by John Shannon
“Remember the big D-D?” Marly Tom said.
“‘Course. Right there.” Dixie’s Diner, the best burgers in town.
“I met Tiffany there,” Marly Tom said, and then sighed. “I miss her boobies.”
“Dude, there’s little kids here.” You could count on Chink kids speaking good American.
“Who cares?”
There was a stir across the street. A uniformed cop trotted back toward what had to be the bigshot command center—a beige trailer where heavyset men in dark suits were standing around trying to look important. The trotting cop carried a baggie in one hand, and Zook could just make out what was in it. An unburst paintball.
Shit, he thought. Might still be fingerprints. It might even be Beef’s. Their weakest link. Get him in a room with some tough cop clownin’ on him, and in ten minutes they’d all be in county jail.
“Yeah, let’s hope it’s not his,” Marly Tom said, reading his mind. “What about the weekend kegger?”
“I’m on top of it. It’ll be at the power lines.”
“Good,” Marly Tom said. “You look all dexed, Z.”
“Hush. I’ll talk to Mr. Hoity-Toity Seth. His Tea Party’s bringing somebody into town to talk to their dinner party. We’ll see if he’s too good to come talk to the beer brigade.”
“We’re as good as anybody. This is a democracy.”
“This is a white Christian republic, man. Don’t forget it. We’re gonna get our constitution back.”
“Course.”
“Gotta go home. I think I’m gonna come down hard.”
“Better living through chemistry.”
FOUR
Soy Amigo
“Morning, Jackie. In your pink I hope. You find out good stuff for me?”
It was Tien Joubert’s unmistakable tonal lilt on the phone. Ingratiating on the surface, but pushy under it.
“Tien, I’ve been at this job one full day. I’ve talked to her parents. I’ve seen the girl’s room. Give me a break.” He was still a bit ratty from dealing with Gloria’s meltdown the night before.
“You know me. I pay for it, I get report in person. Friday you come see me, like old time. Seven at night. My relax time.” As usual, nothing fazed Tien. You could insult her to her face and she would find a way to comment on your shoes.
“It’s not old time, dear. It’s new time. We’ve all got telephones. I’ll call you Friday.”
“No, no. How I trust you, I don’t see your handsome face? I don’t trust no voice. I pay double gas. This definite part of deal.”
Jack Liffey had been wondering why Tien Joubert had decided to pay for a search for such a distant relative, and pay very well, but he figured he was finding out. Her endless automatic and probably meaningless need to try to possess whatever she saw—including himself.
He’d found out that despite all Mr. Quan Roh’s degrees and languages, the poor man was running a mini-mart in a seedy area of Rosemead, the next town over, running it by himself eighty hours a week, including the dangerous night shifts. And he had no ownership share in the place.
“Tien, what’s your relationship to this family again? My mind is going soft.”
She laughed. “Jackie, your mind soft as big slab German steel. My born name Roh Tien, before Mr. Frenchman fils de salope René Joubert come along, and very short time he stay. You come see me Friday seven. You stay short or long.”
He needed the money badly, and he could always sidestep her wiles. And it would get him out of Gloria’s sour orbit for a bit, he thought. Far in the back of his mind, he recalled how much he had once enjoyed romping in a huge satiny bed with Tien Joubert and her utterly guiltless Asian sexuality.
“You was always sweet for a gweilo,” was her signoff.
He laughed. “You were okay, too, for a slope.”
*
“G’day all,” Maeve said as she strode confidently into the big house’s kitchen, trying hard to radiate good cheer. Axel, the only “all” there, had been dating an Aussie geology major named Barry Mackenzie for weeks, and “G’day” had become the greeting of the house, along with “chunder” for vomit, and “chook” (how weird!) for chicken. Everybody loved new idioms.
Right now her psyche was in so much upheaval about Bunny’s rebuff that all she had was superficial cheer. She was relieved Bunny wasn’t there.
“What’s your run-and-tell, Axel?”
Axel looked really downcast. “Oh, cuss. Barry’s decided that we should see other people for a while. You know what that means.”
Maeve poured out some granola and skim milk. She’d learned recently to call it skim, a word that nobody who’d grown up in Southern California ever used, but the stores had started to use it.
“He seemed a really nice guy. Are you sure it’s over?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope it works out.” Deep inside, she didn’t really mean it. Schadenfreude was at work, and after her encounter with Bunny, Maeve hoped everybody in the universe was miserable.
Axel was hoarding their L.A. Times under her elbow.
“Can I see the inside stuff ?” Maeve asked.
“Oh, sorry. Here.” She pushed some of it over as Maeve sat.
“Seen Bunny yet?” Maeve asked lightly.
“I think she’s on a funny track.”
“Funny haha or funny peculiar?”
“What the hell is that?”
“Something my dad says—I think it’s from prehistoric TV.”
“Well, she was funny peculiar. She barged in this morning like Cleopatra on speed and snapped ‘Hold my calls’ like some Rockefeller. She grabbed one of your Pop-Tarts and ran on out without even toasting it.”
Maeve crunched the first bite of granola, and she could feel some of her humanity seeping back. She shouldn’t fob off a friend, especially one languishing in her own dumps. “It might be my fault, Ax.”
Axel looked up as Maeve fell silent. She waved a section of the paper around ineffectually, trying to fold it in half. “Like?”
Maeve sighed. “I sort of made a pass at her last night and she flipped out.”
“I didn’t know you were into oh-six.”
“I like boys and girls. I thought I’d made it clear to Bunny before, but she went ham. Said she was tired of me being a pest.” It felt good to get it off her chest.
“Aw, Maeve. Give yourself a break. Nobody could not like you, you’ve got the biggest heart in the city. Though I’m not into the other stuff.”
“Thanks, Ax. Everybody hurts. I just found out my dad and his woman are in trouble. And then Bunny shook me up. But don’t worry about me. You’ve got big things on your mind, too.”
“Don’t be hangdog. An Ozzie dumped me drongo, as he’d say. But here we are—we’ve got a view of the hills to die for, college a half hour away, and we can eat whatever food we want with no mom. Mac and cheese forever. Think of the starving kids in China.”
“South Central.”
“Sure, Miss Bigheart.” Axel reached out to press on her hand on the table, and abruptly she and Maeve both wept.
*
Megan Saxton did her best with the lukewarm shower in the Bide-a-Wee Motel in a very forlorn Morena, California, near the Mexican border. She stepped out and all of a sudden she was sitting on the sink, holding her bare wet feet high up off the tiles. A tan spider the size of a ginger snap ran in big circles on the bathroom floor. It looped across the tiles, a little blob of energy wound up to demonstrate some obscure scientific principle. Horror suffused her: the meaty legs, the idea of hair on the body, a blur of speed.
Not unlike the hideous Afrikaner himself. In an hour they were scheduled for the second installment of the interview, on assignment from The New Yorker. When the floor seemed spider-free, she hopped out of the bathroom to stand on the bed and wrap her hair in a towel. Moods padded up and attacked without warning. She missed Manhattan and the twenty-four-hour buzz of life.
Things were so much more primitive out her
e. Vi-oh-lence. Just phonemes, she told herself. Outside, a car door slammed. She walked gingerly to the window and parted the curtain a few inches. The windshield of a Humvee reflected back the sun, and the overbearing man himself stepped out. She had meant to drive to his place in her rental, but he had unaccountably come for her. Abruptly she whirled around, panicky eyes darting for any signs of the spider. There was nothing.
She punished her hair quickly with the towel, discarded it with her hair half wet, then tugged on a t-shirt and a pair of sweat pants. She felt her nipples erecting against the cotton in the morning chill and went back for an overshirt, more modesty than warmth. Then she went outside to head him off before he could invade her private space.
“Morning, dollie! I’m back from teaching the fat cats in the east the meaning of life.”
“I was coming over to continue our interview later.”
“We got up early because of a mountain lion,” he said with his feral grin. “The local people are full of him. He is responsible for the death of livestock from Jacumba to El Centro, and pet kittens and cows and the odd drunk Mexican. Yesterday he ate a Buick, tomorrow he eats San Diego. He’s probably a couple hungry coyotes, but as long as it ain’t a Communist, I say, ‘Eat your fucking fill, Simba.’”
He carried a strange-looking rifle with a fat extra barrel underneath, and he nodded toward a couple of Latino men in camo jackets, kneeling to look at the remains of what seemed to be a small dog in the motel parking lot.
“I’m telling you, it’s a good thing we got those castor beans. Super Hardi, he couldn’t track a bloody zebra on Commissioner Street.”
He hadn’t looked directly at her, as she’d noticed before, but there was no one else he could be talking to. Odd man.
“Castor beans?” she asked.
“You like scouts? Castor beans got spots, but who cares?” He laughed confidently. His Chicano trackers stood and looked around.
“Is that a dead dog?” she asked.
“It ain’t a live one, ma’an.” He flexed his arm for no discernible reason, repulsive with muscle. “If the coyote’s a Communist, I’m going to fuck him up.”
“That’s not very funny,” she said.
His eyes came close to seeing her but couldn’t quite make it. What’s his problem? She expected reflexive menace, but found amusement. “I am very funny, duckie. I am whatever I say I am. I am the Charlie Chaplin of this desert valley.” He chuckled. “‘Course, I am also the stain on my new country’s honor. Write that down.”
She tried to imagine what sort of woman would be attracted to this abomination. He offered her his canteen—was it a bad joke?—and she shook her head. The muscles in his neck rippled as he threw his head back to drink, and she tried to remember it all for later. The New Yorker had no idea quite what they would be getting in her piece on the Border Guardians.
He’d sauntered over to his castor beans. She registered the cockiness, the brutal angular voice, the sheer physical beef of him. He was the sort of tempest force that young girls imagined they’d fancy sweeping over them—until one actually showed up. Someone threw an old sack over the dead dog.
He sauntered back. “I think your anger says I interest you.”
“My anger says nothing. I’m always angry. I’m assigned to write about you.”
Why had she said that? She turned to walk back to her room, and froze in place when she heard Hardi Boaz speak in a soft lilt in Afrikaans.
“What did you say?”
“An old expression. ‘It is not the loudest moo that makes the most milk.’”
“Go to hell.” She took three steps and stopped, remembering the spider in her room. “Do you know a hairy brown spider around here about this big?” she asked, turning back and making a big O with her fingers.
“Does it like bathrooms?” he asked.
She nodded.
“The hermit spider. Almost all of them are Communists.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Very.”
“How can I kill it?”
He was backlit by the bright sunlight and it was hard to make out his face.
“You need an experienced killer.” He came toward her.
“I was asking for advice, not help.”
“Don’t insult me. If I need some good English words, I come to you. When you need a killing, you come to me.” He walked past and finally she fell in behind him. “This is the bonus that life gives you out on the frontier: you have a killer on duty.”
“Not everyone would consider it a bonus.”
“Let us track down this hermit spider and teach him the meaning of fear.”
He walked with a slight bandy-legged roll, the rifle in one hand like a long piece of fruit. Simian, she thought, still taking mental notes. That might be too obvious.
Hardi Boaz wrenched open the door. “Freeze, motherfucker!” he shouted.
Everyone knew American films, she thought. She waited behind, scanning the threadbare carpet.
“Ah, the room smells of you,” he said happily. With the barrel of his rifle, he disturbed the bath towel on the floor, prodded and lifted it. She wished she had sent him away. Having him prowl her room made her feel exposed and helpless. Her notes were on the table beside the coffee jug, her suitcase open on the bed with a black brassiere and black panties beside it, which reminded her that she was not wearing either.
He opened the bathroom door. “You’re in the deep shit, my little spider. Kom, liefling.”
While he was out of sight, she flipped a corner of the bedspread over her underwear.
“Een twie drie. Come out, little comrade. Your pals have betrayed you.”
Eventually Hardi Boaz came back into the main room like a predator. Hair was his motif, she decided. Even his knees were hairy above the rolled socks, and more hair spilled out the neck of his safari shirt to give her the willies. He passed close to her, his presence pushing her back like the bow wave of a tugboat.
“I think the little kak has escaped.”
The voice was terribly close behind her, a swelling imminence.
“But you have not, my lovely friend,” he whispered.
She gasped and her vision went pink. His voice had been very soft and close and now two powerful fingers held her neck. Another sound escaped her throat when his roughened fingers flexed slightly on her neck, immensely strong. She was near fainting. Blood thundered in her ears.
“Someday you must watch the lion mount his mate.” The voice was very near her ear. “He comes from behind with great purpose and takes the neck hard to convince her to stay still.”
She couldn’t make sense of what the voice was saying, so calm and insistent. Tears started in her eyes. Her right knee shook violently.
“Stop it!” she insisted.
“Why?”
“Stop.”
“All right.”
The pressure vanished from her neck. She clamped her burning eyes shut.
“I am on duty now. I will come back later, sweetling, to make love not war.”
She could hear the small rattles of his rifle as he walked away.
“By the way, missy, the hermit spider is harmless.”
When he had gone, a shuddering took her uncontrollably. Megan remembered her first story assignment for Mademoiselle, and the way the editor had praised her writing, how promising her future had seemed back then. It wasn’t that it hadn’t panned out, it’s just that it had never gone anywhere that made her happy. She sat on the bed and wept with abandon.
*
“Stop!” Gustav Reik barked as he entered the big room.
His executive assistant, Bernadette Crouch, was writing with a squeaky felt pen on the whiteboard. She knew he couldn’t stand that sound.
The homely woman with short red hair went right on writing.
“Hope you were happy with that useful idiot with the safari suit.”
“What an odd clown,” Gustav Reik said. “What did you think of him?”
&n
bsp; “You don’t care what I think. He’s so primal he’s probably a great lay.”
“So am I.”
“No, you’re not.”
The header on the whiteboard was Freedom at Risk. And the day’s lectures for the gathering, with times and speakers:
• The Myth of Climate Change
• How Taxes Kill Jobs
• Defunding Regulations
• Speak Money to Power
“That’s enough for now, Bern. Have you got the monthly audit?”
“It’s on the piano.” She gestured.
“It’s not a piano,” he said grumpily. It was a priceless Sabathil clavichord that his mother Wilhelmina had played every day of their enforced stays at what their father had called “the farm.”
“Saxophone, then. I’m not musical.”
“No, but you’re hot as a pistol, as usual.”
“How’s your wife, G?” she said with an edge.
He decided to take the question literally, not as a bug off. “She’s very busy with the ballet board that I bought her.”
“You can afford it, you big libertarian cracker. Forbes says you’re number four now after Warren Buffet.”
He smiled to himself, opening the monthly accounting. “Forbes doesn’t have a clue about the Bank of the Cayman Islands and several other places.”
“La-la-la-la-la.”
She had her fingers in her ears.
“What’s all that?”
“Please. What I don’t know, Gus-boy, can’t hurt you.”
“What you do know can’t hurt me either, my fine sex object. I can arrange an underground nap in the New Jersey pine barrens for anyone.”
He saw her puzzled expression, indicating she was not quite sure how serious he was, and he liked that.
*
“Nurse, is this the way to room 441?”
The short, dark woman, encumbered with an armload of linens, pitched her neck forcefully toward a side hallway. “Don’t give up hope.”
“Thanks so much.”
Walt Roski made his way along the corridor of San Pedro’s Little Company of Mary Hospital. Tony Piscatelli’s wife had insisted on moving him here, only a few blocks from her sister’s home where she could stay. The San Pedro hospital had no burn unit, but they made do.
