The Cracked Earth
Page 17
He parked across from the address the DMV had given him for 2MDD576. Toward the back of the driveway, by a detached clapboard garage that was about to collapse, he saw a big antique Olds with the chrome rocket on the front fender. The house was easily the crummiest on the block, with plywood boarding up one front window and patchy shingles missing from the roof.
He watched the house for a while and then thought, The hell with it. He walked across the street and up the walk made of eroding pavers and knocked. It was the big guy all right, maybe twenty years old and the size of a linebacker, and he recognized Jack Liffey from the cemetery but tried clumsily not to show it. Maybe it was the black eye.
“Yes?”
“Wise up, Danny, you know I’m not the Avon lady. If I found my way here, all is lost.” He pushed inside.
“Aw, Jeez …”
“I want to talk to Lee.”
“Who?”
Jack Liffey took out Lori’s cell phone and dialed at random. “Me or the Santa Clarita cops.”
“Don’t!”
Jack Liffey turned the phone off and looked around while the big guy tried to work himself up to it. The place didn’t look like a residence at all. All around there were collapsed umbrellas that he recognized as light stands for film work, and cardboard boxes full of videotape cassettes, and a lot of electronic equipment.
“What sort of name is Firestack?”
“My granddad was born Festacci,” he said glumly. “Dad changed it in the war.” He had a hangdog manner, as if maybe his dad had been responsible for the war, too.
“Come on out, Lee.”
And then, all of sudden, she was there. A girl with dark bobbed hair, older and taller than her picture, but terribly skinny and pigeon-toed. She wore a black T-shirt with the circled red A for anarchy and what used to be called hot pants.
“How did you know?” she asked plaintively. She wore big black-framed glasses like Buddy Holly’s that made her face seem much too small. She didn’t seem to be able to stand still and moved about restlessly, giving the impression she was all elbow and knee.
“You’re the one who chopped me down at the ankles, aren’t you?” he said.
She grinned. “Boy, did you take a tumble.” She circled him like a dollying camera, looking him over. “You’re kind of a scruffy-looking guy, even without that shiner. Did I do that? Wow. I don’t know, not counting that mouse on your cheek, maybe you’re sort of kindly looking. You look like a man who’d stand around with a big net under the trees in the spring just in case the baby birds start falling out of the nests.” She grinned. “A grown-up Holden Caul-field with his hands in his back pockets worrying about the duplicity of the world as he waits to catch the kids that might run off the edge, and in between erasing all the Fuck Yous painted on all the walls. No, I know, you look like the kind of guy who’d still be standing there holding the Alamo when all the rest of them have fled out the back door and left you to Santa Ana.”
“Actually, I’m the kind of guy who lost his job in aerospace and finds missing kids.” He turned to Danny Firestack, standing there with his eyes going watery and frightened. “You’re peripheral in this, aren’t you?”
“He’s just a film student at Cal-Arts. I made him do it.”
“Beat it. I won’t hurt her.”
A terrible relief spread over the boy’s face and he made a cringing smile and went straight out the door.
“He’s not much,” she said, “but he’s company, and the camera’s heavy. I want you to know I’m doing exactly what I want to do and I’m not going back. I have declared my personal independence from that omnivorous woman who calls herself my mother, and anyway, I’m right in the middle of finishing up a real important documentary about the resurgence of fascism in California, and artists are permitted to do exceptional things if it’s necessary to their art.”
“Sounds like you’ve absorbed the essence of fascism, all right. Hush a moment and stop trying to impress me. I’ve never yet taken a runaway back to an abusive situation, but you’ve put me in a tricky position by committing a felony.” He had no idea how he was going to handle it.
“Can I make you a little drinkie-poo, Mr. Detective, I mean, before din-din?” she said. “Isn’t that what all your femme fatales say? As a big handsome shamus, you must get a lot of femmes fatale-ing at your feet, right?”
“Coffee would be nice.” Maybe if he set her to a simple task, her mind would stop zigging around.
She wiggled her hips in an exaggerated way as she headed for the kitchen. “Walk this way. Now, you’re supposed to say, ‘If I could walk that way, I could make a fortune on Hollywood Boulevard.’ ”
He followed her into a kitchen with a week’s worth of plastic dishes dumped into the old cast-iron sink. She plopped a tin kettle on the stove, then, frowning with the concentration it took, measured three spoons of instant coffee into a cup.
“You don’t drink coffee much, do you?” he said.
“More?”
“Less.”
“Here, you do it, then.” She shoved the cup away in a flash of anger at being criticized—and in that she reminded him a little of her mother. She rocked from one foot to another, and he wondered if it was drugs or just nervous energy. “You know, they gave me an IQ test when I was ten, but the testing lady really fucked it up. First thing, they wouldn’t accept my definition of the word ‘tolerate.’ The stupid cow had never heard it used in a negative sense, I guess. I said it was like ‘abide’ as in, ‘I would never abide that sort of behavior.’ Or maybe she didn’t know the word ‘abide.’ And then she showed me a series of numbers and asked me to complete the sequence. That one wasn’t even her fault, it was the test makers. It was three numbers that made an obvious arithmetic series, but if you looked a little deeper it was a Fibonacci series, you know, with each number the sum of its two predecessors. I tried to explain it to her but when I said Fibonacci, she looked like I’d just fallen down from Mars and was going to infect her with some space disease. I try to be tolerant of idiots, but sometimes it’s hard, especially when it matters. You know, she probably got my IQ wrong by twenty points.”
He emptied half the coffee powder back into the jar and shook the teapot once just to make sure there was water in it. “The only three-number sequence that could be both arithmetic and Fibonacci is one, one, two, three, if you leave out the first one,” he said. “That must have been pretty stupid of the test makers.” Normally he let kids run, let them tell tall tales and impress him, and let them top his jokes, but he could see Lee Borowsky was going to require special measures. She wouldn’t like being patronized, for one thing, but she sure didn’t like being called out, either, and she glared at him.
“You needed the money to complete your documentary?” he said.
“Are you about all done?” she said fiercely.
He glanced at her, twitching there in the doorway, unable to find some way to hold her hands still.
“Trying to take me down,” she explained.
“How would you like it? You must be a real special genius for such a cute little girl. Is that what you want?”
“Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.”
“You don’t think you ought to offer a little deference to my advanced age?”
“Not your kind, I know old people like you.” She trembled with indignation. “You just curdle up in your head and everything in there gels into idea aspic and you close your mind up tight and forget what it was like to get excited about something like poetry or semiotics. ‘I grow old, I grow old … do I dare to eat a peach?’ ”
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach, he thought, but he let it go. “You don’t always have to be the brightest light in the room,” he said. “It can be enough to be someone others can depend on. Smart or not, curious or not, maybe not even passionate or quick, just dependable.”
“Windup clocks are dependable.”
No wonder she and her mother threw sparks.
She laughed, but it was a phony laugh, trying to be knowing and streetwise. “Okay, you read books, too. I’ll accept the truce if I don’t have to go home.”
“While we’re thinking about what to do with you, why don’t we get something wholesome to eat. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten properly in days.”
She turned sideways and sucked in her stomach. “You must be referring to my svelte looks. I am not anorexic, I’ll have you know. Did you know that anorexia is often linked to cats? Some of the girls act like cats, let their claws grow, lounge and move like cats, sometimes they can even trace it to witnessing one of those dreadful acts of feline infanticide when a mother cat eats her young. It’s probably a kind of species adaptation to the pressures of overpopulation and underfeeding. Maybe anorexia is, too.”
The water wasn’t quite hot enough, but it wasn’t going to make much difference with instant coffee, so he poured the cup full just to get it over with.
She kept moving, bobbing, peering at things and poking at herself as she talked.
“It’s probably like homeostasis in the human body, you know, the self-regulating mechanism with hormones pouring into your bloodstream until you reach some state where the deactivating hormone starts to flow. In machines, the same thing was called cybernetics by Norbert Weiner back in 1948—the same year Orwell wrote 1984, by the way—and in programming the exact same thing is called error-correction coding. Even in the nineteenth century they had governors on steam engines that released some of the steam pressure if the machine began turning too fast. It’s all just a branch of information theory really, the use of feedback for control.”
The coffee was too terrible even to pretend he could drink it. She poked at the dishes in the sink and cringed as a minor avalanche revealed further depths of the unwashed, but it didn’t even slow her down.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if cancer turned out to be feedback, too, just a kind of homeostasis for the whole race, some kind of yearning leaking out of our DNA or something to get back to a manageable population level. Actually, I think I’d be pretty pissed if I found out that’s true and my granddad died of a brain tumor because a hundred thousand Dexter Weenies overpopulated his area of the world and overused his allotment of resources. That would be cold.”
“Do you carry one of those little cards in your wallet?” he asked. “You know, ‘in case I die in a traffic accident, I donate my ego to science.’ ”
She looked sharply at him as if about to launch herself across the room with fangs bared, but then without warning she burst out laughing. It got more and more convulsive and she didn’t seem to be able to stop it. Tears rolled down her cheeks, then her eyes went wide as she lost her footing on something on the floor and went down hard on her bottom. After a moment’s stunned lull, the laughter came back redoubled. He’d never seen anyone actually roll on the floor laughing, and he wondered if it was a kind of epilepsy. A kind only geniuses got, of course.
He waited it out, holding his coffee cup at half-mast, trying not to see the evil foam on the surface of the brown liquid.
“What’s your name?” she said finally, levering herself up to a sit.
“Jack Liffey.”
“Pleased to meet you, Jack Liffey.”
ON the way, she launched into an earnest discourse on how Coco’s was much better than Spires which was better than Norm’s which was better than Denny’s, but the Hojos that were just moving into Southern California, they were unspeakable. It seemed to him a ridiculous subject to waste all those powers of distinction on, like a sensitive grading system for brands of kitty litter, but it mattered a lot to her, and it mattered that she always chose the very best of everything. He wondered where his 1979 AMC Concord would lie in her hierarchy of automobiles. Probably just above a Yugo. Hopefully.
There was a Coco’s not far from Cal-Arts. It was a short run through an earth-tone postmodern suburb where every front window was topped by a pompous Spade & Archer fanlight. He smiled at himself. With a little effort he could become as pointlessly opinionated as this poor lonely girl.
Every once in a while the staccato of data and lore would shift down a gear and she’d launch a little trial emissary of a question in his direction.
“Did you grow up in L.A.?”
But it didn’t really matter what he replied, her mind would be off somewhere else on its careening getaway from the ordinary. Then there was a lull in her hubbub, and he followed her gaze to a candy-green football field, and mesmerized, he pulled the car over at a hand-lettered sign that read, POP’S WARNERS’ CHEAR TYROUTS.
In the distance, what looked like six-year-old boys in full football pads and helmets ran at each other with abandon, under the direction of men who looked like giants. Nearer, just beyond the chain-link fence, a line of perhaps twenty-five six-year-old girls danced and kicked in approximate unison in gold-and-blue uniforms, waving pom-poms half-heartedly. A woman in a big version of the same outfit walked along the chorus line pointing and blowing a whistle. Those she pointed to came forward and worked harder, shaking their gold puffs into fits of abandon. The little girls all spun around and flipped the tails of their miniskirts up to show gold panties. The chosen ones executed a rolling somersault forward, but about a quarter of them didn’t make it and had to right themselves by main force. At one end, two girls were suddenly pulling each other’s hair and then they locked together and went to the ground. As if on cue, two more fights broke out.
Through all this, Lee Borowsky sat with her jaw dropped open an inch.
“Man,” she said finally, “I escaped some stuff. If somebody dropped down from Mars now, I don’t think I could explain this.”
“Mars, hell. England.”
“ ‘Tyr-out,’ ” she said scornfully.
“Look carefully. Every word on that sign is wrong.”
She snorted once, but she was quiet for another minute as he drove, and then the eye of the storm passed and she launched into a treatise on how it was only the teaching of structural linguistics in high school that could possibly save the American language from galloping illiteracy.
“I want two eggs over medium, so the yellows are still runny but the white isn’t runny at all. They have to be taken off the grill at just the right moment. I hate runny egg white. I want four bacon rashers well done but not burned. I don’t want any glistening transparent fat, I want it all white and translucent, but I definitely don’t want that charred taste when it’s overdone.”
The waitress was being remarkably tolerant, appearing to add codes to the order form that would record all this.
“I want hash browns cooked in butter, but make sure it’s hot enough so they don’t absorb a lot of the butter and get gummy and greasy. They should be separate little shreds of potato. And I want sourdough toast with the butter on the side and a decent jam like strawberry or orange marmalade not grape or that horrible stuff they call allfruit. A tiny glass of orange juice, but only if it’s fresh-squeezed.”
“It is. For you, sir?”
“Coffee and wheat toast, but only if the bread is sliced north to south.”
The waitress tried hard not to laugh as she walked away.
“That wasn’t necessary.”
“You sure you wouldn’t like a little food with your cholesterol?”
Lee Borowsky started laughing again, but reined herself in before it went out of control. “It’s been a long time since somebody’s teased me without being mean about it. I know I can be a pain in the ass, but I think more people should insist on getting things right. Or getting things the way they want them, even if it isn’t right. There’s nothing worse than a bunch of Milquetoasts who never get what they want because they’re afraid to make a tiny little peep of complaint.”
/> For a moment her voice had trembled with messianic energy.
“I can think of a few worse things, actually. But let’s try another subject. Let’s try you and your mother.”
The fidgeting changed gears immediately. “Out come the testicles,” she said.
“I’m paying, I choose the subject.”
She made a lot of expressions with her mouth, one after another, then with her eyebrows, then she seemed to subside into a guarded neutrality that made him sad for some reason. “Mom’s a subject, all right. They do master’s theses on her, you know. Really—at least on her famous image—the whore from next door. And they do features in the press all the time: Where is the delicious Lori Bright now? Whole books on her career have been written in French, La Bright, la Grande Voluptueuse. In France, she’s as famous as Jerry Lewis. They have festivals of her movies at the Cinematheque, they even throw in that early softcore movie where she bares her big tit to the vampire. She gets a kick out of all the fags making a cult out of her dress epics, but she denies it. You probably know that. Hell, you probably fucked her. Everyone else has. Did you fuck her?”
One way or another she was going to make him pay for choosing this subject. “Tell me about growing up with her.”
She was so self-focused that she didn’t even notice he had ducked the question. Her hands worked in her lap like live animals.
“What was your family life like?”
It took her a while to decide to go on. “Living with Mom was a daily depletion allowance. It was a steady drain on your headway in the world. She grabbed everything around her for herself—food, friends, light, air—she couldn’t bear anyone else having anything. If I came in second in a spelling bee, she’d find fifty ways to remind me of the word I missed. She had to trash it if she couldn’t have it. The big cheese in the cosmos, the only cheese.