by John Shannon
That got Steelyard’s attention, and he swiveled in the chair to face her. “What? Is he after Ozaki on his own?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” she said. “What do you know about Jack?”
He sighed. “When we were kids, and I was in a bad way, he gave me the benefit of the doubt and nobody else did. That’s worth a lot in my book.”
“What else? In general.”
“He was a brain, but he never seemed to use it for anything in school. I’d guess he did just enough work in the sixth grade to squeak by. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have girlfriends then.” He puffed out a breath. “It’s a pretty restricted world, Glor, the sixth grade. What else can I say? Neither of us liked kickball or dodgeball. We made up games. We hung out down at the harbor sometimes. We caught crawdads in the park. He said my mom was nice when everybody else was secretly calling her a roundheels because she was divorced and dated guys.”
“He told me you didn’t have much contact after grade school.”
The vice detectives Cole and Buchan looked in the door to the Playpen all of a sudden. “Hi, kids,” Cole said. “Oh, nice bra, Sarge.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gloria Ramirez shot back.
“I watch the ads, see how the straps go and shit, you can never be too observant in the police biz. It shows under your blouse there, a Maidenform cross-your-heart. Women with the big boobs have to go for the real substantial bras.”
“Eat this.” She raised her middle finger, and they laughed and walked on. She wondered how they’d have reacted if she’d told them two-thirds of her left breast was a saline bag after the tumor came out, but she’d be damned if she’d tell them anything.
“They’re just assholes, Glor.”
She shrugged them off. “Jack told me you two lost contact.”
“Yeah, we did. Junior high upsets everybody’s applecart. I don’t know about your school, but mine was total hell. From a secure little world with one teacher in the same room all day, we were all of a sudden running from class to class in a big, confusing world, and running alongside what we’d call gangbangers these days, terrified of stepping on the spit-shined shoes of some pachuco in the halls. Jack and I weren’t in the same homeroom or the same classes. Then I ran away for a while, and I got put back a year. I don’t blame him for moving on. I didn’t try very hard to stay in touch either.”
“I blame him,” Gloria said. “He should have watched over you or at least looked you up.”
“He had his own problems by then. Don’t be such a demanding…” Steelyard seemed to get a sudden idea, and she never learned what noun he was about to use. “Or have you got a crush on the guy?”
“I’ve got a crush on his daughter, that’s for sure. I don’t think he knows what a total sweetie she is.”
“He knows. Believe me. But let’s forget all this personal guff. What makes you think Liffey has a direct line on Ozaki?”
“Nothing specific. But I felt it, I’m sure.”
“I don’t like it. If it really is Ozaki, Jack’s not equipped to front the guy, believe me.”
Dan Petricich was asleep, which was noisily apparent from time to time as his rattling snore seemed to shiver the little house. The Sanja P. wasn’t ready to go out again yet, but his wife told Jack Liffey that he was keeping his sleep cycles tuned to night work. Marin was entertaining Jack Liffey at the dining-room table, steeping a pot of tea that waited on an old round Coca-Cola tray. “You were two years ahead of me. I remember you a little. My friend Cheryl said she always wanted to get into your pants, she was such a hot one.” She chuckled.
He remembered Cheryl, all right. “No kidding? I sure wish I’d known. I thought all the cute blondes were unattainable, private property of the Knights.”
“You bought all that crud about the Knights? They weren’t so great just because they were big jocks. A lot of us liked the smart guys ’cause we knew they were going to be something in life.”
“You’d have bet wrong on me. How’s your son?”
“He seems to have gotten over that trouble up on the hill, and he’s back with his buddies. I don’t know why they all have to dress like Zorro.”
“I wouldn’t worry. Some of them are okay, even into good books and poetry. I think they might be like our beatniks.”
She frowned.
“What did you think of the kids who tried to be beats back in high school?”
“I didn’t know any, I don’t think. You want to know, God’s truth, who I liked? I used to get wet just passing Per Houlberg in the halls. God, he was handsome and sweet.”
“He was that exchange student?”
“From Århus, Denmark. To this day I remember every one of the twenty words he ever said to me.”
“There’re always way too many could-have-beens, Marin. I think you’ve got a good son, and I’ve got a good daughter, and that makes up for a lot of the backseat groping we never got to do with the people we thought we might have liked.”
She smiled skeptically. “I suppose so. I could always use a little groping. Dan sleeps the wrong hours.”
If it was an invitation, he wasn’t even going to acknowledge it. Someone once told him that the best seducers of women were the guys who were the best listeners. But did women have some sort of radar for a guy like him who was at loose ends? “I really came to talk to Dan’s dad, Mare.”
“I think Ante’s in the workshop. I’ll look. But you keep in mind that groping thing.”
He smiled emptily, feeling like a fool, as she sashayed out. He’d had almost the same feeling, for just an instant, from Gloria Ramirez. It was just a glance that implied she might be interested, but it filled him with a lot of complex feelings he didn’t need. It was by no means certain that Rebecca was a dead issue, and he continued to harbor a lot of fondness for that high-humored sexy headmistress he’d been with for six months now, even if Maeve had never taken a shine to her.
A big freighter hooted out in the channel, reminding him how close the house was to the water. It was a tonic sound that took him straight back to his youth. The sound had once been second nature to him, like a train whistle, he supposed, to somebody from a midwestern railroad town. It summoned up the tar and rot smell of the harbor, the gentle lift and roll of ships at anchor. But, more especially, it suggested to him that other horn, the deep beeee-oop of the foghorns early in the morning, walking downhill to school into the damp of a fog so thick that your feet disappeared first, then your legs, until you were swallowed whole by the silent wet hush in which you heard only the occasional shooshing of tires.
Every once in a while nostalgia slapped you upside the head and reminded you that no one ever truly adjusted to the fact of leaving childhood behind. He tried to avoid it, but sometimes it sneaked up. Every moment you lived, he thought, was a small step toward your death.
“So, you want to see me?” The stringy old man stood in the arched doorway with a bottle of beer clutched in one clawlike hand.
“Strange as it may seem. Have a seat.”
Ante Petricich set down the beer, and rested the heels of his hands on the table to help himself settle very slowly into a chair, as if his joints needed time to accustom. “Don’t grow old, son. It’s not worth it.”
“Compared to the alternative, it is.”
The old man smiled tightly.
“I want to ask you about the American Legion crowd you hung out with. During the war and right after. I know my granddad was there, and even my dad as a little kid. Draw me a picture of the legion hall.”
“Go see it yourself. The place’s still there today, off Mesa, but it’s changed some. Back then there were a couple of pool tables with sloppy pockets, one with some adhesive tape where Tommy Santchi tried a fancy massé shot. And a snooker table that nobody used. Snooker was too tough; those tiny, rounded pockets kick the little balls right back out.”
Ante Petricich thought things over for a moment, but something kept him going. “We had one of tho
se bright red Coke chests, though it mainly held Brew 102. That was a cheap LA brand, dead these thirty years now. Or Eastside Old Tap Lager, also dead. There was a podium we didn’t use much, except for monthly business meetings. The American flag had a gold fringe. Not many remember that technically that made it a battle flag. One wall was all covered with snipped-off neckties from the men who forgot on casual night, mostly guests who weren’t told the rule so they could be ambushed.
“Guys came and went all the time to socialize, play cards, share a few laughs. Women were strictly verboten, except the cleaning lady, and one girls’ night a year. The back of the place had a partition for the folding chairs and a little kitchenette. Had a nice Seventh Street Garage calendar with Rita Hayworth on it—you know, the one kneeling with the sweater sticking out. That became our pet, stayed up a helluva long time after the year was used up.”
Jack Liffey was amazed that the old man remembered it all in such detail. “Some guys hung out there a lot?”
“Pretty much every night for some, maybe three nights a week for others. It varied. I went to avoid the fights with Sanja when I was in port. The wife, not the boat. She had a tongue on her would bone a tuna with its shock wave.”
“Anybody else a regular?”
“Steelyard’s dad, Morty, but he took off for greener pastures about Korea time. Morty’s wife was more than he wanted to put up with, too, a real nagger. Some other regulars. We had a floating rummy game.”
“Any of these rummy players still in town?”
He could see a shadow of suspicion flit over the old man’s face, but his urge to dip into his memory seemed to override it. “Robbie Zukor. He must’ve tipped the scales at three hundred then. He ran a tire shop on Pacific for years, gave it to his son Petros a long time ago. His son got the business squashed when a big Black-O chain store went in down the street, and he gave up. The son shot himself in the mouth in his car, parked out at Point Fermin. That was a long time ago. Robbie’s on a walker and oxygen now, and just a shadow of himself, but he comes in from time to time, wheeling his green cylinder behind.”
“You’ve got a good memory.”
“Yeah, sure. Funny to think, a lot of those guys, the stuff that’s stored in my head is all that’s left of them now. Robbie and I put a net load of beer bottles in a tidepool up by White’s Point in 1939 and got busy at something and forgot. Went back in 1947 and the labels was gone but the beer was great, crisp and cold. So what’s going to happen to that fact when he and I kick the bucket?”
“I know it now.”
“Son of a bitch, soon your mind is about all there’ll be of old Robbie Zukor.”
“Tell me about those plates that disappeared from your boat.”
That seemed to do it for the confiding. It was like a roll-down grid slamming closed over a shop window. The old man sipped the beer and said nothing, his eyes wandering the room as if looking for escape routes.
“Memory like yours, you must know something about those plates.”
“Who gives a shit about plates? Something Sanja bought at the Newberry’s and broke half of.”
“I don’t think so. There’s a mahogany chest of drawers, too, and an old kitchen chair from Steelyard’s house. What do you know about them?”
“You can kiss my bony ass, Declan’s boy, and get out of my house.”
“That’s a pretty extreme reaction, don’t you think? It’s just going to make me more suspicious. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“You can amscray right now. Suspicion your own asshole, for all I care.” He got up painfully, abandoning about a quarter of his beer, and walked straight out of the room.
At least he had another name now, he thought, Robbie Zukor, and a pretty good indication that something had happened back then that they weren’t too proud of.
Marin came in without her apron, which revealed a plunging sweater, as if to give him a better look, just in case. “Granddad came storming past like a PT boat in a gale warning. Something wrong?”
“He’s a bit sensitive about that china that went AWOL off the boat. Do you know anything about it?”
“I inherited it from the great Sanja herself before she passed, but, one by one, we broke the important stuff like the cereal bowls and I went over to some Melmac from Perry’s Five-and-Dime. I just told Dan to take what was left and use it on the boat. It’s got no value.” “It’s got value to someone.”
Dec 21 AM
A warrior must face a challenge and solve it lightly, make no great effort, seem to use little energy. If you are resolved beforehand, you will behave with uncertainty. That is why it is essential to study all the possibilities ceaselessly. It is unforgiveable that I made no mental preparations for the card I found on my door, a copy of my own, a taunt, a challenge. It caught me by surprise, and thus I could not treat such a grave thing lightly, as it deserved.
Perhaps I have been walking in a daydream. This is a deep failing that I must remedy before facing this man. Still, I must honor the author of this challenge. I must meet him at the time he chooses. A real man does not fear what comes abruptly, but plunges toward it. Action wakes you from dreams.
Fourteen
Bird of Prey
“Gramps, come help us.”
Ornetta had a grin full of mischief as she pulled her head back into the bedroom.
“Are you sure?” Maeve asked.
“He’s okay. You can’t make my gramps’s eyes go pop-the-weasel, not unless you go and open up that whole Pandemonia’s box.”
It took Maeve a moment to register what Ornetta meant, and then she decided pedants were boring, so she let it be. She might even like it better this way. Ornetta’s glory was playing fast and loose with her tales, whatever their roots. Maeve could hear the four rubber tips of his support cane thumping slowly down the hall. “I want to change to bright blue if you’re going to go for lavender.”
“I want the sparkles, too.”
He peered in, and his eyes went straight to their hands. “Whoa! Oh, my lordy heavens!” He labored in and backed the door shut conspiratorially. “Genesee is asleep, but that’s so loud it’s going to wake her up just looking.”
They both wore three-inch acrylic fingernails that Maeve had picked up on a whim in a nail salon in a walk over to Vermont, and, after gluing them on, they’d discovered that the nails themselves handicapped them so badly that they could barely help one another paint them.
“Gramps, we need your help with the color. We can’t seem to hold the brush right.”
“Well, I got to sit down for this. I sure hope those aren’t permanent.” He settled slowly into the old stuffed chair with the brown Roy Rogers throw over it, lassos and horse heads and corral fences. Maeve guessed this had been his son’s room at one time. His son was dead now—something her own father had discovered almost two years earlier—killed along with his white girlfriend by a group of organized bigots.
“No, sir,” Maeve said. “They come off. It’s just dress-up.”
“Okay, who’s up?”
“You go, girl,” Maeve offered.
Ornetta knelt in front of him and handed him the lavender nail polish bottle and the spangles. “When it’s still wet, you got to sprinkle on the gold.”
“This must be what vampires look like. Don’t you go biting me now.”
“I don’t got to bite you to hoodoo you, Gramps,” Ornetta said. “I just write your name on a piece of paper eleven times and then stick a candle on the paper and when the candle burn down and start to take the paper, your troubles goin’ to begin.”
“Whoa, where did you get that from?”
“A girl at school from down in the delta, she full of the old stuff. It don’t work, though. I tried it on that man that said the bad words to you at the little store and he still okay.”
Bancroft Davis smiled. “Maybe you gave him a slow liver disease.”
“Hope so.”
“Hold still now, girl. My hand is none too steady.” He f
inished one nail and held an open palm under it as he gently tapped the shaker to spread glitter over the paint. “You’re right, it looks great. For dress-up,” he qualified.
Maeve stared at his leathery-looking hands and how gently he held Ornetta’s. She skootched closer and sat cross-legged, waiting her turn.
“Mr. Bancroft, my dad told me you were a hero during Freedom Summer down in Mississippi.”
He smiled some kind of private smile. She expected a modest disavowal, but he was often hard to predict.
“Your dad is exactly right, girl,” Bancroft Davis said without a hint of irony. “I was a big hero, big as they come.”
He let it sit for a moment as both girls locked their eyes on him.
“You got to be sure what you think a hero is, though, you two hero-worshipers. There’s all kinds, some born brave as a tiger and some just too scared to run away. Some people just scared to have people see them run away. But, you know, what’s most important, you got to have the good fortune, be standing in the right place when the big bad wolf start hassling the little pig.”
“I don’t follow you,” Maeve said.
“We argued round and round all the time about this in SNCC. Some of us said if Mr. Lincoln hadn’t signed the Emancipation Proclamation, somebody else would have come along to do it. And I guess that’s true, a little. Slavery was going to be stopped sooner or later, it was just so wrong and evil. But in 1860, it was only forty years to go to the twentieth century. Think of that. Only forty years. Suppose the might-a-been just for a minute. No Mr. Lincoln, and the twentieth century start up with people inventing cars and airplanes while America is still the only country in the world caught in slavetime.” He shook his head.
“People aren’t interchangeable, not a bit. You can’t go and put Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones in that chair and expect to get Mr. Lincoln. He was right there when he was needed, and we’re all lucky for it. Mr. Lincoln went and stood up, just like a lot of boys and girls did in 1963, a hundred years later.”
He finished another nail and carefully sparkled it, gripping his pink tongue hard in his teeth while he worked.