The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  “Can’t you help me?” Her voice was coming from a long ways away.

  “I won’t ask how the call went,” he said lightly, but he could sense he wasn’t going to get away with it.

  She had never looked more beautiful to him, smoothed over with a kind of fury or madness, and never more unapproachable.

  “I require Lee’s whereabouts.”

  “I’ll get her back.”

  “Jack, it’s not a game anymore. I have to know exactly where she is.”

  “No.”

  She held up the envelope and met his eyes for the first time. Hers were depthless, as if shutting him out. “Your fingerprints are all over the money. I’ll tell the police you’re part of the conspiracy. Hell, you are part of it if you won’t help.”

  This was a turn he hadn’t expected, and he wondered if it was a bluff. He couldn’t grasp the magnitude of the betrayal at first.

  “I’ll have her back soon.”

  “No, Jack, I mean it.”

  “Yes, Lori, I know you mean it. People like you always mean it, while I never mean it much, myself, not being a big star or rich or connected.” Now he could see his whole concept of things unraveling. It was absurd, but what he regretted most just then was the sense that he would not get to make love to this troubled woman that night.

  She glared dully, as if passing his words one by one over a scanner until the whole made sense.

  “I gave my word to Lee,” he said as he walked out.

  “Jack!”

  He looked back.

  “You don’t owe anything to a fifteen-year-old run-away who tried to extort money from her mother.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe not. But I owe something to the way I’ve always tried to live my life.”

  HE didn’t even get down the hill before the white Caprice flashed its red light at him. Flor was driving and he seemed really happy about something. Malamud got out first and made the rolling gesture to get him to crank down the window.

  “Kidnapping is an A felony, so we got no choice in this.”

  “If your role in life is playing gods and keeping things even, how come you’re always stepping on the little guy?”

  “We do things correctly, Liffey. It’s our protection.”

  17

  WALKING DRIVES

  IT WAS THE FIRST TIME HE’D ACTUALLY SPENT A NIGHT IN A cell and by late in the evening he’d learned one thing new, that guys in jail had more imagination than the flat average, not a lot more, but more. He listened to stories about ways guys had committed suicide with smuggled drugs or wet sheets that didn’t tear or splinters of wood pulled off benches. He heard about mysterious sicknesses that swept over guys in the middle of the night and ate the flesh off their arms until you could see through to the bones, and about feuds that ended with guys getting their faces blow-torched off while other guys held them down. The stories were all bigger than life because jail time was more intense than real time. On the way to all this entertainment value, though, he hit a bit of a bad patch.

  He’d been booked in front of a window that was dark on the other side so it became a mirror. In the mirror he thought he saw a guy who was up to things, and he told himself it would be okay, but it didn’t quite work out that way. After the booking, he had been pushed here and there by bored guards, as if waiting for just the right room to open up, until he’d complained about it and then he’d been frog-marched into a dim cell at random.

  “Happy now, wiseguy?”

  “Have my luggage sent on.”

  Two bunk beds filled a space meant for one and there was only room for one man to stand up at a time, or two if they wanted to be very friendly. Less than a mile away, he knew there was a brand-new twin-tower high-rise county jail that had stood empty for years, its echoing pristine hallways guarded by a handful of deputies to prevent anybody breaking in and spraying graffiti around. In the wisdom of postmodern politics, there had been plenty of bond money to build it, but none to staff it.

  He lay on the bottom bunk where a sullen white guy on the top had jerked his thumb. Another big stone-faced white guy with a ponytail and tattoos and missing teeth who said his name was something like Jolly-o was on the lower bunk opposite, and after a half hour of desultory monosyllables, the fourth man was brought back from somewhere, a middle-aged black named Fitz who was technically on the top bunk across the nine-inch aisle, but he took up a standing position with his back in the corner as if he expected something.

  “Fucking county,” Jolly-o said after a while. “They used to have this pogie sorted out. Now they so fuckin’ crowded they puttin’ niggers in with real people.”

  Jolly-o looked over for confirmation, but Jack Liffey kept his mouth shut. He didn’t like the way things were turning.

  “There it is,” the guy on top said.

  Jack Liffey met the black guy’s guarded eyes. No wonder he was in the corner.

  You never got to make the kind of principled stands they wrote books about, he thought. Here it was—he’d say something angry and ineffectual about brotherhood, and Jolly-o would knife him with a sharpened toothbrush and the old black guy would stay out of it and it would all go down as pointless jailbird violence. But he had a code that said something about standing up straight, and this was one of the situations where it seemed to apply.

  “What do you say, new guy?”

  “About what?”

  “Puttin’ niggers in with Americans.”

  “Shit,” Jack Liffey said sleepily, “if we got to choose up sides, I hope the black team takes me this time. They got a lot better jump shot from the foul line. And they got a better idea of who their enemies are.”

  Fitz almost smiled. Jack Liffey brought his eyes around and fixed them on Jolly-o, who outweighed him by fifty pounds. Now or never, asshole, Jack Liffey thought, knowing every word could be read across their locked eyes.

  “Don’t you mad-dog me, fool.”

  “We’re all friends in here, aren’t we?” Jack Liffey said, giving him a chance.

  “You want me to fuck you, is that it? You want a boyfriend?” He sat up in the bunk, ducking his head to clear the upper berth.

  “If you even try it, one of us ends up dead. I don’t care which.” Jack Liffey used a flat tone. It didn’t give the man a lot of room to back down, but it left an inch. He kept a weather eye out as the man shifted his weight back and forth, only a foot away.

  “Gentlemen, puh-leaze,” Fitz said. He had a wonderful baritone. “Flattered as I am to have men fighting over my honor, they’s only two more days on my time and I wouldn’t be seeing kindly to have my sentence extended by no business in here.”

  He launched straight into the tale of how he’d ended up in jail, grasping their attention by sheer relentless oratory. He said he’d made a living for years going around the bars betting he could multiply two four-digit numbers in his head, a skill he’d had since he was a boy, and he’d made plenty of bar money on it, a few bucks at a time, until he ran into a guy who thought of himself as a big operator who’d bet him five grand on one pop. The guy worked out his figures on paper but his math was so bad he always got it wrong, and when Fitz asked for the money due him the guy had his friends drop a dime on him for being a sneak thief and pickpocket. Fitz demonstrated his prowess with numbers for a while and had them all laughing and awed, and the fight blew over, so at last even Jack Liffey and Jolly-o became warily civil.

  He slept badly, his dreams full of breathing and cries and bad smells, and after a dreadful breakfast, they told him somebody was bailing him out. Just before he left the cell, wondering who in the hell it was with the money and hoping it wasn’t his wife, Fitz held out a fist and they popped fists together. “I don’t forget, Jack Liffey, it’s my stock-in-trade.”

  “Come see me. I’m in the book. I’ll give you some digits to rub together.”

  Fitz smiled. “I don’t know about that. Here’s my gift to you now in case I don’t make it over to your side of town. It’s a fact that
love and death are the only two facts.” There was a remarkable sense of peace emanating from the man, and Jack Liffey was afraid he was in for some religious two-step, but he wasn’t. “Love and death, they’s the two things, they one thing, they make each other significate.”

  He waited, but that was it. “I’ll think about that when I get a chance.”

  “Come on, Charlie,” the guard said. “I ain’t got all day.”

  THE little, balding lawyer led him out of the building, and she was waiting for him by a jet-black Grand Cherokee. She was already crying, standing there in Mexican peasant skirt and blouse with tears streaming down red cheeks.

  “Jack, Jack, I’m so sorry. I have such a temper when I’m crossed and Lee got under my skin on the phone so bad and then you wouldn’t help and I blew like a five-cent fuse. It’s what you’ve done to me.” She turned abruptly to the lawyer. “Go away, Mo.”

  He did, nodding his parting and then scurrying across Bauchet ahead of a big gray bus with wired windows that beeped him on faster.

  “You’ve reduced me to this state with your strength, Jack. I was your concubine and slave woman, and you didn’t even know it. In my inner life I’d found someone who would envelop me and protect me and who wasn’t after the movie star or the idol or the magic image or the sex goddess but me, and it was someone who could help hold me up. Look at my eyes. Look. Whose eyes are they?”

  He shrugged.

  She reached out and pressed a hand gently against his cheek and his face burned where she touched him.

  “I needed you and you turned away. Oh, Jack, before all the laws invented by men”—she put her second palm up to sandwich his face—“what was natural was the strength of the lion and the need of creatures like me who suffered from hunger or cold. I’m the weak creature, I’m the need. I know it’s going to be hard for you, but you’ve got to forgive me my moment of weakness.”

  Actually, he thought, he didn’t have to do any such goddamn thing, but she did have him in a bit of turmoil, and for all the baroque sentiment that she must have memorized off some old movie script, she had him starting to want her again. The touch of her hands suggested such sexual power that he could barely see through the pink fog.

  “Look in my eyes. What do you see?”

  “Tiny blood vessels.”

  “Don’t do that,” as sharp as Catherine the Great. “Don’t make a joke, please. Look at me. These are your eyes, I’ve become you. I mirror you. I spent the night in jail with you. I’m lost in my need for you.” She looked down demurely. “Get in, please.”

  He got into her Jeep Cherokee, which he’d never seen before, and immediately he thought of it as her contrition car. The Mercedes would have been too decided, too confident for this strange scene. But he was along for the ride, he guessed that much. In fact he had a feeling he would ride this vehicle until the wheels fell off, though he would probably never trust her very far again.

  “I owe you getting your daughter home. That’s my job. Nothing changes that.”

  “Oh, there’s so much more than that. Don’t you hear my chaos? I need you, Jack.”

  The strange thing was she was bringing it off. Even with the phony actorish repetitions of his name and all the rest, she seemed to be offering up all the sincerity in the world. He wondered if she believed it, if she could even tell the difference between what she believed tactically, for the moment, and what she truly believed. Or if there was any difference. It worked for her and that was what seemed to matter.

  Somewhere under his caution he found he actually did care for her. So much confusion created a loyalty of some kind. But he was still angry, too.

  “Right now I want a shower in really hot water.”

  “I’ll scrub you with my own hands.”

  “I’ve already had one group shower today, thank you.”

  She tried to put the key in the ignition but dropped the ring on the floor and then gasped. She turned her palms upward as if checking their color and he could see her hands were trembling.

  “Maybe I’d better drive.”

  “This hasn’t happened to me for years.”

  “What is it?”

  “You big Dudley Do-Right jerk.” She turned her face to him and he saw tears that looked real enough. “I’m in love. And I probably threw away my chance with you, the only decent thing that’s happened to me in years.”

  The Cherokee rocked with the rush of a bus going by too close.

  “Don’t give up just yet,” he heard himself say softly after a moment. And his insides were getting pretty worked up, too. Once again his vanity had him picturing camera flashes and gawking crowds at the entrance to a nightclub. His anger grew transparent, faint, flickering to a wisp. Looking past it, he sensed entrée to a world that lived somewhere deep in the heart of dreams and, yes, it offered the promise of insulation from all disappointment.

  AFTER all, she seemed to be able to drive well enough, and he decided not to worry what it meant about her self-control or her acting skills. Halfway up the steep stretch that was just before Avenida Bluebird, though, she put her full weight on the brake and brought the car to a stop three feet from the curb, where the engine stalled. It took him a moment to see what she saw. Just ahead of the car a big tarantula ambled across the asphalt, delicately lifting and then replanting pairs of hairy legs like some slow modern dance. He knew tarantulas were ordinarily nocturnal, and he wondered what had chased it out of its lair.

  He took her hand and she squeezed back, still trembling.

  “Kind of you to stop,” he said.

  She smiled ruefully. “I know they’re great jumpers. To be honest, I was afraid it would jump on the car and then come in a window.”

  The spider seemed to slow ominously and glance at them, as if considering her version of things.

  “Beat it,” Jack Liffey snapped at the creature.

  The instant he said it, the tarantula leaped, just vanished into another reality. Lori Bright screamed and grabbed for him and the car began to roll. She was too disoriented to do anything, and he dived headfirst under the wheel to cram his hand on the brake pedal. With the engine off, he couldn’t put enough pressure on the pedal to do much and the car kept moving nightmare fashion as he pumped and grunted and fought with his other arm for leverage. Finally the car stopped with a thump that didn’t sound too dangerous, just wheel against curb. He heard the ratcheting of the parking brake.

  When he came up she clutched at him, sobbing convulsively. “Oh, Jack, save me from everything. I’ve always had to be strong. I don’t want to be strong.”

  HE’D never noticed the carriage house on the far side of her estate where the gravel drive fanned out. There were doors for six vehicles, hacked out of the bougainvillea that looked like it had been taking over for a generation. Once inside, he saw the Mercedes, then a little yellow sports car back in the dimness, and, improbably, a snowmobile or something similar under a tarp. It smelled of oil and cool damp.

  They both sat unstirring for a while after she switched the car off, as if afraid to turn the page and go on reading.

  “What did you and Lee say to one another?” he asked.

  “What do cats say to dogs? We called each other names, it almost doesn’t matter what names. It’s an ancient feud, as old as daughters trying to separate from mothers.”

  “It might help if I knew.”

  She put a hand on his chest to stop him speaking and shook her head. “It would only make me look bad and I don’t want to look bad in front of you.”

  “What if I mediate? You two need something like that.”

  “Can you be neutral?”

  He thought about it, or let her see him thinking about it. He was pretty sure he could, but he realized she would probably see neutrality as a betrayal.

  “I’ve wrecked enough things in my life,” he said. “I’d like to try to fix one.”

  Without preface she tugged the loose skirt up and straddled him gently to sit on his lap. She look
ed down into his eyes. “If I made love more demurely, would you love me more?”

  She tugged down the elastic neckline of the peasant blouse, slowly baring her shoulders and then the thin, almost transparent silk bra, the shimmery pink of ectoplasm.

  “If I were less abandoned, would you respect me in the morning?”

  “Possibly, but could you start this whole new demure regime tomorrow?”

  He thought he heard her chuckle once just before she drew his face down hard into the heady perfume she’d taken the trouble to dab between her breasts. But maybe it wasn’t a chuckle, after all, because the last thing intelligible he heard her say for quite a while was, “You must mean something to me because you hurt so much.”

  THE banner along their hallway had changed again. Now it said, BOUNCY BALL IS THE SOURCE OF ALL GOODNESS AND LIGHT. A big inflated peach hung from the ceiling and someone had suspended a motor from it that was rotating a small Sputnik model so it orbited the peach slowly with an eccentric little hiccup each rotation. This time Bruce Parfit led him into the cluttered office Michael Chen shared with Admiral Wicks. They worked back-to-back at their complex workstations against opposite walls, stacks of beige boxes, big color monitors, and open circuit boards trailing cables, all pasted over with Post-it notes.

  Admiral Wicks had a row of vitamin bottles glued upside down onto the chalk rail of a whiteboard where someone had written DYSLEXIA RULES K.O. Some sort of mechanism seemed to be able to dispense a pill from each bottle into a slanted raceway.

  Opposite, Michael Chen was stashing away a box of Dove bars beneath a printed card that said, “THE SLACK THAT IS NOT DESIRABLE IS NOT THE TRUE SLACK.”—BOB, CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS. There was also a framed photograph of Chairman Mao with the inscription To Michael, a world-class coder and a real killer Marxist-Leninist. Your pal Mao.

  They both grinned when they saw Jack Liffey, and Admiral Wicks seemed to have got over his grudge, whatever it was. Together they made the one-arm pumping gesture that tennis stars make when they win a big set. Two wine bottles were half-empty, and the programmers seemed pretty happy.