by John Shannon
Jack Liffey started his battered Concord and cruised across the lot until he was only a few feet from the M3. He popped his glove box and handed Tony a spray can of white Rustoleum.
“Tag him.”
Tony caught his eye.
“You can do it or I will.”
Tony was out in a second, shaking the can until the ball rattled. The hiss of the spray cut through the distant hum of traffic as he squatted to hit the driver door expertly with a placa that looked like C60L in that Aztec writing that was all angles and reversed curves. The other two boys watched in awe. Tony crab-walked back, out of sight of the building, and tagged the rear fender. Liffey took up his post in front of the black car, looking calmly over it at the glass doors where they had gone in. The boy got bolder and hit the trunk, trailing a straight line of white around the car, and then he worked on the other door. In an office window a secretary looked on in horror, frozen to a standstill with a wad of papers in her hand.
“Get in the car.”
Jack Liffey took out the boy's .38. He walked around the M3 and put a bullet into each tire, the shots crashing back to him off the building. The whooping alarm went off, with the headlights flashing and the horn honking insistently, and he put a shot through the windshield for good measure. He'd hoped it would shatter, but it just holed, leaving a neat ring and a few small cracks.
Then he waited at his purring Concord, staring back at the office building.
“Stay out of sight, gentlemen.”
Finally the Cowboy came out in a rush but held up when he saw Liffey. They made eye contact, and then the Cowboy surveyed his car. The Cowboy's expression slowly warmed into a smile. Liffey felt his legs and arms tremble. He had a shot left and he could hurt someone in this frame of mind.
He got in and drove away.
“Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God,” one of the boys in back repeated.
You only had the space you inhabited, and if you let someone take it away, it was gone forever.
ELEVEN
It's Possible to Know Things and Not Be Compromised
He stopped in the middle of the old deco bridge that spanned the L.A. River. The far bank was a moonscape of abandoned factories and smokeless stacks. A few birds flew against the bruised clouds. At a cement works, half a dozen conveyers rose steeply to gray hills like huge mantises tending their piles of dung.
He chose the exact middle where there would still be a little water in the mid-channel next summer and watched the .38 dwindle until the swift gray river swallowed it with hardly a sound. When they drained MacArthur Park Lake to build the Red Line Metro station they found eighteen-hundred handguns in the muck at the bottom, three generations of occluded carnage.
Back in the car he was fed up with warrior taciturnity. “What do you vatos want to do when you grow up?”
Now that they had seen the aging Anglo shoot up a car, they were willing to acknowledge him. In fact, he saw right away that they were still children underneath all the steel.
“I want to go to the Yucatan to catch parrots and sell.”
It was the boy with the scar, Billy, speaking with an artless trust. Jack Liffey smiled. He'd expected more of a low-rent ambition, and he liked the idea of the parrot wrangler. He could see the boy, grown up and wearing tighter khakis from Banana Republic, leading an expedition off into the jungle with a big net at shoulder arms.
“Do you keep birds?”
The boy nodded solemnly. “I teach them to speak. Chinga tu madre, esse.”
Once Liffey laughed, the others did, too. They were still tough kids. “That parrot, he'd be a big hit in Beverly Hills. What do you want to do?”
Nabo screwed up his face in thought. “I want to work for an airline. I see the big airplanes all the time and I never been inside one. I want to fly in one.”
“I have a feeling you will.” Liffey turned to Tony, but he was not to be drawn so easily. His ambitions were more private and Liffey let them lie. He started the car. “I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up,” Jack Liffey said. “But if some cowboy in a BMW wants to play, I'll play.”
*
Jack Liffey knew he'd turned a corner. Up to that point in his life, he could always pretend he could go back and try another tack, maybe even find out what had gone wrong and fix it, but now the way back was harder to imagine. By taking up the Cowboy's challenge, he had marooned himself out at the exhausted edge of things.
A group of Latino kids played baseball in the street and he thought of the afternoon he'd hung on the wire fence for hours, watching little league games one after another, trying not to think of Viet Nam. Most of his friends had drawn magic lottery numbers but he had thirty-seven and he didn't feel like doing a C.O. like Timmy Brice and he certainly wasn't going to tell a roomful of suspicious old farts that he was no C.O., but fuck this war, like Anthony Papadakis who was then doing eighteen months at a federal camp in Arizona. To tell the truth, the six weeks of Basic had been worse than the duty, sadistic gym coaches running his life. His duty hadn't been all that bad, monitoring air-conditioned instruments and watching green blips on screens. It was just that the tour had given him the first sense that the future was no longer provisional, and when the blips disappeared all of a sudden from the scope, he saw there was no way in hell to protect yourself from the future.
An unmarked cop car was parked in front of the boy's court. He wondered if the detectives had been sent to arrest the car vandals, but he doubted the Cowboy worked that way.
He stopped up the street and let the boys off. They'd seen the police, too, and they evaporated into the afternoon without a trace. Lieutenant Zuniga stood behind a screen door at the cottage next door to the Beltrans'. He had been talking to someone inside, but now he caught sight of the white Concord. The policeman pointed straight at him.
Jack Liffey got out and waited where he was. He wouldn't make it easy. The policeman lumbered down the walk and across the street like a tug heading for the next freighter. He stopped a few feet away as if sizing up where to moor.
“Is this where you pull my coat down and start punching my kidneys?”
To Liffey's surprise, the big policeman smiled, a tiny smile, almost against his will.
“Let's go for a walk.”
Liffey was astonished, but he didn't show it. He followed along the sidewalk and ducked away from a pointy yucca that went for his eyes.
“You seem like an okay guy, I guess. As far as that goes.”
“My mom thought so.”
They went quiet as they passed a heavyset woman tending three small children on her lawn, and Liffey realized the two of them strolling down the Cahuenga back street must have stood out like zebras in a supermarket. One child dropped a toy and started wailing. Far away there was a squeal of brakes and then a crash, but Lt. Zuniga didn't seem to notice.
“In a world of very bad things, okay guys can get hurt, whatever their moms think of them.”
Jack Liffey felt a little shock along his spine. This wasn't a lovers' stroll after all. He wondered if the man had spoken to the Culver City police.
“You been in the Big Nam, I believe. Served your country.”
“Something like that.”
“You like your tour?”
“It had its moments.”
“You weren't in combat, though, were you?”
“Only by accident a couple times.”
“You know, more Hispanics died in the front lines than anybody. Per proportion and all.”
“I heard something like that.” They passed a little evangelical church with its name hand-lettered sloppily on a signboard. A building-fund thermometer was in the front, the red stuck down toward the bottom and fading. It didn't look like they were going to make it.
“Do you like the neighborhood?”
“Sure, it's great.”
“They are lots of good ethical people living here who don't have a goddam clue about what really goes on in this town. They get up in the morning an
d get all the kids off to school and drive away in their fifteen-year-old junkers to their jobs in some bucket shop owned by some asshole from Brentwood. They work hard and mind their own business and when they come home the TV is always on to the noisy sitcoms from Argentina on the Spanish cable and they shop at the swap meet on Atlantic and never take a paper clip that doesn't belong to them. They are good people.”
“I wouldn't know about that.”
“I know about it very much. I grew up here, when Hispanics still had to sit in back and the school counselors put us all in auto body shop.”
“You sound bitter.”
“It gives you a certain perspective on good and evil.”
“I see.”
“No, you don't. You don't see shit.” The policeman stopped in front of a weedy lot with a charred foundation. Something had burned down and never been rebuilt.
“Have it your way.”
He nodded at the foundation. “Twenty years ago the L.A. SWAT team chased some Brown Berets into this house and shot them out. Didn't even have jurisdiction here, said it was hot pursuit or something. On the local TV live, just like the SLA. The place was so shot up it sat here empty for years until some crackheads torched it by accident.”
Jack Liffey was getting tired of veiled threats, if that was what they were. “Do all these object lessons have some kind of point?”
The policeman seemed to be chewing his cud. “I take it you've worked out that Senora Beltran discovered some things she wasn't supposed to know.”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“I hope you don't take this wrong. Do you believe that it's possible to know things and not be compromised?”
“Sure, why not?”
“I think I know what she discovered, but it doesn't do me any good at all and it wouldn't do you any good.”
“Ah.”
For the first time he noticed there was a derelict air raid siren on the block. A brown metal canister stuck up on a pole with the paint peeling off. It must have been twenty years since any of them had been tested, forlorn sentinels for a mad war that had never come. He remembered the Friday ten a.m. tests and then the surprise school drop drills, ducking your head between your knees and covering with your arms. He didn't think it had affected him much, but how could you tell? Maybe down deep.
“Is this advice or a threat?”
“Time changes things,” the policeman said heavily. “Bad things go on and sometimes it's best if people get away with them. Then it's just fate or bad luck. You don't have to blame anyone, you don't have to answer why. The town has changed a lot and I had nothing to do with it. It'll go on changing and there's nothing we can do about it. Leave it alone.”
Jack Liffey figured he already had enough people mad at him. “Well, then, I guess I better leave it alone.”
*
The early evening had an edge to it. He realized he couldn't go home or to his office. The Cowboy would get him either place sooner or later. It made him feel restless and angry, like wanting to hit someone. He parked six blocks from the Catholic Liberation house, up an alley in the deep shadows. The rear of the stucco bungalow where he parked had most of its windows broken and plywood over the back door, probably a crack house. They weren't all good hard-working citizens in Cahuenga. What had been a plank fence at the alley had fallen in and lay flat. He noticed flickering light in one of the windows only five feet away and couldn't resist.
Inside, a candle was guttering on a saucer, and the walls were fantastically covered with graffiti. A boy no more than sixteen was on his knees administering a syringe under the tongue of a girl with long stringy dirty hair. Where it wouldn't show, Jack Liffey thought. He shuddered and turned away just as the girl made a sound, like a cry of pleasure. He had a loathing of needles, something purely psychological about foreign objects penetrating his body, and he knew, no matter how low he sank, he would never be a drug addict, not if it had to be injected.
The Liberation youth in the Pendleton shirt was in the front room, moistening a mountain of envelopes ten at a time. He looked up at Jack Liffey resentfully, like a child suspecting a sibling of getting special privileges.
“I thought the Catholic Church had banks of eager women to do that,” Jack Liffey said.
“This is the peewee league. She's praying in the Quiet Room.” He nodded at the hall.
He found a door off the hall that said The Quiet Room, and decided that, all in all, the place was just a little too literal-minded for him. He knocked very softly twice and then went in. A few banks of folding chairs faced an altar with a small Jesus-laden crucifix where Eleanor Ong knelt with her arms dangling at her sides. She wore jeans that seemed to be painted on her hips and a navy blue leotard that made her look like an exercise video. He wished she'd go back to the gypsy skirts.
She made a shush gesture softly and returned to her praying, so he sat in the back row. There was very little to do besides look at the glistening stretchy fabric across her back and wonder how hard it would be to get off. He thought of Marlena, and once again wondered at how making love to one woman could make him want to touch another, and he didn't feel bad about it at all. He felt tenderness toward them both. It was also odd how just looking at a woman was such a physical pleasure, not even contemplating sex, just looking. That was something women would never understand.
For a moment his mind had drifted so much in the quiet that his consciousness went blank and he wondered with a jolt where he was. Maybe that was what meditation did to you. The room seemed more Quaker than Catholic. To be Catholic, he figured there ought to be incense, gold ornament, mumbo-jumbo.
“Amen,” she said suddenly, and stood up. “Hi, Jack. You look upset today.”
That worried him. “Do you really think there's some big consciousness up there listening to you?”
“You are angry.”
“No, it's a question.”
She shrugged. “I'm not sure. It'd be a hell of a thing to guess wrong, wouldn't it?”
He chuckled. “You know what Voltaire said on his deathbed, when they asked him if he was ready, now, to renounce the devil and all his works?”
She shook her head.
“‘This is a helluva time to be making new enemies.’”
It was her turn to smile. Even a tiny smile lit her up like a lighthouse.
“I think it's time we went to dinner,” he said.
She considered for a moment. It's not the impossible dream. I'll tell Jonathan.”
“Be careful. He's already mooning around.”
“He's very vulnerable right now. He left his family and dropped out of college and he's only been with us a few months.”
“Why'd he do that?”
She hesitated. “At the beginning of his junior year his dad gave him a Lucien Picard watch, some gold thing that cost thousands.”
“I can see how that would bust him up.”
“He gave him the exact same watch for high school graduation.”
Jack Liffey wondered what it would feel like to have a watch worth more than $29.95. And he wondered if he'd have dropped out of Long Beach State if his father had given him the same Timex two years running, the one with the little window that showed the date. He didn't say any of this because he saw being a wiseass would probably upset Eleanor Ong and he didn't want her to cancel the dinner date.
She came back in a minute, with a pink sweater over the breathtaking leotard and a fringed leather shoulder bag. She certainly hadn't spent her life studying high fashion.
“You get to start fresh with me,” he said. “Since you dropped the sister business, you can be Lenore, or Nora, or Ellie, or Lena. Take your pick.”
“I think I'll stick with Eleanor for now. It's a poor thing but mine own.”
“Actually,” he said gently, “it's an ill-favored thing, but mine own.”
“Really?”
“I have a very good memory. Is there a back door to the house? I'll explain later, but it would be a v
ery good idea to go out the back.”
She studied him for a moment. “You're serious.”
“Oh, yeah.”
She led him through the kitchen to an all-glass room that was full of sealed paper bags that looked like they contained second-hand clothing. The room was probably intolerable in summer. They shifted a dozen bags to get at the door, and she had to try out several keys on her giant plastic fob before finding the right one. He looked over her shoulder to read the fob: Our Lady of the Plastic Rose. He wondered where that came from.
He touched her back briefly going out the door and it felt great, lots of muscle tone. The alley was dark and something scurried away, driving her back against him for a second and that felt good, too. She hadn't recoiled from the touch.
“I knew a guy from New York,” he said. “Wouldn't walk under palm trees any more after I told him they had rats in them. I guess he was afraid of them jumping down into his hair or maybe just a sort of rain of rat droppings.”
“Is that true?”
“Sure. When I was a kid a lot of the palms along Paseo Del Mar had metal bands around to keep the rats from climbing. But, hell, rats have to live, too. The ecologists don't think of that a lot. Just the nice animals, like rabbits and dolphins.”
“Rats bite children in the projects,” she said.
“If they're as tough as Tony Beltran, good luck to the rats.”
She was silent for a moment as they walked, splashing a little where water still stood in the alley. “What do you think will happen to him?”
“I think he's a pretty good kid, but a lot could go wrong. Every kid out there has a dozen pieces of heavy artillery aimed at him. I can see ten places in my youth where I could have gone bad. Anybody with spirit could. The temptation to steal something you really wanted, a few friends going out drinking and driving, a fight where I could have hurt somebody bad. Of course, there was the time things really did go wrong.”