Terminal Island (7 page)

The old man eyed him strangely. “I don't see hide nor hair of you for twenty years and now you show up, all of a sudden, and want to take care of me.”

“We are flesh and blood.”

“That's out of the question, boy. This is my home, and if I left this place unguarded for so much as a day, the niggers and spics around here would break in and steal everything I got.”

At those potent words, Jack Liffey could see Maeve stiffen and fidget and almost speak out, but once again she subsided and kept her own counsel.

“I thought you might feel that way. For your own sake, if there's something you really value in the house, I mean really, Dad, you should give it to me now to keep safe or put it somewhere you trust. Whoever he is, he's coming back. I imagine Steelyard and the cops will be watching over you, but it didn't do
him
much good in his own home. This guy who's doing this stuff, whoever he is, is something else. He's mean and he's smart.”

“I'll note that, Mr. Detective. But I got ways of protecting myself.”

“Okay, Dad, you've got a gun. Great. So did Steelyard, and the guy disabled two sophisticated alarm systems and two locked doors.”

“What we got here is a battle of wits, then, and I don't figure there's enough wits in the whole world of mud people to catch me with my drawers down.”

Maeve was almost catatonic with suppressed indignation now.

“Might be an angry white guy, Dad. You never know.”

“I'll take my chances.”

They all tried to be pleasant for a while longer, talking about how the lower part of the old downtown had been hammered flat by urban renewal, and later, how artists had moved into the lofts and storefronts of some of what was left.

Finally the police phoned, announcing their imminent arrival, and Jack Liffey used it as an excuse to start his drift out.

“I'll call you, Gramps,” Maeve said.

In front they saw a police plainwrap across the road, and he waved to Gloria Ramirez. He strolled over and told her that the prewar American Legion Hall might be something to look into, and suggested she ask Steelyard if he knew any legion connections with his own father.

“How's Maeve?”

She was waiting over by the VW.

“A little dazed by the old man's up-front nastiness, but she's offered to come back and see him on her own sometime. Probably plans to get him to join the NAACP, but she doesn't know the half of who he is yet. He didn't mention his project or his pals. I assume the whole of San Pedro knows who he is.”

She nodded. “Maeve is a fine young woman.”

“Thank you. I sure think so.”

“I asked her to call me if she needs anything. I hope you don't mind.”

He smiled. “I've met my share of good cops. Thanks.” She patted his hand lightly where it rested on her window, which gave him a little charge for some reason.

Maeve was hugging herself beside the VW, waiting for him to unlock it. “Wow,” she said. “You warned me.”

He had to fight with the key. Something about the old door lock was going bad, just a minor irritation, but it set off a whole wave of irrational annoyance at Declan. Feelings he stepped on hard. He got in his side and then reached over to let her in.

“There's a lot more about him you don't know, hon. But I won't step between you. What do you feel like for lunch?”

“Is there someplace quaint in town?”

“Quaint.” He mulled it over. “San Pedro invented quaint. The fishermen tend to go to a place called Cannetti's, which is a cafe over by the canneries and fish buyers, or there's a nice little dive with an outdoor beer garden right at the head of fish harbor called Utro's, where you can see the boats. Just burgers and stuff.”

“Let's see the boats.”

He drove along the outer reaches of Ports o' Call, a strange failed tourist attraction of the 1970s, an ersatz New England whaling village full of trinket shops, half of which were now standing empty. Though the place was dying, there was a seedy magnetism to it that tugged at his heartstrings, like old sideshows and Tilt-A-Whirls and giant roadside Paul Bunyans.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that some kids were racing radio-controlled cars in the half-empty parking lot. When he looked closer, he saw the cars were on fire and they were trying to leap a ramp into a big tub of water. He wasn't in the mood for oddity points.

“What happened to set your father off?” Maeve asked.

“I wish I knew.” He realized she deserved more than that. “Maybe in some people, as they get older, they just get a kind of rash when they're confronted with the complexity of the world. After the rash, they have this overwhelming need for things to be straightforward and comprehensible. And if there's one thing human beings never have been, that's it.”

He had to stop at a stop sign for an eighteen-wheeler that was stuck and trying to back around on the two-lane road. Apparently it had taken a wrong turn.

“My dad found his simple answers in race. It started with national stereotypes—the British were stiff-upper-lippers, the French were sex maniacs or something like that, the Germans were humorless control freaks … all that guff. But for Dad, it wasn't long before it morphed into something more serious.”

He'd meant not to tell her any more, but he had to give her at least an introduction of sorts.

“Somewhere he latched onto all those northern European scholars of race, if you can call them that. Danes and Norwegians and Germans, they're the ones who wrote those pseudoscience articles about racial types and purifying the races, all the crap that inspired Hitler. You'd think they were long gone, but strangely enough, they never went away. Their heirs are still publishing these unreadable, footnoted articles about the pure Nordic stock and the Alpine stock and whatever. Dad got sucked into it when he went back to junior college and he never found his way out of the woods.”

The eighteen-wheeler finally got itself around, and he started up again. He was happy to concentrate on driving and not see the pain in Maeve's face.

“Recently the question of IQ has been one of the big things. They're using it to prove how great we white folks are.” He smiled. “Though they conveniently forget that the Asians beat our pants off at our own tests. Blacks don't do as well. Personally, when I look at a whole group of people who've been kidnapped from their homeland and enslaved and had their families destroyed and are forced to grow up in the middle of a society that basically assumes they're worthless, I have no trouble understanding why some of them don't do well on the intelligence tests we make up for ourselves. Maybe if the IQ tests measured the ability to improvise music or clever English idioms or manufacture social confidence, the blacks would beat us blind, but the tests never will.” He glanced at Maeve.

“Frankly, I'm a little worried about turning Declan loose on you, hon. He's not a dummy, and you're such a sympathetic person you always give people the benefit of the doubt.”

“I'm blood sisters with Ornetta, remember?” she said. Ornetta was a smart, spirited African American girl two years younger than Maeve. The pair of them had helped save his life in the riots, and she was his unofficial niece now. “I'm cast iron against that sort of argument.”

“Cast iron is brittle, hon. I've seen worldviews crumble in a blink, up against a really persuasive talker. In any case, I'd really rather you waited a while to see Declan. Right now he's a target. This playing card wacko is going to come down on Dad again, I'm afraid.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Give me your promise.”

“I promise. I'll wait a while.”

“Thanks, Maeve. Basically, I trust you, but there's just too much physical danger right now.”

He pulled into a space in front of Utro's, and already her eyes were going crazy taking in the scene, glancing around at the fish harbor stretching away with its piles of nets and the slowly bobbing masts of the big fishing boats. What he noticed was a flash of the yellow police tape on the far-side dock, defining the place where the
Sanja P.
had gone down. The hulk was hidden now by two nearer boats.

After dropping off Maeve, he did something he almost never did and went into a coffee shop by himself, ordering a dark roast that he nursed in a corner. It was a Starbucks, the ubiquitous Seattle company that had taken over the wonderful old Ships Coffee Shop in Culver City after it had died, as they seemed to annex any commercial space left vacant more than an hour or two. Basically Jack Liffey didn't like to go into any kind of eatery alone, since it made him feel like one of those codgers who end up downtown, talking earnestly to their fists or living in refrigerator crates. When you weren't actively paired off, you had a hard time in a world built for twos. He was paired up, of course, but he was beginning to worry about Becky. He was crazy about her, yet Maeve's doubts meant something, because she was so often right about him.

He glared at a pine bough with a red bow and two ornaments on the wall. He hadn't bought a single Christmas present yet. And he was having a little trouble catching his breath, too. He'd have to get the collapsed lung pumped up again soon or go on oxygen. Something was bonding all his doubts and frailties into one big snowball of fretting. Seeing his dad again hadn't helped. He had no idea what to do with a close relation who goes so far off the human rails, but flesh is flesh, and he knew he should have done
something
long ago. It takes a great deal of strength to keep winter out of the soul, even in Southern California. All the Christmas decorations just made it worse.

Dec 16 Late

Am I a
ronin?
Is the concept right for my situation? Not all masterless warriors are
ronin;
some are merely brigands. I fought for years for a country I trusted implicitly, and I fought with ferocity as I should have, without regard for my own life, yet everything I discover now suggests that my fight was worthless. I killed innocent Asians to no purpose. Tsunetomo writes that you must be a
ronin
seven times over as a test in life. Maybe this has all been a test.

Of course, there is nothing to be done about the past. I can only look forward. Father, I am requiting your life.

The last test of a
ronin
is always against a nemesis. I wonder if I am acquiring one. I am not referring to the pitiable policeman whose house was so easy to violate, but to the solitary, this puzzling detective. I know he has been in the war, my war, and he seems to know the deep sadness of accomplished men. And like me, he has no master. I can't hope for an equal in skills, but I can hope for someone who has lived and still lives on the same field of honor.

Seven

The Ghost Dance

“Tony! Watanabe! Hello out there!”

Jack Liffey waved to the man and then crab-walked cautiously down the steep rough slope, using both hands to grasp at roughened outcrops in the concrete. He'd been directed to what one of the secretaries had called a creek, but it was really just another of LA's concrete flood control channels, the bottom punctuated with trash and a few shopping carts, justified by a trickle of rainbow-hued water down the center. He'd searched several places where roads crossed the “creek” and found Watanabe at last, fifty yards north of the Jefferson Street bridge, dipping a little bottle into the effluent that was dribbling out of a barred orifice on the side of the channel like the exit of a secret grotto.

Tony Watanabe semaphored once and called “Kelly Le Brock!” to him between cupped hands, and Jack Liffey laughed. It had been a long time. They'd lived in back-to-back cubicles at TBW Aerospace, with two other tech writers on the kitty-cornered walls, and one afternoon a voice had asked out of the blue for the name of the luscious British star of some teen film. “Julie Christie?” he had tried. Others had suggested Helen Mirren and Jane Birken, and then a supremely scornful voice laid the hunt to rest with the words “Kelly Le Brock.” And so, for a time, her name had become the general-purpose answer to all their over-the-cubicle questions.

Who was it wrote
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
?

Kelly Le Brock!

What's the difference between a secant and a cosine? I can never remember.

Kelly Le Brock!

Tony Watanabe stood erect and smiling. The man defied several racial stereotypes. He was six-two, and, with his shoulders, he could have played a creditable interior lineman, at least at the college level. He sealed up his little vial of effluent water and stored it in a plastic eggshell crate with dozens of others.

“Good to see you landed on your feet after the layoff,” Jack Liffey said. They shook hands heartily. “It's a pretty good bet working for the EPA won't kill babies.”

At TBW they had divided the products the company developed into those that killed babies (satellites for targeting nuclear weapons) and those that didn't (in-flight entertainment systems). Some of the tech writers hadn't minded which ones they worked on, but he and Watanabe had.

“How'd you find me?”

“Your office said you were tracking down some heavy metals leaching into Centinella Creek.”

“And thence Ballona Creek and thence the bay. There's a lot of light industries that feed into this tributary, and I dig it I get to track down the polluters. It's almost like being a cop, but I guess that's your field, too.”

“No, I have a certain talent for chasing down runaway kids, that's all. Some might call it copwork, but cops tend to be a little too wedded to a world of order. Runaway kids can smell that.”

As if to illustrate his point, a couple of small boys on banana bikes came very fast along the bike trail above the creek, now and then daredeviling a few feet down the steeply angled wall of the channel and back up. It made the hair stand up on Jack Liffey's neck.

“Jayzuz,” Watanabe commented. “Kids today.”

“How's your family?”

“Just great, Jack. The kids are both in middle school, getting good grades, and Masako has them going to Japanese school one day a week.” He smiled with a mischievous undertow. “They hate it, of course. They're normal American kids, and, all of a sudden, they have to gear down and be polite to some old guy in a kimono who's teaching them stuff like the tea ceremony. Did you know even boys have to learn that?”

“What I know about Japanese culture you could probably put in one Toyota door hinge.”

“The kids didn't know much more, but they're learning, even some of the spoken language. It's far too late for them to learn written Japanese, but Masako says she doesn't want them to forget who they are.”

Jack Liffey thought of the Xerox of the Japanese playing card he had in his breast pocket, with its rubber stamp runes, but he held off for now. “You know, I can't imagine my folks shipping me off once a week to learn stiff-arm tap dancing and Gaelic.”

“You don't have to worry about your heritage as much when you're part of the dominant group.”

“I never thought of micks as the dominant group.”

A small dog charged abruptly around a bend in the creek, and they both glanced over as it yapped angrily at them. The dog had a collar and a leash dragging behind as it made another mock charge.

“I already called animal control. He won't let you close enough to catch the leash. I'm not really complaining about the race stuff, by the way. Nobody ever beat me up for being Japanese.”

“You're too damn big to beat up, man.”

He started packing up his equipment. Canvas flaps folded up snugly over the plastic tray of vials and snapped into place, and the whole structure went into a backpack.

“Was this once really a creek?” Jack Liffey asked.

“You know, you take a big floodplain like this and the rivers and tributaries change their course all the time. Until we decide to stop it. It's frozen the way it was when the army Corps of Engineers decided to channelize everything in sight. Sort of like that Fukuyama thing,
The End of History.
”

“I kind of like history,” Jack Liffey said.

The dog made another false charge, but this time changed its mind and turned up the cement toward a group of kids who were tagging a warehouse wall just outside the channel fence. The kids ignored the dog. They weren't doing anything fancy, just the zigzag letters of their tagger names.
Zuko,
one clearly said.

“I wonder if you feel any more immortal after doing that,” Tony Watanabe mused.

“All kids feel immortal. There's a bit of sidewalk in San Pedro that's got ‘J. L.' incised into the cement, immortal until the ficus tree roots bust it all up.”

The taggers ran off laughing, banging their own legs with their cumbersome cans of paint.

“You ever go back and look at it?”

“I was back there just two days ago, and I forgot to look up my initials. Ironic, isn't it? I just up and forgot about my immortality.” He laughed. “The lizard brain wins.”

That was something else they'd nattered about a lot at TBW, somebody's theory that what the Buddhists had done was fixate on an ancient part of the human brain that didn't know past or future, only the now.

“You didn't hunt me down to talk about the lizard brain.”

“No. There's a guy down in San Pedro who's committing a series of crimes. Spiteful, really, but nobody's been physically hurt yet. You know about Hello Kitty?”

“I haven't been on Mars for the past few years.”

“Okay, it's like that. He leaves Happy Kitty playing cards at his crime scenes with a—whatchamacallit, a
hanko
—stamped on each one.” He took out the Xerox and showed him.

“I can't read
kanji,
Jack. You have to master five thousand of these to be considered literate. There're also two phonetic alphabets the poor Japanese kids have to learn, plus our Roman alphabet.”

“Jesus, I had no idea.”

“They say it takes seven years of pure memorizing to master written Japanese. It's no wonder the schools have the reputation of being stuck on rote learning.”

“I guess so. That stamp says ‘no no.' I already know that, but it doesn't help me much. I thought it might mean something to you.”

Tony Watanabe took the Xerox from him. “Uh-uh, but Masako is a lot more into the culture, and I could ask this Mr. Japan teacher the kids have. You want me to try?”

“I'd be delighted.”

He'd found a note from Maeve at his condo that she was going to spend a couple of days at her mom's, which was mildly suspicious because she rarely went back there willingly before she was due. But he let it rest and called Rebecca's voice mail at school to say he'd be at her place tonight and he'd make dinner. They tried to take turns on houses, but more often they ended up together for stretches at one place or the other, and when Maeve wasn't around, it was often Rebecca's place.

He bundled Loco into the car and shopped at a fancy market in Larchmont to get the fixings for a sun-dried tomato pasta, only wincing a little when he noticed at checkout that everything was about three times the price of Trader Joe's. Her place was relatively modest, all things considered, a small and finely restored Cal bungalow on the outer edges of Hancock Park. Or, as he and Rebecca pointed out gleefully to one another when they found real-estate flyers rubber-banded to the doorknob from time to time, “Hancock Park
Adjacent.
” Hancock Park was old-money LA, full of true mansions, like great out-of-place Tudor baronials, but you could tell exactly where even
adjacent
ended. Three blocks east of Rebecca's house you were into Latino apartment houses, the streets jammed with Chevies and junkers, and the brand-new high-density Korean high-rises, with a lot of angles and earth tones and balconies the size of postage stamps.

Taunton School, where she was headmistress, was only a short drive away—in Hancock Park
proper
—but he knew she would probably be late home. There were always problems to attend to, it seemed. He had trouble mustering very much sympathy for the problems of very rich young girls, and he occasionally wondered aloud what these unspecified problems could be—an unexpected rumple in the Armani skirt, a drop of a quarter percent on a stock certificate. He thought of his father, and realized that his own prejudices against the relatively innocent children of the rich were parallel to his father's against people of color, at least in the sense that they both relied on stereotypes. But all in all, he just didn't feel that guilty about resenting the affluent and comfortable.

He let himself in Rebecca's handsome front door, which was varnished white oak below and leaded glass above, a bright design of a spreading fruit tree. Rebecca said she had heard that the place had actually been designed—first draft, anyway—by the great Charles and Henry Greene, though taken over and completed by an apprentice. Inside he was struck as always by the resonances of money—the real Kandinsky over the mantel and the little Goya drawing beside it. He didn't like Kandinsky all that much, but you couldn't help being impressed by what it meant, a single oil painting worth more than all the money he had earned in his lifetime, all the way back to his newspaper route as a boy.

It was her family's house—her father had been some bigwig at a film studio—and she was an only child, so she had inherited it all: real Persian carpets, Picasso litho in the bathroom, signed Edward Weston print of a gnarled green pepper in the hall, and even the Lipshitz bronze on a granite pedestal. The only thing she had that he really and truly loved was a portrait of her father on the steps of Angel's Flight by Millard Sheets.

No, he thought, there was another item he loved, tucked away and forgotten in the unused guest room. An LA surrealist piece from the 1960s by Joe Steuben, a kind of kiosk that portrayed an immensely sad view out the back window of a forlorn little house, seen through torn lace curtains. If you plugged the kiosk in and activated it, the taillights of a car passed from time to time in the alley, in some kind of inexplicably heartbreaking depiction of loneliness. It prodded a finger at something deep inside him.

He chopped leeks and sautéed them in olive oil, then added sun-dried tomatoes, a bit of cooked chicken, garlic, and mint. Finally he set the penne boiling. The nice thing about the meal was he could put it aside and the microwave wouldn't wreck it on reheating.

In the living room, he sat in the leathery mission-style chair and started to read a Cormac McCarthy he was fighting his way through. But he found he just wasn't in the mood for that dense, fierce prose, and he let the book fall and sat with his eyes closed, listening to the rattle of the fridge shifting itself into some other mode. Maeve's doubts about Rebecca were hard to shake, and his mind turned to the dissimilarities between them.

They'd gotten past the newness and the excitement of exploring one another, and now he'd begun to notice that the differences were starting to matter more. He'd never paid enough attention to some of the ones he'd had with Marlena, thinking they were both far enough along in life that they could just live them out. But the differences had crouched there, murmuring like poisonous gossips, until she had found a guy on the same astral wavelength as herself, awaiting the same imminent touchdown of the Lord.

Now it was wealth itself—ballet, season opera tickets, fragile china and crystal, plus the regular tidying excursion through his fridge that disappeared his plastic lemon and his off-brand sauces. At dinner, both exercised control over their conversation, and Jack Liffey couldn't help wondering if she thought LA's rich and powerful—many of whom she knew—could overhear his wisecracks about them.

Now and then she gave little yelps that suggested she wanted to free herself from the burden of all this—which touched him in a confused way, as if he'd come in just a little too late after the main titles of her life—but he didn't know how to help. He didn't know, either, how he was going to deal with these things in the long run, but it didn't bear thinking about just then.

Loco snuggled up to his legs, and he focused on a white section of textured stucco and on the curious, lopsided sensation of breathing through one lung. Loco's old coyote nature was giving way more and more to an affectionate petness, and the animal warmth, the general mindfulness of the moment, all his chores done, bathed him in a wonderful nothingness. He wished he still drank, to crystallize the moment that way.

In that state he heard her new car, a Lexus IS, pull into the driveway. Some boyfriend had long ago taught her to gun an engine once and switch off as it was revving down, an old trick from the days when powerful cars had big carburetors and it was advisable to empty the carb barrel when you shut down. But he liked hearing the brief, powerful whoop and had no intention of disabusing her about fuel injection. Not the man who drove a VW 1600 with one Rust-Oleum fender. Loco was up and standing erect at the window, like a Peeping Tom.