The Cracked Earth (8 page)

He tried to imagine himself eating out at some posh place with Lori Bright and couldn't do it. He turned on the radio for a while, but his tuner was stuck and he only got the all-news station, which left him with a shrill voice screeching about Manson 2 and how he was bound to be a mama's boy who'd been coddled by liberal teachers and a society gone spare of rod. He turned the radio off so he could go on thinking about Lori Bright.

It was probably the infatuation that made him careless. The green Explorer had to have been parked down there, maybe even in front of the boarded-up window of the Coffee Bean. Coming up the cement steps to his office, he hadn't even spotted the jimmied door. He did, however, spot the clumsy Webley-Fosbery revolver, big as a toaster in the big Jamaican's big hand. His dreadlocks were tucked up in a red, green, and black knit cap and it looked like he had searched the office and left everything tossed around.

“Hey!”

“Hush you mouf, an tek you hans up.”

“I'm not armed.”

“I-an'-I a suss dat out.” He patted Jack Liffey down expertly, then forced him to kneel and handcuffed him to the leg of his desk.

“You not a penetrate what inna man heart till you see inna man
wallet,”
he said brightly.

The Jamaican went through the cards from the wallet and looked them over carefully, then pocketed about forty dollars. He sat on the edge of the desk, looming over Jack Liffey.

He seemed to ruminate for a moment before speaking. “I get a job, go fe tek my business an' dere you be. Mr. Butt-in. Man say, Go kick dem ass, dem be wicked, and dis time, I-an'-I boun fe harm de wicked and dere you be agin, really an' truly. Don' it seem funny to you, mon? Like we got we a commonness.”

“I'm looking for a missing girl,” Jack Liffey said evenly. “If you're not into kidnapping, we don't have a beef.”

The Jamaican seemed to see something interesting across the room and made a beeline for a plastic relief map up on the wall. It was the L.A. basin, given him by Maeve for his birthday.

“Dis de true riddim of de city.”

He looked it up and down, tracing the exaggerated relief of the Hollywood Hills with his finger. Ominously, the finger lingered just about where Lori Bright lived. Jack Liffey noticed for the first time that there was a lumpy blue gym bag in the middle of the room. It wasn't his and he wondered what it contained.

“Now my views on de ting. Firs ting, you in de way here. You hang wit de PropellahHeads, an' day a substantial problem for I.”

The Jamaican sidled up on the gym bag as if something living in it had to be approached with caution. He grabbed quickly and snatched out a portable tape player.

“Hello dere.”

His eyes lit up as if he'd met an old friend and he set the player on a chair and punched it on. Immediately a reggae rhythm spilled out, everything about the infectious music in a hurry except the beat itself, that throb that lagged back in its own hypnotic lope. He cranked the volume up ominously.

“Righteous, righteous.”

“Listen, I'll tell you anything I know. I was looking for a girl who used to work for the PropellorHeads. Lee Borowsky.”

The Jamaican looked skeptical. “You jus' numbah-two son.” He smiled. “Firs ting, you tell me now wa gwane wit you.”

“Man, I wish I knew what's going on. I really do.”

“Den, I-an'-I got to downpress you, you no see it?”

He reached into his blue bag again and came out with a bottle of Jamaican ginger beer. Jack Liffey relaxed a little. He'd been expecting a weapon, a knife or a sap. The Jamaican shook the bottle hard and banged it on the desk a few times.

Jack Liffey's knees hurt on the hard floor and he was readjusting his posture, a grimace closing his eyes, when the arm went around his neck. He could smell the man, strong and earthy, and a rough palm clapped over his mouth. The Jamaican knocked the cap off the bottle with one practiced swipe against the edge of the desk and then the bottle swept up against Jack Liffey's nose. A bomb went off inside his head. He fought blindly against the arm, but it was too powerful and he had no leverage. Fire burned through his sinuses, down his windpipe. He was drowning.

“You be one weepy baldhead, mon.”

The Jamaican put his thumb over the bottleneck and shook it up again.

“Get ready fe tek some blows.”

Jack Liffey heaved with all his strength as the bottle came around and only part of the spray blast went up his nose. Still, it destroyed his resistance instantly and left him retching and coughing. Another blast would drown him as surely as cement boots.

“Oh-oh.”

He could hear a siren in the distance and then a woman's voice, shouting. “The police are coming! I can see them!” It was Marlena and her voice had never sounded better.

“Babylon come fe tek me. I-an'-I forward now. I did warn you, mon. Don' you be blow past all de trees in I yard.”

He picked up the tape player and sauntered out the door. Jack Liffey lay full-length, coughing and racking and spitting, every atom of his sympathetic nervous system trying to clear the horrible burning ginger out of his windpipe.

Still nobody came. The retching slowed to a spasmodic cough. He lay there wondering what the Jamaican knew and didn't know. The man didn't seem to have anything to do with the kidnapping, hadn't even been interested in it.

Finally a shadow filled the door. “I'll be damned. Not again.”

Jack Liffey thought he knew the voice, but he didn't have the strength to lift his head.

“This is the guy, all right, spends his life steppin' inna shit. Every time I come up here, his place is like a bunch of warring raccoons came to visit.”

It was Quinn, the only man in L.A. he could see himself killing on a dark night.

“Bet he don't even want to file a report.”

“Yes, I do.”

A second cop came in, Quinn's black partner, whose name he couldn't remember. Black—that was the name. How could he forget? He had seemed decent enough.

“So it's going to be good cop, bad cop.” Jack Liffey sighed.

“What the fuck's a good cop?” Quinn said.

“The guy was Jamaican. I was there when he firebombed a house over in Koreatown yesterday. You might tell a Hollywood Division cop named Lieutenant Malamud.”

“You sure about the nationality?” Black asked as he helped Jack Liffey sit up. His wrist was still cuffed to the leg of the desk.

“If he wasn't from the West Indies, he's really gone and OD'ed on a lot of reggae.”

Quinn prowled around, poking through the flotsam of the office, while Black took down the report on a small leather notepad.

“Son of a bitch,” Quinn said all of a sudden. “A
clue.”
He was holding up a small ceramic bowl in the Desert Rose pattern. It was the last survivor of Jack Liffey's mother's dinnerware and he'd kept bent paper clips in it. “We got us a discrepancy in the landscape.”

Nobody said anything. He had a terrible headache, throbbing and banging.

“I can't count the times I walk into some tough guy's place and find fine china on the desk.”

Jack Liffey was expecting him to break it casually. It was his style. But he seemed to be off his game and he just set it down. “You're such a swell fellow, Liffey, we won't do any more of this today.”

The two cops lifted the desk so Jack Liffey could get the handcuff free. It was better than nothing. As they were getting ready to go, Black gave Jack Liffey a little look that seemed to be apologizing for his partner. “You sure you don't need an EMS?”

“I'm okay. They're probably not much good with ginger ale, anyway.”

“Say hi to the big M broad,” Quinn said at the door. “She really knows how to do tricks.”

Jack Liffey almost lost it where he sat. “It was stoneware, shithead. Not fine china. It was the most famous stoneware pattern ever made in L.A.”

“No shit, Sherlock. I'll make a note of that.” Black dragged him out the door before they could get into it any more.

Jack Liffey's vision slowly cleared from the pink buzzing. He stared at the delicate little bowl with its wild roses. He saw it on his mother's Formica kitchen table, holding stewed prunes, or sitting in the back of the old Coldspot fridge with leftover macaroni and cheese. It had been made by the Franciscan works up in Glendale, he thought. Until they'd polluted the land so heavily with lead, they had to be put out of business and the buildings torn down and the earth scoured through sifters, and the pattern was bought by Wedgwood over in England, who still made it. There was a moral there somewhere.

After a discreet interval Marlena Cruz peeked in the door.

“Oh, Jackie.” She hurried in and knelt beside him in the middle of the mess.

He found himself staring at the sheen of stocking on her big thighs where she squatted, her two knees thrust together, and she wriggled so the black skirt rose another few inches. She leaned awkwardly and hugged his head to her bosom.

“Jack, this is
awful.
”

“I'll be okay. Really.”

But she wouldn't stop pawing his hair down, over and over. He hoped to hell he didn't smell of Lori Bright.

“Jackie, poor Jackie.” She didn't say a word about Quinn.

You jus' numbah-two son,
the Jamaican had said. It couldn't mean anything. It had to be some prank of a joker god that Monogram Pictures had made the Charlie Chan movies.

T
HE RADIO HAD TAKEN TO CALLING IT THE
B
IG
T
ARZANA
A
F
tershock, and apologizing that it had been downgraded to a 5.4. Apparently the Big Tarzana Aftershock had dropped trees on half the cars in the city because there were no rental cars going except the exotics and he didn't feel like trying to justify a Ferrari Berlinetta to Lori Bright on an expense sheet at four hundred dollars per.

Maybe there'd be something tomorrow morning. He thought of flogging the old Concord 250 miles up the eastern spine of the state to the film location and 250 back, but he always ended up with a vivid mental picture of the shuddering old Wisconsin-built orphan, the last of the AMC line, with 235,000 miles on the clock, blowing steam and coming to a stubborn halt somewhere on the Sierra Highway.

“Whoa, boy.”

Loco was gnarring softly back in the depths of the walk-in closet, eyes like red coals among the shirts. The dog food in the kitchen had gone untouched. Rather than risk a serious incident, he tossed in a pound of ground chuck and left the dog to nurse its coyote soul by itself.

Then he called Mike Lewis but got Siobhann in one of her pissy protective moods.

“I can't, Jack. He's typing and he gets cross if I so much as poke my nose in.”

“Come off it, Shiv. He feeds on interruption.”

“We're just about off for a meeting of that group that's trying to green up the L.A. River.”

“Now there's a concept. Put him on please.”

“Two ticks, then. I can tell when the rhythm suggests he's about to hit a thinking place.” Her voice was husky and intimate and something suggested she looked on delaying him as a kind of moral victory. He wondered if she was getting even in some way for Kathy. He'd never noticed her choosing up sides before. “How's Kathy anyway?” she asked out of the blue.

“Now, how would I know, Siobhann? You've probably seen her since I have.”

“My money's on you two getting back together. You've beat the demon rum, and you two were always a loving couple.”

He liked Siobhann, but for just one red moment he wanted to come down the line and make her eat the telephone receiver. He could sense her will on the other end, unswerving, and her motives impenetrable. “Thanks for the reminder. Have we perhaps fallen into a thoughtful conjuncture, yet?”

“Ever so sorry. Here he comes. It's Jack, Mike.”

“Thanks.”

“Health to you, Jack,” she concluded.

“Something similar back.” There was a clatter where she dropped the telephone on a hard surface, then Mike was tutting on the line. “Jack, do you know how they test to see if jet engines can survive bird strikes? They bolt them on a test bed, start them up, and hurl chickens into them. Thawed frozen chickens. They even built a compressed-air cannon that shoots the chickens into the engine.”

“That's a pretty thought.”

“Imagine a fine rain of emulsified fowl coming out the business end. Actually I'm using the fact as a kind of epigraph to a chapter on the aerospace industry.”

“It's nice to know the old values aren't dead. Did you learn anything on Monogram?”

“Indeed I did. Siobhann is making signals at me. We have to run, so here it is in a nutshell. Solly Winer, who was bought away from Columbia by Mitsuko Inc. to run the studio and bring it back from the dead, has a real hard-on for PropellorHeads. Something about them cheating him. I don't know the whole story, but he hired the Hollywood fixer G. Dan Hunt to handle it. Hunt is from the old school. He's worked on payoffs and a couple of palimony cases and I think he kept the Heidi Fleiss address book out of the public domain. The kind of guy you tell to go clean up a mess and you don't want to know how.”

“He use Jamaicans?”

“Not that I know of.”

“This is sounding more and more like something that happened in 1948.”

“Everything happened first in 1948,” Mike Lewis concluded. “You need a new line of work, Jack.”

A
S
he passed a small derelict grocery, a bronze-skinned man dressed like a Zouave with a scimitar in his waist paced the parking lot, making hard turns at each corner and shouting commands to himself. He might have been preparing for a movie, or just listening to faraway voices. It was good, he thought, that there were things in life you would never understand. It suggested a kind of exemption from accountability.

The tense and angry commute traffic was already dying away to its ordinary sullen press. The evening darkened and took on its impersonal menace as he headed up to West Hollywood. He wore the frayed old bomber jacket that he'd got on R&R, swapped by a Zoomie for a full case of Budweiser. The name tape still said
KELLEHER,
but he'd taken off the big round unit emblem with the grinning cartoon bomber. He wondered if the jacket would make him more conspicuous at the The Eighth Art, or less.

• • •

“H
EY,
my dad was an immortal.”

“So was mine, but he was only immortal till I was about sixteen.”

Jack Liffey waited patiently by the crowded counter to get his coffee, keeping one eye out for blacks with Jamaican hats or dreadlocks. There was a lot of black around, all right, but the kids were wearing it—black shirts buttoned to the neck, black pants, and girls in black turtlenecks. One young man hammered at a laptop at a round table, but mostly the people sat restlessly on threadbare sofas and folding chairs, facing down a deep and narrow storefront at a big, blank TV screen.

He got his coffee in an absurdly oversize cup and sat at a table across from an uneasy-looking young woman in a pink sari who had one of those Indian colored spots on her forehead, though she didn't look the least Indian. She was overweight but had a hard line of a jaw, as if she'd had surgery on it.

“Do you know when the videos start?” she asked.

He didn't, and almost immediately she was telling him about her unhappy marriage to an Indian who hadn't turned out to be the wealthy businessman he'd said and then had moved his mother and two sisters into their tiny two-bedroom in Palms. The whole family spent most of the day criticizing her housekeeping and telling her how they'd most likely be lighting her on fire to get rid of her if they were home in Ahmadabad.

The place was beginning to fill up, the kids straying in in groups of five or six, all looking like refugees from art college, except for one table where they had brush cuts and two of them wore camouflage fatigues.

The girl in the sari went on talking about her life going to shit. Some days he hated being the kindly gramps, but it could be useful. He showed her the photograph of Lee Borowsky, and when she didn't recognize it, it was time to move on.

He bought an overpriced Italian cookie at the counter and a woman almost his own age sought him out.

“Are you here to show?” she asked. She clutched a copy of Maugham's
The Razor's Edge
and wore a denim miniskirt that looked out of place, or out of time.

“Not this time,” he said.

“I just love narrative evening. I'm not a big fan of the abstract videos.”

“Me, too,” he said.

“There's supposed to be one tonight on religion. I love things of the spirit.” She said it with the kind of intensity that made you wonder if she'd just had her medication adjusted. “I used to think we were into the Last Days, but I'm not a Christian anymore. Not since the solstice.”

“That's interesting.”

She leaned into him, and he noticed she had a faint unpleasant aroma. She whispered: “I know it sounds crazy, but I'm getting into a new religion that's based on the random exchange of apparel.”

She held a fist secretively between them and opened it up as if to offer a counterfeit Rolex. It was a pair of black panties.

“Trade me a sock,” she insisted.

“I'm sorry, I'm an agnostic,” he said.

She made a soft baaaing noise and blinked several times, and he wondered if he was beginning to have trouble with reality again. He hadn't had anything stronger than coffee in over a year. He got her to look at Lee's photograph, but it meant nothing to her and then, luckily, a heavyset man with a bad complexion whistled for attention as the lights came down and the show began without preface. He found a folding chair against the wall.

Like most projection videos, the picture was not very good. A small group near him cheered good-naturedly at the title, which was
Art Show,
and then he saw a slow dolly around a sculptural form that appeared to be in a museum. It was squat and bronze and for a moment he thought it was a big scarab and then it was just a flattened blob of metal with what might have been a seam around the middle. The camera retreated toward a wall and a bell rang on the soundtrack. Suddenly the light changed and there were people wandering past the blob.

They hummed and frowned and scowled as the scene jumped from one set of gawkers to the next. Soon the groups were explaining the sculpture to one another.

“… dismantling the naturalist traditions…”

“… makes the space it inhabits vibrate with light…”

“… a new dynamic relationship between object and observer …”

“… questions the enigma of visibility itself…”

When the audience had all had just about enough of stuff like that, the gallery cleared out and stayed empty until a couple of flower children wandered in and patted the sculpture familiarly. They were about to wander off when the boy did a take and broke into a grin: “Ellie, look, it's two turtles fucking.”

The coffeehouse erupted in cheers and Jack Liffey found himself smiling.

The second short was about a Chicano boy who looked about nine and was being ordered around by an abusive and alcoholic father, then ignored by his mother and taunted by older siblings. This one was hard for Jack Liffey to watch—any abuse of children really pulled his chain—but he stayed with it. The boy's stoicism went on and on and eventually you started hearing a strange noise under everything else. At first you guessed a train in the distance, or a car hammering over a wood bridge, and then it got louder and seemed to be machinery pounding away on sheet metal. It grew so loud that you couldn't hear anything else and the camera moved in slowly on the frozen angry face of the boy, and then abruptly a teenager was pounding a speedbag in a gym.

Again the audience burst into applause, with one table hitting it harder than the rest. Jack Liffey noticed that the guy on the speedbag was bellied back from the table, grinning, and it started coming clear that it was mainly the cast and crew of the videos who made up the audience. When the next video was announced, the baton of fervent applause passed to another table.

He lost interest in the videos but not in the crowd. He looked around at the vaguely self-important, not unhappy kids and wondered, if things had turned out a bit differently, if he'd ever have ended up in a place like this, taken some arts course at UCLA, fallen in with the high-button crowd, and sat up late talking fiercely about the enigma of visibility. It probably wasn't as bad as it sounded. He might have ended up lashing together some sense of vocation that felt like it justified his life. He didn't usually indulge what-ifs, but he found he wanted to like these kids for some reason.

He saw a skinny boy at a table with his shoe off and his foot obviously far up under the skirt of a girl who was giving dreamy looks at the wall. He remembered what an idiot he'd been in college, wasting all that opportunity on one drunken party after another, chasing the wrong women, and taking the easiest classes. Back when life was still provisional and still could go this way as well as that. He felt a profound sense of loss for just a moment, and then he chased the whole thing away.

The heavyset man announced the main course, an hour-long documentary on the SHARPs, which he explained in a bellowy voice stood for Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice, and the table with the short hair and fatigues whistled and clapped. Jack Liffey remembered the Nazi leaflet in the girl's coat pocket, and he settled back to watch the virtuous lads applauding themselves. He guessed there were two sorts at the table, the young men in camouflage who were the SHARPS in person, and the artier-looking kids who were probably the filmmakers.

The show was mainly grainy heads talking about their lives as the camera moved restlessly around them, and after ten minutes he found his mind drifting away. He wondered what they would make of the old guy behind them in the SAC jacket, and he realized all of a sudden that he was just about the only person in the place who'd seen
Ozzie and Harriet
when it wasn't yet high camp and Vietnam was still a real place to Americans, with real pain. On the wall only a few inches from his cheek was a poster of Leonard Nimoy as Spock making his four-finger V gesture. It seemed an odd emblem for the sophisticates at the Eighth Art, but he supposed it suited the TV generation. He leaned away to read the talk balloon someone had written on it:
Jim, TV is information severed from all lived experience.
And another hand had added in tiny letters:
The true problem lies in the scale of what must be destroyed before anything can be renewed.

One of the SHARPs waved a hand high in the air all of a sudden, as if asking permission to go to the bathroom. The sleeve was rolled up enough to show ring after ring of barbed wire tattooed around the biceps. The video seemed to be winding down into a chaos of testosterone—swaggering black and white gangsters who barged arm in arm through startled shoppers, a strange dissonance between angry bellows and words of brotherhood. The SHARP table whistled and pounded their fists over the credits and others applauded politely.

When the lights went up, Jack Liffey made his way to their table.