by John Shannon
Jack Liffey knew by now that eme was the Mexican mafia, a prison-run supergang that stood above all the barrio crews, taxed them, and decided who could do what.
“It’s all about respect.”
“Did you ever think how much nicer the world would be if everybody didn’t have to be in warring armies? If we were all brothers. Remember that truce day—the demonstration against the war down at Salazar Park?”
“Yeah.”
“Imagine you could walk anywhere in town and people would smile at you.”
Thumb shrugged and drove cautiously through the alley onto a narrow street of lovely little bungalows with pots of flowers everywhere, all lashing westward in the insistent wind. “The world ain’t that way, man. I just got here. Don’t blame me.”
“When you think about a better world, what’s it like?”
He could see that the question threw the boy a little. Thumb thought a moment and had a little trouble with third gear, lugging the engine before shifting down. He wasn’t an experienced driver. “I’m wearing a mask and this bright red and green traje like a big hero in the wrestling, and I got a big sword, and when my enemies come after me I just swing them through the guts with the sword. Fwoosh. I want to be so strong nobody fucks with me. I don’t bang much, man, but I gotta have the protection, and I gotta be down for my barrio. I ain’t a pussy.”
Jack Liffey wondered what wisdom he could possibly offer to a cosmos so steeped in testosterone. He wondered if any intimacy at all could pass between their worlds, without continual misunderstandings. “I have daydreams like that, too, but only when I’m frustrated and feeling alone.”
“Uh-huh.” The boy blasted the horn at a car in front of them that didn’t start up fast enough on the green light. Jack Liffey glimpsed eyes in its rearview mirror, looking them over. It was a near thing, but the angry driver moved on. Thumb wasn’t pushing it and had circled back almost to Gloria’s.
“Drive around some more if you want.”
They now took a wider circle through Boyle Heights, passing Roosevelt High School with its football squads working out on the field, and a few hangers-on outside smoking and banging their backs idly into the chain link fence.
“Your old lady don’t like me,” he said abruptly.
“I don’t really like the term ‘old lady,’ Thumb, but there’s not much else in English. I don’t like ‘girlfriend’ either. You could say novia. Maybe she’s pissed because she’s thinking about you taking a shot at my little girl.”
Thumb went quiet for a while. “I told you I don’t know what happened, man. It just went off. It was a accident.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“I’ll take you home, señor,” he said resignedly.
“I’m not mad, Thumb. I’m puzzled. I want to be your friend, and I still can’t figure out what happened.”
“It’s so hard. I want to be the wrestler in the mask that fights for la raza, you know, but then I’m me, and I do that thing.” He looked genuinely confused.
As a gesture of some kind, Jack Liffey held up his left fist and crooked his doublejointed thumb back. Thumb matched him.
“You know, I got sisters, and one of ‘em was attacked when she was little. A really bad pendejo from another street who’s dead now. The other sister is married to a guy who’s up in Corcoran for banging, and she’s got three babies. They both live with it okay. I’m the one who’s angry—it’s not right, but sometimes it make me do bad stuff.”
“Nobody live out hyere but foreigners, Mr. Two Baldheads, so you no tink dey care one likkle bit.” Terror Pennycooke took out the big Webley .455, a British Service revolver from World War II, and held it in Kenyon Styles’ unhappy face. Rod Whipple was frozen in midgesture, opening a beer at the kitchen table across the room. The clunky Webley was Terror’s weapon of choice, a nice reliable revolver with a big shoulder-busting cartridge that the cops back home in Jamaica still used. He was holding the pistol now with his wrist rotated so the handgrip was parallel to the ground, the way they always did in the movies.
“We haven’t got any money here,” Rod said. “I promise you that’s the truth.”
Just a half hour earlier, they had all met in a diner down the street that catered to the whole East Hollywood neighborhood, the hand-lettered menu on the wall offering Armenian lahmajun and Salvadoran pupusas and four or five other imaginative ways to combine bread dough and greasy meat.
The two young men had patiently tried to explain to Terror that there was no big money at all involved in an appearance in Dangerous Games. They never paid their actors more than a hundred bucks, mostly homeless men or reckless daredevils who’d have done their stunts for the challenge and notoriety alone. For some reason, the big Jamaican had stubbornly refused to believe them, persisting as if they were just bargaining hard and would eventually come around.
Finally, growing jumpy, Kenyon had excused himself to use the bathroom and after about five minutes of absence, Rod had realized he was on his own once again, and he had sprinted away into the morning.
Terror Pennycooke had just sat patiently in the diner, grinning confidently, until the two had made their separate ways back to the apartment building in clear view across the street, one of hundreds of similar aging runway apartments in that part of town.
“I-an-I need a discuss byisness some more wit dese buoys,” he had told Luisa. “Hey, you dress up good,” he said, cocking his head as if just noticing that she was really filling out the skimpy blue velvet dress he had bought her.
“I feel good in this. I like to touch the cloth.”
“Mmm, it come off a you fine, too, I bet. You de ongle girl for I, you knaow. You go wait in park dere some time now. Don’t fret. Trev come soon.”
After pushing his way into the apartment, Terror had backed the taller young man across the spare-looking living room. He paused to admire a Richard Widmark poster, grinning his devil-grin. A lot of the rude boys on Jamaica had taken Tommy or Udo as street names, from Widmark’s crazy-giggling gangster in Kiss of Death.
Terror set down the shopping bag he carried and patted the poster as if comforting it. “You marked for life,” he said softly.
Rod Whipple held his head in his hands at the kitchen table, and then looked up forlornly from the open kitchen, glaring at both of them. “Ken, I’ve had about enough of all this.”
“Here de way it is,” Terror said, ignoring him. “A black cat, him run across you pat’. Den your private sector itch you up and you see it Friday 13, and all a sudden, a man like me show up. What you gone say? Just superstitches? Just bad luck? Forget dis guy? He nothing.”
All of a sudden he turned and slammed the heel of his palm straight into Kenyon Styles’ forehead, like some kind of machine arm hammering a rivet, and Styles fell backward over the coffee table and lay spreadeagled across the table and the sofa, moaning.
“Stay right dere,” Terror ordered. He turned to Rod Whipple. “Might as cheap me kill two bird before dey hatch, eh?”
Rod put up his palms. “Don’t hit me.”
“You say de wiseguys come and dey take away de Dangerous Games Numbah One. Dey makes millions, and you two don’ make dibbi dibbi. I tink you bwoys thick as two short planks, you no see it, you need a nursemaid to watch over you. I-an-I not greedy like dese yere Eye-ties.”
He turned on a cheap stereo beside the TV, found a rap station and got the volume up. Then he turned the TV on, too.
“We be partner naow, dis is de ting for you to see, for sure for sure.”
“That’s absurd. What have you ever done for us?”
“Lessee. I knaow you be need protection, and you need some persuade still.” He retrieved his shopping bag, reaching down into it for a fat roll of duct tape and a fourpack of D&G Jamaican Ginger Beer. He plucked out one bottle and began absently to shake it up. “Who wanna be first? Don’ be shy.”
“And that’s not all!” the TV set bellowed. “With every order we include six stainless steel stea
k knives …”
He stopped for gas at the big dinosaurs at Cabazon, as good a place as any, and at a mini-mart in the gas station, he bought a wrinkled hot dog off an automatic griller that rolled them constantly under a plastic hood. “Praise God,” the clerk said as if the twenty Jack Lirfey held out to him was something very special.
“What for?”
“For giving his only begotten son.” The kid had acne scars and a pompadour that wouldn’t stay down.
“Do you think God is more insecure than you are?”
“Huh?”
“Why on earth does he need our praise?” Jack Liffey was in a bad mood, engendered by Gloria Ramirez, who had chewed him out for taking too long in the shower that morning. A meaningless fidget of her generalized resentment.
“Bless you, sir.”
He relented. “Bless you, too, son.”
“Yes, sir.”
The hot dog was inedible, and he threw it away. As he drove past the big power-generator windmills in the San Gorgonio Pass on the way to Palm Springs, he saw that the blades were churning away hard, facing out into the desert. And the car, too, was bucking a little and slowing unnaturally, even on the downhill into the Coachella Valley. The Santa Ana was blowing up a gale out of the great basin, out of the violent Mojave. That might account for half his mood right there, he thought.
Just before the 111 turnoff to all those rich white-belt-and-white-loafer cities, he passed a car that was shaped like an old dial telephone, skulking along slowly in the right lane. As he got up his courage to pull the wind-balked VW over a lane to pass, the giant receiver lifted a foot off its cradle and a sign popped up to say, It’s for you! He kept right on going. It did not seem to be a good idea to answer it.
G. Dan Hunt lived on the edge of a big golf course complex in Cathedral City just past Palm Springs. Jack Liffey had read somewhere that there were 110 golf courses in this 20-mile pearl necklace of gated retirement complexes that stretched from Palm Springs to La Quinta, an area where more land was devoted to the strange Scottish sport than to housing the old and monied themselves.
He didn’t want to announce himself at the guard shack and give G. Dan a chance to be out, so he parked at the back of a gas station with some cars waiting for engine work, made sure to flick off Thumb’s new kill switch, and walked a quarter mile before leaping a concrete block wall. They weren’t all that serious about keeping the riff-raff out. No turret guns, no mines or barbed wire.
The houses were all what Mike Lewis had once called Silent Movie Spanish, with red tile roofs and stucco, all over-large for their retired occupants. Patches were artfully missing here and there to reveal faux adobe blocks. Hunt’s townhouse was on one of the greens, with a foursome stooping to eye the level of the grass. Being on a green seemed preferable to being located near one of the driving tees where the houses all cowered behind wire screens and tall plexiglass shields. From the patio you could step over a low wall straight onto the rough grass that bordered the green. It must have been weird, like living in a pinball machine.
Jack Liffey stopped in his tracks on the rough. There was a figure out on a nearby patio who bore a strong resemblance to G. Dan Hunt. But the Hunt he knew from a few years back had been an immense chesty man with a bark that could draw headwaiters fast and chase off trouble all by itself. He had been a fixer at every level for a number of studios and had used the violent Jamaican, Pennycooke, for his nastier work. The man he saw now had the same colorful suspenders and the same nose and eyes, but he was more than merely older. He had lost a good hundred pounds. Once again, right in front of him, the Grim Reaper was serving up previews of the big feature to come.
The man was sipping a milky beverage that looked more like medicine than a cocktail and baring his face to the sun. Jack Liffey came along the rough toward him, trying to make enough noise in the high grass so he didn’t startle the man.
“Hello, Dan. I’m Jack Liffey, remember me.”
“I know who you are. If you remember, I was impressed enough with you to try to hire you once.”
“Can I come over?” He still stood in the rough.
The man shrugged with one shoulder, a gesture of great physical economy. Jack Liffey boosted himself over the low retaining wall and sat opposite him in an expensive-looking patio chair made of wood and vinyl straps. “Your old employee, Trevor Pennycooke, is back in town. I’m looking for him.”
“Feel that wind,” he said. “It reminds me of all winds I’ve ever felt. I’m just primary process now.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Jack Liffey said.
“You’ll have to ask my roshi.”
“You’re into Zen?”
“Is that so surprising?”
“Yes.”
“Zen is practical as shit. Doctor’s orders, learn about dealing with pain and shit.”
G. Dan Hunt let himself drift for a while, basking.
“You know where I might find Terror Pennycooke?” Jack Liffey asked.
Hunt bided his time. Then he said, “A guy named Levine. He used to work for me, too, and I think Trevor would hook up with him if he’s back in town.”
“Levine have a first name?”
“Not that I ever knew.” Jack Liffey waited patiently. Unless there was more, the trip would have been a waste. He had no need to pay his last respects to G. Dan.
“Levine had a place up on Malibu crest near Fernwood. Someone in the neighborhood might have found Trevor a bit noticeable if he’s staying with Levine.”
“I guess that helps,” Jack Liffey said.
“It doesn’t matter to me whether it helps or not,” G. Dan told him. Then he stood up, breathed a couple of times and started making some strange slow motion exercises in the air, probably tai chi.
“What’s that called?” Jack Liffey asked.
“It’s called Ride the motherfucker till the wheels come off.”
Dear Diary,
Now that I have linked my fate with love I feel different. Trev had some business & he asked me to wait in a little park. I watched kids playing like I was way off the earth above them but I was attached too. Then I got to watching a Mexican man with two little girls on his knees. He talked very serious & then the girls laughed so he laughed & one of them hugged him. God I could of been one of those girls but I never had a man be so nice.
EIGHTEEN
A Little Off Balance and Having to Think Hard
When Jack Liffey got home from the store, he found Maeve’s Toyota parked in front. Kathy must have relented and let her venture out into the wilds of East L.A. after all. Or else she’d come on her own. It wasn’t unknown for Maeve to violate a parental ban. She’d obviously heard his VW approach—everyone within miles could hear the air-cooled engine—and she came out to greet him. In an instant, he herded her officiously back inside, away from any random events the street might toss her way.
“Three more days of Santa Anas,” she predicted. She hugged him. He held on a second longer than she did, but giving Oskar a wide berth. “I predict major wildfires up in the hills.”
“Let’s hope not. Want a Coke?”
“Diet.”
He got them both Diet Cokes and watched her tap softly on the top of the can with a fingernail before opening it—she believed it cut back on the potential for geysering fizz. He wasn’t convinced.
“The wind really worries me,” she said. “I was thinking of some people I know up in the hills. I hope they cleared their brush.” They both knew that he had once lived with a fading movie star in the commanding heights of the Hollywood Hills smack in the middle of a critical fire zone. But she had been dead for several years now, her house leveled by the big Burbank earthquake. It was probably just another empty lot these days. It wasn’t really prime real estate any more since the jumped-up music execs and overnight rock stars and drug dealers had moved in. After the quake, he’d never even been tempted to drive past the place on Avenida Bluebird. Nostalgia was no game to play with yourself
, he thought, even if places and people had once meant a lot to you.
“You’re pretty close to Gloria,” he suggested. “Do you know what’s eating her? I don’t think it’s just the Santa Anas.”
“Have you ever considered that you might have a wounded-bird syndrome, Dad?” she asked.
He sighed. “Gloria seemed a lot stronger than me.”
“You’re overreacting. Gloria’s going to be fine. It’s really just a matter of semiotics.”
He laughed. “Lord, I don’t think I want you to explain that. I’m not imagining her pain, hon. She’s stewing on something, and I just can’t seem to help.”
They both stopped talking as a noisy VW bug just like his rasped past the house. “Reminds me of an old Warners Cartoon,” Jack Liffey said. “I better not look close, I might be in there.”
“No, you’re in here for sure.” She leaned far over to kiss his cheek and set down her can, then noticed what she had set it on. Moving the Diet Coke, she plucked the sheet of paper off the counter and began to read aloud: “There was trouble in Texas and Texas was independent away from Mexico in 1836. US wanted Manifesto Destiny still and wanted all land. California too.”
Prickles went down his spine as he tried to remember if there was anything in the essay that would suggest its author was her assailant. He didn’t think so.
“What’s this?”
“A boy I’m trying to tutor,” he said.
“Another wounded bird. You were always trying so hard with Rogelio, but it didn’t take. It’s too bad, he had a good heart.” Rogelio was the nephew of another woman he had lived with. Maeve was right. He’d tried hard to get the boy into computers, or into anything with a future, but Rogelio just had little interest in applying himself.
“Where’d you find this kid?”
“He lives a few blocks away,” he tried out. But it wasn’t adequate, and he knew it.
“This needs a lot of work, doesn’t it?” she said. She wasn’t making fun of the boy; her interest was quite earnest. “Aside from the mistakes, every sentence has a big black line under it, like a death notice.”
