Terminal Island

by John Shannon

  “Some do. You were a beatnik, weren’t you?”

  “I suppose so, but I wouldn’t have liked being called one.”

  “I don’t think they mind the word at all. It’s a style. There’re maybe twenty of them at Redondo High. Some play Dungeons and Dragons, some go to the raves and listen to death metal or speed metal. Mostly they seem unhappy and kind of lost, but they read a lot, even good stuff, though mostly with dark themes. Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Blake. There’re even a couple of Latino goths. It fits right in with all that Day of the Dead stuff in their culture.”

  The toaster chirped and a brown Pop-Tart, leaking red, rose slowly like a ghoul from its grave. “Want half?”

  He made a face. “I haven’t had one in fifteen years and I still have a distinct memory of the taste. It was like sucking chrome off a bumper.”

  Cops with fizzing flares were funneling the traffic at the bottom of the Harbor Freeway into a creeping clog and by the time he neared the offramp at Channel, he could see why. Two immense belly-to-the-ground pigs were glaring and snorting at a ring of blue-clad cops who were trying skittishly to pen them in. One cop even had his pistol out.

  Freeze, motherfucker! Jack Liffey thought.

  Pigs always turned out to be a lot bigger than you thought, and these looked huge, prehistoric, the size of his car. Just as he angled down the ramp, both pigs squealed on some unheard signal and charged, setting off a panic among the retreating cops, but he didn’t get to see the sequel.

  Then he was coming up Gaffey through the gap in Goat Hill into San Pedro proper, toward the old downtown that had defined his youth: the Warners Theater, the war surplus, the hobby shop, and only two blocks farther down Sixth Street, the harbor itself, which had once had a ferryboat across to Terminal Island. Then there were the shipyards and the dark glamour of Beacon Street, the tattoo parlors and mission hotels and a bar named Shanghai Red’s, where men had once actually been shanghaied. Urban renewal had knocked down a lot of it before the fashion had shifted in the nineties to trying to preserve a cardboard cutout of the past. Pasadena had started the trend by pouring new boutiques and Starbucks and all the ordinary mall stores like Banana Republic into the historic storefronts, as if repopulating the world from outer space.

  He tended to avoid San Pedro as much as he could. It was a great place, one of the few LA districts with real character, but there were just too many of his own ghosts, too many spots where he’d messed up a young love or lost a friend or stepped on some Latino’s spit-shined shoes and had to run for his life. They didn’t call them gangbangers then, but they were. The Latinos in gray checked Pendletons buttoned to the neck and the Yugoslavs in gray felt car-coats with names and designs, just like the Pharaohs in American Graffiti. It had been a working-class town for the most part—longshoremen and fishermen and shipyard workers.

  There was a pang in his heart as he passed the building that had been Macowan’s Market, now a 99-Cent Only Store scrawled with Christmas designs. Two or three times a week, after junior high, he and Billy Engels would hunker down behind the magazine rack with a bag of Bell Brand barbecued potato chips and big RC Colas—sixteen-ouncers—and read the science fiction comics one after another. Once he’d read for so long that his legs had gone completely to sleep and in trying to stand up he’d fallen flat on his face, astonished by his rubbery, numb appendages. The clerk knew they were there, of course, but he had let them read their way through his comics for free on some kindly impulse of a bygone era.

  He tried to stay numb to all that nostalgia as he motored past the ferry building, which had been turned into a maritime museum, and then through the seemingly endless square miles of lovely old California bungalows that spread over the rolling hills above the harbor. In fact, as he parked the VW, the bungalow that waited up a scabby lawn looked eerily familiar to him, and he wondered if he’d been better friends with Petricich and his family than he remembered.

  “Your house looks awfully familiar,” Jack Liffey admitted, sipping the wonderfully strong black coffee Dan’s wife had poured out for him.

  “Sure, sure,” Dan Petricich said. “Everybody thinks so. We rented the place out to Polanski for Chinatown. Remember Curly’s house? Three days of shooting, and it made us more than a good month of a tuna run in the old days.”

  They sat around a big scarred-up oak table, having a hearty late breakfast because Dan’s boat, the Sanja P., had been out squidding all night and had just come in and offloaded. Dan looked suitably spaced out by exhaustion, his hair awry and radiating a certain fishy pung into the room, but it didn’t stop him shoveling down fried potatoes and eggs and sausages, which were regularly replenished by his plump blond wife, Marin. She hovered over them, having been introduced to Jack Liffey as “my damned Swede.” A fantastically leathered old man sat at the end of the table, competing hard with Dan for all the food he could spear. Ante Petricich, the patriarch and original owner of the Sanja P.

  “Fishing was always this big fight between Yugoslavs and Italians,” Jack Liffey said. “All my youth. I knew kids on both sides—Mardesiches and Pescaras.”

  “You remember wrong,” the old man put in in a harsh croak. “It was Croatians and fuckin’ Sicilians, what it was, in fact. Know how you can tell a fuckin’ Sicilian boat?” It was a rhetorical question, and Jack Liffey had no intention of answering. “They got a big open bridge so the fuckin’ hotheaded Sicilian captain can stand up there like some puffed-up godfather all day cursing and swearing at everybody. Croatian boats got a nice professional closed wheelhouse.”

  “The tuna’s gone, isn’t it?” Jack Liffey said.

  The old man shrugged. “Fuckin’ longline boats out of Japan. Ten miles of hooks. It’s like nuking the sea. Tuna was a real man’s fish to catch. Squid is for sissies. I quit when we started using lights.”

  “It pays the bills, Pops.”

  The old man gave a snort. “They shine these big lights into the water to pull them up like magnets. It’s no better than jacklighting deer.”

  “The tuna didn’t have much of a chance either, did they?” Jack Liffey said. “I always figured the only fair fishing would be if you gave the tuna automatic weapons.”

  Dan Petricich laughed. “We got so much sonar and GPS stuff and spotter planes these days the squid are sitting ducks.”

  “Wouldn’t you like some eggs and sausages, Mr. Liffey? I can make fresh.”

  “No, thanks. I already ate.” He tried to remember a Swedish Marin in his class but could only recall a Swedish Carol who had grown great breasts prematurely and had everybody lusting after her. Carol’d had large buttocks, too, and he and a friend had privately named her MNA, for magnisimus novisimus agmen, which was as near as their crude Latin dictionary could get to “greatest rear,” though in fact it meant greatest rear platoon, or, quite literally, “greatest newest line of march.” He was amazed that after so many years, stuff like this was still banging around in his head.

  “It’s here if you want it,” Marin said, turning away in tight pedal pushers to show a fairly nice newest line of march herself.

  “The kid is sulking,” Dan said. “I won’t call him out right now, he’ll only clam up. You take him away from the house and see what you can get out of him.”

  “I’ll be happy to.”

  “And get this”—he waved a fork with his mouth full. “You’re not going to believe it, it’s old home week. The cop on the case is Ken Steelyard.”

  That rocked Jack Liffey back in his chair a bit.

  “Not the one from Seventh Street School?”

  041058

  “How many you think there are in this town?”

  Ken Steelyard was the most unlikely person from his grade school days to turn cop he could imagine. They had still been fairly close friends for a while at the beginning of junior high, but the last Jack Liffey really remembered of the tall, skinny, sad, and troubled boy was when he had secretly piled all of his possessions, including an ungainly hi-fi console, onto
a Greyhound bus and taken himself off to Fresno by himself at age fourteen. When his mom and new stepdad found him, they dragged him home, but for some reason he and Jack Liffey hadn’t stayed close after that.

  “I’d figure him for the guy who goes up on the roof with a high-powered rifle and starts shooting innocent pedestrians.”

  Dan chuckled. “He straightened up, I guess.”

  “I guess I ought to go to some class reunions, but I can’t bring myself.”

  “I went to one ten years ago. You get to know what the guys are up to.”

  “Yeah, I want to see a reunion, but only through about ten panes of one-way glass.” How many times could you stand to explain how you got laid off from a nice aerospace job all of a sudden, in the middle of a normal life, and then got drunk a lot and lost your marriage, and in trying to dig yourself out, you fell into hunting down missing children as a living? It was probably a lot easier to introduce yourself if you were a success of some kind.

  December 14

  When the world around you is in decline in every respect, to excel becomes much simpler, sometimes no more than a basic kata. Last night, after the task of the day, at midnight I constructed a private willed space. I stood against a closed metal grate in the entry of a cheap souvenir shop on Hollywood Boulevard. I remained there until dawn, passed by hookers, by waifs, lost runaways, drug dealers, by pimps and undercover police. For the first time in thirty years I rediscovered what it meant to be both aware of your surroundings and unaware at once. The pain was lessened somewhat, too. I simply was. I was aware of what passed as nothing, as ghosts of this sad underlife. Almost no one saw me there, enfolded in stillness, and the few who did went on quickly.

  The right and wrong ways of behaving are both contained within the trivial. At first, there were distracting thoughts. Then I found the place, on the outer margin of the world, above an infinite cliff. I could have grabbed bullets out of the air with my bare hands. Readiness. I knew: All movement is ritual. Like a new kind of breathing, almost peace.

  Father, my obligation to you is heavy. Honor is everything.

  I am completely at one with your memory and will serve you as if I, too, am already dead. I rush to my death freely. I must act again, for you, according to the code. I will keep ahimsa in mind. Hurt no one who does not hurt me.

  Be sincere and hard and quick. Loyalty. Justice. Bravery.

  Honor holds off darkness.

  The disease of secrets, Jack Liffey thought, the disease of private pain. The boy sat sullenly on a plastic bench at Hugo’s Tacos, while Jack Liffey brought him a couple of nondescript crisp tacos and a Coke from the take-out window, ordering for himself a bad coffee and a cardboard tray of French fries.

  “I already talked to the fucking cop.”

  “This isn’t really your hangout, is it?” Jack Liffey said, ignoring the undirected venom. He had suggested going someplace where the boy felt comfortable.

  The boy shrugged slightly. He’d no more take an adult into his world than put on a Hawaiian lei. He didn’t touch the food. Ants made a line up one of the legs of the concrete table, across a corner to a puddle of catsup, where they milled and gorged before heading back down again.

  “I went to San Pedro High, too.”

  Jack Liffey might as well not have spoken. He continued, “I wasn’t very popular. Before I left, I wrote ‘Fuck the Knights’ on the base of the big pirate. I wonder if there’s any trace of it.”

  The kid smiled at that momentarily.

  Jack Liffey hadn’t done any such thing, but he understood what it meant to be pissed off enough to want to. “Do you want to be called Turtle or Vin?”

  The boy shrugged again.

  “Are the Knights still around?” This exclusive fraternity of suck-ups and student council types had, in Jack Liffey’s day, colluded with the jocks to lord it over everyone else.

  “They leave us alone.”

  “I imagine since Columbine the school’s a bit on your ass, frisking you for shotguns and such.”

  “We can’t wear trench coats to school anymore. No big deal. What was Columbine?”

  He let that alone. He knew the kid knew. “Pedro have metal detectors?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do the campus cops hassle you?”

  He shrugged, which might have meant anything. There hadn’t been any real security in Jack Liffey’s time. It had been an open campus and you could come and go at will. You could play in the parks at night, too. Now it seemed to him as if there’d been a universal toxic spill of some chemical that had etched the comfortable edges off everything in the world.

  “You prefer to be left alone, I take it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll do my best, but I promised your dad I’d talk to you about what happened.”

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “How about you just tell me who your natural enemies are at school. Every food chain’s full of them.”

  The kid looked at him. “Huh?”

  Jack Liffey wondered how much of Western civilization he shared with this boy. “You know, each one eats the weaker, catsup, ants, me.” He squashed a few ants with his thumb. “Worms eat the pond scum, birds eat the worms, coyotes eat the birds, bears eat the coyotes, we eat the bears. Somewhere in there, there’s something that wants to get you. Surfers? Gangbangers? Jocks? Schools are always like that.”

  The boy just looked away for the next few minutes, and Jack Liffey got nowhere with his questions.

  “Did you ever have a fight with anybody?”

  The boy sighed and finally ate a bite of the congealing taco. “I was at a party in PV last month and some vamps got in my face.”

  PV he knew. There had never been any love lost between the working-class town of San Pedro down on the flat and the horsy Palos Verdes hills above. In fact, there were several layerings of new-money towns up there, Rancho Palos Verdes, Palos Verdes Estates, Rolling Hills Estates, and then right up on top, the gated community of Rolling Hills that he’d read somewhere had the highest per capita income in the country, probably the known world. But the word vamps didn’t register.

  “Vamps?”

  The boy took a moment, then answered reluctantly. “Vampire goths. They wanted me to drink some blood with them and I told them to fuck off.”

  Vampire goths. Jack Liffey was not going to betray his surprise. More weirdness. Generally he liked weirdness, but something about kids playing vampires was just sad and pitiable. “You go to parties with vamps a lot?”

  “Some.”

  “You remember where this was?”

  “Somewhere up on Bridlewood.”

  That was PV, all right. It was something. But if he decided to take this case, it looked like he was going to need garlic and some silver bullets. They talked for another half hour as the boy finished the aging tacos and then the fries, but Jack Liffey got no more useful information out of him. In the end he tucked his card in the boy’s shirt pocket. “If you think of anything else, call me.”

  That would happen right after the boy got a button-down shirt and ran for class president, he thought.

  Before heading home, he detoured to the far side of town toward Averill Park, where he’d spent about half his childhood. The park had been a WPA project back in the thirties, but to him, growing up nearby, it had just been a park. It had an artificial waterfall that fed a stream running two blocks between rock retaining walls, and above the stream, trees and then rolling grass hills—the most beautiful urban park he had ever seen. Not a stream, in fact, but a series of long ponds that flowed over stone weirs on and on to the big pond at the end at Thirteenth Street. In the middle was a longer pond with an island and a hump bridge, and just over the bridge, the Big Tree. The Big Tree, the Home Tree, had been home base for a million games of hide-and-seek, and it stood there in his psyche as the anchor point of his childhood. Maybe even where it had all gone wrong. If he could get back to the Big Tree, he thought, maybe he could find some
way to set off again, the right way this time. He wondered idly what sort of tree it had been. He remembered gnarled and gray, branching at head height and easy to climb. He hadn’t been into botany much then, like most kids, or the scientific names of things.

  He found a parking spot behind a bunch of shiny old cars with pom-poms that were spilling out a big overdressed Latino wedding party onto the high grass, where they were posing for photographs. The park below was pretty much as he remembered—along the stream, rustic railings made of concrete molds of the same log, repeating the same knots and sawn-off stub over and over again. At the crest of the bridge he started to get a bad feeling. He stopped and stared. There was no Big Tree at the far end of the bridge, not even a stump where the Big Tree had been. About twenty feet away there was a pepper tree, but not as big as the Home Tree and split in a different way.

  For a long time he stood there trying to reconcile his memory with what he saw. They couldn’t have eradicated his tree so thoroughly. And this other one, it looked so old and so close to where the Home Tree should have been that their roots and branches would have interfered with one another had they coexisted. Could his recollection be that far wrong? He felt bewildered and disoriented, betrayed in some fundamental way.

  Suddenly he was having a little trouble getting his breath, a nasty reminder of his collapsed lung. After a while he found himself on a rock bench set into the wall beside the water, staring dully at the ground at his feet. It was as if he’d never find his way home now. He wiped away a single tear.

  Three

  Soo Busted

  “Jack Fucking Liffey.”

  “Ken Fucking Steelyard.”

  They examined one another from opposite ends of the short bleachers, like two tomcats not sure there was enough food set out for both. Steelyard had filled out a lot and his hair was combed back in one of those looks that made him seem even older than he was. He wore an atrocious brown suit and a tie with a gravy stain on it.

  “So have a seat,” Steelyard said. “It was you wanted to meet in the great outdoors.”