The Burning Ground

by Adam O'Riordan

  “Before I took one in the shoulder I was with him in the 1st. Truth be told my brother Alphonse knew him better. They saw action together at Iwo Jima. He helped a friend of mine find someone a while back.”

  “OK,” said Lindberg.

  “You’re suggesting Mr. Porfirio might be able to help us?” asked the Old Man.

  The Old Man was on his feet now, hands clasped behind his back staring vacantly at a framed poster for a boxing match that had taken place fifty years ago. It advertised the “Battle of the Little Gladiators” as “Volcano” Corbert took on “Fighting Dick” Hyland, twenty rounds, straight rules under the auspices of the Palace Athletic Club, Salt Lake City. Lindberg remembered the Old Man once pointing out his own name in tiny print listed on the undercard for the fight.

  “Yes, I think he might,” Chase said, walking across to Lindberg.

  He placed a hand on Lindberg’s shoulder and leaning down whispered, “I’d go myself but . . .” He looked over at the Old Man, “I need to be here for Mr. Smart. I’m his right hand.”

  “Sure,” Lindberg said wearily, “sure you are.”

  The drive was long. The men had decided to wait until the next morning in case any contact was made by the people who had taken Adella. If not, Lindberg would be sent to find Jesus Porfirio. Shortly after this had been decided Chase had headed into Palm Springs to see if he could unearth any information. Though Lindberg expected this meant him sitting in a bar somewhere boasting to Lynette and Francine about the evening’s events and his role in initiating the hunt for Adella. The Old Man made Lindberg sit up until 2 a.m. with him, working their way through a bottle of Black Label and a box of bad cigars. Lindberg had watched the Old Man move through several moods as anger ebbed to open despair, which had itself eventually given way to an old fighter’s sentimentality. The Old Man yelling up every so often from the cast-iron table the gardeners usually sat around in their lunch hour for Nicky, who was up on the balcony with the gramophone, to change the record. As the night wore on the Old Man had become weepy, describing Adella as his jewel, his baby girl and other epithets not quite in keeping with the young woman Lindberg knew. As they sat at the table Lindberg heard the songs the Old Man romanced her mother to, the song they played at their wedding and all the other saccharine melodies he swore Adella loved as much as he did. As the Old Man talked Lindberg thought back to the first Christmas party. How he had danced with Adella around the huge fir tree that stood at the far edge of the swimming pool, now strung with fairy lights and giant silver baubles. “You’re light on your feet, old timer,” she whispered as they waltzed between the lounge chairs. Lindberg had laughed and leaned her over his arm then pulled her up into a twirl, her ruched skirt billowing out as she spun. When the song ended they sat together on the corners of a pair of sunloungers. She had taken two cigarettes from the top of her dress and, lighting them both at the same time, passed one across to Lindberg. He had taken a shallow drag—as he did, he saw that his hand was shaking. He switched the cigarette clumsily into his other hand, then slid the shaking hand under his leg, where it began to sweat against the slats of the lounge. Adella pulled a shred of tobacco from the commissure of her lips, then tipped her head back, exposing the sweep of her slender brown neck to the sunlight.

  “What do you dream about?” Adella asked.

  “What do I dream about?”

  “Yeah, what do you dream about?” she asked again, narrowing her eyes, rolling a thin blue plume of smoke from between her lips.

  “The past. I suppose,” Lindberg said, “I dream of what’s gone. Sometimes I dream of my children.”

  Adella nodded as if she understood the dreams Lindberg had, as if she knew what it was to live so far away, to miss their love, to wake after dreaming their faces and think himself unworthy of it. She studied Lindberg, tracing his outline with her smoke as she exhaled. She ran the tip of her tongue across her top lip. Glanced away across the pool, then turned back and looked straight at Lindberg.

  “You ever dream of me?” she asked.

  “Of you?”

  “Of me.”

  There was a pause. Voices from the far side of the party filled up the silence.

  “Of course,” Lindberg said. At which Adella broke into laughter and before Lindberg knew it, she was up on her feet gripping him by his bony wrist and pulling him up from the lounge, the unfinished cigarette hanging from her soft mouth.

  “Get up,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, “get up and dance with me, old timer.” The cigarette now delicately held between her ring finger and her pinkie, “I love this song.”

  Later he had seen her leave, hurrying toward a parked car. He was standing at the window in the bathroom where he had gone in search of aspirin after a twinge from the ulcer an expensive physician on the Upper East Side had diagnosed several years ago. Harry Belafonte’s voice echoed around the party as Lindberg watched the car that held Adella pull away.

  When Jesus Porfirio had refused to help, and at a loss as to what his next move should be, Lindberg had driven off down the dirt track and pulled into a turnout where he sat for five minutes, fingers at his temples as the engine idled over. He imagined the Old Man’s wrath if he returned empty-handed, having failed to enlist the help of Jesus Porfirio. How Chase would linger in the background somewhere slowly shaking his head. In the stifling late afternoon heat Lindberg began to feel drowsy, as he often had sitting behind the piles of ledgers and accounts at his desk in the last days of Lindberg QS. Back then sleep had been the answer when it was too early in the day to legitimately head to the bar. Here on Rambla Pacifico with no office blinds to lower, he pulled his fedora down over his eyes. Lindberg welcomed the soft exigencies of sleep and that long shot, that dumb but irresistible gamble, that waking might provide some answer to his predicament.

  When Lindberg woke it was dusk. Something had pulled him from his dream. It was the dream he had continued to have even after he had moved out to the desert. The one where he was locked in his office in Manhattan alone as the building burned down around him, flames rising against the glass of his office door, the lettering of his name slowly peeling away. On opening his eyes, the first thing Lindberg saw was the sky over the Pacific, striated pink and violet. Then came the rap on the window. Jesus stood there. Lindberg noticed he was still wearing his apron. He was carrying an aluminium sandwich box. Lindberg wound down the window.

  “I make some calls. I’m gonna help you. This is what it cost.”

  Jesus slipped a piece of paper through the gap in the window.

  In the roadside diner the waitress refilled their cups. It was dark now and from their booth they could see the lights of traffic moving along the Pacific Coast Highway.

  “So that’s all we know,” Lindberg said, fanning his hands out like a croupier. Then in a hectoring voice that reminded him of his own father and that he immediately regretted, “She was running around with some pretty disreputable characters.”

  Jesus turned the sugar dispenser’s glass sides in his small hands.

  “Claro.”

  He lifted his sandwich box on to the table and retrieved from within a list of names.

  “This,” he said, tapping the sheet, “are the persons we need to visit.”

  The first address was a mansion in Upper Bel-Air where ornate gates and dense foliage hid the residences of the wealthy members of the country club and recently founded Presbyterian Church. The road leading to its entrance was lined with expensive automobiles parked at awkward angles. There was bunting strung across the wrought-iron gates between the two tall stone pillars that marked the entrance to the driveway. As they approached the guard at the entrance nodded to Lindberg. Jesus stared ahead along the driveway.

  “This the place?” Lindberg asked out of the corner of his mouth.

  “This the place,” Jesus confirmed as Lindberg brought the Pontiac to a stop on the gravel turning circle that surrounded the fountain in front of the doorway.

  “Yo
u wait for me here.”

  In the rearview mirror Lindberg saw Jesus talking to a white-coated waiter carrying a silver salver, who pointed him in the direction of the kitchen. Lindberg watched Jesus disappear behind the house.

  “Darling, are you here for cocktails?”

  Lindberg looked up from the driver’s seat. A sunburned blonde, wearing a taffeta dress with a square neck and white gloves, was smiling down at him. She opened his door and held out her hand.

  “You must be a friend of Genie? Am I right? I’m right, aren’t I? Any friend of Genie is a friend of mine. Come on in or we’ll miss all the fun!”

  Lindberg hesitated.

  “Come on, honey! Don’t be shy.”

  Before he knew it the sunburned blonde’s hand was on his wrist and Lindberg had been led into the busy ballroom. A band was playing in the corner. She handed him a drink, tapping her foot to the rhythm of the music. Lindberg sipped the cocktail from the chilled glass where three oversize olives skewered by a plastic shard left an oily sheen on the surface. It tasted good, it tasted of those summers with Angelica before the girls were born, when they would take his father’s skiff around the bay from the Nyack Boat Club and end the day with a cocktail on the veranda looking out on to the Hudson River Palisades.

  “You should try their Manhattans. They shake a mean Manhattan,” the sunburned blonde said. She then turned and greeted her friend, a butch woman a decade or so older with sad, Slavic eyes and a brown bonnet of hair.

  “Myrtle, darling, this is Mr. . . .” The sunburned blonde paused. “Why, I don’t believe I got your name.”

  “Lindberg.”

  “This is Mr. Lindberg,” then turning to her friend, “friend of Genie.”

  “Any friend of Genie is a friend of ours,” they said in unison.

  Lindberg raised his glass.

  Tensely sipping his martini, Lindberg watched the women dance. Their shapes moving around the white room seemed to belong to a land of the young from which Lindberg was permanently exiled. Although the dresses and movements had changed, it brought back the memories of the dances he had attended in Nyack. A man with slicked-back black hair was swinging the sunburned blonde around his hips. Lindberg watched as she clamped her legs around his upper thighs, then he swung her up, almost vertical, above him, revealing a black garter belt beneath her taffeta dress. The party was heating up. More and more guests seemed to be arriving now. Lindberg was buffeted from side to side as they entered the ballroom. The snatches of their conversations came at him loud and distorted. In the swirl of noise he tried to steady himself and focus in on a single sound. He picked out the laughter of a large man in black tie who feigned throwing a punch at his pal on the dance floor. Lindberg began to feel dizzy. He took another long pull from his martini, the sap of panic rising as he thought of Adella.

  As the music from the band grew louder, Lindberg watched the drummer, a bald-headed black man in a white tuxedo, pursed lips purple at their edges, tapping his brushes at the snare drum in its shining silver surround. The hiss of the snare began to overwhelm him. As Lindberg looked away the faces in the room began to spin and warp as if he were on a carousel that was gradually gaining speed. The way Angelica, a migrainer since childhood, had once described the onset of a severe attack, the type that would see her laid up in bed for the best part of the week, the girls growing fractious and restive as she absented herself from family life. Just when Lindberg thought he would have to elbow through the crowd and push his way outside for air, he glanced over his shoulder and saw Jesus standing at the entrance to the ballroom. Lindberg set down his glass and raised two fingers in acknowledgment. He hurried through the mass of bodies toward him.

  “Oh, Mr. Lindberg,” called the sunburned blonde, who had seen him leaving. But Lindberg pretended not to hear as the crowd closed behind him.

  The bright notes of an alto sax reached Lindberg and Jesus as they stood on the gravel turning circle where they had left the car. Lindberg was pale and leaned for a moment against the hood of the Pontiac. He brought his handkerchief up to his mouth.

  “My friend say we gotta go see someone else,” Jesus said.

  “OK,” said Lindberg. Jesus noticed Lindberg was paler than when he had left him in the car earlier. A thin sheen of sweat on his face, like a waxwork replica of the man who had come to his store earlier in the day.

  “You want me to drive?” Jesus asked.

  “Thank you, no. It’s just a little hot in there is all.”

  “Claro,” Jesus said, “so now we need go to Long Beach.”

  Lindberg and Jesus drove the newly opened section of Interstate 5 toward Long Beach. The dizziness and nausea that had afflicted Lindberg in the cramped ballroom had lifted now. He let his focus fall on the white lines on the road as they slipped by at the side of the car.

  “So what are your people telling you?” he asked Jesus, attempting to establish some sense of control or at least a cursory understanding of what was going on.

  Jesus seemed not to hear Lindberg’s question but a few moments later, as they passed a series of boarded-up and part-demolished houses, said softly and with what sounded to Lindberg like real sadness, “They just tear it all down.” Jesus was looking out of the window to what was once Boyle Heights, the section of the east side that had been razed to the ground to make way for the freeway. Lindberg remembered hearing a Latina attorney on the radio complain that the newly completed freeway had put a hole in the heart of a community that had been there since Los Angeles had been under Spanish dominion. Under arc lights a mechanical digger was clawing at the wall of a house. Inside they saw a Formica table with four chairs around it as if the occupants might return at any time.

  When they arrived in Long Beach Jesus directed Lindberg to the forecourt of a Union Oil gas station. A torn poster on a billboard outside advertised its “Grand Opening” three years earlier. It was dark out and when Jesus left the car to go and find his contact, Lindberg pressed down the button on the passenger door. In the locked Pontiac Lindberg felt that sense of anxiety return. A static sweat prickling down his arms and hands, the growing conviction that each stop they made left Adella closer to danger. Unless it was already too late. The thought summoned an image of blanket blackness, the black of the woods at the back of their house and the skies he had looked up at as a child through his father’s telescope. He would have to call the Old Man soon and update him. Through the windshield Lindberg watched an emaciated black woman, her hair in rollers, as she stood rocking back and forth by the phone booth on the gas station forecourt, shouting into the receiver then slamming it against the corner of the booth. He watched Jesus give the woman a wide berth as he returned to the car a few minutes later carrying a brown paper bag. They would have to wait, he told Lindberg; according to the girl at the register the person Jesus was looking for was not there.

  They sat in silence in the Pontiac. Lindberg watched cars come and go with no idea of who or what they were waiting for. Occasionally he would look across to Jesus as drivers alighted to pay for their gas. Jesus sat implacable as ever. As they waited, the emaciated woman remained enraged at the phone booth. After a few minutes, a stooped man in his fifties wearing chinos and a stained undershirt approached her. Lindberg and Jesus watched as he wrestled the phone from the woman. He grabbed her by the wrist, then struck her across the face with the back of his open hand. The woman ducked and tried to shield herself with her free arm. But now the man struck her again, the blow this time landing on the back of her head, sending one of her pink plastic rollers spinning off across the forecourt. Lindberg looked across to Jesus who stared out at the scene as if he were watching a movie at a drive-in theater. As the man jerked her away from the booth, the woman began spitting then clawing at his face. The man turned, feigning once then twice, before bringing his hand down on her. This time as he made contact the woman collapsed and was dragged along for a few yards. Eventually she refused to get to her feet. In a pool of light on the edge of the fore
court, Lindberg saw the man kick her in the ribs. It seemed to Lindberg like the unthinking brutality farmers might use on their livestock or slaughter men at the doors to an abattoir.

  “Shouldn’t we help?” he asked.

  “No,” Jesus said. “We gotta wait here.”

  “But what if . . .”

  “We gotta wait,” Jesus said, more firmly this time.

  The pair disappeared from view but Lindberg heard the woman’s voice cursing until finally her shouting was canceled out by the sound of an ambulance heading in the opposite direction.

  There was silence on the forecourt now. The handset swung by its cord from the booth. The men watched it lose momentum until it finally came to a stop. As they focused on the stilled receiver, Jesus began to speak.

  “After we get home, in ’45, a kid from my unit, Cooper, invites me drinking. Calls my momma’s house. Sure, why not, I say. He was a quiet kid. We never talked much.” Jesus paused and, reaching down into the paper bag he had returned with earlier, passed a bottle of beer across to Lindberg.

  “But we seen a lot of action together,” Jesus continued, “places you don’t think you’re gonna leave alive. He comes and gets me in this rusted pickup. We drive around a couple of hours. It’s a hot night. We put away a lot of liquor between us, talking about the old times. Then he takes me to this bar he knows out by the ocean in Santa Monica. The place was full of sailors. We drink a couple of beers then he says we maybe should go down to the beach. I’m thinking to look for girls, you know?”

  It was strange to see Jesus so talkative. Lindberg nodded for him to continue his story, then took a pull on the bottle of beer.

  “There’s a big moon like a searchlight up there. ‘You saved my life,’ Cooper says to me.” Jesus chuckled remembering this. He opened his own bottle of beer now and took a pull.

  “Cooper stands so close I can hear him breathing and see the stars all reflected in his eyes. Then I look down. Know what I see?”

  Lindberg shrugged.

  “Two guys screwing in the sand, arms and legs all twisted up, panting like they’re animals.” Jesus shook his head reliving the shock.