The Poison Sky

by John Shannon

  He cruised slowly down the winding access roads. Here and there dusty pads off to the side held a handful of cars and Latino families cooking at portable barbecues or playing soccer. Art Castro drove a big silver Lexus but Jack Liffey guessed he’d have some sort of beat-up agency panel van for surveillances like this. The Lexus would stand out here like a gorilla in church. He smiled, thinking of his woeful Concord with its flapping plastic, which would fit right in.

  On one of the parking pads about fifty Asians of all ages were standing under a banner with a big cross and a lot of Korean script as they belted out Christian hymns. He wondered who on earth Art Castro was spying on out here.

  And there there it was, a gray Ford Econoline so old the driver’s seat was forward of the front axle, the only American van ever made that was as dangerous to drive as a Volkswagen. MANNY’S SEWER-ROOTER, it said on the side and it even had a pipe clamp on the hindquarter as window dressing, but it was backed up to the edge of the parking pad so the rear windows would look out over the chaparral to the west and Jack Liffey couldn’t think of a single rational reason to go to the trouble of backing that van into the parking slot except for the view.

  He parked in front of the van and got out to rap on the side door. “Liffey Pizza,” he called. “Anchovies ‘R’ Us.” There was a scurrying sound, like unleashing a big animal, and then the door came open.

  “Fucking-A, Jack, step inside quick.”

  Art Castro helped boost him up and then shut them in, and it was a remarkable shift, like falling through into another dimension. There was a rudimentary bar, a lot of radio gear, and two easy chairs facing back. The light coming in the back windows was so subdued he guessed they were one-way glass.

  “So this is the sort of fancy toy you get when you work for the big boys.”

  “You should see the private jet. What are you doing out here?” There was a crazy glisten in his eyes, and Jack Liffey guessed he’d taken something to stay alert.

  “I used the magic word on your secretary.”

  Art Castro groaned and motioned him to sit. “Dr Peppers in that little icebox. Try to keep your voice to a gentle roar.” He picked up a pair of binoculars with the biggest lenses Jack Liffey had ever seen and gave the area to the west a once-over.

  “ ’Course, I could ask what you’re doing out here, too,” Jack Liffey said.

  “That’s kind of on a need-to-know basis, Jack.”

  “Couple jackrabbits cheating on their disability?”

  “Something like that.”

  Jack Liffey borrowed the glasses and peered out the back window. Surprisingly, the binoculars weren’t as powerful as he’d expected, but all that optical glass made the scene brighter than day. They had a weird resistance to being moved and he felt the faint tremble of spinning gyros in the image stabilization mechanism that was making the picture rock-solid.

  In the distance a strange game was going on in silence, and it was like peering through a thick glass window into another world. Thirty or forty small brown men drifted in shoals behind a ball the size of a cantaloupe that was punched back and forth by men who seemed to have bricks strapped to the punching surface of their fists. One man with a tall pole marked out a position in their midst, and he drifted back and forth regularly to replant his marker without apparent reason. It was like an ancient ghost of some Aztec contest reasserting itself on the face of the land.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know much more than you. It’s called ball, and it comes from the far south.”

  “Way past Mason and Dixon.”

  “Oh, way. My south, Chiapas or Campeche. I don’t think you tracked me down to ask me anthropological questions about Mayan ball games.”

  Jack Liffey described his bounty hunters and asked if he knew who they were. Art Castro went uncharacteristically quiet, then he hummed a little bit, like a machine resonating.

  “What are you taking, man? I thought you were clean.”

  “Just a little crystal to stay on top.”

  “Special Forces popcorn.”

  “Nah, those were those green-and-white amphetamines, but there it is.”

  “You going to tell me about the redhead and his pal, or you going to go on humming some more?”

  “So they fancy themselves bounty hunters now. They’re the kind of guys who start out reading Soldier of Fortune in high school and recruit themselves into private armies. They leaked down here about a year ago from some militia in Idaho or South Dakota and showed up at the office one day, because we’re the best known name, and they wanted a job with us. Rosewood himself threw them out, and when they threatened to blow up his mother and all her friends with C-4 he had them checked out for good measure. Remember BWT?”

  “Bacon with tomato?”

  He smiled a thin smile and swept the west with his binoculars again. “Blood Will Tell, I think it stood for. Christian Identity guys, whatever the hell that is. I’m Catholic and I know who I am. These guys declared the Deadwood Republic up in redneck land and slapped liens on everybody’s property who didn’t swear allegiance along with them. The liens are bogus but it can cost you a fortune in lawyers to get them vacated.

  “These two you’re talking about weren’t smart enough to run the scheme, but their commandante came up with a nasty twist on this scam. He’d file all these liens and then at Christmas he’d send his enemies a forgiveness notice that he was giving them back a portion of their debt. Then he’d send a 1099 to the IRS announcing the amount of the forgiveness as income. The poor schmucks. Some of them are still trying to straighten it out with Uncle Sam.”

  Jack Liffey laughed. “Man, I wish they’d put a lien on my condo. It’s worth half what I owe. I’ll FedEx them the paper tomorrow.”

  “Don’t fuck with these two guys. They’re stupid and clumsy. It’s a bad combination, Jacko, guys who never know when to back off. If they think their macho is in question, they’ll shoot their own foot off.” He rooted in a small Styrofoam lunch bucket and came out with a sandwich in a plastic bag, which he investigated with a dubious look. “Want some?”

  “What is it?”

  “Velveeta on white bread. My old lady’s grand plan to make me more American.” He started tearing the sandwich into pieces, crushing them down to small white marbles and dropping them back into the Styrofoam.

  He liked Art Castro but he didn’t much like being with anyone on speed. It was like being left out of the joke. “Do you think these guys registered a home address when they applied for work?”

  Art Castro stared hard at him. “Don’t do it, man.”

  “They tried to kill me, Art. They messed up Marlena.” He took off his watch cap. “They even shaved my head.”

  “I wondered what that was about.”

  “There’s a code about letting guys do that to you.”

  “I used to subscribe to that, too, but now I just kick back and say nam myoho renge kyo about ten times. It does wonders for your longevity. These guys are just pond scum, man.”

  For just an instant he experienced a terrible sensation of futility. Maybe Art Castro was right. What was the point of spending so much energy to even things up with a couple of miscreants who subscribed to Soldier of Fortune? And for that matter, what was the point of tracking down missing children at all, most of whom would just go missing again first chance? Then the feeling passed, just vanished into the ether. A Dark Thirty Seconds of the Soul, he thought. Everything was devalued these days. He wondered if there was a random electron that fired from time to time in the brain, making you feel there was no Real Meaning in things.

  “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” Jack Liffey said.

  “Do-be-do-be-do,” Art Castro said. “You got to mellow on down.”

  “Thanks for the advice.” He could see he wouldn’t get any more help, even if Art Castro knew their whereabouts. He got up to go.

  Art Castro smiled without much humor and spread his palms wide in a gesture o
f cosmic acceptance. “Just be yourself, man.”

  “And if you can’t, at least try to be someone rich with a Maserati.”

  IT wasn’t all that far south to the industrial area at the back end of Burbank Airport. Milo Mardesich had told him the address and there it was, a couple square blocks of low buildings and giant Tinkertoys behind chain link. A tall louvered structure boiled off clean-looking steam and a number of rusting chemical tanks looked like they would start leaking if you glared hard at them. He couldn’t see a nameplate anywhere.

  He parked and strolled around the perimeter, up an alley that took him close to a thrumming corrugated metal building. He stood on a Dumpster to see a compound containing hundreds of rusting fifty-five-gallon drums, some of which seemed to be toppled and leaking. Finally he saw a pair of low buildings close together that might have been the place where they’d caught Milo with the gas. There was no sign of life anywhere inside the wire.

  Out in front a black guard sat in a glassed-in guard shack at the service entrance. He seemed to be playing solitaire on a surface that was out of sight. A half-dozen cars were parked in a little lot that was across a few feet of grass from what must have been the office. The stucco over the office door was a brighter yellow where a name had been painted out, and one big glass window showed an empty lobby and a counter where no one stood, like a set for an end-of-the-world movie. There was no pickup truck, but he noted the license number of the big black BMW 750 parked nearest the door—RECLAIM.

  Just as he got back to his car, he saw a little blur coming toward him down the middle of a dreary industrial street. The figure gathered reality, framed by a broken sidewalk along one side of the street and weeds on the other, until Jack Liffey made out a slim, almost weightless athlete, tumbling hands to feet to hands, then cartwheeling and twisting and tossing in a back flip now and then. He wore shorts and a tank top and had a big green number on his back and he came to a stop with a last twisting flip facing Jack Liffey’s car window.

  “Geroot-patoot,” he said, or something like that, his arms flung up in Nixon’s victory V.

  “Nine-point-seven,” Jack Liffey said.

  The athlete laughed and did a standing back flip before cranking up his strange progress again.

  SULTANATE Street was eerily quiet, but somewhere inside the house behind all the screwy gingerbread eaves something was pounding the floor over and over. The sound was odd, mostly vibration coming up through the porch, and he couldn’t quite put an image to it. A tabby cat was on the porch and it was confused by the sound, too, its head cocked to one side.

  The cat fled when he rang and the pounding stopped abruptly. Faye Mardesich opened up, something a little off in her eyes. He wondered if she’d been sharing drugs with Art Castro.

  “Eeep.” She gave a little sound in her throat and then cleared it and a real presence seemed to gather substance and come forward to peer out her eyes. “Jack, am I glad to see you. Come on.”

  She backed away and he saw she was wearing leotards and some kind of stretchy top that was made of big bands of elastic that crisscrossed. He’d always liked those tops because you could imagine slipping a hand in easily, but he wasn’t thinking along those lines at the moment. Her feet clopped on the plank floor and he saw that she was wearing her husband’s big cordovan wing tips. They were laced tightly but her feet still slipped about in them a bit.

  “You had to ask,” she said, but he hadn’t asked anything.

  The kitchen floor was littered with shattered bright-colored crockery and she crunched across it with a mischievous extra little pump of energy from the wing tips to pound the jumble down some more. She retrieved a generous drink she had going. “I dropped the first plate. I mean, it was an accident, the first one. I mean, it slipped. I’m not clumsy. I’m not. It made me so mad, I threw the next one, and the next.”

  Suddenly he felt trapped and nervous. Something was going wrong in this house. She sipped and glanced up at the ceiling. “Aren’t we dysfunctional, one and all. Let me count the ways.”

  Thankfully, she didn’t. He was not going to tell her about Jimmy now, even though that was why he had come. She was in no condition to absorb it without looping off in some unpredictable direction.

  “Maybe you ought to lay off the sauce for a bit,” he said.

  “I never liked Fiesta Ware anyway.” She set the glass down with exaggerated care and took up a dance pose that didn’t quite work with the brogans. “And one, and two … plié. The black keys are called the chromatics, the sharps and flats. You’d think they were superfluous, but they’re the true secret of Western music, the sharps and flats.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks, but she didn’t seem to be crying. She offered the empty doorway a ludicrous grin.

  He hated scenes like this, absolutely hated emotion gone sloppy and melodramatic, but he would stay and deal with it. If he’d learned one thing over the years from all the nasty little lessons life forked up for you, he’d learned that whatever you’d managed to absorb of the honorable, you we’re never given the opportunity to deploy it in grand ways, with cheering crowds and a sense of satisfaction, but only in small, messy, and unwitnessed rags of duty like this.

  “Let’s sit down for a while,” he said.

  “I don’t even know what to cry about,” she said. “It’s like I’m trying to write my own back story. I’m crying, so I have to find something hideously sad to cry about.”

  She clomped past him dance-wise, then crossed her arms to grasp the shoulder bits of her stretchy costume and wrench them apart and down so her breasts spilled out. She turned to show extremely large brown nipples and white stretch marks where the breasts plunged. “You could have me, Jack. Milo doesn’t come home until tomorrow.”

  He held her the way a priest would have, enclosing and comforting and immobilizing. “Let’s talk about things.”

  She tilted her neck up and tried to squirm around to get him to kiss her, and he pressed the back of her neck to push her face against his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally, going slack. “I need something so much that I get angry and the anger makes me crazy.”

  He walked her to the messy sofa and brushed aside a number of magazines. He sat her down and she pulled her stretchy top back up and crushed her arms to her chest in an exaggerated pose of modesty. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

  “Try to tell me what you were thinking the moment things snapped.”

  She barked a single laugh, like a cough. “I was thinking it was unfair that only four months have thirty days, and seven have thirty-one. I know that doesn’t make any sense. Maybe there’s just a sense of injustice that blows in with the Santa Ana winds. ‘All the rest have thirty-one, except February which … doesn’t.’ It doesn’t even rhyme.”

  There was a loud bang in the kitchen and he waited for another, but nothing came and he decided it was just one of those noises that a house made. Something smelled a little strange, but he let that go, too.

  “Long ago I met a guy in Laos,” he said. “He was British and he showed me the way they count off the months in England. Watch.” He made a fist and counted along the knuckles and valleys as he named off the months. “January, February, March, April, May, June, July-August … You’ve got to count two months on the last knuckle before you start back. All the up knuckles are long months, and the valleys in between are short months. September, October, November, December.”

  Her eyes focused on the demonstration as if he’d just disemboweled a house pet, and then on him. “Jesus, Jack, I’m not some bar pickup that you have to charm with tricks.”

  He dropped his hands. “You are angry.”

  She seemed to soften. “And I have enthusiasms and I weary of them. I go through things too fast. You know, I can’t even believe in our crusade to save Jimmy anymore. He’s a big boy and he can take care of himself. It’s Milo I worry about. It’s me. I’ve got to have something that doesn’t wear out right away.”

  She picked u
p his arm and brought it up to her face and bit his wrist softly. “We are such failures in this family. World-historical failures.”

  “That’s hopeless talk.”

  “It’s a place to start. It’s not self-deception.”

  “You can say that again,” but she didn’t. She only shook her head.

  A screech filled the house suddenly and they both bolted upright. He noticed the smoke rolling out of the kitchen doorway up at the ceiling, and he was on his feet in an instant. He got to the stove before her and cranked off the knob. Then he picked up the aluminum pot with a towel and got it under the faucet, where the blackening mass sizzled for a while, sending up another surge of smoke that kept the smoke detector going until he reached up with a magazine and fanned the smoke away from it.

  “Chicken noodle soup,” she said as she stared mournfully into the pan. “Once. Failures. In my family, we can’t even boil soup.”

  The exaggerated remorse struck him as funny, and his laugh started her laughing, too.

  “I’m sorry I embarrassed you,” she said. “I would have been good to you but I know it was the wrong thing.”

  They opened all the windows and the back door off the kitchen. The cat stared quizzically in at them. They sat down on the small back porch and talked for a while of neutral subjects—pets, grease fires, childhood. She kept medicating herself with booze and it was getting her sleepy.

  “Oh, wow, I’m so ashamed. You can go now, Jack. Don’t worry. I’m okay.”