On the Nickel

by John Shannon

  ‘Willie! Willie Stone!’ Jack Liffey called into the cell phone.

  ‘I’m here, Jack. Sorry – had to check in.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got two very old men up here and a woman with a broken ankle.’ Gloria opened one eye to his statement and he waved her quiet. ‘What can you do for me?’

  ‘I can’t send you a chopper now, no shit, man. That’s in the protocol. I can send you some gorillas strong enough to carry anyone down a ladder.’

  Jack Liffey thought of trying to carry Gloria himself, and he knew damn well he couldn’t. You can’t save the world by yourself, and sometimes you can’t even save a small part of it.

  ‘Send the gorillas,’ he said.

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century, despite endless political posturing about ‘doing something about homelessness,’ the net change in affordable housing in Los Angeles was a decrease of 11,000 units. And over this time about 7 per cent of the homeless – the invisible homeless out in the suburbs – had become divorced middle-class women who were sleeping in their aging SUVs and spending their days in libraries and malls.

  EPILOGUE

  Walls

  The next time he looked down, both ladder trucks had outriggers planted, and one ladder was already on its way up toward him like an arm reaching slowly for something on the top shelf. Several other firetrucks were parked anyhow and they still emitted scurrying men in yellow overcoats who were carrying big sacks and cases of unidentifiable apparatus. Jack Liffey took a few steps and felt the tar underfoot suck and grab at his feet.

  ‘I feel like this all happened before,’ the boy said, staring down at the ladder trucks.

  ‘It did,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘Just not to us.’ Something made him think, I need to calculate time differently now, or the night will be made horrible with our cries. ‘Gloria goes first, carried down,’ he announced.

  He could tell she was about to demur.

  ‘You’re hurt. We’ve got to get you out of our way. Go with it now, there’s too many people to argue!’

  She seemed to give up and withdraw into herself again. It was as if she drew in all slack, all softness, gathered it into a hardened unresponsive core. He was not even sure whether it was something she was actually doing or some warp of his own consciousness under the influence of his fear.

  He did his best not to look at the biblical pillar of fire that was so loud now it made them shout to be heard. Look or not, it warmed their backs and sides unpleasantly and filled the air with the tang of asphalt and char. The last time he’d had a peek, the flame had gnawed itself a dramatically larger vent and was apparently spreading through something stored in the attic or whatever lay directly beneath them. And now the roof trembled underfoot like an endless subway train.

  Abruptly the top of the first fire ladder appeared, bristling with hose attachments, lamps and strange sockets. It poked up over the parapet and then stopped at eye level, swaying in mid-air, the periscope-weapon of a movie alien come to visit.

  He glanced down quickly and two big men were scrambling up the ladder fast, tugging themselves along by the handrails. The lead guy was black, still a bit unusual in the fire department as far as he’d seen. The second ladder was about halfway up and coming. At last, at last.

  Heat welled around them, plus unendurable bellowy noise. He could barely rip his feet out of the tar. Jack Liffey held on hard to whatever composure he could muster, but he was starting to lose his focus.

  ‘So, nu, I suppose we trust this shtarker?’

  Jack Liffey looked at the two old men, who had touchingly linked their arms, obviously very frightened, waiting trustingly in front of him. ‘Stand right here. You’re number two, and you’re third, after Gloria.’

  ‘Oy, you’re right but you’re wrong.’

  ‘No arguments.’

  ‘No but yes.’

  Chopper Tyrus sat straight up, holding his gut and wondering if he’d been forgotten. It wouldn’t have surprised him. Luckily the bleeding seemed to have slowed to a slow seep. Nearby, the cops had taken over wrestling with the strange little white man, who was bucking and screaming about his inalienable rights, and most everybody else was watching with more fret than satisfaction. MaryLou was still trying to interest the police in the knife, like a vendor with a day-late fish.

  ‘Today is my birthday,’ Chopper said, bemused, to the dark empty air.

  ‘Birthdays ain’t what they used to be,’ a man he didn’t know commented with a wry twist of his lips.

  ‘Yes, friend, I believe that a true statement.’ He heard a siren, and his practiced ear could tell that this one was an ambulance. He felt a sense of relief. A night or two in a real bed up in County, real food, attended by kindly women.

  ‘Hey, could one o’ you gents look after my stuffs? I think I go away for a time. It right back there in the blue condo.’

  ‘Chopper, man, I look after it for you. You know me, Jonas. But you been saved by the blood of the lamb?’

  He could see that Gloria was doing her best to tolerate the classic fireman’s carry, lying head forward across the big black man’s shoulder, one of his arms bunching up her skirt across the inside of her right knee as his hand came around front to hold her right wrist. So encumbered, he backed expertly down the ladder, sliding his free hand in fits and grabs. Before giving in to her pain, she had glanced up for an instant at Jack Liffey. It only took that instant to read: You will never mention this to any of my colleagues, under the very worst of penalties.

  A second big fireman had snapped, ‘I’m Don, come closer.’ He stabbed a control box into one of the receptacles at the top end of the ladder as if he were angry at it.

  ‘We’re only allowed five hundred pounds on the ladder at a time and were almost there now,’ Don explained, mostly to Jack Liffey. ‘But we can’t wait.’ Nobody needed to mention that the fire had noisily engulfed more than half the roof. The fireman had spun off his big yellow coat and was letting the others shelter from the heat behind it. As he used his controls to manipulate the ladder to angle down to rest against the masonry, he shouted to Jack Liffey, ‘I’ll brace it and take a chance. Bring me one now.’

  The second ladder was just appearing, rearing its own movie alien face a few yards away.

  Jack Liffey shoved Morty Lipman at the fireman.

  Lipman’s eyes went wide as the big man swung him bodily through the air and deposited him on the ladder. ‘Go down as fast as you can, man! If you hang us up, I’ll kick you off!’

  They all knew he wouldn’t, but Lipman started down as if bee-stung, clamping his eyes shut against panic. It wasn’t the way Jack Liffey had envisioned it at all, but it was working.

  A section of roof right behind them gave way with a howl and a wave of sparks washed over the coat and then over them. They all ducked down to protect themselves from the new heat.

  ‘We all go now,’ the firefighter said. ‘Don’t wait for the other ladder. You!’ He grabbed Samuel Greengelb, and swung him on to the ladder. ‘Go!’

  Conor Lewis shielded himself in front of Jack Liffey leaning into him. ‘I’m burning up.’

  ‘The boy next!’ Jack Liffey shouted.

  ‘But where’s my dad? I want to know about my dad!’

  ‘Honey, calm down. I’m sure he’s OK.’ A woman in a blue uniform – fire? police? – was trying to give Maeve Liffey a Styrofoam cup of coffee that smelled rancid, but she didn’t like coffee of any kind.

  Maeve pushed the cup way. She felt tight and angry. ‘Do you know how annoying that is when I know for a fact you don’t have a clue about my dad?’

  ‘Sorry, hon. I’ll go find out.’

  One ambulance had already howled off carrying Paula Green. She was in bad shape, but might make it. Jack Liffey sat tenderly on the curb beside the fire engine, resting his hands on his knees. He was careful to hold as still as he could and not disturb the burns on his back and shoulders. They’d given him something like codeine, and the pain was tolerable, but just
.

  He’d gone next to last, right after the fire had virtually engulfed them on the roof, but the firefighter Don, going last an instant later, had reclaimed his fire coat and seemed pretty much OK now. Most of the back of Jack Liffey’s favorite linen and wool jacket had charred away, and some of his shirt beneath it, too. An EMT with a weird flat-top had slathered his burned back with some sticky white ointment and then hurried off to check the others.

  Jack Liffey’s attention was caught by a movement across the street. He glanced over and saw what was unmistakably Eleanor Ong – or Sister Mary Rose, watching him from behind a car without much emotion. He beckoned, and she shook her head. He had a feeling this might be the last time he would ever see her, and he tried to beckon, more urgently. She smiled and shook her head. Then she gave him a big thumbs-up. OK, sister. This is the best you can do. You’re negating the last goodbye message you offered me: I don’t think you’re going to make it.

  After a few minutes of contemplation, Conor came and sat down next to him. The boy appeared unhurt, though maybe a little sunburned. What a difference a few moments of escape could make.

  ‘Hi, Mr Liffey.’

  ‘Are you ready to go home?’ Jack Liffey asked him, not unkindly.

  ‘I guess. Nothing like a big scare. I miss Mom and Dad.’

  ‘Did you learn anything important out here?’

  The boy smiled, then glanced around himself, as if for dangerous beasts. Jack handed him his notebook and he took it with a glum smile. ‘The poor manage to stay so upbeat. It’s incredible to me. They’re much more kind than the people I grew up with.’

  ‘Yes, I think so, too.’

  ‘Liffey!’ The EMT with the flat-top strode their way and reached down to tug Jack Liffey to his feet. ‘Your daughter has been moving heaven and hell to find out how you are.’

  ‘I’m going to live, right?’

  The man stepped around and plucked at some torn cloth on Jack Liffey’s back, each pluck a twinge of pain. ‘You won’t live forever, but a while yet. If you’re virtuous.’

  ‘What does virtue have to do with it?’

  ‘It’s always a good idea.’

  ‘Fuck you. Get me a stronger painkiller.’

  ‘Tell his daughter he’s got a big mouth but he’s OK,’ he barked into a radio.

  The man sat him on the edge of a gurney near an untended ambulance and left him there.

  Jack Liffey looked around him and realized that the Fortnum was right at the cutting edge of gentrification. A fancy refurbished building just across the street had a doorman standing just inside the thick glass doors, wearing an implausible red sash, like some factotum out of Graham Greene.

  And what had he himself learned through this mess – through the weeks trapped in the wheelchair, the immobility and loss of speech, the days on Skid Row, and now the preposterous trial by fire?

  He stared across the street again to see the windowless bottom floor of the gentrified building that had been artfully disguised as pattern but was really a blank windowless concrete wall. A wall to keep out even the curiosity of the poor. This new model for society was taking on an overwhelming power: the blank wall. The wall between us and discomfort, us and the poor, us and them, with all their grief and rage.

  There were fresh walls everywhere in America now, so many since he’d grown up. Separating the needy homeless and the new Downtowners. Walls and gates around the fancy suburbs. Walls at the frontera between so many desperate workers and the jobs in El Norte. Walls, he thought, between genuine deprivation and the lies that denied the existence of deprivation.

  It seemed to him the essential activity of the rich and powerful these days was to build these walls. Of concrete, of disguised foliage, of electronics, of military power, of spy satellites – plus an opaque media that ignored it all. The time of the walled-out and defeated and homeless seemed to stretch on forever now, but it couldn’t.

  How can anyone go on living their lives, he thought, without an impulse toward tearing down walls? But in his heart he knew his daughter would have that impulse, and so would the Lewis boy.

  ENDNOTES

  All statistics and other information on homelessness in Los Angeles come from the following sources:

  Anderson, Troy, ‘Homeless Plan Stirs Debate Among Board [of Supervisors],’ Los Angeles Daily News, March 28, 2006.

  Bartholomew, Dana, ‘Transients Hope to Get Back into Stable Life,’ Los Angeles Daily News, April 7, 2006.

  Blasi, Gary, Michael Dear and Jennifer Wolch, ‘5 Steps to Get Out of Skid Row,’ LA Times, December 31, 2006.

  Blasi, Gary, ‘Policing Our Way Out of Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer Cities Initiative on Skid Row,’ The UCLA School of Law Fact Investigation Clinic, September 24, 2007.

  California Budget Project, A Generation of Widening Inequality, Sacramento, CA, August 2007.

  Cousineau, Michael R., ‘Dumping the Homeless on Hospitals,’ LA Times, December 31, 2006.

  DiMassa, Cara Mia, ‘L.A. County OKs “Historic” Homeless Plan,’ LA Times, April 5, 2006.

  DiMassa, Cara Mia and Richard Winton, ‘Possible Homeless Centers Identified,’ LA Times, April 6, 2006.

  Fry, Richard, ‘Labor Market Outcomes of Hispanics by Generation,’ ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education, Institute for Urban and Minority Education, October 10, 2003.

  Geis, Sonya, ‘L.A. Police Initiative Thins Out Skid Row,’ Washington Post, March 15, 2007.

  George, Evan, ‘Teaching Junkies to Save Each Other’s Lives,’ Los Angeles Daily Journal, January 17, 2008.

  Hoag, Christina, ‘L.A. Seeing More People Living Out of Their Cars,’ TIME Magazine, June 23, 2008.

  Inter-University Consortium Against Homelessness, 2008 Report Card On Homelessness In Los Angeles, University of Southern California, June 2008.

  Jordan, Miriam, ‘Blacks vs. Latinos at Work,’ The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2006.

  Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, ‘2007 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count,’ Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Tong, Eugene, ‘Homeless Plan Raises Optimism: New County Step Watched,’ Los Angeles Daily News, April 6. 2006.

  Valle, Ramón, ‘Los Angeles: City of the Stars Becomes US Homeless Capital,’ World Socialist Web Site, October 17, 2005.

  Villaraigosa, Antonio (Mayor) and Jan Perry (Councilwoman), ‘Appraising the County’s Homeless Plan,’ (Op-Ed) LA Times, April 6, 2006.

  JOHN SHANNON

  On the Nickel

  Private Investigator Jack Liffey has been confined to a wheelchair, unable to walk or speak, for more than a month due to a freak accident that may have damaged his spine. So when an old friend tries to contact Jack to ask him for help in finding his missing sixteen-year-old son, Jack’s teenage daughter, Maeve, intercepts the call and decides to take on the case.

  Maeve’s intuition leads her to downtown LA; however, it’s not long before she finds herself caught up in a deadly battle between hired thugs and the occupants of a crumbling tenement building that has been earmarked for redevelopment by an unscrupulous investor. Trapped, she desperately needs help, but with Jack out of action it is up to his partner Gloria, a LAPD Sergeant, to come to the rescue.

  As Gloria desperately searches Skid Row, she comes across one of Jack’s ex-lovers, now a nun working at a homeless shelter, who provides vital information. But a fresh disaster befalls Jack and soon everything, lives included, hangs in the balance...

  John Shanon is one of the America’s leading writers of neo-noir, and his Jack Liffey series of novels is one of the most critically praised mystery series in the genre. He lives in Los Angeles.

  For further information please Visit:

  www.JackLiffey.com

 

 

 
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