The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  “We did the deed, dude. Feetch feetch. They fell over hard.”

  “Crash and burn!”

  “Fear and loathing!”

  “Laurel and Hardy!”

  Admiral Wicks held his hands flat and Michael Chen came around to the front of the wheelchair and gave him a two-hand slap, then he turned to Jack Liffey, who shrugged and followed suit.

  “Has Mitsuko just made a big donation to UNESCO?” Jack Liffey asked.

  Admiral Wicks smiled and shook his head. “We took a very different cyber route this segment.” He was holding it back for some reason, savoring the secret.

  “No fair being mysterious,” Michael Chen said. “It is I who gets to be inscrutable. You get rhythm.”

  “Did I say anything about your scrotum?”

  “No puns! Puns are brain-dead humor.” Michael Chen closed his eyes, as if in pain.

  “Why do you close your eyes, O wise Buddha?” Admiral Wicks asked in some ritualized singsong. These two had roomed together too long, Jack Liffey thought.

  “So the room will be empty.”

  “I am enlightened, master.”

  “I’m not,” Jack Liffey said.

  Parfit dumped a can of some Australian beer into a tall glass so it foamed right up to the lip, but stopped as if by pure will. “I’ll tell you what it was, mate. Mitsuko’s home office had a damn good firewall on their old mainframe and we couldn’t get into their files. We couldn’t get much of anything out of the heart of their computer system. But we could read between the lines to see the kind of equipment they were using. Trust the Japanese. Out in R-and-D land, their design and production tools are always cutting edge, but you can count on them being two generations behind where they do the accounting and billing. It was a real dinosaur pen.”

  “IBM 360s, can you believe it?” Michael Chen said. “From the elder days. Card wallopers. And they had the old fourteen-inch magnetic drives. DataStars.”

  “You’ve seen them in movies. They look like top-loading washing machines.”

  They were all grinning, fidgety, as if they’d been doing some kind of speed under the wine. A pager on the table went off, buzzing and then hopping around like a wounded insect. It killed all conversation as they watched it with a kind of morbid fascination, and then Michael Chen laughed convulsively and the laugh seemed to shut the pager off.

  “The drives’ve got big heavy sets of disks called media packs,” Admiral Wicks explained. “But DataStars have always had one flaw.”

  “Tell it!”

  “One little flaw!”

  There was another round of palm slapping.

  “Ever seen an out-of-balance washing machine?”

  “Ever seen an electric typewriter walking across a desk?”

  “If you get just the right seek pattern … say, a nice slow access one way and then send it the other way on a fast seek across the whole width of the disk—”

  “All the way to east hyperspace—”

  “Stick-slip, stick-slip—”

  “Angular mo-men-tum—”

  “The whole washing machine gets up and walks! There is a legend that hackers in days of old used to write seek routines to race their DataStars across the room.”

  “Mitsuko had eight of them, mate. Most computer rooms run twelve-hour shifts, three-day weeks. We hit them just before shift change when the ops were all drowsy.”

  “We hosed them! Film at eleven!”

  “Moby hack!”

  “What lossage! Tramp-tramp-tramp, went the drives!”

  Michael Chen did a little war dance around the wheelchair while Bruce Parfit picked up the story again. “We called up an hour after we sent our seek program into the drives and said we were tech support from DataStar and we’d heard there was trouble with the drives. The ops were hysterical. Two of the drives had walked up to the mainframe and wedged there, one had walked to the door in the computer room and jammed it shut, so the next shift had to come down a ladder from a crawl space, one broke the feed tray off their high-speed printer, one fell into a hole where they had the floor up for cabling, and one just kept hopping around in circles like an old dosser with a hotfoot. The others didn’t get off the mark for some reason, but who cares?”

  “Tell him the rest, tell him!”

  The two younger men made hysterical pumping gestures, jabbing both arms in sync a few times and then alternating them, as Parfit just leaned against the whiteboard and beamed. For an instant Jack Liffey thought of the racists doing their Maori karate dance for the Jamaican.

  “We told them our tech support had a simple software fix for their problem, and we gave them a bogus fix. We can do it all again tomorrow!”

  Jack Liffey let them hoot and pump again for a while and then he tugged on Bruce Parfit’s linen jacket. “A word.”

  He led Jack Liffey into his office. “You have that stilled look of a man getting ready to go to war,” the Australian said.

  “My war’s just starting.” He hesitated a moment, watching a bobbing bird toy on a cabinet dip forward to stab its red beak into a tumbler of water. “You’re not my client, but I figure you owe me something for getting them off your back.”

  “What do I owe you?”

  “I want an ounce of coke.”

  COMING out into the afternoon breeze, something up Little Santa Monica caught his eye. Two boys with Mickey Mouse ears were standing in the dirt between Little Santa Monica and Big Santa Monica where the Red Cars had once run. They were twenty yards apart and each had a fistful of those square metallic helium balloons. As he watched, the two of them shouted out a countdown and released a pair of balloons, with some gossamer thread between them. They wailed and hooted and tried to direct the balloons with their body English, like golfers on a long putt. Then he saw they were aiming for the high-tension power lines. He winced as the trailing balloons nearly caught on the wires, but wind took them too far east.

  The boys trotted westward. Up the street he noticed the Dirty Lingerie shop. The crowds were gone but a big poster in the window said, MONDAY SCANTY PANTY SIGNING. BASEBALL HEROES. His imagination wasn’t up to it.

  He heard a boy’s screech of delight and looked up in time to see a torrent of sparks dropping out of the sky like slag in a steel mill. All the balloons took off at once and the boys fled. He decided it was time to get out of there.

  IT was going dusk as he got back to his condo. The table lamp on its timer was on through the curtain, as it should have been, but there was a brown envelope by his door that shouldn’t have been there. He picked it up and felt it for a moment, the rectangular shape within, wondering about explosive devices, but then ripped it open to find a tape cassette. It was a Bob Marley tape called Burnin’ and the meaning was pretty obvious.

  Then he found the dead bolt wasn’t set and a chill went all the way up his arm. He froze with his hand on the key and listened, but heard nothing. He always set the dead bolt, a habit as rigid as logic.

  He pushed the door open and waited out of the line of fire, wondering how a flamboyant Jamaican could have got past the guarded gate into the Astaire. There was a small sound from within, just enough to cause the hackles on his neck to rise. Then Loco stuck his muzzle into the light and gnarred softly.

  Jack Liffey sighed and stooped to pat him.

  “Jack, is that you?” It was Marlena. “I’m just feeding Loco.”

  By the door he saw the white plastic trash bag out of his kitchen wastebasket, tied off and waiting to go out. She’d probably dusted, too, and washed out the sinks.

  “Thanks, Mar.”

  Sure enough, she was wearing his kiss-the-cook apron and had a sponge in her hand. It was half-annoying and half-touching. She smiled and licked her lips in the uncertain way she had, and all of a sudden her sanity and ordinariness and even this mundane way of laying claims on him seemed very, very appealing.

  The least he could do was offer her a drink. “The least I can do is offer you a drink.”

  “Thank you
, I will have some wine. You have a hard day on the hunt?”

  He laughed. After Lori Bright’s mannered dialogue, it was metaphor back where it belonged: tamed and docile. “I shot two gazelles, but the lions got away.”

  He put on a teakettle for himself and then hunted under the old supermarket bags in the tiny pantry and found the Cabernet he’d been saving for special guests.

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s good to see you, querido.” She drew close and then he heard her sniff Lori Bright on him and she stiffened.

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry, Marlena. I’m caught up in something I can’t help right now.”

  She nodded fast. “Uh-huh. I know.”

  “Remember when you had a thing for Quinn and you just had to do it? It’s like a poker hand you got by some strange luck and you’re not sure if it’s good enough or if it’s even the right thing at all, but you’ve got to play it to find out.”

  She didn’t seem very interested in making analogies. “I don’t know about poker. Are you in love?”

  He thought about it a moment. He didn’t know about love, but he knew he wasn’t going to walk away from Lori Bright until something made him. Jack Liffey turned to look at her, at the pain and uncertainty in her big brown eyes, and he held her forearms. “Imagine a young Ramon Novarro walks in now and sweeps you off your feet.”

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to play imagine games, either.

  “What movie star made your knees weak?”

  “Burt Lancaster.”

  “Okay, imagine it’s Burt and he’s fallen into your life, fallen bang into your bed like he just dropped in through a skylight, and he’s being very charming and seductive and he says he wants you.”

  “Is she good to you?”

  “I’ve got to see it out.”

  “You’re better than that, Mr. Jack Liffey.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  There was a sudden bark and growl as if another dog had attacked Loco. They both looked around and Loco’s pale haunches backed trembling into sight, then his forepaws and then the powerful jaws, dragging the remains of one of Jack Liffey’s only decent pairs of shoes, a black Rockport wing tip. The heel was chewed away and the solepad protruded like an orange tongue.

  “Oh, damn.”

  She took only a glance at the dog and shoe and then dismissed them out of existence and looked back at him. He tried to enfold her in his arms, but she brought her elbows in stiffly between them to keep a distance.

  “We’re good friends,” he said, feeling dull and stupid all of a sudden. “That won’t change unless you want it to. I’ve just got to do this thing.”

  And he had to deal with Terror Pennycooke and G. Dan Hunt. He couldn’t go on living with bombs in every envelope.

  18

  A TUMBLEWEED WITH TEETH

  HE WOKE UP TO A TREMOR SO FAINT HE DIDN’T KNOW WHETHER it was a little jiggly aftershock or just the woman upstairs trundling open the sliding-glass door to her deck. He held his breath, waiting, heard a tiny mewling sound, and saw Loco nose the bedroom door open and scamper almost noiselessly into the closet. One vote for earth movement, he thought, but there were no car alarms and he was not convinced of the mystical power of animals to herald seismic events, so he could still interpret his waking as the consequence of a half stumble in a dream or of a barely subperceptual local occurrence.

  Definitely not an omen. There were no omens, that was an article of faith. There were just events one after another and a dog that was wound too tight.

  The clock said five. The paper would be there, so he got up. For a long time getting up without a drug of some kind, without even a place to belong effortlessly and reassuringly, had been a real ordeal, but it was getting easier. Eventually everybody lived in some relation to detachment, and the differences were mainly in the ways you came to it. For a minute or two, drowned now in the familiarity of his surroundings, he didn’t even think about Lori Bright.

  “Loco, you eat any more shoes, I’ll trade you in for a Chihuahua,” he said mildly to the closet door. Marlena would like that, he thought. She fancied the little rat-dog breeds that were all vibration and drool.

  “You hear me?”

  There was no reply. He thought of playing Marley’s Burnin’.

  HE dropped by his office to get the .45 that he’d put back in the big hollowed-out Oxford Companion to English Literature. Marlena Cruz was on the landing outside his office watching her nephew Rogelio tape gold decal letters above a blue crayon line on the glass door. For a year Jack Liffey had only had a posterboard in the window with his name and livelihood stenciled across it. The decal letters seemed to be following the model of his poster, and the top row had already been glued to the glass:

  LIFFEY INVESTIGATIONS

  The second row, smaller, seemed to be going up temporarily for alignment:

  WE FIND MISSI

  Thank God they hadn’t been able to find a big eyeball.

  “Shouldn’t it say Spade and Liffey?” he said.

  “Huh?” the kid said.

  He gave her a one-arm hug her for the gift. “Or do you prefer Liffey and Cruz?”

  “That could be arranged,” she said in a throaty voice.

  He shouldn’t have said it. “Hold up a sec, Rocky.” Jack Liffey unlocked the door and slipped in ahead of the N. He left the light off and found the big book by feel, using his body to shield the operation from sight of the door until he got the pistol under his shirttail, where it cut uncomfortably into his leg. That couldn’t be helped.

  He wished she would make fewer claims on him, but there was nothing he could do about it and the devotion was poignant in its way and warmed him a little when it wasn’t worrying him. He came back out.

  “Now when Rocky goes missing,” he said, “I guess I’ve got to track him down for free.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Give me a kiss, Jack.”

  He held her and she took the opportunity to press hard against him and kiss longingly, and it was all he could do to torque around and keep her from feeling the pistol. He pulled back, but she still clung. Finally she let him go and talked a bit about some designs she could have done for his sign. Over the railing, he watched a homeless woman in a half-dozen overcoats make her way out of the bushes up the street. She clapped her hands as if trying to jump-start her circulation.

  He wondered—if things went really bad and if he started free-falling, and if the last of the money went south, and nothing would break clean for him, he wondered if anything would arrest his fall before he hit the streets like that. He made a mental note to toss an old blanket and some money over the shrubs for her.

  “Thanks for the sign, Marlena. It’s kind of you.”

  “It’s nothing at all.”

  “No, everything is something.”

  THE big bungalow on Ridge Glen was still for sale and the green Explorer was still in the drive. He thought of doing something cute but instead just stuck the .45 under his belt and rang the bell hard. It was almost nine.

  The man swung it open, tugging up multicolored wrestler’s pants with one hand.

  “Hi, there, Tyrone.” Jack Liffey lifted a shirttail to show him the pistol.

  There wasn’t any fear in the man’s eyes, but definitely some consternation. “Bwai, tings dread naow.”

  “I hope you didn’t kill the Nazi boys.” He came in as Terror Pennycooke backed away.

  “No, but dey step like hell back to dere own place.”

  Jack Liffey tossed the Marley tape on a little table by the door. Pennycooke glanced at it without a sign he recognized it.

  “I-an’-I no big man in dis ting, just a scuffle for my bread. You no see it, Babylon?”

  “Sit.” He took out the .45 just to make sure there weren’t any disagreements. The man sat with his back against a stack of identical cardboard boxes that said they were Sony MD-1401 stereo receivers. The rest of the room was jam-packed with applian
ces, TVs, computers, and microwaves, but these were all used.

  “G. Dan tell you to keep after me?”

  His eyes looked around, as if for a way out of his predicament, but he said nothing.

  “If you escape this in one piece, it’s only because I’m a little sensitive about the image of a white man beating up a black man in the home of Western imperialism. G. Dan Hunt told you to shake me up, right?”

  “You a-penetrait.”

  “The war’s already over and your side lost. The only thing left for me to decide is whether to send you home on a plane or in a box.”

  Jack Liffey found a couple of old IBM Selectrics among the inventory and scowled at them. He was careful to keep the .45 on its target while he ferried the heavy Selectrics, one at a time, across the room and set them on either side of Tyrone Pennycooke. Then he took two pairs of Peerless handcuffs from his back pocket and tossed them to the man.

  Tyrone Pennycooke said something that sounded like, “Raas klat licks.”

  “You know, Terror, I bet you can talk Standard English, if you try hard.”

  “Fock you.”

  Jack Liffey laughed. “See how easy it is. Cuff your wrists to the typewriters, right through the frame. Nothing personal, it’s just to slow you down a little. Conservation of momentum, like that.”

  “You tink I a fockin’ puppet?”

  “I think you’re fuckin’ dead, friend. Don’t push it.”

  They locked eyes and at last Tyrone Pennycooke decided to handcuff his wrists to the two Selectrics. “That’ll put you in real good with your boss. We’re going to go see him.”

  He called first, just to make sure the man was home, and Hunt was curiously subdued on the phone but agreed to meet.

  THE big Jamaican and the two Selectrics were a tight fit in the passenger-side bucket seat of the Concord, but there weren’t going to be any sudden moves.

  “I-man nah end my life lockdown wit no typewriters.”