The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  “I’m just a poor kid from the sticks. I’m doing the best I can.”

  She tipped something out of the box into her palm and bounced it a little, like jacks. Part of him was getting pretty worked up, but another part was standing back a bit wondering if he was about to learn what Catherine Deneuve had had in that little box in Belle de Jour that left a spot of blood and a big smile on her face.

  She supported her left breast on her palm and clipped a gold ring through a piercing he hadn’t noticed in the nipple.

  “I thought you had to leave those in,” he said, as nonchalantly as he could.

  “Is that what the lab rat told you?” She placed her finger on his lips again. “There’s more.”

  “Oh, I never doubted it.”

  She stuck out her tongue and used both hands to locate the hole for a round gold stud that went through about a half inch back from the tip. “You’ll like this one.”

  She climbed out gracefully and flexed in the mist like a dancer. Something in the bright, fixed look in her eyes worried him. “Come.”

  He followed her into the bedroom with its big bed and gray silk sheets reflected in even more mirrors on a soffit overhead. For the next ten minutes or so he did his best to keep up with her expectations, but a cinnamon-flavored oil got in his eyes and he started sneezing uncontrollably. She reached under the bed and brought out a Polaroid camera.

  “You’re so lugubrious,” she said as she pointed the camera at him.

  “Don’t do that,” he said sharply, angered all of a sudden by the tears streaming down his cheeks. When he cleared his eyes, the camera was still pointed at him.

  “I’ll do what I like in my own bedroom.” Something very hard had entered her voice.

  “I’m asking you.”

  “So what?”

  “Please, then.”

  The flash went off in his face, and he got off the edge of the bed. Their eyes locked, and neither of them looked away as they listened to Mr. Land’s invention whir between them and eject its instant print. He reached out and put his hand on the camera. The strap was tight around her wrist and the only way he could have gotten it from her would have been to hurt her.

  “Do you want to be hurt? Is that the point?”

  “If you hurt me, I’ll kill you,” she said evenly.

  He hadn’t got this angry at a woman since Kathy, and he forced his rage to back off, just crushed it deep into the white space at the center of him. Hers was still there, brewing up off her will. It was like standing in the street looking at a house that was perfectly normal except for the one chink in the curtains where you saw the fire going within.

  “You do what I want in my house.”

  Fame will bite you on the ass. The demigod had gone and left something else entirely.

  “Uh-huh, sure,” he said with all the generosity he could muster. It would be what he gave her. He was still struggling for a moral reference point when she started to demonstrate what the stud through her tongue was for.

  11

  REFUGEES FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  HE SAT IN THE CONCORD AT THE TURNOUT INTO CASPERS Regional Park, where ten years back a mountain lion had killed a small child and set off a frantic shooting expedition across all the inland mountain ranges of southern Orange County. The air smelled of sage and Jeffrey pine, plus a hint of sweet rot, maybe garbage at the campground or a skunk a week dead somewhere. He watched an empty stretch of the Ortega Highway, trying to come up with something he could do to reestablish a coherent ethical landscape, instead of the confused and ineffectual mess that surrounded him now. Not so long ago he’d felt he had his life honed down to a fairly simple code: do the best you can, avoid self-pity, and quietly hold on to what’s yours. But his path had become lined with all manner of things that were not accounted for in that code, things that were inexpressibly more complicated. Even the trespasses had become more complicated. In some way he could not put his finger on, what he was doing with Lori Bright was leaching away whatever merit he’d thought he had saved up for a rainy day. And he knew he would be going back for more. Even now, forty miles away from her, thinking about her dark energy made him tumescent.

  He’d driven home that morning and fed Loco, as back to normal as the beast ever got, returned the car to Marlena, and got into an argument when she asked where he’d been all night, and then he’d called Kathy and miraculously she was still letting him have Maeve for the weekend. Thus he had completed all his cosmic assignments, and there was one decent and ordinary thing to look forward to. He thought involuntarily of twelve-year-old sharp and inquisitive Maeve crossing paths with Lori Bright, and shuddered. He drew a heavy line: two separate worlds.

  A station wagon full of kids driven by a young woman swung past on the highway, but it wasn’t what he waited for. Somewhere up that road in the Cleveland National Forest, roughly where Orange County gave way to Riverside County, he’d been told there was an unmarked dirt turnout where an unmarked trail led up to what was called, in some circles, the Hermann Goering Shooting Range. It was just a clearing in a high canyon, where the neo-Nazis and militias practiced with their weapons, licit and illicit. It was all probably illegal, but nobody official seemed to care very much, and the boyos themselves wouldn’t go to any of the official rifle ranges because government spies took down your name and the U.N.’s black helicopters might drop out of the skies at any moment to arrest you.

  He’d been half expecting a Humvee or a Jeep painted up in camouflage, but it was just a battered old pickup with a yellow rope tying down the hood, a rifle rack in the window and a couple of duffel bags in back. He waited a minute and then followed, checking each turnoff he passed. Within five minutes he saw the pickup again on a dirt pad off the high side of the road. The duffel bags were gone and it was parked beside a beat-up VW squareback with a bumper sticker that said F**K CLINTON AND HER HUSBAND. Right-wing wit took a little getting used to, he thought.

  For protective coloration as much as anything, he strapped on the canvas holster that held his .45 pistol, a cheap Argentine copy of the U.S. Army service M1911-A1, and he followed the obvious path up the canyon past a live oak and clumps of deep green sumac, the pistol banging away at his hip like a maul. All of a sudden he heard gunfire ahead, a few spaced bangs in a heavy caliber and then a burst on full auto, tinnier, probably one of the little nine-millimeter spray guns that the NRA had fought so hard to protect so gangbangers could shoot up each other’s little sisters from passing cars. After a few moments of silence there was a very loud double blast, sawed-off shotgun, he guessed.

  For some reason, he did not feel much fear, just a tingle of anticipation as he came around the spur of a hill and saw the clearing. There was a shrill whistle as he hove into view and the firing stopped. Three young men turned to stare. What the hell are you staring at? he thought.

  A skinny young man in fatigues and a black beret stood at a card table loaded with weapons. He held what looked like an M-16 on his shoulder. He’d expected that, but he hadn’t expected to see two other men in strap undershirts and a lot of tattoos posing side by side, their legs bowed out like sumo wrestlers. They were heavyset, like weight lifters, and each held his arms hooked in front of himself as if he was about to bash his fists together.

  “Heil,” Jack Liffey said, to warm them up.

  “Yeah, truly,” one of the wrestlers said. This one’s tattoos looked Asian, continuous fields of blue tracery that implied dragons and fire. The other had spirals of zigzags all the way down his arms. They gave up whatever pose they’d been striking and straightened up. He had to remind himself that even goofs could be dangerous.

  “Steak and eggs,” the one in fatigues seemed to say. Jack Liffey wondered if he’d misheard or if it was a password challenge.

  “What you doin here?” one of the sumo wrestlers asked.

  “Same as you. I come to practice.”

  “You look like a fed to me.”

  He walked nonchalantly to the weapo
ns table. “Don’t sweat it. If I was a fed, there’d be helicopters all over the place.”

  He let them wait while he looked over the weapons. There was another M-16 with an M-70 grenade tube under the barrel so dented it would never be used again, a couple of bolt-action deer rifles, an old British Sten that looked like it would blow up in your hands, a wooden presentation box that probably held some sort of target pistol, and he’d guessed right about the sawed-off. “I’m a friend of Tom Metzger down in San Diego and I come here all the time.”

  He saw a full-length poster they had propped up against a hill as a target, and he had to bite his tongue. It was Martin Luther King, Jr., smiling with his remarkable grace. He already had a number of holes in him.

  “Been to any encampments?” the one in fatigues asked.

  “I’m a poison toad. I don’t ask who you’re with, right?” He looked at the two wrestlers. “And you don’t ask me.”

  “Sure, man. Long as you’re standing up for the race.”

  In the next few minutes all three of them said “nigger” as many times as they could, and he was forced to say it a few times, too, which started to work at his temper. He had a feeling things weren’t going to turn out very well for somebody. The skinny one in fatigues took off his beret to reveal a blond brush cut, and there was an extraordinary stillness that came over the kid, not much more than twenty, when he wasn’t talking, as if he had come from a colder, more austere world. He was too young to have had Ranger training, but he wanted you to think he had.

  “Hey, Mr. Toad, you ever seen Atua Hau?” It was the gaudier sumo wrestler. “You got a treat.”

  They took up their bowlegged posture again and they reached overhead in unison as if to grasp a chin-up bar.

  “It’s like tai chi but more martial,” the one in fatigues explained.

  Suddenly, without cue, they shouted out a cry that made his neck hair stand on end. Together, they pulled the chin bar down, stomped one foot, then the other, turned their heads to the left, and stuck out their tongues as far as they would go, then turned the other way. They picked up a chant as they worked out the ritual movements, matching each other word for word and gaining in intensity, barking out the phrases as they pummeled and yanked on the air around them.

  He could only make out snatches:

  “… A proud white Aryan …”

  “… Behold the fate of our race …”

  “… Protect the blood of our family, our culture, our folk…”

  “… The mad dog is the first shot …”

  “… The sly dog is the last suspected …”

  He wasn’t sure he’d heard the last axioms right. If he’d come upon either of them drilling singly, the effect might have been comic, but together it was eerie and stately, like a well-rehearsed line dance for schizophrenics. He had no idea where white supremacists had come up with some debased Maori warrior dance, but it was worth the price of admission. Eventually they ran down with a bellow about Ruby Ridge and free-free-freedom and then they toweled off and came to the card table to claim weapons.

  “Super-duper,” he said.

  “Ain’t it.”

  Jack Liffey opened the presentation box on the table to see a silver .44 auto-magnum that probably cost close to a thousand dollars. It was a strange-looking pistol, all odd angles and reflections on polished stainless steel so it looked as if it had been carved out of ice, and it sat in a velvet cutout that just fit.

  “Quite a gun, ain’t it?” the kid said.

  “A gun is a piece of field ordnance with a high muzzle velocity and low trajectory,” Jack Liffey said amiably, quoting his DI from Bragg. “This is a pistol.”

  “There’s only three hundred and eighty-eight in the world,” the kid said, trying to recover. “High Standard ain’t made them since the eighties.”

  He picked up the auto-mag and ejected the magazine, noticed the tip of a jacketed .44 and felt the weight that said it was chock full, and then slid it back home. The weapon was ridiculously heavy and all that stainless steel glinted like a homing beacon, but the balance was good. He put it back down and looked over the other weapons. Mostly they were junk. The Sten belonged in the trash before somebody got hurt with it. He took a closer look at the assault rifle the blond carried and saw it was a Colt Sporter, the civilian model of the M-16. From the factory it came as only a semiautomatic, but that wasn’t fixed and fated.

  “You convert that?” Jack Liffey asked.

  He nodded. “I bought the sear kit mail order. It’s a bitch. I’ll show you.”

  The big one with the Asian tattoos chose one of the bolt rifles, and the one with the barbed-wire tattoos loaded up the sawed-off that had once been a box-lock dove gun. It had been cut so short that you could see the red cardboard of the shells peeking at you an inch or two down the two barrels. That would be a hell of a persuader for a bank teller, Jack Liffey thought. The one with zigzag tattoos backed off to the side with the shotgun, still keeping a weather eye on the interloper. Jack Liffey could see he hadn’t won their trust.

  The blond lowered his assault rifle and suddenly the canyon was full of sound, like one continuous roar of an un-muffled dragster, spent brass arcing away from the rifle. Martin Luther King’s left leg sprouted holes, but then Jack Liffey heard a little zinging sound in his ears and went for the ground. The Aryans fired away, too rapt to notice the ricochets coming back.

  No discipline but plenty of firepower, he thought. It was the American condition.

  “Oh, bitchin’.”

  “Get some, motherfucker. Man, I can’t get enough of that.”

  When the magazine ran out, Jack Liffey stood up and dusted off his hands. “You might want to move the target a bit,” he said evenly. “There’s some solid granite back in there.”

  “Huh?”

  “That little singing sound is lead coming back this way.”

  “Bullshit. I didn’t hear nothing.” The one with the Asian tattoos looked sheepish, but the blond was trying to tough it out.

  “Have it your way.” He took out the photograph of Lee Borowsky. He might as well get everything he could before they killed themselves off. “Has this girl been bugging you?”

  “How come you’re asking?”

  “She’s been bothering friends of mine and I want to have a little talk with her.”

  They craned their necks. “I remember that cunt,” Asian Tattoos said. “She was hanging out at the roadhouse with a big guy with a camera. They was looking for skins who was into Hitler parapher.”

  Jack Liffey gave him a fish eye. “You’re not? You into Stalin?”

  “Hey, each his own thing, man. We’re into pure white American blood. Maybe Hitler was cool for Germany, but that was a long time ago.”

  He started going into a story about some African-American girl they had humiliated in high school, and Jack Liffey’s skin was starting to crawl, when the man with the zigzag tattoos brought the sawed-off around and spoke for the first time. “Okay, mister. Here’s the way it is. It’s time you tell us your game.”

  Jack Liffey met his eyes and they played dogs for a while. He could see the red of the cartridges without looking directly at the sawed-off. Nobody moved.

  “You’re too fuckin’ curious for me.”

  Jack Liffey smiled without breaking eye contact, and Zigzag started to look worried.

  “I can drop you where you stand.”

  “Your first mistake,” Jack Liffey said evenly, “was choosing a weapon that would blow away all three of us over here.”

  They could see right away he was right, and like the untrained hooligans they were, they were so swiftly demoralized by the mistake that they had no idea how to put things right quickly enough. In that space Jack Liffey picked up the auto-mag. He took a step toward Barbed-wire and grasped the barrel of the sawed-off. He tilted it straight up with his left hand and yanked hard, the man’s finger still on the triggers. Both barrels let off a terrible roar into the blue sky.

&nb
sp; “Jezuz ka-beezus!”

  The young man’s jaw hung open and Jack Liffey used the barrel of the auto-mag to tap the lower jaw open a few inches more, then he rested the barrel on the lower incisors. He wasn’t sure this one was the top dog, but it seemed to be working out that way.

  “Close your mouth on the pistol. You make any sudden move, I’ll notice.”

  The man let his lip descend gently.

  “Teeth. I want to feel teeth. You understand nobody is to fuck around.”

  “Umm.”

  “You guys can’t go around pointing weapons at people. It gets people pissed off. Now, I’m just asking a question, that’s all. When did you see the girl? Anybody can answer.”

  “A couple weeks ago,” Asian Tattoos said.

  “Be precise. It matters.”

  “A week ago Tuesday. We was up there visiting a sick friend Tuesday.”

  Just before the kidnapping, he thought. “Was she getting chummy with anybody?”

  “Some guys from WASP.” The blond took over. Jack Liffey’s eye searched him out, and he went on quickly. “Okay, it means White Aryan Skinhead Psychos.”

  “That sounds redundant.”

  “Huh?”

  “Where would I meet these folk?”

  “They hang out up Bouquet Canyon. A roadhouse called the Big Oak.”

  He’d passed only a mile or two from there on his way up to the Owens Valley. It would be in one of those scrubby canyon passes of Canyon Country that ran from the very north end of the San Fernando Valley out to the High Desert. Where the rednecks and cops lie down in amity, plus gold prospectors, junk collectors, dog breeders, and gun-toting Baptists with “Keep Out” signs on their gates. It was the outer rim of white flight, all the refugees from the twentieth century.

  He could feel a tremor pass up the pistol. “Did you want to speak?”

  The young man made a noise in his throat and Jack Liffey adjusted the pistol long enough for him to speak.

  “We don’t mean you no harm,” he said contritely.