by John Shannon
She pinched his ear, quite hard. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Ow. You can help me is what, with information. This may have to do with vampire goths.”
“Taunton doesn’t allow them. Too lower-class.”
“I think I like them better already.”
Four
To Be Too Conscious Is an Illness
“Hell, I let you drive the Crown Vic. That must put me at least an inch to the good side in the male chauvinist pig league.”
She did her best to ignore the irony he larded up around himself. She didn’t really believe he was what he so often made himself out to be, but she also knew it was hard being a cop without flaunting a little aggressive malice to each and all. Your fellow cops would make you pay dearly for any signs of kindheartedness.
“Nobody uses that language anymore,” she said. “It almost makes it worse.”
“Uh-oh. What do you say now?”
“Insensitive will do fine.”
“Whatever.”
There were two ways to drive from the station to San Pedro Slip, where the commercial fishing boats docked: straight down Gaffey or Pacific and then hard east on Twenty-second Street and back along the water, or you could come in on Harbor, paralleling the ship channel, then through the huge parking lot of Ports o’ Call Village and past Cannetti’s Cafe. This last was her choice, the scenic route, and she went fast, but not code three. It was clear that the deed was over and done, so there was no hurry. She skirted the tour boat dock and approached the space beside the fireboat dock where they were building the square-rigger. She noticed that Steelyard’s eye was drawn to the boat hull under construction.
“I met an old high school friend here yesterday. Man, that took me back to some pretty bad times,” he explained.
“Unhappy childhood?” He never talked about it.
He shrugged. “Broken home. Dad drinks, Dad hits Mom, Dad hits kid, Dad leaves. Stepdad is worse. Same old story.”
“Try being a Paiute kid who gets adopted by a couple of old Latinos who tell you day in, day out that Indians are drunken scum.” She didn’t talk about it either, but since they were confiding …
“Shit, I never knew you were an Indian. Ramirez and all. You got a real name like Red Bird or something?”
“Wilson. I was twelve when I found out who I was.”
“That’s blunt. Did you ever try to find your birth parents?”
“My mom was a wino whore, Ken. Not that that means she should be banished from the human race. But she died outside a saloon, literally in the gutter. They said it was hepatitis C, and after a life of needles and drink, that’s no surprise. I don’t know what it would have done to me to find her. Maybe I’m better off.”
He puffed out a slow breath. “Sorry. I had no idea.”
“It’s okay. Once in a while a window sort of clears between us and I see you’re not the troglodyte you pretend to be.”
“What’s a troglodyte?”
“Literally, I think it’s a caveman or something. One of those cops like Eddie Rafter who thinks the answer to every problem is a curse and a nightstick.”
Steelyard laughed softly, and then seemed to readjust his whole being in some strange movement that she had never seen before, almost a schizophrenic’s body English. “Glor, don’t think I haven’t seen you get right down to work and smooth out a bad situation with a few calm words. You’re a good cop. Maybe that’s what makes women good cops—when they’re good, which happens now and then. But I think we got to have the warriors, too. It’s bad news times two out there. I’ve seen Eddie back down a whole gang of angry perps.”
“And I’ve seen him turn them violent when they were only scared and upset.”
He settled back and thought about that. In glances away from the road, she could actually see him considering what she’d said, thoughts crossing his face like a Times Square news ticker. “Funny,” he said finally, “the way a little thing can make a big difference sometimes.” There was a pause and then a tentative voice, odd for him. “What you said hits me deep, Glor. I can think of times it would have been better to soothe.”
But there wasn’t much more thoughtful time. No question where the problem lay. She pulled the big car directly onto the dock and gunned it over a discarded hawser to brake hard where the semicircle of people stood staring down into the water. He locked the shotgun into its vertical mount by instinct and got out to a chorus of “over here”s. At the heart of the mess he recognized Dan Petricich in a trench coat apparently thrown over floppy pajamas. Beside him was the ninety-year-old grizzled paterfamilias he thought was named Ante, who was cursing softly in Serbo-Croatian.
What they were all staring at was the mast and crow’s nest, plus a bit of the stack and wheelhouse of a big fishing boat that was all that remained visible sticking out of the oily water in the slip. Apparently speechless, Dan Petricich pointed at the stub end of a mooring line that looked like it had been axed.
“Good they cut it,” a voice said. “Whoever. Would have torn the davits off the deck going down.”
The younger Petricich swore a bit in what must have been Serbo-Croatian, in imitation of his father.
Steelyard had his pad out. “Anybody know when this happened?”
“Marco Trani on the San Giovanni saw it sunk when he came in at six. He usually ties up on my port side. I’d’a been out last night, but we got electrical trouble with the power block and the guy couldn’t get to it until today.”
“Now you got electrical trouble with everything,” a short man said, but nobody acknowledged him.
“And look here,” Dan Petricich instructed Steelyard.
Dan and the old man took the two cops over to a wooden sea chest that was bolted to the dock near where the boat’s stack stuck out of the water. A playing card was stabbed fast into the chest with some kind of serrated throwing knife. Sure enough, it was the four of kittens, or whatever they called their suits, and it had the same round Japanese stamp on it. The message read: The sin.
“A little Nip in the air,” the old man said.
“Japanese American is preferred,” Steelyard said.
“Don’t be no cafone. I knew your dad.”
“Dad was the cafone—whatever the fuck that is. Drinking, feuding, and bopping women—that’s all he knew.”
The old man was grinning. “I liked your dad. A real man.”
He turned away from the old man. “Glor, can you call the Harbor Department and see if they’ll send a dive team?”
Dec 16 AM
I don’t know why I waited so long to read the classics. They make so much sense. I know now that Bushido contains two levels of belief. The first level is called hagakure, or life in the shadow of leaves. Dappled, maybe. So lovely and so Japanese, so obvious when you are tuned to it. Warriors addressing themselves to ordinary principles of gentlemanly self-respect, such as bathing and grooming, being courteous to all. Practicing reading and calligraphy and the arts.
Only after that: weaponry. One must learn to master every weapon, beyond even the thinking of it, so it becomes an integral part of the warrior’s body. This is all basic, all to be learned in times of peace.
Then, level two: emergency principles, the warriorness of warrior. A platform of theory, encompassing soldier thought and combat thought. Soldier thought entails the willingness to set aside all comforts and customs of peace in an instant. No questions, no hesitation. Beyond the readiness to die, into the acceptance of imminent death. Dappled again, by the grandeur of sacrifice.
And, after all else: combat itself. Maneuver and disposition, feint and misdirection, direct assault, scissors, assault of the cat and assault of the worm, breakthrough and attack in depth. Here the wholehearted spirit of combat rules the mind, courting death. There is no longer “when my time comes,” only now.
Of course, I am not naive of combat. I discovered much of this on my own, impractically, brokenly, clinging to trees. But until reading the code, I k
new nothing of combat’s hierarchy, its history and its necessity.
Bushido now explains it all, validates it. Honor is all. Father, when your own heart asked, how did you respond?
I performed the next act in full daylight and in the face of a formidable alarm system, and I succeeded. Ahimsa has been preserved and no innocent one was injured. I know it’s self-delusion to think this can be made to last forever. I must learn to welcome the deaths of others, if they come, as I welcome my own. Father, another step in the settlement.
“You got us all wrong, you know?”
Jack Liffey didn’t reply. The Muddy Cup was one of the coffeehouses in Redondo, full of old sofas and not all that far from Maeve’s school. She was waiting across the room as promised while he talked to Hal Englander, a kid who was at least six-six and lying so far back in his chair that his body nearly made a straight line. He had several piercings in his ears and what looked like a pterodactyl tattooed on his forearm.
“No, I’m sure you’re all reading Earnest Dowson and Oscar Wilde.”
Maeve was doing her best to eavesdrop on the conversation, though she was pretending otherwise.
“Wilde I know. Who’s that other one?”
“A poet of the fin de the last siècle, famous for his world-weariness.”
“No shit. I’ll have to look him up. I’m into Poe, of course, and Dostoyevsky. This black is just a homage to the tragic essence of life. We all die, and all that. You oughta honor us for being the last saviors of the humanities.”
“What makes you think I want to save the humanities?”
The boy shrugged, no easy task at his steep angle. “Whatever.”
“What I want is to know about Turtle Petricich and any trouble he had with your friends.”
“Yeah, I remember the guy who wanted us to call him Turtle. He was sniffing around one of our parties, so we decided to have a little fun with him. We made him sing the words to ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead.’ My friend Preston has fang caps on his incisors and he’s good at yanking your chain. There probably are some twisted vamp goths somewhere, actually into weird shit like biting and drinking blood, but I don’t know any of them.”
“Where were you two afternoons ago?”
“I was at a poetry slam at Beyond Baroque in Venice.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Jack Liffey saw another goth kid stop and say something to Maeve. Then he ambled in their direction. He was a bit shorter than Hal and there was something strange about his face. Jack Liffey realized he’d shaved his eyebrows. He sat down next to Hal and deposited on the table what looked like an ordinary lunch pail painted dead black.
“ ‘To be too conscious …’ “ he offered.
“ ‘… is an illness,’ ” Englander finished for him, like a password.
“Notes from Underground,” Jack Liffey said. He could have explained that Dostoyevsky had actually been poking fun at all those gloomy, self-absorbed rebels, but they probably wouldn’t believe him.
“This is Preston Rivet,” Englander said. “Jack Liffey, some kind of detective.” He raised an eyebrow, trying for a camp effect, but didn’t quite pull it off. “Remember that weekender who latched onto us at Meg’s house? Wanted to be cool but was pretty clueless?”
Preston Rivet, if that was actually his name, smiled tightly, just enough to reveal the pointed teeth Hal had mentioned.
“We had him going a mile a minute. He’d have stripped down and sucked his own cock if we asked.”
At this exciting moment, a waitress arrived wearing a form-fitting black rubber wet suit with a tightly laced corset over it, and a big silver cross. Her hair was the red of a fire truck. Jack Liffey couldn’t remember ever having waitresses at coffeehouses. You always went up and got your own.
“What can I do you?”
“A double,” Englander said, and he showed the flat of his hand on offer to the others.
“Americano if you can,” Jack Liffey said. “I’ll get this round.”
Preston Rivet sighed. “Got any O-positive?”
“Eat me, Pres.”
“Name the time and place.”
“Catalina, twelve fathoms down.”
Rivet laughed good-naturedly. “Latte, with nonfat.”
The waitress wandered away, and Preston Rivet’s eye caught on Maeve. “Man, that chick is something. Smart, too. We traded thoughts on Poppy Z. Brite. I can just imagine being bitten by those big ivory whites.”
Jack Liffey’s hands were getting restless, as if they wanted to strangle someone. “Finish telling me about Turtle.”
Before he started in, Preston Rivet made a big show of lighting up a slender brown cigarette with a kitchen match struck on his shoe. Jack Liffey sniffed the air and got a strong whiff of clove.
“He was just a wannabe. It was nothing, man. We made fun of him pretty subtly at first, then got into it a bit. The woman who lives there is into community theater and she had a whole pint of stage blood, so I pretended to bleed my vein into a shot glass and wanted him to drink it. He freaked. He almost did it, though, but even jerks like him get it right once in a while. He just put the shot glass down and ran.”
“No threats?”
“Nah.”
“Tell me about your fangs.”
“These? It’s a joke. No, I do not think I’m an actual vampire. It’s just something that always fascinated me, pointy teeth, like a tattoo or something. I’ll probably have ‘em knocked off when I get as old as you, heaven forbid.”
“And those welts I see on your arm?”
“I used to do one a night with a soldering pencil. Mind over matter. Man, the pain really focuses you. Makes the trivial just go away.”
“Puts you in touch with mortality,” Englander tried to help out.
Jack Liffey had only the one lung functioning, a metal plate in his head over a crushed spot in his skull, and a blood pressure he could sometimes feel pounding in his forehead. Mortality was not something he had any desire to invite on in. But he didn’t really think these last-of-the-breed self-conscious romantics had had anything to do with tying up the poor Petricich kid with duct tape. They were just working overtime trying to make themselves seem interesting to themselves.
He left some money for the waitress. “Gotta get my girlfriend and split,” he told them.
He gave Maeve an ambiguous kiss on the forehead and took her out with his arm over her shoulder.
“That’s supposed to be the steepest street in the whole city of LA.” He’d pulled off Pacific in San Pedro and stopped the VW, looking up Twenty-second Street. It was pretty impressive, with the houses on both sides seeming to cling for dear life. “But I don’t believe it. There’s a street in Echo Park that gives me the heebie-jeebies. I had a friend over there and every time I visited I went miles out of my way to avoid it. Baxter, that was the name. From the top you couldn’t even tell there was a street below you. It was like driving off a cliff.”
She eyed the hill with polite interest. “That would be something on a skateboard.”
“That would be suicide on a skateboard.”
He’d already shown her the Point Fermin lighthouse and the spot out the Palos Verdes peninsula where the beached Greek freighter Dominator had sat on the rocks all his youth, rusting away. It was gone now, utterly, another little tweak to his nostalgia gland, which seemed to be acting up.
“How come you never bring me down here much?” Maeve asked. “It’s your hometown.”
“I guess there’re just too many ghosts for me. I wasn’t at my happiest then, hon. I’m amazed you seem to like high school so much.”
“It’s not bad, but nobody expects me to play football or run a six-minute mile.”
“Ah, you know my secret.”
“It’s not very secret.”
“I’ll try not to rant about sports. But I just can’t see all that noise and spurious loyalty devoted to moving balls from one place to another.”
“The Aztecs killed the losers in their ball games
,” she said, as if trying to establish some sort of moral superiority for modern sports.
“That would be an improvement,” he said. “From my point of view. Look at this.”
A middle-aged woman had pedaled a bicycle right past them, hooked up to a lightweight homemade trailer full of bags and cans and discarded cooking implements, the kind of stuff that all the schizophrenics wheeled around in shopping carts. What had caught his attention were the big wooden tail fins coming out of the bicycle that were alight with spangles and reflectors and dangling fluorescent tassles. The woman stopped at the curb just before the street sloped up steeply and began unpacking the trailer onto the curb, speaking sternly to each item. She was wearing too many clothes, layer on layer.
Maeve took his hand. “It makes you want to do something for her.”
“Yes,” he said. “Like reopen the asylums we shut down on them, or open the community clinics they were promised but we never built.”
“You always think in the big picture. I want to do something for her.”
He nodded. “I bet she’s built up a pretty grand imaginary world around herself. I’m not sure you could penetrate it to do much, hon. She looks pretty clean, so she’s probably got a place to stay somewhere.” He handed Maeve a five. “If you really want to try spooning out the ocean, give her this.”
Maeve took the money, and he could see her plucking up her courage before stepping out to approach the woman. The woman looked quite startled to be addressed. She glared at the money suspiciously, and the two of them talked softly for a while. He watched carefully, but Maeve seemed to be okay. He was actually proud of her willingness to approach someone so obviously around the bend. He did the same on principle now and then, but he had never found it did much good for anyone.
In the end the woman took the money, and Maeve came back a bit chastened.
“How was it?”
“Well.” She paused and took a deep breath. “She’s into, like, visitors from other dimensions, and even has a name for where I come from, really strange. Bagnidor-grizzle, or something like that. I wonder if it comes from TV.” She took another deep breath and rested her head against his shoulder. “Can’t they do anything?”