The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  “Jack, what’s my name?”

  “Mary? Lucy? You’re a movie star, aren’t you? What is it that’s so terribly wrong? It’s like a death.”

  “What time of day is it?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked around. Grass one way, weeds the other, a smudge of smog far down below. His whole body tingled with the awareness of tragedy.

  “You’re going to have a terrible shiner.” She touched his temple and he winced.

  He wanted to lie back and sleep and let the terrible confusion pass, but adrenaline was still working. There was something he had to do. By pure will he fought with his obstinate memory, like climbing up a dark well by the dug-in tips of his fingers. He was Jack Liffey, he lived in Torrance, he was a tech writer at TRW—no. He had been. He lived in Culver City.

  “You look like Lori Bright. You were in Ancient Parapets. God you were sexy in that negligee.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You could almost see your breasts in the backlight.”

  “You’ve seen my breasts, Jack. In nothing.”

  That confused him anew. And then he cried out. The guilt had slipped in under the radar.

  “Something is wrong. I know it.”

  “Who was the little girl?” she asked.

  Every hair on his body stood on end. He had a mental picture of Maeve scampering past him carrying his .45. What appalling circumstance had led him even to imagine he had seen that? He was on his knees, with pain shooting through his head, gasped with it once, and then he was shaking off Lori Bright’s clinging hands and on his feet.

  “That was my daughter.”

  He broke free and ran up the trail through yellow, knee-high weeds. He wasn’t thinking, his gaze just firing left and right.

  “Jack, be careful.”

  “Maeve! Maeve!”

  Trails ran left and right up to the ridgeline that was almost within reach, just there. The widest trail looked as if it had been worn by weed sledders on their cardboard rides. He thundered up that one, ignoring the way his brain shifted inside his skull with each step. He came over the shallow ridge and saw a fire road just ahead, and not far down the road there was a chain-link gate hanging off its hinges where the fire road turned to a real, paved one. A girl came trudging around a curve in the road, carrying something the size of a book wrapped in a pink sweater in her hands.

  “Maeve!”

  He fell to his knees and nearly fainted with relief. Lori Bright was beside him, steadying him. It was coming back now, and he had a vivid sense of how fabulously, unbelievably lucky he was to have his daughter safe and healthy. Lori Bright could go to hell, the kidnappers could go to hell, the rest of the earth could go to hell, as long as Maeve came back okay.

  She scrambled the last few yards and flung her arms around him, banging him on the back with something hard.

  “Oh, honey, honey, why did you take the gun?”

  “I saw the little guy trip you … I don’t know, I thought you’d need it. And then I sort of forgot I had it. Did I do wrong?”

  He just laughed in relief. All their hands were on him now, trying to hold him up, but he got dizzy and sat hard.

  “You’ve got a real goose egg, and you’re going to have a black eye.”

  “Maeve, I want you to meet my client. This is Mrs. Bright.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Bright.”

  Stiffly the woman shook hands with the girl, as if afraid she might break her bones.

  “Two-MDD576,” Maeve said suddenly, proudly. “Mildly Disabled Dog, that’s how I remembered it.”

  It took a moment before he realized she was giving him a license number. He laughed and patted her knee.

  “What did the car look like?”

  “You know I don’t know cars. It was gray and old, like something an old man would drive to go to the store once a week.”

  “Good work, punkin. What’s this about a little guy tripping me?”

  “He was hiding behind the wall there. It looked like he swung a big stick at your ankles, then he ran.”

  That would explain the peculiar behavior of the earth, he thought, upending all of a sudden. He was getting a lot of it back. He got up and steadied himself against the woman, but every time he moved his head, his brain objected savagely and he had to clamp his eyes shut.

  “You’ve got to have that head looked at.”

  “Lucky I didn’t get hit somewhere vulnerable.” He struggled to the wall where Maeve’s little man must have waited. Weeds were crushed down, but he was no Indian tracker. Out in a clump of weed he saw a flash of color and picked his way across to it. He plucked the crushed bright paper up by a corner, smoothed it a little, and then stuck it into his pocket.

  When he got back Maeve was playing grown-up, talking to Lori Bright in that stiff dispassionate voice that she thought adults all used. He collected the gun wrapped in her sweater and they helped him back to his car. Miraculously no one from the mortuary office had been summoned to shoo them off the grass or have them arrested.

  “Jack, I can’t let you go like this. I know a doctor who’ll look at your head right away. Fifteen minutes.”

  He put Maeve in the car and then asked Lori Bright quietly about her own daughter. She said the man on the phone had promised to release the girl in the morning, and she could only trust them.

  The instant he sat in the Concord, he nearly passed out when someone started sawing into the side of his skull and she got her way about the doctor. She moved the car off the grass for him and then drove them all to a clinic in a nondescript building without a nameplate right on the border of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.

  “This is where the studios used to take their starlets for D-and-Cs.”

  Information he’d rather not have had bandied before Maeve, but she probably knew about things like that already. If she didn’t, she would soon enough. “Annie, hey, do you know what’s a DNC?”

  It turned out to be the kind of clinic where the corridors had carpets and nearly first-rate original prints on the walls and the examining rooms played Mozart very, very softly. They X-rayed his head and gave him painkillers and told him to call back if he started hearing voices.

  He didn’t hear any voices, but it hurt like a bastard when he moved his head, and when he shut his eyes just for a moment on the way to the car, he woke up on Lori’s sofa.

  LORI and Maeve were playing cards on a small Greene and Greene table, under a hanging stained-glass-and-redwood lamp that could only have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. They sat hunched forward on Mission ottomans, for all the world like sorority sisters. Maeve giggled and the picture made him nervous for some reason, as if he’d sold his daughter into white slavery.

  Lori Bright said something mirthful and that whiskey voice reinforced whatever dark fears he felt, like the richest Scotch flowing over warm rocks. Surely Maeve would sense too many cigarettes, too much drink, too many men coming up the backstairs.

  He heard the snapping of cards for a few moments and then Lori Bright’s voice poured richly through the room again: “Are you sure I can’t play a jack on that?”

  “No, the rules change every four turns. That’s the way the game works.”

  “I think you’re making this up to keep me in my place.”

  “Ladies, what time is it?”

  “Another country heard from.” Lori Bright looked over at him genially.

  Maeve ran across to him. “Daddy, are you okay?”

  “Sure, honey. I think we’d better get home.”

  “Mrs. Bright’s made up beds for us here. The doctor said you had to rest.” Very softly, she added, “She’s really nice,” as if validating his choice in girlfriends.

  Oh dear, oh dear, he thought.

  Lori Bright stood. “I’ll get us all some camomile tea.” And she drifted out of the room. Jack Liffey felt like the subject of a prearrangement, left alone with Maeve for the imparting of some deep secret.

  “Is she a movie star?” Maeve asked breathle
ssly. “This house is brutally cool.”

  “What makes you think she’s a movie star?”

  “I saw a picture of her in another room with a man I think was Jack Nicholson.”

  “She was in movies in the 1960s and 1970s. She had a small part in Teacher’s Pet with Nicholson.” He rubbed his forehead. And how did he know that? Oh, Daddy, have you been reading up on her credits? Renting her old movies? Oh, Daddy, what’s happening to you?

  “I think she likes you, Daddy.”

  Maeve’s starstruck twitter was like a footnote to his own darker lunacy, and it was too late to shield her from the whole shadowy fugue.

  “Punkin, I’d like to ask you not to tell Mommy about this.”

  “Why? She always says she’d be happy if you’re seeing someone.”

  “I’d like to stay friends with your mommy and I just have a feeling this would interfere. Just for now. Please.”

  “Sure.”

  And probably not tell Marlena, for good measure.

  He could turn his own daughter into a liar for him. The first sidestep into this new world of portable ethics. No, not the first.

  Mike had warned him that fame would bite him on the ass. And Art Castro had told him more than once that Trouble was what you got when you let your dick lead you around. But this was way beyond those warnings, deep into some kind of darkness that only came over you when you violated a thing at the core of who you were.

  Lori Bright came back in with a tray of tea, smiling like Lady Bountiful, but it wasn’t tea he was starting to want. Then he saw the glitter in her eyes and realized it wasn’t tea she’d had on the way.

  “WANT to do a line?”

  He shook his head. “Believe it or not I don’t like feeling my heart pounding like a jackhammer.”

  “That’s not the organ I was thinking of going to work on.” She snuffled the powder off a hand mirror with the kind of red mini-straw that they put in bar drinks. “And you could do with a little pounding down here.”

  She wiped her nose against his penis, which gave his penis a cool rush, but then she subsided into thoughtfulness and sank back into the gray satin. His penis went to ice and began to swell as if it had a mind of its own and he was getting more and more nervous knowing Maeve was in a guest bed down the hall, sleeping in a borrowed nightie made of French silk.

  “What a sweet kid she is. The way every emotion shows on her face, even the little guile she can muster.”

  “I think we were all like that.”

  “Innocence. It’s just sitting there as we grow up. It’s like a big rock in the front yard and all the urgencies and the other stuff pile up around it like silt and the top of the rock gets smaller and smaller and then it’s buried. Just gone.”

  “I’m not sure it’s innocence you should be mourning. I believe in the benefit of understanding how things work. I bet there’s mature kinds of integrity, too.”

  She grinned and perked up. “Your innocence still sticks out of the silt a bit. Let’s see what we can do with it. Ever been tied up? Feeling helpless is a real rush.”

  As usual she wouldn’t accede to anyone else’s wishes, and it was about a half hour later, his wrists and ankles tied to the corners of the bed by the kinds of padded restraints they used in hospitals, and he was beginning to regret just about everything in his life, and Lori Bright had just said, “I like to give hurt a little, too.” And then the wall cracked all of a sudden with a sound like a gunshot and the bed heaved and rolled.

  “Do it, do it,” Lori Bright called furiously to the moving earth with a druggy fire in her eyes, as if mass destruction would validate some deep need in her.

  “Daddy!” Maeve cried in the hall.

  13

  A SERIOUS CRUNCH MODE

  JUST ANOTHER AFTERSHOCK, BUT IT HAD BROUGHT WHAT WAS left of his code of honor down in ruins. Maeve had cried out from the other side of the bedroom door, but even in her panicky Daddy-calling, she knew enough not to open Pandora’s door, and he’d had to leave the day-saving to Lori Bright, who had gathered herself back from somewhere far away, her eyes unglazing, then moistening and softening. She had tugged on a bathrobe and slipped out to comfort Maeve as he lay there like a trussed roast.

  And whatever it was clutching at him, breathing heavy in his ears, it was still there promising the erotic brass ring on the merry-go-round.

  A few years back, when he’d finally given up the drink and drugs, he’d sworn a mighty oath that control was the one thing he’d never lose again. Never get smug, he thought. You could always be blindsided by what you didn’t understand. Celebrity, and tales of the Polo Lounge, and familiar faces huge on movie screens, and all that erotic catnip, and the spooky grappling with a woman who had something dark and something soft and something needy warring inside her, like a child inside a woman inside a child.

  There was no high road to be found that night.

  • • •

  SOMEWHERE deep in the night, Lori woke him from a woozy slumber and handed him her cell phone.

  “Liffey?” a voice said darkly. The voice seemed familiar.

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Lieutenant Malamud.” There was a long pause and a heavy breath. If he’d been more awake, he might have said something about the breathing. “You can look for the girl. It’s your job, we understand that, but stay away from G. Dan Hunt. That’s something else, and I assure you he has nothing to do with the girl.”

  Jack Liffey cleared his throat, but it didn’t do anything for the horrible throbbing in his head. “Malamud, I wish I knew your edge in this thing.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  He looked at the phone for a moment after it went dead, then handed it back to Lori Bright. “Cops. They’ve got it all their own way and that makes them think they’re smart.”

  He wondered who’d told the cops he was looking for Hunt. Could it have been Art Castro? Or did they know something about the Jamaican?

  She wet the tip of her finger and touched it to his penis, but there was nothing doing there.

  BY morning, his headache was letting up and Maeve and Lori both made fun of the giant black eye that was claiming the left side of his face. Maeve jabbered away about Spanish Revival architecture as they reclaimed the car and he drove her home. He was so relieved that Maeve’s purity and cheer seemed to have survived that his spirits soared with gratitude. He drove past toppled chimneys and retaining walls and a few blown-out picture windows. L.A. had both riots and earthquakes, he thought irreverently, and the only real difference was that, after the riots, more poor people ended up with good TVs.

  “I forgot to get her autograph!”

  “Don’t worry, punkin. I’ll get it for you.”

  “She’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?”

  Oh-oh. “I’m not sure you’d put it just that way.” For one thing, Lori Bright was a bit old to be called a girl.

  “You didn’t sleep in that blue room beside mine.”

  “Another detective in training.” He tried to make light of it. “I’m fifty-two, Hon. I’m allowed to sleep where I want.”

  “Don’t worry. I know you don’t want Mom to know about Lori right now.”

  In a slightly better world, he would have said: Hon, I was wrong to ask you to keep your mom in the dark. I don’t want you ever to lie. You can tell her whatever you like. But it wasn’t a slightly better world, and she’d already seemed to reconcile herself so easily to the accommodation.

  “Coo-uhl.” The word had several syllables, and she smiled happily. “We’ll let it stay a secret liaison.”

  He wondered if she’d started reading the Victorians, or if the expression was just from some cheap romance with a torn bodice on the cover.

  He had to slow to a crawl to weave between cars that were double-parked all over the street, and they both looked at a big vacant lot where a score of Latino families were still setting up camp in makeshift tents of black plastic and cardboard to escape the aftershocks of the
aftershock. Squat brown women carried buckets of water and the children lugged cardboard boxes of belongings. In this part of midtown they were mostly Central Americans.

  “They come up here for a better life and all we offer is spiteful laws, the lousiest jobs, and earthquakes.”

  “Mommy says half her fourth grade is Guatemalan kids this year.”

  “Do you have any in your class?”

  She shook her head. “My best friend is Armenian,” she said proudly. “Eremy. She’s really smart and she eats this funny pizza with, like, a spicy meat paste on it.”

  “Lahmajune,” he said dryly.

  She was startled. “How did you know?”

  “I know a lot, punkin. I know the value of pi to nine places. I know how to find runaway girls. I know that the Cretaceous comes after the Jurassic. But I don’t know the first thing about the human heart.”

  “Huh?”

  “HELLO, Bobo. It’s Slack Jack.”

  “Not the Slack Jack.”

  “The very.”

  Beau Creighton had been his best friend in basic and then at the army’s E-tech school, a southern boy from a Birmingham steelworker family who’d gone straight from the University of Alabama into Peace Corps training to learn how to build wells in African villages. He’d trained for three months at a disused summer camp in Louisiana, learning an obscure Bantu language with three tongue-wrenching clicks in it, and playing peace songs on his twelve-string guitar for his new friends every evening. A few hours before the plane could take off for London, Nairobi, and its final stop in Gaborone, Botswana, the army had drafted him. He was still playing the twelve-string at Bragg, sitting disconsolately on a bunk, when Jack Liffey walked in and asked if he could tune it down and play “The Bells of Rhymney.” Beau Creighton had looked up with red eyes, and Jack Liffey had taken a bet with himself that in the next ten seconds this tall, skinny Fucking New Guy filling out their intake was either going to weep or laugh hysterically.