The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  He funneled back onto the freeway just before the big Van Norman Reservoir. For eighty years the Van Norman had held the water stolen from the farmers of the Owens Valley, ostensibly to quench L.A.’s thirst, but for most of those years, to enrich a land syndicate of L.A.’s rich and powerful. His course up to the Owens Valley to talk to Lee Borowsky’s father would roughly parallel the L.A. Aqueduct that brought the water down.

  He came off the 5 onto the 14 heading toward the Antelope Valley and rediscovered how much he liked long-distance driving. It gave you a sense of getting somewhere. It was a feeling he’d once thought he had locked down. In his billet every night he’d read the great nineteenth-century writers, one after another, and then headed off for deep Thai-stick sleep to wake up and jog a half hour through gorgeous Thai countryside before returning to the trailer, where he watched scopes with a half-dozen other guys his age who weren’t bad company at all. A few beers after dinner, a bit too tart from the open crates sitting too long in the tropical sun, but still pretty good, and half-decent conversations like dorm talk at college, then back to communing with Stendahl, Gissing, Edith Wharton, and Gogol. Funny he hadn’t known how happy he was. How come you never knew it at the time when you were happy?

  But he knew perfectly well why you never knew it at the time, for the same reason nobody was really happy in high school. It was only later you knew for sure all those disasters that might have happened didn’t.

  Before long he was passing through dusty Canyon Country with all its rednecks and cops and survivalists pretending they were roughing it out in the dawn of creation. The last time he’d been out here he’d rescued a girl from a megalomaniac preacher who gathered lost kids off Hollywood Boulevard and put them to work sewing leather jackets at slave wages. As he’d crept up on the place he’d come face-to-face with a Day-Glo sign on the side of the workshop: JESUS: I COME QUICKLY, and it was all he could do not to burst out laughing. Me, too, now and then, he’d thought, but I’m not so proud of it.

  The sharp hill line where he came down into the Mojave was the course of the San Andreas Fault and he wondered what possessed people to build their new earth-tone stucco houses right on top of it. IN THE LOW 90S! a billboard whooped. L.A. proper hadn’t seen prices like that for thirty years. He wondered if the realtors out here had to come clean about the fractured bedrock before they signed off. Oh, and by the way…

  Later the desert road turned through a rock canyon and an old fading graffito on a boulder by the road said STAY WITH DYLAN. He wondered at which particular hard-about of Bob Dylan’s career that had been written. Turning Jewish, turning Christian, hard left, hard right? He stopped the Sentra on a gravel turnout and peed behind a feathery green-bark palo verde that didn’t hide much.

  The sun was pleasantly warm, and zipping up, he turned his face up to the light like an eagle on a fence post. If it had been his own car, he wondered if he’d have left his life behind and just kept on driving. How did you deal with a life that wasn’t working out? There was a yawning gulf between the man he’d like to have been and the best he was managing. How did you respect yourself when you saw your own cowardices? How did you grow old with so little to cling to?

  For no particular reason, he made a Japanese grunt and moved into a karate posture. The samurai just kept going, that’s how. That was the existential code. It was walking away that made you old. He laughed aloud and swept the flat of his hand into the belly of an imaginary enemy as he came around and found himself locking eyes with a young woman blowing past in a red Mustang convertible. She grimaced and turned away.

  He laughed again and swung downward with a cry to shatter bricks. Stay on the job, he thought. It was what you had left when what you had was gone.

  • • •

  THE rent-a-cop told him they were shooting right where the Temple of Kali had stood in Gunga Din, but he’d seen the movie too long ago to recognize anything. The Alabama Hills back of Lone Pine were all rounded, weathered rock, like the rubble of a small city kicked into heaps by an angry giant. He’d been flagged down by the rent-a-cop a half mile back and told to park, and he had walked up the box canyon toward the pall of dust that hovered over a semicircular pocket in the hills.

  “Have you ever acted in a wildlife short?” a man at the table of box lunches was asking a beautiful young girl with a long braid.

  “Not so’s I’d notice.”

  “I was a zebra, I swear to God. They had to pad the film out.”

  Only a half-dozen people seemed to be released to eat, and they were peering into the cardboard boxes, as if searching for just the right turkey sandwich. A row of hovels had been built against the cliff ahead and a lot of the actors wore loincloths and looked curiously white of skin, like Finns in the middle of winter. Many of the too-white people were waiting curiously by a Land Rover with some contraption on the roof that reminded him of his mom’s Electrolux vacuum. Perhaps they were making The Far Planet of the Dustballs, he speculated.

  He found a young woman with a clipboard and told her Lionel Borowsky had asked him to come out.

  She pointed. “They’ll break in a minute.”

  A cluster of men sat on beach chairs under a canopy. He couldn’t see a camera, but there were a lot of lampstands and platforms and big black suitcases scattered around. A pile of bloodied severed limbs waited to one side.

  “What’s the movie?”

  “The Makers. It’s a lost story by Philip K. Dick—you know, the Blade Runner guy.”

  “How can it be lost?”

  “Well, you know. It was found, for cripes sake. It’s about a bunch of androids who run off to live in Tibet and forget they’re androids. Over time they build up a bunch of myths about the Makers who made them and then one day these two down-and-out Brooklyn guys stumble into their valley. Sort of The Man Who Would Be King meets The Terminator.”

  A couple of actors he vaguely recognized emerged from the Electrolux Land Rover and walked among the too-white people and then he noticed the cameraman with the Steadicam following them, like a man strapped into a big drill press. When you lived in L.A., you knew about all the latest film gimmicks.

  “I said no fucking giggling!” The wail curled up unnaturally from the canopy, electronically amplified, and bounced off the cliff. “If it happens once more, I’m calling the union and you’re all off the picture! Take lunch, you sick grifters, and calm down.”

  “That’s Jerry Tuck, the first AD.”

  “Uh-huh. Can I go over, now?”

  The shoal of too-white folks drifted toward the box lunches, and the cameraman started unstrapping himself.

  There was no question which man under the canopy was Lionel Borowsky. Everything in the valley was turned just perceptibly toward him, as if waiting on his whims. He was heavyset and balding and he had almost managed to straighten his body into a line by stretching his legs forward in the aluminum chair and letting his head dangle back with his eyes closed. A much older man with dead flat eyes sat beside him, glaring out at the AD, who was chasing after the too-white folks, waving a little battery megaphone. Two men in polo shirts stood behind the awning, rocking now and then like backing vocalists.

  “Mr. Borowsky, I’m Jack Liffey, the man who’s looking for your daughter.”

  The eyes came open and found him with sleepy menace. He watched Jack Liffey for a while.

  “Mr. B,” someone said, “we still got the stand-ins waiting off there.”

  He waved it away. Jack Liffey noticed that the old man was rolling a quarter across his knuckles without looking, like George Raft.

  “Are you an ex-cop?”

  Jack Liffey shook his head.

  “What makes you think you can find her?”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “And take women’s money, a lot of which is my money.”

  Jack Liffey’s vision went pink. “You didn’t ask me all the way up here just so we could wave our dicks at each other, did you?”

  The backing voca
lists went very still, and even the quarter faltered in mid-knuckle. Suddenly Lionel Borowsky sat up and grinned. “Dennis, write that down. I know just the place for it, right after the buzzard scene. Somebody get Jack Liffey a chair.”

  He put out his hand to shake and a folding chair materialized.

  “Mr. Liffey, welcome to my set. This is my father, the famous blacklisted director.”

  “I don’t remember any Borowskys on the blacklist.”

  “Irwin Cohen.”

  “Oh, of course. My privilege.”

  He shook the old man’s leathery hand.

  “Eh.” It was a Jewish sort of shrugging noise.

  “I may as well explain the names,” Lionel Borowsky offered. “I went back in the record and found out what was going on at Ellis Island while a third of Eastern Europe was fleeing the pogroms into North America. The schmucks who ran Immigration couldn’t deal with all those Polish consonants so they counted down the lines of these bedraggled pilgrims just off the boat”—he counted off those surrounding him—“Levy, Cohen, Stein, Levy, Cohen, Stein. Pure goyisheh kop. Long ago I went back and found that granddad was Yusul Borowsky, not Joseph Cohen, but dad is too stubborn to change back.”

  “I already monogrammed my shirts.” He rolled his eyes. “This is a sign of going mad, taking yourself so seriously.” Jack Liffey sat.

  “Coming from the man who went to prison rather than open his yap.” He waggled a thumb at his father. “He wasn’t even a Red. He just did it because Hammett did.”

  Jack Liffey admired that kind of bullheadedness, but he let it sit there.

  “Mr. B. David is objecting to doing his scenes out of sequence. Says his emotions will all end up with clear black lines around them.” The AD shuffled his feet uncomfortably.

  Lionel Borowsky grimaced. “Tell him I don’t want emotions. I want him to deliver the lines I wrote. Coach him until he remembers the lines.” He glanced at his father and added softly, “And then we’ll change them on him.”

  “Getting a Performance out of a Schlemiel 101, four units,” the old man said.

  The AD deposited a shopping bag full of box lunches and wandered away with the two backing singers, arguing about the afternoon schedule, leaving only father and son and visitor. The director dealt out the lunches. “Have one, Mr. Liffey. You may as well get something out of this trip.”

  “I had an idea that you wanted to see me.”

  “Oh, I did, and I’ve seen you.”

  The old man frowned into his box and then tossed it aside.

  “What did you see?”

  “A guy who’s either schtupping my ex-wife or soon will be.”

  Jack Liffey decided to let it go some more and see what happened. “Why would that matter to you?” In his box was a turkey on wheat in a clear plastic tub, a big red apple, a brown cello bag that said HAWAIIAN POTATO CHIPS—NOT FOR RESALE, and a rolled-up napkin with plastic silverware sticking out. He’d heard that Hollywood catering was high end, but it certainly wasn’t true on the set of The Makers.

  “See?” Lionel Borowsky said to his father.

  “Okay, what can I do? Once again, you’re right. A great intellect, my son, a mensch, a guy who’s lived the examined life.”

  Lionel Borowsky started to eat and then spoke unashamedly with his mouth full. “Don’t mistake me, Mr. Liffey. I don’t care what you do with Lori. She has a fertile imagination for boy-girl stuff and you’re consenting adults. I needed to gauge how your loyalties might have become clouded. Beware of her. She may not be quite what you think. She is entirely capable of … oh, just about anything. She could, just for instance, stage a kidnapping for some nefarious purpose of her own. The only thing keeping me from suspecting that is the paltry ransom. Fifty thousand dollars is not a lot of money in her circles, or in mine.”

  Jack Liffey remembered her saying something of the sort. “In my circles, it’ll do, but I’ll take your word for it. What else would she gain by staging a kidnapping?”

  “That’s another thought.” He nodded as he appeared to mull it over. “But in eighteen years of directing movies and forcing underfed, overimportant, and oversexed kids from the midwest to reveal their inner feelings, I’ve learned that I don’t know a goddamm thing about their feelings. The only sure touchstone is believing whatever anybody tells you is absolutely not what they’re feeling.”

  The old man snorted. “Hang on, I got to write that down.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Jack Liffey asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know a company called PropellorHeads?”

  He seemed to think it over for a moment. “They’re a little game outfit that licensed a single use of one of Monogram’s old movies from the forties for next to nothing, and then they made about five games out of it. I even know the Aussie that runs it. He’s a very, very small land shark. Between him and the old boys who run Monogram, I wouldn’t bet a lot of money on Australia.”

  “Did you know your daughter did some work for them?”

  He looked genuinely surprised. “She’s just a kid.”

  “A kid who’s into movies.” He liked the idea that they finally conceded he might know things they didn’t know.

  Just then a young woman wandered past with very large breasts struggling against a bright blue halter top. Some of her spilled out and some was rosy and firm and she laughed at something in her head with the kind of voice you heard on telephones when you got the wrong area code. It aroused him and made him think of Lori Bright and he was surprised by the urgency of his desire. What a disorderly set of emotions he had developed, he thought.

  “Is she in tight with the flakes at PropellorHeads?” Lionel Borowsky asked.

  “I don’t think so. Do you know any Jamaicans?”

  “I met Bob Marley once. Kept thumping a big Bible and I couldn’t understand a word he said.”

  “Any living ones?”

  Something clouded in his eyes, but he wasn’t going to share it. “Nope.”

  “I’ll keep you informed, then. Can you hear colors?” he added as he stood up.

  They looked at him as if he was crazy.

  “I’ll track her down for you, if I’m not too busy fucking your wife.”

  The old man roared with laughter.

  9

  THE REFERENT IS DAYDREAMS

  HE WAS DUE BACK FOR THE POLICE LINEUP AT TEN, SO HE had to rouse himself in the motel bed at about five to be safe. He’d never had trouble running on half sleep; in fact he rather liked the buzz of stoic rectitude it gave him.

  He showered and got on the road so fast it was still dark. The two-lane highway ahead of him was dead straight, with truck lights hanging out there for a long time and then exploding past with a gust that rocked the Nissan. A bit of moon was dying out and the half-light under the hills filled the desert with hallucination, a lot of ghosts he didn’t want to see. Eventually he watched a bloodless sun come up over the barren Argus range to the east. To the west the first light hit the snow-powdered crests atop the long wall of the Sierras, and before long, morning light was hanging above the dark desert floor like a gas.

  The desert had a stark kind of virtue. It reminded him of the last time he’d had his body in tip-top shape, and a good morning run would leave him tingling with chaste satisfaction. A kind of rejuvenating cleanliness waited out there, broadcasting a kind of hope out of all the emptiness. It was where visionaries and prophets came from. And samurai, defenders of the weak.

  He knew he was straying further and further from the easygoing technical writer he had once been, the family man and homeowner who avoided anything new and unusual. That life was like a dream he’d had, a pleasant-enough dream, but evaporated, long gone. A big hand had descended from somewhere, and had as if casually, indifferent to his hopes, overturned everything.

  WIRE PALADIN, SAN FRANCISCO. He saw the calling card with the silhouette chesspiece from his TV youth. He didn’t even have Richard Boone’s fancy hotel room to return
to, no faithful Chinese servant to set out his clothes. He grinned at himself: as a boy, he had misread the calling card that opened the show. He’d thought Wire was the character’s first name.

  THE place didn’t look much like it always did on the cop shows. It wasn’t shabby at all and it wasn’t cramped. There were two rows of plush theater seats on his side of the one-way window, like a private screening room for the money-men at Fox. Lieutenant Malamud was there, standing up by the big window, and Flor sat at the end of the aisle. Dai Kim was there, too, sitting glumly in a tidy suit. For some reason, a chimpanzee in a tutu was handcuffed to a seat arm at the back, and once in a while the animal tugged at the cuffs and made a little scree, but it seemed pretty resigned.

  “I can’t wait to resolve the OMB thing,” Flor said.

  “I tell you, I never saw the guy,” Dae Kim complained.

  Malamud shrugged. “Maybe you seen him elsewhere. Maybe he’s been stalking you.”

  He tapped a little squawk box on the wall and spoke into it. “Let’s rock-and-roll, folks.”

  A door on the other side of the window came open and a reggae band trooped in languorously and lined up under the big black numbers. They all had dreadlocks and bright shirts, and one of them bobbed regularly as if singing to himself, but Jack Liffey could see immediately that his Jamaican was not among them.

  “He’s not there,” Jack Liffey said.

  “Take a good look, Liffey,” Sargent Flor said. “It wasn’t easy to dig up a bunch of Jamaicans at this hour.”

  “I said he’s not there. I can see them.”

  “Take a really good look. Stare at them for a minute. I’d like to be sure you got highly motivated.”

  He wondered if Flor had been talking to Quinn over in Culver City. He had it in for him for some reason and it was going to end badly.

  “I’m motivated. I drove all the way back here from Lone Pine this morning.”

  “What a shame. We thought you’d help us clear up our OMB business. Just give us five minutes, okay? What about number one?”