The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  Again the audience burst into applause, with one table hitting it harder than the rest. Jack Liffey noticed that the guy on the speedbag was bellied back from the table, grinning, and it started coming clear that it was mainly the cast and crew of the videos who made up the audience. When the next video was announced, the baton of fervent applause passed to another table.

  He lost interest in the videos but not in the crowd. He looked around at the vaguely self-important, not unhappy kids and wondered, if things had turned out a bit differently, if he’d ever have ended up in a place like this, taken some arts course at UCLA, fallen in with the high-button crowd, and sat up late talking fiercely about the enigma of visibility. It probably wasn’t as bad as it sounded. He might have ended up lashing together some sense of vocation that felt like it justified his life. He didn’t usually indulge what-ifs, but he found he wanted to like these kids for some reason.

  He saw a skinny boy at a table with his shoe off and his foot obviously far up under the skirt of a girl who was giving dreamy looks at the wall. He remembered what an idiot he’d been in college, wasting all that opportunity on one drunken party after another, chasing the wrong women, and taking the easiest classes. Back when life was still provisional and still could go this way as well as that. He felt a profound sense of loss for just a moment, and then he chased the whole thing away.

  The heavyset man announced the main course, an hour-long documentary on the SHARPs, which he explained in a bellowy voice stood for Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice, and the table with the short hair and fatigues whistled and clapped. Jack Liffey remembered the Nazi leaflet in the girl’s coat pocket, and he settled back to watch the virtuous lads applauding themselves. He guessed there were two sorts at the table, the young men in camouflage who were the SHARPS in person, and the artier-looking kids who were probably the filmmakers.

  The show was mainly grainy heads talking about their lives as the camera moved restlessly around them, and after ten minutes he found his mind drifting away. He wondered what they would make of the old guy behind them in the SAC jacket, and he realized all of a sudden that he was just about the only person in the place who’d seen Ozzie and Harriet when it wasn’t yet high camp and Vietnam was still a real place to Americans, with real pain. On the wall only a few inches from his cheek was a poster of Leonard Nimoy as Spock making his four-finger V gesture. It seemed an odd emblem for the sophisticates at the Eighth Art, but he supposed it suited the TV generation. He leaned away to read the talk balloon someone had written on it: Jim, TV is information severed from all lived experience. And another hand had added in tiny letters: The true problem lies in the scale of what must be destroyed before anything can be renewed.

  One of the SHARPs waved a hand high in the air all of a sudden, as if asking permission to go to the bathroom. The sleeve was rolled up enough to show ring after ring of barbed wire tattooed around the biceps. The video seemed to be winding down into a chaos of testosterone—swaggering black and white gangsters who barged arm in arm through startled shoppers, a strange dissonance between angry bellows and words of brotherhood. The SHARP table whistled and pounded their fists over the credits and others applauded politely.

  When the lights went up, Jack Liffey made his way to their table.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  The eyes of one of the SHARPs lifted to him, trying to look hard and mocking. He had a sinister little goatee.

  “For what?”

  “The movie.”

  “I was in it. I didn’t make it.” The second SHARP was fat and looked even more like a biker. The other three at the table wore plain dress shirts buttoned up to the neck and looked a bit sheepish.

  “They made it.”

  “Congratulations to them, too.” He brought his eyes back to the first SHARP. Dogs were said to go into attack mode if you stared at them long enough, but if you could back them down you had them in your pocket forever.

  “I’m happy you found a way to be civil in an uncivil world.”

  “You mean cause we like blacks? Man, they ain’t nothing civil in it. They’re cool dudes, that’s all. I grew up south of Slauson.”

  Jack Liffey didn’t break eye contact. “My name’s Jack Liffey. I find missing children.”

  He fished out the photo and set it on their table.

  “What would Nietzsche say about that?” one of the filmmakers asked.

  “He’d say life is a lot of bullshit with people trying to take people off,” the first SHARP said. He finally allowed himself to look away from Jack Liffey long enough to glance at the photograph. He showed no recognition.

  The music came on all of a sudden, right in the middle of some techno-dance number, like a door opening on a busy factory.

  One of the filmmakers leaned in to look at the photograph.

  “It’s Lee,” Jack Liffey heard, and he lost interest in the SHARPs.

  “You know her?” The filmmaker looked about eighteen and nervous, just barely able to grow the blond mustache.

  “Sure. She was a real pest. She and her pal have been working on a documentary on our local Nazis. We crossed paths some.”

  “Tell me about her pal.”

  “Looked a bit like a Samoan, huge as a house, but I think he was white. He ran the camera and she was producing. They wanted some comments from Christopher and Samuel.” He meant the SHARPs, and he used the first names gingerly, as if he just might not have permission.

  “When did you last see them?”

  “I don’t know. Greg?”

  “Three weeks? A month? What’s that weird smell?”

  “Man, don’t you know grass?”

  “That’s not dope,” the thin SHARP said.

  “It’s patchouli oil,” Jack Liffey said. “Somebody around here’s wearing it.”

  “You musta been a hippie, guy.”

  “All of us were hippies back then. How would I find Lee or her big friend?”

  “Don’t remember his name. He never talked. You could try her school. I think she goes to that ritzy school in Hancock Park.”

  “No good. What else?”

  He shrugged. “Follow the subject. She was going down to get something on that cocksucker in San Diego County, you know, the guy with the shortwave radio show that the militias all listen to.”

  One of the SHARPs cackled. “Heh-heh-heh, you said ‘cocksucker.’ ”

  “Shut up, Beavis.”

  There was a commotion across the room. The boy who’d had his foot up his girlfriend’s skirt was standing up, holding a nude foldout picture of her over his head, showing it off to the room, and the woman in question was snatching angrily at it.

  “Another country heard from,” one of the filmmakers said.

  He talked to them for a while more, but they didn’t know anything else.

  “Good night, gents. Keep up the good fight.”

  “Fuck the good fight,” SHARP number one said.

  “As Nietzsche would say,” one of the filmmakers added.

  Jack Liffey smiled. “Nietzsche said that everything ordinary is habit, and everything extreme is vanity.”

  He let them chew on that as he walked away in a solemn processional step.

  8

  NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS

  HE HAD ANOTHER COFFEE AT THE EIGHTH ART, FRENCH ROAST and good and strong, and he chewed over his situation for a while, all the oddball things that had been plopping down on his plate and how crowded the plate was getting. There was a missing willful girlchild, a movie star whose image in his head gave him the willies so thoroughly his mind shied away, a summons to see the girl’s father, who was shooting an action movie two hundred miles away, a Jamaican tough guy who kept popping into frame like a Punch-and-Judy puppet, a penny-ante movie studio caught up in a feud with an obscure little start-up CD-ROM company, and now, just so he didn’t get bored with it all, a radar blip of neo-Nazis coming in low. None of it made any sense and it wasn’t getting any better when he thought about
it, so he went home.

  It was past ten-thirty but she must have had sensors planted, because the bell rang ten minutes after he got in. He was still filing away the bills and discarding the catalogs for shirts with little animals on the pocket and he hadn’t even tried to deal with Loco yet.

  Marlena waited sheepishly in the doorway. He’d guessed who it was and he half expected to find her there, wearing a coat with nothing underneath, but a little too much water had gone under the bridge for her to try that on again.

  “Hi, Jack. Can I come on in?”

  Her eyes looked inexpressibly vulnerable. Something about her always seemed too holy to hurt.

  “Of course, of course. You can get yourself a drink, too. Pour me a ginger ale, would you?”

  “That’s wonderful.” She was into the kitchen before he thought of Loco.

  “Hold on. You’re good with dogs, right?”

  “My Fidel thinks so.”

  “I’ve got an earthquake-crazy dog in the closet.”

  “I don’ know about that, Jack. Loco’s not really no dog, he’s one crazy border wolf. He can take off your face with one bite.”

  “We’re two big intelligent creatures. We ought to be able to deal with a little dog.”

  “I don’ know.”

  It was a double closet door and he’d left both sides ajar just in case the dog decided to come out on its own, but it hadn’t. The red eyes were right where they’d been five hours earlier, and just as crazy. It wasn’t even the call of the wild inhabiting the eyes, it was just fear clotted up so close to the surface that there seemed no depth at all behind the pupils. Jack Liffey opened the doors slowly and sat on his haunches facing the dog, cooing softly.

  “It’s okay, boy, it’s okay.”

  Marlena brought a saucepan of water and two drinks. She set the pan down and gingerly settled beside him.

  “What you gonna do now?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, but I’m not giving him the closet to keep.”

  The package of hamburger he’d thrown in was untouched and starting to drip juices. They sipped their drinks, and Loco gnarred softly.

  Jack Liffey nudged the saucepan of water toward the dog. “I wish I had some dilaudid to throw in the water.”

  “I think you want a dart gun, like the guys in game parks.”

  He sipped the ginger ale and, not for the first time, questioned his decision to give up booze. He wasn’t really an alcoholic, just prone to hiding himself away in ordinary pleasures, and he’d decided to deny himself all of them—tobacco, Scotch, drugs, even Raymond Chandler books, and not necessarily in that order. It had something to do with proving his general worth to himself, but a Scotch would have been pretty good right then.

  As if it had little significance, she rested her hand on his knee. He liked the heat of her touch, and he was amazed all over again by the fact that getting excited by one woman did not prevent getting excited by another.

  “I’m sorry you saw me with that policeman,” she said softly.

  “You have a right to be with anyone you want. It’s just it was that shit Quinn.”

  “He hit me up, you know. I tole him to go ’way.”

  “So you said.”

  “He was like some guys I knew. … I had a rotten time, Jack. Back some time.”

  “I want you to tell me about it, but we need to take care of Loco first.”

  “Sure.”

  “Easy, boy, easy. It’s going to be okay.” He inched closer to the dog and the growl ratcheted up a bit. “You’re certainly no judge of the Richter scale, boyo. That was only a crummy little aftershock. You’re just wrapped too tight. Think of all your compatriots that put up with the real thing out there near the epicenter in the Valley. Miserable little terriers bearing up with grace under pressure, flop-eared cockers, even poodles.” He didn’t add lapdogs, in deference to Marlena’s Fidel, a squeaky-trembly hairless rodent dog. He murmured on for a while and then slowly pointed his finger straight at the dog’s face, like Death in a Swedish movie. The dog recoiled a few inches and gave a strangled cry. He let his hand drift closer and closer.

  “Careful, Jack.”

  “It’s okay. I’m the boss. I think I saw some life in his eye.”

  He touched lightly under Loco’s chin, then pressed the flat of his hand up against the dog’s chest, right between the wobbly forelegs. The dog mewed once and collapsed like a deer caught by one expert rifle shot. Exhausted, it went straight into a comalike sleep.

  “Sleep it off, boy.”

  Marlena’s hands were on his back. “Your touch is magic.”

  “Mmmm.”

  Her arms went around him from behind and her large breasts pressed into him.

  “I didn’t ask for bad luck, but it came looking for me again, Jack. I’m glad you’re always nice to me. I had a real bad childhood, you know.”

  “But you turned out fine.”

  She kissed the back of his neck and one hand slid under his shirt and played with his nipple. “You want things all figured out and over with, don’t you? You got to pay attention to the in-betweens, Jack, and respect where people are coming from.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Before they made love, she told him what she’d always avoided telling, about growing up in a family of Protestant evangelicals in Montebello, a ratty house in a ratty flat street even more east than East L.A. She had been allowed no TV, no movies, no boyfriends, no makeup, no telephone calls. Her father had taken an irrational dislike to her and made her do all the housework while her younger sisters got to play, and she’d finally run away with an Anglo biker at fifteen, just to get out of the place, but the biker had passed her around the Devil Jokers in Fullerton and her father wouldn’t have her back when she showed up, locking the door and shouting out the window that she was spoiled now. She’d returned to north Orange County and settled in as the bikers’ property, which was about what she thought she deserved for messing up her life. She got so used to it all that she developed a kind of loyalty to her misery, the sense that that was where she really belonged, and she began to find even her despair soothing.

  “Jesus, Mar, I’m going to start crying here.”

  One day they’d all got doped up and decided to punish her for some fault by driving a half ton of Harley over her dog, hooting and mocking her tears and singing a horrible boozing song called “Lupe, the Hot-Fucking Mexican Whore.” That had torn it. She’d thrown herself on the mercy of a cousin whose family were Catholics. They took her in and she converted on the spot. She went to school with her cousin, in Duarte. A year later her cousin was killed in a drive-by, but the family kept her on and she finished out high school.

  “You don’t want to hear about my first husband, the big tuck-and-roll specialist at the body shop.” She shuddered. “After him, I married an old widow man from Sonora who was sweet to me. I didn’t love him much, but he didn’t mind I wasn’t no virgin and he left me the money for Mailboxes-R-Us. He couldn’t have no kids, but I got no gripes against Salvador. He was a kind man.”

  The story reinforced his intuition of holiness, and he wondered if it would interfere with lovemaking, but he needn’t have worried. All the abuse hadn’t dimmed her enjoyment of her body and hadn’t left her shy about it either. The only thing that seemed to bother her was getting caught up in all the straps, her slip and bra half off and tangled, almost weeping with the urgency. Quickly he helped.

  “Go on, Mr. Detective, go on go on, you do Brown Betty like that.”

  “LIFFEY, this is Sergeant Tomas Flor. Be downtown Thursday at ten. We got some gentlemen of the Jamaican persuasion here we want you to take a gander at. Don’t be late, you know what’s good for you. This judge we know loves to issue bench warrants for material witnesses and we love to serve ’em. Hasta la vista, esse.”

  “Oy, you’re all heart, Flor,” he said to the ether.

  Why, he wondered as he pressed the reset, did so many cops feel they had to throw their weig
ht around? He had no problem with cops in theory. They filled a function in the world. But too many of them just liked to let you know they were in the fraternity and you weren’t.

  A dozen black teenagers were lined up like a medieval gauntlet on the walk outside his condo and they murmured vaguely threatening noises and wore what must have been the latest rage—dark sunglasses with holograms of eyeballs that seemed to swivel as you passed. It was like being challenged by a dozen black Marty Feldmans and he burst out laughing.

  “You stepping up to us, man?”

  “Oh, dear, no.” It was curious how sharing the walled complex defused any real challenges and made them all neighbors in some old-fashioned way. Some good came of walls, indeed, Mr. Frost, he thought. “Where do you buy them?”

  “Eye-Eye Sir in the mall,” one of them grudgingly offered.

  “I’ll get a pair for my daughter.”

  IT was one of those glorious early winter mornings with the sky like a bowl carved out of iridescent blue jade and by the time he hit the Valley there was still only a little smog. Marlena had loaned him her near-new Nissan Sentra. Something about the angle or the depth of Japanese seats always cramped up his legs, but he was in no position to be picky.

  The freeway was closed at Devonshire and they detoured him onto Sepulveda. The overpass of the Simi-Ronald Reagan Freeway was apparently suspect after the aftershock and they had attached huge weights to it and were ramming it over and over with a giant machine that set up heavy vibrations he could feel in the car seat. He half hoped it would fall. L.A. had more than one ex-freeway named for an ex-president. The short Marina Freeway had once been the Richard M. Nixon, and for a lot of people it had been touch-and-go if this one would lose its name, too, after the million-dollar Teflon retirement tour of Japan.