by John Shannon
Even random hurrahs had died away.
“Listen, I’ll take the whole filthy rap on myself and my pals, and two hundred years from now we’ll be known as the George Washingtons of the new white America, the guys who took back the country, and maybe some people will think of us as those regrettable bad boys who went a little over the top but it can’t be helped. I sure as bloody hell won’t be known as that poet, that sissy, that woman who wept over the tulips when the mud people took our country away. Are you with me in this?”
The crowd was stunned silent, though a few decided they had to display a little enthusiasm. A faint cheer began in a couple of pockets and seeped out slowly.
Jack Liffey was interested in the sheer megalomaniac power of the man. He carried something even odder, too, but Jack Liffey hadn’t worked it out. Once in a great while he seemed to talk aloud to himself from an inner voice.
“Bang!” he shouted into the microphone, and the crowd recoiled at the reverberations and the squawk of feedback it set off.
“Listen, my fainthearted friends, do your country a favor. I know this town is full of Ching-chong yellow invaders.” He pointed all around the shallow canyon. “This is wall-to-wall slopes. Dinks, Slants, John Chinaman. My white folks, shame on you, you ain’t done your duty to scare ’em away. You got to begin the fight at home.”
Hardi Boaz tucked the microphone into his shirt pocket with another bit of squalling feedback and reached downward. The skinny man who’d introduced him dug into an olive canvas bag and handed the speaker—oh, no—an assault rifle!
Jack Liffey could see it was an over-and-under M16 with the fat tube of an M203 grenade launcher under the barrel. His first sergeant had kept one in his billet, and he’d seen plenty of them in the Tet Offensive. The sight of the weapon was as electrifying to him as to everyone else. He hoped it was just a prop.
“Listen, fainthearted friends, here’s my gift to you! Fight back! Go on, Hardi.” His voice was just audible with the microphone in his pocket. There was a flash of teeth, a rictus of a smile, and Hardi Boaz shouldered the assault rifle. A cold hand took Jack Liffey’s spine. The big man tilted it up into a high arc. An amplified bloop sent a grenade arcing out into the Monterey Park suburb.
“What are you doing?!” somebody shouted.
“Bloody firepower, ma’an, I can’t get enough!”
The first grenade detonated somewhere out of sight and he slammed the launcher tube forward as the thin man tossed him another grenade. As if in the grip of some bloodlust, he closed the breech and fired again, off to the far left this time. He pumped the M203 open, caught another grenade in midair and loaded it. This time he swung and fired to the right.
“Get some!” he shouted. “Here I am, Ching-a-lings! Get some!” The invisible explosions echoed across the easement and punched Jack Liffey in the chest. There was no indication of damage out there. Yet.
The man stopped firing, and Jack Liffey could hear that something had changed in the crowd, and maybe in the surrounding suburb, too—a world stunned into a new tentative condition.
Hardi Boaz plucked the microphone from his pocket. “Fear not, my tenderhearted friends—these were only flash-bangs today. The rest is up to you. Save our white country. Send your own yellow people the big message to go home.”
Then the Afrikaner was gone, leaping off the platform and swallowed by a group of supporters. The atmosphere hovering over the keg party had gone private and expectant, and Jack Liffey could hear the crackle of the power lines clearly and then an oooh from the crowd. Sirens began to wail in the far distance.
“Time to book, bro,” he heard.
People began to move purposefully uphill toward the street. Before long the pace of the dispersion picked up, everyone picturing the arrival of masses of police in a very bad mood. Sirens were all around the compass now, approaching, and Jack Liffey saw several people up at the patio helping roll the aluminum kegs inside the house. For an instant he saw the thin young man who’d handed the speaker the rifle. Who are you, sport? he thought, watching the young man. We must meet.
Jack Liffey worked his way uphill as fast as his age and the crowd would allow, heading toward his pickup and home. Everything was a bit unreal. He’d felt strangely aloof from the keg party from the beginning, amused at its oddball nature.
What if he’d grown up among angry Boer kids in South Africa, he wondered, mired in some outdated view of what was possible? Or among lost and inarticulate teens in America—kids who could barely express their rage at a changing world and a faraway elite who seemed to run it.
Life was too damn difficult, he thought. Crazy violence was probably the only protest left for those trapped in a shrinking pocket of history.
He watched the partiers hurrying toward their cars. For most of the afternoon he’d been patronizing these people, treating the keg party like a Little League version of the Nuremburg Rally. But the sudden whirl to violence had turned his own detachment against him. He felt a little sick. Are you really so superior?
His pickup was caught in the tangle of escaping cars. Sirens approached fast, and he felt a surge of sudden gas pain in the middle of his chest. Stress?
*
“You’re the only game in town, Gloria,” Maeve said in the kitchen.
Gloria wore an odd pained expression. “I bless the day that wanting Jack brought his wonderful child into my home. I mean that, hon.”
Maeve didn’t know how to respond.
“I’m a mess.” Gloria’s voice was a whisper.
“Aw, woman.” Maeve came and knelt beside the chair to hug her legs. She knew depression could strike deep, though she had no idea what to do about it.
“Thanks for staying the evening, Maeve. I’m going to need help pretty soon, I think. I’m about to—I don’t know. Break into bits.”
Maeve pressed her forehead against Gloria’s knee, feeling helpless.
“My rages are scaring me, hon. I wish I’d been in Iraq. I could call it all PTSD.”
“Your whole life has been an Iraq.”
“Do me a favor, hon.”
“Of course.”
“My weapon’s in a cardboard box in the second drawer upstairs. Take the box and hide it somewhere in the house.”
Maeve felt a chill of real alarm.
“Oh, Glor.” But there was nothing to argue about; she knew she didn’t have the strength and wisdom to give Gloria the comfort she needed.
The large angular pistol was in a leather clip-on holster, her badge-wallet beside it, plus another black clip-on with two spare magazines. And a pouch with pockets for handcuffs and another with a spray tube of Mace. It was like Batwoman’s boudoir.
Maeve flipped the cardboard top back over the box to cover the terrible sight.
Back downstairs, box well hidden: “You’ve got to hold on, Glor. You’re strong—a real role model for me. And for Dad. I know he loves you to death.”
Gloria covered her eyes and began to weep as if she’d just lost a child.
*
It took very little time for Jack Liffey to find out where Hardi Boaz was staying. Ask for a big, loud South African.
As far as he knew, the missing girl had had to cross the border somewhere near where he patrolled. Who knew?
The Washington Plaza Hotel wasn’t much, but it seemed to be the only hotel of substance in Monterey Park. The lobby was definitely for Chinese guests, with bilingual signs and black lacquered furniture as tokens.
He stood a moment near a chest-high vase and tried to consider Boaz’s exotic notion of expelling all Chinese and Mexicans from America, so common to the Tea Party. Quite apart from the fact that Mexicans had preceded Anglos into the Southwest by two centuries, it was like trying to get the chocolate syrup out of a milkshake. Intermarriage, centuries of common citizenship, and a twisted skein of cultures and families had connected everyone. It was ridiculous.
“Mr. Boaz, please, and tell him that his fainthearted friend is here,” Jack Liffey
told the blank-looking Chinese woman at the desk. “Use that expression.”
He waited in the lobby. Before long he had to wince at a shrill whistle, like a referee calling time, as the huge man emerged from an open elevator across the lobby, two fingers in his lips, glaring off somewhere to Jack Liffey’s left. His fists went to his hips, the tactical commander watching over the battlefield he controlled. The man had changed into another set of freshly creased bush khakis, slightly darker. An obligatory costume.
He came straight toward Jack Liffey, still without meeting his eyes, and Jack Liffey began to wonder about something like high-functioning Asperger’s. It would explain a lot.
“I’m telling you, ma’an, it’s a good thing I found some like-minded friends here in L.A. I got plenty of enemies, and it’s still a strange country. I myself couldn’t recognize a bloody liberal zebra in a herd of patriotic horses. Hardi, you talk such rot.”
The man hadn’t acknowledged Jack Liffey directly in any way, but there was no one else he could be talking to. Now and again a corner of his mouth flicked, like a grazing animal involuntarily reacting to a fly.
“Fainthearted friend.” He laughed louder than necessary. “You know what the kaffirs used to call me? They called me Meneer Koppelkop. It means Mr. Fuckhead. I called them Communists. Are you a Communist, too? Oh, don’t be so rude to this man, Hardi.”
The big man laughed confidently and stared at the far wall of the lobby, his laser glance whizzing right past Jack Liffey’s face.
“I think the Communists left the building a couple decades ago. But I’d like to talk to you, sir.”
“I leave in two hours, friend, hustled out of town by the cowardly lions of the Tea Party Crybabies, even though we got the same big pals with the same big moneybags. But come up to my suite and help me finish my gift whisky, Mr. Faint Heart. You seem straight up. I always like that. The guy may be a danger, Hardi. Nah, no way.”
The large man waddled a bit as he walked toward the elevators, not looking back
“The press says we are the neutron bomb of the Campo area. We are responsible for killing wetbacks from El Centro to San Diego, and also pet kittens and sick cows and the odd drunk farmhand. Yesterday we ate a Volvo, tomorrow we eat the Palomar Telescope. But as long as we stop mud people and terrorists, I say, let’s eat.” He stopped talking for a moment and flexed his left arm, hard with muscle. “Come see the wetback I captured in this stinky Chink hotel.”
That gave Jack Liffey a real chill—the image of a Mexican bellboy in chains in the room—but he followed the man into the elevator. Hardi punched the top floor button repeatedly with evident satisfaction.
“What’s your name, fainthearted friend?” He stared hard at the pinging digital floor indicator.
“Jack Liffey.”
“And what do you do, as Americans say?”
“I hunt for missing children, sir. I hope your group doesn’t eat children, too.”
The man laughed heartily, but his laugh was devoid of any sensation of humor. Jack Liffey had expected menace, but saw only a kind of theatrical evocation of various emotions, like a robot who’d learned how to be human from a book.
“Unless the children are Communists. Then I got to fuck them up bad.”
“That’s not very funny,” Jack Liffey said.
Boaz’s eyes browsed the elevator with his hard, indirect stare as if he couldn’t quite find Jack Liffey. “I’m funny if I say I am, Mr. Jack Liffey.” He flicked the corner of his mouth and then smiled grimly. “I am the guy who makes it safe for all the sissies in San Diego and L.A. to complain about me. I’m only doing what I’m good at. And fat cats pay me damn well to do it.”
Fat cats, Jack Liffey thought. He didn’t even want to know. What good would it do? Somebody he couldn’t touch. Who had paid James Earl Ray to kill King? There was far too much of that in America.
The elevator doors came open on seven, and Jack Liffey followed the man to a large suite. Just inside the door, a military-style canvas B-4 bag was already packed and waiting.
The sheer, physical beef of the man in the delicate, Chinesey suite was hard to ignore. He went to a swing-open bar and poured himself a scotch from some expensive-looking single-malt bottle. Jack Liffey declined.
“Behold, I show you my captured wetback now, Jack Liffey.” He strode to the mantel of the false fireplace and touched the top of an upended drinking glass with surprising gentleness. “A tiny wetback.”
He slid a laminated information card under the glass before lifting it. Jack Liffey approached and saw a large cockroach, scrabbling this way and that as its horizons went berserk.
Thank heavens, Jack Liffey thought.
“All of these cockroaches are Communists. You need an experienced soldier like me to track them down. This is the bonus this Chink hotel has without even knowing it. I teach any invader the meaning of fear. You the man, Hardi.”
“Flush the bug, please. I need to talk to you.”
“Ja, you in the deep shit, my little roachie,” he crooned. He seemed to be able to make eye contact with the insect. “Kom, liefling. Een twie drie. Come out, little comrade.” He dumped the bug onto the mantel. “Your pals have betrayed you, liefling, and it is time to learn fear. Don’t you love this part, Hardi?”
Boaz was backlit by the tall west window and it was hard to make out the expression on his face. His oddity no longer seemed quite so harmless.
“Mr. Boaz, I came here because you struck me as a man who’s never afraid to tell the truth.” Flattery almost always worked with those who thought they couldn’t be flattered.
“So you say.” Boaz grasped a roach leg in two fat fingers and held the insect up, wriggling. “Look at this little kak. Life is short, Commie.”
The big man took a Bic lighter from his shorts and flicked it beneath the insect.
“Aw, man, crush it. Stop this.”
“You are indeed a faint-heart.”
Boaz brought the flame up to the roach and a crackle sounded clearly in the silence. Jack Liffey looked away reflexively.
“Oh, ah, liefling. The determined commie-killer now blows out the flame and lets you live one minute more. In pain, ja.”
“Man, stop it. Just kill it.”
“You’re as bad as Emperor Nero, Mr. Liffey. Thumbs down in the arena. Who are we to question another precious minute of existence on earth, even if it means a little pain?”
“A missing girl’s life may be at stake,” Jack Liffey said. “I need to talk to you before your ride to the airport comes. I have a strong feeling you wouldn’t hurt a defenseless young girl.”
There was a sudden sizzling noise and he looked up to see Hardi Boaz toss the flaming insect into the fireplace. Jesus Christ.
“Agh, sis, the big loud Boer has done the deed, Mr. Liffey. I hope you can pardon it, but I consent to your disapproval, too, if necessary. I am as big as America, I am a beacon of white dominion, and naturalized American bison.” He laughed his strange stagy laugh.
“A Chinese girl, crossing the border maybe ten days ago,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m sure you’d never hurt a child.” He wasn’t sure in the least, but he needed to flatter whatever the man possessed of human decency.
“I get the idea, faint-heart. Life is tough all over. Where I live outside a tiny town called Campo, if I wanted to put in a nice bed-and-breakfast, I could offer hunting rights, and your Southern senators would fly in on government-paid junkets to sit on the patio, and together we could potshot any bloody thing that moves in the valley. Javelina, deer—and, of course, wetbacks. The big bad border is only a half mile from my house. You tell him, Hardi, you the man.”
The tic at the corner of his lip had grown more pronounced and compulsive.
“Listen to me, ma’an. I’m put on the earth to enjoy myself and help a few others do the same. In a few years we’re all buried in the dirt, you know it, so why not enjoy while we can? I want you to know that I personally have no desire to be any more saintly than
your average San Diego congressman who beats his Mexican servants and schtups their daughters when his smelly wife is at the supermarket. It’s the real world, eh?”
“Have you seen a Chinese girl?”
“You want to know if I seen some loose-goose Chinee?”
“That’s about it.”
“I like you for some reason, Meneer Jack Liffey. You got brass balls to front me. I could strangle you right now. There is pathology to every kind of politics, eh?”
A chill went up Jack Liffey’s spine.
“But, no, I grant you your tomorrow. Maybe I see this Chinese girl, maybe not. You want to pry into my business, you can jump off a tree into snakes. This Liffey guy is a hell of a guy, Hardi.”
The big man turned his head slowly and his glance smoked Jack Liffey’s cheek with a fierce blow-by. All the bravado seemed to melt away.
“There’s an empty place growing where my dreams was, Jack Liffey. Come out to my place near Campo someday and we’ll talk and shoot some coyotes. Hardi, tell this guy directly that you like him fine.”
“That’s great,” Jack Liffey said. “I get it—no comment.” The invitation was about as tempting as a vacation in North Korea.
Jack Liffey went down the elevator and waited again in a corner of the lobby. In a half hour, he saw an angry-looking man in a business suit enter the hotel and the elevator dinged him all the way up to Boaz’s floor
He still didn’t know what to make of Hardi Boaz. Could the man or one of his vigilantes have run into Sabine? He wondered if the girl’s map led anywhere near Campo.
NINE
Fate Always Has Other Plans
Gloria awoke against her will with Jack Liffey shaking her shoulder gently.
“Let’s not rush the day.”
“Breakfast is served.”
She rolled onto her back, pulled the covers up to her chin, and shook her head at the coffee and toast he’d brought on the sick-in-bed tray. Instantly she changed her mind and plucked the coffee mug off the tray.
