The Poison Sky (22 page)

“Nice to meet you, too,” Jack Liffey said.

“Have you accepted that Jesus Christ is filled with love for you?” he asked. “We approach the millennium,” he added darkly.

“You know, the zero point was pretty arbitrary. They usually reckon Jesus was born somewhere between four and six
B.C.,
so I figure we've already survived the millennium.”

“The Bible does not make
mistakes.”

“I didn't realize the Gregorian calendar was referenced in the Bible.”

A tiny breeze of puzzlement wafted over the man and then vanished as a door slammed shut to return his mind to its accustomed stasis. The heathen sitting on the floor winked out of existence for him, and he lugged his ponderous attention back to Marlena, who was slipping guiltily out of the storage closet, carrying a ream of paper.

“Hello, Father Paul.”

Jack Liffey remembered her telling him that she had been raised in some fundamentalist sect, and she had toyed recently with another one. It was a mistake to think all Latinos were Catholics, particularly since Protestants had made such inroads in Central America. L.A. was full of Templos de Nazarenos Evangelicos de Ultimas Dias and the like.

“The smoke from the bottomless pit that blots out the sun in Revelations eight is every false doctrine that obscures the light of the Gospel. The barn door is still standing open.”

Jack Liffey wondered if that was the one they would lock after the horse escaped, but he decided not to ask. “I'll see you later, Mar.”

Her eyes looked a little desperate. “Call me, Jack.”

He nodded and went out into ovenlike stifling heat and then upstairs to his office. Somebody had shoved a flyer under the door for a local Festival of Recycling Household Waste. It seemed an unlikely subject for a festival. The faltering answering machine winked at him and then played back so slowly he couldn't recognize her voice at first.

“Jack, pleeeease give me a caaaall when you get in. I neeeed to apologize and I neeeeed to tell you sommmmething Milo said to me. Heeee's back at work nowwww. They put him onnnnnn swing, from threeee to midnight. I'll try your hoooome, too.”

It was Faye, her voice so distorted that he couldn't make out the emotional undertow, but he got her machine when he called right back. He guessed she had just stepped out for a bit and he decided on a whim to drive up there. He still needed to tell her about Jimmy anyway, and he hated doing things like that over the telephone. In fact, he hated doing any business over the telephone since you couldn't gauge the feelings of the person you were talking to. He needed that edge.

C
OPS
were stopping traffic along Venice for a parade of gaudy gold-and-red wagons drawn by horses. Banners and flags hung over the wagons like the trappings of a gypsy army. Crowds of young people with tambourines and orange robes danced on some of the wagons and with a twinge of irritation Jack Liffey realized he was being held up by the Hare Krishnas on one of their pilgrimages from their Culver City parking lot to Venice Beach to feed the homeless.

All at once a group of dancers ducked as one, and a girl pointed excitedly up into the air. He squinted and looked where they were all looking, and at last he made out a model airplane and then, not far from his car, he noticed the grinning twelve-year-olds with the radio control unit. The plane banked over his car with a ratchety fizz and then dived to buzz the dancers again. As it rose for another pass, a cop spotted the boys and started in their direction. They laughed wickedly and took off.

Jack Liffey gave them a V with his fingers out the window, but he doubted whether they saw it. It was nice to know he wasn't the only person in L.A. who wasn't on some sort of holy road.

S
HE
was out on her patio staring mournfully at a wilted red impatiens in a clay pot. “They're so sensitive,” she said. “Hi, Jack. Unlike me, I mean. I never wilt, I just get angry. I've done that all my life and it's always cost me.”

For a moment he wondered if she was going to smash the plant down on the brick patio for thwarting her wish that it be healthy, but then she blew softly on the leaves and set it back on the little iron tea trolley with the other plants. She was wearing jeans and a work shirt, which made her look like someone who'd found a bit of comfort in herself.

“Sometimes it costs more when you don't get mad,” he said. “It's probably just a question of deciding which time is which.”

She stared out at the ivy-covered embankment at the back of her yard. “It's hard to believe the universe is expanding, isn't it?”

He laughed and she smiled finally, but there was no humor in her, only tension. “I'm glad you came. I'm sorry I was such an embarrassment the last time. I'll be good, I promise. I'm all under control. Can I get you some lemonade?”

“I don't think so.”

There was a rustle in the ivy and an opossum waddled out onto the grass, looked them over carefully, and then waddled away as if deciding they didn't measure up. It was like a dismissal by some alternate reality. The animal lumbered back into the ivy and crackled there for a while and a couple of neighboring dogs started up. She winced when a leaf blower came on like a chain saw next door.

She turned and met his eyes but he had no idea what her look meant. “Milo is back on the job, believe it or not, straight from his hospital bed. He called and said the tank truck is coming this evening at seven. He wants us to follow it so we can back up his story about the dumping.”

“Actually, I was hired to find your son and I did. I'm off the clock now.”

“I don't think this was ever just about finding Jimmy. I need to put my family back together.” She thought for a moment. “You know, Milo actually asked for my help.”

“These guys aren't juvenile delinquents, Faye. I think they're the guys who sabotaged my steering. They're the kind of guys who see a big federal building and right away think of dynamite.”

The way her hands were fidgeting against one another, it didn't look like he was going to be able to tell her about Jimmy's slumming this trip either. A cat yowled once and came over the fence and then hightailed across the yard. The cat stopped suddenly near a stunted cherry tree and snarled at it, and Faye scowled after the animal. “I don't really care what I'm facing, Jack. Something tells me this is just about my last chance to do my duty for my family and I'm going to do it, with you or without you.”

A mockingbird fluttered up out of the tree, squawked horribly, and then did a dive-bomb run that sent the cat over on its back in self-defense. Faye Mardesich made a little run after the bird and cat and stamped her feet until they both fled. When her voice came, it was shrill and tense, ready to break through a crust into another register altogether. “One more distraction and I'm going to kill something! I swear it!”

It was good she had her anger under control, he thought.

She put her hands on her hips and looked up at the heavens for a moment. Then she slogged back to the patio, and he saw that he would either have to go with her on her crusade or tie her down to prevent her. He felt trapped. There was this limitless obligation to a code that was always there, like a relentless fate, and he could see it would carry him across a lot of life's boundaries whether he acknowledged it or not. His life was a story that was only allowed to unfold along a single path. What if he cut the thread? he thought. What if he veered off in some arc he had never taken before? Walk away from this and let her drive into danger alone.

“Let's do it,” he said.

There were two hours until the appointed arrival of the waste truck at GreenWorld, but neither of them wanted to hang around her house. Out front she came to a halt when she saw his car, the sheet plastic rippling lightly in the hot wind. “I'm not riding in that. I'll drive.” She led him to a good square Volvo station wagon and then drove to a coffee shop called Deep Shaft Miners. Every coffee shop in L.A. had to have a theme, and he was worried a bit about double entendres with this one until it turned out to be literal. They went in through a mine adit, complete with timber shoring, and sat in a brown plastic booth under crossed pickaxes and headlamp helmets as the place filled up for early supper and he ordered apple pie and coffee. She stared for a long time at the menu and then ordered fried zucchini strips and fried shoestring onions. “I feel like picking at things,” she explained.

Across the aisle, a teenage boy had his hand discreetly under the skirt of a girl with an old-fashioned pageboy haircut and a dreamy look. They thought they couldn't be seen.

A sad-looking woman came up and left Jack Liffey a little card explaining the American Sign Language alphabet and then moved silently on. He put a dollar bill in its place and wondered if the manager would catch her before she got back for it. He noticed that
K
would make a pretty serviceable fuck-you in England and
T
would do fine everywhere else in Europe.

“Did you ever have a clue how your life would turn out?” she said, and the burden of dejection was still there.

He was beginning to work himself down into the attitude where you just longed to get the next few hours over with. He liked Faye Mardesich well enough, when she was under control, but he didn't want to deal with the bounty hunters and a nervous breakdown at the same time. The girl with the hand up her skirt gasped once faintly.

“I don't think it's turned out yet,” he said. But it hadn't really been a question.

“I'll tell you, I never thought I'd be a grumpy frumpy housewife, and if I ever did entertain even the vague suspicion that was what lay in store for me around the big corner, I certainly wouldn't have imagined such a hideously dysfunctional family. It's like being caught up in a soap opera that's so bad you know it'll be canceled in midseason.”

She clacked her teeth once, like a dog snapping at flies.

“There was always something a bit dangerous waiting outside my window, something that offered a whole lot more, and I never seized it. I wanted to conquer worlds and I moved to Van Nuys. I wanted to do something that mattered, I wanted to be excited and challenged. I heard the call and I didn't go. You can't blame anyone but yourself for that.”

Now and again he was hearing a little sound that he couldn't identify, a pop, like a cork coming out of a tiny bottle. He looked casually around but all he saw was a dozen busy families and the young couple across the aisle who were pretending they were there to eat hamburgers.

The food came and he didn't have to look very close at the limp battered zucchini to decline her offer.

“I dreamed last night I was trying to write a letter and every time I tipped the paper up the words would come loose and slide off the page. My car was lost in a huge parking lot. Milo didn't know who I was. Some other boyfriend was laughing at me. And every time I tried to dance, I slipped on a wet spot.”

He heard the little pop again. This time he waited a half minute and then dropped his napkin. In turning to pick it up, Jack Liffey caught the eye of a ten-year-old boy two booths away who was shielding a soda straw in the crook of his arm, aiming it at the teenage couple. Jack Liffey wasn't the only one in the room who'd noticed what was going on. The boy stuck his tongue out at him, then put his mouth to the straw and fired a spit wad into the wall just over the heads of the couple. They were oblivious.

“Life is so
gruesome.
It's full of ridiculous people doing awful things to other ridiculous people.”

“You could say that,” he agreed. “But with the right perspective, it can all be pretty funny.”

But she had an unstoppable urge toward misfortune. “You know, it's not so crazy I feel this way right now, now that Milo's back and Jimmy's been found. I've noticed that when you've been sick a long time and the fever finally breaks—it's right then that things start looking grim. You've been looking forward to feeling good for so long and you think it'll be the answer to everything, and then the fever does lift, and you're face-to-face with the fact that the
real
problem is you're unhappy …”

A spitball hit the side of the booth and ricocheted across the floor. The girl in the pageboy was sucking in little breaths, and he resisted the temptation to tell Faye that what she needed was a little of what the girl was having. In fact, what she needed was to learn how to cut her losses, but he'd noticed long ago that women had a hard time doing that. It was probably a good thing for the race but it was hard on the individual case.

Faye dabbed at her eye where a tear had formed. “I'm sorry. I know I'm doing this to myself. My hour is up, doc.”

“I'm sorry I'm not more help,” he said. “You need to talk to somebody who knows how to deal with unhappiness.”

“A therapist?”

“Why not?”

“It's so humiliating.”

“Oww!”

The girl with the pageboy wrenched around in the booth, rubbing the back of her neck, but she was too late to catch the boy. She readjusted her skirt and she and her boyfriend both got up and left their untouched cheeseburgers. He tried to imagine being that age again and unable to wait even a few minutes for a little grope and tickle.

What he remembered instead were those first years with Kathy, when he was desperate to give her a life so rapturous and satisfying that everything in it would remind her of him. He knew now that a feeling like that could only be a sign that something underneath was wrong, that his own insecurities were seeding trouble left and right, slow-acting poisons, but everything had seemed to be scudding along so happily that he hadn't noticed.

He watched Faye take a pill and he hoped it was a tranq but he didn't ask.

“At least I can domesticate the pain,” she said to no one.

T
HEY
were parked in front of a big offset printing factory that was still operating. The printing plant took up both sides of the street, and now and then forklifts trundled across the road in front of them loaded with big rolls of paper or pallets of cardboard cartons that glowed in a peculiar orange light from the sun that was going down behind the car. They had a perfect view of the front of GreenWorld Chemical two blocks away. She said it was Milo in the guard shack, though you couldn't have proved it by him. The BMW 750 was still there by the door. Faye had calmed down and seemed to be on task. Better living through chemistry, he thought.