The Cracked Earth (20 page)

“I've wrecked enough things in my life,” he said. “I'd like to try to fix one.”

Without preface she tugged the loose skirt up and straddled him gently to sit on his lap. She looked down into his eyes. “If I made love more demurely, would you love me more?”

She tugged down the elastic neckline of the peasant blouse, slowly baring her shoulders and then the thin, almost transparent silk bra, the shimmery pink of ectoplasm.

“If I were less abandoned, would you respect me in the morning?”

“Possibly, but could you start this whole new demure regime tomorrow?”

He thought he heard her chuckle once just before she drew his face down hard into the heady perfume she'd taken the trouble to dab between her breasts. But maybe it wasn't a chuckle, after all, because the last thing intelligible he heard her say for quite a while was, “You must mean something to me because you
hurt
so much.”

T
HE
banner along their hallway had changed again. Now it said, BOUNCY BALL IS THE SOURCE OF ALL GOODNESS AND
LIGHT.
A big inflated peach hung from the ceiling and someone had suspended a motor from it that was rotating a small Sputnik model so it orbited the peach slowly with an eccentric little hiccup each rotation. This time Bruce Parfit led him into the cluttered office Michael Chen shared with Admiral Wicks. They worked back-to-back at their complex workstations against opposite walls, stacks of beige boxes, big color monitors, and open circuit boards trailing cables, all pasted over with Post-it notes.

Admiral Wicks had a row of vitamin bottles glued upside down onto the chalk rail of a whiteboard where someone had written
DYSLEXIA RULES K.O.
Some sort of mechanism seemed to be able to dispense a pill from each bottle into a slanted raceway.

Opposite, Michael Chen was stashing away a box of Dove bars beneath a printed card that said,
“THE SLACK
THAT IS NOT DESIRABLE IS NOT THE TRUE SLACK.”—BOB,
CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS.
There was also a framed photograph of Chairman Mao with the inscription
To Michael, a world-class coder and a real killer Marxist-Leninist. Your pal Mao.

They both grinned when they saw Jack Liffey, and Admiral Wicks seemed to have got over his grudge, whatever it was. Together they made the one-arm pumping gesture that tennis stars make when they win a big set. Two wine bottles were half-empty, and the programmers seemed pretty happy.

“We did the deed,
dude.
Feetch feetch. They fell over hard.”

“Crash and burn!”

“Fear and loathing!”

“Laurel and Hardy!”

Admiral Wicks held his hands flat and Michael Chen came around to the front of the wheelchair and gave him a two-hand slap, then he turned to Jack Liffey, who shrugged and followed suit.

“Has Mitsuko just made a big donation to UNESCO?” Jack Liffey asked.

Admiral Wicks smiled and shook his head. “We took a very different cyber route this segment.” He was holding it back for some reason, savoring the secret.

“No fair being mysterious,” Michael Chen said. “It is
I
who gets to be inscrutable.
You
get rhythm.”

“Did I say anything about your scrotum?”

“No puns! Puns are brain-dead humor.” Michael Chen closed his eyes, as if in pain.

“Why do you close your eyes, O wise Buddha?” Admiral Wicks asked in some ritualized singsong. These two had roomed together too long, Jack Liffey thought.

“So the room will be empty.”

“I am enlightened, master.”

“I'm not,” Jack Liffey said.

Parfit dumped a can of some Australian beer into a tall glass so it foamed right up to the lip, but stopped as if by pure will. “I'll tell you what it was, mate. Mitsuko's home office had a damn good firewall on their old mainframe and we couldn't get into their files. We couldn't get much of anything out of the heart of their computer system. But we could read between the lines to see the kind of equipment they were using. Trust the Japanese. Out in R-and-D land, their design and production tools are always cutting edge, but you can count on them being two generations behind where they do the accounting and billing. It was a real dinosaur pen.”

“IBM 360s, can you believe it?” Michael Chen said. “From the elder days. Card wallopers. And they had the old fourteen-inch magnetic drives. DataStars.”

“You've seen them in movies. They look like top-loading washing machines.”

They were all grinning, fidgety, as if they'd been doing some kind of speed under the wine. A pager on the table went off, buzzing and then hopping around like a wounded insect. It killed all conversation as they watched it with a kind of morbid fascination, and then Michael Chen laughed convulsively and the laugh seemed to shut the pager off.

“The drives've got big heavy sets of disks called media packs,” Admiral Wicks explained. “But DataStars have always had one flaw.”

“Tell it!”

“One
little
flaw!”

There was another round of palm slapping.

“Ever seen an out-of-balance washing machine?”

“Ever seen an electric typewriter walking across a desk?”

“If you get just the right seek pattern … say, a nice slow access one way and then send it the other way on a fast seek across the whole width of the disk—”

“All the way to east hyperspace—”

“Stick-slip, stick-slip—”

“Angular mo-
men
-tum—”

“The whole washing machine gets up and walks! There is a legend that hackers in days of old used to write seek routines to race their DataStars across the room.”

“Mitsuko had eight of them, mate. Most computer rooms run twelve-hour shifts, three-day weeks. We hit them just before shift change when the ops were all drowsy.”

“We hosed them! Film at eleven!”

“Moby hack!”

“What lossage! Tramp-tramp-tramp, went the drives!”

Michael Chen did a little war dance around the wheelchair while Bruce Parfit picked up the story again. “We called up an hour after we sent our seek program into the drives and said we were tech support from DataStar and we'd heard there was trouble with the drives. The ops were hysterical. Two of the drives had walked up to the mainframe and wedged there, one had walked to the door in the computer room and jammed it shut, so the next shift had to come down a ladder from a crawl space, one broke the feed tray off their high-speed printer, one fell into a hole where they had the floor up for cabling, and one just kept hopping around in circles like an old dosser with a hotfoot. The others didn't get off the mark for some reason, but who cares?”

“Tell him the rest, tell him!”

The two younger men made hysterical pumping gestures, jabbing both arms in sync a few times and then alternating them, as Parfit just leaned against the whiteboard and beamed. For an instant Jack Liffey thought of the racists doing their Maori karate dance for the Jamaican.

“We told them our tech support had a simple software fix for their problem, and we gave them a bogus fix.
We can do it all again tomorrow!”

Jack Liffey let them hoot and pump again for a while and then he tugged on Bruce Parfit's linen jacket. “A word.”

He led Jack Liffey into his office. “You have that stilled look of a man getting ready to go to war,” the Australian said.

“My war's just starting.” He hesitated a moment, watching a bobbing bird toy on a cabinet dip forward to stab its red beak into a tumbler of water. “You're not my client, but I figure you owe me something for getting them off your back.”

“What do I owe you?”

“I want an ounce of coke.”

C
OMING
out into the afternoon breeze, something up Little Santa Monica caught his eye. Two boys with Mickey Mouse ears were standing in the dirt between Little Santa Monica and Big Santa Monica where the Red Cars had once run. They were twenty yards apart and each had a fistful of those square metallic helium balloons. As he watched, the two of them shouted out a countdown and released a pair of balloons, with some gossamer thread between them. They wailed and hooted and tried to direct the balloons with their body English, like golfers on a long putt. Then he saw they were aiming for the high-tension power lines. He winced as the trailing balloons nearly caught on the wires, but wind took them too far east.

The boys trotted westward. Up the street he noticed the Dirty Lingerie shop. The crowds were gone but a big poster in the window said,
MONDAY SCANTY PANTY SIGNING. BASEBALL HEROES.
His imagination wasn't up to it.

He heard a boy's screech of delight and looked up in time to see a torrent of sparks dropping out of the sky like slag in a steel mill. All the balloons took off at once and the boys fled. He decided it was time to get out of there.

I
T
was going dusk as he got back to his condo. The table lamp on its timer was on through the curtain, as it should have been, but there was a brown envelope by his door that shouldn't have been there. He picked it up and felt it for a moment, the rectangular shape within, wondering about explosive devices, but then ripped it open to find a tape cassette. It was a Bob Marley tape called
Burnin
'
and the meaning was pretty obvious.

Then he found the dead bolt wasn't set and a chill went all the way up his arm. He froze with his hand on the key and listened, but heard nothing. He always set the dead bolt, a habit as rigid as logic.

He pushed the door open and waited out of the line of fire, wondering how a flamboyant Jamaican could have got past the guarded gate into the Astaire. There was a small sound from within, just enough to cause the hackles on his neck to rise. Then Loco stuck his muzzle into the light and gnarred softly.

Jack Liffey sighed and stooped to pat him.

“Jack, is that you?” It was Marlena. “I'm just feeding Loco.”

By the door he saw the white plastic trash bag out of his kitchen wastebasket, tied off and waiting to go out. She'd probably dusted, too, and washed out the sinks.

“Thanks, Mar.”

Sure enough, she was wearing his kiss-the-cook apron and had a sponge in her hand. It was half-annoying and half-touching. She smiled and licked her lips in the uncertain way she had, and all of a sudden her sanity and ordinariness and even this mundane way of laying claims on him seemed very, very appealing.

The least he could do was offer her a drink. “The least I can do is offer you a drink.”

“Thank you, I will have some wine. You have a hard day on the hunt?”

He laughed. After Lori Bright's mannered dialogue, it was metaphor back where it belonged: tamed and docile. “I shot two gazelles, but the lions got away.”

He put on a teakettle for himself and then hunted under the old supermarket bags in the tiny pantry and found the Cabernet he'd been saving for special guests.

She put her hand on his shoulder. “It's good to see you,
querido.
” She drew close and then he heard her sniff Lori Bright on him and she stiffened.

“Oh.”

“I'm sorry, Marlena. I'm caught up in something I can't help right now.”

She nodded fast. “Uh-huh. I know.”

“Remember when you had a thing for Quinn and you just had to do it? It's like a poker hand you got by some strange luck and you're not sure if it's good enough or if it's even the right thing at all, but you've got to play it to find out.”

She didn't seem very interested in making analogies. “I don't know about poker. Are you in love?”

He thought about it a moment. He didn't know about love, but he knew he wasn't going to walk away from Lori Bright until something made him. Jack Liffey turned to look at her, at the pain and uncertainty in her big brown eyes, and he held her forearms. “Imagine a young Ramon Novarro walks in now and sweeps you off your feet.”

She shook her head. She didn't want to play imagine games, either.

“What movie star made your knees weak?”

“Burt Lancaster.”

“Okay, imagine it's Burt and he's fallen into your life, fallen bang into your bed like he just dropped in through a skylight, and he's being
very
charming and seductive and he says he wants you.”

“Is she good to you?”

“I've got to see it out.”

“You're better than that, Mr. Jack Liffey.”

“No, I'm not.”

There was a sudden bark and growl as if another dog had attacked Loco. They both looked around and Loco's pale haunches backed trembling into sight, then his forepaws and then the powerful jaws, dragging the remains of one of Jack Liffey's only decent pairs of shoes, a black Rockport wing tip. The heel was chewed away and the solepad protruded like an orange tongue.

“Oh, damn.”

She took only a glance at the dog and shoe and then dismissed them out of existence and looked back at him. He tried to enfold her in his arms, but she brought her elbows in stiffly between them to keep a distance.

“We're good friends,” he said, feeling dull and stupid all of a sudden. “That won't change unless you want it to. I've just got to do this thing.”

And he had to deal with Terror Pennycooke and G. Dan Hunt. He couldn't go on living with bombs in every envelope.

H
E WOKE UP TO A TREMOR SO FAINT HE DIDN'T KNOW WHETHER
it was a little jiggly aftershock or just the woman upstairs trundling open the sliding-glass door to her deck. He held his breath, waiting, heard a tiny mewling sound, and saw Loco nose the bedroom door open and scamper almost noiselessly into the closet. One vote for earth movement, he thought, but there were no car alarms and he was not convinced of the mystical power of animals to herald seismic events, so he could still interpret his waking as the consequence of a half stumble in a dream or of a barely subperceptual local occurrence.

Definitely not an omen. There were no omens, that was an article of faith. There were just events one after another and a dog that was wound too tight.

The clock said five. The paper would be there, so he got up. For a long time getting up without a drug of some kind, without even a place to belong effortlessly and reassuringly, had been a real ordeal, but it was getting easier. Eventually everybody lived in some relation to detachment, and the differences were mainly in the ways you came to it. For a minute or two, drowned now in the familiarity of his surroundings, he didn't even think about Lori Bright.

“Loco, you eat any more shoes, I'll trade you in for a Chihuahua,” he said mildly to the closet door. Marlena would like that, he thought. She fancied the little rat-dog breeds that were all vibration and drool.

“You hear me?”

There was no reply. He thought of playing Marley's
Burnin'.

H
E
dropped by his office to get the .45 that he'd put back in the big hollowed-out
Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Marlena Cruz was on the landing outside his office watching her nephew Rogelio tape gold decal letters above a blue crayon line on the glass door. For a year Jack Liffey had only had a posterboard in the window with his name and livelihood stenciled across it. The decal letters seemed to be following the model of his poster, and the top row had already been glued to the glass:

LIFFEY INVESTIGATIONS

The second row, smaller, seemed to be going up temporarily for alignment:

WE FIND MISSI

Thank God they hadn't been able to find a big eyeball.

“Shouldn't it say Spade and Liffey?” he said.

“Huh?” the kid said.

He gave her a one-arm hug her for the gift. “Or do you prefer Liffey and Cruz?”

“That could be arranged,” she said in a throaty voice.

He shouldn't have said it. “Hold up a sec, Rocky.” Jack Liffey unlocked the door and slipped in ahead of the
N.
He left the light off and found the big book by feel, using his body to shield the operation from sight of the door until he got the pistol under his shirttail, where it cut uncomfortably into his leg. That couldn't be helped.

He wished she would make fewer claims on him, but there was nothing he could do about it and the devotion was poignant in its way and warmed him a little when it wasn't worrying him. He came back out.

“Now when Rocky goes missing,” he said, “I guess I've got to track him down for free.”

“I ain't going nowhere.”

“Give me a kiss, Jack.”

He held her and she took the opportunity to press hard against him and kiss longingly, and it was all he could do to torque around and keep her from feeling the pistol. He pulled back, but she still clung. Finally she let him go and talked a bit about some designs she could have done for his sign. Over the railing, he watched a homeless woman in a half-dozen overcoats make her way out of the bushes up the street. She clapped her hands as if trying to jump-start her circulation.

He wondered—if things went really bad and if he started free-falling, and if the last of the money went south, and nothing would break clean for him, he wondered if anything would arrest his fall before he hit the streets like that. He made a mental note to toss an old blanket and some money over the shrubs for her.

“Thanks for the sign, Marlena. It's kind of you.”

“It's nothing at all.”

“No, everything is something.”

T
HE
big bungalow on Ridge Glen was still for sale and the green Explorer was still in the drive. He thought of doing something cute but instead just stuck the .45 under his belt and rang the bell hard. It was almost nine.

The man swung it open, tugging up multicolored wrestler's pants with one hand.

“Hi, there, Tyrone.” Jack Liffey lifted a shirttail to show him the pistol.

There wasn't any fear in the man's eyes, but definitely some consternation. “Bwai, tings dread naow.”

“I hope you didn't kill the Nazi boys.” He came in as Terror Pennycooke backed away.

“No, but dey step like hell back to dere own place.”

Jack Liffey tossed the Marley tape on a little table by the door. Pennycooke glanced at it without a sign he recognized it.

“I-an'-I no big man in dis ting, just a scuffle for my bread. You no see it, Babylon?”

“Sit.” He took out the .45 just to make sure there weren't any disagreements. The man sat with his back against a stack of identical cardboard boxes that said they were Sony MD-1401 stereo receivers. The rest of the room was jam-packed with appliances, TVs, computers, and microwaves, but these were all used.

“G. Dan tell you to keep after me?”

His eyes looked around, as if for a way out of his predicament, but he said nothing.

“If you escape this in one piece, it's only because I'm a little sensitive about the image of a white man beating up a black man in the home of Western imperialism. G. Dan Hunt told you to shake me up, right?”

“You a-penetrait.”

“The war's already over and your side lost. The only thing left for me to decide is whether to send you home on a plane or in a box.”

Jack Liffey found a couple of old IBM Selectrics among the inventory and scowled at them. He was careful to keep the .45 on its target while he ferried the heavy Selectrics, one at a time, across the room and set them on either side of Tyrone Pennycooke. Then he took two pairs of Peerless handcuffs from his back pocket and tossed them to the man.

Tyrone Pennycooke said something that sounded like, “Raas klat licks.”

“You know, Terror, I bet you can talk Standard English, if you try hard.”

“Fock you.”

Jack Liffey laughed. “See how easy it is. Cuff your wrists to the typewriters, right through the frame. Nothing personal, it's just to slow you down a little. Conservation of momentum, like that.”

“You tink I a fockin' puppet?”

“I think you're fuckin'
dead,
friend. Don't push it.”

They locked eyes and at last Tyrone Pennycooke decided to handcuff his wrists to the two Selectrics. “That'll put you in real good with your boss. We're going to go see him.”

He called first, just to make sure the man was home, and Hunt was curiously subdued on the phone but agreed to meet.

T
HE
big Jamaican and the two Selectrics were a tight fit in the passenger-side bucket seat of the Concord, but there weren't going to be any sudden moves.

“I-man nah end my life lockdown wit no typewriters.”

“Just take it easy and you'll be fine.”

A station wagon was parked at the corner, and a half-dozen scrubbed white boys with flattops and skinny ties were lined up at the tailgate where an old man with flyaway hair was breaking open cartons and apportioning what looked like big presentation Bibles, an armload to each. He wondered what peculiar turn of logic had a Bible company using cracker boys to sell King James rhetoric to middle-class blacks, if it was some curious appeal to reverse guilt. But he didn't think about it for long, and he drove past the station wagon and headed north.

“Dis a bitch naow.”

“Just let it go.”

It was twenty minutes to the blue glass mid-rise on an unfashionable stretch of Sunset—a legendary L.A. distance. You said anything close was twenty minutes, and anything far was forty-five. Farther than that was out of town. The building looked like an upended Kleenex box, wedged between a banner-draped lot called Muscle Machines that sold big candy-colored Detroit cars of the seventies—Dodge Hemis and Chevy 409s—and a strip mall with a Chinese takeout, a liquor store, and a ninety-nine-cent store. There was no guard in the empty lobby. He herded Terror Pennycooke ahead of him, the man's big fingers hooked onto the heavy typewriters, pushed him into the scuffed, piss-smelling elevator, and hit eleven.

The doors on eleven were all solid wood, so there was no chance of catching the silhouette of Sidney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre through frosted glass. The door at the end said
G. DAN HUNT, PERSONAL SERVICES
.

The Jamaican's eyes were puffy and angry, and he seemed to realize this was actually going to go down. “I-an'-I gwaan fock you up good.”

“Sure you will.”

There was no anteroom and they went straight into a cluttered single office. The big desk was sideways to the door, but what you saw right away on the far wall was a life-size photograph of a grinning John Wayne arm in arm with a fat man on a boat dock beside a big cabin cruiser. The fat man, twenty years on, was there in the flesh, too, behind the desk, the Humpty-Dumpty from Musso's.

In the center of the desk there was a large revolver with ostentatious notches on its wood grip. The Jamaican started to say something, but the man just shook his head and shushed him. Then he turned a little and put a foot up on a drawer.

“So this is what makes the goat trot,” he said to Jack Liffey.

“You got your big gun and I got my big gun.” Jack Liffey patted his hip without showing it off. “But none of us is going to go shooting the place up. That's just to establish the balance of power. Why don't you have a seat, too, Terror?”

The Jamaican looked like he was about to blow, but the typewriters were tiring him out and at last he subsided into a hard chair in the corner to set his burden down. He started to speak again as he sat.

“For you someday cyan come a dance widdout no gun inna you waist—”

“Shut up, Tyrone.” G. Dan Hunt didn't even look at the man as he spoke.

“I assume you've heard from Japan by now,” Jack Liffey said. “They've probably had a couple bad days.”

He didn't admit to any calls. Jack Liffey glanced over at Tyrone Pennycooke, who looked like he was going to be sick. The man's eyes shifted from one typewriter to the other, then back to the first, as if he was having trouble counting to two.

“What's the plan?”

“Let's talk about him first. We skip the arson, the assault, the kidnapping, the extortion, we just forget about it. You give him a one-way ticket back to the Big J. I figure that's probably negotiable.”

“You got the whole secret of life right there, guy. Knowing what's negotiable and what ain't.”

Pennycooke rustled a bit, but the big man hissed at him.

“The only other thing I want, I want to know what this shit is
really
all about. I'm tired of being the only guy in town who's in the dark.”

G. Dan Hunt shrugged. “You ever hear of Tim-Tam?”

Jack Liffey just stared at him.

“You've seen him, you just don't know it. He's the little grinning round-face Jap kid with the baseball hat. You see him on burger wrappers and in the window at the 7-Eleven. Tim-Tam is the biggest fucking video game on the Omega Game system that Mitsuko owns. I might add that video games now pull in more money, gross, than the entire fucking Hollywood film industry. And Tim-Tam is like Mario or that hedgehog thing, he's a whole franchise all by himself. I believe Tim-Tam goes to rescue his sister, who's held by a bunch of bad guys in a dangerous world full of things you got to stomp along the way. Sort of like Terror, here. I think you got the picture.”

Jack Liffey nodded.

“Was a lawsuit between Monogram, that Mitsuko owns, and this Australian character that runs PropellorHeads. It was a nasty business about some breach of contract, that doesn't concern us. Mitsuko decides to settle quick and in the settlement they give the Ozzie rights to use Tim-Tam and his pals in a CD-ROM game. Mitsuko doesn't make CD-ROMs anyway and they figure he'll never get to first base with it, most of these games die in a week, and at worst, if he brings it off, the deal is publicity for the crown jewel of their game system. Any kids that want more Tim-Tam then got to whine to Dad to buy an Omega system.”

Jack Liffey remembered the display in the PropellorHeads lobby, with a little kid on several screens zipping along in some imaginary universe. For a moment the whole world seemed to lose its reality, like a noun you repeated until it was only a sound. It didn't make any sense to him that that ridiculous little cartoon image could have touched off a whole business war that spilled out into a shooting war. Then he looked at Hunt's pistol on the desk and it came back into focus and seemed real enough.

“Well, the Ozzie is pretty good. He makes a game the kids love, and they build up one of Tim-Tam's minor enemies into a big deal in the game. It's this thing called a Zomboid, like a tumbleweed with a big mouth and big teeth that's always tryin'a roll up and bite your ass. Turns out the kids like what he's done with the Zomboid. They love fighting it off, and they make running away from Zomboids a kind of cult. So far, we're okay. But the Ozzie figures he's developed this thing enough that he owns it now and he makes three more games starring the Zomboid. Calls it something new, Mr. Zoom, or something. Word filters across the Pacific and the guys over in Japan have a shit fit. He licensed
one
game and he's building an empire on it, and to make things worse,
their
Zomboid isn't called Mr. Zoom, so the spin-off value isn't standing up and saluting for their flag.”