On the Nickel

by John Shannon

  Jack Liffey rapped the phone on his forehead in frustration, then handed it back to Gloria and went off into scribbling at a white heat again.

  ‘Me again, Mike. How’s your wife taking it?’

  ‘Pretty hard. She’s his stepmom and that’s more hurtful, somehow, but I cooked up my own wild oats when I was his age, and I think he’s going to be fine. His aren’t really that wild at all, if I’m right.’

  ‘It’s a rougher world than ours was,’ Gloria said. ‘The city parks where I ran barefoot long into the dark, you’ll stab yourself to death on used syringes now.’

  ‘Yeah, somewhere deep in the funhouse they’re making the children give up their innocence. I think we had a window of about fifteen years after World War Two that were different from everything that came before or after. That whole cohort of dads came home hating what they’d seen in the Depression and the war and wanting to make a protected world for their kids. And they damn well did their best – as long as you weren’t black, of course, or some other kind of outsider. It was a model railroad and Erector Set kind of world for a long time, the Fifties and most of the early Sixties.’

  She couldn’t help thinking of her first lover, the cop Ken Steelyard, and the huge model train layout he’d worked on for thirty years in his basement in San Pedro. He never acknowledged it, but part of his pleasure had obviously been playing God over that tiny little world that he could still control, the Twin Peaks and Western Railroad in imaginary Colorado.

  She felt a tug at her skirt.

  BOTH OF YOU, I NEED TO KNOW ANY TIME M CONTACTS YOU AND EXACTLY WHAT SHE SAYS AND DONT LET ON THAT I KNOW ANYTHING. OBVIOUSLY I CANT TRUST HER ANY MORE. FIND OUT ALL YOU CAN ABOUT WHERE SHES BEEN AND WHATS HAPPENED. SHED JUST CLAM UP OR GET CLEVER IF I GOT MAD AT HER. PLEASE – BOTH OF YOU!

  Gloria read it off, and Mike talked to him once more, mainly apologizing for not guessing what was going on. Jack Liffey just handed her the phone and nodded, and she talked to Mike a little – she’d never met him in person but what she’d heard she liked – and she said goodbye for Jack and then endured his angry glare for a while.

  ‘I was about to check up on her, Jack. I think Mike is right. There’s no real danger, and she’s got to try this business on her own for a while. She idolizes you so much that if she doesn’t find out how boring and shitty your job is, she’ll never even go away to college.’

  He wrote three words: CHECK UP NOW!

  She thought for a moment about how exhausted she was but then nodded. For the first time, she felt a bit of remorse. ‘OK, I should have rode her harder. Let’s make a trade. Can I get a psych therapist in to start working on you?’

  He shook his head angrily. They both knew that getting him to accept mental help was like pulling teeth without anesthetic.

  WATCH OVER MAEVE. LET IT BE THE XMAS GIFT YOU GIVE ME.

  Jack Liffey thought he detected a hint of amusement on Gloria’s face, and he felt overwhelmed by things, unable to check up on them, exiled to his customary inner prison, paralyzed and mute. He was deprived of so many simple faculties, basically reduced to a jellyfish in a chair. Maybe it was time to treat it all as a joke, he thought. Nothing more tragic and existential than that.

  ‘Ak-ak.’

  ‘Oh, Jackie. I do love you.’ Gloria ruffled his hair.

  I’m not a cat, he thought. Though I shouldn’t mind, I guess. A cat was a remarkable being, a castaway from some other world – bred down over millennia to be something quite unlike its hunter-killer species-being, yet still disdainful, still authentic in some way. Proud and fierce – despite being relegated to a fondle-object and stuck with some ludicrous name. Mieumieu, Booties, Annie Oakley, Griddlebone, and so much worse.

  Art Castro was the only person he’d ever let use the revolting nickname Jackie (except Gloria, now), and he’d had to grit his teeth at it sometimes. Something about them both demanded indulgence to their foibles. Perhaps a general sense of desolation about them – a life interrupted by something and never properly restarted.

  Which led him to tell himself to stop whining. He still had his sight, his hearing, his touch, some of the function of his dick, and all his taste buds. To assuage the other losses he began to hanker after spicy sausage, an old indulgence. A gift to his body. He’d have to get Gloria to buy some dry Genoa salami, some German liverwurst, Argentine Chorizo, Chinese lap cheong, even that South African stuff, boerewors. His mouth was watering already. Was this the way the devil worked to distract you?

  It was only a few blocks to the big downtown library with its pointy tile tower where scores of the homeless – fairly smelly, having splash-washed in the public bathrooms – snoozed over the comfy chairs. Maeve spent several hours there, killing time by looking at a huge photo exhibit of street pictures of Broadway, which was now a part of Latin America, with all its old-time department stores and movie palaces turned into Swap Meets, a term that had just come to mean a collection of small shops. Then she did some research on G-8 summits for her International Relations class so she didn’t feel like a total truant, and she helped an incredibly timid Japanese tourist find the section of Japanese books. He bowed and thanked her profusely in words she couldn’t understand.

  In late afternoon she emerged to find two helicopters circling low overhead with their blinding searchlights illuminating the block where she’d parked. She waited back in the shadows as sirens wailed and police cars came on so fast from so many directions that they almost collided. At the far end of the block a dark-skinned man wearing the top of a pink bunny suit was waving a shotgun in the air and shouting.

  A cop came up from behind Maeve, unnoticed, and shoved her face hard against a building, then pushed her into an alcove.

  ‘That wasn’t necessary,’ she complained. Why did they always need to hurt?

  ‘Shut up. Stay there.’

  She clearly heard her dad’s voice in her head, insisting that there was almost never a point to antagonizing a policeman. She decided, for once, to follow the advice she seemed to carry around now that she didn’t have his real voice in her life any more. The cop had his pistol out, but there were plenty of officers down near the pink bunny so this one seemed to take it as his primary responsibility to bully Maeve.

  ‘Don’t move!’

  She had yanked her head around to see.

  ‘The children! The children!’ the bunny man seemed to be howling.

  She could see one officer near the bunny man go down on a knee with a strange gadget like a salad shooter in his hand. The device jerked upward a little, and the pink bunny screamed and fired his shotgun high into the air. Maeve winced, expecting return fire, but miraculously they all held off as the shotgun fell to the ground, and the man in the bunny suit collapsed like a sack of old bricks.

  ‘Moke is down and clear,’ her cop said, touching a microphone pinned to his chest.

  Squawk.

  Maeve sat down in the alcove and encircled her knees to suggest she was no danger to anybody, and he finally wagged a finger once at her and moved off toward the ruckus to get his share of whatever glory was going. Luckily her car was parked nearby. She waited a minute or two, then walked very slowly toward it and then very slowly drove away in the opposite direction. She wondered if she’d just seen a Taser in action. They said it was better than getting shot, but they also said it had killed more than 150 people. It disturbed her personally ever since she’d found out her dad had been water-boarded six months back, another sort of high-concept demonstration of official bullying. All legal, apparently, under the Patriot Act.

  She felt a little trembly – that kind of treatment disturbed her deep down – but drove back to the Catholic Liberation shelter in the waning light, past scores of men drifting along the roadway or sitting on the curbs. A different black woman let her in the gate, the heavyset woman she’d seen at night when she’d dropped off Felice and Milie. She settled back down on to her folding chair, breathing a little hard, as if just getting up had been a chore
.

  ‘Your friends done came back.’

  ‘Felice and Millie?’

  ‘Yeah. They be pretty upset. The little squirrelly cat with the N’awlins voice, he be hittin’ on Felice most all they whole walk home.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I seen him some. He seem to think the shelter his personal ho’ junction.’

  ‘Can’t you do anything?’

  ‘Sister dimed him once, but you know the cops, they make a face and take down your words – maybe – but they don’t stay round. We need a really tough armed guard.’

  ‘You look pretty tough. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Kenisha Duncan.’

  ‘Mrs. Duncan, I’ll bet you scare that little funny-eyed man more than you think.’

  She smiled. ‘He scare me, girl. He best scare you. They’s long ho’ trains in this world dead and gone to hell ‘cause of men like that. He got the awful power of violence. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t believe in hell but I believe in sociopaths. I guess that man likes to hurt women. And he probably only fears somebody who can hurt him.’

  ‘Say amen. Girl, do me a favor real quick.’ Kenisha Duncan looked around furtively and saw no one at the wired windows of the shelter.

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Slip yo’self out the gate. They’s a small sack on the ground just by the twisty wheel of that honey-bin.’

  It couldn’t be anything positive, but Maeve undertook to do it anyway. Everybody had needs that should be honored. The sun was low in the west, blocked by the wall of downtown’s high-rises, but the sky was still light enough out not to be too frightening. She found the paper sack right away behind the overstuffed dumpster and could tell by feel that it contained one of those flat bottles of booze. She didn’t look, feeling it would violate the woman’s trust. Kenisha had two long slugs of whatever it was, and then she had Maeve put the bag back at the front caster of the dumpster.

  ‘That medicine not ‘lowed in here, but a body’s got to have a taste now and then to stay well.’

  ‘I understand, I do. Can I go in and see Felice?’

  ‘Why sure, chile. They either in the TV room or up in 202.’

  ‘Thanks, Mrs. Duncan. Next time I’ll have a sip with you.’

  The woman chuckled. ‘You most welcome. You the onliest person here to understand what a body got to do to keep her ol’ carcass goin’.’

  Maeve wanted to tell her she understood hardship and compromise and weakness, maybe better than the woman thought, but there was no need.

  ‘Bless you,’ Maeve said.

  ‘Keep it real, baby girl,’ the woman said. And Maeve felt an electric jolt as she walked away. That was what Beto and his bangers had called her.

  ‘You can do this to any building down here,’ Vartabedian said.

  ‘Well, not any building. It would be tough to build lofts in the Disney Music Center.’ Eddie Wolverton had his forehead to the tall glass windows that he’d had his guys put into the two luxury penthouses of the Driscoll Building. The view west was worth it all. He wouldn’t mind one of them himself, but living up Corrigan Canyon ovelooking Hollywood in a famous Lautner house was hard to beat. He hadn’t even thrown his housewarming party yet.

  ‘You know what I mean. What you’ve done here is just gorgeous, Eddie. This was a shithole. I saw it. A brick rectangle full of sweatshops. Though one was a pretty good cigar-rolling sweatshop, somebody who’d got himself run out of Havana.’

  ‘Yeah, I had one of his Yamilet Robustos myself.’

  ‘Where did the shop go?’

  Eddie just shook his head. ‘Who knows? It was Puerto Rican leaf. You can’t shine shit, V. Fuck it. They’re gone now.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

  ‘There isn’t room in life for second rate. Look at me; I stood beside Bobby Kennedy up in Delano in ‘Sixty-Six. Me. If Bobby hadn’t been shot, you know, I’d probably be designing big monuments to César Chávez on the Mall in D.C., and you’d still be selling used cars out in Glendale. We all move on, and life gets funny when you watch the Current disappear from Events. OK, the Driscoll’s over now. What’s next?’

  ‘The Fortnum Hotel,’ Vartabedian said. ‘I almost got it cleared.’

  Wolverton turned and his forehead wrinkled up. ‘That’s right on the edge of The Nickel, uh-huh?’

  ‘Sure. Skid Row is doomed, Eddie. We’re gonna see it put to rest in a few more years.’

  ‘I hear there’s some guys in the Fortnum who want to stay. Jewish gentlemen with gentlemen’s agreements – or maybe even real leases from the old owner. Am I right? The press is going to love this, kicking out a bunch of old Jews. You better hope none of ‘em are Holocaust survivors.’

  ‘I’m going to pay enough so they want to clear out.’

  ‘A horse head in the bed?’ Wolverton said with a grin.

  ‘Real money,’ Vartabedian countered. ‘To them anyway. It’s worth a little premium to keep the process moving.’

  ‘Ah, the code of gentrification,’ Wolverton said with a big grin. ‘I guess it’s our very own kind of global warming, isn’t it?’

  Conor came back to the Fortnum a bit jittery, anxious to write down the tales he’d been told by the homeless men he’d met around Eddie Monk. These men were more fascinating than anyone he’d have met in a thousand years around Fallbrook. He was writing furiously in his diary when a knock interrupted him.

  ‘Hi there, Mr Greengelb.’ Conor was on the very cusp of saying he was busy just then. In comparison to his diary, he couldn’t help thinking of Greengelb as interesting but not quite as memorable. Nothing to do with music. But some quirk of ingrained courtesy held his reply. ‘What’s happening, sir?’

  ‘The Musketeers are meeting. Vartabedian’s hooligans sabotaged our heat today. I thought you might like to be with us. You get just as cold as we do.’ There was something else Greengelb was supposed to tell the boy, but he couldn’t remember. His anger made it all worse, more confused.

  ‘I tremble like a leaf.’

  ‘Come to my room in ten minutes. We can’t let this go unanswered.’

  ‘Count on me, sir. I’ll just be a minute or two.’

  Felice and Millie weren’t in the TV room, which was full of women sprawling with their children on threadbare sofas and old bean bag chairs watching something – a TV surely – around a corner that flashed light over their faces and emitted unnatural laughter too often to be anything but a sitcom. She went on up the stairs, past posters for The Year of the Woman from Mozambique, and some bearded man named Paolo Friere under a big quote: ‘Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful.’

  As she already knew, Eleanor was not part of an organization that worried too much about what the Pope thought. And this was not a place that would have a lot of use for wry humor either, she thought. Though the women here, like Kenisha Duncan with her hidden booze, might have appreciated a little mischief now and again.

  She found the room number and knocked softly.

  ‘Felice! Millie! It’s Maeve.’

  Felice opened the door and smiled a strangely cool recognition as she beckoned her inside. Maeve almost froze in her tracks when she saw the slim form of Sister Mary Rose/Ms Eleanor Ong propped placidly on the windowsill watching her neutrally.

  ‘I just wanted to know if you were OK,’ Maeve said to Felice. She noticed the little girl moving slowly toward her.

  ‘We had a bad scare jus’ half a thumb-twiddle ago,’ Felice said. ‘That little shitass! Oop, I think I’m losing my religion. He snatched hard at my nipples when I told him to go away.’

  ‘I bet I know who you mean,’ Maeve said. ‘He tried to shake me up by stabbing his own leg. What a creepy guy.’

  At that moment Millie took Maeve’s hand hard. ‘Hi, Millie,’ Maeve said. ‘I’m sure you’ll be OK here.’

  ‘I got to go out sometimes, look for Clarence,’ F
elice said. ‘I know he’s here somewhere, I feel it in my heart. That drip-nose with his knife seem to be ever’place, like a used Kleenex. He said I remind him of Marilyn Monroe.’ She made a contemptuous noise.

  Maeve looked up at Eleanor, who hadn’t said a word. Her eyes were watching her thoughtfully, almost disinterestedly. ‘He’s what’s called a sociopath,’ Maeve said to Felice. Eleanor didn’t move a muscle. ‘He even said it himself. That means he’s got no conscience.’ She studied Felice, dowdy and drawn and plain, but she decided a lot of that was worry and lack of taking care of herself. ‘You know, you could be really pretty with a little fixing up,’ Maeve told her. ‘I’ll bet some of the women here would help.’

  ‘I don’t care about that. I just want to find Clarence and go home where things is normal.’

  ‘I’m looking for somebody, too, a missing boy. I showed you his picture. But when I get through finding him I can help you.’ She wondered if tasks and missions had multiplied unpredictably like this for her dad.

  ‘Could I talk to you outside, Maeve?’ That was Eleanor, speaking at last and smiling now, though barely, like the Mona Lisa.

  It turned out to be impossible to separate her hand from Millie’s, who had fastened on like a sucker fish, so the three of them stepped into the hallway. ‘We’ll just be a second, Felice,’ Eleanor said. ‘We’ll do something about that rotten man. I promise.’

  All of a sudden, Maeve was tense as a small wild animal caught out in the open. Eleanor shut the door behind her.

  ‘You know who I am, so please let’s not belabor it,’ she said pleasantly. ‘How’s Jack these days?’

  Maeve wouldn’t give the woman an inch. Whatever she did, she had to keep this woman away from her father. She knew he’d had such an overwhelming infatuation with her that he could never again be trusted to keep his pants zipped around her. After her own bout of love madness, she would never underestimate the tug of infatuation. ‘Should I call you Sister Whatever, or Eleanor?’

  ‘Whichever name makes you comfortable, Maeve. I don’t mind.’