The Cracked Earth (21 page)

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-five-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.”

T
HE MAN WAS DYED PURPLE FROM HEAD TO TOE.
H
E 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.

S
HE'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 got 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?”

She turned away from him.

“Let's see, was this the yellow turnip or the boogie-woogie blue?”

“Eat shit and die.”

“You're not synesthetic, are you? It was just something to make yourself feel interesting, like seeing flying saucers.”

“I
used to
see color. It went away.”

“I used to have a good job, so we're even. We both feel abandoned by our destiny.”

She stood up and rocked a little on her pigeon toes, glaring at him. “Are you making fun of me?”

“A little.”

“Is all this easy for you? Manipulating people, humiliating little girls, lusting after movie stars?”

“Which of those questions would you like me to answer?”

“The lust would do.”

“The lust is none of your business.”

She grinned a surprisingly feral grin. “A
ha
! Mom's got you, too. The bitch goddess never fails.”

“Let's go have a talk with her.”

“I guess I have to, don't I?”

“Yup.”

She studied the mess of browns on the canvas unhappily. “I may as well. I'm not much of a painter and Danny's got the movie under control.” She considered, as if one more good reason might just push her over the edge. “And I'm not very happy here. I need to be someplace where I can be happier.”

She sealed up the paint cans and tubes carefully, then smiled apologetically. “You never know, I might be back.”

J
UST
as they came outside a big goat kicked out a couple of pickets in the fence next door and squeezed through into the weeds where a sidewalk should have been. It offered a terrified and bewildered bleat at its freedom and bucked once, like a basketball player setting up to change direction in midair. When it came down, it headed up the ratty street as fast as it could go, trotting a bit, then working its hind legs together like a kangaroo, then trotting again, as if it was trying to relearn all the gaits at once.

“Nature is out of joint,” he said.

“Or something is rotten in the state of California.”

He watched the goat diminishing up the street and thought about how seeing the animal burst its bonds like that made him feel the way he hadn't felt in a long time, that maybe it wasn't a good idea to try to control everything. It probably wasn't a bad lesson, but on the whole it wasn't his nature to let things develop at their own pace. It meant the really bad stuff would probably catch you with your pants down.

He took San Fernando Road out of the scrubby town, past a sign that told him William S. Hart had once lived up a hilltop, and then he caught 14 and took it down into the spaghetti of high overpasses where it joined I-5 south, the Clarence Wayne Dean Interchange, named for the poor motorcycle cop who'd ridden off into blackness when the old overpass had come down in the 1994 Northridge quake. Lee Borowsky had gone quiet for a while, brooding over something or other.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“I was thinking I'm too close to Mom to see who she is. It's like trying to study an elephant from an inch away. All you know is it's gray and rough and it's got coarse hair and it smells pretty bad, and you don't think it could be any other way because it's all you know. It's a dumb comparison. What's my mom like to you?”

“You can't get past being her daughter. I can't get past the fact she's a movie star.”

“So what?”

“Maybe in your world that's a so-what. But I was just a poor kid from the harbor. Where I grew up, most of the men worked with their hands and kids could play in the street after dark and divorce was pretty much unthinkable and everything that mattered, all the people that
Life
wrote about, belonged to some other world far away. When I saw her, her face was twenty feet high on the screen at the Warners.”

“But you've seen her now as a person.”

“And every time it carries all that baggage.”

All of a sudden he had a revelation and it all seemed so simple—all that weird guilt he felt toward her. Back in his youth, Miss Lori Bright had lived in the magic faraway world of the powerful and carefree, courted by princes and kings. Now he was stepping across the magic line to touch her, and what he saw was a sad and anxious, slightly overweight woman who clung fiercely to the few quirks that still made her seem extraordinary to herself. It was his own effrontery crossing over that line that annihilated her magic. The relation between what he saw and what he remembered refused to settle, and in that tension was his heartache.

“Are you in love with her?”

“God only knows.”

“Be careful of her, Jack.”

He didn't think he'd ever invited Lee to use his first name. He didn't really mind, but it seemed a pretty big leap for a fifteen-year-old.

As they descended into the San Fernando Valley she grew less intense. She started jabbering again, pointing out the sights, telling the names of the malls and the larger shops, and recounting adventures she had had hither and beyond. At the Ventura, he headed east, and he was just onto the Valley end of the Hollywood Freeway when it happened. They say being in a moving vehicle is one of the best places to ride it out.