by Zack Parsons
“Swiftee Burger?”
He snapped his fingers, “Yeah, yeah, that’s it. I seen her filling out that uniform like a job application for heartbreaker. And she rides one of them motorcycle things around. Real fetching look with her on the back. Real nice girl. Real nice.”
“Who pays the rent?”
“What?”
“Some girls have men who pay for nice things.” I looked around the dank office. “To some people this might qualify.”
“I don’t know who pays it. The cash is always waiting for me with her apartment number written on the envelope.”
“Where?”
“Here, when I get up in the morning,” he said. “Always on time. They slide it under the door.”
The trail was getting colder as the day was getting hotter. Somebody needed to pick a setting on the thermostat and stick to it. The black paint of the old Tudor coupe sucked up the sun. The inside seat leather was too hot to touch. I cranked the windows down and hoped the air from the drive would cut some of the sweat souping up my shirt. I tossed my overcoat into the back with my hat.
It was a long drive from South LA to El Segundo, floral tie flapping around my throat, fighting traffic from the war factories. Buicks and Lincolns and DeSotos crowded the highway. These were the second-shifters leaving for the aircraft plants. All those cars were bought with money from building warplanes for Bishop and men like him. I figured America would fall apart if peace broke out. Ten years of killing and we’d forgotten how to do anything else.
An end to hostilities wasn’t much of a concern, though. Korea was worse by the day. The Red Chinese were eager for a scrap, and good old six-star MacArthur was happy to oblige them. Maybe he’d go a round or two with the Soviets next. Maybe it would be World War III. Bishop would find a way to make money as the bombs were falling. It’d be war machines and stop-and-go traffic until the end of the century.
Something black splattered on my windshield. A moment later it happened again. Goddamn birds, I figured. I craned my head out of the car and searched for the source. Instead of a bird, the sky was filled with thousands of slowly drifting tufts of black, almost like feathers or ashes. One landed on my face, cold and wet and melting.
A snowflake. In Los Angeles. In June.
Traffic was snarled up, so I pulled into the lot of a nearby garage. Other drivers had the same idea. Men and women were getting out of their cars and looking up at the sky. Children were climbing out of backseats to chase the falling snowflakes.
There were no storm clouds, and yet the air was filled with the lazily dropping snowflakes. Discussions broke out among strangers about what could cause such a strange thing to occur. Wind currents from the arctic, theorized one man. No, no, said a skinny fella in a suit, an aircraft burst open high in the atmosphere, and its cargo of liquid was frozen and falling as snow. The snowflakes made a soft ticking sound as they fell and melted on contact with the hot pavement.
A burly man stepped out from behind the sign advertising white-walled tires. He had a look up at the sky and then at the kids chasing the snowflakes.
“I’d keep those kids away from it,” he said. “Nothing to be played with.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, studying the bulging profile of the man’s face.
He turned to me slowly, revealing the extent of the tumors on his face in malignant increments. Layers and scales of black carcinomas dripped from his eyelids and lips and bulged from his brow.
“It’s poisoned by the bombs,” said Lt. Milo Gardener.
I was back on Kyushu. 1945. Pursuing Lt. Col. Ishii, who had knowledge that could threaten the secret of our existence. Gardener was talking about the rain. Black rain was falling, pattering on our helmets and our ponchos. He said it was caused by the atom bombs we dropped on X-Day.
“It will make you sick,” he warned. “You should see the poor bastards in the POW camps. They built the camps in the bomb zones, and now they’re all puking their guts up.”
“Wouldn’t want to be a guard there,” I said, and I watched the rainwater gather in the folds of my poncho like liquid coal. I shook it out and wiped the rest from my face.
There was me and Gardener and Gardener’s menagerie of irregulars. There were nine of them—castoffs in various uniforms, each chosen to serve some esoteric purpose for Gardener’s mission. They kept to themselves, or at least apart from me and Gardener.
Maybe because of the cold shoulder from my traveling companions I gravitated toward Gardener. The usual suspicion that exists between all men of our shared flesh, that belief that each individual’s life is a secret betrayal of all the others, faded as we marched through forest valleys and steep merchant roads.
Each new vista became a shared experience gluing us one to the other, and I came to believe Lt. Gardener was a fine man with words more learned than mine and an easy confidence in himself and in the men he commanded. I saw a true reflection of myself in him.We traveled for three days through the green mountains and valleys west of Sendai, following a course suggested by Lt. Gardener. There was someplace, some point on the map, where he believed we might intercept Ishii before he reached his unit.
My duty was to keep my companions mindful of the methods and indications of ambush. By careful scouting and altering our course around dangerous terrain, we avoided any serious encounters. Our boots overflowed into livid landscapes of destruction. Towns and factories and schools and hot springs; no village or structure was spared by the relentless waves of our bombers. Sometimes we heard the fighting beyond the mountains. Sometimes we saw the smoke rising from a battle or from a place where bombs or shells had fallen without purpose to sow destruction in the strange country.
No men dwelt between these ruins. No upright humans with bright eyes. There were only slumping beasts gathered in stunned tribes, wandering the forests or haunting the mountain trails. These were raggy things, pitiful creatures that crowded and sawed at the sour meat of dead horses for nourishment. They never slept or played; they only staggered through the world, their hair and clothes dark and limp with the rain.
If I lay still at night, I could hear them shuffling in the darkness, indefatigable, cursed and forever seeking some lost child or life now blasted to ruin. They cringed from our approach, but I came to fear them. I came to believe that only the certitude of our purpose allowed us to pass living through this aimless world of the lemures. I believed if we forgot our reason or lost our way, they would clench us with their ragged hands and carry us off to make us like them.
On the third night of our search for Lt. Col. Ishii we entered a small village engulfed in flames. It was not on the maps I carried in my bag, but Lt. Gardener said it was called Korano. This burning place was our destination. The townspeople were occupied with battling the fires. We watched them draw buckets of water from a well and throw the waters onto the flames swallowing up their homes. It was a futile effort.
The scurrying bucket brigades ignored us as we passed into Korano and walked among the falling ashes. Lt. Gardener identified a house made from stone that stood removed from the flames. We beat in the door with our rifles and found a terrified family of elderly parents, a woman, and several children. Lt. Gardener and his translator interrogated the adults one by one.
A cold meal was laid out on their table, and the rest of us, being tired and hungry, sat and ate their dinner while they huddled against a wall. There was a little girl with a pink ribbon tied around the waist of her dress. Her eyes were wide and dark and never seemed to blink. She was not crying like the other children, and so I held out a piece of chocolate left over from my ration. Her grandfather pulled her away and stood between me and the child, and so I sat back at the table and ate the cold, dry rice.
After several minutes Gardener signaled us to leave.
“Did you get your answers?” I asked him.
“Ishii was seen here during the day.” Gardener held up a green book. “I showed them this. Photographs of Ishii’s atrocities in China. Th
e people in the village do not care for him much.”
“Where is he now?” I asked as I followed Gardener out of the house.
“He knows I’m after him, and he’s taken refuge with the Catholics in the Church of St. Ramon. It’s about three miles from here.” Gardener’s face was alive with the colors of the burning village. “He will attempt to ambush us.”
We stepped back into the street and were met by a small old man dressed in the blue uniform of a policeman. We were used to ignoring the outrage of Japanese civil officials, but this one was holding a pistol. He came toward us and shouted something that was lost to the roar of the flames. The bucket brigades ceased, and the townspeople stood as an audience to this encounter, their faces and details lost in the brightness of the flames at their backs.
The old policeman shouted again and came closer. Several of Lt. Gardener’s men brought their guns up in a casual manner, as if they could not take this man seriously as a threat, but his approach forced them to react. The policeman brandished his pistol again. Lt. Gardener motioned for his men to lower their guns. The anguish and frustration of the policeman was painted on his face in valleys deepened to black by the moving shadows of the firelight. His pistol was a tiny revolver of obsolete manufacture. He thrust its barrel at Lt. Gardener, and there was a pop and a flash in the darkness, and white smoke puffed from the cylinder. No one was shot.
Lt. Gardener’s men fired in response, and the policeman was struck several times. He fell to his knees, and the pistol slipped from his fingers. Blood darkened the front of his blue uniform. He looked up from his kneeling position, up above our heads at where the stars would be, as if his soul might leap out and into the night sky, and yet surely all he saw was smoke.
The old policeman’s eyes dimmed, and he slumped onto his side and did not move again. The confrontation over, their champion slain, the black paper dolls of the townspeople shifted and picked up their buckets and wordlessly resumed their efforts to extinguish the fires.
“Why did you do that?” I demanded of the corpse. I kicked it and shouted at it, “You idiot!”
“Goddamn you all!” I shouted at the townspeople with their useless bucket brigade. “Why didn’t you stop him? Why didn’t you do something?”
Gardener pulled me away from the fires, as though I might throw myself into the conflagration. He dragged me down to the road.
“Why did he do it?” I asked, my voice hoarse with anger.
“The same reason they all do it.” Gardener was already walking away down the road, his words almost lost to the fire’s roar. “ There’s nothing left for them here.”
The black snow had stopped in Los Angeles. The freak weather had produced nothing more lasting than oily puddles that were already being ignored. In a matter of seconds the heat had transformed something magical—or at least unusual—into something forgettable. The leaves of the palm trees were dripping with black. The world was moving on. The children had quit playing in the snow. The man with the faceful of tumors was gone.
Mister Swiftee was smiling, but his eyes were crazy. Round and wide. Maniacal. His burger-shaped head loomed over the parking lot of the Swiftee Burger in El Segundo, his expression not so much beckoning as challenging. He was daring the shift workers from the aircraft plants and the high school football teams to stop in and try to stomach one of his hamburgers.
Swiftee Burgers were cropping up all over the Los Angeles area. They were called franchise restaurants. The formula was to take the same mess of chrome and neon, the same paper hats and shake mixers and vinyl booths, the same not-terrible hamburgers, and duplicate everything and transplant it all over. It seemed to be working, based on the gangrenous spread of Mister Swiftee’s likeness. Somewhere out there somebody wanted this.
The inside was decorated in the red and gold of the franchise. Waitresses in red dresses fringed with gold lace moved from table to table serving up baskets of hamburgers and French fries to families and shift workers. I felt more out of place here than in Ciro’s. At least that was my neighborhood. This was something that didn’t have a neighborhood, something out of the rocket future, some dark vision where Pluto landed on us instead of us landing on Pluto. One wrong word and a fox in a silver suit was gonna burn a hole in my chest with a ray gun.
“Can I help you?” asked a chubby-cheeked doll. She was just a kid. ELLA on her name tag.
“I sure hope so, miss,” I said, taking off my hat. “Do you know a girl by the name of Holly Webber?”
That chased the cheery smile off her face. “Bob,” she hollered. “Some man is here asking about Holly.”
Bob came out from the kitchen and did not live up to my expectations. I was waiting for forearm hair and Navy tattoos stuffed behind a greasy apron. This guy had a pomaded wave of black hair neatly parted at the side, gold wire spectacles, and a mustache of two commas above his lip. His red apron was immaculate, his paper hat cocked to one side like Robin Hood’s cap.
“Robert Mellon.” He held out a hand, and we exchanged introductions. “I’m afraid I can’t be of help to you. Everything I know has been given to the police, along with Miss Webber’s earnings history.”
“I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”
“She was only employed here for two months, I didn’t know her well, she seemed like a nice girl, but she was late about half her shifts.” He ticked each item off on his fingers.
“Was she working on the night of her disappearance?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Ella. Bob gave her the skunk eye.
“She was scheduled to work until close,” said Bob, “but I let her go early. She said she had something personal.”
“She lived in South Los Angeles,” I said, and Bob nodded. “Do you know if she had any roommates or friends? Did she ever talk about anyone else?”
“Ella, why don’t put on a fresh pot of coffee?” said Bob, and Ella snapped her gum in annoyance as she departed. Bob put an arm around me and walked me toward the door. “I’m a married man. I don’t make it my business to know what these girls get up to, you understand?”
“I hear what you’re saying, and I wasn’t making any implications of an untoward nature.”
“Good.” Bob walked me through the door and out into the lot. The wind was picking up. “I think you’ll find you have arrived back at your starting point. If I see you again, I hope you bring an appetite in place of questions. Beyond that, I would leave this matter to the police. Vultures have no business picking over a sweet girl like Holly.”
He said everything real friendly, but there was nothing friendly about the smile he gave me before disappearing back into the restaurant. Struck out by a dandy in an apron. Society, such as it was, wouldn’t let me beat the answers out of a guy like Mellon. I trudged back to my car as the lot was beginning to fill up with the evening crowd.
“Hey.” The soft call belonged to a dame.
Caroline, judging by the name tag. Plain Jane, gangly, too many teeth, but there was something nice about the way the black snakes of her hair kept blowing across her face. Her eyes were pale blue and watery from all the wind.
“You were asking about Holly’s roommate,” she said.
“Did you know Holly?”
“She was my friend,” said Caroline. “Look, she did have a roommate. She talked about her sometimes, this girl named Veronica. I don’t know much about her except I think she was a dance hall girl. Seemed like her and Veronica were real close friends.”
“Any boyfriends?”
Caroline shook her head. “The guys were all over Holly, but she stuck up for herself. Didn’t seem interested in romance. She had given up on trying to be an actress like her mom, but she always wanted something more.”
“I didn’t know about her mother. What was her name? What pictures was she in?”
Caroline slid a cigarette between her pursed lips, and I leaned in to light it for her, cupping my hand to keep the flame going. She took a long drag before she answered my
question.
“Isabella was her name. Holly only talked about some Western serial. Red something, maybe. No, it was Rex. Rex Rawhide.”
I wasn’t familiar with it, but Hollywood was in the business of making and hoarding records of everything. Old serial reels were often pillaged for footage to fill in gaps in new productions. A train here, a leaping Indian there. All I needed to do was track down the studio behind Rex Rawhide, and I was willing to bet a sawbuck I’d find reels of it collecting dust on a shelf somewhere.
“What was Holly like?” I asked.
“Like? You mean, personally?”
I nodded and said, “It might help me understand who she was in contact with.”
“She was real sweet and funny,” said Caroline. “Always reading too. She loved to read. Mysteries mostly, but other sorts of books too. She’d come in sometimes and tell me all about someplace she’d read about in Africa or in the tropics.”
“She wanted to travel?”
“Yeah, far as I know, she never left California, but she said her mom used to go away on trips and leave her with her uncle.”
“Her mom still alive?”
“No, she died. Holly never said how, but she went to stay with her uncle for good when she was eleven or twelve.” Caroline tossed the cigarette down and stubbed it out beneath the toe of her shoe. “Something bad happened with him.”
“He touch her?”
“I don’t think that’s it. He died. Her whole foster family died, but she wouldn’t talk about it except to say they were gone. Something bad happened.”
“You’ve been a big help, Caroline.” I flipped my notebook closed and started to get into my car.
“Hey.” She stopped me again. “There’s one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Holly was sure something big was happening that night she was killed. When she was packing up to leave, she told me, ‘After tonight, everything is going to be different.’”
“She was right about that,” I said.
