by John Shannon
His chair jolted, and a voice demanded, ‘Leggo, you fucker!’
A tennis shoe was on his neck all at once, and he couldn’t turn his head to see who was speaking. He felt the wheelchair ripped away from him, inch by inch.
‘Ak-Ak!’ The chair! It was his last connection to a life that was still under some kind of control. It had his notebooks, a water bottle, several felt pens, and a snack bag of potato chips.
‘Man, ain’t this cold!’ a voice exulted, already diminishing, and his newly sensitive ear detected the grindy bearings of his wheelchair, with no weight on the wheels, receding.
‘Worth a Benjamin, I bet!’
Hell, Jack Liffey thought, not sure whether he was cursing or describing where he’d been deposited. Not so long ago there’d been something like a wall of affection surrounding and protecting him – Gloria, Maeve, friends, a house that he’d been able to maneuver around, a safe back yard, a dog, neighbors who knew him or at least knew about him and would come to his aid. But now he was alone in the dark somewhere, vulnerable and overwhelmed, without strategies. A small helplessness sinking into the void. Are you still home in there, Mr Jack Liffey? Honest to God, I don’t know. There’s so little left of who I was. There was one positive point, and he clung hard to it; he actually believed the claim that they wouldn’t hurt Maeve and Conor. They had no cause to.
The docs insisted his disabilities were all psychosomatic – actually they’d used some fancy new word to that effect – but he tried his damnedest now to lever himself up under his own power. Maybe he’d just forgotten how. He did feel a bit of buzz in his legs, but he couldn’t budge them. Even his arms seemed to have lost much of their strength. It’s just panic, self. Calm down.
He thought of Loco for some reason, and the semi-crippled wreck that his poor dog had become. Or was he getting himself and the dog mixed up? Tears of self-pity pooled on his upward cheek, then dripped off the bridge of his nose. Loco, this is me, Jack. Sell your condo, sell your favorite pet-bed and buy me out of this situation, please, he thought. He could tell he wasn’t thinking very clearly.
‘Ma’am, could I have a word?’ Gloria called through the tall chainlink at Catholic Liberation House. Sitting on a folding chair on the strangely idyllic lawn in front of the facility, a powerful-looking black woman was apparently guarding the place, but also imbibing from a small bottle she seemed to think was hidden in a paper bag.
‘What up?’ Her tone told Gloria that the woman resented this interruption of her righteous sundowner.
‘I just want to know if you’ve taken in a new girl recently, about eighteen.’ She held Maeve’s photo up to the fence.
‘A girl alone? We only take mothers and families, Officer.’
Officer. Some day she’d learn all the clues that made it that obvious to the rest of the world. Gloria was about to insist that the woman come over and take a good look at the photo anyway. Half your leads on the job came through pure doggedness, against all reason and inertia, but her energy was flagging badly after the twelve-hour shift that had started at 6 a.m. and now the dozens of random inquiries she’d made at shelters and SROs and foundations across the whole west side of The Nickel. She wasn’t as indefatigable as she’d once been, she realized. She wondered if she was losing her edge. It was a bad sign for a cop, one reason so many cops retired early.
‘Forget it, ma’am.’ Gloria saw the woman go alert, the brown bag do a vanishing act in the grass, and then she heard the front door come open. Sensitive radar, the woman had.
‘Is there a problem?’ a soft-spoken voice called out the door.
A thin woman with graying red hair came slowly out of the backlight, and down along the walk, approaching Gloria. She seemed tense, not in a mannered way, maybe just a rabbity kind of energy that Gloria had noticed before in a number of women who’d worked their way up in charge of institutions – orphanages, shelters, schools – always a little more to handle than they’d bargained for. Or maybe it was simpler than that, she thought. Maybe that nervy alertness was just a mark of the ones who lasted, people with a strong sense of responsibility.
‘I’m Sergeant Ramirez, LAPD Have you seen this girl in the last few days?’
She saw recognition immediately in the woman’s green eyes, probably before she realized she was broadcasting it. She had a mobile freckled face with a kind of tenderness in the aging eye wrinkles.
‘I’m Sister Mary Rose. I’m in charge here. May I ask you, Sergeant, why you’re looking for this girl?’
She saw no reason to withhold. ‘She’s my daughter. Stepdaughter, and I think she’s hunting for a boy who’s gone missing around here somewhere. She should have been home long ago, and she didn’t go to school today. I’m afraid she may have got mixed up with some of the toughs that hang out down here.’
Gloria could see the woman study her with an unusual curiosity, even a little amusement, as if Gloria had just grown a second nose, and she knew something was going on between them that she wasn’t aware of. The thin woman took out a key on a chain around her neck and unlocked the gate.
‘Come in, Sergeant. Yes, I’ve seen your daughter. I was pretty sure I recognized her. I won’t keep you in suspense – a long time ago, almost ten years now, I knew Jack, too.’
‘Knew?’ Gloria felt herself stiffen. Only police training had kept her from coming to an abrupt halt and bellowing: KNEW?!
‘Please have some coffee with me, Sergeant. Please. I am not a problem. Maeve is probably on her way home right now.’
She hadn’t used Maeve’s name. Reluctantly Gloria followed her in through the nondescript entry, past several militant posters in the hall, all featuring women of color looking competent and composed, and into what looked like a cramped staff room with cubby-hole mailboxes and a small fridge and coffee-brewer.
‘Yes, a long time ago, Jack and I were intimate, Sergeant. I’m sorry. Is that a word that anyone uses any longer?’ The nun explained that she’d left a convent back then, only a year before she’d met Jack, and she’d been running a different shelter and art center in south L.A., in the town of Cahuenga. She’d had almost no experience of men up to then, and Jack Liffey had shown up one day, a knight errant looking for the missing mother of a Latino boy, and he’d just bowled her right over, as she put it. She hadn’t been prepared at all for how his attentions would ‘sweep her off her feet.’ Gloria noticed the old-fashioned turns of phrase in her speech, as if she’d slept soundly through a couple of decades.
The nun sighed and shook her head at her own tale. Jack Liffey’s slam-bang life had turned out to be much too overwhelming for her, and after a particularly rough experience, she’d found she needed her old sense of vocation back, but maybe in reality, she’d needed the security of the large safe family that she’d left behind in the cloister. She confessed that there was probably a tendency for all that convent security and earnestness to infantilize the nuns a little.
Holy orders rarely took anyone back, on any terms, after they’d laicized, she explained, but her order, like most of them these days, was quite desperate for warm bodies and had been willing to make an exception. In many of the nuns’ retirement homes, she said sadly, the women – unlike old priests – had been pretty much abandoned by the Mother Church. The declining eighty-year-old nuns were now left to tend the ninety- and ninety-five-year-olds. It should have been a terrible scandal but nobody took notice.
She fussed ineffectually with a coffee filter as if her mind were elsewhere.
‘I’d actually prefer a beer,’ Gloria said.
‘I’m afraid we don’t allow alcohol here … except for that inexpensive port you undoubtedly noticed Kenisha Duncan drinking. She thinks I don’t know about it, of course. We could borrow it from her, but I have a feeling sweet port wouldn’t suit you.’
‘Uh, no. How long would you say you and Jack were intimate?’
‘Really not long at all. A few weeks. Just long enough so we were both almost killed by some terrible hooli
gans who came after him. I had compound fractures in both my legs. We were thrown about thirty feet straight down a storm drain. Unfortunately it was raining in the hills that day, and the whole pipe soon flooded. I’ve never been so physically frightened in all my life.’2
Gloria wondered if there was another kind of frightened that mattered. Be generous, she thought. ‘Jack’s life does tend to attract trouble. I’ve learned that, too. It’s lucky my job leaves me used to it.’ Gloria thought of telling her about Jack’s condition now, but for some reason she held back, put off, or annoyed (jealous?) by this competent middle-class white woman. She hadn’t realized that she had this jealousy in her. Even when she’d been with her first big love, her police mentor Ken Steelyard, his flirtations with others hadn’t bothered her too much – though he’d never been much of a ladies’ man.
‘I’ll bet Maeve’s grown up to be quite a bright girl,’ the nun said.
Nice shift of topic, Gloria thought. ‘Sometimes too clever for her own good.’
‘I suppose. Why don’t you call her?’ She nodded toward a telephone in the corner.
Gloria held up her own cell. ‘I’ve been trying. She either means to be out of touch or she’s in trouble.’
‘Of course.’ The nun seemed amused at herself. ‘I’m sorry, Gloria, I completely forget about these mobile telephones that everyone has, even the children. You know, I’ve never driven a car, never watched television. I suppose I’m the true Luddite. I was cloistered and silent for many years, but I think I’ve learned that claustral adoration of God isn’t really my vocation, even a second time, no matter how hard I tried. I need to be more active, and I guess I need to feel I’m being of use.’
‘You were silent all that time! Sweet Jesus. That would kill me. I need to chew people out now and then. I need to bang against them.’
The nun laughed softly. ‘I think Jack’s found someone who’s really good for him.’
‘You’d have to ask him that. It hasn’t been all roses and firecracker sex.’
She’d said that on purpose and saw the woman blush a little. ‘I’d like to give you something,’ the nun said, looking away.
‘Uh-huh,’ Gloria said, as neutrally as she could. The woman finally gave up her distracted, half-hearted attempt at making coffee and left the room. Gloria brooded for a moment and then studied the poster that faced her, above the desk. She liked the look of the woman on the poster and rose a little, leaning forward, to read that it depicted someone named Dorothy Day (1897–1980). Across the bottom was a quote that was presumably from the pensive-looking cleft-chinned woman: ‘I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.’ She’d never heard the woman’s name before and would have to ask Jack if he’d heard of her.
Why such a big deal? Gloria thought. Why the fuck not care about the poor? It’s supposed to be the deal.
She finally decided that watching what powerful people kept doing to the poor was part of what was killing her. She liked the look of the woman on the poster. As a cop, she was supposed to be observant, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever looked as closely at a photograph as she looked now at this plain-looking dead woman in black and white with the transparent plastic eyeglass frames, the vertical worry furrows over her nose and the squared-off jaw.
The nun came back into the room with a large loose-leaf notebook in black pebbled covers, fat with celluloid-encased pages, like somebody’s memory book. She flipped through them rapidly and finally stopped with a closed-off unreadable look. She handed the open book to Gloria.
Each page seemed to contain a photograph of an oil painting, back-to-back. But that wasn’t what caught Gloria’s attention. The book was open to a startling oil portrait of Jack Liffey, a whole lot younger and more full of vigor than she’d ever seen. He was hiking one leg of his trousers to sit on the edge of a table. The painter was pretty good – probably this annoying nun herself, ex-nun, nun-again – and Jack Liffey looked back at the painter as if captivated by some ambiguous emotion, a little full of himself as usual, curious, almost smiling. Oh, it was Jack, all right.
‘I want you to have it,’ the woman said.
‘Did he pose for you?’
‘No, I did it from memory.’
‘Where’s the original?’
‘Who knows? They were probably all thrown in the trash down in Cahuenga after I left. I want you to know I have no designs on your man, Gloria. This is all I have of him and I give him back. Jack is all yours now. I’m married to Jesus. Please take it.’
Gloria studied the woman for any nuance of irony or spite and saw nothing. ‘In another universe I might have liked you.’
‘I find I’m stuck in this one,’ the nun said. ‘If we ever started competing, God knows where we’d end up. Just take care of Jack. Jesus and Mary watch over you.’
‘It’s getting really dark over here,’ Conor announced.
‘No shit, Sherlock.’ Maeve was so frightened and so intent on watching a faint line of gray at the foot of the cubicle wall that she’d almost forgotten who it was talking inanely at her from nearby. That was unfair – but still. She was preoccupied with her own fear. The animal noises had gone on skritching, now and again, along that disappearing line of gray. Catbox sounds, holding her full and utter attention.
Somewhere deep in the funhouse, somebody had decided to test one of her worst fears: it was Room 101, if she’d got the number right, from Orwell’s 1984. The room that held everybody’s worst nightmare. Winston Smith’s had been rats. And rats would do for her, too, absolutely, she thought. Oh, yes, rats eating at you when you’re helpless. ‘I wish you could save me,’ she called. She figured she’d always wanted somebody to save her. Mostly her father, of course, who was incapacitated now and so self-obsessed by it all that he was impossibly far beyond saving anyone.
‘I’m not very good at saving,’ the boy called. ‘I can’t see myself as anything but myself – a guy who’s a bit wretched at anything useful. I can’t saw a board the right length, and I can’t hammer a nail straight. But I do feel risk in the air right now, and it scares me. I’d sure like to be one of those people who always knows what he’s doing, but I’m not.’
‘Thank you, Conor. For your honesty. Let’s try to help each other through this terrible night.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what options we’ve got. I’ve been trying to get my wrists out of these handcuffs for hours.’
‘Well, I’ll be honest,’ Maeve said. ‘I’m so terrified by these animal sounds that I’ve almost gone into another state of being and I’m surprised when I notice I’m still the same person I used to be. I’m almost catatonic.’ It seemed more like a nightmare than an event, and she wished she could wake up in a cold sweat with the danger over.
Just then she saw it, saw its vague ovoid shape scurrying along the base of the cubicle wall. She screamed as she’d only screamed in dreams – all her terror pouring out at once as if she’d unstoppered a big vat of fright.
‘What is it?’
She brought her knees up to protect her face, assuming a fetal mania of denial.
‘Maeve, please! Tell me!’
Nothing bit her, nothing brushed against her, and after a while, after increasingly desperate pleas from Conor, she forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, to imagine the rat somebody’s scientific subject – a harmless furry creature that could be set to hunting through a maze, at the whim of some geeky psychologist. Then fed to a boa. Yes.
‘Just a rat,’ she snapped.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘So am I. My scream probably scared the poor thing spitless.’
‘I don’t know about the rat, but my mouth is pretty dry.’
Jack Liffey dragged himself along the gutter with what strength he still had in his arms and found he was long past worrying about the smells or the muck that he was accumulating on his clothing as he plowed through the unmentionably squishy heaps. Eventually he did navigate his body a few feet away from the curb,
away from the worst filth as he moved toward light. Up ahead – either impossibly far or only a short walk, depending on your condition – he could see an old-fashioned streetlamp that was still functioning, spilling a yellow pool across a crumbling curb. Oh, yes, light. Better to be visible and to be able to see.
He felt a bit detached from his fear now, but maybe that was just a sign of coming unglued. He was doing his very best not to worry about Maeve; there was nothing he could do for her right now. The last true memory he nurtured of being able to use his muscles with competence, he had twisted himself around to embrace her but avoid pressing himself against her breasts as a mammoth mudslide headed for them. He had been told quite a lot about that event, but he had no memory of being buried alive. The idea alone was enough to bring back a brain-freezing horror.3
Needing a powerful image to push away the shuddering, he thought of his father, across town. A wizened old man down in San Pedro harbor, hunkered down in a bungalow that was surrounded now by the Latino families whom he loathed as he wrote his bizarrely scholarly, obsessively footnoted articles for the racist eugenics magazines that they still published for some indescribable purpose in Denmark and Sweden and now Middle Europe. The Aryan Comeback. Nord Ren. En Framtid för Våra Vito Barn (A Future for our White Kids). Tsar Lazar – a compilation of racist screeds named for the ancient hero of Serbia who’d fought the Ottoman Turks.
Jack Liffey had received these articles in the mail for years, and some superstition had made him tuck them away in a closet rather than burn them immediately. Don’t try to explain any of that to yourself, he insisted.
A siren sounded, then died. You explain too much as it is, he thought. Just get yourself into the light right now and plan from there. A big truck rumbled past him, and its headlights couldn’t have missed picking him out, but the truck made no effort to stop and help a prostrate human form in the street. Thanks a lot, guys. I must look terribly threatening down here – a cripple who’s arm-crawling along the gutter. Of course, this was the borderlands of Skid Row and he was probably no more unusual than a lot of other sights down here.