by John Shannon
Above the food awning, a surreal red tennis ball is entrapped in bands of horizontal crimson netting, rising slowly and burning my eyes. I’ve never been able to look away from things.
‘Morning, Mr Bird,’ a man in an electric fetch-cart calls cheerily as he burrs past.
I nod. I’m not sure if I can speak at all.
How can I still be so confused? Is it boys or girls? Anthro or something else? School or run off to Europe? I don’t even know if Bunny would want me, and I’m not sure I can get out of anthro. I’m torn between memory and desire. Who was it said that? Today will tell on anthro, I guess. All the art history classes are closed, but I have a lead on a sketching class if the old Czech who teaches it will let me in. I wonder what would be best to convince him? A beret? A short skirt? Cleavage? Be serious, Maeve. Confusion and I speak a common language. Gotta get out of bed and get going.
Maeve hid the new diary away under the mattress, and, in her bathrobe, she went to the kitchen and brewed the first pot of the day. The kitchen was untouched since her midnight snack of Cheerios – this was just supposition from the abandoned bowl that was still on the table, not a sly hair taped to the fridge door as a test. She wondered if she got that sense of detective melodrama from her dad. Where else?
The coffeemaker was too slow. She poured a tiny glass of pomegranate juice and wandered out on to the patio. With the steep hills opposite, the sun wasn’t up yet, only bands of dark cloud with maroon linings underneath. In Topanga there would always be long teasing twilights at both ends of the day, she thought. It was the price of living in a canyon.
Then as she sat down, the first crimson ray shot upward from the slope near the top of the tallest hill, loosed from a tiny burning hole in the sky. Wow! She watched the dot swell into a thin slice of a molten red disc. She’d never seen the sun quite this deep red and wondered if it had to do with firesmoke somewhere nearby. Everyone she’d met in the canyon lived in utter terror of fire.
The night before, Loco had been ecstatic to see him, uncharacteristically doggy in his affection, licking his hand and mewling and banging his rump against Jack Liffey’s leg for a petting. Señora Campos across the street had made her way over to tell him – in their muddle of broken English and broken Spanish – that she’d noticed the lack of cars in the driveway and decided to come across and feed the ailing dog. She kept the key for emergencies, and he’d felt guilty for letting himself get distracted and not calling her to ask her to look in on Loco.
Jack Liffey made himself the strongest coffee he could manage. Winston was crashed face down on Maeve’s bed, still fully fluorescent in his Jamaican outfit, sleeping off too much rum and Coke. She wasn’t likely to scurry back from UCLA midweek, and if she did, he knew she’d be a good sport and take the sofa.
He carried the cup of brown mud out on to the front porch to try to think, a nearly hopeless enterprise on four hours sleep. As usual (in the rare instances he was up this early) he was astonished by the spirited activity at dawn in Boyle Heights, Latino east Los Angeles. Under an unusually eerie red sky, men bicycled off to work, women dragged along big plastic ice-chests of tamales on lopwheeled wagons, young men under hoods banged on car engines. His whole being was in an uproar over Gloria, who owned the house along with his heart, and should have been there about twice over by now. He figured he’d been getting nothing but lies and evasions from Bakersfield, but this was the last day he was going to put up with that.
Then, like an aggressive challenge, a ruby laser beam flared straight at him from over the Campos house. The air around him filled with a kind of unidentifiable reddened foreboding. A spark at the base of the laser beam spread slowly into a burning wafer, then a furnace door left open. He sat on the steps and nodded as a young Latino he probably should have recognized, but could barely see against the glare, walked past and waved to him.
The blood-and-fire sun formed itself unbearably at the bottom of a striped purplish sky as he began to wonder which crisis demanded his attention first. And was the arrival of too many crises all at once just the human condition?
They had got her up out of bed, and dragged her feet as far as the front porch of Jenny’s house in Bakersfield and then had to take a rest so they sat her on the old barrel chair there. Gloria was partially awake but obviously in trouble and couldn’t help them much with the shifting of her weight. Sonny Theroux and Jenny Ezkiaga had been informed the night before that if they got Gloria to the Harrison Memorial Women’s Center by seven o’clock, well before it officially opened at nine, their friendly doctor would meet them and take some discreet X-rays and other scans of her injuries.
As they waited, panting, on the verandah, the sun began to peek over the Sierra foothills to the east, discolored only a little by the ugly veil of Central Valley smog that had matured over the last two decades of runaway growth.
‘We may need more help with the weight,’ Sonny said, panting with effort and soured by lack of sleep.
‘Bite your tongue,’ Jenny snapped. ‘Let’s find out if she’s going to live.’
‘I’m alive,’ came a weak voice, her eyes still shut. ‘I plan to stay that way.’
‘Another country heard from. I meant nothing, my sweet. I love every ounce of your abundant body.’
‘Shut up, Sonny! Back your van up on to the grass.’
On the TV news the night before they’d seen frenzied reports of some big drug war going on in L.A. ninety miles to the south, apparently a kind of shoot-out usually only seen in films, but they had no idea at all that the insane drug war involved Jack Liffey, if only indirectly.
Orteguaza was sick of being cooped up in the basement, and he took himself up the stairs to the street door of the tenement. His men were all snoring away on the sofas and chairs below, but he never slept more than an hour or two at a time, and then only lightly. He figured he was part vampire or maybe the famous animal-sucking chupacabra of Mexico, and he would eventually have to go wandering the nights in search of blood. He was only half joking when he worked himself into this mood. Jhon Orteguaza read his horoscope every day in the Barranquilla El Heraldo. He believed almost everything he read, especially when it had to do with disasters or betrayals. Betrayal was his great truth of life, and only fools refused to anticipate it from every direction.
He opened the street door and stepped out boldly, as befits a man of special gifts. Shorter people of approximately his own skin color, mostly contemptible Central American mestizos, were rushing left and right, carrying baskets and boxes of common things to sell or hurrying to the bus to some menial job far away. One man was inexplicably dragging an engine block along the street with a rope, making a terrible scraping sound. He wondered when Eighteenth Street would get back to him with news from their own dirty cop. There was a tension in him: he had no choice, but these gangbangers, like so many others here, were not fully honoring his status, or even his manhood.
Then he was hit in the face by the god of fire. In the narrow gap between two tall buildings, across that ugly street, a red eye opened suddenly to him alone, pinning him in place with its scorching regard. The eye began pumping into him a boundless wrath that came from very ancient times – the times when games had been played with human heads for balls, and the losers became the next game.
Yes, he thought. Do not trouble yourself, great Fuego. He recognized Fire himself. I am of your belief. I will do my duty to our joint wrath before I leave this city, or you may incinerate everything.
SEVENTEEN
I Can’t Go On I’ll Go On
The old man staggered bowlegged down the stairs with a cup of coffee that, after the first taste, Stoney knew could only have been boiled grounds, cowboy-style, tasting like battery acid.
‘You may not credit it no credit, but I recollect you, Mr Stone, from so long ago. You was always polite as the barkeep to a sheriff.’
‘Was I?’ Stoney wondered how many blacks had come though this stinker, after all. ‘I may not be so damn polite any more
.’
‘I got a good think-box still ’cause I got out of stunts in time,’ he said, apropos of nothing. ‘I worked on the TV oaters in the early sixties but I quit the horse tricks before I got throwed too much. Lucky to get this gig, sir. I remember it all – the movie stars, the senators, the famous folk. And the bad nights with some poor girlie going crazier’n a biting boar. A little too much sex for some. Some nights it was a young husband, thought he wanted to see things he really didn’t.’
Stoney sipped his boiled mud as the sun outside rose out of the murk and became a big yellow traffic light. Caution.
‘A little too much privilege gone berserk for me,’ Stoney said. He might have said ‘white privilege,’ but he rather liked the old fart and saw no point in needling him with stuff he’d only take the wrong way.
‘For sure, some’s got more money than they can keep dry. They wasn’t all so pretty in their behavior, I tell you.’
‘But you put up with a lot of it, didn’t you?’
The old cowboy shrugged. ‘I saw more tits and pussy than a gyner-cologist. Got my share of nookie down here, too. But here’s the thing I used to exercise my think-pan about. Say you build you a really big room, like this room, and you put up four of these new flattie TVs on the four walls. One of them’s got a fancy sermon on saving your soul, all in rousing talk. Next one’s got Mr Shakespeare or suchlike, a really good one with good actors. The next one is showing a talk about science and ee-volution, interesting as hell with platypuses and aardvarks. And the last one’s got a loop of one of them classy pornos of the seventies – Behind the Green Door or The Devil in Miss Jones. Where do you think most people gonna end up when you let ’em loose in that room for a while?’
Stoney laughed. ‘That supposed to be your contribution to philosophy, old man?’ He tried to drink another sip of the dark sludge. The old fart wasn’t quite the bumpkin he feigned. Stoney wouldn’t have minded settling back with the old poop and some genuine coffee, maybe a hair of Jack Daniels, and have a nice bar yak, but it was important not to relax this morning. Too much to worry about. ‘Anybody from those times ever come back here for a look-see?’
‘Not so much recent-like. Things around here got quieter’n a hole in the ground after the last boss lost heart for the sex game and left. All the true believers went like cats runnin’ from a broken vase. Later the property owner got some renters in over in the east wing for a while, but they gone. Ain’t no buyers. I like the peace. I can’t never seem to move my draggy carcass on.’
‘Visitors. Think.’
‘That movie star showed up a week ago, but I told you that. Tyrone Bird.’
‘I’ll pay you generous room rental, old man, for a few days’ stay, but you’ve got to keep your trap shut about me. Got a TV?’
‘Nothing fancy but she works. Up in the old kitchen. I practically live total in the kitchen.’
‘Any weapons here?’
His eyes slitted a little. ‘You be the huntee, Mr Stone?’
‘Call me Stoney. What does it look like with me nervous as hell? If they find me, these crazy assholes will skin us both alive and crucify us to the wall. And that’s not a fucking metaphor, Mr Cowboy.’
‘It’s them Colombians from the TV news. Betcha.’
‘I asked – weapons?’
‘One old double-barrel that been sawed off, and one box of 12-gauge shells. Never used. Ain’t much.’
‘Keep it close to you, friend. That’s yours. I’ve got my own. This is just like the worst of the Indian days. The last round goes in your mouth.’
Reston has set up shop under a freestanding awning that he’s co-opted from a makeup crew. We’re well off shot. He’s the troubleshooting producer, but he seems to be wearing an assistant director’s hat as well to coach me on my lines for the first shot, while makeup dabs annoyingly at my face. Right in front of us the best boy and the gaffer are unrolling cable for an arclight, and two other crew are playing with a collapsible reflector, trying to see where their mischief can send the big glary circle of sunlight among the waiting extras who turn their backs or give them the finger.
‘“Are you the kind of guy to jeopardize his whole future because some ignorant white guy calls him a nigger?”’ Reston reads in a tinny unconvincing voice. It’s supposed to be my white lover, Alice. Conny Hughes is playing her damn well, and she’s been a good sport about my absence.
‘“Hear my story first,”’ I say without much acting.
His eyes contract with worry, but he goes on: ‘“If the white people hated you as much as you hated them —”’
‘“They’d kill me now and have done with it,”’ I say. I can tell it’s got no real conviction. I always save that up. ‘“And that’d be fine.”’
‘Hold on,’ Reston says. ‘Ty, your feelings are a thousand miles away.’
‘I got the lines, man. The rest will come when we’re rolling, trust me. I am Bob Jones. I know him like my brother.’
‘You’ve got no brother. Bob Jones is broke and angry, and he needs this welding job desperately, and his white lover is just starting to realize that he’s wrapped so tight he’s inevitably going to blow up and turn himself into a loser.’
‘Yeah, yeah. You don’t think I grew up with three or four angry and self-destructive niggers in every school class?’
‘Don’t make this a black thing, man.’
‘What? The whole movie is a black thing!’
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. Ty! I didn’t mean it that way, man. I meant a thing against me. This is a big moment in the movie. Joe is going to make fifty retakes until he sees something he really likes. He’s already pissed off at you. I’m on your side, believe me. This is the scene where Bob just begins to kick back at the whites, when he doesn’t even have to yet.’
‘I get it, man. You know, it’s wrong that they moved this scene to her car. It should be at the party at her house, with all the white Commies doing their best to get down with the blacks.’
‘You know that’s gone, Ty. Commies is totally gone. It is what it is. I promise you, the new script works. You been around long enough to know you can’t ever film a novel word for word.’
‘Maybe that’s the problem,’ I say.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t be taking all those mind-killer drugs when you’re trying to do real work.’
‘Pecker – you got a real knack for saying the wrong fucking thing.’ I turn away from this geek and walk back toward my trailer, wondering if I can get into my dented Porsche behind the trailer before a dozen grips tackle me. At least the two gorillas are gone, which makes better odds.
‘Most Señor Orteguaza,’ the unexpected voice from the street called him away from watching a young long-haired beauty who was walking toward him with some of the most immense bouncing chupas he’d ever seen.
‘What is it?’ He saw it was Estuardo, leaning out of an old Chevy, with someone else driving. He was obviously unwilling to get out of the car and stand near him, as if Orteguaza carried some disease. He wondered if Eighteenth Street were about to cut them loose, or worse. Betrayal was always the most probable act. The horoscopes had warned him about this trip.
‘Man, I got what you want,’ Estuardo said.
‘What’s that?’
Estuardo glanced around first. He saw the same woman still approaching, and waited while she walked disdainfully between them, his head almost bobbing with all that soft flesh. ‘Alma mía, te adoro intolerablemente,’ Estuardo called out. She made a shooing gesture and went on without pause.
‘Friend,’ Orteguaza said gently. He touched the pistol in his coat and was very close to blowing the kid away unexpectedly, almost always the best policy.
‘¡Tremenda! I bet that puta has nipples the size of béisbols.’
‘What is it that you have for us, amigo? Are you sending us to hell?’ Orteguaza’s hand fished slowly into his jacket pocket and curled around the .357 Magnum.
‘¡Ay, coño, no! Man, our cop says all the known cr
ibs of this American nee-gro are clean as Tide Soap, and that he is in the wind. Every policía in ten cities is looking for his gang, those you didn’t kill, plus the federales, and they look for you, too, of course – you got to know that, you all over the TV. But my good friends offer you three places from the man’s distant past, where he might run, out of love for you. Don’t ever call me or Eighteen again.’ Estuardo dropped a piece of folded paper on the sidewalk contemptuously, and the car accelerated away.
Orteguaza stood with his legs braced and very nearly pulled out the pistol to let off a shot at the heads as the car receded, but the growling old muscle car got away fast, and he didn’t do it. He knew the alliance with Eighteenth Street, that El Diablo had worked so hard on, was over now. Best to finish business here and get home, and they could start over from a new genesis, with advice from new witch-men and new horoscope. El Diablo in Medellin could betray, too.
He sighed and picked up the note off the sidewalk.
Pierce College, Philosophy Department, the first line said. And then it gave two addresses, one identified as old residence, and the other as famous free-sex cult: Señor Stone was known visitor.
Time to wake up the boys, he thought.
‘Time to rise and shine. What do you want for breakfast?’ Jack Liffey shook the Jamaican’s shoulder, and he could feel how muscled and young Winston was, without too much envy, though the lad was still dead to the world. He shook some more and waited. Winston eventually turned over and sat himself up on Maeve’s bed like a mechanical vampire. Jack Liffey gently handed him a cup of coffee.
‘Take it slow. Do you have a breakfast order?’
‘Okra and boiled banana.’ He sniffed the cup. ‘You got tea, mon?’
‘Okra’s all run out, but tea I can do. Maeve has some English breakfast tea somewhere. You want it strong with milk?’
Winston nodded and tried to focus. ‘I dream of that poor man on TV. The one they peel off his skin. Why they do that?’
Jack Liffey paused at the door. ‘Come to the kitchen and talk to me while I’m brewing. You can tell me if you’ve got a convincing theory of evil. I sure don’t.’