by John Shannon
‘Jaysus, man, suck it up! Be frosty now!’
‘They blinded me!’
‘Shit, stay right here.’ McCall set him down hard at the foot of the steps, against a wall, and hurried upward, drawing the huge .50-caliber Desert Eagle from his shoulder holster. The old Jews could wave their little .25 purse-gun all they wanted now.
Maeve was scrunched up, fixing the oblong of plywood back in place with her tape on the uphill side as Jack Liffey kept forcing his way under the box springs, urging Felice and Millie on ahead.
Time is all that matters, he thought; it’s the only narrative we’ve got. Hurry or die. ‘This is all bullshit!’ It was a man’s deep and resonant voice, yelling from well below them. The voice was vaguely familiar to Jack Liffey – Goldilocks. ‘Just fall in where you are! OK. Ow, you got live steam blowin’ loose, don’t you? Did you plan that? I can get past this shit!’
‘Go away, golem!’ one of the old men called from above.
‘You’re outgunned, man! Don’t think you can make war on an old warrior!’
Jack Liffey knew that he and Maeve were still sitting ducks – trapped in a maze of wire bedsprings if a shooting war broke out. By the lantern light, he could just see Maeve working rapidly and clumsily with the roll of duct tape, tying things back together below himself.
Reluctantly Jack Liffey reached into the back of his waistband and drew out the .revolver – a terrible lump between his hip and the floor that had bruised him at every step. He aimed it high, well over Maeve, but still held his fire. OK, kiddo, this is where we all find out who we are, he thought.
‘Listen to me, my blond friend!’ Jack Liffey called out. He knew who the voice belonged to now. ‘Whoever you are, whoever you’re working for. I don’t know you and you don’t know me – other than dumping me on Skid Row in a wheelchair. Not very brotherly, I must say.’
‘Who the fuck are you, man? Are you Liffey? I’ve still got your wallet and gun.’
‘I have a better pistol. I’ve been through Tet in the big Nam, and I’m guessing you’ve seen your own share of hell in Iraq. Am I right?’
‘Well, I think you’re an asshole, Liffey. You’re just a guy of nothing, less-and-less as you turn into a senior citizen.’
‘So what was your MOS? 44C?’ Jack Liffey suggested. That was the military occupational specialty for accountant – a challenge that was well over the edge of insulting.
Maeve continued wrapping the duct tape around wire frames at his feet, and he wormed up and up through the convoluted barricade to stay ahead.
‘Screw you, gimp! MOS 11B and proud. What about you, friend? What was your stupid MOS?’
Eleven B was plain rifle infantryman. This guy had never even made NCO, or made it and got busted back down. He himself had been a 350G – imagery intelligence technician, a radar watcher who’d tracked the B-52 runs from Thailand, but he wasn’t going to cop to that, nor was he going to falsely claim eighteen something-or-other for Special Forces. No lies when you were this close to death. ‘That’s for you to worry about, creampuff!’ Jack Liffey shouted. ‘Maybe I was in a sniper team! These people up here are under my protection tonight, son. Like Have Gun, Will Travel. Wire Palladin, San Francisco. Or were you too young to remember all that?’
‘What the fuck you on about?’
So he was too young to remember even the reruns of that wonderful old Richard Boone TV show. Basically, Jack Liffey was just trying to keep him occupied while he gestured frantically for Maeve to do a less thorough job of sealing the barricade and step it up a notch. She nodded when she felt him pluck at her back.
Chills ran up and down his spine whenever he realized they were trapped like insects in amber. He had no doubt his 11B infantryman opponent downstairs was well armed. There was something in this terrible moment that he knew he would remember in his nightmares.
‘What’s your name, soldier?’ Jack Liffey called.
‘Maybe you could just tell me who the fuck you really are, Mr Big Nam.’
‘I’m a specialist in protection now,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘Like all those trigger-happy jerkoffs Blackwood sends to guard the Baghdad embassy and shoot up civilians.’
There was a sharp bark of a laugh below. ‘Then you’ll love my partner. That was him for two years. Blew away whole families of towel-heads just for getting too close.’
From the progress of the voice, Jack Liffey sensed the man was working his way slowly up the stairwell, and he strained to see into the darkness below. Unfortunately, the kerosene lantern threw most of its light on him and Maeve. They were only two-thirds of the way through the entrapping barricade, but there was no way he was going to hurry on and leave Maeve behind, methodically wrapping her duct tape.
‘Be very careful about entering my line of fire, Private Eleven-B,’ Jack Liffey called. ‘The minute I can make you out, you’re part of my business.’
‘Why you protecting these folks? We ought to get together on this. There’s big money in clearing out this building.’
‘What’re they promising you, soldier – a thousand a head?’
Suddenly, he thought he saw a blur of movement down below, then a point-source flash, and a powerful gunshot pazinged past them, a kind of chime at one of the box springs. The deep boom a half-instant later echoed deafeningly up the staircase and raised the hackles on Jack Liffey’s neck. It was the loudest pistol shot he’d ever heard, probably some oversized magnum. There was little chance the man was still standing where he’d seen the muzzle flash. Whereas, if he fired back now, he’d show his own muzzle flash, and he couldn’t dive quickly away from it.
‘Don’t do that again, son,’ Jack Liffey called, with all the authority and calm he could muster. ‘I don’t want to hurt an army brother.’
Then Jack Liffey heard two men down below, speaking in that voiceless voice that was often quieter than a whisper. He guessed his opponent had retreated one landing at least.
‘Who’s your pal, Eleven-B?’ Jack Liffey called out. ‘Mr Blackwood finally show up? In a world of bad things, mercenaries are about as bad as you get!’
‘Fuck you, asshat!’
It was the other one he remembered. The shrill voice he recognized, the knife man who’d grabbed his gun. He’d hoped to provoke him, get a kind of read on him, and he had already: a voice that was off-center, carrying some peculiar undertow of impassive madness. Jack Liffey knew he’d been a small man. He guessed he’d been something of a loser all his life.
He grabbed Maeve’s collar with his free hand and bodily dragged her away from the taping chore that she was intent upon. The barricade would just have to do as it was. ‘Up,’ he said very softly but urgently a few inches from her ear. ‘Now.’
She knew better than to resist. She crawled over him and wriggled under the last of the barricading box springs. It would do fine as a barrier as long as they watched it.
‘Hey, Liff,’ the knife-man’s voice called scornfully from down below. ‘One good trainee from Blackwood could wax ten of you bearded doper draftees from Nam. What you got – a peace sign tattooed on your forehead?’
Keep him talking, Jack Liffey thought as he wormed his way out beneath the last springset, pinning his own arms dangerously for a few moments. ‘Why not the regular army for you, Shorty? I bet they wouldn’t take you. You a Section Eight? You one of those dingbats who eats his own shit?’
‘You’re mine, Liffey! I’m a knife man. Whatever else goes down here tonight, whatever iron you’re carrying, I’m going to git behind you some time and carve you like a jack-o-lantern.’
Jack Liffey’s legs came free and he jumped to his feet too soon and then toppled forward into the barricade – he’d forgotten how weak and dizzy he was on his feet. He waved several people nearby to get around the corner of the stairwell and pointed urgently at the lantern until Maeve got the idea and took that away as well.
Now the payback, if they came up to the landing. He wished he had a reload for Gloria’s .38.
; ‘Come on up, pals. Let’s talk. I have a weakness for dingbats.’
There was only silence and he figured they were ascending silently.
He aimed to the right side of the stairwell, timed it out as best he could to what he heard and fired twice. Not as loud as theirs, but loud enough. Then he fired once quickly to the left, just for the hell of it.
‘Work with that, pendejos!’ Jack Liffey shouted. ‘I’m Palladin tonight. There’s plenty more to come!’
Recently immigrated Latino teens are, remarkably, the highest paid of all teenage workers, largely because they work a whole lot more than anyone else. Second-generation Latino teens are paid much less, experience higher unemployment, and have much lower rates of job-holding than the recently arrived immigrants.
4 But only in Woody Guthrie’s song and Nunnally Johnson’s movie script, both of which were vast improvements on the embarrassingly sentimental breast-feeding scene at the end of the original book.
SIXTEEN
The Laughing Buddha
‘Oh, man, did you hear that?’ Paula said quickly to Gloria. ‘That wasn’t no firecrackers.’ The gunshots had been blocks away, muffled by the walls of a building, but they both knew the difference between a gunshot and black powder tamped into a small cardboard tube for a festival. They knew it intimately and from far too much experience.
‘Makes my day,’ Gloria said, settling into a kind of job-related assurance. ‘Damn big handgun. Drug-dealer’s piece maybe. A.forty-five or a mag, I’m sure.’ She realized this guessing the caliber of a gunshot was like other L.A. residents speculating on the Richter level of an earthquake, an endless local sport. Probably only a four-point-two, unless it was far away.
‘But I bet there’s a lot of that night shit out here. I spent my first New Year’s Eve on the job in Seventy-Seventh Street Division, and it was like, you know, Baghdad on steroids. There was automatic weapon fire solid from eleven-thirty to twelve-thirty, I swear to the God of guns, whoever he is. Some of us went out onto Broadway and followed our ears and caught a big Latino family in their own back yard, walking a circle around two card tables with a dozen weapons, guys grabbing the next and the next and firing in the air, while the women sat on folding chairs reloading like the Alamo. I guess it’s a tradition in Sonora or wherever. The next morning the janitor showed me what he’d swept off the division’s flat roof – two big buckets of fallen blunts and copper jackets.’
They stood beside Gloria’s car in the dark and listened intently to the thrum of downtown noise – a crackling transformer on a power pole, the faraway freeways, maybe something deep in the earth turning over slowly.
‘Made me want to wear a metal hat next year, but Ken got me down to Harbor, and Harbor Division wasn’t half so bad.’
‘I say it came from there,’ Paula pointed. ‘I got radar ears.’ Her finger pointed off through a vacant lot. Not far from where her pointing finger ended up she was startled to discover the head of a leather-skinned man with long straight black hair under a headband standing stock still only three feet away, as if catatonic, eyes wide open.
‘Sorry, man,’ Paula offered, but he didn’t so much as budge.
He looked like a true burned-out case, Gloria thought. A Native American – she guessed that much; her own people. Gloria waved a hand in front of the man’s eyes but he didn’t come around.
‘Shit. It is the Nature Channel,’ Paula said.
Crystal meth could leave people frozen like that for hours, Gloria thought. ‘Let’s go on foot and listen for more shots. The car’s too loud.’
‘Go, girl,’ Paula said. ‘I love this and I hate it.’
‘Really? What part?’
‘The hunt for trouble. Isn’t it what we’re trained for?’
‘I don’t know,’ Gloria said. She’d never heard this note of edgy melancholy in Paula’s voice. ‘I always think the best part of the job is untangling things. People all choked up in their problems and their relatives. Trying to bring peace to them.’ The momentary upset began to melt back into her bloodstream, her nerve fibers.
‘Sure, all that, too. But hunting them out. First you find them, then you whack them a few times upside the head to get their attention – then you bring the peace.’
Gloria tried to take it as a joke, but the tone was pretty grim. Something was demoralizing Paula.
‘And maybe the only peace you bring them is a hellhole like Corcoran for twenty-to-life. So be it,’ Paula said.
‘What’s this about?’ Gloria said. ‘I’m always here for you, Paula.’
‘Welcome to L.A., girl.’ Paula laughed, without much humor, as they reached the far side of the vacant lot. ‘What you perceive here is the curse of being an emotional human being. No, a woman, a vuln-able pussy under all this damn gear. Sorry, sister. Dieter dropped me hard last week.’
‘Oh, shit. I’m so sorry. You didn’t say.’
She shrugged. ‘He was ‘sperimenting, I guess to tell. White boys and that ol’ brown sugar, you know how it go.’
‘I can’t barely see, man. I’m a cutter, but I got to see good to carve. We got to wait a while for my eyes to bogue it out.’
‘Go for it, Mr Rice. Keep your eyes tight shut. Ain’t got no eyedrops but the water’ll help.’
‘That steam was awful bad.’
‘Are you gonna be OK?’
‘Outstanding,’ Thibodeaux said. ‘A few minutes or so here.’
‘Take your time, little brah,’ Steve McCall offered from where they sat side-by-side on the staircase. A sad little song, was what he really thought. This psycho is going to go down hard one day, maybe very soon.
‘He’s got iron balls, whoever this Liffey is,’ McCall said. ‘Palladin, shit. That fuckstick.’
‘Maybe we got to burn them all out. I got the gas.’
‘Vartabedian wouldn’t like that,’ McCall said warily. ‘You can send that scheme back to your idea fairy.’
‘Burn the fat Armenian out, too. Fuck him.’
‘Man, this is so far beyond right and wrong. Shit belongs to the guy who stays in control.’
Thibodeaux tried to open his eyes, which watered and burned. He knew his partner wouldn’t recognize the source of the quotation that was coming. ‘It’s nobler to declare yourself wrong than insist on being right – especially when you’re wrong.’ He cackled, but the pain made him grimace, and he had to press the heels of his palms to his eyes.
McCall stared hard at the little man while he seemed to be blinded. This is just more of his adolescent crap, he thought. ‘That some of your Nietzsche shit?’
‘Get ready to ratfuck the weak,’ Thibodeaux fluted. ‘I had my ass on the line in the sandbox over there just like you, man. You know damn well the bold always fuck over the slaves.’
Things became primitive so quickly, McCall thought. He watched the little man with something like pity. The compulsion to be a loser was always there in losers. For all his bravado, Rice Thibodeaux embodied it like a genuine retard. Petulance was the only real emotion Rice seemed to know.
But then McCall started to recognize a tiny mirror of himself. He, too, had lost everything he’d once owned – a passable marriage to his high school sweetheart with really big tits, a pretty nice cabin behind his in-laws, a job he liked in a hobby-and-comics shop – a whole sense of self back then as a guy for whom things were starting to come out right. Little by little his assets had fled, without him ever making a genuine outcry against the gradual decline of expectations. Betty picked up a librarian lover, moved out, the folks asked him to go, his boss insulted him, and then walking in impulsively and enlisting in the strip-mall Army Center beside the Ralphs. Maybe after that his brain had been devoured by the parasites of the Eye-raq syndrome that they all laughed about. He’d read somewhere that you always decay from the inside out.
So, maybe the little psycho was on the right track after all: they were both just lying there as speedbumps in life when they ought to stand tall.
‘Is t
here another way to get up here?’ Jack Liffey asked.
‘The fire escape is rusted out at the bottom, frozen. Won’t move an inch – that ladder thing.’
He’d learned this man’s name was Samuel Greengelb, and he acted like the one in charge. They all sat on the hall floor now, around the corner from the barricaded staircase, the boy with his harmonica and notebook and Maeve carrying an aluminum baseball bat for some weird sense of protection. The other small man was wearing a yarmulke and tweeds and cradled his little purse .25. There had apparently been a third tenant standing with them, but he was gone, whisked away by the winds of looming threat. Jack Liffey rested his .38 on his lap, the barrel still vaguely warm from his warning shots. Sitting around the lantern, he guessed they looked like some demented campfire party at a pretty haphazard scout jamboree. The boy was scribbling away like mad, as if taking notes from memory.
‘So, Morty, you’re wearing the yarmulke. For religious I never figured you.’
Morty shrugged. ‘I had other things on my mind. Everybody’s marginal something. Maybe at heart I’m a Jewish commando.’ He grinned. ‘The Lehi Group, Avraham Stern, and all that.’
‘Calm down,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘Gentlemen, please concentrate. Any other ways up here? Service stairs? Elevator? Over the roof from another building?’
‘My blessings on you all anyway,’ Morty said.
‘There aren’t any other stairs, Mr Liffey. The elevator’s broken. If they fix it and try it, we hear it groan and gasp maybe ten minutes on its way up.’
‘I don’t trust the fire escape,’ Maeve put in. ‘The bottom may be broken, but what if they go up to the second floor and go out a window?’ She gave them a moment to consider her logic. ‘It comes out in that room. I saw it.’ Their eyes all went to a doorway standing open nearby.
Greengelb clapped his forehead: the What-an-ignoramus gesture. ‘The young woman is perfectly genius. I never thought. What a shmuck! That’s the old Rubio room, the cookroom. A little hibachi Miguel kept out on the fire escape so we could all cook some meat. About his carnitas he always warned us was pig.’ He shuddered a little.
