by John Shannon
“You see a doctor?”
“It’s not necessary. Just bruises and this eye. If they’d had another few minutes to work on me, it might have been worse.”
After he explained it all four or five times and she had calmed down, he helped her finish the underwear and then the sheets, taking the corners and walking toward her with a kiss at each big fold.
“You’re not going back there, are you?”
“This won’t happen again. Don’t worry.”
“I don’t want you in no danger, querido. You’re too precious to me just like you are. All this stuff is precious.” She was pressing softly through four layers of sheet against his penis and testicles. “Is it all okay?”
“A kiss will make everything better.”
She smiled. “I’ll kiss you everywhere you feel bad, and everywhere you feel good, too.”
“Then I won’t have to make up my mind which is which.”
While she made dinner, he opened a ginger ale and sat with the boys watching the soccer. As much as he hated sports, it didn’t matter very much that he didn’t even know where Pachuca and Iguala were and he couldn’t follow the frenetic commentary. The game was just a long tormented ballet in which men ran around on grass, leaped straight into the air and jumped in front of each other without ever accomplishing much of anything. A pretty good metaphor for life, after all, he thought, though in general he felt life didn’t really need a metaphor.
“So why don’t they just pick the ball up and throw it?” he asked disingenuously. “It’d be a lot easier.”
Rogelio knew he liked to tease.
“Esse!”
“Man, it’s not supposed to be easy. That’s the whole point.”
“Then tie their legs together. Make it harder. Wouldn’t that be more interesting?”
“How come in American football they don’t just carry guns and shoot each other, eh?”
“Hey, Paco, they did last weekend at the Coliseum.”
“Oh, man, I forgot.”
They all laughed and Paco made a pantomime of shooting one finger of each hand at the players on TV. “Oh, man, full combat soccer. That would be so rad.”
“Rogelio, how’s your computer course?” Jack Liffey knew he had enrolled in a computer repair class he’d found on the back of a matchbook.
“It was too hard,” he complained. “And they wanted a lot of money off me right away to buy stuff.”
“I was afraid of that. You could try the JC up the hill.”
“Maybe.” It was a pretty vague maybe and Jack Liffey wondered if he could think of a way to draw the young man into something that would interest him and give him a future. He liked Rogelio’s cheerfulness, his readiness to assist anybody who needed help, his ability to apply himself when the spirit moved him, and a kind of bedrock decency in him that it would be very hard to overrate.
Jack Liffey looked through the archway at Marlena in her frilly apron, bending forward to peer into a big pot. He liked the way the dark skirt stretched taut across her bottom, and he was overwhelmed all of a sudden with a wave of tenderness that felt so strangely like loss that he had to get up right then and hug her to make sure she was really there.
They found quite a few things they could do in bed in between his bruises without him wincing too badly, and then he was so exhausted he thought he’d sleep forever, but he woke at half past 3, wide-eyed and jangled. There had been a dream of some sort, in a strange city with a lot of urgent obligations he had to see to and he kept forgetting where he’d parked the car. He watched her sleep for a long time, as if he’d never seen her before, then he spooned against her and ran his hand under the nightshirt to cup one of her large breasts. She made a few satisfied breathing sounds and wriggled once against him. That wasn’t much help sending him back to sleep.
After a while he got up and sat in the kitchen. The yard was still dark out the window set into the back door, and doves were cooing and gurgling somewhere. He stood at the window and watched a pickup truck with the lights out accelerate down the alley, up to no good. Rogelio had left an old automobile tire mounted on a wheel right in the center of the yard, and he wondered once again about that peculiar trait. When something no longer had an immediate use for Rogelio, it went out of existence. Jack Liffey found screwdrivers in the sink, empty beer bottles in the bookcase and, once, a half-eaten cocoanut inside the washing machine that Rogelio had just cleared out. He wondered if it was just a hyperactive sense of focus that moved on to its next object too quickly. Jack Liffey got up abruptly and rescued the note that he’d tossed in the trash under the sink: Go home, fuck you, dead dead dead.
If you saw a note like that in a movie, he thought, it would just be words on paper and you’d forget about it after a while, or maybe you’d think the grammar a little quaint and sad and then you’d forget about it—but that easy equanimity would be there because the note hadn’t invaded your personal space. It was remarkable how all your illusions of security could be swept away by a simple token of someone else’s ill will. The ridiculous note with its childish-looking capital letters and bad punctuation constituted a gross violation of his space in the world. It was like stumbling on a burglary that left you gaping blankly in awe at the wall where the TV and stereo once had been. He hadn’t realized how the note was going to prey on him. He was naked in a universe where a shitstorm could come down any minute.
He realized he hadn’t checked the answering machine in his condo-office, and he called it up and keyed in his code. There was only one message. “We don’t forget so easy. Maybe we come get you where you live.” It was an Asian voice and he was glad the answering machine was in a guarded condo complex, four miles away.
Hello there, Death, he thought, prickling with sweat. He wondered if there was anything at all to be done in those moments when the foreboding and gloom fell through unexpectedly, just plopped down into your consciousness to haunt you with the one simple idea that you couldn’t shake: things come to an end. There is no after. You don’t get to find out who becomes the forty-forth President. Perhaps, he thought, what you did was just look square at the foreboding and curse it and say, I’m going on, man, the hell with you.
Fuck you, Death, dead dead dead.
He came very close to invading the liquor cabinet, but he started reading the labels on cups of dried soup and boxes of instant mashed potatoes instead, and finally he grinned, pretending he was at ease and confident, in order to send the foreboding on its way. He wasn’t, but it was the best he could do.
“Come on over!” the man in the wheelchair bellowed from the far side of a small koi pond.
Jack Liffey had found the address in the phone book, about as elementary a detective technique as you could get. It was a tasteful cedar-sided ranch house located on a meandering street called Vista Del Montana in a whole tract of tastefully meandering streets with tasteful Spanish names. But this one was different out back. Redwood planked walkways led through a mannered wildness of papyrus and reeds and elephant ears to give the look of a jungle. Even a stream, and a little Asian-looking hump bridge.
“Watch out for the tigers! Come on around, man!”
Jack Liffey passed a short banana palm as the man in the wheelchair did a wheelie and propelled himself rapidly toward the little bridge. He was wearing a threadbare khaki fatigue jacket with RESNIK on the name-label, and he had a scraggly beard and unruly hair that made him look like the police mugshot of a sex-offender. “Whee!” he cried, going over. “Airborne Ranger, Green Beret, this is the way we start our day!”
A few minutes earlier, Jack Liffey had offered his hand and introduced himself as a detective looking into scandals associated with the El Toro airport.
“No shit, Jack. It’s about time. Where’d you get that eye?”
“Mugging.”
“Too bad, too bad. Should’a called down an air strike.”
He’d led straight out back and, by flinging his big wheels in opposite directions, he’d spun once
around on a high patio that was like the observation deck of a game park. “How do you like my jungle?”
“Looks like you put a lot of time into it.”
“I got nothing but time, man. Police up those grounds private!” he bellowed and spun back. There was no private in evidence.
The tour completed, the man seemed to settle a bit into a funk, but then emerge unpredictably just as rambunctious as before. “You look about the right age, Jack. You over in the big Nam?”
“Not really. I was a technician, stuck off in a trailer in Thailand.”
“But you know what it was about. You got with the program. You had enthusiasm for the mission. You were one of us despised few.”
“I don’t know about the despised.”
The quiet Asian woman who had met him at the door brought out a tray of iced tea. Resnik seemed to go into a calm mode with her presence. He introduced her as his wife An, speaking with real tenderness, and some private look of forbearance passed between them before she set the tray on a bench and drifted away. “My other little souvenir of Nam,” he said softly. “I mean that with no disrespect whatsoever. The first souvenir is three ounces of metal imbedded about here.” He wrenched around to indicate his back. “Air Cav grunt, just minding my own business sitting on the deck of the chopper. A mortar, if you can believe it, came right through the door of the Huey and—sayonara spine. It’s a freak I lived. Everybody else bought it and the ship nosed in. I bet I’m the only person in the history of warfare ever mortared in flight.”
“I’ll bet you are.”
“But all injuries follow the logic of human probabilities,” he insisted. “Somewhere, a hundred fucking monkeys are writing up my citation on a hundred fucking typewriters right now. They’ll get around to me right after they write Hamlet.”
Jack Liffey sat on a teak bench and sipped at an iced tea, hoping the man might settle down again. He wondered if Resnik had missed his mood stabilizer for the morning.
“What do you require from me, Jacko?” He took his own iced tea off the tray and slipped it into a cup holder that snapped up from the arm of his chair.
“What do you know of the Industrial League?”
“Scumbags!” he shouted. He flung up his arms. “Doing the dirty work for the rich assholes who want to wreck the value of my home and send me packing.”
“Have you had any contact with them?”
Now he started to get suspicious. “Who you working for, sport?”
Jack Liffey told him the truth, that he was looking for a man’s daughter, Phuong Minh, who was missing.
“That’s not exactly a scandal relating to the airport, is it, Jack?”
“It is if she’s been hurt. You’ve been giving them a hard time, haven’t you?”
“Roger that. If I had access to some C-4, I might just air them right out. I telephone a couple times a week, let them know they ought to get real and pull out of this one. I didn’t kidnap some poor girl though. Here, you secure that drinks tray, and I’ll show you what this little firefight is about for me.”
He spun once more and wheeled toward the house and Jack Liffey had to follow. A sharp turn inside the wide glass door led into a bright kitchen that was unlike any kitchen he’d ever seen. The counter tops were all black granite and set at mid-thigh, and most of them you could run a wheel chair right under to chop up vegetables. The sink and rangetop were low, too, and there were two shorty fridges side-by-side. It was like a world made for elves, the only thing more than three feet off the floor a band of photos of tropical scenery that ran around the wall to keep the top half of the room from looking too empty.
“You don’t think this cost a pretty penny?”
“I’m sure it did.”
He gave a broad beckoning wave, a squad leader bringing his troops up, and led along a hall and into a very large room that had probably once been two bedrooms. Near the door was a rack that held a strange looking pump shotgun with a long flexible tube that ran out of the stock into some kind of stanchion, like a small gasoline pump. The man hit a switch and the far wall lit up faintly. Jack Liffey could see it was a projection screen. As the apparatus gathered steam, a rural lake came into eerie existence on the wall. The room lights went down gradually and the scene took on reality. The lake was surrounded by willows and poplars, ruffled by a faint breeze. There was even the sound of the breeze, and a distant honking of geese, from hidden speakers somewhere.
Marvin B. Resnik shouldered the shotgun and backhanded some control on the stanchion. Before long a goose flew low out of the edge of the picture and Resnik tracked ahead of it and fired. There was a blast, about half what a real shotgun would have produced out in the open, but somehow the long gun actually recoiled. A small bright burst seemed to stun the goose and it fell out of the sky. There was no splash, however, just the eery sound of a splash as the plummeting goose vanished as it touched the wind ripples on the lake that went on and on.
“Gotta stay loose.” He pumped the shotgun. “Get your goose.”
Another bird came out of the opposite wall. Marvin fired and brought this one down, too. The illusory lake was starting to get frightening. It was like a siren call from another world, a beckoning. Just saunter forward into this beautiful land, my friend, and Marvin B. Resnik promises not to blow you away.
“There’s anothing scenario on this doohickus called ’Smoke the Perp!’”
He hit some control, and Jack Liffey started a little as the entire wall flickered and became an urban street scene in the dusk with an alley leading away between four-story buildings with their windows blown out and rusting fire escapes. Trash cans, heaps of broken boxes, and a moan of wind with a distant fuss of sirens and traffic. A man with a pistol popped up in one of the windows and Marvin Resnik fired. There was the same small bright burst where the man had stood, and the sound of a body thudding to the floor.
“Goin’ down!”
Resnik pumped the shotgun. A sniper with a rifle appeared on the roof and Resnik blew him back off the parapet. Then a gunman jumped up from behind the trash cans in the alley and Resnik pumped and fired twice, three times, in a frenzy.
“Get some, motherfucker!”
He was breathing heavy and then he rested the butt of the shotgun on the floor and leaned on it to get control of himself. “Want to give it a try?”
“No thanks. It’s quite an illusion.”
“Gets the juices goin’, don’t it? There’s also a low-level chopper attack comin’ at ya over a forest, Russian Mi-24s, HIND-Ds, but it lacks something in realism, taking out a big hunter-killer chopper with a shotgun.”
He racked the shotgun and spun the chair around. “Whoa!”
His wife looked into the room. “Do you require anything, Marvin?”
Resnik just shook his head, and she slipped away. “I got three quarters of a million dollars tied up in this house, Jack. And a secret conspiracy of rich fucks that live in Newport and Nelly Gail Ranch up on the hill think they’re going to put me and a lot of other folks at the end of an intercontinental runway for 747s. When I bought here I was assured El Toro would remain a Marine base for the duration and all we’d get would be a few dozen small jets a day, and most of those pull afterburner and turn north over the hills the minute they’re off the ground.”
Jack Liffey could sympathize, but he couldn’t work up that much concern for a guy with three quarters of a million dollars to sink into a house like Disneyland. When they’d put the Century Freeway, the 105, through the working class areas of Hawthorne, Inglewood and Watts, they’d given poor old couples so little money that a few years later they couldn’t buy a doghouse with their fair market value.
“I’m not going to let them make me fall back and regroup, no fucking way, but I’m not as crazy as I look.”
He started slowly out of the room.
“I think I know the girl you’re looking for. At least, I think I talked to her on the phone.” He smiled. “I put a scare into her but it’s just a ga
me.”
“They said you used a racial epithet.”
He turned back and scowled. “Take a good look at my wife, Jack. Do you think I’d do that?”
“It’s hard to break the habit sometimes. Those words just rolled off the tongue in the Army.”
He shook his head. “Not with me, no sir. Those words even think of coming out of my brain, they stick on the back of my tongue and make me choke. I had heavy training from a mother whose maiden name was Lovejoy and who was proud of having some famous Abolitionists way back in the family in Illinois.” He changed gears. “Down the hall is a room full of computers, but you’ve seen computers. The point is, I’m dug in here and I ain’t about to let the choppers haul me off the roof.”
He rotated and backed expertly into a living room that had handrails all over the place.
“How far would you be willing to go to stop the airport?”
“I read this philosopher once, he said, ‘Not everything that succeeds is right. But to be right you’ve got to succeed.’ I mean to stop that airport.”
He backed his wheelchair up near a tall bookcase full of paperbacks and rocked it back and forth restlessly.
“Have you ever met Phuong Minh in person?”
“I am a freelance copywriter for a number of advertising companies in Newport and Irvine. I work back there on a computer, and I teleconference by computer, and I send stuff in by modem, and money is transferred to my bank electronically. I haven’t left this house and this yard in two and a half years. The only way I am going out of this place is in a pine box. Now you get out of my house, asshole.”
TEN
The Toadstone
First thing the next morning he phoned Art Castro at his office. Castro worked for one of the really big detective agencies, and he had a grand rosewood and marble office in the historic Bradbury Building with a view out over downtown L.A. They owed each other a half dozen favors, and he wasn’t sure who was ahead.
“Could I talk to Art?”
“Could I tell Mr. Castro who’s calling?”
