The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  She let go, but his arm still burned where her hand had been. I’ll bet you do that to all the boys, he thought.

  “At the top of the stairs, just on the left. I think I’ll let you look by yourself.”

  “I’ll try not to soil things. By the way, is her name Cohn or Bright?”

  “Borowsky. It’s Lionel’s legal name. I’m tired of the story about it. You can ask him if you see him.”

  She was already walking away and for a moment he watched her buttocks reciprocate against her gauzy skirt, speculating on dance training, and then he tried to get his head working clearly. He took hold of that terribly inviting, vulnerable-tough image of her and pushed it down hard into the interior white suspended space where he kept everything else he had lost, or fucked up, or never had. He knew he could keep her there and get on with things because he had a hard selfish streak.

  The first thing that struck him in the girl’s room was the large black lapel button taped to the wall that said EAT SHIT AND DIE, but any kid might think that was funny. There were Victorian colored prints of stringy pastel flowers and a rather silly poster of a birthday cake being run over by a big snow tire. He drifted to the single shelf of books—S. E. Hinton, the beat poets, Khalil Gibran, The Fountainhead, Alan Watts, Aleister Crowley’s book on black magic, and Henry Miller. It was a sampler of all the cul-de-sacs of Western culture. There was an expensive-looking boom box and a pile of tapes with names like Thrashing Apes, violent names without wit or imagination. He saw an oversize deck of cards and guessed they were probably tarot, but when he turned a few up he saw the star, square, triangle of Rhine cards, popular with the ESP crowd.

  He went through the drawers one at a time, prodding gently and feeling the undersides for taped-up secret messages or keys. He found only expensive black underwear, padded black bras, a hundred used batteries, black tank tops, and an old stuffed elephant, worn from being clutched in bed. The clothes in the closet were mostly black, too, blouses, tight skirts, black jeans on hangers, and a long shiny leather coat like something from the panzer korps. The closet shelf held a year-old high-school yearbook from Hollywood High. He found her by name in a group photo, skinny and innocent looking in a pink dress, obviously from before she’d joined the Waffen SS. He wondered what had happened there, only a year earlier, to drive her to private school.

  He stopped at the door and looked around. The bedroom had a weird volatile quality that kept defying his focus, like a layering of several lives. In the bathroom he found a lot of creams for vaginitis and dark makeup and a giant plastic bag of puffballs.

  He waited in the hall a moment and then he went back to the bedroom closet and felt all the pockets. In the leather coat he found a movie stub, a Kleenex with dark purple lipstick on it, and a crude Xeroxed leaflet demanding death to the “mud people who are stealling are birthrite.”

  Up until then he had dismissed the ESP cards, the punk music and black leather, imagining a celebrity daughter who was just working overtime trying to make herself interesting to herself, but now he realized that kids like that were on a breakneck merry-go-round that spun them through adolescence. With a little luck the wheel might stop at a graduate school back east or a coffeehouse in the Valley, but who knows what hitch in the mechanism might toss her off into a Buick driven across the plains of Idaho by a handsome serial killer out of the local militia.

  The maid met him in the hallway and gave him a note with the contact numbers at the school, plus a check for one thousand dollars. The señora was asleep. A retainer, he thought, staring in awe at the check. He’d been hunting missing kids for two years and finally he had a real retainer. He was in the big leagues.

  “How well did you know Lee?” he asked the maid.

  She seemed not to know English, which was unlikely, but he let it go.

  He stepped out into a balmy crystalline day, smogless and warm, one of those late-winter–early-spring California mornings that should have promised endless satisfaction. Flowers glowed, the air smelled of eucalyptus, a seagull swooped across the sky, but he wasn’t moved by it. He seemed to have lost the knack of that kind of satisfaction.

  He watched a Latino gardener clipping the hedge in a fussy way. There was no truck in the cul-de-sac, and Jack Liffey wondered if the man was staff, maybe even the maid’s husband. That would be tidy.

  “Compañero, buenos días. Did you know Lee? The little one?”

  Jack Liffey would never know what the answer might have been, for just as the man glanced up, there was a faint deep rumble and the lawn gave them both a thrusting jolt.

  “Eeeee,” the gardener said softly, and his eyes filled with perfect panic. A car alarm went off somewhere, and they both held their breath, but there was no more.

  The gardener got hold of himself quickly and sighed. “Terremoto,” he said.

  “Yeah, three-point-five.” Of course, if it wasn’t an aftershock of the Pacoima quake a year earlier, his guess was meaningless. Everyone in L.A. got to be a fine judge of the Richter scale, but it only worked when you knew where the epicenter was.

  The gardener left the clippers on the hedge and scurried around the house.

  One thing for sure, the car alarm wasn’t his. He climbed into the white 1979 AMC Concord wishing someone would steal it. He and his wife had had a nice, tight trouble-free Accord, but that had left with her and his daughter, and then there was the secure aerospace job that had gone south earlier still.

  His satisfactions now lay in disdain and self-control, in his resistance to all the easy compensations that had once sustained him—cigarettes or drugs or drink or even the tough, edgy novels he had once read endlessly and that now seemed to be weirdly leaking back into his world.

  “HEY, Dick Tracy.”

  A bunch of black kids were hanging by the steps of the complex. Usually he’d greet them as he passed and they’d nod sullenly or offer a grudging sampling of the current salutations.

  “ ’S up,” he said.

  “Hey, check it out, man.”

  They looked like they wanted to tell him something. He sat on the retaining wall to put himself on their level. He was pretty good with kids through the simple expedient of having burned out all his own ambition. Most people didn’t realize how threatening an adult’s ambition was to the teenagers who inevitably felt the last crop of adults had grabbed all the available decent space in the world and would go on rusting over their heads for the rest of their lives. Jack Liffey never felt he had to top their jokes.

  “You really private detective?” He had a rough idea of which kid was which and this had come from one of the leaders, a fifteen-year-old who hunched his shoulder regularly like a tic. Jack Liffey knew he was called Ducks.

  “Nah, not really. I look for kids who are missing and I get them out of trouble sometimes. If the parents have a bit of money, they even pay me for it.”

  They looked confused, but he couldn’t help that.

  Ducks hunched his shoulders. “Check this out, you was gettin’ ran up on. We caught a couple cowboys tryin’a bust in your window.”

  “Two months ago?”

  “That’s it.”

  He knew about the cowboys, all right. It was over, but the emotion and terror of the ordeal was still fresh. A woman he’d loved had left him because of the terror, and worse, he’d had to kill someone for the first time in his fifty-two years, even counting thirteen months in Vietnam.

  “The cowboys are out of the picture now. How come they didn’t get in my window?”

  “Me an’ Li’l Hammer drew on ’em.”

  “No shit. Why’d you do that?”

  “You got to represent, man. This our ’hood, down or die.” It was nothing to joke about: the head cowboy had been a psychopath sack of shit, and Jack Liffey was impressed the kids had taken him on. Kids grew up even faster than he thought these days.

  “I guess I owe you guys one.”

  2

  REMARKABLE POWERS

  HE PICKED UP A TIMES AT T
HE COIN RACK. THE MAYOR WAS in a feud with the police chief about a citizen’s arrest performed by one of the mayor’s aides who’d caught the chief smoking in an airliner over Fiji, the President was chopping wood in front of a circle of admiring Asian diplomats, and the celebrity killer whom they’d taken to calling Manson 2 had left another music cassette full of rhymed taunts at a radio station. Random notes from a universe that was getting a lot stranger than the one he’d grown up in.

  It should have been Marlena Cruz’s nephew running Mailboxes-R-Us over the noon hour. He’d taken to avoiding her, mainly to save her embarrassment. They’d had a bit of a thing until he’d accidentally caught her in bed with a cop, and a cop he really didn’t like. But it wasn’t Rogelio looking up to see him open the mailbox, it was Marlena herself and she gave a strangled little cry.

  “Jack.”

  “Hi.” He decided not to tiptoe. “How are you and Quinn doing?”

  “I don’t see him no more, not since he hit me and called me a wetback.” She’d put on a couple of pounds since he’d had a good look at her. She still didn’t look bad in it, but she’d be lighter on her feet with a lot less. The tight dress emphasized a mannish paunch and he felt a real tenderness for her.

  “I bet that’s not all he said.”

  “There was another bad word, too, means my private parts. He’s got a mean streak.”

  “Taken as a whole, he’s got a tiny little nice streak. Thanks for tidying up my place after it was wrecked.”

  “I do it for you anytime, Jack.” Her eyes were begging something, but he wasn’t ready for that.

  “Thanks. I’ll see you later.”

  The mail was all solicitations for services he couldn’t afford and bills he couldn’t afford either, but only one was the red one you really had to pay or go without something. The check from Lori Bright was already earmarked for last month’s condo mortgage and penalty, and a couple of other red bills.

  “Just coffee and toast,” he said to Dan Margolin as he stepped into the Coffee Bean that was two doors down the strip mall from Mailboxes-R-Us and directly beneath his own office.

  “How ’bout those Lakers?” Dan Margolin said.

  “I’m not up on the doings in Minneapolis.” Margolin knew he hated everything to do with sports.

  Liffey thumbed through the paper. Somebody had found a new way to deny the poor health benefits, a plane had crashed into Lake Michigan, some study had just revealed that the steel trussing they’d been doing for earthquake reinforcement for twenty years wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Dan Margolin brought his coffee with toast and the little pot of homemade jam. He had a ponytail, a dry sense of humor, and a real knack for cooking simple things, and Jack Liffey liked him.

  “These two yentas are just off the bus in Miami Beach and they unfold their sand chairs and settle in.

  “ ‘Say, Ruthie,’ one of them says, ‘you been through the menopause yet?’ ”

  “ ‘Menopause-shmenopause, I haven’t even been through the Fontainebleau yet.’ ”

  Jack Liffey didn’t glance up. “What’s a yenta? Speak English.”

  “You live in the town MGM made, for chrissake. You’ve got to learn a little Yiddish.”

  “I don’t have to do anything.”

  Ever since Jack Liffey had moved into the old travel agency upstairs, Dan Margolin had been telling him Yiddish jokes and he’d been playing Mike Hammer back. It was just a way of passing the time.

  He took the coffee up to his office and looked up the Taunton School in his collection of phone books. He’d picked up most of the directories for the L.A. basin, which was the most overtelephoned area on the planet. He even had the thin neighborhood books with the cheerful majorettes on the cover.

  The machine was flashing at him, two calls.

  “Jack, Kathy. It’s getting kinda dumb me going on denying you visitation month after month. Where’s the surprise, right? Maeve really wants to see you and the lawyer says maybe let you see her for a couple months and then it’ll break your heart and you’ll come through with some child support. I know, I know. We agreed we’d be adults, but I can’t just let you go on being irresponsible. Anyway, you’re on this weekend. Pick her up Saturday at nine. Don’t be late.”

  What that meant was Kathy had red-hot plans for Saturday with the new guy she was seeing.

  “Mr. Liffey, this is the Bright residence. It’s eleven-forty. I think you’d better come back here as soon as you can.” The Bright residence. It was her voice, all right, but she didn’t say Lori, or Lori Bright, or Mrs. Bright. Weird. There had been a tremor in the voice and then she seemed to be working up to tell him something, or wanting him to think so. It was hard not to be cynical with actors. “Just come back, please.”

  According to the map, Taunton School was near the Wilshire Country Club smack in the heart of Hancock Park. That was the last bastion of old money in L.A., though old money in L.A. only really meant electric railways or graft or oil at the turn of the century. Behind every great fortune is a great crime, somebody had said. He’d loop down to the school after Avenida Bluebird.

  He got stuck in a jam on Branson when he forgot they were diverting traffic around the giant crater where two square blocks of Hollywood had caved in on the Red Line tunnel, carrying down twelve souls—nightwatchmen, two winos, and a CPA burning the midnight oil. The hole was so big no one had figured out how to fix it yet, and the contractors were too busy pointing fingers at one another and gearing up for court.

  He filed slowly past where one end of the hole had become an unofficial public dump. Every day the police tried to stop it with barriers and every night the barriers seemed to be pulled down. He could see an alluvial fan of mattresses, old stoves, TV cabinets, tree trimmings, and black plastic bags. He could also see thirty or forty children and old women, mostly Latinos, clambering over the slope to pick through the trash, like something on the outskirts of Bombay. Another small step in the transformation of North America into a scavenger economy.

  He diverted west to Gower and drove up through the Plains of the Locust, the infamous Gower Gulch where in the 1920s dimestore cowboys from New Jersey had hung out to be seen by the shabbier little film studios. The traffic broke up and the car spurted up out of the gulch into the hills where the more successful cowboys had settled. He had once got a kick out of knowing things like that.

  Lori Bright waited for him on a stone bench beside a fountain in a Spanish cloister garden. Nice to have money, he thought, and enough taste not to use it to build a kidney-shaped swimming pool. The maid waddled away and Lori Bright squinted up in annoyance at a helicopter that circled the neighborhood, “orbited” as the cops called it.

  “The blonde pop singer down the slope sunbathes in the nude and the sheriff gives her extra-special protection.”

  “I could see the tendency,” he said.

  She sighed. “I suppose it means my house is safer, too. How the neighborhood has fallen. That house used to belong to Malcolm Lowry before all the British exiles moved to Santa Monica Canyon. He played the ukulele in his backyard.”

  “It didn’t have very far to fall then.”

  She smiled thinly without looking at him. “I can’t always work out your attitude.”

  “We all have our problems.”

  He sat on a second stone bench, waiting for whatever it was. What was she fishing around for? Maybe she was just lonely.

  “I once walked along a jetty with a lover, sun setting in the distance, and I asked him whether he would choose courage or happiness. This was in a film, of course.”

  “Children of Light,” he said.

  She nodded, unsurprised that he recognized it.

  “With happiness you don’t need courage, but it never lasts. With courage you can outlast unhappiness, but it’s no fun.” She shrugged. “Of course this is the town that thinks courage was personified by that draft-dodging drunk John Wayne because John Ford taught him how to huff and puff.”

  “You c
ouldn’t take your eyes off him,” Jack Liffey said.

  “It’s true,” she conceded. “Clint Eastwood, James Coburn—they’re like snakes coiling up in front of you, but John Gielgud shows up, you can’t bear to look at him. Voice like a god, acts like a god, but you can’t look at him.” She laughed once, softly. “They always say I had a dusky sensuality, whatever that is.”

  He wondered what she was after. Why would she need compliments from him?

  She unfolded a sheet of paper and set it on the bench in front of him. It was a fax, apparently reproducing an original on which words and letters cut out of a newspaper had been glued down to eke out:

  WE HAVE GOT LEE GET $50 GRAND NO COPS

  Most were whole words in various fonts, though they’d had to go to individual letters for LEE.

  “When did this show up?”

  “It came to my husband, on location. The publicist at Monogram called and then faxed it to me an hour ago.”

  “You seem to be taking it rather oddly.”

  “Do you believe a ransom note that shows up after ten days?”

  “You mean you think she’s hoaxing?”

  Lori Bright jiggled her head, maybe not even a denial, just as if shaking off a persona to leave behind a clearer-headed, more focused person.

  “It’s not beyond her. I don’t know.”

  “You have to call the cops.”

  “Lionel already did. Or he had the studio call them. I thought you should know.”

  “Before the cops notice me sniffing around and pick me up. Does anything in the note ring any bells?”

  She reflected. “ ‘Have got’ is British idiom. An American would just say ‘have’ or maybe ‘got’ in some social circles.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars isn’t very ambitious.”

  “It’ll do in my social circles.”

  “My husband could get his hands on quite a bit more, without much trouble.”

  He took a last look at the note. “Where’s the original?”