by John Shannon
“I wouldn’t expose you and Genesee if I thought there was a chance in hell the trouble could find Maeve here.” He explained about the “no no” boy and the fact that the main targets so far had been physical objects—a sunk boat, a wrecked train set. “I’m told the danger is to what I hold dear, but I own so little of any real value. The problem is, I can’t be sure he isn’t targeting families.”
“That’s some profession you got for yourself,” the old man commented finally.
“I just fell into it, really. You can’t be opposed to finding lost kids—whether they’re lost on purpose or not—and getting them out of trouble. And if home is the wrong place to go, I never force them. It’s turned out to be a lot better calling than writing boring copy about how to wire up a microwave relay station.” Jack Liffey smiled, and took a good, slow, deep breath, as he was doing more often now, running on half his cylinders oxygenwise. “It doesn’t always get me into trouble.”
“I confess to a soft spot for people who work in technology. It always seems to me they’re the ones building the world.”
Jack Liffey hadn’t really thought about things like that in a long time. “It’s a great privilege to like your job, and greater still to be able to respect it. I’m thinking of your life’s work, Ban.”
“Not many are called to be in the middle of the struggle, thank the Lord,” Bancroft Davis mused. “It just overtakes you. It frightened me so deeply, so many times, I wouldn’t wish it on a single soul.” He opened and closed his fingers, watching as if surprised that his hand still worked.
“Genesee and her Marxist friends made a fetish out of the need to struggle. But we were never trying to build a world where people had to fight all the time. I was working for a world where everybody could settle down and go to a job in a nice, comfortable car every day and raise a family.” He looked at Jack Liffey.
“I guess I was lucky enough to have some of that. But I couldn’t make it last.”
They talked for a while longer, but Jack Liffey knew he had to leave soon to meet Ken Steelyard. “May I give my regards to Genesee?”
“She’s pretty tired since Ornetta got in. Let me pass her your affections.”
“Maeve isn’t going to be a burden, is she?”
“On the contrary. She can help us with the chores.”
He knew perfectly well Maeve would more than pull her weight. She was a born nurturer and choredoer. He went down the short hall to say good-bye to her and rapped lightly on the door where he heard the murmur of the girls’ voices.
“Password!” Ornetta demanded.
He was taken aback for a moment. “Rhinestone animals,” he replied finally. It had been the title of the first tale she had ever told him, as an eleven-year-old, wide-eyed, storytelling prodigy. Ornetta was a formidable wordspinner.
She opened the door for him. Maeve was cross-legged on one of the twin beds, looking happy.
“You still telling stories?”
“At school we have story night once a month. It’s great—we’re preserving our oral tradition.”
“That’s terrific, Ornetta. I’ve got to go now, but I want you to save a story for me.”
She grinned and took something off a shelf to hand him. It was a little booklet, obviously her school’s literary journal, with the title North Star No. 157. “I write stories now, too. That’s for you.”
He flipped to the contents page and found her name on a story called “How the Mule Learned to Tell Time.”
“Can I get you to autograph it?”
She lifted her chin. “At Dunbar, we don’t be believing in making celebrities out of storytellers,” she told him.
“I’ll be darned,” he said. “Bless you all.”
* * *
He tugged hard against the silver tape but couldn’t move his enfeebled forearms more than a quarter inch from the wooden arms of his desk chair. It was an old wheelless barrel oak chair and he was sorry now that he’d never upgraded to a rolling chair because, while he could still move his feet a little, he couldn’t budge the heavy thing on the carpet. He hoped his asthma didn’t kick in because a big wad of cloth was taped into his mouth and he was already having trouble breathing through his deviated septum.
For half an hour, Declan Liffey’s eyes had not left the apparition that was hard at work across the room, dressed in a dark black jumpsuit like some TV ninja. He tried to memorize what he could. From what little was visible through the holes of the dark balaclava, the man’s skin and eye shape said he was some kind of Oriental. Sneaky, like all of them, of course. There was more than one reason for calling them yellow.
The man had clamped a portable shredder on the lip of the big garage trash barrel and was methodically shredding every paper in the room. It was a cheap shredder, good for only twenty or thirty sheets at a time, so this had been going on for quite some time now—handful after handful of paper buzzing into strip spaghetti. The bottom two filing drawers of the cabinet stood open and denuded now, and the intruder was halfway through the third.
The only duplicate copy of his irreplaceable manuscript was in the top drawer—good, old-fashioned carbons—but, far worse, the original was in plain sight on the desk, where he always kept it. He liked to have it there to add notes as they occurred to him or to have a quick reread of a particularly satisfying section, marked by Post-its. He hadn’t taken his son’s warning seriously enough. He did his best not to let his eyes drift to so many years’ loving work waiting there, vulnerable as a newborn baby: The History of the White Race, complete from the dawn of time, with only the final chapter, “Maladaptive Liberalism,” waiting to be finished.
The intruder seemed to be serene in his long task, collecting handfuls of papers from the drawer without hurry and feeding them deliberately into the buzzing device. That must be how Orientals like him built the Union Pacific across the Sierras, Declan thought, slowly cutting through solid rock at ten thousand feet. Something in their genes suited them to repetitious and tedious work. They were supposed to be smart, but you couldn’t be all that smart if you could tolerate such boredom. And what sort of music or literature had they given to the world? Nothing. It was all copies and imitations, and tinny little cars.
The man got to the top drawer eventually. Declan thrashed and grunted in distress, but nothing could prevent him from stripping off the rubber bands and starting to shred the carbons. The flimsy paper fed easily and, as a result, it didn’t take long to dispose of the only duplicate of his manuscript. He dare not let his eyes drift to the original beside the old L. C. Smith upright typewriter.
What was this all about? he asked himself for the umpteenth time. Or could there be any logic at all to the Oriental mind? Was it just random destructiveness, out of envy of the West’s superiority? If anything, he’d given the yellow races a more positive assessment in his work than most of the others—industrious and self-sacrificing, disciplined, a culture in which instinct presided over reason. The problem was, they were also derivative and uncreative, always half a step behind the evolution of the white race. Declan had no idea whether the man even knew about the years of work he was annihilating.
He was already contemplating the heart-sinking thought of starting over when the gloved hand reached across him and picked up the manuscript on his desk. He could feel tears rolling down his cheeks and onto the duct tape holding his gag. He mumbled and grunted and tossed his head, but there was only methodical concentration from the Asian mechanism at work in his home. The dark figure went at his task, driven by some destructive impulse beyond any thinking of it. Declan saw the first sheets buzz into fine strips and flutter down into the barrel and clamped his eyes shut for the first time. It was like watching a child violated, a child you had nurtured all its life.
Eventually the buzzing stopped, and an abrupt prickle in his nose snapped Declan’s eyes open, some noxious chemical. The ninja figure was emptying gallon plastic jugs of chlorine bleach into the barrel. If there had been the slightest chanc
e of salvaging anything from the shredded strips, it was disappearing into a gluey mass of cellulose and chemistry.
“The Yellow Peril”—the phrase came to him all of a sudden. Jack London and those fellows had been right to worry about the destructive impulses brewing in the East that might sweep over Western civilization and attempt to wipe it out.
The man took a steak knife from the kitchen and drove it through one of those strange playing cards, and then through the side of the plastic trash barrel. At this point the invader addressed himself to the one truly and utterly inexplicable act of the afternoon, something not even the logic of envy and destruction could account for. He emptied the old family china cabinet on the far wall that Declan almost never used, leaving the cloth napkins and old plates and 78-rpm records set out neatly on the carpet. He was obviously very strong, and he braced the cabinet against his hip and lifted the entire thing at an angle by himself, then carried it slowly across the room and out the back door.
The only coherent word Declan Liffey’s mind could form for several minutes was gook. Just fuck all you gooks, he thought.
Steelyard drove him down to Fish Slip in the plainwrap Crown Victoria, and they parked next to a giant mound of seine net under tarps, where Dan Petricich was talking to his father. The fishing boat had risen from the seabed and was tethered to a big crane on the dock and a large, seagoing tug on its far side, while workmen scrambled over its deck. It looked a bit denuded of equipment and pretty damp, but otherwise fairly sound.
“The crime scene folks will look it over now, but I don’t expect much. He didn’t leave any clues on dry land. I don’t see why he would on a boat.”
Steelyard and Jack Liffey sat in the car a while, becalmed by some impulse neither of them could name. In grade school, when both of them had been troubled for various reasons, they had tentatively supported one another, and it seemed to count for something, even though it was more than forty years behind them.
“You getting anywhere with that list?”
“We’ve been promised the names today.”
“I think that old man knows something,” Jack Liffey said.
“Every time I touch on a subject he doesn’t want to talk about, he starts cursing.”
“Do you think you could find your own father?” Jack Liffey asked. “It’s just a hunch, but this seems to be about them, not us.”
“God.” Steelyard gave an inadvertent shudder. “Would I want to find the old man? I don’t know. How about your dad?”
“He won’t talk to me about anything that matters. I’ll make you a deal: you talk to my dad, and if you can find him, I’ll talk to yours. There’s something about that generation that clams up with their own kids.”
“I don’t even know if my dad is alive. But it’s a deal. I’ll talk to Declan.”
“Get specific. Push him hard on some very concrete plane. Don’t let him slip into rattling off abstractions and types. He’s a greased eel in that world. Why don’t you have another try with Ante there?”
“Let me do my job my way, okay?”
“Sorry. I’m trying not to presume on all that history we had.”
Steelyard smiled ruefully. “Thanks, Jack. You were a good friend in a really bad time.”
Finally they got out into the salty, fishy air and walked toward the salvage operation.
Dan Petricich hailed them as they approached.
“Any news on this fucking boatsinker?”
“No. How’s the boat?”
“I think we’re going to save her. I may need a new GPS unit. It didn’t take well to complete immersion. But there’s something else.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jack Liffey could sense Steelyard’s professional curiosity gather steam.
“I went aboard this morning when it was first stabilized and looked around.”
“I’d rather you waited for the crime scene people.” Steelyard glowered.
“Sorry, but listen. Everything was normal except the galley. Some of the plates were missing. The metal ones were still there and some old scratched Melmac, but there were a few old plates that had Chinese designs, real china from home, and they’re just gone. I almost didn’t notice. They were from a set we had for years, and we’d broken so many of them that there was no point trying to use them anymore, so I just demoted them to the boat.”
“Where did they come from?”
“I have no idea. They was just always there, even in my childhood. Dad?”
“Ja?”
“Where’d that old china come from—you know, the one with the blue designs all over?”
He snapped something in their own language.
“He says we’d have to ask my mother. She’s passed on.”
Steelyard scowled at the old man for a moment but finally let it go. “Is the boat stable enough so you could get your work crew off for an hour or so? I know we probably won’t find anything, but I’d like to have our lab people look around before you paint everything and stomp all over it.”
“Sure … okay … sorry.”
Steelyard made a call on his cell and then grabbed Jack Liffey’s sleeve and pulled him back toward the car. After they got in, he said, “The old fuck knows something, doesn’t he? I’ll work on him later. I want to show you something.”
They drove back north on Harbor Boulevard to where they could swing around and get on the Vincent Thomas Bridge to Terminal Island. It was a graceful Rust-Oleum green two-tower suspension bridge, like a smaller version of the Golden Gate, but it hadn’t been there in Jack Liffey’s youth. There had only been the car ferry, and when that stopped running late in the evening and on weekends, there’d been a smaller passenger ferry to bring shift workers home from the canneries. For a nickel each, he and his friends had pushed through the rotating grid gateways on weekends and ridden across the channel as passengers, scampering all over the boat and then hiding under the benches at the far side and riding back for free, over and over. Only much later did he figure out that the crew had certainly known what the kids had been up to and had winked at it all that time.
The fifty-cent tolls had finally paid the bridge off and, unlike the bay bridges up north, the city had dropped the toll completely so it was free both ways now. Steelyard swung off the bridge, past the immense conic hills of coke dust to be shipped to Asia, and on into the old cannery area. The big canneries such as Star-Kist and Chicken of the Sea were gone now, empty shells or razed, their operations moved to American Samoa and other low-wage zones on the Pacific Rim. Some smaller packing plants still seemed to be functioning, but the main part of the island was now devoted to stacks and stacks of shipping containers and an endless bristling of the tall K-cranes that unloaded them.
Steelyard turned down Tuna Avenue where, miraculously enough, there was one cafe that still survived. Then he turned along a broad basin where only a few out-of-town boats were tied up. The only one Jack Liffey could see stern-on had a registry from Seattle. Being down at ground level disoriented him a bit, but he was pretty sure this was the square basin where the Japanese fishing boats had tied up before the war.
Steelyard turned south on a straight street, heading for a big gray building. “That’s the federal prison where Al Capone’s syphilis ate up his mind,” he said.
“I think I knew that once. We joked about it as kids.”
He swung to the left around the prison and showed his badge to a Coast Guard officer who lifted the gate to let them enter.
The base was immaculate. There were a few white frame buildings—so clean they looked like a movie set—a dock with a small cutter all set to go in case any Arabs rowed out into the harbor with bombs, and huge expanses of far-too-green lawn. Steelyard drove as far south as he could along the grass to where a stone seawall rising ten feet out of the water formed the southernmost tip of Terminal Island.
“Come on,” Steelyard said.
They got out and stood at the seawall to look back into the basin, which was surrounded by smal
l icehouses and packing plants, most of which looked shuttered and abandoned.
“This is the way the Japanese fishermen saw it coming back from the sea,” Steelyard said.
“From this far away, it just might still all be there.”
“There’s a plaque now and a monument, but this view is better.”
“Hell, how much of our past is marked by anything at all?” Jack Liffey said.
“Maybe I’d prefer it this way. Blast it all flat. It would match some inner feeling.”
Liffey looked at the man with compassion but said nothing. Wind blustered against their clothing. Steelyard looked back at Jack Liffey with an expression so lost that he could sense some kind of resigned ghost behind the man’s eyes. Steelyard gripped Jack Liffey’s shoulder hard. “This is private, friend. Respect it. I’ve come close to eating my gun three times.”
Dec 19 PM
The old man has been paid in full. Paid a little extra, one could say, because the nature of his writing and his life invited it as much as his family’s long-past offense.
The span of revenge is endless. A palpable weight all my life, even when you carried it yourself, repeated yourself endlessly, your own merit drowning in the tediousness of your rancor.
You were unfortunate. The Hagakure tells us that it is best to pass on through the experience of bitterness when you are young, or your disposition will never settle down. If you become fatigued when you are unhappy, you become useless. You will never be freed from its bondage; the merely appropriate and necessary will dominate what is left of your life. Every one of these men I confront eases the weight a little. I wonder if concluding this task will leave me weightless and substanceless, without a place in the world any longer. Perhaps the space I occupy will cease to be and the world simply close up around where I had been, as if you and I had never existed. What a perfect Bushido death!
Ten
A Haunted House
Jack Liffey sat in Ken Steelyard’s oversized prowl car for the better part of an hour, trying not to feel oppressed by all the angular gadgetry stuck to the dashboard as he listened to the halting, inarticulate revelations that he knew overprocessed and overtight men like Steelyard tended to confess to anyone handy when their egos started collapsing. Seagulls wheeled overhead, and a single pelican dived and dived off the tip of the island. He wasn’t much of a consoler or psychologist, with his own problems crystallizing slowly inside him, but he did his best to hear the cop out. He knew better than to offer a lot of glib consolations, some fatuous “purpose in life,” but he was sorely tempted to offer the man something.