by John Shannon
Jack Liffey hunted in the cabinets until he found the English tea. Right beside Maeve’s guilty stash of apple strudel Pop-Tarts. It was in round teabags without the danglies, and he rinsed out the china pot with hot water, as once instructed, and put several of the bags in the ugly Wedgwood pot while he boiled water in a saucepan. Fancy teakettles were in short supply in Boyle Heights, right along with okra. Lord, does anybody really eat okra and boiled bananas in the morning, he wondered, or was Winston pulling his leg?
He could hear Winston peeing hard for what seemed five minutes with the bathroom door open. Jack Liffey resisted the urge to step into the hall and see if his dick really was a whole lot bigger. Eventually the Jamaican wandered into the kitchen, tugging up the waistband of his striped wrestler pants, and sat wearily.
‘I believe Mr Marcus Stone is in dread and trouble,’ he said.
‘No shit.’
‘Rituals of blood in the burning,’ Winston chanted.
‘Jesus Christ – what’s that?’
‘Just a song that come to me, Mr Jack.’
‘Just Jack, please. You know anything about these Colombians? They sound more than unusually crazy to you?’
‘Back on J, we say Colombians got the money sickness. It’s about all those drugs emanating from their country and all that money emanating back the other way.’
‘Neither of those things emanate, Winston,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘People carry them. Some poor souls in Colombia, trying to get to America, are made to swallow rubber balloons of pure coke and then fly up here to shit them out and make a few bucks. Or die, if the balloons spring a leak.’
‘I know all dat stuff. But, Jack, why some ma’an go cut de skin off another ma’an? That a sickness, for true.’
‘I used to think evil like that could only be a sickness,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘But then you meet some very sick people, like Tyrone, that don’t have an atom of cruelty in them. You’ve got to think, Why is this sick one evil, why not that sick one? Are we stuck with the way the dice roll? You believe in a God?’
‘Not so much,’ Winston said.
The water started boiling noisily in the saucepan and Jack Liffey poured it into the teapot. ‘Me, neither. I used to think I had a grasp on things like cruelty and mean spirit, but the whole idea I had then is just gone, poof. I don’t seem to have a clue any more.’ He gaped into the teapot and watched the turbulence start to settle out.
‘My life slowed way down last year for a while. I was without my voice or working legs after a bad accident, and I had to really listen to everything, to wood floors creaking, refrigerators starting to hum, windows just making their little pops in the sun, to the grumbles deep in my own body. Even my woman confuses me now. I know it’s deeply dangerous to start attributing reasons to things that just happen, but I think I’ve started to want reasons.’ He knew he’d better just let the tea brew and stop brooding, so he sat down in silence for a while, with the redness turning to yellow in the sunlight flooding into the kitchen.
‘Maybe there’s got to be great suffering to weigh up in the scale so that good can exist,’ Winston Pennycooke said.
‘You got a plausible reason for that?’
Winston considered, then frowned. ‘Not really.’
‘I wish I believed in a world with giant gods who look like elephants and play jokes on people – like the Hindus,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘But only playful jokes.’
Winston smiled. ‘I know Ganesha. My good mate in school was an East Indian.’
‘What do you believe?’ Jack Liffey asked. ‘You don’t think Haile Selassie is a god, the way your brother did?’
‘Oh, no. That’s so dimwit. At school we all say it’s the homemade philosophy of the poor.’
‘Nice.’ Jack Liffey stood up. ‘I’ll make us some toast. Sorry that’s all. No okra here, mon.’
I guess I believe in Samuel Beckett, Jack Liffey told himself, as he worked deliberately at slicing the whole-grain bread. Neither of them said a word for a long time. I can’t go on I’ll go on.
* * *
‘Watch the bump at the door.’
They pushed Gloria’s wheelchair over the slight hump out of the X-ray room and on into a small side office in the dark building. She looked pretty used up, almost a zombie, after a thorough series of standing, sitting, lying and tilted exposures, and a lot of prodding of sore spots with the business end of an ultrasound.
One of the techs had been called in early, and she’d proven a good sport and helped out a lot after she’d heard Dr Morretti’s spin on events. The doctor was developing the X-rays herself in the darkroom.
‘How do you feel, Gloria?’ Jenny asked.
‘Like a million dollars,’ she said, but her tightly closed eyes belied it.
‘If they let us go, you can sleep all the way home.’
A million Confederate dollars, Sonny thought. He rested his hand on her shoulder, knowing that he’d soon be losing her, at least for the foreseeable future. It meant a lot to him when she reached up blindly and pressed down on his hand briefly. She’d been lusty enough in bed but had rarely shown him simple affection. An angry stubborn beast at bay.
‘After we get you out of here, is there anything else we need to know about what happened?’ Sonny asked her. Any other dead bodies, he meant.
Jenny tried to shush him.
‘No, we need to know,’ he insisted.
Gloria seemed to be trying to focus her attention and not having a lot of success. ‘Those horrible men who assaulted my mother in Lone Pine. Then left her in a gutter in freezing weather,’ she said softly. ‘That was forty years ago. I wonder if those two damn cops knew I’m Indian. So they could fuck the old squaw any time they wanted.’
‘We’re never going to know what they thought,’ Sonny said. He wasn’t sure if the news of their death had percolated down through her pains and dreams. ‘You took care of that, Glor. Those pricks are dead as corned beef. You were lucky you got to snatch an ankle piece. They’d have killed you sure.’
‘I don’t remember much, I think they drugged me.’
‘Keep it that way,’ Jenny said, pressing a hand to Gloria’s warm forehead.
‘We’ll deal with the leftovers,’ Sonny said. ‘Where’s that doctor?’
She must have heard him from the open door to the hall. ‘Just let me write it up for her own doctor.’
‘We can fax later,’ Sonny said. ‘Right now we’ll take the X-rays wet and whatever it is you get out of a sonogram. We’ve gotta go before there’s trouble.’
The doctor came in. ‘Then I have to wrap her chest. You’ve got three broken ribs, Gloria. Can you hear me?’
Gloria nodded.
‘The rebuilt breast. It was cancer, I guess. The sac is smashed and the silicone is on the loose. You’ll want that drained and fixed, but it’s not critical. You might need your spleen out. I’d have an MRI when you get home. You were really worked over by at least one strong and angry male. The bruises and edema you can live with, but the ribs are going to hurt. Here’s some genuine painkillers. Be careful of them, they’re addicting.’
‘Don’t want ’em.’
‘Take them and be brave later.’ She tucked the bottle into Gloria’s shirt pocket, an old shirt of Jenny’s, far too big.
‘Who’s driving her?’ Dr Morretti asked.
‘I am,’ Sonny said.
‘No, I am.’ Jenny looked daggers at Sonny. ‘What do you want – a comic book fistfight with Jack when you get her home? Go away now, Sonny. You’ve got duty and love all mixed up, and it can sort itself out later.’
He made an angry face, but realized that she was right. He couldn’t bear to deal with Jack, not right now. And, in truth, it was a torment to hear Gloria moan now and then with some indescribable pain as her wheelchair moved. Besides, Jenny had a cushy station wagon, an old Buick, and Gloria could lie down in back. He made a mental note to grab a mattress, maybe swipe one from the clinic.
‘Whatever I can do,
Jenny.’
Gloria’s eyes slitted open for a moment.
OK, Sonny thought to himself, quit spittin’ on the handle and get to work. ‘I love you more than myself,’ Sonny leaned in and whispered. ‘I’ll see you again.’ And to the doctor, quietly: ‘We’ve got to snag a mattress or a foam pad. Right away.’
* * *
I have no idea where to take myself once I sprint off the rancorous film set to my car and then accelerate noisily past the guard at the gate. By default I head east off Terminal Island over to the Long Beach Freeway, and then I use my cell and ask for Jack Liffey’s number. The operators usually don’t help much, but I give her an extra boost of charm in that instant before she can switch on the talking robot, and she gives me his address off her screen. I’ve got GPS in the Porsche so I know I can find him easy on Greenwood. My life has changed, and there’s no going back to Joe Lucius’ venomous movie world for now. I need my father. My next anti-psychotic pill is due soon, and that’ll be another big decision. To submerge into the woozy half-light or dance in the sun with the Skinnies.
From a storeroom, they’d grabbed an inch-thick foam pad, in a durable blue plastic cover, one of maybe fifty that the clinic had held there for half a century for civil defense emergencies. They emptied various odds and ends out the back of the station wagon into a dumpster. Then the four of them helped Gloria off the chair and on to the pad and covered her with a pink thermal blanket.
‘Make your own way home,’ Jenny said to Sonny.
‘I’ll take him,’ Dr Morretti said.
For some reason, Sonny seemed to be in a hurry to get away from there and he hurried the doctor up.
Jenny had to stop for gas and then the green-and-white sheriff car started tailing her as she passed Panama Road at the very south edge of Bako, one car and a motorcyle.
Luckily, Jenny thought, it was town cops Gloria had killed, but that fact didn’t provide much comfort when the flashing red light came on in her side mirror, and even her toughened heart missed a few beats.
Highway 99 was a freeway here, but you could just pull off against the oleanders and be clear of traffic. The motorcycle cop went on past and stopped diagonally right ahead of the station wagon to block her – in case she decided to run. Her apprehension was going a mile a minute. Traffic laws on state highways were the jurisdiction of the California Highway Patrol, who mostly worked out of overpowered Mustangs, so this wasn’t about breaking the speed limit.
He looked in his late twenties, standing in the window, as she ran the glass down to let in the gathering Valley heat. He had the usual trim mustache, and that uninflected We-both-know-I’m-the-boss voice. ‘License and registration, please.’
‘I’m a Bakersfield attorney, sir. Which makes me an officer of the court. I need to know why you’ve stopped me.’
‘No, you don’t, ma’am. But as a courtesy to an “officer of the court”, I can tell you that we received a radio call about your plate from the Bakersfield PD.’
‘That’s all I need to know,’ she said. She sighed as she reached for the glove box.
‘Freeze! Step out of the car now!’
‘That’s where my registration is, sir. Like about a hundred per cent of the car-owning population.’
‘Step out of the car now, or I’ll have to arrest you for refusing a request from a peace officer.’
‘California Penal Code eight-three-two, seventeen,’ she suggested. ‘Broadly.’ It would never have stuck, not in a million years, but it was the Catch-22 they always had. She didn’t want to sit in a sheriff’s substation for hours with poor Gloria wrapped in a blanket, in pain and in danger of far worse. ‘OK, sir. You’ll have no trouble from me.’
She showed him both palms and then opened the Buick door. His hand was resting hard on his sidearm, but he hadn’t drawn it, though the keeper strap was unsnapped.
‘Come out slowly, ma’am.’
‘Yes, sir.’ She would have said a lot more, but she knew she had to kiss ass for two, now. The last thing she wanted was Gloria dragged out of the back because she’d sassed a cop.
‘Please turn around and put your hands on the hood. What’s in back?’
‘A very sick woman I’m taking home to L.A. on the authority of Dr Carly Morretti in Bakersfield.’
‘Is the rear unlocked?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Stay right there.’ He walked to the back of the car, glancing to the side quickly when dust whuffed up off the shoulder as an eighteen-wheeler blasted past on the near lane. He opened the tailgate and studied what he saw for a while, then grabbed the mattress pad and yanked it toward him several times until half the pad and Gloria’s legs dangled off the tailgate.
‘Sir, that woman has broken bones. She’s in very bad shape.’
‘So you say. We say you’re using her to conceal drugs.’
‘Oh, don’t do this, deputy. We both know it’s not true.’
Looking back at him, she noticed a familiar white panel van pull off the road behind the sheriff’s car, stirring a new cloud of dust. Everybody took note immediately, and then she realized it was Sonny, and the thump-thump of danger in her chest redoubled. He hadn’t gone home after all, but only a few blocks to her house to collect his van.
Sonny could get them all killed with one of his intemperate outbursts. There would be apologies later, of course, many expressions of regret, but nothing of consequence would ever be done to the deputies who’d ‘accidentally’ killed him and her and Gloria Ramirez.
A husky man climbed out of the passenger side of Sonny’s van, carting a TV camera with a big rectangular hood on its lens. He looked like a local football hero, and Jenny thought she recognized him from a local TV crew she’d seen several times. Sonny climbed out of the driver’s seat with a microphone mounting a shield that carried the number seventeen. He must have called in all his favors, she thought, and awfully fast.
‘Roll tape! KGET,’ Sonny called out. ‘This is Bakersfield channel seventeen. Rich Arnold, reporting from the scene south of town just past Panama Road on 99, where several sheriff’s deputies have stopped a mission of mercy on its way to UCLA medical center for the operation that just might save a woman’s life.’
She didn’t think they could actually transmit from this far out of town without a microwave truck, but she didn’t know if the young deputy would realize this.
‘Get out of here!’ the deputy called to Sonny.
‘Can’t do it. We’re told to follow this woman to emergency surgery at UCLA, where they’re setting up now.’
A Humvee burst past in the near lane, offering them all a moment or two of pounding rap music.
‘We can change your career forever, deputy,’ Sonny Theroux said softly. ‘Or we can shut the camera off and go on our way. It’s your choice. I like the story for the noon, five and six o’clock news, eleven if she dies. Would you identify yourself, please?’
Jenny lifted her hands from the hood and glanced at the deputy who appeared undecided about what to do next. He seemed half ready to draw down on Sonny, or maybe throw his head back and bray at the sky. When his attention came around to Gloria, he had that slightly wild expression in his eyes of someone who was about to delaminate.
‘Please, deputy,’ she said softly. ‘My friend is hurt bad. Be generous. You have no idea what this is all really about.’
He looked at her blankly and gave a single shudder.
‘Please push the woman back inside so we can get her to the hospital.’
The deputy took on a businesslike manner and made a point of feeling under her body and patting her down under the thin blanket before pushing her back inside.
Jack Liffey wandered into the living room and turned on the old TV. The world had gone digital, but their house hadn’t. Except for the cheap converter box that rested on top of the forty-year-old white wood console TV the size of a tipped-over fridge. The other half was a record changer; coming back into fashion he’d heard. There was nothing on TV
he ever wanted to see, but Maeve watched PBS once in a while, and Gloria watched, too – a couple of cop shows, strangely enough – and he realized this was the way most people in America got their news.
He tuned to the locals, five, then eleven, then nine, then eleven again, as something was dominating all the local channels. Cameras in helicopters were circling what looked like a small flat campus somewhere, and he punched the sound up until he could follow what was happening.
‘Winston, you’d better come in here,’ he called. ‘Something big is up, and I have a funny feeling.’
‘I don’t think I’m liking your country as much as I thought I would,’ Winston said as he came in with his steaming cup of tea. ‘I was just reading your newspaper. Even a grown man has to cry for all the pain here.’
‘There’s no pain in Jamaica?’
‘Almost all of us is poor together. And we don’t hate so much. Even the bad boys don’t shoot into schools. Life is all war and hate here.’
‘Yeah, what is it about the well-off middle class that makes them hate so? I’ve never understood what’s grieving them. They’ve got possessions and houses and tons of entertainment. Everything except grace.’
Orteguaza and his crew drove away from Pierce College in the nondescript old cars, just ahead of an arriving armada of police cars and SWAT wagons. They’d been through the philosophy department, right on through it like locusts, and they’d had to kill three professors, the hard way, before they found a woman who admitted knowing Professor Marcus Stone. This one was very old and gray, and she said the man had been gone for more than three decades. And the smart-mouth had never been as good a teacher as he thought he was, anyway. She’d clearly told the truth and earned a quick and easy death.
‘Which way, jefe?’
‘Pull over a moment.’ Their short cortege stopped on a business street full of shops with Spanish words either in the store name or invitingly on the windows, and it made them feel less uncomfortable. Orteguaza studied the note. The school was eliminated. The home address was certainly out, too, if he hadn’t taught at the school for thirty years. But a famous free-sex clubhouse. At least it might be entertaining. ‘Buenos, muchachos. Turn left at the next street, and we’ll get on that autopista.’