by John Shannon
All at once a group of dancers ducked as one, and a girl pointed excitedly up into the air. He squinted and looked where they were all looking, and at last he made out a model airplane and then, not far from his car, he noticed the grinning twelve-year-olds with the radio control unit. The plane banked over his car with a ratchety fizz and then dived to buzz the dancers again. As it rose for another pass, a cop spotted the boys and started in their direction. They laughed wickedly and took off.
Jack Liffey gave them a V with his fingers out the window, but he doubted whether they saw it. It was nice to know he wasn’t the only person in L.A. who wasn’t on some sort of holy road.
SHE was out on her patio staring mournfully at a wilted red impatiens in a clay pot. “They’re so sensitive,” she said. “Hi, Jack. Unlike me, I mean. I never wilt, I just get angry. I’ve done that all my life and it’s always cost me.”
For a moment he wondered if she was going to smash the plant down on the brick patio for thwarting her wish that it be healthy, but then she blew softly on the leaves and set it back on the little iron tea trolley with the other plants. She was wearing jeans and a work shirt, which made her look like someone who’d found a bit of comfort in herself.
“Sometimes it costs more when you don’t get mad,” he said. “It’s probably just a question of deciding which time is which.”
She stared out at the ivy-covered embankment at the back of her yard. “It’s hard to believe the universe is expanding, isn’t it?”
He laughed and she smiled finally, but there was no humor in her, only tension. “I’m glad you came. I’m sorry I was such an embarrassment the last time. I’ll be good, I promise. I’m all under control. Can I get you some lemonade?”
“I don’t think so.”
There was a rustle in the ivy and an opossum waddled out onto the grass, looked them over carefully, and then waddled away as if deciding they didn’t measure up. It was like a dismissal by some alternate reality. The animal lumbered back into the ivy and crackled there for a while and a couple of neighboring dogs started up. She winced when a leaf blower came on like a chain saw next door.
She turned and met his eyes but he had no idea what her look meant. “Milo is back on the job, believe it or not, straight from his hospital bed. He called and said the tank truck is coming this evening at seven. He wants us to follow it so we can back up his story about the dumping.”
“Actually, I was hired to find your son and I did. I’m off the clock now.”
“I don’t think this was ever just about finding Jimmy. I need to put my family back together.” She thought for a moment. “You know, Milo actually asked for my help.”
“These guys aren’t juvenile delinquents, Faye. I think they’re the guys who sabotaged my steering. They’re the kind of guys who see a big federal building and right away think of dynamite.”
The way her hands were fidgeting against one another, it didn’t look like he was going to be able to tell her about Jimmy’s slumming this trip either. A cat yowled once and came over the fence and then hightailed across the yard. The cat stopped suddenly near a stunted cherry tree and snarled at it, and Faye scowled after the animal. “I don’t really care what I’m facing, Jack. Something tells me this is just about my last chance to do my duty for my family and I’m going to do it, with you or without you.”
A mockingbird fluttered up out of the tree, squawked horribly, and then did a dive-bomb run that sent the cat over on its back in self-defense. Faye Mardesich made a little run after the bird and cat and stamped her feet until they both fled. When her voice came, it was shrill and tense, ready to break through a crust into another register altogether. “One more distraction and I’m going to kill something! I swear it!”
It was good she had her anger under control, he thought.
She put her hands on her hips and looked up at the heavens for a moment. Then she slogged back to the patio, and he saw that he would either have to go with her on her crusade or tie her down to prevent her. He felt trapped. There was this limitless obligation to a code that was always there, like a relentless fate, and he could see it would carry him across a lot of life’s boundaries whether he acknowledged it or not. His life was a story that was only allowed to unfold along a single path. What if he cut the thread? he thought. What if he veered off in some arc he had never taken before? Walk away from this and let her drive into danger alone.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
There were two hours until the appointed arrival of the waste truck at GreenWorld, but neither of them wanted to hang around her house. Out front she came to a halt when she saw his car, the sheet plastic rippling lightly in the hot wind. “I’m not riding in that. I’ll drive.” She led him to a good square Volvo station wagon and then drove to a coffee shop called Deep Shaft Miners. Every coffee shop in L.A. had to have a theme, and he was worried a bit about double entendres with this one until it turned out to be literal. They went in through a mine adit, complete with timber shoring, and sat in a brown plastic booth under crossed pickaxes and headlamp helmets as the place filled up for early supper and he ordered apple pie and coffee. She stared for a long time at the menu and then ordered fried zucchini strips and fried shoestring onions. “I feel like picking at things,” she explained.
Across the aisle, a teenage boy had his hand discreetly under the skirt of a girl with an old-fashioned pageboy haircut and a dreamy look. They thought they couldn’t be seen.
A sad-looking woman came up and left Jack Liffey a little card explaining the American Sign Language alphabet and then moved silently on. He put a dollar bill in its place and wondered if the manager would catch her before she got back for it. He noticed that K would make a pretty serviceable fuck-you in England and T would do fine everywhere else in Europe.
“Did you ever have a clue how your life would turn out?” she said, and the burden of dejection was still there.
He was beginning to work himself down into the attitude where you just longed to get the next few hours over with. He liked Faye Mardesich well enough, when she was under control, but he didn’t want to deal with the bounty hunters and a nervous breakdown at the same time. The girl with the hand up her skirt gasped once faintly.
“I don’t think it’s turned out yet,” he said. But it hadn’t really been a question.
“I’ll tell you, I never thought I’d be a grumpy frumpy housewife, and if I ever did entertain even the vague suspicion that was what lay in store for me around the big corner, I certainly wouldn’t have imagined such a hideously dysfunctional family. It’s like being caught up in a soap opera that’s so bad you know it’ll be canceled in midseason.”
She clacked her teeth once, like a dog snapping at flies.
“There was always something a bit dangerous waiting outside my window, something that offered a whole lot more, and I never seized it. I wanted to conquer worlds and I moved to Van Nuys. I wanted to do something that mattered, I wanted to be excited and challenged. I heard the call and I didn’t go. You can’t blame anyone but yourself for that.”
Now and again he was hearing a little sound that he couldn’t identify, a pop, like a cork coming out of a tiny bottle. He looked casually around but all he saw was a dozen busy families and the young couple across the aisle who were pretending they were there to eat hamburgers.
The food came and he didn’t have to look very close at the limp battered zucchini to decline her offer.
“I dreamed last night I was trying to write a letter and every time I tipped the paper up the words would come loose and slide off the page. My car was lost in a huge parking lot. Milo didn’t know who I was. Some other boyfriend was laughing at me. And every time I tried to dance, I slipped on a wet spot.”
He heard the little pop again. This time he waited a half minute and then dropped his napkin. In turning to pick it up, Jack Liffey caught the eye of a ten-year-old boy two booths away who was shielding a soda straw in the crook of his arm, aiming it at the teenage c
ouple. Jack Liffey wasn’t the only one in the room who’d noticed what was going on. The boy stuck his tongue out at him, then put his mouth to the straw and fired a spit wad into the wall just over the heads of the couple. They were oblivious.
“Life is so gruesome. It’s full of ridiculous people doing awful things to other ridiculous people.”
“You could say that,” he agreed. “But with the right perspective, it can all be pretty funny.”
But she had an unstoppable urge toward misfortune. “You know, it’s not so crazy I feel this way right now, now that Milo’s back and Jimmy’s been found. I’ve noticed that when you’ve been sick a long time and the fever finally breaks—it’s right then that things start looking grim. You’ve been looking forward to feeling good for so long and you think it’ll be the answer to everything, and then the fever does lift, and you’re face-to-face with the fact that the real problem is you’re unhappy …”
A spitball hit the side of the booth and ricocheted across the floor. The girl in the pageboy was sucking in little breaths, and he resisted the temptation to tell Faye that what she needed was a little of what the girl was having. In fact, what she needed was to learn how to cut her losses, but he’d noticed long ago that women had a hard time doing that. It was probably a good thing for the race but it was hard on the individual case.
Faye dabbed at her eye where a tear had formed. “I’m sorry. I know I’m doing this to myself. My hour is up, doc.”
“I’m sorry I’m not more help,” he said. “You need to talk to somebody who knows how to deal with unhappiness.”
“A therapist?”
“Why not?”
“It’s so humiliating.”
“Oww!”
The girl with the pageboy wrenched around in the booth, rubbing the back of her neck, but she was too late to catch the boy. She readjusted her skirt and she and her boyfriend both got up and left their untouched cheeseburgers. He tried to imagine being that age again and unable to wait even a few minutes for a little grope and tickle.
What he remembered instead were those first years with Kathy, when he was desperate to give her a life so rapturous and satisfying that everything in it would remind her of him. He knew now that a feeling like that could only be a sign that something underneath was wrong, that his own insecurities were seeding trouble left and right, slow-acting poisons, but everything had seemed to be scudding along so happily that he hadn’t noticed.
He watched Faye take a pill and he hoped it was a tranq but he didn’t ask.
“At least I can domesticate the pain,” she said to no one.
THEY were parked in front of a big offset printing factory that was still operating. The printing plant took up both sides of the street, and now and then forklifts trundled across the road in front of them loaded with big rolls of paper or pallets of cardboard cartons that glowed in a peculiar orange light from the sun that was going down behind the car. They had a perfect view of the front of GreenWorld Chemical two blocks away. She said it was Milo in the guard shack, though you couldn’t have proved it by him. The BMW 750 was still there by the door. Faye had calmed down and seemed to be on task. Better living through chemistry, he thought.
Inside GreenWorld’s fenced complex, the big rusting tanks were partially obscured by a plume of steam that drifted off the louvered tower and billowed east on what little of the evening onshore wind leaked over the mountains into the Valley. A red warning light on a tangle of pipes that stuck up four stories began to flash ominously, and then up at the top of a tall thin chimney there was a flare of burning gas so bright it hurt his eyes. The flame sputtered a bit and then flared brightly again and wavered upward in a picturesque pennant like Liberty’s torch. They could hear a faint rumble on the air. Then the flashing light went out and so did the flame and, a moment later, the sound. It was as if somebody had given up on a recalcitrant cigarette lighter.
“I read somewhere that belief is very delicate,” she said. She smiled. “If a flame doubted physics for just an instant, it would go out.”
He watched as the warning light came on once more and the flame tried and failed. “I’m rooting for physics.”
A young worker in a ponytail came out of the printing plant and sat on the trunk of a Thunderbird to smoke. He rapped the cigarette on his thumbnail a few times and then fiddled with it long enough to make it clear he was adding something to the tobacco.
“Thanks for not being sanctimonious with me, Jack.” She sighed once as if gathering some kind of newfound energy. “It feels like people have been doing things for me for years and years, and I guess I’ll be all right if I just give something back.”
“It’s a plan,” he said.
A battered black tank truck came around the corner, made a wide turn as it clashed gears, and rumbled right past them. There was no name on the door and it looked like generations of chemical spills had collected on the tank itself and crusted on the piping along its flanks. It wasn’t the shiny stainless-steel truck that Milo had described, but behind the wheel he’d seen the stout bounty hunter named Schatzi. Jack Liffey’s scalp crawled and he actually ran his hand over the fuzz that had grown back. The redhead wasn’t in evidence.
He thought back to that evening in his apartment and how Schatzi had talked so much about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He wondered if Schatzi had anything to do with Marlena’s goofy millenarian priest, but L.A. was full of people who talked apocalyptic stuff like that. Every few years some group or other gave away their possessions, put on white robes, and clambered up onto the roof to wait for Jesus, or the bolt of Holy Lightning, or the Martian spacecraft, or the Black Helicopters of the Next Life. They always assumed the next deal would come out much better for them, but he figured things could always get a lot worse and it was best to play the hand you had.
“Is it …?”
“Oh yes.”
The black truck idled at the gate a moment and Milo came out to look over a sheaf of papers Schatzi dangled out the window and then he unlatched the long gate and rolled it aside. The truck stalled once and then pulled inside. Evidently, he wasn’t much of a driver. Milo stared after the truck for a while and then closed up the gate and went back into his guard shack. Nothing further happened until seven-thirty, when one of the lights went off in the long window in the office block and a small balding man in a business suit came out and got into the BMW. It was RECLAIM, he thought. He needed to have a talk with RECLAIM soon.
The last of the daylight was fading away and they took turns doing the L.A. Times crossword in the faint light from a street lamp down the road. “Three letters for salt?” she asked.
“Tar,” he said.
“Tar?”
“They’re both nicknames for sailors.”
“Oh, crud.” She threw the paper down. “That’s ghastly. It’s too dark, anyway.”
Just after eight, a stake truck full of fifty-five-gallon oil drums arrived. As the stake truck pulled inside, the black tanker reappeared around the office building. He nudged her alert behind the wheel.
“Time to rock-and-roll.”
You could tell by the way the truck rode low on its springs, and by a heavy inertia that it suggested in its starts and stops, that it was loaded to the gills now.
“Don’t start up until he’s past. He’s not going to lose us in a forty-ton tank truck.”
When the dark truck rumbled past, they could feel its weight in the ground. It was still Schatzi sitting up stiffly in the high old-fashioned cab. She gave it a long count and then did a U-turn to follow him slowly to San Fernando Boulevard, where he turned north to parallel the freeway. She missed the light and then had to wait nervously as a flagman got in front of her while half of a big church approached up a side street. Jack Liffey couldn’t believe his eyes. A nave drifted slowly across their bow, towed by a big house mover bedecked with red flags. They stared straight into the right half of an American Gothic church that seemed to have been cut down the middle, complet
e with stained-glass windows and blond wood pews, all lit up by their headlights. A big sheet of plastic was nailed across like the plastic that sealed his missing windows. Running behind was a truck that said WIDE LOAD.
“Let’s not wait for the other half,” he suggested.
She maneuvered her way past the church despite an angry wave out of the wide-load chase truck and caught up. The tank truck was in no hurry and Jack Liffey had already noticed that it had four distinctive red taillights, round and bolted on the bumper like something from Pep Boys, so it was easy to follow on the wide city boulevard.
The truck stayed off the 1-5 all the way to the pass, trundling slowly up what was now called the Old Road. At Newhall, Schatzi had no choice and he ground onto the freeway at about forty. They stayed well back.
“Where do you think he’s going?” she asked.
“Somewhere where we’re going to be damned conspicuous, I’ll bet. When he pulls off, I want to take over.”
She nodded grimly and he could see her knuckles white on the wheel. She was as tense as he’d ever seen her.
But in the event, the truck carried on all the way to a busy truck stop at the top of the Grapevine, where it pulled behind the gas pumps and parked between a Shell tanker and a long refrigerator truck. A sign at the edge of the lot said mysteriously DO NOT SWAT. Schatzi got out and went into the restaurant. They parked two roads away in front of a closed motorcycle repair shop, where they had a good view of the truck stop.
“How long do you think he’ll be?”
“If he’s not out in half an hour, he could be a good long time. He may be waiting for the wee hours.”
He took the driver’s seat, and Faye walked to a 7-Eleven up the road. He left the car door open and wedged his foot against the trip button to keep the dome light off. Far away he heard the distinctive slap of a screen door closing. It was the kind of taut heat on the air that carried sound a long way, and a cicada was sawing away somewhere. She came back with sandwiches in plastic tubs and coffee in Styrofoam and tore into her food hungrily.