by John Shannon
“Do you know why Milo launched this crusade of his?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m such an emotional wreck, either, or why Jimmy’s playing Jesus. I thought we were a normal family, dealing with everything the way normal people are supposed to, and then Milo got laid off and it was like a virus falling from outer space on all of us, like a time bomb going off in our DNA. Maybe we weren’t as normal as I thought we were. Or maybe there’s a lot of families so near the edge that all it takes is a little push to send them running for cliffs like lemmings, I don’t know.” She looked away and shrugged. “You can’t really talk seriously sitting in a car.”
So he let it go.
IT was a long wait. They took turns napping and he was nearly dozing on his watch when a little jolt of guilty electricity went through him as the dark truck’s headlights came on. It was three A.M.
“Here we go, Faye.”
He followed as the truck ground onto the freeway, surprisingly turning back south toward L.A. Traffic was light, running in dots and dashes in the darkness. Trucks with onions and tomatoes bound for the big produce market, a few beat-up commute cars heading into L.A. from beyond the farthest reaches of the sprawl, loners on the last legs of their thirty-seven-hour drive from somewhere. It was a time he’d always loved to drive, private and peaceful, the hour of the super-dependable, the outcast, or the fanatic.
There was a good thirty miles of high mountain pass between the Grapevine on the north end that led steeply up from the central valley and the more gradual descent into L.A.’s San Fernando Valley on the south, and it seemed Schatzi was going to take 1-5 all the way back to L.A., but at almost the last moment he pulled slowly down a ramp and turned west. At the bottom of the ramp, Jack Liffey turned out his headlights and waited. A two-lane road led off into a desolate canyon in the foothills. There were no shops or houses, only rolling hillsides that would be yellow and dry in the day, dotted with sumac and stunted live oaks. There was just enough moonlight to make out the silvery road leading off toward the taillights of the truck that dwindled ahead.
He started up the road slowly without lights.
“Whoa.” She clung to the dashboard.
“I can see well enough.”
He followed the road very slowly as it curved gently away from the freeway. On the left was a bland hillside that rose maybe a hundred feet above the road, and on the right there was a ditch of indeterminate depth that was to be avoided at all costs. At one point the truck seemed to stop for a while and he hung back until the lights started to dwindle again.
They smelled it before there was any other clue, a rich tarry odor on the air that prickled the nose with little hints of ammonia, old photographs, and rotting citrus. When the taillights disappeared around a bend, he stopped and opened the car door. The interior light showed a damp sheen that seemed to spread out from the middle of the road. He used his ballpoint pen to poke at a tiny gob of damp tar. The pen tip came up blackened and he sniffed it and tossed the pen away.
“I don’t want to drive on this much more.”
A dirt track rose shallowly up the slope to the left and he used parking lights to take the track very slowly up to a flattened dirt pad maybe fifty feet above the road, where he parked and shut the car off. They stepped out into the bloodheat air, and from the edge of the pad he could see the truck’s taillights winding up the canyon. There were no other lights. Even far above the road his eyes smarted from the chemicals.
“I know where we are,” he said softly. “Just over this hill is Val Verde.”
“What’s that?”
“Long ago it was the only rural black community in California. They came first to work in the oil fields around here. Then, back when all the big resort towns were still segregated, they put in little cabins and it became known as the Colored Palm Springs. The only whites who even knew of it were the Communists who used to come through to leaflet.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” she admitted.
“Once they broke the color bar at Vegas and Palm Springs at the end of the 1950s, Val Verde died a pretty quick death as a resort, but there’s still a lot of poor black and brown folks amongst the yuppies looking for cheap land.”
“And that truck is poisoning their environment,” she said indignantly. “Why are they doing it?”
“Money, of course. Disposing of toxic waste the right way is expensive. I’m sure GreenWorld is making a pretty penny taking the stuff off the hands of other chemical companies.”
“Bastards.”
After a while they saw the headlights of the truck coming back down the road. “I’m surprised he’s willing to drive over his own dump site,” Jack Liffey said. “Maybe he hit a dead end he didn’t anticipate.”
“Maybe he’s just too stupid to know the danger.”
The truck ground slowly past and stopped on a wide bit of road just fifty yards away. The big man got out and smoked for a few minutes. It was Schatzi all right, still wearing his suspenders. His cough echoed clearly off the hills. Then he fiddled with some controls on the piping on the flanks of his truck and drove away.
Jack Liffey drove down to where the truck had stopped. A puddle had formed, deeper than the chemical slick that had sprayed the rest of the road, and it was slowly spreading. “Have you got anything like a container in the car?”
“There’s a quart of oil in the trunk.”
“That’s it.”
He retrieved the yellow plastic bottle from a plastic bag and let it glug itself empty into the ditch. “Of course, this is toxic waste, too.”
Holding the bottle gingerly, he scraped it across the puddle again and again to scoop up what he could, then he capped it and wrapped it carefully in the cello bag that the oil bottle had come in.
The sky in the east was just beginning to lighten as they drove down out of the San Gabriel Mountains. When he got off the freeway at Victory, the early commuters waiting at the metered entrance looked just as bleary as he felt. The first sun was just peeking out between low office buildings. She let her hand rest on his for a moment.
“Jack, we’ve just spent the night together.”
He smiled. “I hope Milo doesn’t misinterpret.”
“I’m not sure he cares enough to care.”
“I’m going to put your family back together,” he heard himself promise. It startled him and he turned to look at her and he could see she was confounded, too. It had just tumbled out of him, like a sneeze or a long-forgotten name, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
15
SEND THE GUNSELS PACKING
IT WAS ALMOST EIGHT BY THE TIME HE’D RETRIEVED HIS own car and fought his way south with the commute traffic to Culver City, and he could barely keep his eyes open. For a while he had worried at it, wondering what he’d been thinking about when he promised to put the Mardesiches back together, but now there was only a heavy stillness inside him. Weariness was in charge, and trying to get his mind to budge in any direction was like trying to shift a huge soft mass that flopped back over your wrists wherever you pushed. He was too old to go all night without sleep.
Both Loco and Marlena were in the kitchen and they looked up with identical scowls.
“Morning,” he said.
Loco gnarred softly in the back of his throat, and Marlena probably would have done the same if she’d known how. “Good morning,” she said with a frosty tension in her voice.
He sensed something was wrong but he had no energy for it. He set the plastic bag containing his loot of toxic waste on the table. “Don’t anybody touch that,” he said with his last flicker of energy. “It’s dangerous.”
“Do you want some coffee?”
“I have to sleep. Sorry. Talk later.” He staggered down the hallway to the bedroom, where the bed had been made tidily for the first time in weeks. He kicked off his shoes, and was astonished when he didn’t drop off the instant he hit the bed surface. He was still wired, and some strange brain chemic
al was fizzing away, keeping him going on nervous energy.
“Jackie.” He sensed her in the doorway. “Were you with her?”
Her?
“Staking out … toxic dump,” he managed to say.
He felt the bed give as she sat, and his hand was plucked up into the air. He opened one eye to witness her smelling his hand carefully, thrusting her nose along the fingertips.
“Don’t do this,” he said.
“I can’t help it.” She seemed about to weep, but mercifully he fell sound asleep.
HE awoke in a sweat with a hot light pouring in the bedroom window. Loco was beside him, half asleep but still watching with a slitted eye to ward off any retribution for partaking of the forbidden bed. It was just past noon.
“Partner, you take chances.”
Marlena had left a small plate of flan on the night table for him. She knew he loved it, but it was subsiding to a puddle in the heat. He passed the yellow mess across to Loco, who roused and sniffed it suspiciously, then licked once and made a face, if a dog could be described as making a face.
“Hey, that’s good stuff. But I suppose I wouldn’t like your kibbled kidneys either.”
He showered and made coffee, changing his mind about four times along the way on how to deal with Marlena’s jealous snit, and finally decided just to leave it alone. She had a forgiving nature, even if there was nothing to forgive. He dug through his medicine cabinet and came up with a little yellow plastic tube that had two Tylenols rattling inside. He dumped the pills and then downloaded an ounce of toxic sludge into the container. In another mood, the irony would have entertained him: whoever tested the sample might report that someone had adulterated the poisons with a little Tylenol.
A crossing guard flagged his car down at Overland with an octagon-shaped stop sign as a gaggle of little kids crossed to the boop-boop of the east-west light. The north-south signal went bleep-chirp. Something at the edge of his consciousness seemed wrong and then he noticed that the crossing guard had a guide dog and he held his gaze off in no particular direction, the way blind people often did. At the far curb the last of the little kids announced loudly that they were all across. They trooped up Overland toward the rec center as the crossing guard’s dog came about on the sidewalk like a tug with the Queen Mary in tow and waited diligently for the next green. Jack Liffey believed wholeheartedly in affirmative action, but this seemed a particularly dubious application.
As he left Culver and passed into L.A., he had that strange steely taste he got in his mouth whenever a police car was pacing him, but he watched carefully in the mirror and there were no police cars, not even a plain-wrap, unless the cops had started using cement trucks. He decided it was just a taste after all and he needed to clean out his coffeepot. He couldn’t think of the last time he’d done more than rinse it under the tap.
He found he was squinting as he drove, his eyes burning, and then he realized that only a few blocks away buildings were fading out into the ocher air. It was one of those days where the parking-lot exits of all the big aerospace companies would be posting a first-stage smog alert for the next day, but what could you do, bicycle thirty miles to work? On a day like this, the city lost its ring of mountains completely and seemed to have been whisked up out of its basin and dropped back into the flattest reaches of the Mojave, where it belonged.
Downtown didn’t even show up until he turned off the Santa Monica Freeway and headed up the harbor into the small nest of skyscrapers that L.A. had thrown together in the 1980s out of insane jealousy of New York. He looped around the downtown and came down the east side into the Nickel. An old guy with one tennis shoe and one bare foot was banging on the wall of the Grace Mission with a coffee can, but no one paid any attention.
A bored-looking woman with a pencil in her hair sat behind the chicken-wire hatch, and she told him Jimmy was out.
“Ya think he stays in here hanging around the Polo Lounge?”
He asked a number of people on the surrounding streets, showing them Jimmy’s photo, and finally a midget waved his arms in an animated way and said he knew “Cousin Jimmy,” and he thought he was preaching over in Indian Alley.
Cousin Jimmy. Already he was preparing the ground for his TV ministry.
The alley ran uphill shallowly off Fifth, just enough of a slope for an overpowering reek of urine to flow downhill around him off the blue plastic hogans and lean-tos. One forlorn seagull came streaking out of the alley as if chased. At the entrance, an old man sat against the brick of an abandoned building with his head slumped forward, rocking lightly, showing the back of a neck that was fantastically crosshatched by cracks and wrinkles. A woman sat dully beside him, her hand wrapped with bloody gauze. About fifty yards up the alley, he saw a half-dozen middle-aged Indian women sitting in a semicircle of boxes and pails and battered folding chairs. Jimmy Mardesich faced them, half sitting on the detached fender of an old car that was propped against the wall. He wore a Hawaiian shirt with yellow pineapples against red, and his Latino bodyguard hovered nearby.
“I can’t offer you a thing.” Jimmy’s reedy voice drifted down on the heady air with its usual serene tone, like a heavy dose of Quaaludes. “Everything you need you have within yourselves already. It’s all there in your heart or your soul or your mind—whatever you choose to call it. All you need to do is detach yourself from the baggage that’s dragging you back toward doubt and let out your ability to love yourself. You’ve already learned the lessons you need from all the things you’ve experienced and you only need to tap into that wisdom and appreciate who you are. It’s not always easy, I know that. For many of us, it’s only when we’ve come to the end of the path of self-destruction that we’re caught on, that we’re ready to turn and move in a new direction. I realize that, and I make no effort to force-feed anyone beliefs that don’t make sense. What you hear has to set up rhythms in your own heart before you hear it properly and use it. But some of you may be ready right now, and if you are, I’m here to try and help you find your way back to God, or back to that sense of comfort and safety you felt in your first home, or to that warmth you feel when you genuinely help your fellowman.”
He went on and on like that, and Jack Liffey was torn between the desire to go bang the boy’s head a few times to wake him up and send him back to high school and a kind of reluctant forbearance because of the obvious urge to something generous and virtuous that was welling up in the kid. He wondered if he really was witnessing the first ministrations of somebody who would found a new religion, an Aimee Semple McPherson or a Joseph Smith launching the New Thing right before his eyes, and he could tell his grandchildren, Honest, I was standing right there in the alley that day …
The boy had definitely found a Sinai to test himself on. An old woman with a reddened leathery face watched him with curiosity but the rest seemed more taken by the things they saw in the distance or on the ground at their feet. It was not even clear if any of them understood the words he was using. One old man sat cross-legged on the ground, almost within reach of Jimmy Mardesich, arranging and rearranging small bright objects on the pavement in front of him.
“And what if there is no big floaty place above the clouds filled with saints and angels with white wings and harps, what if this life is all there is and we all reap what we sow right here and now? If that’s true, if the here and now is all we’re going to get, is it any reason to make ourselves even unhappier than we are in the here-and-now? Joy is a state of mind, it’s unique to each of us, and all you need to do to help find your own joy again is to remember one splinter of happiness from your past, one little ray of sunshine, and build it up again. Think back, get in touch with it, and detach yourself from everything that’s denying you that feeling now.”
A man with long shiny hair in braids came out of a plastic lean-to and glowered at the boy, the Latino bodyguard watching him like a hawk. He said something too soft to hear and strutted away down the alley. As he passed Jack Liffey, the man with the braids
muttered, “Pecker Christer greaseball.” Jimmy hadn’t even noticed and the mild, imperturbable voice droned on and on.
The old man sitting on the ground finally seemed to decide he had achieved the perfect arrangement of bottle caps and stones and cigarette wrappers, and he looked up hopefully like a bower bird expecting a mate. The piss smell was getting to Jack Liffey and he pulled out. He’d look in tomorrow, and when he did, he’d probably find the boy troweling in the cornerstone of a shrine to himself—the Church of the Big Floaty Place—or pounding on foreheads to hurl out devils, or patiently explaining to the homeless how to levitate. There were some processes that you had to let work themselves out on their own. He just hoped the boy didn’t stumble into something he couldn’t handle.
• • •
OUTSIDE the Nickel he started trying pay phones until he finally found one that still had its phone book inside the dangling fiberboard clamshell. There was no listing under the federal government for a local office of the Environmental Protection Agency and he had to settle for the city Environmental Affairs Department, which he knew had moved into the old city hall into offices the mayor’s staff had fled during the big earthquake retrofit.
He realized he’d never actually been inside it—that wonderful L.A. version of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus that he’d probably seen several thousand times embossed on police badge 714 opening Dragnet and he’d seen destroyed almost as many times by Martians and giant lizards. Some of his image of city hall still had to come from his imagination that day because the top half of the tower disappeared up into the smog. Inside there was a four-story Byzantine rotunda full of colored tiles and mottoes on the walls and then the elevator took him up to an ordinary hallway in two shades of institutional beige.
A bit of cardboard taped by a door said Environmental Affairs, and he had a momentary image of a man and woman coupling in the woods but he guessed the people inside had already heard that joke a few times too many. A low wooden fence penned him in a reception area, and mostly empty desks filled the rest of the open space. A young woman with a crooked nose had her feet on an open lower drawer as she read a tabloid paper that seemed to be called Moxie. He saw a big headline saying: