The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  “Just take it easy and you’ll be fine.”

  A station wagon was parked at the corner, and a half-dozen scrubbed white boys with flattops and skinny ties were lined up at the tailgate where an old man with flyaway hair was breaking open cartons and apportioning what looked like big presentation Bibles, an armload to each. He wondered what peculiar turn of logic had a Bible company using cracker boys to sell King James rhetoric to middle-class blacks, if it was some curious appeal to reverse guilt. But he didn’t think about it for long, and he drove past the station wagon and headed north.

  “Dis a bitch naow.”

  “Just let it go.”

  It was twenty minutes to the blue glass mid-rise on an unfashionable stretch of Sunset—a legendary L.A. distance. You said anything close was twenty minutes, and anything far was forty-five. Farther than that was out of town. The building looked like an upended Kleenex box, wedged between a banner-draped lot called Muscle Machines that sold big candy-colored Detroit cars of the seventies—Dodge Hemis and Chevy 409s—and a strip mall with a Chinese takeout, a liquor store, and a ninety-nine-cent store. There was no guard in the empty lobby. He herded Terror Pennycooke ahead of him, the man’s big fingers hooked onto the heavy typewriters, pushed him into the scuffed, piss-smelling elevator, and hit eleven.

  The doors on eleven were all solid wood, so there was no chance of catching the silhouette of Sidney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre through frosted glass. The door at the end said G. DAN HUNT, PERSONAL SERVICES.

  The Jamaican’s eyes were puffy and angry, and he seemed to realize this was actually going to go down. “I-an’-I gwaan fock you up good.”

  “Sure you will.”

  There was no anteroom and they went straight into a cluttered single office. The big desk was sideways to the door, but what you saw right away on the far wall was a life-size photograph of a grinning John Wayne arm in arm with a fat man on a boat dock beside a big cabin cruiser. The fat man, twenty years on, was there in the flesh, too, behind the desk, the Humpty-Dumpty from Musso’s.

  In the center of the desk there was a large revolver with ostentatious notches on its wood grip. The Jamaican started to say something, but the man just shook his head and shushed him. Then he turned a little and put a foot up on a drawer.

  “So this is what makes the goat trot,” he said to Jack Liffey.

  “You got your big gun and I got my big gun.” Jack Liffey patted his hip without showing it off. “But none of us is going to go shooting the place up. That’s just to establish the balance of power. Why don’t you have a seat, too, Terror?”

  The Jamaican looked like he was about to blow, but the typewriters were tiring him out and at last he subsided into a hard chair in the corner to set his burden down. He started to speak again as he sat.

  “For you someday cyan come a dance widdout no gun inna you waist—”

  “Shut up, Tyrone.” G. Dan Hunt didn’t even look at the man as he spoke.

  “I assume you’ve heard from Japan by now,” Jack Liffey said. “They’ve probably had a couple bad days.”

  He didn’t admit to any calls. Jack Liffey glanced over at Tyrone Pennycooke, who looked like he was going to be sick. The man’s eyes shifted from one typewriter to the other, then back to the first, as if he was having trouble counting to two.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Let’s talk about him first. We skip the arson, the assault, the kidnapping, the extortion, we just forget about it. You give him a one-way ticket back to the Big J. I figure that’s probably negotiable.”

  “You got the whole secret of life right there, guy. Knowing what’s negotiable and what ain’t.”

  Pennycooke rustled a bit, but the big man hissed at him.

  “The only other thing I want, I want to know what this shit is really all about. I’m tired of being the only guy in town who’s in the dark.”

  G. Dan Hunt shrugged. “You ever hear of Tim-Tam?”

  Jack Liffey just stared at him.

  “You’ve seen him, you just don’t know it. He’s the little grinning round-face Jap kid with the baseball hat. You see him on burger wrappers and in the window at the 7-Eleven. Tim-Tam is the biggest fucking video game on the Omega Game system that Mitsuko owns. I might add that video games now pull in more money, gross, than the entire fucking Hollywood film industry. And Tim-Tam is like Mario or that hedgehog thing, he’s a whole franchise all by himself. I believe Tim-Tam goes to rescue his sister, who’s held by a bunch of bad guys in a dangerous world full of things you got to stomp along the way. Sort of like Terror, here. I think you got the picture.”

  Jack Liffey nodded.

  “Was a lawsuit between Monogram, that Mitsuko owns, and this Australian character that runs PropellorHeads. It was a nasty business about some breach of contract, that doesn’t concern us. Mitsuko decides to settle quick and in the settlement they give the Ozzie rights to use Tim-Tam and his pals in a CD-ROM game. Mitsuko doesn’t make CD-ROMs anyway and they figure he’ll never get to first base with it, most of these games die in a week, and at worst, if he brings it off, the deal is publicity for the crown jewel of their game system. Any kids that want more Tim-Tam then got to whine to Dad to buy an Omega system.”

  Jack Liffey remembered the display in the PropellorHeads lobby, with a little kid on several screens zipping along in some imaginary universe. For a moment the whole world seemed to lose its reality, like a noun you repeated until it was only a sound. It didn’t make any sense to him that that ridiculous little cartoon image could have touched off a whole business war that spilled out into a shooting war. Then he looked at Hunt’s pistol on the desk and it came back into focus and seemed real enough.

  “Well, the Ozzie is pretty good. He makes a game the kids love, and they build up one of Tim-Tam’s minor enemies into a big deal in the game. It’s this thing called a Zomboid, like a tumbleweed with a big mouth and big teeth that’s always tryin’a roll up and bite your ass. Turns out the kids like what he’s done with the Zomboid. They love fighting it off, and they make running away from Zomboids a kind of cult. So far, we’re okay. But the Ozzie figures he’s developed this thing enough that he owns it now and he makes three more games starring the Zomboid. Calls it something new, Mr. Zoom, or something. Word filters across the Pacific and the guys over in Japan have a shit fit. He licensed one game and he’s building an empire on it, and to make things worse, their Zomboid isn’t called Mr. Zoom, so the spin-off value isn’t standing up and saluting for their flag.”

  G. Dan Hunt swiveled and put his feet square on the floor.

  “These guys in Japan don’t even think in money, you know. They think in face. Maybe it’s living on an island like the fucking Sicilians breeds all this permanently touchy dignity and shit. Anyway, these Nips need some way to get their face back. This is where they call in Monogram, which they own over here, and tell them, do something about it, and Monogram calls me because my dad and I been fixin’ things for them since Lana Turner started footsying with mobsters, and they tell me, do something about it and they tell me not to be too gentle, neither. And I call Tyrone here. The real Mr. Zomboid. You don’t got to tell Tyrone, don’t be too gentle.”

  He put his pistol into the drawer where his feet had been and shut it. Jack Liffey turned and glared at Tyrone Pennycooke. “This whole thing was over a cartoon tumbleweed with teeth.”

  “You, I wouldn’t mind working with,” G. Dan Hunt said. “There’s something of the old days about you. Maybe that’s how we negotiate our way out of this, set up some kind of contract work.”

  “That’s already taken care of,” Jack Liffey said. “All I want is him on his way back to Trenchtown, then I lay off you and Monogram and Mitsuko and we’re even. It’s not a lot to ask for you guys having done me some real damage.”

  Jack Liffey took out the plastic film tube with G. Dan Hunt watching him like a hawk. He pried off the plastic lid and displayed the white powder that filled the little canister the size of a thirty-f
ive-millimeter film can. He dipped his finger and leaned over to wipe it on the Jamaican’s nostrils. Tyrone Pennycooke’s eyes went wide and his head snapped back.

  “He’ll report the quality.”

  “Wooo, mon,” the Jamaican said.

  The top few millimeters of the can held about two hundred dollars’ worth of Bruce Parfit’s cocaine, and under that was about nine cents’ worth of talcum powder, but if he was careful they’d never know that. Jack Liffey went straight to the filing cabinet, yanked it open, and whisked some powder across the files inside. He blew on it to spread it around. Then he hit the next drawer. G. Dan Hunt watched as he dumped a little more on the big easy chair and then sprayed what was left across the carpet.

  “Vacuum all you want. If I ever see you or him again, there’s gonna be drug-sniffing dogs alerting on all the shit you own. Have we got a deal?”

  G. Dan Hunt watched him for a few moments neutrally, then his big round head tilted back and back until it looked like he had only one chin, and he laughed, jiggling and rippling. “We had a deal this morning when somebody in Monogram called me up, crying and whining, to get out from under. Get the fuck out of here. I couldn’t work with you, Liffey, you’re a comic.”

  19

  A BIG ONE

  THE MAN WAS DYED PURPLE FROM HEAD TO TOE. HE WORE only a loincloth and that was purple, too, and he stood at the corner, pinioned between two policemen who seemed to enjoy snapping him back and forth a bit as if they were toying with the idea of whipsawing him into traffic. Jack Liffey came to a stop at the stop sign only a foot from the purple man, and the man’s eyes sought him out through the glary windshield, startling white flashes against the violet, eyes that were appealing to him for something. Jack Liffey wondered if the cops were more offended by the aesthetics or the morals of the situation.

  The man lunged forward a foot, or was propelled, and his belly brushed the Concord to leave a purple smudge on the fender before the policemen yanked him back. Jack Liffey had no idea what a purple man would want from him. One policeman pointed straight though the windshield and gestured him on peremptorily and he decided to go. L.A. was like that, but how long could you go on using that excuse?

  Within a block he had to brake hard to avoid three large dogs that sprinted out of nowhere onto Sunset. The largest trailed a leash and the others seemed to be snapping at his heels like dog bounty hunters. Jack Liffey waited a moment, expecting a breathless owner to appear, but no one did.

  His hand shook a little. It wasn’t the dogs or the purple man. It was Lori Bright. He’d phoned to tell her he was on his way to get her daughter, and her voice had immediately taken him right up over the high side. He still had no real handle on what it was she did to him, but he could tell her celebrity ruffled something down deep in him. Whenever his mind came to rest on thoughts of her, he experienced one of those vague dream feelings that you couldn’t quite put your finger on, amalgams of desire and guilt and who-knew-what-else. In fact, he’d had a literal dream about her, just an image really. She was looking past him at something over his shoulder and he was waving both arms, trying to get her attention.

  All in all, it was mostly the sex that was real, he thought, that was where they made contact, but even that was spoiled by all her games and extravagance.

  A car honked angrily behind him and he realized he was stopped in the middle of Sunset. “Get off the dime, bud,” he heard faintly. He threw up his hands to apologize and drove over to the Hollywood Freeway to head north for Saugus.

  The traffic was light and fast over the Cahuenga Pass and he brought himself back to the present. Driving was always the best tranquilizer. He knew he should have been happy. He’d outwitted a big Japanese zaibatsu, and beaten their American surrogates, and all he had left to do was what he’d been paid for in the first place, talking a confused teenager into coming home. He might even get enough of a bonus to make up some of his delinquent child support. It all seemed solid. Everything seemed exact and finite, which in his experience was just about when you were going to drop into the shit, but he couldn’t find the hole in it.

  SHE’D cleared out a big area of the living room and thrown down a plastic tarp. In the middle of the tarp was an easel with a large canvas clamped fast and she painted on it impetuously with a stubby brush and a lot of browns. Some spooky music was going very loud on a boom box that was out of reach of the spatters.

  “Where’s Godzilla?”

  She rocked a bit on her feet as she slashed more brown across the canvas. “You mean Big Danny? He’s over at Cal-Arts in one of their edit bays. You ever seen nonlinear editing? It’s really fierce. You digitize all your footage and store it on these huge hard disks and then you can work through your movie deciding how to cut things together and you never even really make any cuts. The machine just remembers where you want to do a cut or a dissolve or something else, and you can go back and watch it over anytime and change it. Even a little smidge of a change or you can move the sound or put in another shot. You know, maybe someday everybody can take home some digital multiversion of a movie and make their own choices at home. You can let King Kong live if you want to or let Rhett stay with Scarlett.”

  “Some of us like to let the artist do that!” He had to holler to be heard and it felt absurd.

  “Hey, give the viewer a choice and that makes them an artist, too. It’s called deconstruction.”

  “It’s called noise!”

  She waved her hand with a little snap and somehow the music muted. In the dead echoing silence, she whispered dramatically, “You mean that noise?”

  “No. As in physics.”

  “Oh, you mean random data. That’s a cruel judgment on democracy.”

  She waved again and the other noise swelled into a kind of primitive chant. She worked in time to the chant, lurching into the canvas and recoiling.

  “Come talk to your mom, Lee. It’s time.”

  “I’ve decided not to go. You just head-tripped me into it, man. The worst thing in the world, the absolute worst, is getting yourself bored. I’ve got nothing to learn from that woman, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s all she wrote and the fat lady sang, if you like mangled metaphors.”

  “I love them. We made promises to each other.”

  “I can’t do it. She pushes all my buttons.”

  It was ironic considering how much he’d risked to keep his end of the promise, but he didn’t think simply insisting would cut much ice with her.

  He turned the boom box down a notch so he could hear himself think, then noticed the oak barrel at the edge of the tarp with a plank on it, the sort of impromptu table an Impressionist might have set up to hold a pear, two apples, and a red vase, but someone had set out three toy cars and a fifties-style cocktail shaker. The shaker gizmo caught his eye because it was the one his own father had used during a brief period in the Eisenhower era when the old man had gone back to JC to try to complete his education and leave longshoring behind. The martinis were an affectation he’d picked up for a while from a philosophy professor, but in the end he’d liked the martinis a lot more than the books. “Can’t do it anymore, Jack, and that’s the truth,” the old man had said. “I just can’t sit in a room full of nineteen-year-olds and listen to some dried-up asshole pontificate.” Patience had never been the old man’s long suit, any more than his own.

  He picked up the martini shaker and admired the fatter waist and then the narrowing to its silver top, a bit like a Lava lamp. Recipes for mixed drinks like daiquiris and manhattans were printed in red on the glass, mixed in with line drawings of happy homemakers, and he could feel the raised ridges of the drawings under his fingers. It was hard to resurrect the fifties without conjuring up a sensation of some rank evil festering away in the dark, back in the closet behind the poodle skirts and angora sweaters, a big maggot of fear that lay in wait under all that conformity. He had a physical chill.

  “You’re painting the music,” he suggested.

  “You g
ot it. It just comes. Maybe it’s a cheat, you know, I don’t do anything, I just listen.”

  “Show me,” he said. He cut off her CD and swapped in a different disc out of the pile. “Just tell me what you see.”

  The music was Baroque harpsichord, he had no idea who. She posed, eyes closed and a hand ostentatiously stretched out, as if for Prince Charming to plant a kiss on it.

  “Red rolling hills,” she said quickly. “There’s a brighter orange light coming from out of sight beyond the crests, and a kind of speckling that shifts and darts in the air like Brownian movement.”

  He stopped it and put in a new disc, a woman wailing unintelligibly against a slow beat. Really weird stuff, he thought, and wondered if this was what they were listening to these days.

  “Blue and green bars that pulse against one another as if one set is breathing in while the other is breathing out. They taper a bit as they go up.”

  He swapped discs again. A faster beat, with a strong backbeat, and then he got a momentary chill from a Jamaican voice.

  “Big patches of color. It’s too irregular to describe very well. The biggest is silver and then orange and yellow. The edges are ragged and there’s a black rectangle to one side.”

  He went on for a while, working through the haphazard stack of CDs and sampling tracks. She seemed to enjoy it. She put down her brush and sat on a metal stool, then rested her forehead on a palm, like a clairvoyant concentrating.

  “Fringes and tassels of a lot of bright colors, and they’re rippling like in a breeze. That’s really awesome.”

  “Yeah, I bet,” he said. “Last time I played that piece, though, it was a big blue balloon with purple behind it.”

  He saw her stiffen.

  “Let’s try one more,” he said, with terrible friendliness.

  “I’m tired of this.”

  He fired up the CD and she sat in silence as the female crooner begged for relief from heartache.

  “Cat got your tongue?”