The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  “Then you’ll find I have a warm and sympathetic nature. You two sit down. Your pal is going to walk me to the road. Heil Hitler, folks. You, keep your teeth on the barrel, and back up the path.”

  He looked worried.

  “You can do it.”

  It was ungainly and slow, but he kept Zigzag entertained with the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar-baby plus a little history about Joel Chandler Harris and The Atlanta Constitution. Zigzag backed up with his hands on his hips and his elbows thrust out, his back bent forward a bit to cushion the pistol. Every once in a while he bobbed a little as he stumbled and extended his arms for balance.

  At the road Jack Liffey took the young man’s car keys and made him sit a few yards down the low side of the highway. “I’ll leave the keys and the auto-mag at the first turn.”

  Barbed-wire watched the ground sullenly.

  “We don’t want any more trouble with each other, do we?”

  “I know where the bitch is, man, but you can shoot me and I won’t tell you shit.”

  Jack Liffey considered threatening him, but the boy was right, there was nothing he could do if he wasn’t prepared to shoot.

  The fact that he’d known something all along and hadn’t given it up brought the boy up in his estimation a bit. It was something, a particle of honor. In another universe, he would have lectured the overgrown child about the roots of the American republic in the Enlightenment, and the contributions of blacks and Jews to American culture, and about the fragility of justice and honor, and everything would have been changed between them. But that was another universe.

  “Get another racket, son. I was never much of a soldier, and you couldn’t even handle me.”

  “OH, Dad, you should see her! It’s so pathetic.”

  She stopped laughing to take another bite out of her Pink’s hot dog. He always let her have a Pink’s hot dog, though Kathy disapproved. They sat at the plastic table at the back of the patio, the very one where Bruce Willis had proposed to Demi Moore, surrounded by dozens of people who kept looking around at each other to see if any of them were movie stars. He drank coffee out of a foam cup. He had a lot of weaknesses, but Pink’s hot dogs were not among them.

  After a bite, she giggled again. “She had the flu for three days, way, way bad. Then she thought she was better and she got up in the morning and it was like the right side of her face had collapsed. Like it was a hillside of mud and it just, you know, slumped.” She covered her mouth to kill the laugh.

  Maeve wore a bit of makeup and her breasts had started to grow since he’d last been allowed a look at her. It was hard to disapprove of that, but it made him anxious. Too many things could happen to girls, far too many. She slurped on the straw.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “The doctor said it’s called Bell’s palsy. The flu germ jumps into this nerve that goes through a hole in your skull and the nerve swells up until it hits the bone and then it just goes on strike, so nothing works on one side of your face. Mom drools.” Maeve giggled. “It’s so weird. The right side of her face is fine, so half of her goes on smiling or frowning or blinking and the other half is just dead as a dognail.”

  “Doornail.”

  “What’s a doornail?”

  “Beats me. It’s just an idiom. Is the palsy permanent?”

  “Naw. They said it would go away pretty soon, but Mom is in hiding until it does. That’s why she wouldn’t come to the door, she’s not mad at you.”

  “She has every right to be mad,” he said. “I made three hundred and forty dollars last month. Which is half my bare mortgage, not counting condo fees, so I didn’t have a lot left over for essentials like supporting you.”

  “Is it that bad?” She glanced down at the remains of the hot dog, as if she’d just thoughtlessly eaten his inheritance.

  “It’s better now. I’ve got a rich client for a while.” He showed off the cellular phone that Lori Bright had insisted he carry.

  “Cool! You’ve got a cell phone.”

  So, the word ‘cool’ was back. “And I’ve got a lovely date.”

  She blushed.

  “Who has paint all over her face.”

  “Oh, Daddy, please please don’t object.”

  She hadn’t had it on when she came to the door at Kathy’s, but ten minutes later she’d pleaded to go to the bathroom at a Chevron and she’d come out with it on. She wasn’t quite twelve, but he didn’t have the heart to make her wash it off. That was one of the problems of being an intermittent father. He wasn’t that worried about it, though. She was too levelheaded to end up obsessing for long about makeup or clothes.

  “Got any oddities for me?” he asked.

  “Jody showed me one! C’mon, let’s go.” She wolfed down the fag end of the hot dog.

  “You are what you eat,” he said.

  “Woof,” she said, and he laughed. She was a great kid.

  They reclaimed the Concord and he headed down La Brea at her direction.

  “Go right on Wilshire. Now pull in there. Look across the street.”

  With the car idling, he stared across six lanes of light traffic at a big oval bank building in smoked glass. It was ugly, but not ugly enough to stand out much in L.A.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Look close.”

  “John Wayne on a horse.”

  “Look at the horse, Dad. You’re not very observant.”

  She was right. He started laughing right away when he made himself look. There was John Wayne and his chaps and six-gun and his mouth open a bit as if he needed to move his lips to read the street signs. Nothing too strange until you looked at the horse and noticed that it was far too small. Maybe it was an attempt to aggrandize the Duke, and maybe it was just clumsy sculpting. The equestrian sculpture gave the impression of a man sitting on an oversize Saint Bernard.

  They crossed the road on foot to get a closer look, and he noticed right away that it was definitely not a mare the Duke was riding, and it was very well hung for a little horse. He didn’t mention that to Maeve. He’d never drive down Wilshire again without laughing. It was like someone pointing out to you that Steve McQueen was always upstaging his costars by tugging on his earlobe and fiddling with his hat, and you could never look at The Magnificent Seven the same way again.

  “Okay, doll, you get a point for that one. Who’s ahead?”

  “We’re even. Twenty-two apiece.”

  “Then I’m going to blow you out of the water with this one, but it’s not a funny one. It’s a nice one.”

  “We’ll see.”

  You only got points by convincing your opponent the oddity was worth it, and there were no rules. He picked up Crescent Heights and headed north to the hills. Just after it became Laurel Canyon he made a hard left. “Bet you didn’t even know there was a Hollywood Boulevard up here.” Up here it was just a winding two-lane hill road, with a few of the usual stilt houses on the sides. He handed her the emergency necktie from his glove compartment. “Blindfold yourself. You’ve got to see this all at once.”

  She was restless with excitement, and tied the old striped tie over her eyes. He wondered what a prowl car would think, if one happened by, or even the woman in the Volvo turbo who slitted her eyes and glared at him as she went past.

  He found a wide spot about where he wanted and stopped.

  “Blindfold off, punkin, and tell me where we are.”

  She ripped the tie over her head without loosening it. She blinked theatrically and then goggled at the sight of pleasantly rolling hills staked out with grapevines just off what appeared a country road. Beside the vines was a stone Tudor cottage with a twisty chimney, and there was a Tudor farmhouse farther back.

  “Wow. France, I guess. This is outtasight. You get a point.”

  Just then the cell phone brrred, and a chill went through him. Kathy would kill him if Maeve got involved in any way with his business.

  “This is Jack.”

  “Jack, they called. Th
ey want the fifty thousand plus my small Utrillo and I’ve got twenty-five minutes to get there. They want me at the other Forest Lawn, the one in Burbank. At the foot of the Lincoln sculpture.”

  “They haven’t seen this car. I’ll be there. Bye.”

  His mind was ticking over as he swung the car around. If he went like a bat out of hell over Laurel Canyon and down the Ventura Freeway, he could just make it. But there was no time to do anything with Maeve. He considered and abandoned one idea after another.

  “What a lovely voice. Who was that?”

  Daddy’s new lover, punkin, the famous movie star. Uh-huh. “My client. A rich lady.”

  “Why is she taking money to Forest Lawn?”

  He sighed. “Will you please promise to stay in the car?”

  12

  I TRUST YOU. DADDY

  STRAINING UP THE STEEP BIT OF LAUREL CANYON NEAR MULholland, the car offered up its little shudder, something to do with the carburetor, and he held his breath in a rage, thinking that he’d get out his .45 and put a round straight through the hood into the damn carburetor if it chose this moment to die. Maeve sensed his intensity and retracted a bit into herself, squeezing the tips of her fingers, one after another, the way she did.

  “Honey, I shouldn’t be doing this with you along, but I can’t just dump you off by the road, I’m sorry.”

  “Are you gonna be in danger?”

  He shook his head. “They haven’t seen this car, so they won’t know who I am. Would you grab the Thomas Bros. out of the glove compartment and double-check my navigation.”

  He could see her fumbling in the corner of his eye and then he was preoccupied with making a reckless pass on the wrong side of an old Toyota. He cut back in, the heavy car wallowing in the swerve.

  “Oh, Jesus, give me that.”

  She was staring down at the .45 in her lap, still in its canvas holster, frowning at the automatic as if it were some refractory science-fair project. His big hand took it gently off her lap and tucked it under his seat. This was starting to spin out of control and his mind’s eye taunted him with a number of unpleasant possibilities. Gosh, Mom, guess what Daddy had in his car …!

  “I put it in there yesterday for something down in Orange County. …” That wasn’t helping much. “Try page twenty-four. Tell me where to get off the Ventura, the closest ramp to the cemetery.”

  When he got a chance to glance over, she seemed to be all right, biting her upper lip as she thumbed the frayed map pages.

  “You okay, sweetie?”

  “You’re going awful fast, Daddy.”

  “I know.”

  “What page did you say?”

  “Twenty-four, I think.”

  “Buena Vista is right across from the entrance. No—you’re on the wrong side of the river. You got to go to Forest Lawn Drive and come back a ways.”

  “Thanks.”

  He looked for cross traffic as he came off the hill and then gunned across a red light at Moorpark. The freeway was just ahead and he cut off a shiny new Lexus for the on-ramp and then he was cramming into traffic with the old Concord floored, slewing across the path of an eighteen-wheeler that smoked its brakes.

  “Wooo,” she said. “It’s a good thing I trust you, Daddy.”

  He changed lanes left and right to go around the slower cars and gain a few seconds. He wasn’t thinking quite straight and the road signs nearly panicked him into ducking down the ramp onto the Hollywood Freeway where it took over the designation 101, but he remembered at the last instant and cut back on in front of a pickup with a bewildered-looking rube in a straw hat. He glanced once and saw that Maeve sat with her eyes closed and her hand clutching the armrest.

  He swung off the freeway ramp and slowed dramatically to loop back along the base of the hills, past Mount Sinai, the Jewish twin of Forest Lawn, and then he turned in past the mullioned Tudor mortuary building.

  “It’s okay, punkin.”

  He didn’t have time to stop and ask where Honest Abe stood, but he guessed at a big monument up the hill where he saw a black Mercedes SL that looked like Lori Bright’s. He climbed slowly and let his car mutter past the Mercedes. Miraculously, he had ten minutes to spare.

  He parked about fifty yards past and got out. “Stay, no matter what,” he said sharply.

  He strolled out onto the grass across the road from the giant pensive Abraham Lincoln and pretended to read the plaques set at grass level, as if looking for a particular one. They were all in Armenian characters and had little etched portraits of balding men with mustaches. Due east of him there was an elderly couple who held hands as they stared mournfully at the ground. Improbably, he wore deep green lederhosen and she wore a dirndl. No one else was around. Down below in the smog of Burbank was the postmodern Disney animation building like a dropped box of Legos, with ANIMATION written across the roof in huge letters in case you really needed to know.

  He heard the door of the Mercedes open and shut. It would have looked strange if he hadn’t been curious, and he let himself glance at her. Lori Bright strode toward the big Abe with a bright blue airplane carry-on bag. He checked his watch, glanced at the car, and seemed to concentrate on something in the middle distance. She set the bag at Abe’s feet, rubbed her forehead, and started back. He looked away. He guessed they would come zooming up the road in a car, and someone would sprint to the statue. He wished she’d told him more about the arrangements for the transfer.

  A light plane came over the hill, brrring on the air like a sense memory of Vietnam, a spotter for the artillery that was coming, and it passed straight out toward Burbank airport. When it was gone he could hear traffic off the freeway and intermittent wind on the dry brush a little farther up the hillside where a wall marked the boundary of the unnatural greenery and the beginning of Southern California’s natural yellow. Peaceful as a graveyard. The elderly couple knelt and in the corner of his eye the spot of bright blue still rested at Lincoln’s feet. Lori Bright reached her car and the door slammed weakly.

  Wind had played in her hair, a picture he held on to, and he thought idly of the feel of running his hand over it, twisting it around a finger. He realized that she wore it a lot longer than most women her age. Kathy had gradually trimmed her hair back to a kind of whipped-cream helmet. He wondered if that represented a reining in at some key passage in a woman’s life, a passage that Lori Bright had emphatically declined. The Mercedes drove up the last leg of the loop road and then slowly down toward the exit.

  Worry crept up again. Maeve was there, only a few yards away, but her head was as motionless as an extra headrest in the car. He couldn’t stand there exposed forever and he headed slowly back to the beat-up Concord. A glance told him the polka dancers were still kneeling in prayer. A heavyset gardener putted up the hill on a Cushman three-wheeler. Jack Liffey stiffened when the go-cart stopped near Abe and the gardener dismounted with a big rake. He hoped to hell the man wasn’t about to tidy up the abandoned flight bag, but that seemed exactly his purpose.

  Jack Liffey reached the Concord and waited. The big gardener rested his rake on the steps and picked up the bag, hefting it gently as if weighing it. Then all at once he was sprinting straight uphill with the bag, toward a gap in the low wall that gave onto the weeds and live oak. Jack Liffey was in the Concord immediately and by some miracle it started on the first crank. Maeve shrank back into the seat, knowing enough not to ask him anything just then. The car rammed right over the shallow curb and headed toward the sprinter. A small part of him hoped he wasn’t doing too much damage to the grass, but most of his attention was focused on the back of the sprinter, the overalls and a blue work shirt. The big man had dark hair and broad square shoulders. He was making good time with an unusual reaching run, pushing off harder with his right at each step.

  The Concord banged its underside, faltered, and then stalled unexpectedly in a shallow depression in the grass. He was out immediately, not more than twenty yards behind the man, praying all of a sudden t
hat the kidnapper wasn’t armed. He’d left his pistol in the car.

  The gardener made a strange flying lurch out the gap in the wall onto a clay path and Jack Liffey saw that he was gaining. He was just cranking up to full throttle as he left the grassy expanse himself and then he felt a sharp burn in his shins and the earth went haywire. Blue sky was where it shouldn’t have been and his arms windmilled. A ragged crop of granite was coming up on his face and he twisted away. There was a jolt and a sharp pain in his cheek. He tumbled sideways once more and then the world stabilized, leaving him with his nose in the dirt. He could feel he was badly dazed, but he managed to lift his upper body off the ground a bit before crying out with a bright pink blaze of pain.

  He heard sparrows twittering. A rustle somewhere. His own heart thundered. Then he realized he was lying on his side just beyond a gate in a stone wall, his shoulder in a gritty pile of exfoliated granite. He was not quite sure where he was or why. When he sat up he could see his Concord on the grass below with both doors open. Something was wrong with that. He was having trouble deciding what it was doing there, but he knew that wasn’t the only thing that was wrong, and the other was much worse.

  A little girl in a thin pink sweater bolted right past him out of the grassy park and a chill of panic took him from head to toe.

  “No!”

  The girl had been carrying his .45 as she ran, clinging to the heavy automatic with both hands.

  “Maeve!” he shouted, and passed out.

  • • •

  THERE was blood in his mouth. He knew that. Something warm rested against his forehead and his closed eyes burned yellow with sunlight. He opened them to see a concerned face against the sky. A familiar face, beautiful face, but without a name. He’d lost his memory to concussions twice before, and still had recurring nightmares about it. Once in sixth grade he’d waited on deck too close to the cleanup batter, who’d caught him with a full swing to center, and once in the showers in basic he’d slipped on a bar of soap and gone down hard on the back of his head. It was mostly the short-term memory that went, leaving a profound sense of frustration, and it came back soon. He knew that, but this time something else was wrong, he just didn’t know what it was.