Terminal Island (19 page)

“Can you tell us one?”

“Oh, I do think so,” Ornetta said, and this was a new tone, too, as far as Maeve could tell, with a suggestion that she would not be hurried.

They heard another deep hoot from the harbor, and then some answering signal, much weaker, like a child replying to a shepherding parent.

“This is the story of the big grouchy bear and the monkeys,” Ornetta announced. “Are we ready?”

Declan Liffey smiled gently. “Shoot, young lady.”

“For years, the monkeys were all afraid to move into the big grouchy bear's neighborhood. He was so mean and so big, they just stayed in their own place across the forest. Then, one day, two young monkeys who didn't know any better moved in right next door to Mr. Bear.”

As the story went on, Ornetta recounted the monkeys' tentative attempts to be neighborly, which were reciprocated by the big, grouchy bear's snubs and taunts, and Maeve noticed that Ornetta had not once switched into dialect. It was the first time Maeve had ever heard her tell a tale completely in Standard English, as if even a single step into that other world would leave her too unguarded, too vulnerable in some way to the old man.

“ ‘All right, you monkeys,' growled the big grouchy bear. ‘I'll have you over for dinner, but you've got to wash your hands. They're so filthy, they're black.'

“The monkeys looked down at their hands and they were truly surprised. They'd never noticed it before, their hands
were
black as night. Of course, since they moved near Mr. Bear, they were all alone in the neighborhood so they couldn't check out any other monkeys. They didn't remember that all monkeys have black hands.

“So they scrubbed and scrubbed in the stream, but the black just wouldn't come off.”

For some reason Maeve was reminded of
The Jungle Book
and the mesmerizing duel of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the mongoose and the cobra. Not so much by the story Ornetta was telling, but by the real world there in the room. Ornetta and her grandfather seemed just as wary of one another, circling, watching, and she wondered which one was the mongoose and which the cobra. In Ornetta's story, the bear made the monkeys rub their hands with sand harder and harder until they bled, and when that didn't work, he made them scrape their hands on rough rocks for as long as they could stand it. Of course, that didn't work any better. Eventually their hands hurt so much that the monkeys had to stop, and the grouchy old bear turned them away and said if they couldn't get their hands clean, they couldn't eat with him.

“The monkeys were sad for a long time, but little by little, other monkeys moved into that neighborhood until there were hundreds of different kinds of monkeys there, and just only one Mr. Bear. Those first monkeys couldn't help noticing that the orangutans, the chimps, the spider monkeys, and even the howlers—in fact, all their neighbor monkeys—had black hands just like theirs. Their hands were still sore with scars from all the scraping, trying to get the black off, and they started to frown at that big, grouchy bear every time he peeked out his window and saw the changes in his neighborhood.

“Finally they called a congress of the monkeys and said they should invite the bear over to a big dinner party and all make friends. But first he had to make himself respectable, like any good monkey. The monkeys all agreed, so the two monkeys who had moved there first were appointed ambassadors to Mr. Bear.

“One morning, they were ready and they stood on the porch of the big grouchy bear's house and knocked.

“ ‘What do you want?' Mr. Bear growled through the door. ‘I know you two.'

“ ‘We want to invite you for a friendly dinner party with all the monkeys,' the two first monkeys said. ‘But before you can come out here, you got to make yourself respectable, like all of us.' They set a bucket of soapy water and a big razor on his porch. ‘No respectable monkey would be caught dead with a big hairy rump like yours. You can't come out in polite society until you shave all that ugly hair off your big bear butt.' ”

Ornetta trailed off a few moments at this point. Maeve gulped at her tea to suppress a kind of nervous laugh. She was overwhelmed by the tension, but Ornetta seemed as calm as ever. Her grandfather seemed on the edge of laughter, too, in his own way.

“Well,” Declan Liffey finally said, “did the bear go and do it?”

“I don't know,” Ornetta said. She wouldn't take her eyes off him. “That's where the story seems to stop for now.”

He waited until precisely eight o'clock again, still haunted by the worry that being either early or late by a few minutes would reveal some kind of failing. There was a damp cold off the harbor, and another house in the neighborhood had added Christmas decorations, simple multicolored big-bulb lights along the eaves, a fixture from yesteryear. The door of the garage dwelling in back was standing ajar again, which he hoped was a good sign. He had no idea whether his big bluff would bear fruit. He had tossed down his gauntlet, that it was Joe Ozaki's turn to talk, without any assurance that it would work. He knew perfectly well that there were times that a pure act of will could spread like a ripple in the world around you, to oblige others to acknowledge what you had decided. But that might only work with normal impressionable people. Ozaki was another kettle of fish altogether.

If anything, the room was darker than the evening before. Ozaki was not on the sofa. Jack Liffey waited there a moment in the doorway, willing his eyes to adjust. All of a sudden he saw the man, and the same chill shot through him. Joe Ozaki stood facing him in the dining room at parade rest, this time wearing his black jumpsuit. He had a black watch cap on, too, that looked like it would roll down to make a balaclava and hide his face, but it was rolled up now. Oh, Lord, Jack Liffey thought, here we go. He was determined not to talk first. If it was to be a battle of wills, so be it. He'd wait him out.

“Sit down,” a reedy voice finally ordered, after their eyes had rested on one another for what seemed a very long time.

Jack Liffey shook his head. He'd stand as long as the ninja did. Backlighted now with a faint outside glow from the dining-room window, the man looked amazingly thin and lithe. Jack Liffey had a better sense of his height now, maybe five-ten.

“There is nothing outside the immediate moment,” the man intoned. The pitch of his voice was a little high, but it was strong and unaccented, used to being obeyed, or at least heard out. “The mind that is pure and lacking complications.”

“Oh, I think there's a lot outside the immediate moment, and it's all complicated as shit.” He hadn't meant to get drawn into an argument, and he renewed his vow to remain silent. He needed to learn what Ozaki was about.

“All of man's work is a bloody business,” he went on, as if Jack Liffey hadn't spoken.

At this point, Jack Liffey realized he could mention Buddha or Yeats or Gandhi or a few other rag ends of man's business that weren't very bloody at all, but he didn't. A ship hooted in the harbor, so close that it seemed to be warning of a collision with the little house. His brain tingled in anticipation of something.

“It might seem to you that Lieutenant Steelyard and Dan Petricich are innocent as individuals, but that's just your Western individualism speaking. Honor inheres in families, as does shame and dishonor. Their families, and yours, participated in the dishonor of my family.”

What rubbish, Jack Liffey thought. And we all imported slaves and we all slaughtered the Indians at Wounded Knee. But he controlled his tongue.

“If I run from battle, my ancestors will carry that shame to the ends of time.” His voice seemed to shift gear. “You have chosen to challenge me.”

It was a flat statement, but it set all the hair on Jack Liffey's neck astir. Had he, in fact? He had thought of it more as offering help, but in Ozaki's strange world, offering help, certainly accepting it, would probably signify a kind of weakness. Real warriors, if there were such things outside the stunted male imagination—and he supposed a Special Forces soldier qualified as a real warrior if anyone did—were probably meant to be self-sufficient and pitiless.

The man brought his hands from behind his back, and there it was. There it was. One of those big horrible serrated killing knives in his left hand. A K-bar. Jack Liffey nearly bolted, but he knew the man hadn't hurt a soul yet.

“As a child I was afraid of knives,” Ozaki said, “especially very sharp knives like straight razors. I had a recurring vision of receiving one of those sudden deep cuts into my flesh, like a fish being gutted.”

He held out his right arm and ran the tip of the blade down his forearm, laying open a long cut. He let his arm dangle and watched without emotion as blood ran down his wrist, through the webbing of his fingers, and dripped to the floor.

“The idea of a knife fight terrified me in training. But once you accept the fact that you
will
be cut, there are no further barriers. To go into battle, you only need to decide that you are already dead. Morning after morning, you imagine your death, in every possible honorable way. You anchor your mind firmly in death. That is the true victory in the terrain of honor. Earthly victory or earthly defeat is irrelevant, a conjunction of stronger and weaker forces that you have no way to control. Welcoming death is not morbid, it's no more than a question of a different awareness.
Right now
is no different from ‘when it will come to pass.' ”

He put the knife back into some sheath in the small of his back and turned his gaze to the low coffee table in the room. There was a small book on the table.

“You have made the decision to be my enemy, Jack Liffey. Right now you are not worthy, not because you lack the military skills, but, more importantly, you haven't the proper spirit. A duel with you would not be honorable. Take that book and read it.”

Jack Liffey's eyes went to the book, a slim black paperback, but he couldn't make out the title, and he was so rooted in place by dread that he couldn't move toward it, couldn't even lean. When he looked up, Ozaki was gone, just vanished, like a lizard removing itself suddenly from a big rock in the sunlight.

He let out a breath, felt how lopsided his one good lung made him feel, and let his head hang a moment as if exhausted. Finally he roused himself and picked up the book. It was a pristine copy of
Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai,
by Yamamoto Tsunetomo.

Lord, he thought, take this nonsense from off my shoulders.

Sixteen

The Xhosa Delusion

The instant the door groaned open, he emerged angry from the graffiti-scarred elevator into the parking structure. He strode to his car, wrenched open the unlocked door, and then sat hard in a fuming funk. Dr. Shaheed had refused to pump up his left lung, maintaining that it needed another few weeks of healing. Jack Liffey had asked if this was some sort of exact science, the timing of the deflation and reflation of body parts, and the doctor had admitted it wasn't. A few months earlier, in a small closed space, Jack Liffey had suffered the explosion of a powerful bomb loaded with finely milled granite—which the FBI had switched for what was supposed to be powdered plutonium in a dirty bomb. Not only had it filled his airways with silica and collapsed one of his lungs, but it had also ended up putting him into the keeping of these two quacks, Shaheed and Auslander, to continue getting a temporary disability check.

Shaheed explained that intentionally collapsing a lung had been done long ago as a desperation treatment for tuberculosis. The problem was, there wasn't much good information on the procedure, and Jack Liffey's pulmonary system had received such a trauma and such a dosing of fine particulates that the doctor thought it would be best to let the left lung rest a while longer. Best to be safe, not sorry, Shaheed intoned, poking his thick spectacles up his bulbous nose with a forefinger. He who hesitates is lost, Jack Liffey quoted back at him, hoping one dim-witted cliché might nullify another, but Doc Shaheed just smiled indulgently.

Jack Liffey knew better than to start the car right away in his foul mood—he might drive straight into a pillar in his rage—and he reached for the little black paperback about Bushido that he'd been reading off and on for a day now. You couldn't take the stuff in large doses, all that macho strut and swagger, the toxic pall of a world slowly suffocating in its own mania for honor. It was like a fantastically bitter medicine that would cure nothing.

It is better not to bring up daughters. They are a blemish to the family name and a shame to the parents. The eldest daughter is special, but it is better to disregard the others.

He slapped the book shut and banged it on his knee. Nuggets like that didn't help. He wondered what Maeve would make of that aphorism. Still, he puffed out his half breath and opened the book again. He wasn't sure why he had taken on this responsibility, but he felt he should try to drag poor Joe Ozaki, kicking and screaming, out of all this medieval nonsense if he could, before anybody got seriously hurt. Jack Liffey did have a certain reservoir of sympathy for this poor frozen-souled warrior who had obviously become overwhelmed by his need to soothe the wounds he'd carried inside himself for so long. And he was using all this manly gibberish for the soothing. But Ozaki's dark hurt scared him, too. The man was wound so tight that he was obviously capable of serious mayhem at the drop of a hat.

He read for a few minutes more, and the passages seemed to lighten a little, one even speaking briefly of a kind of single-minded compassion.

Then two men in skimpy black bathing suits, racing Speedos, walked toward the VW. It was a dark afternoon in the dead of a California winter, maybe fifty degrees at best, made worse right there, at least psychologically, by the flat slabs of cold, gray concrete all around, like a manmade ice palace. They passed him, barefoot and as buff as professional bodybuilders, with bulgy arms and annoyingly narrow waists. One turned around slowly as he walked, keeping pace backward with the other, as if to check if anyone were following. Before this man turned away again, Jack Liffey caught a glimpse of the washboard abs that the TV infomercials that sold pricey exercise machines were always going on about. He cracked his window and heard one say, “Archibald insists on weight training on Sundays, right up to the moment of the contest. But Exodus thirty-five, verse two, says he should be put to death for working on the Sabbath.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I wonder if it means we're obligated to do it.”

“It wouldn't be right to let him win by violating the word of the Lord.”

They reached the waist-high wall at the edge of the parking structure, where it was open to the chill air outside. The first man cupped his hands as if to pray, and, without hesitation, dived straight over the wall and out of sight, giving Jack Liffey a sudden frisson of fright. The second man held back a moment and then followed. This time there was a chilling scream as the man went out of sight. They had leaped westward, if Jack Liffey's orientation was right, but he couldn't form a mental picture of what was out there in the West Hollywood environs. He was pretty sure he had parked on the fourth floor coming up the spiral ramp, and he had no idea what they could possibly be jumping into. He wondered if he had an ethical obligation to check, and maybe to try to save Archibald from whatever fate they had planned for him, but he figured his ethical dance card was already full up dealing with Joe Ozaki. He started the VW engine, first twist, reliable as always.

Maeve's little white Toyota was in the lot at his condo when he got back, which surprised him, but he was less worried about her now that he'd met Ozaki and satisfied himself that the man's malign will was pretty much focused on himself. It was now a duel of wills of some arcane sort. Well, more than a duel of wills, of course, he thought. Ozaki was well armed. But he was hardly going to meet the man out on the Palos Verdes bluffs at dawn with samurai swords. He would do his best to grasp what was eating at the man's soul and try to defuse it, that was all.

He went inside quietly, and his heart melted as he saw Maeve napping snuggled against Loco on the sofa, her arm casually over the dog's shoulder. Her mouth was open unattractively, and she snored softly. There was a bright green envelope on the tiny table by the door, without a stamp. It was from Becky and hadn't been opened. As silently as he could, he tore it open with his finger and brought out a three-page missive.

Dearest Jack, I think it is best that for a while now.…

That was all he needed, really. He folded the letter back up and put it into the envelope. It would take quite a tin ear, he thought, to miss the precise resonances of a “Dear John” letter. There was no need to subject himself to the full humiliation at that moment. He noticed some food brewing in pots in the kitchen and had no idea how long it had been going, so he squatted beside the sofa and rested his palm on Maeve's forehead.

“Hon. Wake up.”

Loco stirred first, and his forelegs quivered, some ancestral dream of a hunt, then he writhed around in a predator's panic and woke Maeve.

“Oooh, Dad.” She rubbed her eyes. “I was soo far away.”

He stroked her head, the touch soothing him probably much more than her.

“My car was parked in this really complicated city and I couldn't find it anywhere.”

“I think that's probably a common dream for a new car owner. Or anybody with a sense of responsibility. There's something cooking. I was afraid it might overdo.”

“My digital wristwatch will wake me”—she glanced at it—“in five minutes.”

He let her shake herself awake for a moment, her eyes becoming progressively less glassy. “I thought you were going to stay over with Ornetta,” he said.

“I'll go back tonight, but I asked somebody to dinner and I could hardly cook at their house.”

“Ornetta's coming?”

“Not exactly. There's plenty for you, don't worry. You're part of the deal.”

“Deal?
My presence at dinner has been traded for a washed-up southpaw and two future draft choices?”

She grinned. “Exactly. It's Gloria Ramirez. You know, she's really very nice.”

His eyes narrowed as he realized what she was up to. “Don't you think it's a bit soon to be matchmaking?”

“What did Rebecca's letter say?”

“None of your business. You should have steamed it open, if it worries you so much. I suppose it's too late to do anything about this dinner.”

“Uh-huh.”

He gave in to his manufactured fate. “What are you cooking?”

“There's water for pasta. It's the round tube type.”

“Penne is the smaller one; rigatoni is bigger.”

“Penne. I want to make that thing you taught me with the chicken and mint and Greek olives and stuff.”

“Then I better break out a good red wine.”

“You have wine?”

“It's from prehistory.” He meant from before he quit drinking. “It ought to be pretty well aged. I don't know how well ordinary Chianti ages in the bottle, but she can find out.”

“Can I try some?”

He thought a moment. “Half a glass. They do it in Europe, at least in France. I think they water it a bit for kids, but they say it stops a lot of binge drinking later on if you get used to being civilized when you're young.”

“Will you be joining us?”

“I don't think so, but don't let it worry you.” It was partially the drinking that had broken up the marriage to Maeve's mom, after he'd been laid off from his last good job. Staying off the booze was one of the ways he proved his own willpower to himself—and atoned a bit for what had led to the breakup.

Maeve's wrist alarm went off with an annoying little burr, and she levered herself up and hurried to the kitchen. He went into the back and took a shower, without quite articulating to himself why. He had liked Gloria Ramirez well enough, but anything more than a casual friendship right now was ridiculous, especially since she was a cop. He had no intention of telling her or Steelyard about meeting Joe Ozaki.

“I just learned about the Ghost Dance a few years ago,” she said. “It's so strange it's hard to believe it.”

Jack Liffey held out the wine bottle and raised his eyebrows. She nodded, so he refilled her glass. He came close to pouring a little into his empty water glass but resisted. The rich red sloshing liquid looked awfully inviting to him. Maeve had done a fine job on the pasta and salad, and he noticed that she was watching them make these near-flirtatious contacts across the ruins of the dinner, watching with a kind of astuteness beyond her years.

“I'm surprised you hadn't heard of it,” Jack Liffey said. “But you know, in case it makes you feel uneasy about your relatives, there are other places and other times where people went gaga under the same pressures.”

“What do you mean?”

She'd just told him about Wovoka, possibly her great-uncle, a bit mournfully inebriated, apologizing to Maeve for making her listen to the story another time. Almost two-thirds of the Chianti bottle was gone, but Maeve had only had a few sips. It was hard for him to keep his eyes off the plunging loose neckline of Gloria Ramirez's blouse, which seemed designed to invite an exploratory hand. Every time she moved, another angle of cleavage was revealed.

“I read this in anthropology back in college so I'm a little hazy on the facts,” Jack Liffey said. “It was before Wovoka, though, I'm sure. But it was almost exactly the same situation—here was a traditional society that, all of a sudden, found itself facing these damned confident, predatory Europeans who had dropped in on them out of the blue with guns and new ways of life. This was in southern Africa—the Xhosa people fighting the British and the Boers to hold onto their land. By this time they'd been crushed in a whole series of wars, spears against guns, and their spirit was pretty much broken. Just like the Sioux, or the Paiute, if you like.

“With the Xhosa it was a young girl who had the vision. She told her father that spirits had instructed them to kill all their cattle and burn every last grain of their crops, and the whites would go away. Then the cattle would come back fatter than ever and the crops would reappear. Like the buffalo.”

Jack Liffey's hand drifted to the wine bottle and he finally did pour himself half a glass. At his nearest reckoning, he'd had only two sips in the past seven years. He saw Maeve's eagle eye on his glass, so he let it sit just to spite her supposed grasp of his weakening resolve under the assault of so much latent emotion.

“So the Xhosa leaders announced what the spirits had said, and everyone did what was demanded: they slaughtered their animals and burned all their food stores. Then they built large new corrals to hold the cattle that would reappear, and granaries for the crops that would spring up. It became known as the Great Xhosa Delusion. Something like fifty thousand of them died of starvation that winter, waiting, and the rest were forced to drift helplessly to the cities on the coast or to the new Boer farms to beg for work.”

Gloria nodded sadly. “Sounds like the same thing; you're right.”

He did take a sip of the wine. It hadn't aged well in the bottle, but it still tasted wonderful, tannin and all. He refused to meet Maeve's eyes. He took a whole gulp and the buzz was almost instantaneous, though it was probably just his imagination. He felt relaxed, strong, wise.

She had another sip, too, which dribbled a little onto her chin.

Then Maeve was stirring. “Dad, could you do the dishes? I promised Genesee I'd be back before nine.”

This was a little too obvious. “How much wine did you have?”

“Two swallows. I didn't really like it. I bet I can pass any roadside test you set me.” She showed her glass and it was hardly touched. Then she stood up and remained very still, cocked her head back, and with her eyes closed, bent her elbow like a hinge to touch the tip of her nose precisely with one finger. Probably something she'd seen on
Cops.

“I'll clean up,” Jack Liffey said.

“I'll help, for heaven's sake,” Gloria said, and Maeve kissed both of them and was gone before anybody could blink.

They both found themselves staring at the closed door. Maeve's departure had left a big hole in the air in the room, and they hadn't realized how changed it would leave things between them when she was gone. “You know what she's up to, of course,” Jack Liffey said.