Terminal Island (16 page)

Every once in a while nostalgia slapped you upside the head and reminded you that no one ever truly adjusted to the fact of leaving childhood behind. He tried to avoid it, but sometimes it sneaked up. Every moment you lived, he thought, was a small step toward your death.

“So, you want to see me?” The stringy old man stood in the arched doorway with a bottle of beer clutched in one clawlike hand.

“Strange as it may seem. Have a seat.”

Ante Petricich set down the beer, and rested the heels of his hands on the table to help himself settle very slowly into a chair, as if his joints needed time to accustom. “Don't grow old, son. It's not worth it.”

“Compared to the alternative, it is.”

The old man smiled tightly.

“I want to ask you about the American Legion crowd you hung out with. During the war and right after. I know my granddad was there, and even my dad as a little kid. Draw me a picture of the legion hall.”

“Go see it yourself. The place's still there today, off Mesa, but it's changed some. Back then there were a couple of pool tables with sloppy pockets, one with some adhesive tape where Tommy Santchi tried a fancy massé shot. And a snooker table that nobody used. Snooker was too tough; those tiny, rounded pockets kick the little balls right back out.”

Ante Petricich thought things over for a moment, but something kept him going. “We had one of those bright red Coke chests, though it mainly held Brew 102. That was a cheap LA brand, dead these thirty years now. Or Eastside Old Tap Lager, also dead. There was a podium we didn't use much, except for monthly business meetings. The American flag had a gold fringe. Not many remember that technically that made it a battle flag. One wall was all covered with snipped-off neckties from the men who forgot on casual night, mostly guests who weren't told the rule so they could be ambushed.

“Guys came and went all the time to socialize, play cards, share a few laughs. Women were strictly verboten, except the cleaning lady, and one girls' night a year. The back of the place had a partition for the folding chairs and a little kitchenette. Had a nice Seventh Street Garage calendar with Rita Hayworth on it—you know, the one kneeling with the sweater sticking out. That became our pet, stayed up a helluva long time after the year was used up.”

Jack Liffey was amazed that the old man remembered it all in such detail. “Some guys hung out there a lot?”

“Pretty much every night for some, maybe three nights a week for others. It varied. I went to avoid the fights with Sanja when I was in port. The wife, not the boat. She had a tongue on her would bone a tuna with its shock wave.”

“Anybody else a regular?”

“Steelyard's dad, Morty, but he took off for greener pastures about Korea time. Morty's wife was more than he wanted to put up with, too, a real nagger. Some other regulars. We had a floating rummy game.”

“Any of these rummy players still in town?”

He could see a shadow of suspicion flit over the old man's face, but his urge to dip into his memory seemed to override it. “Robbie Zukor. He must've tipped the scales at three hundred then. He ran a tire shop on Pacific for years, gave it to his son Petros a long time ago. His son got the business squashed when a big Black-O chain store went in down the street, and he gave up. The son shot himself in the mouth in his car, parked out at Point Fermin. That was a long time ago. Robbie's on a walker and oxygen now, and just a shadow of himself, but he comes in from time to time, wheeling his green cylinder behind.”

“You've got a good memory.”

“Yeah, sure. Funny to think, a lot of those guys, the stuff that's stored in my head is all that's left of them now. Robbie and I put a net load of beer bottles in a tidepool up by White's Point in 1939 and got busy at something and forgot. Went back in 1947 and the labels was gone but the beer was great, crisp and cold. So what's going to happen to that fact when he and I kick the bucket?”

“I know it now.”

“Son of a bitch, soon your mind is about all there'll be of old Robbie Zukor.”

“Tell me about those plates that disappeared from your boat.”

That seemed to do it for the confiding. It was like a roll-down grid slamming closed over a shop window. The old man sipped the beer and said nothing, his eyes wandering the room as if looking for escape routes.

“Memory like yours, you must know something about those plates.”

“Who gives a shit about plates? Something Sanja bought at the Newberry's and broke half of.”

“I don't think so. There's a mahogany chest of drawers, too, and an old kitchen chair from Steelyard's house. What do you know about them?”

“You can kiss my bony ass, Declan's boy, and get out of my house.”

“That's a pretty extreme reaction, don't you think? It's just going to make me more suspicious. Why don't you tell me about it?”

“You can amscray right now. Suspicion your own asshole, for all I care.” He got up painfully, abandoning about a quarter of his beer, and walked straight out of the room.

At least he had another name now, he thought, Robbie Zukor, and a pretty good indication that something had happened back then that they weren't too proud of.

Marin came in without her apron, which revealed a plunging sweater, as if to give him a better look, just in case. “Granddad came storming past like a PT boat in a gale warning. Something wrong?”

“He's a bit sensitive about that china that went AWOL off the boat. Do you know anything about it?”

“I inherited it from the great Sanja herself before she passed, but, one by one, we broke the important stuff like the cereal bowls and I went over to some Melmac from Perry's Five-and-Dime. I just told Dan to take what was left and use it on the boat. It's got no value.” “It's got value to someone.”

Dec 21 AM

A warrior must face a challenge and solve it lightly, make no great effort, seem to use little energy. If you are resolved beforehand, you will behave with uncertainty. That is why it is essential to study all the possibilities ceaselessly. It is unforgiveable that I made no mental preparations for the card I found on my door, a copy of my own, a taunt, a challenge. It caught me by surprise, and thus I could not treat such a grave thing lightly, as it deserved.

Perhaps I have been walking in a daydream. This is a deep failing that I must remedy before facing this man. Still, I must honor the author of this challenge. I must meet him at the time he chooses. A real man does not fear what comes abruptly, but plunges toward it. Action wakes you from dreams.

Fourteen

Bird of Prey

“Gramps, come help us.”

Ornetta had a grin full of mischief as she pulled her head back into the bedroom.

“Are you sure?” Maeve asked.

“He's okay. You can't make my gramps's eyes go pop-the-weasel, not unless you go and open up that whole Pandemonia's box.”

It took Maeve a moment to register what Ornetta meant, and then she decided pedants were boring, so she let it be. She might even like it better this way. Ornetta's glory was playing fast and loose with her tales, whatever their roots. Maeve could hear the four rubber tips of his support cane thumping slowly down the hall. “I want to change to bright blue if you're going to go for lavender.”

“I want the sparkles, too.”

He peered in, and his eyes went straight to their hands. “Whoa! Oh, my lordy heavens!” He labored in and backed the door shut conspiratorially. “Genesee is asleep, but that's so loud it's going to wake her up just looking.”

They both wore three-inch acrylic fingernails that Maeve had picked up on a whim in a nail salon in a walk over to Vermont, and, after gluing them on, they'd discovered that the nails themselves handicapped them so badly that they could barely help one another paint them.

“Gramps, we need your help with the color. We can't seem to hold the brush right.”

“Well, I got to sit down for this. I sure hope those aren't permanent.” He settled slowly into the old stuffed chair with the brown Roy Rogers throw over it, lassos and horse heads and corral fences. Maeve guessed this had been his son's room at one time. His son was dead now—something her own father had discovered almost two years earlier—killed along with his white girlfriend by a group of organized bigots.

“No, sir,” Maeve said. “They come off. It's just dress-up.”

“Okay, who's up?”

“You go, girl,” Maeve offered.

Ornetta knelt in front of him and handed him the lavender nail polish bottle and the spangles. “When it's still wet, you got to sprinkle on the gold.”

“This must be what vampires look like. Don't you go biting me now.”

“I don't got to bite you to hoodoo you, Gramps,” Ornetta said. “I just write your name on a piece of paper eleven times and then stick a candle on the paper and when the candle burn down and start to take the paper, your troubles goin' to begin.”

“Whoa, where did you get that from?”

“A girl at school from down in the delta, she full of the old stuff. It don't work, though. I tried it on that man that said the bad words to you at the little store and he still okay.”

Bancroft Davis smiled. “Maybe you gave him a slow liver disease.”

“Hope so.”

“Hold still now, girl. My hand is none too steady.” He finished one nail and held an open palm under it as he gently tapped the shaker to spread glitter over the paint. “You're right, it looks great. For dress-up,” he qualified.

Maeve stared at his leathery-looking hands and how gently he held Ornetta's. She skootched closer and sat cross-legged, waiting her turn.

“Mr. Bancroft, my dad told me you were a hero during Freedom Summer down in Mississippi.”

He smiled some kind of private smile. She expected a modest disavowal, but he was often hard to predict.

“Your dad is exactly right, girl,” Bancroft Davis said without a hint of irony. “I was a big hero, big as they come.”

He let it sit for a moment as both girls locked their eyes on him.

“You got to be sure what you think a hero is, though, you two hero-worshipers. There's all kinds, some born brave as a tiger and some just too scared to run away. Some people just scared to have people
see
them run away. But, you know, what's most important, you got to have the good fortune, be standing in the right place when the big bad wolf start hassling the little pig.”

“I don't follow you,” Maeve said.

“We argued round and round all the time about this in SNCC. Some of us said if Mr. Lincoln hadn't signed the Emancipation Proclamation, somebody else would have come along to do it. And I guess that's true, a little. Slavery was going to be stopped sooner or later, it was just so
wrong
and evil. But in 1860, it was only forty years to go to the twentieth century. Think of that. Only forty years. Suppose the might-a-been just for a minute. No Mr. Lincoln, and the twentieth century start up with people inventing cars and airplanes while America is still the only country in the world caught in slavetime.” He shook his head.

“People aren't interchangeable, not a bit. You can't go and put Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones in that chair and expect to get Mr. Lincoln. He was right there when he was needed, and we're all lucky for it. Mr. Lincoln went and stood up, just like a lot of boys and girls did in 1963, a hundred years later.”

He finished another nail and carefully sparkled it, gripping his pink tongue hard in his teeth while he worked.

“I watched some of these boys from the North like Bob Moses, full of piss and vinegar, but quiet about it, and I learned from them how there just wasn't any otherwise when the time came. I couldn't Jet them see me back down. I reckon I was lucky just to be there. And I did find how to go still inside so I could sit there quiet at that lunch counter with all those ignorant white boys spitting and shouting hate at us. Not many kids today get the luck to be somewhere important, no matter what they got inside, and I feel sorry for them.”

Maeve was in so much awe of him she didn't know what to say.

“Maeve, give me your hand for a sec.”

“You're not done with Ornetta yet.”

“Not that.”

She held out her hand, and he took it in his as if shaking it. His hand was twice the size of hers. The skin was roughened and tough, and his palm felt dry, and he held her hand hard—hard enough that it hurt a little, as if he didn't realize the strength he had.

“Look there.” He pointed toward their hands with the nail brush in his free hand. “There's nothing stronger on this whole earth than a white hand in a black hand.”

Maeve wanted to say “or vice versa,” but she couldn't. She felt herself needing to cry for some reason, her cheeks burning, the feeling pricking the corners of her eyes and then one tear just let loose and rolled down her cheek.

“I'm so happy you two gals are friends.”

“Blood sisters,” Ornetta corrected.

He went back to painting Ornetta's nails, and Maeve surreptitiously wiped her eyes. It was a long while before she could join their conversation about how hard it must be to work a typewriter or cash register with acrylic nails.

Then all of a sudden the door came open. They hadn't heard the sound of Genesee Thigpen's wheelchair coming down the hall, but it was there now, her hands tight on the wheels. Her eyes took in the scene and then lasered in on Ornetta's long purple spangled nails with a look of wrath.

“You get those things
off you
right this minute!”

“But my momma wore them,” Ornetta complained.

Maeve watched them all carefully, and somehow she got the feeling that that may have been exactly the point. Maeve had never heard the full story, but she knew that many years ago, when Bancroft Davis had been a lot younger and stronger, he had flown to New York to rescue his adopted daughter, Ornetta's mother, from either a crack house or a brothel—Maeve could hardly believe such things existed outside of movies. He had failed. The best he'd been able to do was sweep up Ornetta, still a small child, and bring her west. Ornetta only spoke of that time in allegory and folk tale, through a screen of make-believe, as a time of living in a big brick palace with her beautiful mother's many men attendants and a tall knight guarding her.

The old woman's expression softened. “When you two get those evil things off, come help me shuck peas for supper. I'll teach you how to make hush puppies.”

“I'm sorry, the dress-up was all my idea,” Maeve put in. “The remover'll take them right off.”

Ornetta bristled a little but seemed to go along.

“Can I call my grandpa later?” Maeve asked, surprising herself. She said it as much to divert their attention from this fierce focus on one another as out of any desire to talk to him. She hadn't even realized she wanted to call.

“Of course you can, hon',” Genesee said.

“You're a rude old fuck,” Steelyard said.

Declan Liffey seemed to stretch his neck, and then roll his head a little, as if working out a kink. “You mean, impolite?”

“And more. Let's come at this another way. I'm not leaving this room until you tell me what happened here during the war that's pissed somebody off so bad and scared all you old farts into conniptions.”

The room had been tidied obsessively since his ordeal. All the books were gone, the magazines, and what little had remained of any loose paper. The desk had a brand-new computer on it now, one of those Macs with the swiveling flat screen like a giant shaving mirror.

“Some would say being impolite to authority is necessary. Saying your mind. Truth-telling—a deep human duty.”

“Deep doo-doo. Like I give a shit what you assholes think about things. You and your pals
did
something to some Jap in this town that you know you shouldn't ought to 've done and you've been letting it mulch since Truman beat Dewey.”

“You like Japs?”

Steelyard wasn't going to get drawn into this. Once you let your subject set the agenda, the interrogation could only go seriously adrift. “The point is what you fuckin' perpetrated, Declan, you and your legion pals.”

Declan Liffey went off on a tear anyway, about the Japanese being sneaky and underhanded, coldhearted and unfriendly, vengeful and buck-toothed, copiers and mimickers of everybody else's creative impulses. The old fart would have fit right in at one of the detective lunches, Steelyard thought, though he'd have to shift to a more popular target—say, spades or Mexes. Basically, they trashed everybody but nonhomosexual Protestants, even when one of the detectives present happened to be a spade or a Mexican, he was more or less expected to sit there and keep his mouth shut.

“I don't want to talk about the Japanese, Dec. I want to talk about you and your ballooning guilt.”

“You've got to let me demythologize your thinking. You been stuffed with so many half lies. You'll sink in all that shit and never be seen again. You got to get rid of that sentimental claptrap and bleeding-heart stuff about people all being the same.”

“Legion hall, 1941. You can fuckin' bottle the rest of your crap and send it out with the tide.”

Declan Liffey frowned. “Maybe I got nothing to say.”

“Maybe I got no help to give you the next time this ninja shows up.”

“What more can he do to me? He's trashed my life's work.”

“There's your son and your granddaughter. He's threatened both of them.” That gave the old man pause.

“The girl, too?”

“Looks that way. There's a photo of her with a knife through her neck. He seems to go after families.”

“They oughta clear out of town and stay out.”

“They have, for now. Give me a hint here, Dec. Did you push some Jap around? Lynch him? Beat him up? After Pearl, it was understandable.”

For a moment it appeared he might actually be ready to talk, but then the phone rang. Ken Steelyard swore in his head.

The old man eyed the machine for a moment but then answered it. “Yes. Uh-huh.”

Ken Steelyard could hear a tiny girl's voice at the other end, though he couldn't take in the words, like a bee in a bottle.

“I'm okay, but I don't think your father wants you to.”

The bee buzzed some more, insistently. Slowly old Declan's face took on a defiant air. “Sure, come on down tomorrow.”

There was another little sizzle and trill from the bottle.

“Bring your friend, too, the more the merrier.” He set the receiver down.

It was not hard to work out. “I doubt if Jack is going to be happy about that.”

“Then park your SWAT team in the alley to protect us. I want to see my granddaughter. I've never properly met her. My son cut me off years ago like a pariah dog you kick in the gutter.”

Now, why would Jack do that, Ken Steelyard thought sarcastically, to such a pleasant old man? “Wartime, Declan. Pearl Harbor, sneak attack. People are cussing Japs on the street. They're closing down Japtown over on Terminal Island. I imagine you and your legion pals got busy. You know, evening the score for Pearl by beating up little Jap schoolgirls.”

The old man sighed. “Most of us then are gone. I was just a kid hanging with the men. Are you going to turn down the lottery if Ed McMahon walks in and tells you you just won? Especially when taking your winnings involves punishing somebody you hate?”

“C'mon, tell me straight.”

“I'm not gonna answer. You know and I know that's no fuckin' innocent question.”

“I ain't leaving, Dec.”

He shrugged. “Shit, it's way past the legal limits anyway. Mike Zorotovich ran the San Pedro Moving and Storage just off Beacon. What an opportunity, man. All these Japs stored their stuff and then got hustled off to camps. We figured they were going to send them back to Japan. Why not help ourselves to all the good stuff before somebody else did?”

“Break a few padlocks?”

“It didn't work that way. It was one big place back then. Had been an icehouse. They just had ropes around their stuff, with their name on it. Trusting little buggers. It didn't even feel like stealing.”

“And after the war?”

He chuckled. “Not even after, man. The whole thing gets real funny here. We pretty much cleaned out the place the week after they dropped off their stuff, but I think the Ozakis went on making storage payments all through the war. Tough titty.”