He swung his flashlight up to signal that the men should continue their search for Adella on the floors above. As they looked up they saw that from the ceiling someone had strung wires full of babydolls’ heads: bald, red lipped, the eyes rolled back into their plastic skulls. The stairs were barricaded by two upturned shopping carts, their frames bent and dented. They looked as if they had been fished out of the river. The carts had been placed on top of each other and stuffed with rags and old newspapers. Concrete breeze blocks buttressed their base and a pair of scaffolding poles were set in a diagonal cross behind them. Behind the scaffolding poles a soiled mattress had been leaned on its side. When Jesus peered in, shining the flashlight at the steps beyond, they glittered with broken glass that had been scattered across them.
“So maybe we take the elevator.”
Jesus led them back across the factory floor to the service elevator. As he thumbed the faded red button there was a rumble from the basement. Slowly the cable in the elevator shaft began to move and when it appeared, Jesus opened the cage for Lindberg. Inside the elevator it stank of ammonium and the sharp tang of stale beer. Lindberg entered with his handkerchief pressed to his face.
The first two floors the men examined were empty. On the first one the wooden floorboards had rotted and Jesus had turned and caught Lindberg by the elbow when his foot had passed straight through one. The third floor was almost identical to the one below: the same flaking paint and exposed wires, the same rusted vents and hastily emptied storage cabinets, the same gauges and switches and broken brown bottles of chemicals that had been left behind when the factory was abandoned. There was still no sign of Adella, no sign of human life at all. But from here they were able to access the stairs again. When they opened the fire door onto the fourth floor the windows were no longer boarded but were broken into pinnacles of jagged glass. It took the men a moment to adjust to the light.
“Hear that?” Jesus said, placing a finger at his ear and cocking his head. Lindberg nodded as they listened to the broken, staccato notes drifting down from the floor above them.
The men moved slowly along the stairs that led down from the fourth floor. Lindberg following Jesus as he softly picked up and put down each foot, careful to avoid standing at the center of each stair lest any sound betray their presence in the factory. As they reached the final flight Jesus pressed his body against the wall and moved slowly, his small frame hunched tense as he crept toward the door. As he watched him Lindberg was given an intimation of the man who had taken the blockhouse at Iwo Jima. With the back of his hand, Jesus opened the door a fraction and looked through. A beam of light was cast sharply against the wall of the stairwell. Through the gap Lindberg could make out the corridor. It was carpeted and in good repair. He assumed that this floor must have originally held the administrative portion of the factory. At the end of the corridor the men saw a figure leaning against a doorway.
“What now?” Lindberg whispered to Jesus.
“You go ask for her,” he replied. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
The man looked like a middleweight. He had a thick neck and his dirty blond hair was greased back in curls from a deeply lined forehead. His nose was hammered flat like a piece of misshapen modeling clay. He was dressed in a powder-blue suit, arms folded. Beyond him at the far end of the corridor Lindberg’s eye was drawn to a door that opened out onto a fire escape. Lindberg reasoned this must have been the entrance through which, if Red was right, Adella had been led. Lindberg wondered if they had had to drag her through the door, if she had put up a fight, kicking and screaming as she was bundled up the staircase, or if they led her slowly, her mind blurred from the dope they had hooked her on in the months leading up to her being snatched from her bedroom in the Old Man’s place in the desert. The two scenarios competed for prominence in Lindberg’s imagination: Adella screaming like a frightened infant, then Adella silent as a widow walking in a funeral cortege as they led her into the room. Lindberg wondered if the men he had seen her get into the car with that Christmas as he watched her from the bathroom might be the men they found behind the door guarded by the middleweight in the powder-blue suit.
“We’re here to collect Miss Smart,” Lindberg said.
Before the man could respond, Jesus exploded toward him, his fists suddenly around the man’s lapels. As Jesus pinned him against the wall, the man’s head flew back like a dummy in a crash test. Lindberg heard his teeth smash together as Jesus slammed the man, who stood a foot or more taller, over and over against the brick wall. Lindberg saw the man’s eyes glaze over, oily, opaque almost. Then just when Lindberg thought Jesus was going to kill him, he stopped and lowered him to the floor, gentle now, with the practiced calm of a hospital orderly putting a patient in a chair. Jesus brought his face close to the man.
“So now you going to tell us where she is, claro?”
“Yes,” the man said, blinking rapidly as if he was staring up at the sun. Lindberg saw dark blood oozing out from the man’s nostrils and one of his ears. Lindberg had stood with his hands in his pockets throughout the frenzied attack. When he brought his hands out, he saw the white half-moons he had dug into the flesh of his palms. Standing over the dazed middleweight Jesus looked down and raised a finger to his lips. The middleweight nodded as Jesus then ran his finger across his throat in warning. In the inside pocket of the middleweight’s powder-blue jacket Jesus found a service revolver; inspecting the weapon he saw printed on the plate on its handle: Property of the Los Angeles Police Department. He showed Lindberg.
“He’s a cop?” Lindberg asked.
“Nah, these things get lost or stole. Maybe he killed a cop. Or maybe he just bought it off of someone who did.”
Jesus cocked the pistol and opened the door.
The squalid room was bathed in red light. The men saw that the music they had heard earlier had been coming from a single player: a man in his fifties sitting on top of a tea crate holding an oboe. His lips were chapped and he kept licking them, then playing broken phrases on the instrument. There were several other men in the room who had seemed oblivious to the commotion Jesus had caused outside. There were mattresses on the floor and by the mattresses leather straps and several glass syringes stamped Excelsior. Lindberg saw the floor was strewn with yellow tubes whose red lettering told the reader they contained: Soluble Hypodermic Tablets of Morphine Sulphate that had been manufactured by the Fraser Tablet company in New York. Adella lay on a divan by the window in the far corner of the room. Her track-marked arm hanging limp, a little patch of white foam gathered at the corner of her mouth. Her lipstick was smudged and clownish. Lindberg pointed her out and Jesus walked toward her.
“Adella? Adella? Habla me, chica.”
Jesus pressed his fingers to her wrist. He began to pat her pale face roughly. Lindberg looked at the men in the room; half a dozen frozen in his gaze as if at gunpoint. The man with the oboe clutched the instrument to his chest. Others slowly buttoned up their shirts, or simply rolled over away from the action on their dirty mattresses. No one seemed willing or able to take responsibility for Adella.
“Who brought the girl here?” Lindberg asked. There was silence.
In the corner of the room, slumped against a large green filing cabinet, Lindberg noticed a man rocking slightly. His knees were pulled tight up against his chest, his chin pointing down hid his face and showed only a thinning crown of hair. There was an expensive-looking jacket nearby that Lindberg suspected the man of throwing off as he heard them enter. Lindberg turned to Jesus who nodded having also noticed the man. Lindberg helped Adella up from the divan, her thin arm hanging over his shoulder.
“You take her down to the car now,” Jesus said, setting down his sandwich box and inspecting the room in the manner a decorator might having been called in to price a job. Lindberg lifted Adella; her body seemed to weigh almost nothing as he made for the fire escape. He turned at the doorway to see Jesus wiping his hands on his apron, then pulling down the tattered
sheets of fabric that had been pinned at the windows. The men squinted as light poured into the room. Jesus walked to the door they had entered through and held it open for Lindberg. Lindberg heard the lock click closed when he was out in the corridor.
As he carried Adella down the fire escape, Lindberg tried not to listen to the noises coming from inside the room. As they neared the street below Lindberg heard the sound of the police service revolver discharging once, twice, then after a brief pause, for a third time, after which there was silence.
When Jesus returned to the parked Pontiac, Lindberg saw that his apron was flecked with blood. His right hand had ballooned and was bruised with four purple welts across the knuckles. It reminded Lindberg of an injury he had once seen sitting ringside with Angelica’s father at Madison Square Garden on the hand of a bantamweight who had gone a vicious twelve rounds against an opponent who had been carried from the ring on a stretcher. Lindberg had watched as the boxer’s trainer took off his gloves and cut away the bandages to reveal the hand beneath. He watched as Jesus took off his apron and folded it across his bruised knuckles.
“Tell Mr. Smart I have a name for him if he want to pursue this any further.” Lindberg nodded.
“This is for you,” Lindberg said, handing Jesus an envelope containing cash he had withdrawn earlier at the City National. Jesus placed the envelope inside his aluminium sandwich box.
“Claro,” he said, sounding tired. “Now we go back to Rambla Pacifico.”
Jesus had set up a camp bed in the back of the store. It was dark out and the room was lit by a kerosene lamp. Lindberg watched Jesus spooning a thin broth into Adella’s lips. He thought of his own girls up in Maine and the spring they both came down with chickenpox and he had nursed them through their fever. Something in Jesus’s manner reminded him of how he had behaved when his daughters woke up mumbling and terrified from their fever dreams.
“She needs to sleep a while,” Jesus had told him. “Then maybe you take her home.”
It was close to dawn the next day when Adella finally woke. Jesus and Lindberg had spent the evening and the night taking turns to watch at her bedside. The Old Man had insisted Lindberg keep her there until she was well enough to be driven back. He had given Lindberg the number of a private nurse and a doctor he trusted in the Pacific Palisades should she require medical attention. He had forbidden Lindberg to take her to a hospital.
“No. You just watch over her,” the Old Man had told him. Already he could sense the Old Man’s concern now turning to anger. Anger that he was sure in part would be directed toward Adella. He wondered what Chase had been saying to the Old Man in his absence, what seeds of doubt he had been planting in the Old Man’s mind, who he might have inculpated in the story. He even wondered if Chase might try and paint him as somehow complicit in Adella’s disappearance.
“You know he always did like her,” he imagined Chase saying to the Old Man, his face blurred by the smoke from one of his cigars.
That night Lindberg had stood in the back of the store smoking a cigarette, replaying the events of the past twenty-four hours. Jesus, who had busied himself carrying out inventory by flashlight as Adella slept, came and joined him outside. It felt to Lindberg like the two men had spent months together and he wondered if Jesus had misunderstood Cooper’s statement on the beach. It was strange seeing Jesus back in the store and stranger still that the store seemed more of a hobby than a going concern. As if Jesus collected the tins and cans inside on its cramped shelves as some men did the rolling stock and cast-iron figures on model railway sets.
As the men stood in the yard, Jesus busy with a long-handled broom, Lindberg had asked him what kept him here. Remarking to Jesus that this seemed an out-of-the-way spot for a convenience store.
“I like it,” Jesus said, bending down and scooping up a handful of dry soil from the yard. He let the ribbon of dirt run away through his fingers.
“In a month the big rains come and wake up the valley. Nights you hear the owls swooping in to catch the mice.”
“I guess so.”
“After the wildfires last year, they try and buy me out. Want to build some fancy houses here. But I say no. I like it just fine. I’m not selling.”
“Everybody has their price.”
Jesus frowned and shook his head.
“I’m going nowhere.”
A little after dawn Lindberg decided it was time to get back on the road. He wanted to leave with the light while it was still cool enough to drive. Adella’s fever had dropped but Lindberg feared the effects of the sun and the drive back to the Old Man’s house. Jesus helped him carry her out to the Pontiac.
“Thank you,” Adella whispered to Jesus as he positioned her across the backseat of the car. It was the first she had spoken since the men found her at the disused toy factory. Jesus nodded but said nothing and turned and walked back to the store, with no more thought than when helping any customer load up their car. Lindberg felt suddenly fatigued and too tired himself for any formal good-bye. “Let’s get you home,” he said and started the engine.
As he pulled away he saw Jesus standing in the doorway of the store, lacing a fresh apron below his breastbone. He signaled for Lindberg to wind down his window and walked over to the car, resting a hand on the rubber lip where the glass sank into the door, looking away down the track as he spoke.
“Ever need help again, maybe you give me a call.”
“Sure,” said Lindberg, “I’ll do that.”
Jesus banged the roof with the flat of his hand. Adella asleep in the back wrapped in the Army surplus blanket did not stir. Clouds of dust, bright in the first light, rose up around the automobile as Lindberg pulled off down the red dirt track. Back to Rambla Pacifico and other roads that would lead him through the early morning to the Old Man and that half-built hotel somewhere out in the desert.
Wave-Riding Giants
McCauley watched as the boy’s father carried him the last two hundred yards out to the ocean. He was a tall child, or should have been, but his legs had wasted away and were floppy and white and in their translucence made him think of two wilted sticks of spargel. For a minute he watched as the boy’s father held him there, cradling him in the breakers, the surf from the Pacific foaming up around him, as if the force of all that water might do something for those ruined limbs. McCauley hadn’t been out to the beach or the boardwalk the recreation room overlooked since he fractured his pelvis last year. A girl in her teens on a skateboard pulled by two toy terriers had knocked him down at the corner of Paloma Avenue. He heard the hiss of her acrylic wheels on the concrete, and had a sense of something approaching at speed. He was turning when she had collided with him, her shoulder slamming against his ribs, sending him falling awkwardly backward. It was a closed fracture under a dark plum bruise that curled around from his hip to the top of his buttocks. But there was limited bleeding, the doctors told him, and the butterfly-shaped group of bones had stayed in place.
In the past he enjoyed walking among the crowds on the boardwalk as the evening came on. The tourists and their families, the groups of sunburned bums and drifters on the concrete benches with their out-of-tune guitars, the Latino kids with their muscular Staffs and Pits outside the tattoo parlors, hot in their dark jeans; it had been a salve to the welling loneliness in the years since Dolores died. And although there was a notice in the recreation room advising all residents to remain in the building after dark, he liked the boardwalk best just as the light was fading.
Instead he now had a pair of binoculars heavy as a candlepin bowling ball, like the ones they had used on the convoys, except that this pair had Kriegsmarine stamped on them. One of the caregivers, Vanessa, plump under her white nurse’s shift, got them for him from an antique show up at Big Bear Lake where her boyfriend, Carlos, had taken her one weekend last April. To tourists walking past on the boardwalk, McCauley must have seemed a benign, spectral figure behind the window six feet above them. He would offer a wave if a child riding on
their father’s shoulders caught sight of him. In the Senior Housing Facility where he lived for the past eight years, there was a cold-cuts buffet each Wednesday, uniform slices of ice-cream-pink meat marbled with white fat laid out on trestle tables, and tepid melon Jell-O every Friday. In the recreation room, where he spent most of his time, there was a small library donated to by the daughter of a former resident who owned a surplus bookstore in Santa Fe. It included a set of books by Zane Grey that McCauley liked: The Vanishing American, 30,000 on the Hoof, Riders of the Purple Sage, The Light of Western Stars. Once a month a handsome Dominican man named Conrad, who was prematurely gray and played keyboard at the Shul on the Beach, came to give a little concert inside the lime-green walls of the recreation room. He enjoyed hearing Conrad play, his concentrated, beatific smile, his neat, even features and shining complexion. Despite these distractions the binoculars Vanessa had bought for him were the most significant source of pleasure. There was usually something to hold his interest on the expanse of sand across the boardwalk: the yellow Coast Guard truck cruising between the breakwater lifeguard stations or the yachts on their day races up along the coast. But lately when he had come to take the binoculars out of their case, they had begun to remind him of the convoys he served on in the war. Those hours in the fire room, the rocking hull, the smell of the hot lube and combustion fumes coming through the vent shafts. Memories he hadn’t thought on for decades seemed to cling around the binoculars.
He had signed on at the Lower East Side recruiting station in the new year 1942. He queued in a foot of snow on January 2, after seeing the first posters go up in the window of a barber’s shop in the Bowery: “Man the Guns—Join the Navy,” a picture of a tanned sailor stripped to his waist breech-loading a three-foot shell into a deck gun. “Remember December 7th,” “Navy Needs Young Patriotic Americans.” He had seen there and then the chance to turn himself into a citizen with motive, purpose, and direction like the son of that mother whose testimonial ran in the promotional literature. There was something right about the words. They were words he would like to associate his life with. After he was sworn in, his parents three rows from the front in the audience, he was sent by rail to the Naval Training Center near Geneva in the Finger Lakes of New York State. There, identifying an aptitude, they trained him to work and maintain the ventilation systems: the change rates; the ducts and pressure drops; all the repetitive, necessary work to keep a ship afloat. It was bitterly cold in the Finger Lakes but nothing could have prepared him for the cold on the boat as they did circles of the Arctic, protecting the convoys delivering food to Stalin’s Russia. Setting out from Iceland, under Svalbard and, after a fortnight at sea in summer, dropping down into Archangel. It amused him sometimes to think that he was helping run supplies back to the continent his grandparents fled from.
The Burning Ground Page 7