The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  The sirens became very loud and then the first one choked off as a pumper pulled up in front, a red sedan squealing in dramatically right behind it. A man came out of the sedan, pulling on a yellow slicker, and sauntered up the drive as if he was on a Sunday stroll. Jack Liffey and the cops watched as he spoke to Kim and waved down to his men, then Lieutenant Malamud tucked in his shirt and walked down to join them.

  “You been playing with matches?” Flor said pugnaciously.

  Jack Liffey sighed. “I’ve been helpful, Sergeant. I’ll tell you anything I know.”

  Flor watched with leaden eyes, then glanced at Dae Kim. “How does the slope figure in this?”

  He wondered what Flor’s problem was. “You know a cop named Quinn?” Jack Liffey had had a lot of trouble with a belligerent Culver City cop named Quinn, and not just over Marlena. It only took about a square foot of the surface of the earth for a man to stand up straight, but you couldn’t let anyone take your square foot away or you’d never get it back.

  “Buddy of yours?”

  “Nah, just a racist cop. Talks about wetbacks a lot.”

  Flor watched him for a long time without speaking. Down below, the firemen were stringing hose from a hydrant across the street. A ladder truck came up, blocking the whole street. “How does the ‘Oriental gentleman’ figure in this?”

  “Ask him yourself.” He started to walk away.

  “Liffey! Do you want trouble?”

  His vision went red and he turned back and got in Flor’s face and noticed the acne scars and the thickened eyebrows and broken nose. He’d probably been a boxer once. After the first few seconds Jack Liffey wasn’t half as angry as he pretended, but he could sense they were watching from below and he raised his fists and waved them angrily, saying under his breath, “You’re probably a really nice guy. I think I might like you. Of course I don’t want trouble. We’ll be the best of friends.”

  He went on for a while, with Flor looking more and more puzzled. It was an old baseball manager’s trick so up in the stands it looked like you were cursing an ump to his face, but you weren’t really saying anything that he could eject you for. Then he turned abruptly and walked away, past the whole startled group. A canvas hose swelled just as he stepped on it and someone shouted. Someday the cops would figure a way to recruit guys who didn’t feel the need to throw their weight around. The shower room at the Olympic Auditorium was probably not the best place to start.

  He knew Kim would be tied up for a while now and his car was thoroughly blocked in, so he walked down to Wilshire and Western and found a pay phone near the Metro station and called Lori Bright.

  “Hi, this is Jack Liffey. Any news?”

  Her breathing was odd at the other end.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked. “I’m sorry.”

  She sighed. “No. I was masturbating and you wrecked the rhythm.”

  He didn’t know how to deal with that. He’d never known a woman who would joke about something like that.

  “You want me to call back and start this all over again at some time more convenient?”

  “No, that’s fine, thanks. No news has flashed past on my ticker.”

  “Have you ever heard of PropellorHeads?” he asked.

  “Huh? No.”

  “Dae Kim?”

  “Is that a Chinese dumpling?”

  “Korean. I wouldn’t call him a dumpling.” He couldn’t help wondering if she was using something, or just her hands, and if she was undressed, or was she just teasing him for some reason of her own.

  “No.”

  “Has Lee ever worked directly for her dad or for Monogram Pictures?”

  “Lee is fifteen, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Know any Jamaicans?”

  “I worked once with the guy from the soft-drink ad with the big ho-ho-ho baritone. I can’t remember his name. That was donkey’s ages ago.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you going to report in regularly like this, read me the latest clues?”

  “Isn’t that my job?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Back to work then,” he said. “Both of us.” He hung up and contemplated Lori Bright sexually, the laugh and the gravelly voice and the bobbing he’d noticed under her blouse and the aura of heat she flung around so recklessly. He didn’t know what he felt, but he knew even thinking about it like this put him in over his head. That was one experiment that was definitely excluded.

  The news rack had the street edition of the News, formerly the Valley Greensheet, and the headline screamed that Manson 2 had done in a TV starlet. Through the scratched plastic rack he could read that Kim Barbara Kelly, the bright new secretary from TV’s Friend in Need, had been found dead in her Silverlake home with OFF THE PIG scrawled in her own blood on the— He wondered when the world got to a point where there wasn’t even anything left to copycat. Perhaps it was a good sign that the murder of a celebrity was still shocking.

  On a bus bench beside the news rack he saw a Xeroxed flyer, neatly hand-lettered and glued to the backrest. He’d seen them before, from a woman who called herself Saint Becky and plastered her obsessions up and down Wilshire. At the moment she was enraged that “colored people” were stealing million-dollar royalty checks from her mailbox, and to rid herself of the problem she gave explicit directions on getting to the airport—“be sure to ‘jot’ down the ‘directions’ and go to any ‘bookstore’ and find a ‘map’ and go west on ‘Wilshire’ to ‘Sepulveda’ and turn ‘left’ and in ‘case’ you have any ‘problems’ along the ‘way’ you can call ‘411.’ ” It was apparently their inability to find the airport that kept the blacks from going back to Africa.

  He’d seen her by accident once, when he’d been staking out an apartment not far away for the return of a runaway’s boyfriend, a stringy blonde in her mid-thirties. She had been flitting from phone pole to bus bench to utility box, plucking flyers from a satchel and gluing them up with a roller of some kind. There hadn’t been anything furtive in her movements. She’d seemed perfectly normal, in fact, just intense in a way you couldn’t quite put your finger on, like a lightbulb a few moments before it was going to fizz and burn out.

  He went into a flyblown diner just off Wilshire and stared dully at the big menu over the counter: world-famous burgers, tacos grandes, pastrami on bun, Armenian pizza, and dim sum, a whole U.N. of ways to combine bread dough and grease. The counterman was Asian and the cook, as usual, looked Latino.

  “I’ll take a world-famous burger,” Jack Liffey said.

  “No meat.”

  “Pardon.”

  “No meat. Very sorry.”

  “What do you have?”

  “No meat.”

  “Pastrami?”

  “No meat.” The counterman smiled, with a vague air of embarrassment, and Jack Liffey wondered if there was something he didn’t know going on here.

  “Armenian pizza?”

  The man shook his head sadly. Politely unhelpful: he’d taken a whole lot of R&R leaves from ’Nam to places like Singapore and Bangkok, looking for culture rather than whores, and that was Jack Liffey’s concept of Asia in a nutshell. Maybe Dae Kim would rectify it.

  “Coffee?”

  That they had, though he knew it wouldn’t be any good. He sat in a plastic booth to sip dutifully from the foam cup. He looked out a scratched window across an alley at a rundown brick apartment block, the lower windows all kicked in. It was a postnuclear scene, with one old woman hanging sheets dully as if she’d been asleep when the sirens had gone.

  He thought of Kathy, and wondered if they’d ever get back together. Things hadn’t really gone bad between them until he’d been out of work for a year and was demoralized and drinking. He hadn’t had a drink in eighteen months now, no coke in longer than that. No cigarettes for almost a year. On his dresser he kept an ashtray with matches and a loose cigarette, what he called his failure kit. It was to prove to himself he had a right to any good luck that came alo
ng, if any ever did. The cigarette was so old, oils were leaching out of the tobacco and soaking through the paper and he was getting tired of looking at it.

  The floor shuddered for an instant, then gave one sideward jolt, as if a giant had swatted the diner lightly. All their eyes met.

  “Three-point-eight,” Jack Liffey said.

  The counterman shook his head. “Four-oh.”

  The cook said nothing.

  After a moment, with no follow-up, they all stopped anticipating.

  He looked at the old building again and thought of Kathy sitting at the vanity mirror, brushing her long brown hair, over and over. It was like an ache. And the high-school teacher she was seeing now. A nice guy, actually. Jack Liffey wanted to drop him off a cliff.

  Sergeant Flor had started it off, getting up against him, and he could tell his temper was still frayed. It was a good day to punch someone.

  HE found Dae Kim sitting on a stool to contemplate the remains of L.A. 2099. Outside, the fire trucks had gone and the cops were back in their car, looking bored. The South African was squeegeeing up a mud made of balsa-wood ash. The flash fire had made short work of everything west of the Harbor Freeway, L.A.’s “West Bank,” and the water had done the rest. A strap of his overalls drooped over Dae Kim’s arm, and for the first time Jack Liffey noticed how thin he was. He couldn’t have weighed in at much over one hundred.

  “Sorry,” Jack Liffey said. “It looked really great.”

  Dae Kim nodded. “We’ll have to do it all digital now. I didn’t want to. Digital’s not really good enough in our price range.”

  Dae Kim let his eyes drift across the shelves that held old electronic components and meticulously labeled boxes. “It’s funny if you’re superstitious. Just this morning I was thinking that houses have no memory. All the family dinners that took place right here. The arguments and the making up and kids being disciplined and somebody listening to The Shadow on a big, old cathedral radio and somebody hatching plans to go to college, and nervous dates squirming as they wait to meet the parents. It’s all gone, just like my model.”

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “How do you mean?” Dae Kim asked.

  “Think what would happen if the memories kept piling up and never made room for newer stuff. You couldn’t hear yourself talk.”

  That had engaged the man’s notice and he looked at Jack Liffey with new interest.

  “You’re a strange gumshoe. Did you know the dead have been dying off for half a million years and still they’re a minority?”

  “I think I heard that. Unfortunately, it’s not true if you do the math.”

  “Okay, but there’s lots of folks, right? What always gets me is, where’s our Shakespeare and Dante and Rembrandt, and our great statesmen like Metternich and FDR? It doesn’t say a lot for the upward spiral of history, does it?”

  “It’s been a little hard to talk about the upward spiral of history ever since Goethe gave way to Hitler.”

  He chuckled. “Can I offer you a beer? They’re in the icebox there.”

  “My mom used to say ‘icebox,’ ” Jack Liffey commented. “If you want to know the truth, I think the world tends to make people of stature when it needs them. It seems to be resting right now. What did the cops ask you?”

  “If I had any enemies. If anybody was jealous of my work. If I had a lot of insurance.”

  “Well?”

  “No, no, and no, as far as I’m aware. I’ll take a beer as long as you’re up.”

  Jack Liffey wasn’t up, but he got the two beers anyway, overpriced German bottles with the ceramic-and-spring gizmos for tops. The South African seemed to grow frustrated with the progress of his cleaning-up and stomped out of the house without a word.

  Dae Kim watched him go thoughtfully. “He thinks he’s seen everything because other people in his country have seen everything, but there’s some things you don’t get by birthright. Actually he spooks pretty easy.”

  Jack Liffey fiddled the sprung tops off and handed one of the beers to Dae Kim. “How did you come to have a fifteen-year-old working for you?”

  “She said she was eighteen, and the work was just informal. She wanted some experience with art film, and she came and went whenever she felt like it. Mostly weekends and a few evenings.”

  “Was she special friends with your South African there?”

  “Him? I don’t think so. He’s pretty shy.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Too old for her own good. She was from a film family, but you know that, don’t you? Film people are very worldly along a very narrow track, so she’d been exposed to a lot, but she didn’t know half of what she pretended to know. Mention a name that a European intellectual ought to know—Lacan, Barthes—and she could give you a little potted summary of what she was supposed to know, but she hadn’t actually read very much. The ideas weren’t old enough. They weren’t inside her. Still, she talked a mile a minute and she was eager to be thought knowing, and that’s rather touching. It is a kind of respectfulness, after all.” He stopped to consider something. “I’d say she usually had an air of rectitude about her, like someone planning to run for higher office.”

  “Was she sexually precocious?”

  Dae Kim frowned. “Is that a roundabout way of asking if I was fucking her?” He looked at Jack Liffey around the bottle as he drank.

  “I didn’t think it was so roundabout.”

  “I’m asexual myself. I’m just not interested.”

  “Like Andy Warhol,” Jack Liffey said.

  He grimaced. “As a rule, I don’t like to compare myself. It’s not my preferred style of discourse.”

  Jack Liffey noticed he was wheezing. Dae Kim stretched his neck back and then brought out an inhaler and hissed it into his mouth. He waited a few moments and did it again.

  “Did you know Che Guevara had asthma?” Dae Kim said after a bit of deep breathing.

  “No.”

  “With all that marching and hiding in the mountains. What force of will. He said revolutions are made out of love. He was wrong, of course, but it’s one of those ideas that ought to be true. Like truth equaling beauty.”

  “Or kids ought to have a childhood,” Jack Liffey said. “Instead of playing video games.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  “Did Lee ever mention Monogram Pictures or her dad?”

  “No.”

  “Anything at all you can tell me?”

  “I think she was keeping a diary. She’d stop what she was doing and hurry off into a corner to write something down. You had the sense she was in serious training to be somebody when she grew up.”

  “What did she want to be?” Jack Liffey asked.

  “I don’t know. But she was a special kid, and I’ll tell you how. I got the sense she was trying on personalities, looking for the one that would fit just right when she found it. She’s the kind of kid who knows she’s responsible for what she’s really going to become, not just some cockamamie idea of herself.”

  HE drove up Rossmore, past the tall Ravenswood Building where Mae West had once lived, and past the big walls of the Wilshire Country Club where Louis B. Mayer had fought his way onto the membership list in the 1930s as the first and only Jew, before the Jewish businessmen built their own Hillcrest Club over on Pico and even Groucho gave up and joined a golf club that would have him as a member. Rossmore changed its name to Vine and then he was into the dreary industrial wastes of Hollywood. He’d miscalculated on the address, as everyone always did in that part of town. The downtown, eight miles away, was set on a skew from the rest of the city, and it made the zero point for the addresses drift as you moved north. Rossmore crossed Wilshire at the 4300 block, but two miles due north it crossed Santa Monica at 6300. He turned east again until he found himself in a traffic jam where the shopfronts were all owned by people named Hartounian and the churches were Armenian Orthodox.

  Ahead of him a school bu
s had rammed an old truck that had been stopped illegally to sell vegetables, and two dozen kids in school uniforms were raiding the truck to hurl vegetables left and right in a gigantic food fight. A zucchini glanced off his windshield and an old woman was berating a girl who was banging together two brilliantly purple eggplants. Two girls in front of his car dueled with bananas, one of them just beginning to make the transition from lampoon to rage. The old Latino who owned the truck kept trying to shoo children away but it was hopeless.

  Glass broke nearby and a young man jumped out of a Jaguar bellowing. Jack Liffey quickly backed and made a U-turn. He did not like to be close to things that were getting quite that ragged. He thought of his own twelve-year-old daughter getting swept up in a riot, and then his imagination saw her hit by a random brick, as his imagination often did, and sweat prickled. The vulnerability of children was unbearable. It was the kind of thought that could taint your whole day.

  The address was a small stucco complex built in silent-movie Spanish. The number had a “¾” after it which took him out through a fountained courtyard that had been pretty once but was now a public dump. A small terrier was worrying its way along the edge of the path. Suddenly it squatted and dragged its rear end along the concrete with its forepaws. Worms, Jack Liffey thought, the dog rubbing itself raw against the itch. He wondered what life would be like without hands to scratch an itch.

  He found the converted garage on the alley and knocked on the side door. The curtain behind the door window parted to show a face through the glass darkly. The young South African opened the door and beckoned Jack Liffey in without meeting his eyes, then stood with his arms crossed, a body language that said, Don’t hit me.

  “I’m making tea,” he said finally, almost as if apologizing. Not, Would you like some? Or, Could I offer you tea?

  “No thanks.”

  “I’m glad you were there to push me out the window,” he said very softly. “I couldn’t budge. It’s a character flaw.”

  Jack Liffey looked around quickly for any signs of Lee Borowsky. The room was untidy, but nothing suggested a girl. An envelope on the table with foreign stamps was addressed to Hennie van der Merwe.