Dangerous Games

by John Shannon

  “Huh.”

  “Let’s say I shoot you to get even. If I do, everybody loses. You’re dead, and I probably go to jail, my girl has to visit me 400 miles away through bulletproof glass. If I teach you how to write a passable essay, we all win. Most important, my daughter wins. She didn’t get shot in vain. You’re up to the Civil War, right?”

  “Huh.”

  He was absently rocking the old push-mower back and forth a few inches, and Jack Liffey took it away from him. “The South after the Civil War, Reconstruction.”

  “Si, esse.”

  “That means you’re well past the Mexican-American War. Write me one page about how the U.S. stole this part of the country from Mexico. If that’s too big for you, you can limit it to how the war started. Don’t just use that textbook you’ve got. Look in a couple of books.”

  “I can’t write good.”

  “You will when we’re through, I promise, unless you’re afraid to learn. Have it for me tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow! Dame chanza!” Thumb was indignant.

  “Hey, was that ‘Give me a break?’”

  Thumb nodded. Jack Liffey could see he still hovered on the edge of rebellion.

  “I’m learning, too. Let’s go do the back yard.”

  He could tell by his cranky reaction that a little too much was being asked of Thumb at one go. But the boy had taken that first step now, and he seemed resigned to accepting Jack Liffey’s authority, which, of course, was the point.

  * * *

  Thumb was negotiating the mower around the plum tree, and Jack Liffey was building the rudiments of a compost pile inside a chickenwire ring against the cinderblocks at the back corner when Gloria came down the back stoop with the cordless phone. She mouthed “Maeve,” and he took it from her. She watched the boy with an unreadable expression for a moment and then went back inside, while Jack Liffey retreated around the side of the house for an extra margin of privacy.

  “Hi, hon,”

  “Hi, Dad. What’s going on there?”

  “A kid’s helping me mow the lawn.” He wondered what sort of reaction she’d have if he told her about Thumb, but he decided that would be stupid. She was so good-hearted she would undoubtedly forgive the boy eventually, probably want to help him herself, but there was no sense pushing it while she was still healing. The ostomy bag was still there as a constant reminder.

  “Physical labor getting too much for your advancing age?” she teased.

  “I’m always ready to help the underprivileged with some pocket money.”

  “I miss you, Dad, and I miss Gloria. Mom won’t let me come there. Can you visit me?”

  “How about tomorrow? We could go for a drive up PCH.”

  “Wicked.” She loved the Pacific Coast Highway, especially where it ran right along the water in Malibu.

  “How you doing with your apparatus?” He glanced up at a terrible fingernail-on-chalkboard noise as the boy wrestled the mower over some pavers that stuck up from the crabgrass.

  “Apparatus. That’s a new euphemism. You mean my shitbag. It actually came in handy last week.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We’ve got some tough girls at Redondo High, believe it or not. They try to corner you and go for your lunch money and stuff. I was in the head to empty the bag and this J.D. girl came in to smoke and started hassling me through the door. When I laughed at something she said, she kicked open the stall door, but all I had to do was turn around and fire Oskie at her. Man, did she run away, gagging and screaming.”

  Jack Liffey laughed. “Glad he’s your friend and protector. I’ll see you tomorrow. I love you a lot.”

  “Met, too, Dad. Bye.”

  When he rang off, he could feel the heat behind his eyes, he was so proud of her cheerful bravery in the face of the disability. He watched Thumb wrestle the mower with powerful biceps and wondered how brave Thumb would be with an ostomy bag. Maybe—who knew?—given that portrait gallery of the maimed and dead at the police gang substation, one day he’d have a chance to find out.

  Luisa stood on the fieldstone patio out back looking at the ocean far below. The way the hills and canyons rumpled away from the patio, she could see only one wide slice of water between the tall windbreaks of eucalyptus trees and the shrubby yellow hillsides. But it was enough. A half dozen other houses were visible on knobs and ridges but none nearer than a quarter mile. She had a good eye for distance, because back home her world was measured in bicycle distance—to school, to Joseph’s Bi-Rite market, to the health center and to all her friends’ houses. When she got up to a good cruise on her old Schwinn, ass-banging hard because of the packed clay instead of air her grandfather had put into the tires, she could do a mile in three brutal minutes.

  “All fruits be ripe here, dawta. You overstan’?”

  She smiled privately, looking away from him. Neither of these guys had tried to sleep with her the night before, but she’d grown fond of the colorful up-and-down Jamaican music in this one’s voice. It was as unexpected as a kiss and tickle, though she only understood about half of what he said. His confidence affected her, too, and the amazing colors of his wardrobe.

  “What a great place,” she said. “I can smell salt water on the wind, it’s different from creek water. And eucalyptus and sage. Those are easy.” She sniffed. “There’s hawkweed out there, too, and goosefoot and some others that I only know the Paiute names. Ootoop’ and Oos’eev.”

  “Them some damn strange names. I guess every person, dem got dey words and dey knowledge. Jah rule. Tek de simple concep’ ob live wid love for all man and woman. No need for waar and envy. You no see it?”

  “Sure. How does kidnapping and cutting people’s dicks fit into that?”

  He grinned slyly. “Weall, naow, I-an-I got to protect from bad business. I-rie.”

  Levine came out the sliding glass door with a cold six-pack of Jamaican beer and a Jamaican ginger beer. He offered the ginger beer to Luisa.

  “Thanks, I’m already a little woozy from that hit of weed.” Remains of those giant joints were lying all over the place, like traffic cones.

  Levine grinned. “Be careful. The ginger beer is stronger than the beer.”

  “You mean stronger with alcohol?”

  “The ginger will blow your head off.”

  She took a sip and the liquid burned its way down her throat like acid. It was as if someone had grated fresh ginger into the drink, but she liked it. Terror took a beer and tipped it up, his Adam’s apple bobbing until it was two-thirds gone.

  “I-and-I challenge to domino, Mr. Big,” he said to Levine.

  “I can’t stand the way you play, Ter. I’d rather have my ears drilled out with a jackhammer.”

  There was a table and chairs at the side of the patio, and the Jamaican beckoned to Luisa. “Woman no afraid, you see it? Mr. Big, bwai, you jus’ one big damn coward naow. Boo-yah, oh don’ be hurtin on me, Mr. Terror, please don’. Me sooo skeered, I got me a inferior complex.”

  Levine burst out laughing and headed back to the house. “Eat me, Tyrone.”

  Luisa sat down gently opposite the man and helped him turn a worn box of dominoes face down. She watched his long dry-looking fingers work deftly at it. “I think I know how to play. Do you and Levine own this house?”

  “When time come, we forward out of hyere. We live on de earth, dawta, in no special place here in Babylon.”

  “Please call me Luisa.”

  She wondered who owned the lovely hill house and what had become of them. Maybe the two were house-sitting. She hoped there wasn’t some rich couple in a shallow grave just beyond the patio.

  “Dis de boneyard, Miss Lou,” he said, indicating the pool of face-down dominoes. “You tek seven cards, and don’ be fret my talking trash at you, dat’s just the way of the game. You some sorry ass likkle lost Indian girl.”

  Luisa glanced up sharply.

  “See, dat what I mean. You got to unnerve de enemy.”

  “Enemy
? There’s no such thing as a friendly game?”

  His forehead wrinkled up in mock perplexity. “Course not.”

  “You dumb black cocksucker,” she said tentatively.

  He yowled happily and slapped down the first tile so hard that the table jumped, and they had to pick up a few pieces that had bounced off onto the flagstones. “Dat de idee, Missie! You not so dim, least for a Red Indian whitetrash likkle bitch can’t find her own pussy with both hans.”

  Luisa picked out a tile with a three to match the one he’d laid down and slapped it onto the card table about half as hard as he had. She tried to remember some of the insults she had heard in the break room at Lovey-Dove, Inc. “I hear your mother was so ugly that when she went to the ugly contest they said, ‘No professionals allowed.’”

  Terror Pennycooke threw back his head and howled.

  “I know I’ve told you about this place, but somehow we never made it here until now,” Jack Liffey said to Maeve. “You sure it’s okay to walk the best part of a mile?”

  “We’re out in nature,” Maeve said. “I can go off into the bushes if I have to. And I sure don’t remember you telling me about a waterfall.”

  Gloria was hiking along with them, dressed in jeans and a tidy safari jacket so clean that it looked like it had just come from Banana Republic. In fact they had used her purple RAV-4 for the trip up PCH, a pleasant enough drive in the fall when the beaches weren’t crowded, but Gloria was still prickly and tense. They were just across the L.A. County line into Ventura near Point Dume.

  “I’ll believe a waterfall when I see it,” Gloria said.

  “I know two others in Southern California,” Jack Liffey bragged. “But this is the nicest one, with a soaking pool at the bottom. Some other time, we can walk way up into the hills here, too. Not today, though.” And if they indulged him, on the way back he could check out a beach house where Chris Johnson had found out that the fixer/dealer/procurer known only as Keith was supposedly shacked up. As long as Rod Whipple was out of the picture, Keith was his warmest lead to Luisa Wilson, though he hadn’t told either Gloria or Maeve about it.

  A few minutes after they set off, Maeve stumbled badly. He was only a few feet away, but he held back and let her catch her balance unaided. After a moment of patting her side to make sure everything was still attached, she glanced at her father. “Thanks for not running for a telephone booth to put your Superman suit on.”

  “It’s been my observation that you’re pretty good at taking care of yourself.”

  “Look at this,” Gloria said. She had stopped beside a whole colony of sparse bushes covered with delicate pink cupped flowers the size of dimes.

  “That’s mallow,” Jack Liffey said. “It’s native. There’s a much more orange variety up in the Sierras. Not many plants flower this late in the year except rabbit brush and stuff most people would call weeds.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Maeve and I used to take field guides on hikes and learn the native plants, but I still don’t know garden stuff. I can’t tell a zinnia from an iris. You ask me any of these, though.”

  “Okay, that one.”

  He grinned. “It’s called a big green bush with oval leaves. Sorry, ask me when it’s in flower. My memory’s not what it used to be.”

  Maeve bent over and looked closely. “Monkey flower, Dad. And what’s that beautiful vine with the red leaves?”

  They shared a knowing smile, but Gloria had already moved toward the vine that was growing thickly on the bank of the dried up stream. She was just about to pluck one of the leaves when Jack Liffey snatched her hand away. “Whoa, hon. Your Paiute senses are failing you. That’s poison oak. Leaves in three, let it be.”

  “If I ever had any Paiute senses, they were beaten out of me,” she said angrily.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She looked at him for a moment curiously and then visibly decided to ratchet down her inflamed sensibilities. She took his arm when he offered. “Next time I’ll wear moccasins and turquoise and woo-woo if you like.”

  His heart soared with the easing of her pissed-off state, even the lame joke, and he took her roughened hand where it was clutching his bicep. “We’re almost there.”

  The problem was that the waterfall was largely a bust. In the late fall, the stream was so feeble that water barely dribbled over the mossy fifty-foot cliff to send only a trickle into the pool. Still, the pool at the bottom was full and inviting, maybe three feet deep. “If we had suits we could at least soak,” he said.

  “It’s going to be a while before I’m in a bathing suit, Dad,” Maeve reminded him.

  “Yeah, sorry. I guess even one of those ruffled Victorian bathing costumes wouldn’t do the trick.”

  “Victorian bathing machines would be better. You know about them?”

  “Never heard of ‘em.” He had, but he knew she loved it when she got to explain something to him.

  “We did turn-of-the-century customs in my class on Time and Culture. All the popular beaches in Victorian England had these weird bathing machines. They were little wheeled cabins that were closed on all the shore sides. The women got inside and sat on a bench attached to the wall and changed into their bathing costumes. Then horses backed the bathing machines out into the water so that the women could dabble their feet and stay completely unseen. The ayatollahs would have loved them.”

  “Why wear anything at all if you’re that hidden?”

  Gloria squeezed his hand once as prelude to extricating her fingers. “There’s no end to the silly stuff men expect us to do so they don’t have to control their own emotions.”

  “I understand completely,” he said. “Gloria, you could put on a chador so all I could see is those lovely brown eyes and you’d still drive me nuts.”

  That earned him a soft punch on the shoulder.

  Maeve turned to face them both. Putting on her most earnest look, she stopped dead, arms akimbo. “How come you two are mad at each other? It’s like the ghost at the feast.”

  He waited a few moments, but it didn’t seem Gloria was going to say anything. “I was a bad boy,” Jack Liffey said. “I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to negotiate the terms of my surrender ever since. I lied to Gloria.”

  Maeve’s expression took on that panicky look she had sometimes, when life started moving too fast for her. “About what? I hope this isn’t another one of your world-historic failures at keeping your pants zipped.”

  He smiled tightly for an instant. “No, hon, and I think you exaggerate that problem a little. Anyway, Gloria is who I want and I’m not on the prowl.”

  “Well, sometimes the problem is that there’s a woman who is.” She looked at him pointedly. “What about the Dragon Lady?”

  He knew who she meant and wondered if the warmth in his cheeks meant he was blushing. “Hon, there are times I’d prefer not to look at my life in comic terms.” He’d been looking for a missing Vietnamese girl at the time, and her employer had come after him hard.

  Jack Liffey and Gloria Ramirez now stared at one another, each waiting for the other to blink. He didn’t want to tell Maeve that he’d found the boy who’d shot her, but Gloria was giving him no help. “I withheld some information that I thought would put Gloria in an uncomfortable position as a sworn officer of the law. We’ll tell you about it a little later, if you can trust us until then.”

  He yearned for the days, right after Maeve had broken a couple of promises to him, when he could pull rank. But whatever credit you gained that way inevitably trickled away faster than you could make good use of it.

  She reached out and took Gloria’s hand and then his hand and put them together petulantly until they clasped reluctantly. Maeve was still part child, in willful denial of the world of separation and divorce, of conflicting interests, loss, defeat, and general human breakdown. “Give each other a kiss now.”

  They pecked, and Maeve sighed. “I guess that’s the best I’m going to get. Please don’t scare me,
guys. I’ve had too much change already. I like you too much.” She put an arm around Gloria and clung.

  Apparently, there was a Santa Ana brewing up. A gritty blast of wind erupted down the trail and made them all turn away and cover their eyes, breaking the tension.

  “‘Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus,’” Jack Liffey said softly. “Unfortunately.”

  “One of the Greeks?” Maeve asked.

  “Aristophanes, I think. We’ll do our best to stay together, hon. That’s all I can promise.”

  “I need a tall bush to hide behind,” Maeve said in an abrupt change of tone, clutching her side. “And something to dig with.”

  Gloria hadn’t spoken in some time, and her silence had been swelling in his psyche like a lit fuse.

  “Sit over there a moment,” Gloria said. “Jack and I’ll dig you a pit against the cliff.”

  The ordinary considerate words felt to him like a fever breaking.

  Dear Diary,

  Lord, this happy Jamaican is built like a big truck & really he really sees me & talks to me. When I’m in bed tonight I hope he comes to me. Black skin dont make no nevermind to me at all. Its so funny we play dominos & just insult each other so much & it makes me so happy to be insult by him Im still laughing. Up here makes down there seem so far away. I feel like a princess in a castle.

  THIRTEEN

  A Strong Faith System

  The wind was so powerful, gusting out of the northeast, that it was hard to keep the tall RAV-4 in lane. They were on an exclusive stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, with overpriced beach getaways on stilts lining the ocean side of the road, shoulder-to-shoulder like a long irregular fence.

  “You folks mind if I double-park here a minute?” He pulled off the road, blocking a gray two-car garage door on a nondescript modern house Its only notable feature was a sunburst doodad lamp on the clapboards that really belonged on a sixties apartment building inland.

  “The Coastal Commission hired me to make sure there’s still beach access.” In theory, all of the beach—seaward of the mean high tide—was public, but when celebrities built their beach houses elbow to elbow along the water, cutting off access, they’d pledged to keep open a few stairways. Little by little, of course, the access stairways had been walled off or actually built over, in order to keep out the riff-raff.