On the Nickel

by John Shannon

  ‘I thought you’d gone back into one of those silent convents. That’s the family legend – after Dad’s life turned out to be a bit too technicolor for you.’ She couldn’t think of a nastier way to put it.

  Eleanor laughed softly for a moment. ‘I tried. It turns out I’m better at serving than silent prayer. I can’t really keep my mouth shut, they tell me. Speaking of legends – have you ever heard the age-old convent tale?’

  Maeve shook her head.

  ‘This isn’t strictly true – but take it as an analogue of the truth, possibly said about another nun centuries ago. The Mother Superior allows us to speak two words out loud every fifth year. My first two words were “hard bed.” So they got me a better bed. Then, just last year, after ten cloistered years, I said, “lousy food.”

  ‘“OK, it’s going to be best if you leave us,” the Mother Superior said. “You’ve done nothing but complain since you got here.”’

  Maeve smiled but did her best not to laugh. ‘Dad has a permanent woman now. He’s very committed to her.’

  ‘And I have what we call a vocation. I’m still a nun, Maeve, a bride of Christ.’ She displayed the plain gold ring on her marriage finger. ‘My order is St Procopius, of the Benedictines, the same as Dorothy Day. If you don’t know her, look her up. She’s a wonderful hero. “Bride of Christ” works much the same way as marriage.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Maeve said. ‘Gloria isn’t imaginary and Jesus is.’ She was trying to be hard as a rock to remain loyal – insulting and untouchable – but she realized she’d just revealed Gloria’s name. Was that a mistake?

  ‘Gloria,’ the woman mused. ‘A Latina? How interesting.’

  ‘A Paiute Indian, in fact. She’s strong as an ox, hard as nails, smart as a really good shrink. A very good cop. And possessive as all get-out.’

  The half-smile came and went. ‘Don’t worry, Maeve. I don’t covet Jack. I just wanted to know how he’s cooking along these days. I was worried. When I knew him long ago, things were a bit ragged.’

  No way on earth Maeve would tell her about Jack’s problems. ‘He’s fine. Just perfect, in fact.’ She felt Millie’s hand tighten twice on hers, like some kind of weird lie detector going off.

  ‘You should go back to your mom now,’ Eleanor said to the little girl, as if there was something more she wanted to say to Maeve.

  ‘I have to go find a runaway boy now,’ Maeve said quickly.

  NOTES FOR A NEW MUSIC

  Day 5

  Make a song of that afternoon, Conor. It was like being caught up in a wildlife special on PBS. But that’s a mean thought. Eddie introduced me to an old friend Macedonio Perez, who looked as shriveled as a prune though something told me he wasn’t really very old at all. Eddie said PAIR-ez, I remember that. ‘I just took a bad blast,’ Perez said. ‘Sorry, old man. But my brother died yesterday at MacArthur Park.’

  ‘Of what?’ I said. Pretty naive, I guess.

  He squinted one eye at me. ‘TB maybe. No T-Cells left, septicemia, diabetes, hearing voices, not feeling a thing from the knees down. Pick your favorite.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  ‘It’s OK, kid. You didn’t know him. He had seizures, same as me.’

  And not ten minutes later, after Macedonio and Eddie had talked at random in a slang I had difficulty following, Macedonio was lying on the sidewalk near Mike’s Market, throwing his arms around, and Eddie was fighting to get a balled-up corner of his shirt into the man’s mouth. I did my best to help. After a while, he went limp and passed out peacefully, and Eddie took his violin gently out of its padded case and offered the man a little solo – Brahms, to lull him far away. Eddie just seems to get better and better at the instrument as I stay near him.

  ‘They swallow their tongue and strangle if you don’t keep the teeth apart,’ Eddie explained.

  ‘I’ve heard about that. We had a kid in school.’

  ‘Mac spent all his life with high windows, from eleven or so in juvie, then the old L.A. jail north of the I-10, then prison up in Corcoran. He never learned to read, and he’s sensitive about it. He pretends he needs glasses and asks you to read letters to him. But there’s lots of Mex words in his letters that kind of mess up my steez. I never learned much Mex.’

  ‘I know it pretty good,’ I said. ‘I’ll help you if he gets another letter.’

  Eddie seemed surprised. ‘That’s a mind-blow, kid. They teaching Mex to white kids in the ‘burbs now?’

  ‘Only if you want it. Most of my friends took French or German.’

  ‘They oughta teach you coon talk, too,’ he said, grinning. ‘Strivin’ my duns be dollar and coin.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothin’ you wanna know, son. You really gotta have a coon-life, you wanna unnerstan’ coon talk.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I said. ‘I’m doing my best …’

  Uh-oh. He broke off writing at the knock on his door, thinking it was the Musketeers again, then he tried to ignore the interruption and finish the sentence, but he’d lost his train of thought. So he sighed and got up and opened the door. Surprisingly, he found a girl there, freckled and aged about eighteen. She was slim and big-breasted and looked pretty good, even though she was trying to be fierce-looking, for some reason. You didn’t really have to guess about self-protection on Skid Row.

  ‘Wow, you’re Conor,’ the girl said.

  ‘Whoa – who told you that?’

  ‘Your dad, Mike Lewis.’

  ‘Ah, shit. Tracked down to my hideout. Who are you?’

  ‘Come on, man, let me in. I’m not screwing with you, and I’m not your enemy.’

  ‘How do I know that?’

  She shrugged. ‘Maybe I made it all up. I’m Jack Liffey’s daughter.’

  He smiled. ‘Amazing. Another generation torments the new one.’

  ‘Come on, come on. There’s no torment here.’

  He waved her in at last. ‘You’ve got the hospitality of everything going, believe me. But it’s not much. Hard surfaces, cold looks and schizophrenics. Hey, that could be a song. ‘Hard surfaces, cold looks and schizophrenics,’ he sang. ‘And nobody sleeps like a baby.’

  She stepped in and saw his guitar leaning against the rickety table at the window. Her focus bored in on an open journal book with a pen beside it on the table. She sidestepped, surreptitiously she thought, to try to get a glimpse of a little of what must have been a diary, but he hurried over and slapped it closed.

  ‘That’s private, friend.’

  ‘I was looking for you in Hollywood – that was your dad’s best guess,’ Maeve said. ‘My name is Maeve. Hollywood is the usual destination in this town for music-heads on the lam.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to explain myself to you. I came here because I came here.’

  ‘Cool. You picked The Nickel because it’s the utter bottoming-out of America’s moral abandonment of its poorest and weakest.’

  His eyes widened. ‘Well said, Maeve.’

  ‘I’m sure I could have said it better.’ She sat in his only chair, beside the closed diary that drew her eye from time to time. ‘I was scared at first walking around out there,’ she admitted. ‘I bet you were, too. There’s still a few guys out there who scare me, but mostly they’re just people, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Lost people who drink too much and bad-luck people and some really really crazy people. They may be strange, but nobody wants to be here. I think so, anyway.’ He plopped down on the edge of the bed, the only other seat.

  Maeve folded her arms. ‘I think we were actually talking about different things, if you listen really close,’ Maeve said. ‘I was really talking about myself and my own fears, wasn’t I? You were talking about the people who live out there.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He screwed up his face and looked even younger for a moment. ‘Back in high school, I gave up trying to cure my really angry friends. Goths and punks. They were so angry they were like chained dogs who were strai
ning out at the end of the chain, and you couldn’t do a thing for them. Seeing it that way helped me see them better.’

  ‘Were you part of the garage-band tribe?’

  ‘Uh-huh, and a little Goth, too.’

  ‘I think I’m still in the movies-and-books tribe.’

  ‘I don’t think we have to be so extreme any more,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’re all a little bit of everything, even soch and dweeb. You know, I heard a homeless man play a Beethoven concerto this morning. Not perfect, but pretty damn good. Jeez, let’s give credit.’

  She noticed that there was a delay before he spoke, and almost everything he said was considered first, measured out, trying so very hard to be fair – or just not quite trusting her. He didn’t have that pop-off-at-the-mouth quality that she knew she had. ‘You seem to stay very slow and thoughtful. That’s a compliment, Conor. My foot’s been stuck on the accelerator for years.’

  He smiled, also delayed. ‘That’s where the prestige is, isn’t it? The fastest mind, the quickest wit. But you can slow down, too, I’ll bet. And without drugs.’

  ‘I don’t do drugs. Have you got a slow-down theory? I’d like to hear about that.’

  ‘I think so. But right now, all I can think about is the Musketeers. These old guys are fighting the pirates who want to take over this building. They asked me to meet with them tonight to make plans.’

  ‘I met the chief, I think,’ Maeve said. ‘I’d love to sit in, if I could.’

  Like a signal in some spooky dream, her voice drew a knock at the door.

  ‘That must be them,’ Conor said. He got up and opened the door, but seemed to be knocked back by an invisible shove.

  ‘You don’t deserve this palace, kid!’ the tall one with the golden curls barked at him. The short one already had his switchblade open and was waving it at Conor.

  ‘Come back to me, sport,’ Gold-head said.

  The short man took three quick paces inside and wrapped his arm around Conor’s neck, holding the knife point up, just poking a little into the soft underbelly of his chin.

  ‘You guys are really fucked up,’ Maeve said.

  ‘Mouth shut,’ the tall man demanded. ‘But real shut. It’s this one we wanted, sweetie. But maybe we’re going to take both of you because you seem to be hitched now.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about this guy,’ Maeve said, taking a leaf from one of her dad’s stratagems. ‘I don’t even know his name.’

  ‘You keep your version. We’ll keep ours. Start for the door now, girlie, or my pardner sinks his knife right up through your boyfriend’s tongue.’

  ‘Don’t! I’m there.’

  In 2005, police cars from various jurisdictions and ambulances from several nearby hospitals were observed dumping their unwanted mentally ill and homeless on The Nickel (one was even on an I.V. drip). This discovery provoked a furore in the press and L.A. City Hall for a while, and the courts ordered a stop to the dumping. But very little changed. The Nickel is still very often the designated last stop.

  SEVEN

  Words are Worth a Thousand Pictures

  Gloria began to worry when she called the school, using the police codeword for the week – Frosting – to establish her bona fides, and the attendance clerk at Redondo High told her Maeve Liffey hadn’t responded in home room and was presumed to be out sick for the day. A discreet call revealed that she wasn’t at her mother’s, and by dark she hadn’t shown up home at Boyle Heights.

  Maeve Liffey was presumably at it again, the scourge of evildoers, answering some Bat-Sign that only Maeve could see in the sky. Well, strictly speaking, it wasn’t that great a mystery, Gloria thought. She knew Maeve was out looking for Conor Lewis. She had total recall of both sides of the phone conversation with Mike Lewis, between Jack’s scribbles and the boy’s dad responding. And she’d also gone out of her way to find out for Maeve the address of the ATM that was Conor’s last cash-out the day before – Mike’s Market on the edge of Skid Row. Jesus! Gloria thought. She didn’t look forward to spending her evening after a twelve-hour shift down on The Nickel, fending off horny old men, trying to make sense of mushmouth ravings and avoiding the body sores that would give her a methicillin-resistant staph infection in a blink.

  She heard a pounding behind her and turned to see Jack Liffey glowering from his chair and hitting the side of the stove. When he saw that he’d got her attention, he started to write.

  YOUR WORRIED LOOK SAYS TROUBLE. MAEVE ISNT HERE. QED.

  She didn’t know what the hell QED meant, but she got the gist of the message all right.

  ‘Yeah, Jack, Maeve didn’t come home. I’m off to look for her, right now.’

  TAKE YOUR PIECE.

  ‘You want me to shoot her when I find her? Don’t worry, querido. Going into the world armed is department policy. I’m an officer of the law even in my down time. I can’t go to a Sunday picnic without my sidearm.’

  Loco limped in and rubbed against her legs in an ingratiating way before plopping down beside Jack. Thanks for that, she thought. I did contribute quite a bit to your cancer fund, old man.

  SORRY IF IM A BIT RATTY, Jack scrawled.

  ‘It’s OK, Jack. I know worrying about Maeve always does it to you. You’re damn good at finding runaway kids, but I’m better at ordinary police work, and you know it. This should be ordinary. We know she’s looking for Conor Lewis.’

  NOTHING ABOUT MAEVE IS EVER ORDINARY.

  They both smiled at that, and she crossed the kitchen, hugged him awkwardly and kissed his forehead. Every time she was about to step out of the house, she had an intuition that one of them was about to be struck dead, shot in the back by a teenage killer with an AK – such a nice boy, everybody said! – or blasted in the heart by a sudden blood clot stuck sideways. She always made sure her last communication was a moment of affection.

  ‘Love you, civilian,’ she said.

  She detoured to the bedroom to get the small photo of Maeve they kept in a silver frame by the bed. She already had a surreptitious copy of the faxed photo of the Lewis boy.

  They lay uneasily on either side of the super-high pickup truck bed, locked down under the camper shell. They were handcuffed and footcuffed to tie-downs that the men had pried out of recesses in the sides of the bed, and both of them had been duct-taped around the mouth and then around again. Maeve wondered what raw nerve in the world’s underpinnings she had touched to set all this off. She assumed it was her doing. She just couldn’t believe they were after Conor.

  Maeve had recognized the one with the knife all right, but the fact that he’d brought yet another thug along, and a thug who didn’t seem to approve 100 per cent of the whole venture, probably meant she wasn’t destined for a night of someone’s perverse sexual pleasure. That helped, but nothing really made sense.

  It was possible that Conor was trying to tell her something with his facial expressions, but she’d always found that words – clear, direct, unambiguous – were worth a thousand pictures as well as a thousand passionate and desperate gestures. By turns he seemed to be miming fear, idiocy, nonchalance – he could have been signifying anything in some twisted game of charades. Who could tell?

  It wasn’t a long journey in the truck, and she wished she’d been counting turns the way real detectives always did. She was pretty sure they were still downtown somewhere. The abrupt stop and then the tailgate skreeking open and the little crazy creep unfastening their cuffs and hauling them out into a pitch darkness outside meant only uncertainty. He shoved them both under a steel roll-up door that looked like it led into an abandoned warehouse. She tried to look around for landmarks, but he pushed them on too fast, using his knife to poke her painfully in her butt. All she’d seen was one sign, a badly painted Hsun’s Toys on a back door. She knew that the commercial toy district was against the northwest corner of Skid Row. She’d read that the Korean and Chinese toy merchants had begun hosing down their sidewalks day and night, trying hard to discourage street people.

&
nbsp; The roll-up door clanged down hard behind them, leaving them in a big echoey room, with half collapsed cubicle partitions on one side and lots of pipes and ducts from overhead dangling cut wires. One old sewing machine hung from an electrical conduit pipe like a public notice of what the place had once been. It was so close to her that she could read its brand, Juki, which she’d never even heard of. Whatever became of Singer and Pfaff? Maeve and Conor, both with steel handcuffs snapped down on their ankles, were frog-marched into the remains of nearby cubicles. Maeve was recuffed out of sight of Conor to a pipe that rose straight out of the floor all the way to the ceiling. The knife-man took delight in ripping the duct tape around once and then off her face hard.

  ‘Owww! Damn you! That hurt.’

  ‘It was meant to. Pain is good for the soul, girl.’

  ‘Give me the knife and I’ll help your soul,’ Maeve snapped.

  ‘I only use my own pain when I don’t have someone else.’

  She didn’t like the smirk she saw and decided to shut up. The big guy leaned against her cubicle wall as the little one went off to attend to Conor.

  ‘Owww!’ she heard. Undoubtedly that was Conor’s tape coming off.

  ‘No sympathy from me,’ said the big one. ‘We plucked you out of that human landfill.’ For the first time she noticed with surprise that he was wearing a red Rutgers sweatshirt. She didn’t really believe he’d gone there.

  ‘You went to Rutgers?’

  ‘Lousy football team. In a dipshit league,’ he added. ‘Everybody in Jersey would rather play for the Mafia.’

  ‘Why did you pick me up? I’m nobody.’

  He made a contemptuous flap of his lips. ‘Your boyfriend means something to the old Jews that we got to move out of that place real quick to make room for progress. Consider yourself collateral damage, precious. Nobody nowhere gives a flying-A shit about a couple of runaways.’

  She figured she should have left it there, but she couldn’t help herself. ‘I’m no runaway, you idiot. My mom’s an L.A. cop. You’ve screwed up big time.’