The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  The young man fiddled with a teakettle on an electric burner.

  “My name is Jack Liffey, in case I didn’t say.” He couldn’t remember if they’d been introduced. Van der Merwe seemed to be hiding deep inside, the sort of kid you never remember much about, though he wasn’t really a kid, certainly into his thirties. “Character flaw,” Jack Liffey prompted.

  Van der Merwe smiled to himself, a furtive smile like a rabbit peeking out of tall grass. “A lot of people think if you’re timid, you must be a bloody idiot.”

  He went back to his tinkering. He seemed to need a prod now and then to keep running.

  “But you’re not a bloody idiot.”

  “Lee was working on the timidity. She had a game she called épater la bourgeoisie. You know the words?”

  “Shock the squares?”

  He nodded and ruminated for a while. “She barged into the Eagle Corner Market and asked how many corners there were on an eagle. The point was to keep insisting until they got angry.”

  “Sounds like a barrel of laughs.” He remembered Dae Kim saying the girl was trying on identities, looking for one that fit. “Did you join in?”

  He smiled fleetingly, still without looking up. “I suggested she go in the Chinese hand laundry and ask if it was less if you only laundered one finger. She wouldn’t. She said it wasn’t fair to do it to foreigners.”

  “Did you ever try to épater anyone yourself?”

  He shook his head, then poured himself some tea and stared into the cup for a long time.

  “You can go home now, you know,” Jack said. “If it was the racism you hated.”

  Hennie van der Merwe shrugged. “One fucked-up country at a time is enough.”

  Jack Liffey couldn’t quite discern his attitude, but that wasn’t what he was there for. “What else can you tell me about Lee?”

  “Not much.”

  “What was her relationship to Dae Kim?”

  “You don’t know the name, do you? Dae Kim is a very well-known video artist. He’s got stuff in the Newport Harbor and the County. I’m fortunate he lets me hold his coat.”

  “Is that what Lee did?”

  “Sure.”

  He sipped at his tea and stood in the middle of the room. A lot of shy people feel compelled to make small talk to keep the ball rolling, but van der Merwe seemed to prefer silence.

  “Where would you start looking for her?”

  He thought for a while. “You could try this.” He handed Jack Liffey a postcard advertising someplace called The Eighth Art. Venue for video artists. New work Tuesday and Thursday nights.

  Jack Liffey waited for a while, but nothing else was forthcoming. “Are you going to be a video artist?”

  It took him a lot of reflection to come up with his answer. “If I can get over the hurdle of ego. I hate ego.”

  5

  FIVE-POINT-FIVE

  HIS CAR STARTED RIGHT AWAY, AND IT WAS LIKE WAKING healthy from a long sickness. A wave of good feeling washed over him, almost made him cocky. He whistled to himself as he accelerated away toward Sunset to head for the Pasadena Freeway. Maybe things would go right for a while.

  He stopped at a light behind a black Hyundai with fancy wheels and wide low tires. Jack Liffey was just wondering why anybody would bother putting expensive rims on a Hyundai, when the light changed and he noticed the driver was reading something in the seat beside him. He tapped the horn gently and the guy crammed on his parking brake and jumped out. A wiry-looking young man in cutoff jeans came around and huffed and puffed by his door so he rolled the window down.

  “What the fuck you honk at me for?” The man’s hands worked asymmetrically and his eyes kept jumping from place to place.

  Anger had a bad effect on Jack Liffey. A little hammer in his forehead started thumping and his vision narrowed down. At moments like this he recalled the gang of tough black kids he’d seen go for a puffy hopeless white boy in basic. They knew they were all headed to ’Nam to die and they were getting their last licks in at anything they could humiliate, full of taunt and dare. It was the feel of a baseball bat he remembered, the taped handle in his hand as he had waited for them to come after him next, ready to take a couple down with him, but they hadn’t.

  “Before we do something here, let’s both settle down.”

  The man glared at the ground and one of his knees was wobbling. He started to rock and Jack Liffey could see he was egging on his own insanity.

  “Sorry, man,” Jack Liffey said. “I didn’t see the way you were.”

  “You cuntlick!” He wrenched the door open and Jack Liffey came out after it, seeing red. Something sharp hit his shoulder and a woman only a few feet away screamed at the top of her lungs. It sounded like pain and it confused him and made him turn to look. But it was only a heavyset woman watching him, holding her hand to her mouth.

  When he looked back, the Hyundai was getting sideways into the cross traffic with smoke off the fat tires, and he stood there in the street wanting badly to feel a baseball bat. He glanced at his shoulder and saw his shirt was torn and blood was spilling out. He wondered if it was a ring or some little palm weapon. He hadn’t seen a knife. Ambient sounds came back up and the urge to kill something diminished slowly like a hot fog burning off.

  MIKE Lewis and his wife had a rental, shingled bungalow overlooking the Arroyo not far from the Rose Bowl. The wind that funneled up the canyon had found the flagpole on a much bigger house across the street and was banging the metal pulley on the rope and sending a bright Japanese doodad shaped like a carp out over the lawn. The little old Saab wasn’t in the drive so Lewis’s wife, Siobhann, was still at work. She’d been best friends with his own wife, and when they’d divorced nobody’d felt the need to choose up friends.

  Lewis was a social historian who’d been ignored for years until a book on the hidden agendas of L.A.’s elite had gotten hot and now everybody wanted a piece of him, even the elite. When he got out of the car he could hear the manual typewriter going in the front room. Lewis was the last human being to write on a big, black upright L. C. Smith, and it bore the same graffito as Woody Guthrie’s guitar, THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.

  The door was unlocked, and he walked right in, holding tight to the rag he’d tied over his shoulder, through the kitchen and then past Lewis. “ ’S up, Mike? … Use your bathroom.”

  “Hi, Jack. Is that blood?”

  “Sort of.”

  Lewis kept on typing as he went through into the bathroom and took off his blood-soaked shirt. The flow had slowed to an ooze. He found some Band-Aids in the cabinet and made a big X over the slash cut on his bicep, not far above the tattoo, then tied some gauze over that. He knew he should have got stitches, but he didn’t get along with needles.

  “You know what synesthesia is?” Jack Liffey called.

  “Yup.”

  “Do you believe in it?”

  “Who knows? I’m not a senses guy, I’m a data guy. In fact, I’m into white knowledge.”

  “What’s that?” Still holding his arm, he drifted into the living room where Lewis sat, readjusting a coffee cup on the fold-down desk with great focus, as if getting messages of divination from the damp circles it left.

  “Stuff you know without knowing you know it. It’s like, every time you get a little shock of recognition from a novel.” His eye came to rest on Jack Liffey’s bare arm, puzzling over the tattoo. “What’s ‘Good Conduct’?”

  “It was an army thing. It’s what gets you out of the shit in one piece.”

  “Looks like it caught up with you. Don’t bleed on the rug, Sergeant. You know, in a deeply ironic sort of way, I was always sorry to miss out on Vietnam, since it was the defining experience of our generation and all that. Just between you and me, of course. I was an SDS organizer.”

  “In my case, you missed out on a lot of boredom. I wasn’t on a sergeant track, by the way. Do you know anything about an outfit called PropellorHeads?”

  “Software and comp
uter games, taken over last year by an Australian venture capitalist named Nick Dunne, who made his fortune on real estate plus an Aussie beer called Castleton. Installed his own management team. How am I doing?”

  “Not bad. Monogram Pictures.”

  “Nineteen-forties, they made the Bowery Boys, Charlie Chan, and a lot of Bela Lugosi B-movies. In the sixties, the Roger Corman cheapies made the name Monogram a running gag for any schlock movie studio, but the French liked the spirit of the place so much that Godard’s Breathless is dedicated to it. On the other hand, the French like Jerry Lewis, so what does that tell you?”

  “Today?”

  “The current Monogram isn’t really a successor. Some Chicago dentists bought the name and the film library, and then Mitsuko bought them, trying to put together a media empire. They’re back in business in a different building with a lot of Japanese capital.”

  “What do they make now?”

  “They have rights to some of the old stuff. And they make TV movies. Disease of the Week. Straight-to-cable horror. Once in a while, like all of us, they try to do better.”

  He sipped at his coffee and made a face, then headed for the kitchen. Jack Liffey caught up with him rummaging in a cupboard.

  “Do you know any connections between the two?”

  “As it happens, yes. PropellorHeads released a computer game called Chan Lives. Might have something to do with Charlie Chan. And it’s pretty clever of me to know that because I don’t use computers. Hush, I hear leprechauns.”

  Jack Liffey listened, wondering what that was supposed to mean. He didn’t hear anything but a dog baying until all hell broke loose. The house began to roll and there was a deep rumble like a big jet nosing down, throttles stuck open, about to plow into the front yard. The fridge walked a few steps toward them, and Mike Lewis tried hard to say something, but it blew itself out against the roar, and then Mike was under the kitchen table on his hands and knees. Jack Liffey got into the door frame, clinging to the wall with both arms as the house bucked again. There was a high-pitched crack, like a big tree snapping off, and a panicky kind of dislocation as he attended to images, then sounds, then touch, checking in on his senses by turns, not knowing which one would turn out to be the key. After what was probably only ten or fifteen seconds, things began to settle and the noise was just gone. He wondered if the noise had existed at all or was just his imagination supplying a sound equivalent to the terrible rolling thrust.

  “My my,” Mike Lewis said. “That was over five.”

  “Amazing how well trained we are,” Jack Liffey said, referring to their taking shelter.

  “It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget how to fall off.”

  “We know enough not to run outside and get killed by a falling chimney.”

  “Door frames are passé, Jack. They talk about getting under tables now.”

  Jack Liffey looked at the sturdy table. Mike Lewis was sitting up under it, peering around the kitchen. Funny they hadn’t heard the dishware breaking. There was a lot of it on the floor.

  “That would save you a nice coffin-size space if the house collapsed.”

  Jack Liffey stepped outside and saw the air was filled with dust. Every car alarm in the universe was going off and there was a queer electricity in the air, like a promise of something more. He tried to will the seething inside himself to settle. There was nothing quite like the earth moving under you to hit you deep, where something in you needed things not to move. A siren started up, and a woman in an apron stood in her yard up the slope. She waved shyly across the ice plant and bougainvillea.

  “You okay?” she called.

  “Sure.”

  “Can you see a gray cat? It looks Siamese.”

  He looked around, but he knew none of the missing pets would show up for days. He shook his head and she waved once and walked away. The house had a hairline crack diagonally up a patch of stucco on the add-on room in back, but it might have been there before.

  Inside he heard the TV come on. He was surprised there was still power. When all was said and done, after the terror receded, there was always something a little too cozy about an earthquake. It wiped away every kind of failure and started everybody even.

  Mike Lewis sat in a lotus in front of the little TV. The announcer wore an open-neck sport shirt, harried and pissed off, as if he’d been dragged away from something more interesting. He was on a cell phone, trying to drag the real dope out of a geologist, like a police reporter trying to make a felon confess.

  “It’s just an earthquake, Mike. They won’t know a thing yet.”

  “You realize this and football are the only live TV we ever see?”

  “Do you know any serious bones of contention between PropellorHeads and Monogram?”

  His interest gathered slowly, like a comedian doing a slow burn. His gaze came around. “Should there be?”

  “Maybe.” Hidden agendas and corporate feuds were the air Mike Lewis lived on.

  “Give me a day.”

  Jack Liffey called his answering machine and amazingly enough got through. There was an old message, halting and breathless, to visit Lori Bright, which did funny things to his respiration that he did not want to think about.

  He thought of his dog, Loco, probably burrowed under his bed and howling. Long ago he’d left Marlena Cruz his door key.

  “It’s a five-point-five,” Lewis called out. “Epicenter in the Valley near Tarzana.”

  “Marlena, this is Jack. How are you?”

  “Hello, Jack, it’s wonderful to hear your voice.” Emotions banging into each other in her voice. They had unfinished business and he didn’t know what he felt about it.

  “Your shop okay?”

  “There’s stuff all over, and Dan’s window broke out at the Bean. Nothing too bad. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, but I’m worried about my dog. You’ve got my key, you know, in the pencil box.” She’d also once had a little throwaway pistol of his for safekeeping.

  “Sure, I know.”

  “Could you send your nephew down to see about the dog? Tell him to be careful, it’s half coyote and tends to flip out in strange ways. I just don’t want him left alone in there if he’s hurt. If the dog’s okay, Rogelio can just put out some of the dog food from the pantry.”

  “Rogelio’s not around. I’ll go myself, Jack. Right away.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Will I see you later?”

  She was never shy about pressing an advantage. “If I can get back. Thanks a lot. Bye, Marlena.”

  He stared at the small black cordless phone for a moment. She was a good friend and she loved dogs. But she’d fallen in with an asshole like Quinn for a while and that pissed him off somewhere deep, as if it reflected on him. He tried Lori Bright’s number, his heart doing funny things again, but a strange-sounding busy signal started up even before he finished dialing and he guessed that was the end of phone service for a while.

  “You’re not going to try to drive?”

  “I’ll stay off the freeways.”

  “And stay out of any big cracks.”

  “And you watch out for Jamaicans.”

  “How come?”

  “If there is a feud here, it seems to run via Jamaica.”

  Mike Lewis’s eyebrows went up comically. He spoke slowly, judiciously, “Remember last time, when you got mixed up with the hired guns? Mon, I can tune you into the vicissitudes of history, but I can’t protect you from them.”

  JUST down the street from Mike’s, a young Asian in a tiger suit was guarding the front of a mini-market with an AK-47 across his chest. It might have seemed an acid flashback to ’Nam, but he had seen so little combat that the guy reminded him instead of the bad old bomb-shelter days of the 1950s, when the government pamphlets told you to shoot your neighbors rather than let them crowd in. Past the mini-market a bungalow was off its foundation, broken-backed, with a few sad people trying to prop up one wall with a big post. It looked l
ike about a third of the chimneys in the area were down.

  It was a tough trip from the Arroyo to the Hollywood Hills without the freeways—down Figueroa, he figured, then skirting Elysian Park and taking anything west that was going. In fact, by the time he got there, the police had blocked off the old Fig bridge over the L.A. River and they wouldn’t let anyone on until it was inspected. One alternate route ended in a fallen peppertree, and farther south, cars were gridlocked against some other obstacle. He finally went north and got across at Fletcher and wound down through the Silver Lake hills. People were already setting up camps in open fields and parks, mostly recent immigrants. Central Americans had long memories for earthquakes.

  Then he came around a corner by the lake and had to stop fast. A dozen horses were spooked and rearing, each held by a wrangler. Beyond them the street was a prairie of some strange angular rubbish, like a beach after a hurricane. People were digging through the rubbish with a sense of urgency, hurling things aside, and most of them were dressed as hussars or grenadiers or something like that. A hussar at the center of the scene shouted and pointed and others congregated with a kind of rapt fury.

  He got out and traversed what turned out to be a moraine of lath and canvas and plaster chips toward the busy group. One slab of castellated fortress still stood, and he saw that it had all been a false-front film set. What remained was painted so crudely he was surprised it would even fool a camera. Perhaps it had been a movie about a movie.

  “Denny! Get a fucking crane!”

  “Sorry, man. We wrapped the crane this morning.”

  A man in a devil suit struggled to lift a long two-by-four still attached to a lot of rubble.

  “Somebody who isn’t a junkie give me a hand here!”

  Jack Liffey wedged his shoulder under the two-by-four. A grenadier slipped in beside them, and the plume of a brass helmet waved in Jack Liffey’s face, smelling for some reason like beef bouillon.

  “Heave. One-two-three, heave.”

  “Put some emotional investment in it. Lift!”

  Something ripped audibly and the plank rose a foot.