by John Shannon
‘Not because he ain’t asked, Sonny, over and over, just like you. I told him no because I’m too fucked up and too angry inside for any man. You don’t see that now, but you would.’
‘I’m prepared—’
‘Hush now,’ she commanded. ‘We still got an evening and a night and maybe a morning. Don’t spoil it.’
She rolled over and began slow-licking the gearshift back into operation.
‘Oh, jumpin’ Jesus.’
It didn’t take a genius to find Ratchet Pennycooke sitting on a bench overlooking placid Lake Balboa and hurling torn hamburger buns out of a bag to the pigeons surrounding him.4 With his floppy tricolor knit hat, gold silk shirt and striped pants, Pennycooke was either a Jamaican archetype, or someone on a clown tryout. For all the flamboyance, though, the whole getup did look great.
Jack Liffey watched him for a while, amazed by the dead-on resemblance to his big brother Trevor, who was now dead. In fact, Trevor had fallen desperately in love with a young Paiute girl caught up in the ‘adult entertainment’ industry who Jack Liffey had been hired to find, and Trevor had become the victim of a three- or four-way feud for her loyalty. They had almost escaped a raging wildfire in Malibu when one of the angry rivals had shot Trevor from long-distance with a rifle, before dying himself in the fire.5
Jack Liffey had come to like Trevor quite a lot, and he hoped the younger brother had some of the same spunk and innate decency. He’d been told over and over by Trevor that Winston was by far the smarter brother, who got three A-levels in school. Now here he was, the big colorful man tearing up sandwich buns for the pigeons. Not a bad sign, really.
‘Winston or Ratchet. I’m Jack.’
They shook hands, an amazingly normal handshake, no strange tugs or twists or fist-pops, and he didn’t get up. He looked tired and a bit lost.
‘Thank you for coming, sir. In this country anything can go wrong.’ He seemed to have concluded that Jack Liffey wasn’t his brother’s killer, which was a plus.
‘And often does.’ Jack Liffey sat down beside him. ‘I really liked your brother a lot. He was a fine man, a determined vegetarian and I believe a true Rastafarian.’
Winston nodded. ‘He posted I-an-I a raggedy letter that said you were a good man, too, and this Red Indian woman he call Luisa was his big-love.’ With all the brag about Winston’s smarts, Jack Liffey guessed some of this rude-boy patois was probably put on. He was almost certainly bidialectal with Standard English.
‘Yes. She’s doing OK, now.’
Jack Liffey told him what he could about the way Trevor had died, and that there was no need for the man to brood about vengeance, as the killer himself was dead. He said that Luisa was in an Indian school out in Riverside County, catching up on lost opportunities, and he would set up a meeting with her if Ratchet wanted, but not right away. Now he wanted to get Ratchet away from the drug-dealers and gangbangers who had presumably hired him and brought him here.
But that was going to be tougher than he thought. They’d paid Pennycooke’s way, and the large young man felt he had an ethical obligation, which he took seriously. They talked for a long time about what the gangs were like in L.A. Apparently it was much more anarchic back on Jamaica.
‘I understand your loyalty, son, but these men feel no obligation to you. They don’t give a damn if you live or die. You’re just Kleenex to them. Please think of me as Trevor’s only real friend in L.A.’
Jack Liffey gave him his business card. ‘Sooner or later, if not right now, you should prepare yourself to walk away from them. You’re always welcome with me. Be warned that my woman is a cop, but she’s an honest cop. She’ll like you fine.’ That is, if she still likes me, he thought.
‘I-an-I suppose to be finding dis man dat’s looking for some friend of my bossman. Messin’ up da scene for him at a bad time. Dis commitment ain’ got no flexible, sir. I got to finish the job. Today I-an-I question Rolf Fuchs and dat’s where I got your card de firs’ time.’
‘Oh, no. You didn’t use ginger beer, did you?’
Ratchet looked a bit chagrined. ‘It don’t leave no lasting hurt.’
‘Except in the heart,’ Jack Liffey said, and he pressed his finger very hard on Ratchet Pennycooke’s chest, right where the heart was reputed to be. ‘De people,’ Jack Liffey said, with what he hoped was a Jamaican emphasis, ‘somma dem fight and somma dem talk rough, but I hear Winston Pennycooke got him three A-levels from Knox College. Dis man yere smart as a computer, and he knows what’s righteous.’
Ratchet grinned and chuckled. ‘You Jackie-too-bad youself.’ All at once, the Jamaican’s black eyes lost a kind of glint, and he grasped very hard on Jack Liffey’s finger that had been prodding at the center of his chest and moved it away from himself with tremendous strength as he stood up. ‘Thank you, with my blessings, for looking after my brother and now for watching over me. I know who I am on earth, and it’s no bad thing to let these wicked punters think I’m only the brainless country mouse. Right now, I got to do what they pay me to do. We know all about slave-time on J. I’ll be seeing you one day soon as a free man.’
The last minute before his departure he had sounded like another man entirely who’d been brought up listening every day to the BBC.
Jack Liffey was caught up in an irrational worryfest about Maeve. For years he’d never watched the local TV news, but the L.A. Times had collapsed so thoroughly that there was no longer any hope of learning much about the city’s day-to-day life in print, so when he got home he flicked on KCBS, the least awful of the local stations. They confirmed the brief burst of chat he’d heard over his half-broken car radio that there’d been another random shooting incident at a college, but he didn’t catch where or much else.
How long do we have to go on paying, he thought, for our dysfunctional families and dysfunctional schools and our whole dysfunctional social order? He wondered where this shooting had happened – these things had moved on from post offices and now went off unpredictably in rich and poor areas alike, rich or poor schools, glitzy or shabby malls, fast-food restaurants, wherever people congregated.
Then his jaw dropped as, on screen, he saw Maeve, utterly unmistakably, and a handsome boy handcuffed side by side on their knees in front of a vending machine full of potato chip and pretzel bags. She didn’t seem hurt at all, thank God. But how was she involved in this?
The sound began to come up as he punched madly at the remote’s volume control.
‘… reports of as many as three gunmen. Some students say the police went on a rampage looking for accomplices, but so far it appears to have been a lone gunman. He ranged across the north campus of UCLA, not far from exclusive Bel-Air, carrying two semi-automatic handguns. At least twelve shots were fired, most of them apparently up in the air. No one except the gunman appears to have been hurt. Police cornered the gunman and shot and killed him when he refused to drop his weapons. No notes have been reported, and nothing is known about his motives.’
On screen there was a human-size lump under a blue tarp, with the concrete area surrounded by yellow police tape. He flipped around all the channels, but there were no more shots of Maeve. What weird karma kept doing this to her?
Gloria had been trying to cook fajitas on his kitchen grill, but Sonny was kissing her neck, making her concentration on the cooking extremely difficult.
The phone rang three times, then coughed its way through Sonny’s outgoing message, until they could both hear Jack Liffey’s voice on the monitor thirty feet away. Gloria pushed him away gently and walked to the phone to listen.
‘… I’m sorry to bother you, Sonny, but if you know how to reach Gloria, Maeve needs her help. She’s somehow caught up in a shooting incident at UCLA. I saw a shot of her handcuffed on TV. I’m doing my best to find out what’s going on, but a smart cop with connections can always do better. Please. Don’t let anything else get in the way of this. Me or you.’
He sounded heartsick, and it wasn’t just about his daugh
ter, she knew that. Jesus, the fact that he knew where to call. He did have a sixth sense. OK, she thought, fuck him. He’d figured it all out, and now he’d have to live with it, and so would she. Some indescribable change for the worse had come upon her, subtle but momentous, as if the air in Bakersfield had just become twice as dense. Her senses were actually disarranged a little – by her raging hormones, and by her desire for the world to be back the way it had been ten minutes ago. But it wouldn’t be. She had to ride this new thing all the way down.
‘Sonny, pull yourself together.’
‘It’s hard.’
‘Forget hard. There’s only do. Wait ten minutes, then call Jack back and tell him you reached me, and I’m coming home fast. That’s all. No more.’
‘But I want you tonight, Glor.’
‘I know that. If you screw this up, you’ve lost me for good. Get it right and maybe I’ll be back. Think about that.’
4 This is a lake that probably ninety-nine per cent of Los Angeles residents south of the mountains have never heard of. It’s an artificial reservoir created after a real-estate bust in the early nineteen nineties, trying to boost local property values, set into a small part of an emergency flood catchment basin behind Sepulveda Dam. In bad rains the whole basin goes deep under water, but a big chunk of the Van Nuys area of L.A. has now been renamed ‘Lake Balboa’ and thus the developers have created a new reality, created ‘facts on the ground’, as the Israelis say. Fitting, since tens of thousands of emigrant Israelis live in the area.
5 See Dangerous Games, 2005.
SEVEN
Melanie’s Son
‘Why we wait a day on this?’ Harper asked.
Stoney shrugged. ‘Their original deal. I presumed they needed the time to meet their courier and collect the product. We can use it to plan.’
Stoney decided to make it clear he was war-captain. Harper may have done his famous two tours in the big Eye-raq, but Harper had never shown Stoney the most rudimentary tactical sense. All buck and bluster. Sometimes, he thought of it as the ghetto curse: better to look cool, than go the extra distance to be cool.
‘Your four best homies – no loose cannons. The tight ones we can trust. Tell them to park at ten fifteen exactly, way back with Mr and Mrs Shopping Cart. They can move the car if they have to to keep a straight run toward us, but everybody just kick it and hunk down in the car except one good pair of eyes on point. If we need help, it’ll be my signal, mine alone. I’ll slap my neck.’ He demonstrated, as if offing a mosquito. It was the perfect signal; natural looking, but almost nobody did it in L.A. ‘Then they open a can of whoop-ass like maybe they the DEA or somebody the Spics don’t want to mess with. Maybe get them blue cop warm-up jackets, with the badge printed on, the ones they use for the drug busts so they don’t shoot each other.’
Harper acted out the slap himself, and Stoney nodded. ‘It’s all good. We’ll pay them real money for a day’s work, whether they got to roll up on the Panchos or just scrunch down and whack off all morning.’
Marcus Stone stood up and levered open the grill-cloth that covered his center woofer. He took out his kit with a rolled joint resting on top. He lit it with a Bic and drew twice. Was he starting to want it too bad? Like the booze-hounds?
‘My go on the blunt, man.’
Stoney passed it to Harper who was sitting cross-legged on the floor.
‘Know why this meet tomorrow gives me the willies?’ Stoney said at last. ‘I just heard trouble a second time – from that fat cop Ernie Keeler who thinks I’m gonna be his snitch some fine day. He go, “Just so you know, man, your crew from the Big South is said to be in money trouble. The Medellin chief’s on their ass for some fuckup, and they need extra yayo bad. Maybe they think they can knock over a simple nigger like you.” Course, Ernie’s trying to play me, but I don’t see any percentage for him in freaking me out.’
Harper smoked for a while, ruminating.
‘My worry’s different, Stone,’ Harper said. He drew a last deep burn and handed the blunt back, almost down to a pinch. ‘Sister’s got this Chinese friend now, does us an eye-ching whenever we want, and, man, she always been right on. Don’t be hate on me, man, I see you. It’s for true. This Chink cunt throws the bones for me, and the bones say the dragon is flying. That’s wack. Last time the dragon was flying, Li’l Tight-eye got himself capped.’
Stoney tried not to glare at him like the half-wit the man was turning himself into. Once he’d had hopes for Harper – he’d shown some real promise. Intelligence. He’d tried to get him into a community college, but the man was glued to the streets.
All of this made Marcus Stone feel doomed, trapped by the decisions he’d made long ago. It was as if his life was narrowing down around him now, closing him inside his own bad choices. Surrounded now by asshole street thugs who could barely tell time with a digital watch.
Growing up, he’d assiduously avoided the street as his mother had insisted – and here he was with all their paranoias and homemade mythologies and their dumb-ass ideas of the way the world worked. White Satans and black politicians taking bags of Jew money. Man oh man!
The dope brought back thoughts of his best girl Melanie, way back when. Damn, he’d blown that one for real – thrown away the best thing in his life. And just because she talked so half-smart; she couldn’t make the fancy talk of revolution at his house parties.
‘Where you head at?’ Harper asked.
‘It’s all good,’ Stoney said. ‘We on top, don’t you worry.’ The weed was maybe beginning to mood him up a little.
My cellphone offers its dull tunk for an incoming call, probably another plea from my agent or a raging threat from the director or one of the producers. Fuck ’em all. My head is heavy as a boulder, but I’m determined now to follow through. I should let one of the Skinnies answer the phone, I think, let him giggle down the line for a while like Jack Nicholson with his head through the axed door. Hee-ee-re’s Skinny!
Damn if they couldn’t put their tiny heads through some pretty narrow slits, too. Cool it, Ty. You know they’re only imaginary. Halloo – cinations. Luckily, right now they’re still off at the edge of my vision, investigating the Sputnik Motel.
Then I remember Art Castro. Said he’s gonna get back to me by sunset. I look, and there’s a voicemail on the phone. ‘It’s Arturo, dude. I got what you think you want. Mr Marcus Stone is the guy, all right, but watch yourself. He used to be a big kahuna in the revolution business and now he’s into the drug business.’ Art Castro gave him an address in Woodland Hills – a Valley locale, but not hard to get to at all over Topanga Canyon. ‘That three-quarters number in the address got to be an upstairs or a pool house. Honestly, pard, he has all the props in the world for being a hard guy, so take care. Oh, yeah, he drives a black Escalade, no pimp shit on it like cow-horns or such. It’s not sundown so I did my duty. I’ll take cash money, a check, anything negotiable works fine for me. Break a leg, dude.’
A chill travels up and down my spine at thinking I have my possible father’s actual address. Could this be it? Melanie’s lover so long ago, and my real pops? It doesn’t really bother me what the guy’s into now. I know perfectly well that half the best minds in the black community are into bad business. It’s what you do when you’re smart and all the doors are closed.
Dads. Pops. Father. I try the words, but they don’t sound right.
Mr Stone, sir. I’m Melanie’s son. Look at my face. Is it yours?
I find myself sitting on the edge of the bed and crying, and the Skinnies are going crazy all around the motel room, doing summersaults and jumping jacks like anorexic clowns on speed.
Gloria’s little SUV was a case study in tense dead silence as she and Jack Liffey drove over the Fourth Street bridge to the brand new post-modern police headquarters, right across from city hall. There was some kind of irony in that juxtaposition, he wasn’t sure what. That glass box was where they were holding Maeve. Sooner or later he’d raise the issue of Sonny, he
thought, but not before they’d got Maeve out of the hands of Big Law. Maeve had a way of rubbing officials wrong.
Gloria left the car in an official lot down a tunnel and hung some kind of plastic label over the rear-view mirror.
‘Stay here,’ she commanded. ‘Don’t even think until I get her out of here.’
‘Understood.’
‘Then we talk,’ she barked.
‘Got it.’
Shit. He watched her stride away purposefully. What was there to say between them? Good-bye? You’ve got a week to pack up, Jack? It was about as despondent as he’d ever felt, and he found his life frozen into a kind of glacial melancholy. There seemed precious little of his ego left.
He watched young cops coming in to work, hanging their tags on the mirror-posts on their windshields, leaving pocket items in their cars, taking away other things, stringing them around their necks for good luck, probably Saint Christophers or Iraq dogtags.
Jack, he told himself. You still want a life with Gloria. It hurts like hell, but it’s honest.
I don’t know what I’m thinking, to tell the truth. I don’t know if I’ll work up my nerve to go up there and knock on the door, but here I am on Topochico Drive, my Porsche Targa parked about two houses down from the address Art Castro gave me. I’m watching the lights and shadows in what appears to be the window of the tiny stucco pool house in front. Grass and hedges and geraniums, a slightly nicer version of what all the post-war whites had bought fifty years earlier.
I can see somebody’s inside, moving around, and it makes me feel cowardly just to sit here. But you can’t take such a giant step all at once. Maybe he won’t want to see me. Did he ever know I existed? Moms was a proud woman.
I flip the passenger sun-visor down and there’s the photo of me a few years ago, smiling, with Paulita and her son Mikey from her marriage to Dan. I do my best to be Mikey’s ‘dad.’ We’re standing with a gray donkey painted hideously with white stripes to mimic a zebra. The latest item of Tijuana kitsch, a sad photo-op on literally every streetcorner along the Avenida Revolucion.