The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  “That’s what we brought to the screen, you know. The thing that mere actors couldn’t do, no matter how good they were. Whoever Jimmy Stewart played, he carried with him that bemused small-town righteousness that you loved and trusted. And Marilyn, she always had that deep devious sensuality that’s only given to the pure of heart.”

  “And you?” He heard Mike’s words about celebrity and daydreams on the phone and wondered just where he was. He was in a seedy restaurant in Hollywood, all right, but he was also sitting opposite lips that had once kissed Marlon Brando. Hair that always caught the backlight no matter which way she turned.

  Words evaporated away as they talked, like the mist over ice in the sun. And she was watching him as if she was about to eat him alive.

  “What do you think I projected in all those films?” she said.

  “You were sly and knowing.”

  She nodded slightly, as if it was a half-bright try. “I’ve paid my dues in the big bad world and I know more than I’m ever going to let on. Somewhere sometime I made a stand for the right thing and I lost badly for it. Now I’m a stoic failure, but I have a bigger soul than all these successes around me.”

  “Jesus, sort of a younger Rita Hay worth,” he said.

  “Thanks for the younger. What are you doing this afternoon?”

  “I’ve got to see some Nazis about your daughter.”

  That stopped her for a moment, which was the point. She’d already adjusted to the Phuket as if she’d been coming there for years. You had to get up damned early to stay ahead of this woman, he thought.

  “Come back to me tonight. Please.”

  “I wouldn’t call it the impossible dream.”

  And then she jumped six inches as if someone had stuck her with a needle.

  10

  A MORAL REFERENCE POINT

  HER HAND WAS CLAPPED AGAINST HER BREAST, AGAINST WHAT looked like a slim silver pen but turned out to be one of the new pagers that got your attention by shuddering away in your pocket like a rat in a straitjacket. It was letting her know that her cell phone, set to mute in her purse, was ringing. She dug the phone out, more agitated than he’d ever seen her, and listened with a frown.

  “When? Okay. How?”

  She turned the cell phone off, moving very deliberately now, and stared at the tiny instrument as if it might turn into something quite different.

  “That was the call,” she said at last.

  “How long have we got?”

  “An hour, to get home and get the money—I have it ready. And get to Forest Lawn in Glendale.”

  “Pibul,” he called. The cook stuck his head through the bead curtain. “Do us a favor.”

  OUT front they waved cheerfully, arm in arm, as Pibul drove off in the Nissan, then they ducked back inside. He wasn’t certain, but he thought it was Malamud and Flor in the white Caprice parked on the red zone down the block. No one had ever bought that car but cops, what the kids in his condo called a real P-ride. Five minutes later Pibul Phanomyong had the car idling in the garbage-smelling alley in back.

  Jack Liffey gave him two twenties. “Thanks, my friend. Find someone to give your drunkard’s pasta, maybe the chesshead.”

  Pibul wrinkled up his forehead. “No good. Jailbird chess, all impulse.”

  “That doesn’t disqualify him from eating.”

  He didn’t see anybody following them up the hill. He dropped her off and then punished Marlena’s Nissan fast along Los Feliz to beat Lori to the cemetery. He cut down a side street, nearly losing it to the strange understeer of front-wheel drive, and caught a glint in the street ahead. It was one of those unexpected sights that his eye had trouble resolving, and when he did he was standing on the brake.

  Fifty homeless scavengers had chosen the middle of this street for a meeting, and they pushed their shopping carts along, filling the roadway from curb to curb. The carts brimmed with cans, cardboard, plastic Coke bottles. The whole moving shoal trended eastward, dot-dashing with light through the arching Chinese elms, but not fast enough for him. He backed into a driveway and headed for another shortcut.

  Then he was turning off at the grand iron gates into the parklike cemetery. It was not the usual graveyard. There were no headstones, no real reminders of death to ruffle the moral stillness, no rue allowed. The founder of the place had long ago decreed that death was an upbeat occurrence and only the soothing and sunny were permitted in his cemetery. He headed up the hillside through the scattered pines and sycamores to the little walled courts along the ridgeline.

  He had trouble finding the Court of David. He followed the signs but still couldn’t find it and then he parked and got out and discovered the plinth where the giant sculpture should have been but where there was an apology on a little plaque instead. For the third time a reproduction of the David had been toppled by an earthquake and a new reproduction was at that moment being carved out of Carrara marble by one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary artisans.

  He seemed to have beaten them and he took up a discreet watch in the next courtyard over, the Court of the Mystery of Life. There was some complex sculpture group posing along the wall, but no humans were in the court. He had a good view down the slope where a fat man was planting a small Confederate flag, and a woman not far from him was sitting cross-legged on the grass, reading a book out loud to one of the markers set below grass level. A gardener was far away with a posthole digger, and nobody else was in sight. He plucked a wilted rose out of a bronze urn to give his hand something to do.

  Partially screened by cypresses, he could see to his right the plinth where David should have stood and straight ahead he could see miles across the smoggy Valley. He wasn’t invisible and he decided he’d better look busy, so he turned to the big sculpture group next to him, twenty figures emoting in various ways around a couple of marble doves who were kissing. He couldn’t help thinking of the two turtles at the Eighth Art.

  Then he noticed a plaque at the side, with a lot of text keyed to the figures.

  1. A boy who is astonished at the miracle that has happened in his hand—one moment, an unbroken egg; the next moment, a chick, teeming with life. “Why?” he asked. “How did it happen ? What is the answer to the mystery of life?” he questioned.

  Fucking A, Jack Liffey thought. His eye went down the plaque.

  The happy family group, not greatly perturbed by the mystery, although even they seem to ask: “Why do the doves mate?”

  There was a powerful thumping as a helicopter passed overhead and skimmed out over the Valley.

  Gentle Reader, what is your interpretation? Do you see yourself in one of the characters here portrayed? Forest Lawn has found the answer to the Mystery of Life. Have you found it? Or are you still in anxiety of doubt?

  He felt a shiver—the daffy earnestness had distracted him for too long, and when he glanced back at the road, a Volvo station wagon was coming up the long slow ascent. He drew back deeper into the court, but he soon saw that the Volvo was full to the gills with a serious-faced African-American family and the car muttered past.

  His eye went to another plaque beside a bronze door in the wall at the side of the court. The plaque told him that Death was nothing more than a simple door in a garden wall and not to be feared at all. The hair rose on his neck and he broke into a sweat. There was the door. Uh-unh, later, he thought. It was a damn strange neighborhood he had wandered into. Wind picked up and a few errant brown leaves skittered across the flagstones.

  A black Mercedes convertible with the top up was climbing fast. He couldn’t see into the smoked windows and he knelt as if he were offering up the wilted rose. The car stopped right in front of the Court of David and the door came open. Lori Bright emerged with a small flight bag in her hand and strode to David’s plinth. She hadn’t had any trouble finding it. Perhaps she’d been to Hollywood funerals here.

  She noticed him kneeling on the lawn but did a good job of concealing it. Down the slope the woman was showing off
pictures in her book to the grave site. The man with the Confederate flag was standing with his hand on his breast, reciting something that was blown away by the wind. Lori Bright paced the Court of David for a minute, and he could see how tense she had become. She kicked at a pebble and it skipped away into a flower bed.

  A funeral went past far below, Lincoln after Lincoln. They stopped at a set of blue folding chairs that faced an open grave. He watched it for anything unusual, but everything seemed normal. It was time to move. He’d be conspicuous if he stayed there any longer, and he started slowly down the hillside toward the Confederate supporter, who seemed to have finished his recitation. He heard the electronic brrr of a telephone and held up as he heard Lori Bright murmuring behind him. Discipline kept him from looking back.

  “Jack!” her voice came sharply. There was such anguish that he turned back after all. She stood there with the bag at her feet and the cell phone in one hand. She was staring forlornly at a piece of paper in her other hand. “Help me.”

  He trudged back up and she handed him a Polaroid photograph. It showed a thin sad-looking girl with short dark hair holding that morning’s LA. Times under her chin. JET FIGHTER CRASHES OFF VIRGINIA BEACH.

  “They said they’d changed their minds about making the swap today. They’ll let me know.” She seemed really wrung out. “Bastards.”

  “Where was the picture?”

  “Over there in a plastic bag.”

  He looked fiercely out over the whole scene. The Confederate was dwindling down the hill, the woman with the book was lying flat to sun herself, and the funeral party were taking up their seats. Was that a glint of binoculars from the faraway trees? The wind was picking up.

  “Will you come back tonight?” she asked forlornly. “I need you.” It was a strange time to be thinking of that.

  “I’ll come back.”

  “Now they’ll probably raise the price,” she said.

  “Now they’ve had a good look at me,” he said.

  IT was the same cool wind blowing in out of left field and Jack Liffey made himself thin to work down the row to the empty seat beside Art Castro.

  Art offered the cardboard tray and Jack Liffey took a Dodger Dog wrapped in foil.

  “Man, you know just what I like,” Jack Liffey said. “Watching a bunch of grown-ups in pajamas running around on grass.” He squinted at the uniforms on the outfielders. “What’s that P for? Pasadena? Paris?”

  “I can’t figure out your prejudice, Jack. This is manly stuff.”

  “You’ve been around a war. How can you stand all this spurious loyalty? Man, those players don’t come from L.A., even the owners don’t.”

  A big man in a blue parka was starting to look oddly at them.

  “That makes it purer, esse. It’s about watching guys who are the best at what they do, do it. It’s like ballet with muscles.”

  The batter hit a long ball into center and the whole stands gasped and then sighed in disappointment as it was caught, and the fielders zinged the ball around a bit.

  “I don’t like ballet much either. It’s too much like baseball.”

  “Didn’t you play as a kid?”

  “I liked a game with more possibility to cheat.”

  Art Castro laughed and the big man in the blue parka glared and stood up. For a moment Jack Liffey thought the man was going to try to get seriously in his face, but he met his eyes and something the man saw there changed his mind and he slid down the row.

  “Hombre,” Art Castro said, “someday you’ll get in trouble like that.”

  Jack Liffey held up the ticket stub. “This is my space, right? You paid for it.”

  He shrugged. “My company did.”

  “You can’t let anybody take your space. You’ll never get it back.”

  “That’s some profound shit, Jack. You take that philosophy out into East Los and you can get yourself dead three times a day.”

  Now Jack Liffey grinned. “Okay, you win. I’ve got a hot date. I’d like to hear what you found out.”

  There was a sharp crack and twenty thousand necks craned upward at a towering pop fly. Two fielders nearly ran into each other, but at the last moment one dived unceremoniously out of the way. The catch ended the inning, and a screechy sound system started to rasp out Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” He had no idea at all why sports fans went nuts for a dead homosexual pop singer from Zanzibar.

  “G. Dan uses a Jamaican all right. His name is Tyrone Pennycooke. His street name is Terror. They’re not really working for the local boys at Monogram Pictures. They were hired direct by whoever came over from Mitsuko. Those Japanese companies are so used to using yakuza to clear up their little problems they did the next best thing over here. Somebody must have thought dreadlocks and tropical shirts were better protective coloration in L.A. than ninja jumpsuits.” He contemplated for a moment. The man in the blue parka came back with a big paper cup of beer, but he kept his eyes averted. Jack Liffey thought about ginger ale for a moment.

  “Jack, these guys may be into some kind of vendetta, but unless I’m way off base, they aren’t involved in a kidnapping.”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either. If I needed to get in touch with G. Dan, where would I go?”

  “I happen to know he lunches at Musso and Frank’s every day. They keep a booth for him on the left side toward the front.”

  For some strange reason, he felt intensely alive all of a sudden, almost elated. The horrible music had stopped. The cold breeze gusted through people’s hair, the high stadium lights cut cones out of the dark, and voices made a susurrus that rose and fell all around as the infield worked a ball around with a distinct popping. Lori Bright and anticipation, that was probably it. He wondered what Art Castro would say if he told him he was about to drive up into the Hollywood Hills to fuck a famous movie star. He wondered if women ever had ignoble thoughts like that.

  “Thanks, Art.” He got up.

  “Jeez, Angelenos are famous for trying to beat the traffic, but the top of the third is really pushing it some.”

  He was tired of disliking baseball, so he just waved and wormed his way down the row to an aisleway. The crowd roared as he went out the portal. From the lot he looked back at the unnaturally lit structure in Chavez Ravine. The Ravine had held a Latino village up to the fifties, already being torn down for new integrated and subsidized housing, and then the L.A. Times and real-estate interests had combined to throw out the progressive mayor who had been behind it all. He wondered what that picturesque high valley in the hills would look like now with a big integrated housing project instead of the baseball palace. To be honest, he thought, the tenants would probably have torn the place up pretty badly by now. There were no jobs going, and when people didn’t have jobs, they got demoralized. He knew all about that.

  Before he could get into the car a bedraggled skinny girl appeared from behind a battered old Ford van, her hair tangled as if she’d slept in the weeds. She looked about fourteen and wore a sparkly bandeau where breasts might show up someday soon. “Blow you for two bucks,” she said dully. She made pumping motions with one hand and formed an O with her tiny red mouth. He gave her two bucks and shooed her away. It would go for crack, but what could you do?

  Descending from the Ravine, he looked out over the famous shimmering lights of L.A., a billion acres of yellow-lit distress. His elation was ebbing fast. He still felt alive, but not quite clean anymore: he’d grasped that odd sensation of vitality up there without paying for it in some way.

  STEAM billowed up his nose and made him sneeze. He was in a big, low bathtub made out of mirror tiles that reflected more mirror tiles on the bathroom walls beyond until you couldn’t tell what was what, like being trapped in an experiment in optics.

  He’d liked her better anxious, distraught about the ransom call, but a few drinks and the swooshing water jets had finally seen to that. He could barely see her through the fog and bubbles, but he could locate her as a haunte
d presence at the core of a big clot of froth that spilled over the tub edge to obscure yet another point of reference. And sonar helped: she was humming something to herself, a lullaby.

  An arm appeared out of the bubble bath and did something over against the wall. Miles Davis came up, playing “In a Silent Way” from an unseen speaker, and she scatted a bit with the music, and he went with it and hunted with his foot until he settled it into her crotch like a bicycle seat.

  “Mmmm.”

  She tugged his foot against her with one hand and rocked as the foam slowly cleared. Her eyes were closed. He could see her hand fumble on the soap shelf for the remains of a joint. She discovered it had gone out and ate it.

  “It’s good to be with someone new. It’s getting harder and harder to find a new perspective. Move like that. Yes. Another J?”

  “Nah.” He hadn’t had any of the first one.

  “Puritan. You going to turn down experimental sex, too?”

  “Did the white rats survive?”

  She sat forward, smiling into his eyes. “I’ll bet there are things you’ve never tried.”

  “Does that mean you’ve tried them all?”

  “Name something and I’ll tell you.”

  His mind was silently going bananas.

  “What’s your wildest fantasy?” she insisted, running a finger around one of her own nipples that was still lathered with the evaporating bubble bath. “I’ve done it.” She leaned and touched his lips with a finger. “Shh. Yes, I’ve done that.” When she withdrew, she pretended he was going to speak again, though he wasn’t, and then touched his lips again. “Aha. I’ve done that, too.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Me, I’ll never forget the day I got my hand up Jeannie Dankov’s bra in the eighth grade.”

  She took his erection with one hand under the water and then reached for a small wicker box he hadn’t noticed on the edge of the tub. “I can feel you trembling.”