The Poison Sky

by John Shannon

  “You look better. I want you to know I’m off the clock. I know where Jimmy is and I’ll look in on him and make sure he’s okay but there’s no charge for the service.”

  Her eyes were closing of their own will. “I have to nap. I’m sorry about all this.” She went in and crunched away across the crockery and disappeared into the back of the house. He let himself out. He stood in front for a while, wishing he still smoked. It was one of those moments of relief that a cigarette would have completed.

  HE left Sultanate in a different direction than he usually took, and in a block he braked to a stop in the middle of the road. It was the camouflage netting covering the entire backyard that had caught his eye, all the little peanut-shaped figures worked into the net that probably did make it look like foliage from way up in the air. A black POW-MIA flag flew over the netting, and a concertina of razor wire that ran along the top of a tall chain-link fence marked the entire perimeter of the lot. The front yard was a flat expanse of pea gravel, and poking up through the gravel there were a couple of Claymore mines realistic enough to give him a chill. A wooden gate into an interior motor pool stood open, and when he let the car drift forward he could see a couple of mannikins with M-16s crouched beside an armored personnel carrier. An olive four-by was parked in a gated driveway. It was either a perverse art project of some kind or a guy who’d never really made it home. He wouldn’t want to try delivering the mail there.

  THEY were lining up along the outer wall for the bubble and treat, the five o’clock sermon and free dinner, but if you were paid up for the room you didn’t have to get in line. He found Jimmy Mardesich in a utility room down the corridor from the cafeteria sitting on the edge of a beat-up table like a college professor facing a half-dozen men in folding chairs. A huge Latino sitting beside Jimmy like his keeper had his T-shirt sleeves rolled up high to show off jailhouse muscles and blurry jailhouse tattoos, one of which said FUCK PEACE. Something about Jimmy appeared different.

  Everybody was listening intently to a skinny kid with a Mohawk and a mannered haughtiness. “So he goes, ‘When I find her and tell her what you did, you little fuck, she’s gonna kick your ass back on the streets.’ And I go, ‘Look, whoa man, I know I been a screwup a lot but I didn’t do this one, I swear,’ and he pulls off this big fat leather belt and says he’s going to teach me not to lie all the time, and I must’ve been on something because I say, ‘And I didn’t ask my mom to go remarry no imbecile biker dude who can’t find his ass with the toilet paper neither,’ and I get this.”

  He torqued his torso around and pulled up a frayed shirt to show fresh welts along his back. His pants hung low to reveal a lot of his blue-striped boxers. Then for a moment or two he made guttural sounds that were not even distant relatives of words. His head jerked around in a petulant little rage, or a fit of some kind, and then he seemed to readjust himself to reality.

  “Okay, wheet, I used to be a happy kid and Mom and me’d spend hours listening to the Grateful Dead and she’d talk about all the years she been a Deadhead and gone from place to place to follow them and selling hash and hubba, and we used to snuggle up and she’d close her eyes and let me play with her tits a little, and we’d eat Cheez Whiz out of the jar and we were both happy as Larry until Godzilla comes along and takes over her mind like the fucking Body Snatchers. I swear, he musta put a big pod in the basement. Now he goes, Marcella, you go stand on one leg and sing ‘Dixie’ and she goes and stands and sings fucking ‘Dixie.’ Anything he says. He gets her fucked up on speed and turns her out to his friends—” The boy’s head jerked around again, as if a giant were shaking him.

  “Hold on, Low Pockets,” Jimmy Mardesich said.

  Low Pockets, Jack Liffey thought, was probably two or three years older than Jimmy, but he was a good eight inches shorter and gaunt as a Depression photograph. When he stopped twitching, Jimmy locked eyes with him for a full minute, and Jack Liffey couldn’t tell what was passing between them. “We need to focus on what’s true, what you know is true,” Jimmy said very softly.

  Low Pockets rose up in a threatening way, and so did the big Latino.

  “Don’t fuck with the man,” the Latino warned ominously.

  Jimmy calmed the bodyguard, and Jack Liffey noticed a smell of vomit wafting down the corridor, warring with cleaning fluid. Somewhere down the hall live music started up behind a closed door, bad Christian rock on an organ.

  Low Pockets let his stiff neck fall forward and he gobbled like a turkey once. “Sure, okay, the last stuff’s BS. He never turned her out, and he never hurt her. This Clarence probably even likes her some, but he sure hates my ass.” His voice was starting to break. “He took away my mom. Abba-dabba.” The boy choked back a sob.

  “Come here,” Jimmy said.

  The boy stumbled across the intervening space, Jimmy’s Latino guardian alert to pounce at any sign of trouble. Low Pockets started to weep and hugged Jimmy, and Jimmy placed his hands on the sides of the boy’s head. “Let it hurt. This is the man who stole your mom from you.” The sobbing redoubled and the boy trembled and had another little fit.

  After a while, much softer, Jimmy said, “Don’t worry so much about what your mother said in the church. If there’s divinity at work in the world, it’s not located in some building, it’s inside you and me and her.”

  Jimmy let the boy cry for a while as everyone sat and watched, one or two fidgeting, and then he took his hands off the boy’s head and reached for about half of an uncut loaf of bread that Jack Liffey hadn’t noticed sitting on the table. He ripped off a piece and pressed it into the boy’s hand. “Eat this bread and remember its taste, it’ll be the taste of your letting go, your beginning to heal.”

  Tentatively the boy took the morsel of bread and chewed.

  “I think they want us for dinner,” the bodyguard announced. Only then, with the men rising and mumbling to one another, did Jimmy Mardesich acknowledge Jack Liffey’s presence. He glanced up and nodded a greeting as the bodyguard looked the newcomer over.

  Two men brushed past him at the door, one saying over and over, “I’m indicated, I tell you, I’m really indicated. I saw the papers.”

  Jack Liffey nodded back to Jimmy. I told your mom I’d check up on you didn’t quite seem appropriate after the messiah performance. He knew what was different about the boy now. He’d always seemed calm and distant, but now he was well beyond that, as if he’d withdrawn some part of himself into a world where it couldn’t be touched at all.

  “How are you?” the boy asked, as if Jack Liffey were the one in jeopardy.

  He laughed softly. “Fine, thank you.”

  The boy didn’t see the humor, but it didn’t seem to worry him any more than anything else did.

  “I’ll check in tomorrow,” Jack Liffey said. “See if you’ve risen yet.”

  As he left the shelter, he struggled with the pesky feeling that there was an ambience of fraud in what he’d just seen. He wondered how he would respond if there really were holy men and some latter-day Moses appeared before him. Perhaps it was just that so much bogus religiosity condensed out of the smog in L.A. that it tainted the real thing when it arrived. Real thing—he smiled at himself. As if there were such a thing as a real thing in the holy-man business—short of megalomania.

  BANDS of fire and purple struggled in the western sky as he walked to his car, silhouetting the fancy skyscrapers downtown. It was a gaudy stage set for an end-of-the-world movie, and with a sudden whirring, a big man with an even bigger motion-picture camera passed overhead walking on air just above the roof. The line of men and women waiting for supper gawked upward as an amplified voice bellowed and crackled, “Don’t look up, don’t look up!” to no avail.

  Jack Liffey made out the cable and then the arm of a crane from which the man dangled. For some reason, two white seagulls, turning rosy pink in the dusk, wheeled around the cameraman like performers who’d wandered in from a different dream.

  “I don’t think the kid needs
your help,” Jack Liffey said to whatever god was orchestrating all the symbols.

  THE noises behind his front door made him hesitate, but he didn’t really think the bad guys had come back, and they hadn’t. Marlena was cooking something in his big iron frying pan as Loco watched with interest.

  She’d been a little anxious, too, peeking out the blinds at the sound of his key.

  “Hi, Mar. Brave of you coming back here,” he said.

  She waited for it, so he kissed her and she kissed back but didn’t push it.

  “I got this now.” She took a tiny purse automatic out of the pocket of her apron. Something was odd about the way she was dressed, but he was distracted by the pistol. He took it gently from her.

  “Let me hang on to it for now. You’re scaring Loco.” The dog had stirred, but now it relaxed and sauntered away.

  “I’m making you fajitas, querido.”

  He peered into the pan, but that was refried beans. The sliced steak and vegetables were laid out on a cutting board on the counter.

  “I love fajitas. Where did they come from, anyway? Ten years ago they didn’t exist, and then like some bush telegraph, every Mexican restaurant in the U.S. put them on the menu in the same week.”

  “I think it was invented at some resort, maybe Cancún.” She switched the fire off and turned to him, and before she had the housedress half off he realized what had been odd about it. Only one or two buttons had been fastened and under it she wore the black merry widow she’d bought from Victoria’s Secret plus the garter belt and black nylons. He found it all a bit silly, but knew better than to say it.

  She looked down demurely and then up at him and then down again, and he liked the way her face changed from a bit plain to beautiful each time, and he liked the comforting sense he had coming home to her, and he figured he ought to just marry her and get really used to it.

  She let the housecoat fall around her feet. “I want you to take all this off with your teeth,” she said huskily.

  14

  IF A FLAME DOUBTED, IT WOULD GO OUT

  “YOU THINK I’M SMART ENOUGH TO DO THIS?” ROGELIO asked him. He handed Jack Liffey a matchbook that promised a rewarding and fulfilling life after fourteen weeks of General Computer Repair School. To prove it, there was a picture of a grinning youth soldering something together on his kitchen table while a young woman looked on proudly cradling a baby. The scene had everything except a beaming Ike giving his blessing.

  “I think you can learn the same stuff for free at JC.”

  “Not in fourteen weeks.”

  “What especially makes you trust an ad on a matchbook? If you look close, that’s not even a computer he’s working on.”

  Rogelio ducked under the table and fed the cables from the Mac around behind the rear panel. “I dunno. I seen it on TV, too.”

  Jack Liffey took the ends of the cables where Rogelio passed them up and bundled them with the PC cables. Marlena was trying to expand her Mailboxes-R-Us into a small service bureau, and she’d bought a secondhand Mac and PC and an old laser printer, and he and Rogelio were setting them up at the back of the shop where she used to keep the mailing envelopes, notepads, and cheap pens. It was good to be able to do a favor for her for once, but he didn’t know half as much about computers as she thought he did.

  “Where did you learn electronics?” Rogelio asked.

  “The army taught me everything I know.” Jack Liffey stretched a thick black power cord in two clenched fists. “Men, this is a power cord. Think of it as a pipe. Think of the electrons as little PFCs like yourselves running along the pipe. Voltage is how hard the men are running. Amperage is the number of men in the pipe. Resistance is how narrow the pipe is, which forces the little men to bend over and rub their shoulders along the walls as they run.” He couldn’t quite keep up the drill-sergeant voice, and he chuckled once. “A short circuit is when the little enlisted men turn and frag their officers.”

  Rogelio had picked up a gray cord and was sitting in a lotus beside the table, staring at it, as if he might actually see the little men. “Cool. What’s inductance?”

  Marlena bustled in with a white tub of the day’s mail. She was wearing a tight low-cut sweater and you didn’t have to know her all that well to see she was really glowing.

  “The U.S. Army does not recognize inductance. It’s not a muscular concept.”

  Marlena was showing quite a bit of chest muscle. She bent a little more than she had to to set the tub down by the letter boxes, and a bright red bra under the black sweater flashed at him like a traffic light. “Rogelio, you can go on to your game now,” she said huskily.

  “Thanks.”

  “Jackie can finish the computers.”

  He figured people for miles around could hear the endearment she varnished over his name, but if Rogelio noticed, he was keeping it to himself as he grabbed his baseball windbreaker and saluted himself out the door.

  He booted up, but as usual couldn’t get the computer to find the printer. “It’s right there, dammit. I can find it. Computer, meet the printer.”

  He felt her hand hot on his neck and something large and soft pressed his ear, and he had to close his eyes and swallow.

  “I forget how good you are for me,” she whispered.

  She went into the storeroom off to the side and left the door open. No one in the shop could see her, but she was only a few feet away from him when she pulled the neck of her sweater to the side and showed him one cup of the lacy red bra. It was semitransparent, another purchase from Victoria’s Secret, and he could make out her dusky nipple clearly. She really had her pilot light going and it was having an effect on him, too.

  “Querido … querido …” she mouthed softly.

  She ran one finger softly around the shape of her breast, watching him. He smiled as she mouthed more words at him. He couldn’t make out the words but it hardly mattered. She kept her eyes on him with a kind of fixed ferocity and let her hand drift south. He was beginning to wonder if he ought to reciprocate in some way when the deep male voice boomed over his shoulder.

  “Do not be affrighted, my child. The cleansing that is coming soon will be great, but all who have stayed in the light and gathered up their grace shall be saved. We have not shared Communion with you recently at the barn door.”

  Marlena had stiffened like a deer hit by one clean shot, then turned away as if looking for a particular box of red pens on the shelf. Jack Liffey turned to see a gaunt man in a black robe and dog collar. He had one of those Swedish beards that ran in a thin line along the rim of the jaw, framing skin so white and pasty that blue veins showed in his cheeks. It looked like the wrong face had been poked into one of those photo props you saw in carnivals, with the bodies of princesses and cowboys.

  “Our Redeemer’s tears are falling upon nations as the end days draw nearer and the world will be cleansed in a baptism of fire. My child, we miss your bright face in our congregation, among the righteous.” The preacher glanced down at Jack Liffey with an unyielding dark gaze.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” Jack Liffey said.

  “Have you accepted that Jesus Christ is filled with love for you?” he asked. “We approach the millennium,” he added darkly.

  “You know, the zero point was pretty arbitrary. They usually reckon Jesus was born somewhere between four and six B.C., so I figure we’ve already survived the millennium.”

  “The Bible does not make mistakes.”

  “I didn’t realize the Gregorian calendar was referenced in the Bible.”

  A tiny breeze of puzzlement wafted over the man and then vanished as a door slammed shut to return his mind to its accustomed stasis. The heathen sitting on the floor winked out of existence for him, and he lugged his ponderous attention back to Marlena, who was slipping guiltily out of the storage closet, carrying a ream of paper.

  “Hello, Father Paul.”

  Jack Liffey remembered her telling him that she had been raised in some fundamentalist sect, a
nd she had toyed recently with another one. It was a mistake to think all Latinos were Catholics, particularly since Protestants had made such inroads in Central America. L.A. was full of Templos de Nazarenos Evangelicos de Ultimas Dias and the like.

  “The smoke from the bottomless pit that blots out the sun in Revelations eight is every false doctrine that obscures the light of the Gospel. The barn door is still standing open.”

  Jack Liffey wondered if that was the one they would lock after the horse escaped, but he decided not to ask. “I’ll see you later, Mar.”

  Her eyes looked a little desperate. “Call me, Jack.”

  He nodded and went out into ovenlike stifling heat and then upstairs to his office. Somebody had shoved a flyer under the door for a local Festival of Recycling Household Waste. It seemed an unlikely subject for a festival. The faltering answering machine winked at him and then played back so slowly he couldn’t recognize her voice at first.

  “Jack, pleeeease give me a caaaall when you get in. I neeeed to apologize and I neeeeed to tell you sommmmething Milo said to me. Heeee’s back at work nowwww. They put him onnnnnn swing, from threeee to midnight. I’ll try your hoooome, too.”

  It was Faye, her voice so distorted that he couldn’t make out the emotional undertow, but he got her machine when he called right back. He guessed she had just stepped out for a bit and he decided on a whim to drive up there. He still needed to tell her about Jimmy anyway, and he hated doing things like that over the telephone. In fact, he hated doing any business over the telephone since you couldn’t gauge the feelings of the person you were talking to. He needed that edge.

  COPS were stopping traffic along Venice for a parade of gaudy gold-and-red wagons drawn by horses. Banners and flags hung over the wagons like the trappings of a gypsy army. Crowds of young people with tambourines and orange robes danced on some of the wagons and with a twinge of irritation Jack Liffey realized he was being held up by the Hare Krishnas on one of their pilgrimages from their Culver City parking lot to Venice Beach to feed the homeless.