Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  “Thanks for coming,” I choked out.

  “My pleasure,” he said, leaning an arm across the roof of my car and looking down at me. “Always look out for a fellow cop, right?”

  Kapinski looking down his fat nose at me was giving me a crawl on the back of my neck. I tried to open the door of my car to get out, but he held it closed.

  “Not so fast, Rex Rawhide. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “This is my case.”

  “Soon as your voice came outta my telephone, this belonged to the LAPD. I got twenty blues and a half dozen detectives on this. If what you say is true, Bishop kidnapping a girl is going to be the biggest headline this department has seen since we brought out the tanks for those Mexicans back during the war. You are not running this operation. I am.”

  “Just get in there,” I said. “He might hurt her.”

  Kapinski drummed on the roof of my car and backed away. He whistled and motioned back down the road. A line of squad cars and unmarked cars that had formed up behind us pulled back onto the road and started toward the Pit. Kapinski’s car was last, idling in the lane long enough for Kapinski to turn back and give me a parting shot.

  “You really pulled a Houdini act, disappearing from that hospital,” he said. “I’m leaving your old buddy Flores to keep an eye on you. If you disappear again, it’s on his head.”

  A squad car driven by Flores pulled in behind me. He looked none too happy, but then again, he never looked happy. Kapinski waggled his fingers at me and disappeared into the blue Buick, his attention already focused on the Pit.

  I could see that the coppers got in easily enough through the entry gate and began disappearing in a convoy toward the control building where Bishop kept his office. The next hour was an agony of waiting. I imagined scenarios of Bishop and the cops shooting it out, scenarios of Bishop giving up peacefully or snowing them with his grift, buying them with deep pockets. The longer it took, the more pessimistic I became. I got out of the car and chain-smoked Bravos and paced by the side of the road.

  There was a shift change at the Pit, and the engineers came streaming out in their candy-colored cars, headed for the nice houses in Channel Heights. The laborers doing all the hard work used other exits and probably rode in the white buses to Power Town. Poor whites, blacks, and Chicanos crammed into the longhouses like farm chickens.

  I commiserated with Flores, but he was none too friendly, I’d guess still smarting about my disappearance from the hospital.

  “Could go for a belt of the Brown Barrel,” I said.

  “You’re in up to your eyebrows,” he said. “If you’ve put Kapinski on to some nonsense, he is going to have your ass. And mine.”

  “I can handle Kapinski,” I said.

  “My wife said I should stop talking to you.”

  “She doesn’t know how charming I am,” I tried to say, but I started coughing and had to bend over and spit into the dirt.

  “What are you doing running around on Lynn?” Flores said. “That isn’t the sort of thing a man does. Running around with these women. Who was Holly Webber? Another one of your twists?”

  “Didn’t know her,” I choked. “Swear.”

  “Now you got us after some girl named Veronica? You are a piece of work, man. Piece of work.”

  “Sorry,” I managed, and finally I was able to stand up.

  “And you’re a damn mess. Where’s your tie? Here. Drink some coffee. I think I have a tie in my trunk.”

  Flores gave me a spare, uniform-blue. Didn’t go with the blood on my collar, but I wore it anyway. The coffee helped a little. Flores and I sat on the rounded trunk of the squad car, our backs to the Pit. We looked up the winding road to Channel Heights. The perfect lawns and healthy palm trees. It was a wonder they could pump all that water up there just to spray it on grass.

  “I think Lynn is going to leave me,” I said.

  “Sounds like you have it coming to you.”

  “Yeah, it’s for the best. She always deserved better than me.” I tapped out another cigarette and put it between my lips. Flores lit it for me. “And I’ve got cancer.”

  “What?”

  I nodded my head through the exhaled smoke.

  “How did that happen?” asked Flores.

  “I was in the war. Guess it was all that dust from the bombs Murrow has been talking about. Lot of Marines and Army got it in their lungs.” I tapped ash onto the gravel. “Doc said a few months, but I think my time is running out quicker than that.”

  “Does Lynn know?”

  “No.” I looked at him seriously. “And you keep your damn mouth shut. Not even your wife can know.”

  “I got it.” Flores twisted his lower lip between thumb and fingers. “That is the real business, ain’t it? My daddy got it. Didn’t know what to do with it back then, but there was one thing that helped. I don’t tell people what to do, but you need to get straight with God. Yes, sir. Go to church. You can come with me this weekend. It will be like starting over again.”

  Flores could see I wasn’t buying what he was selling, but something in that Catholic brain of his kept him going.

  “It’s a nice church. Mostly Irish, believe it or not. You ever even been to a Catholic church?”

  I was married to Lynn in St. Philomena’s, but it was not the church that sprung into my head when Flores asked.

  “St. Ramon,” I said.

  “That in Hawthorne?”

  “Kyushu.”

  That’s all it took to send me back. All the way to the end of my time in the mountains.

  Gardener forced the priest and the nuns to bury his men. It was a pitiful sight, watching those skinny nuns breaking their backs with the shovels. I think the yellow engineer was a Catholic, but he kept his mouth shut. When the bodies were in the ground, Gardener told them in Japanese to march back to Korano. That fat priest back-talked in that Dutch of his, and Gardener shot the ground by his feet. That sent him packing.

  We watched them depart. A forlorn procession. They must have felt safe in that church, but it was Ishii, not us, who’d brought the war to their doorstep. He remained silent, watching, but called out to his sister at the last moment before she disappeared from view. I couldn’t understand the Japanese. I wondered what I would say in that last moment. What do you shout out to someone you know you’ll never live to see again?

  When they’d gone, we began to climb. More than a thousand feet to the snow-capped summit of the nameless rock. Ishii said it was a holy mountain, but he wouldn’t give us its name as he marched between Gardener and me. We followed a hiker’s path for the first few hundred feet, but this dead-ended at an outcropping. Ishii insisted what we were after was at the very top.

  “I can’t go any farther,” complained the engineer. “I’m afraid of heights.”

  It was a poor lie. He’d been with us through and over the mountains east of Sendai. We’d all grown used to narrow paths and perilous drops.

  “Stay here,” said Gardener.

  The engineer did, watching us begin the more difficult climb up the nearly vertical rock face and into the morning’s light. The mountain there was black beneath our hands, volcanic, like the sun-hot rocks of the Oscuras. From this height we could see for many miles, above the mossy tops of the surrounding mountains, into tiny villages waiting like grains to be plucked and harrowed by the advancing Americans. Their deeds were to the east of us. Smoke obscured the way to the sea, fires burning wherever our bombs fell, fires wherever our tanks and men arrived.

  To the east it was deceptively peaceful. Villages disappeared into the dreamy mists, and the fog that swallowed the valleys made it seem as if the mountaintops emerged from snow. The world to the east was incomplete: golden where it peaked into morning’s light and purple where it hid in the mountain shadows. At the borderland between light and dark there was a gray nothing, no visible details, but I could not tell if the world in these places was unfinished or already ending.

  “It is beautiful,
” said Ishii, noticing my gaze. “I grew up in villages like those. Always misty in the morning, and the air ... I have heard that men who spend their youth upon the shores of the ocean will live haunted by it their whole lives. My dreams are always of the mountains. No matter where my life takes me, I know my happiness is in these mountains.”

  I said nothing, but I must have betrayed my agreement with his sentiment.

  “Do you dream of a place like this?” he asked.

  “Not a place,” I said. “Of a girl. Always her.”

  My foot slipped against loose stones. Ishii caught my arm and pulled me back against the cliff face. I stared down at the rocks plummeting away. They clattered from the mountain and disappeared into the mist.

  “Do you have her?” asked Ishii, snapping me out of my vertigo. “Back in your home. In America.”

  “No,” I said. “She is gone forever.”

  Ishii nodded. “I think these mountains will soon be gone. I was taught they were immortal, but I do not think so anymore. You have changed the world.”

  “Americans?”

  “Yes.” He hoisted himself up onto an outcropping of rock and helped me alongside him. “You have upset the order of things. Your atom bombs are many orders of magnitude more destructive than anything that has come before, and the project that created you is unthinkable. Producing men like automobiles to fight your wars. The Germans could not even begin to unravel the science behind it.”

  “You were there?”

  “Yes,” he said. “At Buhlendorf. Hoffman tried to unravel you there. And Mengele with his failed research on twins. Even Doctor Yakamura’s fetal injections produced only short-lived freaks.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Whatever it is you think is going on here is wrong. I heard what you said in the church—”

  “Hurry it up,” Gardener, a confident mountaineer, called down to us from above.

  I offered Ishii a hand up. He looked at it for a moment before accepting.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Your face is the same, but you are not Gardener.”

  “There’s no project,” I said to Ishii. “You’ve got it all wrong. Somebody lied to you.”

  “Perhaps it is you who was lied to,” said Ishii. “Why don’t you ask Gardener about Operation Westward? Maybe he can tell you the truth.”

  An eerie cairn painted with Japanese characters marked the final approach to the mountain’s peak. Gardener warned us that things would be treacherous for the last hundred feet. He climbed ahead, finding handholds in the bare rock and tying off ropes for Ishii and me to ascend behind him.

  Halfway up I slipped. My fingers and one of my feet lost their grip in the same moment. I saved myself with a lucky kick of my boot and a turn of my hips that slammed me against the stone. Rocks clattered down around me as I scrambled for a new handhold.

  I closed my eyes rather than look down. I imagined Lynn receiving a terse Army telegram stating that Casper Cord had fallen off a mountain. Would Gardener write that letter home, or would my death be added to the tally of some faraway battle?

  “You all right?” Gardener called down.

  “Yeah,” I lied. “One minute.”

  I was turned sideways on the cliff and had to release one of my handholds and swing my body back into the groove Gardener was leading us up. My hand found new purchase, and I resumed the climb.

  When we finally reached the summit, Ishii and I were exhausted, crawling up to the mountain’s peak and onto the cold rocks, slithering the last few feet like salamanders. Our breath came out in steaming gusts.

  Gardener stood over us. “Get on your feet. Both of you.”

  “Water,” gasped Ishii.

  Gardener unscrewed the top from his canteen and, staring down at Ishii, emptied its contents into his own mouth. He discarded the empty canteen and said, “No more stalling.”

  The view had a dizzying clarity, an expansiveness that shamed the mountains of New Mexico. The mountaineer’s cabin was ahead, barely larger than an outhouse, with a shingled roof and walls made from wooden slats painted black. Its tin chimney was blackened with soot, and a camp lantern dangled from a hook beside the entrance. Japanese symbols were carved above the door and slopped with gold paint. We walked toward it with Ishii at gunpoint ahead of Gardener and me.

  “Before you say anything,” said Gardener conspiratorially, “be warned that Lt. Col. Ishii is a silver-tongued devil. I know you were talking to him. He will confuse you and prey on your kindness.”

  “I’ve been around enough men stalling on their way to the hangman. I don’t give a damn if you kill him. Ishii said something about Operation Westward. What is he talking about?”

  “What did he say to you?” Gardener shook his head. “Damn it, Sergeant. Do I need to get out that green book again, show you all the miserable shit Ishii and his people were up to?”

  “Don’t mean we can’t have miserable shit of our own,” I said. “I know he’s mixed up about what we are, but he knows something else. I can tell by the way you’re spittin’ mad that there’s truth to it, so let’s hear it. Aren’t we supposed to be in this together?”

  “Yeah, right,” said Gardener. “Okay, Ishii wasn’t lying about that. There is something called Operation Westward. The Air Force is running it out of White Sands.

  “That’s near the Pool,” I said.

  “Not my department.”

  “You know more than that.” I prodded him with a finger.

  “I know it’s Shiftman’s ball game. The Gideons are invested in it. The same crew that gave us the bomb. Some secret project that has something to do with rockets.”

  “Rockets? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “There are pilots they’re training for Operation Westward. Warrens among them. Lots of the German eggheads we rounded up in Operation Paper Clip were sent to White Sands to work for the Air Force. Must be rockets. This is next-war business. Washington is looking ahead to the Soviets.”

  “Tell me the truth,” I said. I stopped walking and jabbed my finger into Gardener’s chest. He took a half step back.

  “That is the truth,” said Gardener, and he prodded my midsection with his pistol. “I’m OSS, not Air Force. I’m telling you everything I know about Westward. Don’t you touch me again, or I swear I will—”

  “It is just inside here,” said Ishii. He was ahead of us, having reached the door to the mountaineer’s cabin.

  Gardener seemed to forget his quarrel with me and stomped past Ishii to the mountaineer’s cabin. He took down the lantern hanging beside the door and lit it. Ishii and I followed him in. We stepped onto floors of frayed tatami and crowded around a table hardly big enough to play checkers on. There were no windows, only the light of the lantern that Gardener raised above his head. It swayed back and forth on its handle, creating movement in the shadows surrounding every object and on every face.

  In the center of the table was the object Gardener had sought. He ran his fingers lightly over the lid before clutching it to his chest. Half-submerged in the swimming shadows conjured by the lantern, I saw that Gardener held a small tin box, green, painted with the image of a young girl and over her head Vervains.

  Sirens blared, startling me out of the past. Three ambulances came speeding down the main access road to the front gate of Bishop’s power plant.

  “What the hell is that about?” asked Flores.

  I didn’t know, but I didn’t like the look of it.

  “I need to get inside.” I dropped off the back of the squad car and turned to make a run for my Ford. Kapinski was in my way. He’d returned without my even noticing.

  “Bad news,” he said.

  “Is she safe?”

  “There’s no girl in there,” said Kapinski. “But there is a crime scene.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Ethan Bishop is dead,” said Kapinski. “Must have been a hell of a fight. Bullet holes everywhere. Him and seven other sti
ffs with their blood and guts all over the expensive furniture. At the moment, you’re my only lead as to why the son of the richest man in California has been murdered.”

  The news was a rock in my guts. Kapinski wasn’t taking any pleasure in my being wrong, which meant it really was as bad as he was saying up there. I only knew one man who could shoot his way through Ethan Bishop and his bodyguards and leave a homicide detective looking pale. One black hat and a giant, melt-faced freak beneath it.

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  “You’ll have a chance to prove your innocence,” said Kapinski, “but you brought us to a goddamn slaughterhouse. Flores, get him down to the station, put him in the stew. I’ll have somebody drive his car to the impound.”

  Kapinski turned to walk away.

  “Wait a second,” I said.

  “No.” Kapinski leveled a finger at me. “No more games. You’ve dropped a mess into my lap that I’ve got to clean up. You used to be a cop, and I don’t want to humiliate you, but if you leave me no choice, I’ll get some of the boys to subdue you and put you in irons.”

  He waved to Flores and said, “Get him the hell out of here.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I’ve done things in life that made me feel lower than a worm. Killed people I shouldn’t have, lied, cheated, even stolen. Nothing ever made me feel lower than what I did to Hector Flores that day.

  We’d just left the Pit, headed for the station downtown. A long haul, longer because of the traffic. Plenty of time for me to get Flores into more trouble than he deserved.

  He was headed west, about to turn the squad car onto the highway. I was in the back with my hands free as a courtesy. I put a cigarette between my lips and asked for a light. Flores used the electric lighter in the dash. I leaned forward to make it easy for him. As he brought the lighter up, I knocked it with my hand. It fell right into his lap.