Terminal Island (11 page)

Dec 18

How intoxicating the
Hagakure
is! Here is a true warrior, forbidden suicide after the death of his master, who because he cannot do what he knows is his duty, demands permission to go into retirement and become a monk. It is in this seclusion that his journal is begun. He brings me close to something very ancient, and not just to the values and philosophy of that matchless era of honorable combat in Japan. This awakening stretches back much farther, to the yellow flicker of campfires, to guarding the cave mouth through the night until the
other
is seen approaching in a cold dawn. To the ancient dream of hurting.

Nine

Across the Bridge

Jack Liffey slowed the VW and then had to pull over and stop for what appeared to be a Rose Parade float puttering slowly along Slauson toward him and filling more than half the roadway. It was led by two big motorcycles and a truck encroaching on his lane with a sign that said
Wide Load.
But it wasn't even Christmas yet, he thought. Almost, though. He felt a little tingle of guilt as he remembered, once again, that he hadn't gotten anything for Maeve or Rebecca yet. To avoid that thought he watched the float. Could it actually be for the Rose Parade already? He remembered that the powers that be had wrecked the Rose Bowl, anyway. Now it was set up to please the gamblers and math fetishists, turning a traditional matchup of the Big Ten and Pac Ten into some foul computer-selected national playoff that would put teams like Florida and Nebraska in the bowl but bring in millions in Vegas betting. Not that he cared that much, really. Football was about as important to him as a flower show.

He got a better look at the float as it drew abreast, and what he saw gave him a shock. It was made of flowers, all right, but the dystopic tableau depicted several dead young men lying in front of a burned-out storefront while others crouched within—a shoot-out at the LA Gang Corral. Most appeared to be African American. Even their Uzis were rendered lovingly in some dark silver buds.

“What do you make of
that?”
he asked Maeve.

“Two points, I'd say. But what on earth could it be for?”

“Maybe they're letting the Crips into the Rose Parade?”

“That's two weeks away. The cut flowers would all be wilted by then. Who knows?”

A pickup truck followed with another
Wide Load
sign. “We'll probably never know. And it's better that way. The world I recognize is strange enough.”

He was driving Maeve into protective hiding. The knife through her photo had freaked him enough to work on coming up with some way to protect her that she would be willing to buy into. On an earlier case, they had met a famous old civil rights leader and his granddaughter, and Maeve had made a blood sisters pact with the little girl. Ornetta Boyce, two years her junior, had been sent away to school. Working on possible places for Maeve to hide, Jack Liffey had found out that Ornetta was home for Christmas. She was staying with her grandparents, and South-Central LA seemed far enough off the beaten track to be a safe bet. Maeve was keen to see Ornetta again, anyway.

“We write all the time. Remember I saw her last summer?”

Actually, he did. But keeping up with kids was hard, especially when they didn't live with you full-time.

“I saw Bancroft and Genesee, too. They're pretty frail now.” Maeve looked sad as she talked of Ornetta's grandparents.

He nodded. “I saw them once. I'm amazed they manage to take care of one another without full-time nursing.”

He pulled up in front of a bungalow that was set back above a sloped lawn, and he had the same warm feeling he always had thinking of the couple. Visiting them was like visiting the cloister of some Old World saints: their aura would reach out to enclose and protect you.

Maeve got out and folded the seat forward to get at her overnighter. She'd graduated from her little checkered pasteboard number—its innocence had always stirred a little pang in his heart—to a lumpy Gore-Tex contraption on rollers that looked like it came from Mount Everest Outfitters. The front door banged open, and a shriek announced that Ornetta had seen Maeve. They rushed at each other like diminutive linebackers. Ornetta was something like fourteen now but had grown a lot and filled out even more. He was amazed at how mature she looked.

Bancroft Davis came out onto the porch next. He was on a walker now, but it was one of the new-style ones that looked a lot more like sports equipment, with handlebars and hand brakes and a canvas saddlebag for books and such, as if it came from the same expedition outfitters as Maeve's bag.

“Jack,” Bancroft Davis said. “It's a great treat to see you again.”

“The pleasure is all mine. That thing looks like it'd be happy to do a marathon.”

“It'll have to do it without me.” They shook hands warmly.

“How's Genesee?”

“She's inside. Fine, but a little tired.” His wife had been in a wheelchair for some time now.

“Hi, Uncle Jack.” He got a hug from Ornetta, and then the girls were a blur of eagerness heading away down the hallway toward her bedroom.

“How's she doing in school?” Jack Liffey asked. He followed the old man inside to the living room, with its bleached fifties modern furniture and African artifacts everywhere.

“Straight A's,” he said proudly. He smiled with satisfaction as he waved off help and shifted himself gradually into a leather chair that someone had mounted on a box to raise it about eighteen inches and make it easier to use.

The school Ornetta attended, Jack Liffey knew, was called Dunbar Latin, and it was in Washington, D.C. It had been founded in 1807 for the half-white illegitimate children of plantation owners and had sent far more than its share of famous African Americans to Harvard and Yale. The first time Bancroft had told him about the place, he had shown him a photocopy of an old ad the school had placed in newspapers across the South in the early 1800s, disingenuously promising
not
to teach its students to read. But, of course, they had.

Genesee, herself an old Communist, didn't really approve of such an upscale place. But since it got Ornetta away from South-Central LA and its ever-looming troubles, she acquiesced. Jack Liffey wasn't all that fond of private schools himself, but as he was living with a headmistress, what could he say?

“We'd best talk a bit about this danger you said your daughter's in,” Bancroft suggested as Jack Liffey took the chair across from him.

“I wouldn't expose you and Genesee if I thought there was a chance in hell the trouble could find Maeve here.” He explained about the “no no” boy and the fact that the main targets so far had been physical objects—a sunk boat, a wrecked train set. “I'm told the danger is to what I hold dear, but I own so little of any real value. The problem is, I can't be sure he isn't targeting families.”

“That's some profession you got for yourself,” the old man commented finally.

“I just fell into it, really. You can't be opposed to finding lost kids—whether they're lost on purpose or not—and getting them out of trouble. And if home is the wrong place to go, I never force them. It's turned out to be a lot better calling than writing boring copy about how to wire up a microwave relay station.” Jack Liffey smiled, and took a good, slow, deep breath, as he was doing more often now, running on half his cylinders oxygenwise. “It doesn't
always
get me into trouble.”

“I confess to a soft spot for people who work in technology. It always seems to me they're the ones building the world.”

Jack Liffey hadn't really thought about things like that in a long time. “It's a great privilege to like your job, and greater still to be able to respect it. I'm thinking of your life's work, Ban.”

“Not many are called to be in the middle of the struggle, thank the Lord,” Bancroft Davis mused. “It just overtakes you. It frightened me so deeply, so many times, I wouldn't wish it on a single soul.” He opened and closed his fingers, watching as if surprised that his hand still worked.

“Genesee and her Marxist friends made a fetish out of the need to struggle. But we were never trying to build a world where people had to fight all the time. I was working for a world where everybody could settle down and go to a job in a nice, comfortable car every day and raise a family.” He looked at Jack Liffey.

“I guess I was lucky enough to have some of that. But I couldn't make it last.”

They talked for a while longer, but Jack Liffey knew he had to leave soon to meet Ken Steelyard. “May I give my regards to Genesee?”

“She's pretty tired since Ornetta got in. Let me pass her your affections.”

“Maeve isn't going to be a burden, is she?”

“On the contrary. She can help us with the chores.”

He knew perfectly well Maeve would more than pull her weight. She was a born nurturer and choredoer. He went down the short hall to say good-bye to her and rapped lightly on the door where he heard the murmur of the girls' voices.

“Password!” Ornetta demanded.

He was taken aback for a moment. “Rhinestone animals,” he replied finally. It had been the title of the first tale she had ever told him, as an eleven-year-old, wide-eyed, storytelling prodigy. Ornetta was a formidable wordspinner.

She opened the door for him. Maeve was cross-legged on one of the twin beds, looking happy.

“You still telling stories?”

“At school we have story night once a month. It's great—we're preserving our oral tradition.”

“That's terrific, Ornetta. I've got to go now, but I want you to save a story for me.”

She grinned and took something off a shelf to hand him. It was a little booklet, obviously her school's literary journal, with the title
North Star No. 157.
“I write stories now, too. That's for you.”

He flipped to the contents page and found her name on a story called “How the Mule Learned to Tell Time.”

“Can I get you to autograph it?”

She lifted her chin. “At Dunbar, we don't be believing in making celebrities out of storytellers,” she told him.

“I'll be darned,” he said. “Bless you all.”

* * *

He tugged hard against the silver tape but couldn't move his enfeebled forearms more than a quarter inch from the wooden arms of his desk chair. It was an old wheelless barrel oak chair and he was sorry now that he'd never upgraded to a rolling chair because, while he could still move his feet a little, he couldn't budge the heavy thing on the carpet. He hoped his asthma didn't kick in because a big wad of cloth was taped into his mouth and he was already having trouble breathing through his deviated septum.

For half an hour, Declan Liffey's eyes had not left the apparition that was hard at work across the room, dressed in a dark black jumpsuit like some TV ninja. He tried to memorize what he could. From what little was visible through the holes of the dark balaclava, the man's skin and eye shape said he was some kind of Oriental. Sneaky, like all of them, of course. There was more than one reason for calling them yellow.

The man had clamped a portable shredder on the lip of the big garage trash barrel and was methodically shredding every paper in the room. It was a cheap shredder, good for only twenty or thirty sheets at a time, so this had been going on for quite some time now—handful after handful of paper buzzing into strip spaghetti. The bottom two filing drawers of the cabinet stood open and denuded now, and the intruder was halfway through the third.

The only duplicate copy of his irreplaceable manuscript was in the top drawer—good, old-fashioned carbons—but, far worse, the original was in plain sight on the desk, where he always kept it. He liked to have it there to add notes as they occurred to him or to have a quick reread of a particularly satisfying section, marked by Post-its. He hadn't taken his son's warning seriously enough. He did his best not to let his eyes drift to so many years' loving work waiting there, vulnerable as a newborn baby:
The History of the White Race,
complete from the dawn of time, with only the final chapter, “Maladaptive Liberalism,” waiting to be finished.

The intruder seemed to be serene in his long task, collecting handfuls of papers from the drawer without hurry and feeding them deliberately into the buzzing device. That must be how Orientals like him built the Union Pacific across the Sierras, Declan thought, slowly cutting through solid rock at ten thousand feet. Something in their genes suited them to repetitious and tedious work. They were supposed to be smart, but you couldn't be all that smart if you could tolerate such boredom. And what sort of music or literature had they given to the world? Nothing. It was all copies and imitations, and tinny little cars.

The man got to the top drawer eventually. Declan thrashed and grunted in distress, but nothing could prevent him from stripping off the rubber bands and starting to shred the carbons. The flimsy paper fed easily and, as a result, it didn't take long to dispose of the only duplicate of his manuscript. He dare not let his eyes drift to the original beside the old L. C. Smith upright typewriter.

What was this all about? he asked himself for the umpteenth time. Or could there be any logic at all to the Oriental mind? Was it just random destructiveness, out of envy of the West's superiority? If anything, he'd given the yellow races a more positive assessment in his work than most of the others—industrious and self-sacrificing, disciplined, a culture in which instinct presided over reason. The problem was, they were also derivative and uncreative, always half a step behind the evolution of the white race. Declan had no idea whether the man even knew about the years of work he was annihilating.

He was already contemplating the heart-sinking thought of starting over when the gloved hand reached across him and picked up the manuscript on his desk. He could feel tears rolling down his cheeks and onto the duct tape holding his gag. He mumbled and grunted and tossed his head, but there was only methodical concentration from the Asian mechanism at work in his home. The dark figure went at his task, driven by some destructive impulse beyond any thinking of it. Declan saw the first sheets buzz into fine strips and flutter down into the barrel and clamped his eyes shut for the first time. It was like watching a child violated, a child you had nurtured all its life.

Eventually the buzzing stopped, and an abrupt prickle in his nose snapped Declan's eyes open, some noxious chemical. The ninja figure was emptying gallon plastic jugs of chlorine bleach into the barrel. If there had been the slightest chance of salvaging anything from the shredded strips, it was disappearing into a gluey mass of cellulose and chemistry.