The Poison Sky (18 page)

“I'm sorry I caused this mess, it's typical of me the last few years. I think I'm the original Hard Luck Kid. Even when I try to do something selfless, it backfires. At some point life just becomes a whole bunch of things you don't want to do but you've got to do.”

“Could we explain this in some sort of order?”

He smiled slightly. “Sorry. You know I was working as a night watchman at GreenWorld Chemical. There were always two of us on duty, and every hour one of us would have to do the rounds. You know, you carry that big punch clock on your waist and there's keys on chains in these little boxes all over the grounds. You walk around and insert one key after another in your clock and it records you were there at that hour doing your duty.

“Most of the place … Well, I don't know what they do in most of the place, but out in the middle there's an area behind a lot of skull-and-crossbones signs that's got holding tanks for toxic waste, a kind of transshipment yard where I think they collect waste from little manufacturing companies all over and then when the tanks are full, they do whatever they do. Every night I'd see these scabby old tank trucks pulling in and pumping waste into the tanks. Some of them had Mexican plates and some were California and they all said ‘Joe's Waste Collection' or ‘Ed and Arnie's Refuse' or things like that. Some were GreenWorld trucks and they looked a little better.

“I only had one key station in that area and the smell was pretty bad, like somebody spent about half the day burning cats around there, so I got in and out pretty quick. I noticed, once a week, Thursday about one
A.M.,
a big shiny–stainless steel truck came in and loaded itself up. One Thursday I'm clocking myself into the toxic yard and the driver of the shiny truck tried to bum a cigarette from me. He was a big guy with a kidney belt like a lot of truckers and a strong New York accent and a real fuck-you attitude, even when he was asking a favor. Just to be friendly, I asked him where he takes the stuff he picks up, and right away he turns into George Raft, tells me to mind my own beeswax. That got me to thinking and then it got me to watching for him. And one Thursday I called in sick and I waited outside the gates and I followed him. I must have been flat out of my mind.”

The breath rasped across the room and the bed creaked, and slowly Jack Liffey became aware that the old man over there was perfectly conscious and masturbating. The cords in the back of the man's neck tensed, and finally Jack Liffey came around to the chair on the far side of Milo Mardesich's bed and sat so his back was to the busy creak-creaking.

“I followed that truck all the way out to the desert. I figured there was an incinerator or a government dump of some kind out there, but he turned off on a small ramp called Corn Springs Road and then onto an old stretch of Highway 60 that's parallel to 1-10. I had to turn out my lights and follow him slowly but he got slow, too. There was nothing on that road but a few abandoned foundations of old gas stations. Then the smell came in my window and I realized what he was doing. He'd opened up the taps and he was dumping his evil concoction on the old road as he drove along.”

The air conditioner kicked in and the sound mercifully helped cover the insistent whittling noise from the old man just as it seemed to be coming to a crescendo.

“I stopped when I saw what I was driving on because I didn't want to expose myself to any more of that stuff than I had to, but I'm sure he emptied his whole load on that back road. It's called Chuckawalla Road now, out past Chiriaco Summit, if you want to check it out.”

“I'll take your word for it.”

“A couple weeks later I followed him again. The same big stainless-steel truck. This time he went up on an old stretch of the Ridge Route that's still there beside 1-5 past Castaic. He did the same thing, just motored slowly along with the pipes gushing. I could see the spray in the moonlight. I don't know how long they've been doing this, but I sure wouldn't get out and walk around on any old back roads in Southern California, I'll tell you that.”

“Do you remember where you were when you were gassed?”

“Sure. I was walking between A-six and A-seven, they're two low corrugated metal buildings just outside the toxic area. You could stretch out both arms and touch the walls and it was a dead air trap under the eaves, but I don't know any storage tanks there. It was a shortcut I used most nights.”

“And when did you get interested in Bhopal?”

“Well, I remember the smell that knocked me on my ass. It was like chili powder thrown in the air and then being walloped with an old gym sock. I've never smelled anything like it. The first day in here, I watched them draw my blood and it was the color of cherry Kool-Aid. It jogged my memory. I remembered descriptions like that from
Time
magazine or somewhere.”

“Were you right?”

“I don't know. I'm an engineer, not a chemist. The gas at Bhopal was methyl isocyanate, but they think it reacted with water and gave off lots of products and the real damage to people might have been done by cyanide. What I experienced could have been cyanide. You going to help me find out?”

“Are you planning to go back to
work
there?”

“Next week, if they let me out.”

“I think your gassing was deliberate. Somebody probably found out you followed the truck and laid a trap for you.”

“The possibility crossed my mind. All the more reason to nail it down. Hey, Mr. Spade, my life hasn't been worth very much up to now. This gives me something to do.”

“Woooo.” The old man gasped and expelled a long breath as if deflating. Milo Mardesich frowned and turned to look at him and Jack Liffey realized Milo had been aware of the long intimate sonata, too. “What the hell's wrong with this place?”

“It's full of sick people,” Jack Liffey said.

12

STAYING ABSOLUTELY EVEN

T
HIS WASN'T AT ALL WHAT THE BOY HAD EXPECTED.
S
CORES
of unfriendly eyes along the curbs and against the walls followed their progress. Jack Liffey motored slowly down Fifth past Wall Street and then San Pedro Street, well into the heart of the Nickel, L.A.'s Skid Row, and Jimmy Mardesich said nothing. Wind cut around the homeless missions and abandoned warehouses and plucked eddies of paper trash up off the streets into little white whirlwinds. They passed what had come to be called Indian Alley, where homeless Native Americans were encamped in hogans of cardboard and blue plastic tarps, and then they reemerged into the larger tribes of the African-Americans and Latinos. Curiously, the few Anglos they could see were all women. One brown-skinned man with half his face blasted away by some disease reached out ominously for the car.

“Not quite here, I think,” Jack Liffey said.

Jimmy Mardesich was too stunned to reply. For some reason even the physical environment was eroded away down here, the fire hydrants losing their last paint and the curbs rounded and chipped away, as if a great burden of something corrosive had hung over the streets and rasped regularly back and forth on tides driven by the last faint currents of the sea breezes that made it fifteen miles inland. The sharp-edged skyscrapers of the bankers' downtown were only six or seven blocks west but they fussed away in their own universe, barricaded into safety by security guards and every wile of street-level grille and blank marble facade the architects could devise. Discreet urban fortressing had become an L.A. specialty, tens of millions of dollars invested in keeping these few thousand lost souls at bay.

The car drifted past a half-dozen black men who sloped along the sidewalk with walkers and wheelchairs like a shoal of the wounded.

“These are real people,” Jack Liffey said. “They are not mere circumstances of your spiritual education.”

“I understand that. I hope I do.”

They passed people squatting to eat beside cardboard encampments, tearing hunks of bread off a hard loaf. A young man hurried along wearing one red tennis shoe and one black loafer, pushing an empty hospital gurney. A dwarf stared back angrily at the car and gave them the finger. A woman clung to a man from behind and reached over his shoulder, shouting and trying to grab something from him, but no one was inclined to come to her aid. He drove on.

“Maybe here,” the boy said.

It was the Grace Mission. A sign on the side wall said
SLEEPING ZONE
and had arrows pointing every which way. The street seemed less chaotic, and a short line of men waited at the door.

“Do you have some money?”

“Enough for a while I think.”

“Do you really think this is the way to share their experience? I don't think you're equipped.”

The boy seemed to summon his equanimity back from some deep reservoir.
“They
don't have any choice. I have to try.”

H
E
caught up with Mike Lewis at the channel end of Fish Harbor in San Pedro, where he was dangling his short legs over the gunwales of a ratty old shrimper named
The Great Regret
that rode the swells off a container ship that was just beating its heavy way out the channel. Lewis was an L.A. social historian, with a specialty in where the bodies were buried. He'd had a vogue for a time after a book of his had unburied a few choice local bodies, but then had fallen out of the public eye and ended up teaching a few courses here and there at small art colleges where the deans weren't particularly sensitive.

“Nice car, Jack,” Mike Lewis said.

“I'm running a scientific experiment on the strength of sheet plastic.”

“Nice hair, too.”

“That's a longer story.”

Mike Lewis did something businesslike with the valve of his scuba gear and set it aside just as a weathered old sailor came on deck from below. His skin looked pocked and unhealthy and he grinned at Mike.

“Jack Liffey. Dusko Marrot.”

“Hey.”

The container ship hooted as it rounded the end of Terminal Island, and the old man sat nimbly on a hatch. He dug out a Popeye corncob pipe and lit it as Jack Liffey stumbled aboard with his landlubbers' legs.

“How does Mike get you to take him out diving?”

The old man thought about it awhile, scratching his leathery neck. “He save my boy's bacon,” he said finally.

Another Mike Lewis story, Jack Liffey thought. There were a lot of them, and he didn't really have room for any more. The last time around someone had told him how Mike had been desperate to find out which bureaucrat the L.A. School Board was grilling in closed session over a leak about one of the many district breakup schemes that percolated up out of the whiter reaches of the Valley. So Mike had phoned in a bomb threat and then videotaped everyone scurrying out of the big gray building above Grand Street.

“So I will do the world for him.” The old sailor subsided, and they all seemed to endorse his reticence, though probably for different reasons. Mike Lewis never talked about what it was he expected to find down in the channel bed between Catalina and the shore, but whatever it was, it was probably there.

A sudden breeze swept across the boat and caught his car where he'd parked behind a mountain of seine netting, and they watched the plastic on his windows flash and ripple in the sun.

“Dusko used to be a Yugoslav,” Mike Lewis said. “Then he was a Serb for a while, until he got fed up with what they were doing.”

The old man puffed a bit, a kind of European huff of contempt, like steam leaking from a pot. “Not just in Bosnia neither,” he said. “Right here in town, too. Throwing pipe bombs and calling names, 'You fascist Eustache Croat bastard.' ‘You commie Serb baby-killer bastard.' Guys been friends for forty years, they eat at Ante's every Tuesday, their kids play football at San Pedro High together, it's all so moron. It makes you want to bring Tito back. For a little peace, I would even drive a Yugo.”

“Don't go overboard.”

Jack Liffey wondered how Milo Mardesich fit into the Balkan feuds. It was a Yugoslav name of some variety, but he seemed so far removed from it all, with his engineering degree and his home up in the mongrel suburban vastness of the Valley. He tried to imagine his own Irish heritage catching him up in the same way, reduced to feuding with some Scots-Irish Presbyterian in his condo complex over what was going on in Northern Ireland, but it was too ridiculous. It would be like fighting over TV shows or the size of the cuffs on your pants.

“I sponsor a petition. We got the Jugoslavian Club in town, you know, with the
J,
and I know we can't use that name no more and I say, ‘Let's make it the Dalmatian Club, we all from the Dalmatian Peninsula,' but then Disney make the damn movie and we all suddenly damn spotted dogs.”

Mike Lewis laughed. “What are you now? Adriatics?”

“I'm a southern Slav, but I don't know. It's all too moron.”

“This guy might not be all that magnanimous,” Mike Lewis explained. “Most of the other ‘southern Slavs' in town here are Croats, from the fishing coast around Zadar and Pag, and he's an inland Serb and distinctly in the minority.”

Dusko Marrot waved the pipe and hissed contemptuously. “This hatred goes across the ocean by magic waves. It's in the air. It sneaks into brains like virus and these little bitty brains swell up like a blister. Somebody say one word, ‘blubba-blubba,' and the blister burst open, and the virus fly out and look for enemies.”

“That's two words, blubba-blubba,” Mike Lewis corrected.

The man shrugged. He seemed to have talked himself out on the disturbing topic for the moment.

“Corruption's two words, too,” Jack Liffey said. “Cor. Ruption.”

Mike Lewis frowned and turned toward him, and Jack Liffey could see him coming into focus. It was the kind of word that did that to him. Mike Lewis smiled a kind of feral smile. “You look like a man with a question.”