by John Shannon
He bundled Loco into the car and shopped at a fancy market in Larchmont to get the fixings for a sun-dried tomato pasta, only wincing a little when he noticed at checkout that everything was about three times the price of Trader Joe’s. Her place was relatively modest, all things considered, a small and finely restored Cal bungalow on the outer edges of Hancock Park. Or, as he and Rebecca pointed out gleefully to one another when they found real-estate flyers rubber-banded to the doorknob from time to time, “Hancock Park Adjacent.” Hancock Park was old-money LA, full of true mansions, like great out-of-place Tudor baronials, but you could tell exactly where even adjacent ended. Three blocks east of Rebecca’s house you were into Latino apartment houses, the streets jammed with Chevies and junkers, and the brand-new high-density Korean high-rises, with a lot of angles and earth tones and balconies the size of postage stamps.
Taunton School, where she was headmistress, was only a short drive away—in Hancock Park proper—but he knew she would probably be late home. There were always problems to attend to, it seemed. He had trouble mustering very much sympathy for the problems of very rich young girls, and he occasionally wondered aloud what these unspecified problems could be—an unexpected rumple in the Armani skirt, a drop of a quarter percent on a stock certificate. He thought of his father, and realized that his own prejudices against the relatively innocent children of the rich were parallel to his father’s against people of color, at least in the sense that they both relied on stereotypes. But all in all, he just didn’t feel that guilty about resenting the affluent and comfortable.
He let himself in Rebecca’s handsome front door, which was varnished white oak below and leaded glass above, a bright design of a spreading fruit tree. Rebecca said she had heard that the place had actually been designed—first draft, anyway—by the great Charles and Henry Greene, though taken over and completed by an apprentice. Inside he was struck as always by the resonances of money—the real Kandinsky over the mantel and the little Goya drawing beside it. He didn’t like Kandinsky all that much, but you couldn’t help being impressed by what it meant, a single oil painting worth more than all the money he had earned in his lifetime, all the way back to his newspaper route as a boy.
It was her family’s house—her father had been some bigwig at a film studio—and she was an only child, so she had inherited it all: real Persian carpets, Picasso litho in the bathroom, signed Edward Weston print of a gnarled green pepper in the hall, and even the Lipshitz bronze on a granite pedestal. The only thing she had that he really and truly loved was a portrait of her father on the steps of Angel’s Flight by Millard Sheets.
No, he thought, there was another item he loved, tucked away and forgotten in the unused guest room. An LA surrealist piece from the 1960s by Joe Steuben, a kind of kiosk that portrayed an immensely sad view out the back window of a forlorn little house, seen through torn lace curtains. If you plugged the kiosk in and activated it, the taillights of a car passed from time to time in the alley, in some kind of inexplicably heartbreaking depiction of loneliness. It prodded a finger at something deep inside him.
He chopped leeks and sautéed them in olive oil, then added sun-dried tomatoes, a bit of cooked chicken, garlic, and mint. Finally he set the penne boiling. The nice thing about the meal was he could put it aside and the microwave wouldn’t wreck it on reheating.
In the living room, he sat in the leathery mission-style chair and started to read a Cormac McCarthy he was fighting his way through. But he found he just wasn’t in the mood for that dense, fierce prose, and he let the book fall and sat with his eyes closed, listening to the rattle of the fridge shifting itself into some other mode. Maeve’s doubts about Rebecca were hard to shake, and his mind turned to the dissimilarities between them.
They’d gotten past the newness and the excitement of exploring one another, and now he’d begun to notice that the differences were starting to matter more. He’d never paid enough attention to some of the ones he’d had with Marlena, thinking they were both far enough along in life that they could just live them out. But the differences had crouched there, murmuring like poisonous gossips, until she had found a guy on the same astral wavelength as herself, awaiting the same imminent touchdown of the Lord.
Now it was wealth itself—ballet, season opera tickets, fragile china and crystal, plus the regular tidying excursion through his fridge that disappeared his plastic lemon and his off-brand sauces. At dinner, both exercised control over their conversation, and Jack Liffey couldn’t help wondering if she thought LA’s rich and powerful—many of whom she knew—could overhear his wisecracks about them.
Now and then she gave little yelps that suggested she wanted to free herself from the burden of all this—which touched him in a confused way, as if he’d come in just a little too late after the main titles of her life—but he didn’t know how to help. He didn’t know, either, how he was going to deal with these things in the long run, but it didn’t bear thinking about just then.
Loco snuggled up to his legs, and he focused on a white section of textured stucco and on the curious, lopsided sensation of breathing through one lung. Loco’s old coyote nature was giving way more and more to an affectionate petness, and the animal warmth, the general mindfulness of the moment, all his chores done, bathed him in a wonderful nothingness. He wished he still drank, to crystallize the moment that way.
In that state he heard her new car, a Lexus IS, pull into the driveway. Some boyfriend had long ago taught her to gun an engine once and switch off as it was revving down, an old trick from the days when powerful cars had big carburetors and it was advisable to empty the carb barrel when you shut down. But he liked hearing the brief, powerful whoop and had no intention of disabusing her about fuel injection. Not the man who drove a VW 1600 with one Rust-Oleum fender. Loco was up and standing erect at the window, like a Peeping Tom.
“Good work,” Jack Liffey said. “Several million years of adaptation to hunting and only a few hundred to window glass.”
She came in the side door with a couple of large store bags that meant she’d probably been Christmas shopping.
“Hello, Jack. I smell mint, mmm.”
He got up and kissed her. They were still new enough so it wasn’t perfunctory, and her body pressed against him.
“That’s even better than the mint. How was your day?”
“Entertaining.” He plucked at one of the bags to help her. “It looks like I may be too late, but I’ve been wanting to say something about Christmas.”
She held on and set the big bags beside the hall. “ ‘Bah, humbug’?”
He laughed. “Something like that. Do you think we could keep it simple between us, maybe just one present each and even that more a token of affection? Whatever that means. I can’t keep you in the style to which you were accustomed, Beck, you know that. I can’t buy you anything new from Prada on this disability they’re allowing me. And I may even lose that if I start working.”
She kissed him again. “Don’t worry, these are for a couple of aunts and some nieces and nephews in the Midwest. Tell me about your adventures while I strip down to something more comfortable.”
“We may never get around to dinner if you use words like that.”
“I’ll try to stop somewhere between pricktease and serious come-on.”
He was actually a little shocked. “I didn’t know you knew a word like ‘pricktease.’ ”
“Jack, really!”
“Okay, sure, you deal with overheated teens all day. You know words even I don’t.”
“Fisting took me a while to work out,” she admitted.
“Oh, Lord.”
They had one last smooch. “You know how to please me heaps,” she said. “That’s better than words forever and ever.”
She went into the bedroom and changed into loose sweats while he made her a Campari soda and got himself a diet ginger ale.
“You’re weasling out of telling me about your new case,” she called. “I know you’re on the job.
I can sense it.”
He told her a bit about it, the man down in San Pedro challenging and taunting the police with his planted clues. “Actually, you don’t know me well enough to be surprised by today’s real news flash.”
She peered curiously into the kitchen, made a happy face when she saw the bright red drink, and took it up. “Tell Rebecca, who is wearing nothing underneath.”
He let that go. “My father is involved in some way. Maeve and I saw him today.”
“I thought your father was dead,” she said lightly.
“Uh-huh. Believe it or not, so did Maeve and so does her mother.”
“That’s got my full attention.”
“What would you do if you found out one day that your father, whatever else he was, was a prominent Holocaust denier?”
“Oooh.” It was a noncommittal sound, as if a tooth had just given her a twinge.
“Somewhere in his well-before-midlife-crisis my father became an obsessive about race and eugenics and the dangers that threaten the poor overwhelmed white race. Mom was utterly flabbergasted by it all, but she died before it became that big an issue. I think I blamed him a bit for killing her with his new meanness of spirit. I’m not proud of this, Beck, but when I couldn’t argue him out of it, eventually I just cut him off. I was going to get married—actually Kathy was already pregnant—and I didn’t want him around my family. I told everybody he’d died, and I told him to fuck off. I wanted him away from my family. He bought it, I’ll give him that, and he let me pretend to Kathy there was some out-of-state funeral I had to go to alone.”
He listened to the ginger ale fizz in the can for a moment, his entire being filling with a burning shame. “I say I didn’t want Kathy and Maeve exposed, but really it was me. I just couldn’t stand him anymore, going on and on about those ideas. His ideology was so damn mean that resisting him day in and day out just got me to hating myself.”
She came across the room and hugged him.
“Was I wrong to cut him off like that?” Jack Liffey had a terrible sense that everything going on now in this discussion was foreordained, all destined to have a bad end.
“I wasn’t there.”
“You can be prosecutor, if you want. I think I need to suffer a little here, Beck.”
“Jack, counseling girls every day, I learned long ago that sometimes there’s just no right answer.”
The multicolored kite dipped and spun ineffectually before settling onto the grass, its owner visibly annoyed. The onshore wind that hit the cliff and gusted upward just wasn’t steady enough for a kite today.
“They used to do hang gliding off that cliff,” Gloria Ramirez told her. “Because of the updrafts. But they banned it when a couple of people fell to their death.”
They were in Point Fermin Park, at the southernmost tip of San Pedro, also the southernmost tip of the city of Los Angeles, marked by a lovely old Victorian clapboard lighthouse and a park with a tiny bandshell and an expanse of grass that ended in cliffs. The cliff-side walk high above the Pacific was now truncated by chainlink where sections of the cliff had fallen away. The whole peninsula was like that, yielding slowly to slippage and subsidence, and the unhurried resolve of the pounding surf down below. Without the upthrust of tectonic movement, Maeve thought, the whole landmass would eventually wind up as smooth as a Ping-Pong ball and about fifty feet under the ocean.
“A friend at school dared me to go skydiving, but I chickened out.”
“Good for you.” Gloria Ramirez sat across the park bench and extracted their cheeseburgers from the big take-out box. It had probably been three years since Maeve had eaten anything as wicked as a cheeseburger, but after Gloria Ramirez had suggested that the best eats in town came from Tommy’s Charbroiler at Twelfth and Gaffey, Maeve wanted to be “one of the girls.” Complete with curly fries and chocolate milk shakes.
Just rig me up intravenously with that ol’ cholesterol, Maeve thought, but she nibbled at the cheeseburger and, of course, it tasted glorious.
Her companion had unpinned her pigtails to let them fall free, and she was wearing turquoise jewelry, so she really did look Indian. She set out a cell phone and peered at it for an instant to make sure it was on. “I guess you want me to tell you about your granddad.”
“Uh-huh. It’s a real shock just having one all of a sudden when you thought you didn’t. And then the one I ended up with … wow, that’s a pretty bad dream.”
“Are you going to go see him?”
“Dad made me promise to wait. He says it’s too dangerous right now.”
“Um-hmm.” Gloria Ramirez glanced up over the enormous bite she’d taken out of the cheeseburger and waited while her mouth worked and worked and finally cleared. “You’ve got plans to change him, don’t you?”
Maeve grimaced as she nibbled at one of the curly fries. She didn’t really like the flavor. “Somebody should.”
“Hon, in my experience the only time you can change a male is when he’s in diapers. This old man is pretty set in his ways. I hear when he first moved downtown there, he wasn’t so unfriendly, but gradually his neighbors learned what he was up to and, let’s say, a mutual dislike sort of flowered.”
“He did seem pretty crusty.”
“That’s only a little of it.”
The phone buzzed and she picked it up. “Ramirez. No, Detective Steelyard is doing that. Get off my back. I’m half day off.” She punched off with a disgusted look, glaring, then went back to what she’d been saying.
“Maeve, most cops think I’m a Latina, and they damn well know I’m a woman. I live with a certain level of rude comment and disrespect every day of my life in the department, but your grandfather is something else. I’m not saying he’s mean. Nobody’s meaner than a street cop. He’s openly racist against just about everybody, but it’s even more than that. It’s not common knowledge, but he’s tied in with some groups—all I can say is that they’re a real boatload of weasels.
“I’m telling you this for a reason. It’s hard to put a dent in somebody who has his own community to support him. You move him an inch and they move him back two inches. Some of his friends are grown-up skinheads, and some are tight-eyed angry professors, but professors of what I couldn’t tell you. I’m going to swear you to secrecy on this. I learned it from our antiterror unit, which isn’t really supposed to exist, but it’s watching Declan Liffey along with some other people like him.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“I just don’t want you to get your hopes up, hon. He may look like a way-past-it old coot, but Declan Liffey is a big frog in a little pond of full-bore racists. He’s one of their mentors. An idea man.”
They ate in silence for a while, Maeve digesting the food more easily than the information. She’d have to Google Declan Liffey on the Internet and see what was there. Gloria Ramirez disposed of another cell call and then made some stilted conversation about school before Maeve decided to ask her about her own heritage.
“Do you have some kind of pretty Native American name, like Swift Eagle or something?”
Gloria became thoughtful, and it took her a while to think this over. “I found out my real name, Wilson, and some stuff about my mom down here in Owens years and years ago. But more recently I went up to my mom’s ancestral territory up around Yerrington, Nevada, and I finally found an old distant aunt. My heavens, Indian women become enormous. All that fry bread and lard. Anyway, she said she’d give me a Paiute name if I really wanted it. I can’t remember it now. I found out later it really meant Did-you-hear-a-coyote-fart? or something like that, and I figure she was just having fun with me.
“Wilson is real, though. My aunt swore I was the great-great-granddaughter of Jack Wilson, who was better known as Wovoka. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No.” A large Mexican family was strolling along the path at the cliff edge. Clearly, by the evidence of the woman’s peasant dress, they were recent immigrants. The father pushed ahead of him a shopping cart pa
dded with blankets that held a boy with an overly round Down syndrome head. The boy grinned and looked around excitedly, but the rest of the family looked grave and indomitable. For the first time the thought struck Maeve that these people were just about as brave as Lewis and Clark lost in the huge West. She thought of the nerve it must have taken for a whole family to cross a dangerous border into a country where they didn’t even know the language, bringing along a child with a disability. It was unimaginable to her.
“Wovoka was a medicine man and farm laborer. He had a vision that led to the Ghost Dance in something like 1890.”
“Wow, I’ve heard about that.”
“Yeah, the dance spread across the Plains like wildfire, even to the Sioux, or the Lakota, as they call themselves, and Sitting Bull. Their world had already been pretty much destroyed by the white man, and most of the buffalo they lived on were dead. Wovoka’s vision said if they did this special dance for three nights and three days, the white men would all go away and the dead braves and the buffalo would come back. They even had special ghost shirts that were supposed to stop bullets.
“Wovoka became a kind of messiah. The government banned the Ghost Dance, of course, since it scared the willies out of the settlers. The Lakota were doing it when the Seventh Cavalry freaked out and slaughtered them all at Wounded Knee. It’s so pathetic, really. Just a kind of hopeless gesture of a people who couldn’t comprehend what was happening to their world and tried to do anything to stop it.”
“I don’t suppose there were many good ideas right then for getting their land back,” Maeve offered.
“No, I guess not.”
All of a sudden Maeve’s attention was drawn to a congregation of pigeons drifting over a section of the patio nearby, hunting for crumbs or whatever pigeons hunted for. Whenever one bird seemed to find something substantial, they would all make a rush for it on some silent signal. All except one bird, who was hopelessly late every time because he was hopping along on a single leg. Coming right on top of the talk about the Ghost Dance, this poor one-legged pigeon just about broke Maeve’s heart.