by John Shannon
A woman in a Volvo looked at the two men gesturing wildly at her car and quickly looked away as she accelerated.
Jack Liffey walked back to his car with a smile of satisfaction. He sat on the front fender to wait for Faye as the old man carried on whooping and gesturing at the traffic. The night was warm and airless and Jack Liffey smelled musk and fruit on the air, then realized it was steaming off his own forehead. He wiped a sleeve across the perfume brand. Luckily it wasn’t a homeless woman in the planter, he thought. He’d have had to marry her.
Faye Mardesich finally came out carrying a paperback book. She heard the commotion and watched the old man cursing and waving his middle fingers at the street.
“I taught him that,” Jack Liffey said equably.
She caught a whiff of something and leaned closer to him, sniffing the air. “You smell like condensed sex. Just add hot water.”
He rubbed again. “It’ll do until the real thing comes along. What have you bought?”
They got into the car and shut out the old man’s howling. Jack Liffey glanced at the title of the book she held. Craft and Rite, a misty drawing of Stonehenge on the cover.
She scowled. “I thought it might tell me something about them, but it probably won’t. Do you ever feel there’s too much belief in the air? It’s like a big toxic spill of wishes and notions. The bottom falls out of Pandora’s box and everybody’s grabbed onto something, just whatever fell nearby, and everybody’s waving these notions at each other like that old wino until you can’t hear yourself think.”
“We’ve probably had enough detecting for one night,” he said, and he U-turned back up Lankersheim. He waved at the old man as he passed. The old man gave him the finger with both hands.
4
IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME NOW
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT, AND AS USUAL A FEW KIDS WERE still hanging out in the courtyard, sitting on the retaining walls and laughing languidly in the blood-warm night as one of them bounced a basketball. The air was so heavy even the feathery bottlebrushes behind them were motionless. He’d seen most of these kids around but he didn’t know any of them by name.
“’S up,” one of them offered as he passed, a rare tribute to an old white guy.
“Not much,” he said. He could have come up with a swifter reply, but it might have been seen as getting competitive and there was no percentage in that.
“A couple a your homies was in to visit, cuz.”
He stopped. “You mean into my house?”
“Uh-huh. Your Mexican lady let them in.”
His blood froze. “When was this?”
“Couple hours, it didn’t look like nothing.”
“Did one of them have red hair?”
“Ye-eah. Like a real enough jarhead.”
“Thanks.”
Jack Liffey slipped into his alcove and listened. No dog, no radio, just the steady thut-thut of the basketball behind him and a car alarm cycling through its warnings far away. He thought of going back to ask if any of the boys was packing, but there wasn’t much chance they’d own up to it.
He stared glumly at his front door. This was the second time this week he’d come home on something unexpected, and the odds were bound to get him sooner or later. Once again he noted that it was easier to keep your routine and risk death than make a scene. He knew perfectly well you had to live with the results when things didn’t go right, that was the deal.
He let himself in and immediately heard a scrabbling from the back, like a playing card in the spokes. A light was on in the bedroom.
“Mar,” he called.
The bike speeded up and became erratic, dog claws on a door.
“Shut up, Loco, I’ll get to you.”
For some reason, his Mennen Speed Stick lay on the floor of the hallway with its plastic cap off and crushed underfoot.
“Mar!” he called again.
The claws grew frantic on the closed bathroom door as he eased down the hall toward where the light was on. He pushed the door open slowly to see Marlena on the floor with her back against the bed, her wrists handcuffed awkwardly beside her to the bed frame. She was gagged with silver duct tape and what looked like a wad of his favorite blue shirt. There was shock in her eyes and something was wrong with her complexion.
The instant he pulled off the gag, an exhaled sob set her heaving and bucking and made whatever she was trying to say incomprehensible. He clasped her and held on through the worst of the ride, wriggling himself around to find a comfortable position.
“Shhh, shhh, Marlena. It’s okay now. I’m here. Shh.”
He hadn’t checked the living room or the closets but she wasn’t behaving like someone with assailants still in the house. He was overwhelmed by a sicky-sweet smell and then he saw they had swabbed his deodorant all over her face. When he pulled back a little, he smelled cigarette smoke and ash, too, and he saw someone had smoked one of the cigarettes that he left lying around and stubbed it out into the carpet. He hadn’t touched tobacco for years, but he left cigarettes around because he enjoyed the ascetic buzz he got out of beating the temptation day after day.
“Jack, it was horrible! They said they were friends. I opened up for them.” He wiped gently at her face with the shirt that had been used to gag her. Little flakes and chunks from the Speed Stick clung to her cheeks.
“It’s okay. They’re gone.”
“How did you make them so mad?” she asked, and there was an undertow of blame, as if he’d purposely set them on her.
“I don’t know.”
“They said you do,” she complained. “They said to leave it alone.”
They always say that, he thought. “I don’t know who they were, Mar. Really. Did they say anything else?”
“Only a foreign name, Ethel something I think. The one with red hair said it to the other one.”
“Did they hurt you?”
She nodded, then shook her head as if overcome by the strictest of scruples. “It was more like making fun of me.”
“Why did they use the deodorant?”
“I don’t know. They pushed it against me hard. They joked about my breasts and kept asking if they were real or chemicals but they didn’t do nothing to me but touch.”
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “We’ve got to get those cuffs off.”
He kept his tools in a storage closet off his patio. He unlocked the door and dug around in the mess until he came up with a big red bolt cutter with three-foot arms. It made short work of padlocks and would probably work on the handcuffs, though he’d noticed they were a good pair of Peerless, the kind the police used.
Loco was still scratching away when he came back. The inside of the bathroom door would be a mess, he thought, but dogs had to wait. That was just the way it was. He didn’t have time to deal with the displaced aggression that opening the door would unleash.
“Lean forward, Mar.”
One powerful bite of the bolt cutter severed the three-link chain between the cuffs, and she brought her arms around front and slumped to one side.
“Let’s see a wrist.”
It was a good-quality stainless steel and wouldn’t give up without a fight. They’d snugged it tight and he was a bit worried the loop might deform and cut her when it broke.
“I’m scared.”
He picked a point of attack and rotated the cuff so the hinge point was away from her wrist artery. Resting one arm of the bolt cutter on the floor, he put all his weight on the other arm and suddenly the tempered jaws bit through the cuff with an audible clack and the metal fell away. She wasn’t as lucky on the second one and ended up with a blood blister where a bit of skin was pinched.
She fell against him to hug his neck. “I want you to know they didn’t spoil me.”
“Mar—”
“No. They didn’t, they just touched me.”
“Mar, nobody can spoil anybody. If one of those jerks picked up…” He looked around and saw a Wallace Stegner on his nigh
t table. “Say that book. It’s a good book. If he sat there and read it, it wouldn’t spoil the book. I’d still like it.”
“I’m not a book. I know how men think. My father sent me away when a guy spoiled me the first time.”
“I know that story, but you don’t begin to know how I think.” And he didn’t really want to deal with her sad story just then. Her father was a poor disoriented immigrant who’d grown up in a Sonoran village and couldn’t really handle a world that was so much more complicated than his own father’s farm, and he had driven her out of the family bungalow in Baldwin Park at fifteen and straight back to the biker who’d already taken what he could get, and then the biker had passed her around to his friends, and she’d learned to live with a particularly gruesome form of self-loathing until a cousin had taken her in and started restoring her to the human race. Jack Liffey took her face in both his hands. “What you have inside you can’t ever be spoiled. That’s the absolute truth.”
She took his hand and placed it against her breast.
“Do you still want me?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
“Come to my house tonight. I can’t stay here.”
He wasn’t really in the mood, but he could see it was going to happen, whatever he wanted, so he worked up enough enthusiasm to kiss her, and she kissed back hungrily.
“As soon as we feed Loco.”
“WHAT you laughing at?”
He pointed. He’d burst out laughing the moment he read it, lit by the orange street lamp at the corner. Neat sans serif lettering on the back of the bench spelled out IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME NOW. He didn’t know whether it was political commentary on the homeless by one of the city’s guerrilla artists, or just a teasing ad ploy for something incongruous, like the billboards an L.A. magazine had once put up hawking drive-through high colonics. A lot of people had taken them seriously, trying to figure how it was done.
“I don’t understand.” She whisked her lap, as if she’d spilled ashes on her skirt.
“It’s just the absurdity, I guess.”
“You can’t live on a bus bench,” she complained.
People try, he thought. “No, you can’t, you’re right.” He liked her quite a lot most of the time, but their worlds didn’t overlap by much and that made it hard sometimes. “How’s your wrist?”
“It hurts.” She was aggrieved for some reason, and it made him feel helplessly insensitive.
HE walked gingerly, trying not to bump into a dog of some kind, the big flocked red ones on the floor from TJ, little porcelain poodles on the Danish Modern coffee table, plastic head-bobbing toys meant for the car window, stuffed-rag dalmatians, and a set of handblown glass Afghans like the ones you saw made at the crafts fair. Marlena liked dogs. There was even a real one, of sorts, a mewling Mexican hairless named Fidel. There had been three, but Raul had got distemper because his shots hadn’t taken for some reason and Che had been run over by a Sparkletts truck.
Jack Liffey was happy he was wearing black shoes. The randy little Fidel invariably tried to mount his brown shoes.
“Would you get yourself some ginger ale, Jackito. I got to get ready some.”
“Hi, there, Comrade,” he said to Fidel, who was panting a mile a minute and eyeing his shoes, apparently unconvinced of their color. The dog yipped once and backed off all of a sudden, probably getting a whiff of Loco. The minute Marlena left the room, the dog went up to her sofa, lifted a leg, and sprayed it with a few drops, then fixed Jack Liffey with a stare, as if daring him to rat. “Whoa, little fella. Looks like you and I have something in common.” It was a point of honor in his life to challenge only what could hurt him, and he could see a bit of that ethos in the tiny canine, too, and he liked the dog a lot better for it.
“Never forget that dog is god spelled backward,” he said equably.
He bent to pet the dog, but Fidel yipped once and hurried off. Jack Liffey found a big ginger ale in the fridge and some ice and poured one for her, too. A memory of exquisite lovemaking was beginning to work on him. She still carried a lot of guilt about her sexuality, and she’d usually slam one foot all the way down on the gas and keep the other hard on the brake, and that made it all spectacular, somehow.
He leafed through a big picture book on dogs on the coffee table and learned that two dogs with well-defined territories would exhibit what was called “agonistic behavior” when they met on their boundaries. They’d turn their flanks to one another, offering neither to fight nor flee, a kind of posture of armed truce that entailed the least likelihood of attack. He wondered if it was possible for him to work out some kind of agonistic deal with fate. He’d like to approach the front door of his condo without worrying who had been there, or was still there, and once in a while he’d like to pass a dark doorway without feeling compelled to shout a challenge into the darkness.
She came in wearing mesh nylons, a black garter belt, some kind of complex semitransparent merry widow arrangement on top, and nothing else. “You like me?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. It was all so earnest and calculated that he had a little trouble not being amused.
“Is this equipment all new?”
“I been keeping it for you. It’s not for nobody else.”
Luckily his tenderness took over and he started getting aroused as she cupped the underside of her breasts.
“You want me to do a strip for you? I do anything you want for you, Jackito.”
“That’s very sweet,” he said. He felt stupid and confused and a little alarmed by her intensity, but they were both grown-ups, and if he didn’t feel completely and overwhelmingly in love, she wasn’t asking him for that. There it is, he thought—he could confront a scruple and dispose of it as decisively as anyone.
“I guess I’d better change my brand of deodorant,” he said. He sat up on the edge of the four-poster bed and pulled on a T-shirt, but he could see she wasn’t ready for jokes about what had happened to her. He felt a need to shift gears. He wanted to shake the feeling that he had just taken advantage of a woman he didn’t quite love enough, at least in the big scheme of things. But you never got to live in the big scheme of things, he thought. You lived in the right now, and the right now was always full of adjustments, and properly adjusted, he did like Marlena quite a lot.
He touched her cheek and she pressed into his palm.
“You said they used a name like Ethel.”
“Uh-huh. It was strange, maybe it wasn’t a name.”
“Would you remember if you heard it again?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe Ethel Somebody is the Aimee Semple McPherson of her day. She’s founded one of these new religions that we’re all drowning in,” he said, and saying it changed something, left him feeling as if he was falling through a crust into a different place and being forced to notice the difference.
“They scared me.”
“I don’t know what it was all about, Mar.”
HE parked up the road from the big yellow toyland of the Theodelphian Elect and watched a guy in cowboy black, like Johnny Cash or Roy Orbison, including the ten-gallon hat, walking along Melrose digging coins out of the fringed leather pouch at his waist and feeding the parking meters. Meter after meter he went, like Millet’s Sower, seeding each one with a little pivot at the waist, a poke with a quarter, a twist of the knob, and then on to the next. Jack Liffey had heard of him, Johnny Meterman, bane of the parking enforcement corporation, but he’d always thought he was a myth. Go go go, he rooted. It made perfect sense, and it was one of the few vocations he’d ever seen that did.
“You wanted to be dealt in,” he said to Faye Mardesich. “All you have to do is go in the reception center and tell them you’re lost and you want to be found. You can play lost, can’t you?”
She started laughing, stepped it up a pitch, and then had a little trouble climbing off. “How little you know, tough guy.”
“You think I’m a tough guy?”
; “Ooo-la-la. Don’t disabuse me, all right? I need that strength. Jack, I am lost. It’s just that other women my age go bats and don’t even know it’s happening until some bartender shakes them awake at two A.M. YOU know what it means to be supported and have nothing of your own? I am the original soccer mom, and now Jimmy doesn’t even need me. I didn’t used to be stupid, I used to think I was smarter than Milo, but your brain goes to mush if you don’t use it.”
She looked at her hands for a bit. He didn’t really want to hear this, but she was paying.
“One by one, all the things you’re supposed to get comfort from fail you. It’s like being in a peewee-league version of Chekhov. Everybody’s unhappy and nobody gets what they want and nobody knows what’s going on.”
“Nobody ever gets just what they want, Faye.”
“Yeah, I know. Some people do okay settling for third or fourth best. Maybe that’s all wisdom is.”
A yellow Cadillac pulled up and turned in, its bow wave opening a channel among the kids in the yellow cadet suits who were flowing into the courtyard of the Theodelphian compound. The windows were smoked.
“You know what starts getting you, Mr. Tough Guy? It’s when the box boys at the supermarket don’t even look at you anymore. You’re not even worth a mental undressing.”
She seemed plenty tough and self-possessed to him.
“So, yeah, I can play like I’m lost.”
“I’m convinced. If you turn out to want to stay in that place until light rays come out of your eyes, just give me a sign and I’ll stay out of it.”
She snorted. “The day I believe in crap like that you can tie my tail to the old oak tree.”
The marquee had changed and now said: “THE SCIENCE OF THE THIRD HEAVEN BEGINS WHERE MATERIAL SCIENCE LEAVES OFF.” —DL. He wondered if they changed the sign every day, and then he wondered what had gone wrong with the first two heavens.
“There’s a coffee shop up on Santa Monica. Wingo’s. I’ll meet you there at noon. That ought to give you time to find out what they do with new initiates.”
“Are you going in, too?”
“You could say that.”