by John Shannon
He stroked her head, the touch soothing him probably much more than her.
“My car was parked in this really complicated city and I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“I think that’s probably a common dream for a new car owner. Or anybody with a sense of responsibility. There’s something cooking. I was afraid it might overdo.”
“My digital wristwatch will wake me”—she glanced at it—“in five minutes.”
He let her shake herself awake for a moment, her eyes becoming progressively less glassy. “I thought you were going to stay over with Ornetta,” he said.
“I’ll go back tonight, but I asked somebody to dinner and I could hardly cook at their house.”
“Ornetta’s coming?”
“Not exactly. There’s plenty for you, don’t worry. You’re part of the deal.”
“Deal? My presence at dinner has been traded for a washed-up southpaw and two future draft choices?”
She grinned. “Exactly. It’s Gloria Ramirez. You know, she’s really very nice.”
His eyes narrowed as he realized what she was up to. “Don’t you think it’s a bit soon to be matchmaking?”
“What did Rebecca’s letter say?”
“None of your business. You should have steamed it open, if it worries you so much. I suppose it’s too late to do anything about this dinner.”
“Uh-huh.”
He gave in to his manufactured fate. “What are you cooking?”
“There’s water for pasta. It’s the round tube type.”
“Penne is the smaller one; rigatoni is bigger.”
“Penne. I want to make that thing you taught me with the chicken and mint and Greek olives and stuff.”
“Then I better break out a good red wine.”
“You have wine?”
“It’s from prehistory.” He meant from before he quit drinking. “It ought to be pretty well aged. I don’t know how well ordinary Chianti ages in the bottle, but she can find out.”
“Can I try some?”
He thought a moment. “Half a glass. They do it in Europe, at least in France. I think they water it a bit for kids, but they say it stops a lot of binge drinking later on if you get used to being civilized when you’re young.”
“Will you be joining us?”
“I don’t think so, but don’t let it worry you.” It was partially the drinking that had broken up the marriage to Maeve’s mom, after he’d been laid off from his last good job. Staying off the booze was one of the ways he proved his own willpower to himself—and atoned a bit for what had led to the breakup.
Maeve’s wrist alarm went off with an annoying little burr, and she levered herself up and hurried to the kitchen. He went into the back and took a shower, without quite articulating to himself why. He had liked Gloria Ramirez well enough, but anything more than a casual friendship right now was ridiculous, especially since she was a cop. He had no intention of telling her or Steelyard about meeting Joe Ozaki.
“I just learned about the Ghost Dance a few years ago,” she said. “It’s so strange it’s hard to believe it.”
Jack Liffey held out the wine bottle and raised his eyebrows. She nodded, so he refilled her glass. He came close to pouring a little into his empty water glass but resisted. The rich red sloshing liquid looked awfully inviting to him. Maeve had done a fine job on the pasta and salad, and he noticed that she was watching them make these near-flirtatious contacts across the ruins of the dinner, watching with a kind of astuteness beyond her years.
“I’m surprised you hadn’t heard of it,” Jack Liffey said. “But you know, in case it makes you feel uneasy about your relatives, there are other places and other times where people went gaga under the same pressures.”
“What do you mean?”
She’d just told him about Wovoka, possibly her great-uncle, a bit mournfully inebriated, apologizing to Maeve for making her listen to the story another time. Almost two-thirds of the Chianti bottle was gone, but Maeve had only had a few sips. It was hard for him to keep his eyes off the plunging loose neckline of Gloria Ramirez’s blouse, which seemed designed to invite an exploratory hand. Every time she moved, another angle of cleavage was revealed.
“I read this in anthropology back in college so I’m a little hazy on the facts,” Jack Liffey said. “It was before Wovoka, though, I’m sure. But it was almost exactly the same situation—here was a traditional society that, all of a sudden, found itself facing these damned confident, predatory Europeans who had dropped in on them out of the blue with guns and new ways of life. This was in southern Africa—the Xhosa people fighting the British and the Boers to hold onto their land. By this time they’d been crushed in a whole series of wars, spears against guns, and their spirit was pretty much broken. Just like the Sioux, or the Paiute, if you like.
“With the Xhosa it was a young girl who had the vision. She told her father that spirits had instructed them to kill all their cattle and burn every last grain of their crops, and the whites would go away. Then the cattle would come back fatter than ever and the crops would reappear. Like the buffalo.”
Jack Liffey’s hand drifted to the wine bottle and he finally did pour himself half a glass. At his nearest reckoning, he’d had only two sips in the past seven years. He saw Maeve’s eagle eye on his glass, so he let it sit just to spite her supposed grasp of his weakening resolve under the assault of so much latent emotion.
“So the Xhosa leaders announced what the spirits had said, and everyone did what was demanded: they slaughtered their animals and burned all their food stores. Then they built large new corrals to hold the cattle that would reappear, and granaries for the crops that would spring up. It became known as the Great Xhosa Delusion. Something like fifty thousand of them died of starvation that winter, waiting, and the rest were forced to drift helplessly to the cities on the coast or to the new Boer farms to beg for work.”
Gloria nodded sadly. “Sounds like the same thing; you’re right.”
He did take a sip of the wine. It hadn’t aged well in the bottle, but it still tasted wonderful, tannin and all. He refused to meet Maeve’s eyes. He took a whole gulp and the buzz was almost instantaneous, though it was probably just his imagination. He felt relaxed, strong, wise.
She had another sip, too, which dribbled a little onto her chin.
Then Maeve was stirring. “Dad, could you do the dishes? I promised Genesee I’d be back before nine.”
This was a little too obvious. “How much wine did you have?”
“Two swallows. I didn’t really like it. I bet I can pass any roadside test you set me.” She showed her glass and it was hardly touched. Then she stood up and remained very still, cocked her head back, and with her eyes closed, bent her elbow like a hinge to touch the tip of her nose precisely with one finger. Probably something she’d seen on Cops.
“I’ll clean up,” Jack Liffey said.
“I’ll help, for heaven’s sake,” Gloria said, and Maeve kissed both of them and was gone before anybody could blink.
They both found themselves staring at the closed door. Maeve’s departure had left a big hole in the air in the room, and they hadn’t realized how changed it would leave things between them when she was gone. “You know what she’s up to, of course,” Jack Liffey said.
“But you’re already with someone.”
“Not exactly. That seems to have collapsed. And Maeve never liked her, anyway. ‘Too snobbish.’ ” He smiled without meeting her eyes. He was afraid to look at her. “Maeve likes people who are down-to-earth. Like you.”
He reached for his wineglass, but she laid her palm over it. “Why don’t you stop now, Jack.” It was ambiguous what she meant. He let go of the glass.
“I don’t really need it, I don’t really want it,” he said. “I think I want you.”
“If you’re going to make love to me, I don’t want it to be the wine.”
“Hey, what about you? You’re half lit.” He eyed the bottle, and it was
just about gone. “Maybe I’ll figure you only like me when you’ve had a snootful.”
“Oh, let’s stop this.” She unbuttoned the remaining buttons at the bottom of the vaguely Indian blouse. When it came open he was astonished to see that she wasn’t wearing a brassiere. He wondered if she’d had implants. The brown nipples were like doorbells, and he wanted to ring them both.
“Bedroom,” he said. “But no handcuffs, Sergeant.”
“No, no handcuffs. If you’re good.”
Ken Steelyard didn’t bother bagging the knife and playing card, not yet. They had become so commonplace, and he already knew there’d be no prints. The card was the jack, the next one in the malicious sequence—assuming the nine would ever turn up—and it was stuck into a hatch-cover table that Dick Lammerlaw had painted with ultra-shiny epoxy. It fit right in with all the hand-me-down and beach-combed furniture that crowded the small apartment. The knife was one of the old man’s own steak knives, as if the perp were running out of his own knives, or just growing less interested in being outrageous.
“Think back to the forties,” Steelyard suggested. “How old are you now?”
“Seventy-nine.”
“So you were in town then.”
Dick Lammerlaw had a clubfoot in one of those big black shoes you couldn’t miss, so he’d obviously been exempt from the draft.
“Yeah, look, I heard about this business. There’s some Jap on the rampage with old grievances.”
“It’s December 7, 1941, Dick. Pearl Harbor day for everybody but the first George Bush. What were you up to?”
“I worked at San Pedro Moving and Storage. It’s Bekins now, the one off Beacon Street. I was just an assistant, kept the records.”
“What a surprise.”
“We wasn’t so responsible back then, I admit, but you can’t touch me for what we done. Statue of limitations has ran out, you know.”
“It’s ‘statute,’ bright boy, and I think you’ve just had a rude message from somebody who doesn’t recognize them. How many of the internees did you rip off?”
A large tabby cat hobbled into the room, spotted Steelyard, and made a wide circuit to get to the sofa where Lammerlaw sat. Something was wrong with the cat, and as it jumped up and settled, Steelyard finally saw what it was. There were six toes on each paw, so it looked like it was wearing catcher’s mitts. Seeing the cat gave him a trifle more compassion for Lammerlaw, whose own deformity so far hadn’t pushed any sympathy buttons.
“Most of them didn’t have no money to store their stuff. They mostly sold their goods for peanuts to all them vultures that drove out there to the island in pickup trucks. Jews and dagos.”
“As opposed to the vultures who helped themselves to the storage. You took off two, three families? Or was it more?”
“Just two. And one never came back. You got to understand, things was different then. It was a big open warehouse, and we stacked things sky high in piles and put a name tag on each pile.”
“Frank Ozaki was the one who came back, right?”
He nodded.
“What did you get out of it?”
He looked around dubiously. “I don’t even have none of it no more. There was a stuffed chair, but it give out years ago and went to Goodwill. A Chinesey table my wife took when she left me. There’s a big cookpot I still got, one of those big blue enamel ones. It was too big for any meal for one guy and I got sick of it, so it’s in the garage with a bunch of old tools and shit in it. He can have it back, all I care.”
“I think it’s a little late for that, but you might try putting it out on the porch with a big note on it, ‘Sorry, better luck next war.’ He just might not kill your cat.”
The man glanced down protectively at the tabby and let a hand drift to scratch its ears. “What do you mean?”
“He seems to go after the things people love the most. Assuming you care for this beast.”
“Six-pack. Sure. Him and me are brothers in diversity.” He bent and gathered the limp cat onto his lap.
Diversity, Steelyard thought. Dick Lammerlaw was not going to win any quiz shows. Steelyard questioned him a while longer, but he already knew the answers. Frank Ozaki had come for his possessions in 1945, after they’d released the last of the “no no” boys from Tule Lake up north. Sorry, was what he’d been told at San Pedro Storage. But he didn’t just walk away. He came back at them for years with angry visits, demands, lawsuits real and threatened. He made the connection to all the layabouts from the American Legion and plagued the legion hall, too.
Lammerlaw hadn’t been the clerk on duty the day Frank Ozaki signed the goods in, so he told him he didn’t know a thing. Must have been this other guy—these ten other guys, all long gone by 1945. Patriots, guys who went off to the war, unlike some.
“You dumb bunny, you think Ozaki couldn’t look in your window and see his own stuff in your living room?”
“What’s he going to do? Some Jap? Nobody’d listen to him no matter what he did. Judges just sent him packing, there was no proof.”
“Well, his son isn’t going away, either. He’s declared another world war against you bright boys.”
Fear entered Lammerlaw’s eyes, and he clutched the docile cat to his chest with both arms. “You got to protect me.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’ll do my best to protect the cat.”
He was spooned up against her brown nakedness in the rumpled bed, and he could tell by her breathing that she was awake.
“Glor.”
“Um-hmm.”
“You’re not upset?”
“Let’s not talk about it right now, Jack. Okay?”
“It was okay, wasn’t it?”
She wriggled around to face him, and just feeling so much of her flopping against him started arousing him again.
“Men always think it’s something about the sex. It was splendid, okay? You were very considerate. I have plenty of problems, apart from you, to occupy me.”
“I understand. If I can help with any of it, I want to.”
Her hand came out and rested softly against his cheek. “That’s sweet of you, but I might just break your back with my problems. I just don’t come easy. I’m a cop twenty-four hours a day. I’m an orphan. My plumbing is stripped out like an old house. One of these breasts, this one”—she pointed to the left one—“is completely rebuilt. And I’m an Indian, and I just plain don’t have a clue how to be who I am.”
Dec 23
I fear he may not be a worthy enemy after all. This is regrettable. I wish I could wrench the great warriors of the 17th century back from wherever they have gone, Lord Katsushige or Samurai Doken or Kazuma, and test myself against one of them. I cannot imagine such lack of discipline: his first act after studying the Hagakure is to weaken himself with sex, and with a policewoman at that. He should know it is time to grit his teeth and prepare. I gave him fair warning. I only hope he still has hidden places within his heart that contain the right material. Otherwise I have chosen the wrong bird. And when a hawk has chosen his bird, he has no eyes for any other birds that flock around. He dives straight and true.
Seventeen
Innocence
As he brewed the coffee and put in the toast he could hear the shower running and eventually she came out wearing nothing but one of his dress shirts, a getup he’d always found profoundly sexy. Her hair was wrapped up in a frayed blue towel dug off the bottom of his pile.
“Maeve stocks us with frozen waffles, English muffins, Pop-Tarts, and a few other overprocessed breakfast foods, so I can do better than toast and coffee.”
“Uh-uh. Toast. Strong coffee with a little honey. That’s it.”
“Your wish is my command.”
“Really? Go out and wash and wax my RAV-4.”
He chuckled. “If you’ll stay in that shirt all day, I will.” He loved the way it rode peekaboo above her hips as she sat. He gave her a cup of coffee, and some honey in a little plastic bottle shaped like a bear.
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br /> “I’ve got to go in and help Ken this afternoon. I already feel guilty as sin being on half time.”
“I hope you don’t feel guilty about this?”
“You mean sleeping with you? Not a chance.”
She stirred around the parts of the Times on the table, selecting the California section, which used to be called the Metro.
“It’s always interesting to see which part someone goes for,” he said.
“Yeah, I realize most of the cop business is in here. But you’ll never guess what I like it for.” She flipped it open, causing the shirt-tail to ride up even higher, and he had to busy himself with another cup of coffee to keep from getting aroused.
“Not the editorials?” he said dubiously.
“The letters. I love to read all those forlorn voices coming out of the ether—angry, pained, hurt voices. They’re always going on passionately about things the rest of us forget or just take for granted. It’s like all the dark corners of the city talking back.”
“Or like the old guy downtown broadcasting his warnings about flying saucers into an upside-down ketchup bottle.”
She shrugged. “You’ve got to respect the human voice.”
“How come you’re a cop?” He sipped his coffee with appreciation. The darkest dark roast possible, like beans rescued from a factory fire, but not before the factory itself was a dead loss.
“How come anybody’s anything? No, that deserves an answer. I was having a hard time when I was a teen, and it was a cop who dragged me out of it. It seemed to me—in theory, anyway—that cops were there to help. I know there’s a lot the other way.”
He got another piece of toast and sat facing her.
“I’ll bet you reach for the sports section first,” she challenged.
He laughed. “Say that again when you know me better.”
This was always one of the best parts, he thought. Getting to know someone new, unaware yet of all their foibles and tales, what they liked in life, what they liked in bed, all the sunny promise of a summer romance. On the other hand, it might be nice if he could settle on one person and not have to go through this periodically. But it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried.