by John Shannon
‘You got their best filet mignon sandwich.’ He hopped down from the cannon. ‘What went wrong with your career, Mr Monk? I can tell you’ve got fine hands.’
‘Oooh, where did that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow get off to?’
‘Sirs! Hello.’
Maeve had seen the two white men emerge from the Fortnum Hotel and they obviously weren’t the kind of men who lived there. They looked more like desk men or security guards who might be able to give her a coherent answer about Conor.
‘What you doing down here in the deep shit, kid?’
The one in front was really big-shouldered, like a TV wrestler, and had ringlets of golden curls cascading from under a baseball cap that said Ignore Previous Hat. The other was shorter even than she was, and his eyes were all over the place. She began to doubt her judgment about approaching them at all. There was something distinctly hostile and dangerous about them.
‘I’m looking for an old friend,’ she said. ‘Have you seen this boy?’ She held out the photo of Conor at arm’s length. But they barely looked at it.
‘Get a new boyfriend, Sugar,’ the little one said. ‘If he’s living down here, he won’t never do you right.’
‘He’s a nice young man, a musician.’
‘Poverty and death are all you’ll find here,’ the big man said, and she backed a step involuntarily at the harshness of his voice. He shooed her away with a backhand gesture just as three very old men emerged from the hotel door carrying aluminum baseball bats. One of them wore a yarmulke, and it was one of the oddest confrontations she’d ever witnessed. Maeve ducked down behind a trash dumpster near the curb.
The little man with the wild eyes turned to his pal. ‘Can I take them down?’
‘Not now, Rice.’
‘Did you just cut the steam pipe for our heat?’ one of the old men demanded.
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, Fructose.’
‘We’re calling the cops and the city inspector immediately. You’re not welcome in this building any more. Tell Vartabedian that we’ll move out of here when he gargles in the toilet.’
‘Tell who?’ the big guy said.
‘Just tell the prick you work for he’s farcockt,’ another of the old men said.
The little man with the strange eyes was trembling, his right hand digging around in his pocket, and the big man encircled Rice’s shoulder gently but forcefully and walked him away hard.
‘It ain’t but one thing to know,’ the big man called back at them. ‘One thing. Clear out real soon, darlin’s.’
The two men climbed into their high SUV and drove off, and Maeve cautiously came out from behind the dumpster where she’d been hunkered down.
‘Sirs!’ she called as the three old man headed back toward the hotel.
‘Young lady. What are you doing in this den of iniquity?’ The man who seemed like their leader lingered while the others waited for him by the doorway.
‘I’m looking for a friend who might be here,’ Maeve said. ‘Is this place so terrible?’
‘I’m afraid it’s a war zone, daughter, and we’re a bunch of dainty cowards,’ the old man said. ‘Thank you, Musketeers,’ he said to the two other old men as they chose to ignore Maeve, shoulder their baseball bats and slip inside.
She wanted to ask immediately about Conor, but she was too intrigued by the confrontation she’d just witnessed. When she kept talking, the man waited outside with her and told her his name was Samuel Greengelb, and then he insisted they go into the lobby. ‘Please, child. It’s safer for all in here. Have I met you?’
‘No, sir. I don’t think so.’
All but two of the overstuffed chairs had been slashed to shreds, and she settled primly near a dead TV. He told her about their fight with the landlord over expelling them in order to expedite the conversion of the Fortnum into high-priced lofts.
‘But we have long-term leases from an old owner. We’re the three Musketeers – pardon me – the Resistance. We got nowhere to go but some public-assistance dreck. Those thugs of Mr Vartabedian are playing every dirty trick in the book to get us to leave. They kill the elevator so Joel in his rheumatism can’t hardly get down to the store. They paint the halls with curses and they even deposit human excrement on the floors. They bang on our doors at three a.m., yelling anti-Semitism. They break our door locks when we go out, so we got to use wood bars and chairs to be safe. Tonight they cut the steam pipe. It’s the only heat we got in winter. We talked to a lawyer, pro bono like, but he says it’s very hard to beat guys with the big money.’ Greengelb was so obsessed by his story that he hadn’t even asked her name or why she was there.
‘My name is Maeve Liffey, sir,’ she said, when he finally ran himself down. ‘My father is a detective, and I’m helping him look for this boy.’
She didn’t expect much from showing Conor’s photo. The old man studied it for some time. ‘Yes, I think this little pisher is staying here. He’s on floor three near me, but he’s usually out all day. He really should be home with his mamele and tate, if you ask me – he’s a very nice boy. If he’s the same one.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Maybe this boy is too nice. This is a rough place here – it’s so much worse now trying to live on The Nickel, and I don’t think this boy really knows about the bite of the snakes out there.’
‘Thank you for the information, sir. Please tell Conor I’ll come back to see him tonight. I’m Jack Liffey’s daughter, a friend of his father. Remember Jack Liffey.’
He nodded gravely. ‘Better you write a note. I forget names. And if your father has any power in this city, don’t forget us, the Fighting Musketeers.’
‘One for all, all for one!’ Maeve said.
‘That’s it!’ He almost shouted. ‘Kibosh the mothers, in the idiom,’ he responded with an arm pump, like a tennis player taking down his opponent.
NOTES FOR A NEW MUSIC
Day 4
What a wonderful day! Eddie Monk introduced me to musicians all over The Nickel, and we spent so much of the day talking eagerly! These people are every bit as interesting as any people at home – much more really – and I’m a little hoarse from talking so much through all the excitement. But not too hoarse to try hard to work out a song.
After a while, he glared at the notebook that was mostly chicken-scratches and inserts, but he finally crossed out all his mistaken attempts and copied over his semi-final version, with only a few more amendments.
The Knowers
He lies on his face to drink from the Concrete River
Brushing away the rainbow slick of oil
That has leaked from the factories and the gutters
Of a city that once knew his name
But what does he know now?
He lives in a box that contained a stove.
It made Maeve edgy to return to the Catholic Liberation shelter, but she’d finally convinced herself that she’d really only imagined that Eleanor Ong had recognized her. There was no way, not after so long – nobody had that kind of memory. So she’d come back to mollify her sense of duty and see how Felice and Millie were doing. She was a bit chagrined that she hadn’t thought of buying any dollie clothes yet. Finding Conor was still at the top of her agenda, but she’d checked the Fortnum again, and he wasn’t back, even though evening was gathering.
A skinny woman with a strawberry mark on her cheek, who was either taking the last of the sun or discreetly on guard, sat on a folding chair in the unlocked yard. The strawberry woman told her Felice and Millie had gone out looking for the missing husband. They’d had a second-hand report of a man much like him staying at a nearby flop a few days earlier. It seemed so sad to Maeve, all of it – suggesting a whole post-apocalyptic world of people who were out on their own in the hard rain, hunting for someone they had lost or a job they desperately needed or just the big lottery ticket. Felice looking for her husband, Maeve herself looking for Conor Lewis, her mother looking for a new b
oyfriend, her father looking for the secret to his legs and voice – everybody else in The Nickel probably looking for a smoke or a drink or just a generous soul to pass a few hours with.
‘Is your husband lost, too?’ Maeve asked.
The woman on the chair roared with laughter. ‘Girl, I be runnin’ from. If that cheatin’ motherfucker ever find me, we both dead and buried. D’Sean – the dog, the whoremonger, man of a hunnert per cent lie …’ She seemed to run down. ‘He say he gonna hit me with his big whoopin’ karate swing when I lef’, but I know he just gonna die stupid. This nun’s got a place of peace here, what I call my temp’ry high tower of retreat. That what Reverend Lonald C. King back in Michigan say we all need, ever’ one of us. Thereafter shall ye live in stillness, delivered from the hand of the wicked.’
Maeve wondered if she might need a high tower of retreat herself. She could see how it would be nice to think something like that was out there for her, waiting for the day when her father was truly gone and buried and there was nobody else she could lean on in that particular way. The way that had probably spawned the idea of god for millions in the first place. Thinking of her dad made her choke up a little.
‘What’s the name of that nun who runs your high tower of retreat?’ Maeve managed to ask.
‘Sister Mary Rose. I tell you – that woman got one great big soul on her.’
It was strange that nuns changed their names so radically, but Maeve decided not to say anything more about her for fear of arousing suspicion – plus the fear that her voice might break.
‘Please tell Felice that I’ll come back later. My name is Maeve.’
‘I mos’ surely will, Miss Maeve.’
Maeve slipped outside the gate into the abrupt piss-smells of the ruined street. What an unpleasant place, she thought. Then, standing not twenty feet away like an evil crow watching her, she noticed the short white man with the funny eyes that she’d met coming out of the Fortnum. He was watching her like a predator. She remembered the way he and his pal had challenged the old men at the hotel, and a chill clutched her spine as she walked deliberately toward her car, which meant diagonally past him, trying to ignore him.
‘Don’t be no Runaway Sue,’ the man said gently.
She wondered why something inside her required her to face up to moments like this rather than just sprinting away as fast as she could. She stopped on the crumbling street and turned back to meet the little man’s crazed powder-blue eyes.
‘You rich kids hang down here, get you a big kick out of it. Mostly at Thanksgiving. You serve turkey dinner an’ shit to the winos. Ever’body tell you how terrific and sanctified you are. That right, waspie?’
‘I’m not rich.’ She saw his hands moving restlessly in odd patterns. She had a feeling that this man had risen from a trap door from somewhere deep down below, and his simple presence could taint any place on earth that he happened to stand, even a great cathedral.
‘Mebbe, girl. But you ain’ no poorhead. I know you. I saw your picture of your boyfriend. What you think is worse? The things you do in this here life or the things you go and neglect to do?’
His whole body moved fretfully now, foot to foot. All she could think was that this was some poor puppy who’d been kicked badly when he was little. And for some reason she still had an urge to try to save even the worst of the lost ones. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say, sir. Your manner is scaring me.’
‘I want you to say the truth. Your very own dumb ideas of the truth.’ He brought a switchblade knife out of his pants pocket and her neck prickled as he held it up between them and snicked it open. ‘This is my truth.’
It made her too terrified to move, and then angry that he’d do this to her. ‘Why is a weapon the truth to you? If I had a gun, I could hurt you even more, and it wouldn’t change anything about me or you.’ For the first time in her life, she actually considered the idea of getting a little gun. Just for men like this.
He grinned and let the knife sag. ‘Oh, it wouldn’t change anything, you say?’ he said. ‘How you forget about Indiana Jones pulling out his big pistol against all them waving swords on the bridge. Life is all about relations of power, sugar. Having the most pow’ful weapon is what wins ever’ time.’
‘No!’ she said with determination. She grasped for an idea that had come to her but was so easily dispelled she almost couldn’t hold onto it. ‘Life is about holding out a hand of help. Good people do it for anyone who needs it. You need it, too.’ She didn’t actually hold out a hand – wouldn’t that be insane? – but it made her wonder how sincere she was. The idea made him cock his head in a strange way.
‘They tell me I’m a sociopath, missy,’ he said. ‘Psychopath, they used to call it. My juvie counselor said so over and overtimes. That means they should have strangled me at birth.’
‘No,’ Maeve insisted. ‘No one on earth is hopeless.’
‘Get away from that girl, you Satan!’ The strawberry woman at the shelter had come out the gate, and she began yelling back toward the shelter for help.
The man’s eyes went to the woman for just a moment, as if to fix her in memory for the future, and then back to Maeve. Something strange happened within his eyes, and then he laughed and drove the knife hard an inch or two into his upper thigh.
Maeve gasped.
‘We decide what hurts us,’ he said. ‘And what doesn’t.’ He yanked the knife out and walked away without delay, not even limping.
African-Americans make up 9 per cent of Los Angeles County’s population, but constitute a full 41 per cent of the homeless, and seemingly 90 per cent if one takes even a cursory drive through The Nickel. Latinos and Anglos make up 77 per cent of the county’s population, but represent only about 50 per cent of the homeless, spread through many other impoverished pockets in the city.
At least 20 per cent of the homeless are war veterans, largely from the Viet Nam War, men and a few women who’ve been forgotten by the government that sent them as cannon fodder into that misbegotten war.
SIX
A Slow-Down Theory
It’s lucky you’re not a horse, Jack Liffey thought, looking down at Loco basking in a trapezoid of winter sun in the back yard. They shoot horses, so they say. The dog had worn one of those plastic lampshades for a while to keep him from gnawing at his leg stitches, but that was before the chemo had killed his appetite, even for chomping on himself. Now the ordeal was over, and he was getting his relish for some foods back, even sampling dry food, which he would never touch before.
Staring at the dog lying there lazily, experiencing a pang of affection, Jack Liffey had what he knew was a meaningless premonition that Loco would die in the near future, despite all of the – what did they call it? – heroic measures. Cancer. It seemed like half the women he’d ever met had either died of it or were fighting it. Gloria had had her own bout with breast cancer just before they’d met. Breast cancer was the plague of our time, he thought. Aside from AIDS, of course. He was a gimp now himself. When you got stuck in disability thinking, everything in the world seemed to suggest disease.
The phone rang in the house and brought him alert as he heard Gloria answer it. Your other senses were supposed to sharpen to make up for the missing ones, and he was doing his best to listen for nuance these days. But the voice was coming through too many walls where his chair sat above the top step of the porch. Before long she brought the cordless out with her, pressing the speaking end to her thigh to suggest confidentiality.
‘I think it’s time you know about this, Jack.’
No worry about nuance here, he thought, as he nodded pensively. Maeve was eloping? The police were sending Gloria to New York? His health insurance had been canceled?
‘It’s your old friend Mike Lewis. Get out your pad and I’ll translate.’ She brought the phone up to her ear. ‘Mike, I’ll let you talk directly to Jack, then he’ll give me a signal, and I’ll read you what he writes back. It’ll take some patience. Does that dog hunt for y
ou?’
Jack Liffey could just hear the reply, the voice of a tiny man in a bottle. ‘Of course. I love Jack. Don’t tell me this has all been Maeve’s doing?’
‘Jack hasn’t been in the picture, I’m afraid. You get to start from Go.’
She handed him the phone, and he listened, as Mike Lewis told him that his sixteen-year-old son Conor had been missing for about five days now, presumed headed for Hollywood, a bit peeved and rebellious, to try his chances at the music business. A few days ago, Mike said, he’d thought he was relaying this message to Jack through Maeve, but apparently that wasn’t quite the case. He should have suspected.
‘Ack-ack!’
Gloria grabbed the phone away. ‘Write, pendejo. Stop that acking. Mike, I’ll tell you in a minute what he’s scribbling furiously right now, but you can probably guess some of it. She’s a headstrong girl and I’m sure she meant well, trying to spur Jack into action.’
‘There really shouldn’t be any danger,’ Mike said. ‘It’s not like Conor stole the family Porsche, or joined some death cult out in the desert. He’s a pretty sensible guy, but he does have an empathy overload that tends to draw him to three-legged cats.’
‘Then he’ll get along fine with Maeve.’
GLOR – YOU DIDN’T TELL ME THIS!
MIKE – PLEASE TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU TOLD MAEVE.
ALL OF IT. AND WHAT SHE SAID TO YOU.
‘Incoming,’ Gloria announced on the phone. She pursed her lips as she read over the reproach in the first sentence, directed at herself, then read out the rest, word-for-word. ‘Over,’ she said evenly.
‘Jack, I’m really sorry,’ Mike said. Jack had the receiver, but she could hear the tiny voice clearly. ‘She said she was going to tell you about it and you couldn’t really talk right then, but she said you were getting better and you’d love an easy job to get you going again.’ Mike Lewis told him as much as he could remember, including the fact that he’d faxed Maeve the photo and other information about Conor.