by John Shannon
The bald man let go, and Keith spit and sputtered and then clutched at his bleeding penis with both hands, still wailing in pain.
“Today, Keith. You eke that money our way. We’ll keep your cute little friend until you do. I’m sure you understand.”
“Let’s go, let’s go,” the director improbably named Ram Gold chanted. “Time is moolah.”
The blonde woman in the two-gun cowgirl outfit, little more than an open vest and denim miniskirt, made a puzzled face.
“We paid a fortune for this standing set, Miss Why-not Earp, and I want one tracking shot to make it all worthwhile. You just hop back to the saloon and flash us from the door again.”
A big black man tugged a rubber-tired platform back about fifty feet in the dusty street. A cameraman with a Van Dyke beard sat cross-legged on the wheeled platform with a small video camera in his lap.
Jack Liffey waited for a break, staying out of shot. He had found them on Monogram Village Road, a dirt track not far off the undeveloped part of Mulholland in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. A decaying false-front cowtown had been built there decades ago, in the golden age of the Western, saloon, hotel, jail, etc. But it looked like Hollywood had given up on this particular back lot decades ago and big chunks of plaster were spalling away to show the unlikely framing and chickenwire underneath.
“Roll tape.”
“Speed, dude.”
“Flash ‘em at us good. You’re telling us you’re the best. Then march down here. Action!”
The big blonde came out the swing doors and tore open her snap-button cowboy vest toward the camera, and then she walked clumsily along the boardwalk toward the steps down. She tripped a little on the bottom step.
“Keep going, keep going, we’ll get cover.”
She stalked purposefully up the street, with the wheeled platform retreating just ahead of her, pulled along by the burly man.
“Draw and fire.”
She fumbled a bit getting the pistols out, but both blanks went off, aimed rather askance.
“Cut. Star it. Okay, we can set up for the reverse. Take a break, Trish. You guys know where Sandy’s gonna be.”
“Can I smoke?” the cowgirl asked.
“You’re not in the next shot. You can go practice feng shui for all I care.”
He turned and saw Jack Liffey approaching, taking note of him with a kind of relief and pleasure, like acknowledging a grown-up entering a playroom of unruly infants. “Temperament, the last refuge of the brain whacked. But you watch my guys move. A feature crew would take an hour and a half to relight and move the reflectors. And then they’d still be re-laying the dolly tracks …” He threw up his hands in a gesture somewhere between exultation and despair.
Jack Liffey could tell the director was freewheeling on something, and he realized he’d been mistaken for somebody important, a producer or someone connected with the backlot. Maybe somebody connected with the financing. “So we use the doorway dolly. Some guys use a wheelchair, but that’s really down the chickenshit end of things.”
“Luisa Wilson,” Jack Liffey said, holding up a photograph. “Somebody was supposed to call about her.”
“Okay.” He wound down a bit, and took the photo to look at it. “Uh-huh. She was here, all right, a week ago.”
Jack Liffey waited. There was obviously more to come.
“This girl was right off the farm, all soap and water. Rod, my AD, brought her in. She did a day’s work on the set and then our extracurricular courier Keith took her away from Rod, nothing he could do, he said. If you wait around, Keith will roll in here like the roach coach in a few minutes, ready to service every appetite.”
“Where’s Rod?” Jack Liffey asked.
The director shrugged. “Off on his own Games project too much. I had to fire him. It’s Keith you want.”
Somebody whistled, and he looked around.
“Danny,” he yelled, “get Dyke Clanton. It’s shot 30A.”
A skinny man in a tie-dyed shirt waved and trotted off and soon came back with another woman in cowboy attire, even larger breasted than the first one, if that was possible. He turned her shoulders against the sun, and a young man with a baseball cap that said Baseball Cap squatted down nearby and untwisted a big gold reflector and moved it around until he found where it washed the sunlight over her.
The director turned back on Jack Liffey abruptly. “Look, she was a good kid, and I tried to give her a hand. You can fall a lot lower than sex films in this town. Some days, I think our work is even holy. Some days, I’m the last juvenile delinquent. Okay, I admit to a certain level of bad faith in the air.” The man’s head was speeding somewhere, on something.
He turned away suddenly and began framing things with a rectangle made of his fingers. “Maybe I can do some good in a bad place,” he said and Jack Liffey wasn’t sure who he was talking to. “My guru told me that we never get to fight any of the big battles on a field of purity, but only where things are already debased.”
“That’s the worst rationalization I’ve ever heard,” Jack Liffey said.
Ram Gold laughed. “Which proves that silence is usually better than holiness. Where’s Jimmie now?” he bellowed. “Where’s makeup? Will people please stop wandering away!”
But Keith didn’t show up on schedule with their nose candy, and he wasn’t answering his pager either. Jack Liffey didn’t particularly want to hang around the set any longer. Obviously neither Rod nor Keith was coming.
“You think he’ll be in tomorrow?”
“Wherever there are still human needs to fill.”
Jack Liffey could either go down the hill to Malibu and then along PCH or over the top to the Valley and 101, and it was just about as fast back to East L.A. either way, but going by the ocean he got to see the water for a while. It was too cold for anybody but surfers in wetsuits and a few hardy sunbathers. It was probably not too bad, though, lying down out of the wind, he guessed. A small plane towed an advertising banner along the beach, but the number of bathers on the strand didn’t seem to make the effort worthwhile.
Slowly the plane caught up with his car on PCH, and he chanced a long look over his shoulder on the twists and sweeping curves. They were individual letters, wired together, floating along behind the small plane: TRISH IS A BUTTHEAD.
There was a second plane far back, towing another banner. He wondered if it rhymed but he’d forgotten all about it by the time he’d passed the Incline and come into Santa Monica.
Nobody he tried at the Adult Entertainment Coalition knew anything about a Keith who sometimes provided financing. He guessed the police could come up with Keith’s address if he wanted to go that route. Thinking of the police reminded him that Thumb Estrada was due to show up to mow his lawn at noon. He got the old push mower out and sharpened the blade with a hand stone, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized a voluntary appearance by the boy was pretty unlikely.
“Your friend a no-show?” Gloria leaned out the door, waggling a glass of lemonade at him.
“It’s beginning to look like it.” He still hadn’t told her who Thumb Estrada was. He was afraid she’d be obliged as a cop to turn the boy in, and though he didn’t have a clue why he’d spared him, he’d made his decision to drag the boy kicking and screaming into a civil world, and he meant to stick to it, even if he had to go round him up bodily to start the process.
“You made this off the tree in back, didn’t you? We ought to set up a little booth out here and sell it in the neighborhood for a nickel a glass,” he mused.
“That was your ideal childhood that never happened, Mr. Anglo Middle Class. My ideal childhood that never happened was a quinceañera gown all in white and big hair and a sea of white roses.”
He put an arm around her. “You never got your gown?”
“My fosters couldn’t afford it, not on the $300 a month the county gave them. The whole point of their scam was living off the kids. The cheaper the upkeep, the more to keep
.”
“Ah, shit. Was it really bad?”
She stared at him. “It was worse. Let it go. Do you think this thing still works?” A cheap old Polaroid camera dangled from its lanyard off her left wrist, clunky as a toaster.
“They’ve been pretty well wiped out by digitals, but I think you can still get the film. What do you want to shoot?”
“You,” she said.
“Why?”
“I want to make a collection of the different kinds of shit-eating grins you get on your face when you’re lying to me.”
ELEVEN
Notching up the Reality
“I guess you really are a detective.”
“I really am a detective. I’m nobody’s tame Mexican spitfire, Jack.”
“There’s only one thing I haven’t leveled with you about, and I did it to keep from putting you in an uncomfortable position.”
She thought about that, then grabbed his lemonade back and drank it herself, as if to punish him. “I knew I should have insisted right then when I saw you come home with that gun in your pants like some cholo punk. You can put things over on me, or you can fuck me. You can’t have both, Jack. I never let a man do that.”
He was reminded once again how sensitive and angry she was deep inside—at her foster parents, at being given a Chicano childhood for her Indio genes, at a lot of other slights and indignities, and, oh yes, at men. It gave him a funny feeling, like being flattened out to some two-dimensional character in a soap opera and then being forced to defend the ideological territory that came with it.
He opted for honesty. It wasn’t always the best policy, even considering his half-assed perpetual thrashing around in search of integrity—what Maeve called his portable ethics—but it was generally the simplest course of action once you’d been caught out, that was for sure.
“Okay, I’ll tell you, but then I’m going to have to kill you,” he said. That didn’t help, and he put down the sharpening stone and righted the lawnmower. “Please hear me out. I know you’re a sworn officer of the law, and you have some kind of duty to report crimes and criminals wherever life takes you. I was trying to keep you clear with your sense of duty. And with your supervisor, too.”
She glared at him and turned the lemonade glass upside down to spill away the last spoonful.
“I mean, isn’t it true—if you know something, you have to report it?”
She thought about this for a moment. “Not necessarily. I might be protecting a snitch, or what I think I know might be hearsay. I could name other situations. You get to use a lot of judgment on the street. It’s called HBO—handled by officer.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
She went back into the house and refilled the glass, then offered it again. This time he took it from her and gulped. It needed more sugar, and it burned down like acid. Just what he deserved, he supposed.
“Okay, I found the kid who shot Maeve. He lives in a converted garage over on Clarence. I went to see him. I don’t know what I was thinking about. Maybe I just took the pistol along to protect myself and make him listen to me.”
“Make him listen?”
He shrugged. “Well, he’d shot at me once. I liked him a lot better sitting still and paying attention. You know, I don’t think he even knows why he did it. He says it kind of just happened. I think I can see that. He’s the usual fucked-up mess, but sometimes kids like that make the best adults of all when they straighten out.”
“I see. It’s a reclamation project.”
“You’re always high on Father Boyle and his unconditional love for the gangbangers. I don’t think my temperament is quite that forgiving. Hell, I know it isn’t. I was actually thinking of killing the kid for a while, and, for some reason, the god of mercy just reached out and whacked me, just like that, and I decided to try something else. I don’t understand it any more than he understands why he tried to cap me. Though I think he was probably just trying to scare me. To wring some respect out of an Anglo. I’d like to help him. Maybe it’d even up some big scoreboard somewhere.” He eyed her warily. “Are you going to report this to Padilla?”
She let her head hang for a moment, as if a sudden upsurge of thoughts had created ideas within her cranium far too heavy for her neck to support. “Jesus Christ, Jack. It does put me in a tough place. Sit with me.”
There was an old wooden glide on the little porch that had frozen up long ago. He loved sitting on it because it was such an image of neighborly life, and here in East L.A. there were actual neighborly things to see from it, women bent over in flower gardens, children pedaling big-wheel tractors along the sidewalks, teens drinking beer under the open hoods of their jalopies. At the moment, there was only a tiny girl in a pink dress and way too much makeup and an earring, staring straight at them through the chain-link gate.
“¿Qué pues? You gonna fight?” she asked them.
Gloria smiled tightly and gave Jack Liffey a one-arm hug. “No, querida, ya estuvo. We love each other very much.”
“That’s good to know,” Jack Liffey said softly. “Zing went the strings of my heart.”
“Is Maeve home?” the little girl insisted.
“Maeve is away right now,” Jack Liffey told her. “She’s staying with her mother for a while. It’s muy lejos, way across town, cerca la playa.”
“Oh.” She seemed very disappointed. “Maeve plays cards with me.”
“That’s nice,” Gloria said. “We’ll tell her you asked for her. Run along now, ranita.”
The girl waved and skipped down the road.
“Ranita, that’s a pretty name,” he said.
“It’s not her name. It means little frog.”
“Sorry, I’m trying.”
“That’s okay, Jack.” She squeezed his knee. “I forget sometimes you’re a pretty good man, all in all. I’m sorry I went off on you there, but you got to keep me in the picture, especially if you wander off into deep water and get over your head. Out here in my part of town. Peligro, esse. It’s a hard rain in the barrio.”
They both watched the quiet scene for a moment. It was a beautiful neighborhood, if a bit beat up, full of flowers and much-loved front gardens offered up as a gift to the street. There was just a certain insinuation of protection in the fences that surrounded every front yard, so unlike white L.A., suggesting an undertow of prudence and apprehension.
“Whatever happened to that nice world we were supposed to have where kids played kids’ games and grew up slowly?” Jack Liffey asked. “Then they learned a trade and got their own house and had their own families? Most Latinos I know are a lot better at families than my people.”
“That world is right out there, querido, it’s just not the whole picture. A little more respect from the world, a few more jobs, a little less need for macho—maybe it could be the whole thing.”
“You still have bad dreams?”
“Let’s not talk about that.”
“It leaks in, sweet,” he said. “You thrash around a lot.”
“You can always leave for quieter parts and all the blondes with the good dreams and the Volvos.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He entwined his fingers with hers.
She squeezed his hand back, and he felt the roughness of her skin. “Tell me more about this dumb thing you’re doing.”
“I’d like to believe everybody’s just an inch from okay,” Jack Liffey said. “As you say. A little less this, a little more that. Look at this punk who potshotted me. Thumb is his street name.” He shook his head sadly. “He dresses like a gangster, he acts menacing at the drop of a hat, and he mad-dogs you. Back in the car, he even held the damn gun horizontally the way all the gangbangers do it in the movies these days. I mean, where do kids like that get off complaining that people take them for gangsters?” He waved a palm in the air as if erasing his argument. “Okay, I’m just frustrated. I do understand a lot of it. You fail in school, your dad drinks himself into a stupor and beats your mom, your only
heroes are urban warriors, etc., etc. That’s why I want to give this guy a break. My little Pygmalion.”
“Pygmalion? What’s that?”
“Better known as My Fair Lady. You’re the one that loves Greg Boyle and his theories about saving all these kids. You going to turn me in or let me try to do this?”
“Thumb didn’t show up to mow the lawn,” she said, as if that settled it.
“So, he didn’t turn his life around on the first try. Is that all he gets?”
An ice cream pushcart came down the road, tinkling its bell. East L.A. was full of them, unlike the white suburbs, like emblems of the world everybody really wished it was.
“I won’t tell Padilla right now, but you got to let me back you up. You don’t even speak the language, Jack.”
“I try. It notches up the reality a bit. I’m gonna go find Thumb.”
“I said you have to let me get your back. I mean it.”
“Stop wriggling, young man, or I can’t stitch it.”
“Who said anything about stitches?” Keith howled and clutched himself again. With his feet tangled in his hastily downed pants, he almost rolled off the stirrup table in the back office. The first doctor’s office he’d come to in his panicky drive into Santa Monica had been an OB/GYN and he’d left the Porsche out on the sidewalk, door open and engine running, and blown straight through the reception with a pistol in his hand demanding immediate help. The doctor had sensed some big money to be made and kept his nurse from calling the police.
“You want to be obliged to pee around corners? It’s up to you.”
“Oh, shit. Then gimme some Mister Blue. Or at least some Hillbilly Heroin. I mean it.”
“What on earth is Hillbilly Heroin?” Dr. Steinmetz had been practicing on a very rich, north-of-Montana clientele for years now—often abortions reported as D-and-Cs—and he found the wild boy a refreshing change. None of his Brentwood matrons had ever asked for Hillbilly Heroin.