by John Shannon
“Why are you doing it?”
“My forebears were croppy Irish peasants, stuck with eating grass when the British exported all the food. It's left me with a bad temper.”
“Wire Paladin, San Francisco.”
“You got to protect the weak, Art. This country has turned on them.”
*
He telephoned Mike Lewis and told him about the BMW and about Cahuenga Concepts.
“Art's such a wanker.”
“What do you mean?”
“There's a lot more onion. The Houston Opera Company didn't send a hit squad to L.A., trust me.”
“A Houston developer, not the opera society.”
“No way. Keep your head down and call me back later today. Keep out of sight.”
*
So he did. He kidnaped Eleanor Ong and drove her up across the San Fernando Valley and then west toward what looked like a seam of light under the dark sky. She had been reluctant to go, full of her musts and mustn'ts, and then she had crumpled all at once and hugged his arm.
“The hell with duty. Just once, the hell with duty,” she said.
They drove through a little rural town that looked like a snapshot of the 1930s and then he turned north through the hills, past a sign that warned them away from the condor sanctuary.
“I feel like a condor,” she said. “Some artifact of evolution. Some days I can't believe I was ever part of a monastic order.”
“Which days are those?”
“Most of them. I just don't have things figured out.” She seemed sad for some reason.
“I know,” he said. “I don't have a clue any more, either. But that's the way it's got to be. Any other way is smug simple-mindedness.”
She squirmed in the seat to study him. “You always act like you've got things under control.”
“That's the white male's burden. If we didn't act that way, the world would fall apart. The thing to do with your anxiety is to crank it all the way up to dread. It tends to make you very polite and watchful on the surface.”
“What are you talking about?”
He laughed. “Things are just too complicated. Let's not go back.”
“Let's not. We'll drive to the moon.” She lay her hand on his leg and the skin under his trousers burned.
For a moment he let himself imagine running off with her, abandoning everything in L.A. to drive on northward over the hills and let the road throw them up in some Central Valley town like Tulare or Visalia where they could start over with new names and new personalities.
He recalled his fantasy of the Canyon Country dog ranch with Marlena and felt vaguely guilty, so he downsized the new daydream. He would sit in a glass booth and sell gas at night as the trucks rumbled past, and she would waitress in an all-night fly-blown EAT. They would rent a motel by the week, and he would bang in at dawn through an old wooden screen door and they would make love on clammy sheets.
“I want you inside me,” she said. “Really inside me this time.”
*
It was surreal, as he knew it would be. Only an hour from L.A. and a postcard river meandered through a rolling valley, guarded by a scattering of live oaks. Past the graded trail there wasn't a single sign of civilization.
She looked around vaguely.
“That's the Sespe, the last free flowing river in Southern California. No concrete, no weirs, and it runs all year long.”
The blue-gray river rippled over rocks at the foot of the hundred-foot cliff it had carved. From where they stood, the meanders stretched away until they broke up into dots and dashes of water glimpsed in the high grass.
“It's lovely.”
He was disappointed that she didn't seem very impressed, as if he'd built her something that wasn't quite good enough. He turned the engine off and the wipers stopped half way so the view started going diffuse with mist.
“Have you ever known anyone who killed herself?” she asked.
“I show you a fabulous river and all you can think about is suicide?”
“I'm sorry. I just heard today. She was Catholic so it makes it worse.”
“Not really,” he said. “Dead is dead.” He realized he was being unpleasant. “Was she a friend of yours?”
She nodded and rested her head against his shoulder.
“Best pals. She laicized a year ahead of me. A sweet girl from Michigan with really abusive parents, but I thought she turned out pretty good. Very earnest.”
For a while there he had felt great, but nothing good ever lasts very long. “I didn't think it was possible to be more earnest than you.”
She chose to ignore that. “It's amazing how attractive energy is, at least as long as it’s not mean-spirited. She glowed with it. She was interested in so many things, even if she never went very deep into any of them. I just don't understand it. I thought she was happy. I wonder if it can just sneak up on anybody, like cancer?”
He turned the key a notch and the wipers cycled down, clearing some of the view for a moment. He opened the side window, and realized it was actually not cold out at all. He could hear the splash of the river and a breeze in the trees and something else, a bustling ambience, just the outdoorsness of it all.
“I guess she ran out of beginnings,” Eleanor Ong said. “We used to talk about how we had lots of them, and we could start over and over if we wanted. Some days I can imagine that feeling just going away for good and you can't see anything new at all and then you've got to keep yourself running on, whatsit, just your momentum.”
Momentum wasn't so bad, he thought. What else was there? But he didn't want to talk about that.
“I'm not sure I like the way you look at things,” she said. “Everything disappears into a big black hole for you.”
“There's such a thing as a sense of honor,” he said. “I believe in that.“
She pulled away a few inches to look at him. “Is that why you're helping with Connie Beltran?”
For an instant he had a feeling that whatever he found out about Consuela Beltran would clarify things for him. Up until that moment he had never consciously thought about it that way. Then the feeling fled, and he knew whatever he found out would do him no good at all. That was just a superstitious itch for order.
“Come on.”
He took her hand and they stepped out into a drizzle so light that it hardly dampened them. He plucked a plastic raincoat out of the back and handed it to her, but she ended up just carrying it balled up in her hand as they stepped carefully over the big slick rocks at the river's edge.
Willow switches bobbed back and forth on the far shore and something leapt out of the water and then gulped back down before he could see it. She stumbled and he stiffened his arm to give her leverage. He was glad she was being quiet because he didn't want to hear any more about suicide or black holes.
The rocks gave way to sand and weeds, a band between river and cliff. Water beaded in her hair. He took the raincoat from her and spread it out on the shore, the plastic tenting up where weeds wouldn't smooth over. He held her and she kissed back. It was strange, feeling the cool damp between them. He wanted to chase away the sadness and he began to undress her very gently, folding her striped shirt and setting it on a big clump of white sage. She teetered and caught her balance as she stepped from foot to foot while he slid off her panties, leaving gooseflesh down her thighs. Then she started on him. She folded his clothing decorously, and she teased herself, revealing then covering then revealing his erect penis, until the self-consciousness went away in a laugh.
They lay on the raincoat and touched each other and licked the moisture off their bodies. He tried several ways to enter her, and when he managed it at last she hollered out, not in pleasure, but in a kind of relieved triumph. The sound echoed off the cliff and rolled away across the Sespe's flood plain. In the end she wept and clung to him and he found himself saying that he was falling in love, which was the simple truth.
On the way to an overpriced meal in Ojai, she retu
rned to what he had been trying to drive away. “Maybe you commit suicide when you finally decide that there's nothing left to figure out.”
“Then being a detective is a kind of faith in life, isn't it?” he said.
THIRTEEN
Bad Luck Does Not Mean Something
One headlight seemed to be out and he headed for a bright gas station in a townlet just off the highway. The road curved off between a pair of giant live oaks that stood like sentinels, and past the trees, what was left of the town looked like a few old teeth in a shattered denture.
“What happened?” she asked.
“The Northridge earthquake happened,” he said. Most of the shops had migrated a quarter mile west into a row of prefabs that had become permanent and looked utterly dispiriting in their featureless blandness. A few old shops that remained were buttressed by wood braces.
“The earthquake do all this?” he said to the old man who waddled out of the gas station. Thermal underwear extended from his rolled up shirtsleeves, like a baseball player in late autumn.
“Town went to shit,” he said nonchalantly. “But it ain't the only heartbreak.”
“What do you mean?”
“Stable of horses burned up last week out at the flats.” He was still coming slowly. “We had an Olympic hopeful in the shotput go down with a nerve disease. Then there's Bosnia.”
“You're a connoisseur of bad luck.”
“Just a realist.”
Jack Liffey pointed at the headlight and saw that the glass was broken. He must have picked up a rock, unless someone had shot it out. “I used to subscribe to the theory that expecting the worst kept you alert,” Liffey said.
The old man took a screwdriver out of his back pocket and worked at the chrome rim. “Used to? You up and turn into an optimist?”
“I just could never figure out where the rounds were going to come from. Melancholy didn't help me much.”
“Too true.” The old man worked out the remains of the bulb. “Let's see if we got your size.”
Catching sight of Eleanor Ong through the streaky windshield made him feel tender and weak inside, the way seeing his daughter did. How could you protect someone against all the bad luck? The plague even stalked a little backwater like this.
Her window was down an inch and he rested the tips of his fingers on the rounded top of the glass. She caressed his fingertips, the touch so electric he started getting an erection and had to readjust his trousers.
Love meant worrying about someone, he thought. Anxiety, suspicion of strangers, fear of the future. That's the way it worked. He took his hand away. How come people always ran toward it, then?
“Its gonna be kinda yellower, the new bulb.”
“I don't care what color it is.”
“Even in L.A. you'll have a hard time getting exact with this car. They haven't made no AMCs for fifteen years. Government only makes ’em stock parts for seven.”
“That was the problem with it,” Jack Liffey said. “It lasted.”
The old man tinkered and prodded and had to force the base of the bulb into the socket. “Car this old, I reckon you've seen some of your own bad luck.”
“Just my share.”
The old man straightened up and slapped rust off his hands, and Jack Liffey put the new bulb on the one credit card he hoped still had a little credit on it. He was not looking forward to taking Eleanor back home. “What's to do around here nights?”
“Not much since the ballet left town. The bar down the road there is all Mexes. They won't hurt you, but you may not feel mucho bienvenido.”
The old man offered the carbons, and Liffey shook his head. He tore them in half and tucked them in the paper towel box on the side of a pump.
“All the luck in the world, mister.”
“You, too.”
Jack Liffey got in and headed reluctantly back toward L.A.
“I heard you two talking about bad luck. Are you bitter about your life?”
“Not really,” he said. “The people who get bitter are the ones who think bad luck means something.”
“How's that?”
“You just bought yourself a story.” He grinned to himself. “My uncle had this door up into his attic made of frosted glass, this was in Michigan. I don't know why it was glass but it was. One day I saw a bit of a shadow on the glass and it moved and startled me, a little living shape, and I thought at first it was a mouse, but it kept making this tiny ticking sound on the glass. Tick-tick-tick. I went up the folding ladder and saw right away it was a robin. It had been up there a long time and it was pretty weak, but I still couldn't catch it to get it out of there.
“So I got my uncle and we chased it across the attic holding up bedsheets to corner it. I got it finally and that little lump in my sheet started to make its distress call, a high-pitched screeching so awful that you wanted to kill it right there, anything to stop it. I had to climb down and cross that house with this bird banging against my hands and screeching a mile a minute. Out on the back porch I tossed it up in the air. The bird fluttered up about ten feet and then took off for a vacant lot, but it didn't have much strength left and it was losing altitude all the way, still going like a tiny smoke alarm.”
“It went straight in like a glider, and the instant that scared robin hit the weeds, I saw a big blur of black above it. It was a shiny old rook the size of a cat diving straight down on the robin. That scream went up a note, and then the rook was flying away with the robin in its beak. I never even knew rooks were meat eaters. Now that was one hard-luck robin, I'll grant you that, and saving it temporarily like that made me feel like some agent of doom, but here's the punch line. You'll never convince me there was some sort of pattern in that bird's bad luck, no numerology or fate or God's big plan. That robin just couldn't keep it's mouth shut at the wrong time. Ten minutes later or ten minutes earlier the rook might have been off somewhere else. The robin might have dived in the weeds and found a nest of worms and fattened up so it lived to tell the tale. You can't get bitter about that. It's a crapshoot. If you're willing to take the good, you can't get angry about the bad.”
“So, you're a stoic saint. I get it.”
Telling the story, or her reaction to it, had left him vaguely unsatisfied. Nothing had been granted. She was still sending God get-well cards.
“Are you really happy being a detective?” she said after a time.
“I don't think of myself as a detective. I find lost kids.”
“You're not looking for lost kids right now, though. Aren't you worried about the men after you?”
“I should be. Maybe I don't have enough imagination. Are you happy being a do-good?”
“It's close to what I used to do, what I was trained to do,” she said. “Do-good.” She toyed with the words, as if trying to decide whether to protest.
“That's not an answer.”
“I'm in some kind of transition, Jack. I can't get a focus. Things seem too complicated. Some days little things pester me and some days I feel fine with what I'm doing.”
They were funneling down a dead straight blackness between vast groves of orange trees, like a deep velvet version of night. It was hypnotic and eerie, the kind of road where the county put up signs telling you to run with your lights on during the day.
“You know the word noise? In engineering? It means too much data, you're getting data you didn't expect mixed in with the stuff you did expect. You're getting noise in your life. You thought all you had to do was deny yourself and love God and do your duty and you'd be satisfied forever and ever. Then this biological alarm clock started buzzing and telling you, ‘What's in it for me?’”
“That's too schematic, but there's some truth in it.”
“I'll bet nobody's ever made much of an effort to know you.”
“What do you mean?”
“All you nuns, you probably take each other for granted, sitting around your big wood tables. You haven't been married, and you probably didn't get re
ally serious with anybody before you took the vows, or you wouldn't have taken the vows. And at the Liberation House in Cahuenga you look like you're the den mother, watching over everyone else. I'm just guessing. You get so flattered when somebody looks at you close, it's like nobody ever did.”
She made a sound that might have been a soft laugh or even a sigh and pressed her head against his shoulder. “I never thought of it that way. And now that a big handsome hard-edge detective is paying attention to me, I should roll over and become his floozy.”
“I don't think I've ever heard anyone use that word.”
“We nuns tend to be antiquated, and sheltered, too.” She rested a palm softly on his swollen penis. “Whoa, what's this?”
“That's good luck.”
*
She said she didn't want to push her luck at Liberation House, though, so he dropped her off up the T-alley so nobody would see her sneaking back, and he drove straight up the Harbor Freeway to spend the night on Mike Lewis's sofa in the Arroyo. He didn't bother calling because Lewis never went to bed before two.
On his way through the four-level downtown he saw an eighteen-wheeler toppled on the third ramp up, the cab broken through the guard rail and dangling into space. Helicopters circled, playing searchlights on the truck. Something dark was dripping from level to level but hadn't hit the Pasadena yet. He was lucky to get through because the Highway Patrol was just setting up cones and flares.
The living room light shone out onto the drive.
“Jesus, Jack, where have you been? I did everything but send up smoke signals. I thought you'd… Well, I was worried.”
“I didn't know you cared.”
“I'm glad you're still breathing, it's the way I like you best. Come look at something. You are now number one of the Find One Hundred Things Wrong With This Picture.”
Mike Lewis beckoned him over to the growing scatter of papers on the living room floor. “Keep your voice down, Siobhann sleeps light. Your packet of goodies was laundered by someone, but they weren't careful enough.”
He stretched out his arms and lowered himself among the papers like Mephistopheles going down through the floor.