Terminal Island (8 page)

“Good work,” Jack Liffey said. “Several million years of adaptation to hunting and only a few hundred to window glass.”

She came in the side door with a couple of large store bags that meant she'd probably been Christmas shopping.

“Hello, Jack. I smell mint, mmm.”

He got up and kissed her. They were still new enough so it wasn't perfunctory, and her body pressed against him.

“That's even better than the mint. How was your day?”

“Entertaining.” He plucked at one of the bags to help her. “It looks like I may be too late, but I've been wanting to say something about Christmas.”

She held on and set the big bags beside the hall. “ ‘Bah, humbug'?”

He laughed. “Something like that. Do you think we could keep it simple between us, maybe just one present each and even that more a token of affection? Whatever that means. I can't keep you in the style to which you were accustomed, Beck, you know that. I can't buy you anything new from Prada on this disability they're allowing me. And I may even lose that if I start working.”

She kissed him again. “Don't worry, these are for a couple of aunts and some nieces and nephews in the Midwest. Tell me about your adventures while I strip down to something more comfortable.”

“We may never get around to dinner if you use words like that.”

“I'll try to stop somewhere between pricktease and serious come-on.”

He was actually a little shocked. “I didn't know you knew a word like ‘pricktease.' ”

“Jack, really!”

“Okay, sure, you deal with overheated teens all day. You know words even
I
don't.”

“Fisting took me a while to work out,” she admitted.

“Oh, Lord.”

They had one last smooch. “You know how to please me heaps,” she said. “That's better than words forever and ever.”

She went into the bedroom and changed into loose sweats while he made her a Campari soda and got himself a diet ginger ale.

“You're weasling out of telling me about your new case,” she called. “I know you're on the job. I can sense it.”

He told her a bit about it, the man down in San Pedro challenging and taunting the police with his planted clues. “Actually, you don't know me well enough to be surprised by today's real news flash.”

She peered curiously into the kitchen, made a happy face when she saw the bright red drink, and took it up. “Tell Rebecca, who is wearing nothing underneath.”

He let that go. “My father is involved in some way. Maeve and I saw him today.”

“I thought your father was dead,” she said lightly.

“Uh-huh. Believe it or not, so did Maeve and so does her mother.”

“That's got my full attention.”

“What would you do if you found out one day that your father, whatever else he was, was a prominent Holocaust denier?”

“Oooh.” It was a noncommittal sound, as if a tooth had just given her a twinge.

“Somewhere in his well-before-midlife-crisis my father became an obsessive about race and eugenics and the dangers that threaten the poor overwhelmed white race. Mom was utterly flabbergasted by it all, but she died before it became that big an issue. I think I blamed him a bit for killing her with his new meanness of spirit. I'm not proud of this, Beck, but when I couldn't argue him out of it, eventually I just cut him off. I was going to get married—actually Kathy was already pregnant—and I didn't want him around my family. I told everybody he'd died, and I told him to fuck off. I wanted him away from my family. He bought it, I'll give him that, and he let me pretend to Kathy there was some out-of-state funeral I had to go to alone.”

He listened to the ginger ale fizz in the can for a moment, his entire being filling with a burning shame. “I say I didn't want Kathy and Maeve exposed, but really it was me. I just couldn't
stand
him anymore, going on and on about those
ideas.
His ideology was so damn mean that resisting him day in and day out just got me to hating myself.”

She came across the room and hugged him.

“Was I wrong to cut him off like that?” Jack Liffey had a terrible sense that everything going on now in this discussion was foreordained, all destined to have a bad end.

“I wasn't there.”

“You can be prosecutor, if you want. I think I need to suffer a little here, Beck.”

“Jack, counseling girls every day, I learned long ago that sometimes there's just no right answer.”

The multicolored kite dipped and spun ineffectually before settling onto the grass, its owner visibly annoyed. The onshore wind that hit the cliff and gusted upward just wasn't steady enough for a kite today.

“They used to do hang gliding off that cliff,” Gloria Ramirez told her. “Because of the updrafts. But they banned it when a couple of people fell to their death.”

They were in Point Fermin Park, at the southernmost tip of San Pedro, also the southernmost tip of the city of Los Angeles, marked by a lovely old Victorian clapboard lighthouse and a park with a tiny bandshell and an expanse of grass that ended in cliffs. The cliff-side walk high above the Pacific was now truncated by chainlink where sections of the cliff had fallen away. The whole peninsula was like that, yielding slowly to slippage and subsidence, and the unhurried resolve of the pounding surf down below. Without the upthrust of tectonic movement, Maeve thought, the whole landmass would eventually wind up as smooth as a Ping-Pong ball and about fifty feet under the ocean.

“A friend at school dared me to go skydiving, but I chickened out.”

“Good for you.” Gloria Ramirez sat across the park bench and extracted their cheeseburgers from the big take-out box. It had probably been three years since Maeve had eaten anything as wicked as a cheeseburger, but after Gloria Ramirez had suggested that the best eats in town came from Tommy's Charbroiler at Twelfth and Gaffey, Maeve wanted to be “one of the girls.” Complete with curly fries and chocolate milk shakes.

Just rig me up intravenously with that ol' cholesterol, Maeve thought, but she nibbled at the cheeseburger and, of course, it tasted glorious.

Her companion had unpinned her pigtails to let them fall free, and she was wearing turquoise jewelry, so she really did look Indian. She set out a cell phone and peered at it for an instant to make sure it was on. “I guess you want me to tell you about your granddad.”

“Uh-huh. It's a real shock just
having
one all of a sudden when you thought you didn't. And then the one I ended up with … wow, that's a pretty bad dream.”

“Are you going to go see him?”

“Dad made me promise to wait. He says it's too dangerous right now.”

“Um-hmm.” Gloria Ramirez glanced up over the enormous bite she'd taken out of the cheeseburger and waited while her mouth worked and worked and finally cleared. “You've got plans to change him, don't you?”

Maeve grimaced as she nibbled at one of the curly fries. She didn't really like the flavor. “Somebody should.”

“Hon, in my experience the only time you can change a male is when he's in diapers. This old man is pretty set in his ways. I hear when he first moved downtown there, he wasn't so unfriendly, but gradually his neighbors learned what he was up to and, let's say, a mutual dislike sort of flowered.”

“He did seem pretty crusty.”

“That's only a little of it.”

The phone buzzed and she picked it up. “Ramirez. No, Detective Steelyard is doing that. Get off my back. I'm half day off.” She punched off with a disgusted look, glaring, then went back to what she'd been saying.

“Maeve, most cops think I'm a Latina, and they damn well know I'm a woman. I live with a certain level of rude comment and disrespect every day of my life in the department, but your grandfather is something else. I'm not saying he's mean. Nobody's meaner than a street cop. He's openly racist against just about everybody, but it's even more than that. It's not common knowledge, but he's tied in with some groups—all I can say is that they're a real boatload of weasels.

“I'm telling you this for a reason. It's hard to put a dent in somebody who has his own community to support him. You move him an inch and they move him back two inches. Some of his friends are grown-up skinheads, and some are tight-eyed angry professors, but professors of
what
I couldn't tell you. I'm going to swear you to secrecy on this. I learned it from our antiterror unit, which isn't really supposed to exist, but it's watching Declan Liffey along with some other people like him.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

“I just don't want you to get your hopes up, hon. He may look like a way-past-it old coot, but Declan Liffey is a big frog in a little pond of full-bore racists. He's one of their mentors. An idea man.”

They ate in silence for a while, Maeve digesting the food more easily than the information. She'd have to Google Declan Liffey on the Internet and see what was there. Gloria Ramirez disposed of another cell call and then made some stilted conversation about school before Maeve decided to ask her about her own heritage.

“Do you have some kind of pretty Native American name, like Swift Eagle or something?”

Gloria became thoughtful, and it took her a while to think this over. “I found out my real name, Wilson, and some stuff about my mom down here in Owens years and years ago. But more recently I went up to my mom's ancestral territory up around Yerrington, Nevada, and I finally found an old distant aunt. My heavens, Indian women become enormous. All that fry bread and lard. Anyway, she said she'd give me a Paiute name if I really wanted it. I can't remember it now. I found out later it really meant Did-you-hear-a-coyote-fart? or something like that, and I figure she was just having fun with me.

“Wilson is real, though. My aunt swore I was the great-great-granddaughter of Jack Wilson, who was better known as Wovoka. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No.” A large Mexican family was strolling along the path at the cliff edge. Clearly, by the evidence of the woman's peasant dress, they were recent immigrants. The father pushed ahead of him a shopping cart padded with blankets that held a boy with an overly round Down syndrome head. The boy grinned and looked around excitedly, but the rest of the family looked grave and indomitable. For the first time the thought struck Maeve that these people were just about as brave as Lewis and Clark lost in the huge West. She thought of the nerve it must have taken for a whole family to cross a dangerous border into a country where they didn't even know the language, bringing along a child with a disability. It was unimaginable to her.

“Wovoka was a medicine man and farm laborer. He had a vision that led to the Ghost Dance in something like 1890.”

“Wow, I've heard about that.”

“Yeah, the dance spread across the Plains like wildfire, even to the Sioux, or the Lakota, as they call themselves, and Sitting Bull. Their world had already been pretty much destroyed by the white man, and most of the buffalo they lived on were dead. Wovoka's vision said if they did this special dance for three nights and three days, the white men would all go away and the dead braves and the buffalo would come back. They even had special ghost shirts that were supposed to stop bullets.

“Wovoka became a kind of messiah. The government banned the Ghost Dance, of course, since it scared the willies out of the settlers. The Lakota were doing it when the Seventh Cavalry freaked out and slaughtered them all at Wounded Knee. It's so pathetic, really. Just a kind of hopeless gesture of a people who couldn't comprehend what was happening to their world and tried to do
anything
to stop it.”

“I don't suppose there were many good ideas right then for getting their land back,” Maeve offered.

“No, I guess not.”

All of a sudden Maeve's attention was drawn to a congregation of pigeons drifting over a section of the patio nearby, hunting for crumbs or whatever pigeons hunted for. Whenever one bird seemed to find something substantial, they would all make a rush for it on some silent signal. All except one bird, who was hopelessly late every time because he was hopping along on a single leg. Coming right on top of the talk about the Ghost Dance, this poor one-legged pigeon just about broke Maeve's heart.

“Help me,” she said.

She and Gloria tore up the remaining burger bun into crumbs, and Maeve got up to deposit half the crumbs on the far side of the patio. When the birds rushed toward the feast, she waited until One-Leg had dropped far behind, and then she made a little circling run to approach the wounded bird, leaving a pile right in front of him. As she retreated, he was able to gorge for at least fifteen seconds before the stragglers noticed and circled back to overwhelm him.

As Maeve came back to the bench, Gloria Ramirez watched her with a pensive expression. “That bird's not going to make it in the long run. You know that.”

Maeve found she really liked this woman a lot, and she wanted to say to her,
Don't think I'm just this soppy sentimental collaborator with pathos. I'm more complicated than that, I have my own moments of mischief, and I have been known to turn my back on pain, too, in my own kind of despair.
But she didn't say any of that.

“No I
don't
know that,” Maeve said obstinately. “I don't think you should give up on anyone.” They both realized that she was really talking about her granddad. I'm hopeless after all, Maeve thought. Just me—ol' heart-on-sleeve.

Dec 17

One should constantly be aware that what one is doing is exceptional and not hide it. It does not matter if you are the only witness. Your acts are testaments.

From a Buddhist text: everything in the world is a marionette show and you must learn to act, accepting that you do not know which strings will be pulled next. Victory and defeat are both temporary, both illusions.

They use the word
gen
for illusion, but I believe there is no negative connotation to the word, as we in the West impute to illusion.
Gen
is what is, the surface of the temporal world, a veil that must be. Merit lies in following the way of the warrior, not in the results.

I am more sure than ever that I am acquiring a worthy nemesis.