8, 180, about the size of, say, Queen Latifah—with tattoos on her back, ankles, and hands, Amber was on parole for the bad check but wasn't making progress. She'd just been fired from her fish-packing job in Westport, and her parole officer in Montesano was upset. He was planning to issue an arrest warrant in the next few days to send her back to jail.
