The Poison Sky (31 page)

“I'm locally famous,” he owned, indicating his two Scrabble opponents. “That's plenty for me.” Outside, the interminable basketball bounced on and on as the kids from the Astaire sat on the retaining wall, chatting and dribbling, a kind of mindless fidget of conversation for so many of them. In fact, it was a basketball player who'd almost made him famous for real. A minor pro star who'd played in Chicago in the eighties and then become a small-time Hollywood producer had called him up and pestered him to death about his story. Jack Liffey had finally agreed to talk to a man the ex-point guard called “his screenwriter” about his experiences. The screenwriter, a boozy old hack with bad body odor and a plastic hand, had been sharp enough to fasten like a hawk on the possibility that Jack Liffey might have touched off the whole disaster by digging into GreenWorld's dirty work, but nothing had ever come of their talk. Thousands and thousands of dollars had been in it for him—the only reason he'd put up with the screenwriter's horrible body odor—but the money was always somewhere far down the road.

He remembered suddenly to record his score—distraction was another trait that had slipped up on him since Burbank—and he rotated the board toward Maeve. She'd been thinking for some time.

“How's that family doing?” Marlena asked.

“They're all just super-duper. The boy fell off the Holy Boy Road and decided to take himself to college at Northridge this fall. The dad taught himself Java and is making a killing designing Internet Web sites. And the mother is working for the Red Cross or something like that, caring for victims of the gas. It's another family saved from the brink of doom by the timely intervention of Jack Liffey, always standing at moral attention over the world. Wire Palladin, Culver City.”

He noticed that Marlena watched him closely whenever Faye's name came up, but he was not going to make any concessions to irrational jealousies. There had never been anything between him and Faye.

He knew that there were broader effects of the gas cloud, too, harder to articulate, difficult even to notice in the urban muddle of the world city. In a peculiar way, the disaster seemed to have burned off some of the excess religion that had lain heavily over the basin. That's the way it felt to him, anyway. The Broom Closet in North Hollywood and an ashram in Burbank had shut down for good in the wake of people who had died taking shelter within. It was like one of those borderline camel-straw-broken-back changes—just enough of a change, the ecumenical babble retreating from some critical mass of competing versions of holiness, until the city became livable again for the secular.

Maeve was making all kinds of faces at her letters, canting her head this way and that, as if the little wood tiles were purposely defying her.

“And we're all onto the next phase of our lives,” he concluded.

“I seen too many phases already,” Marlena said. “I like this one.”

“Ha!” Maeve cried. “Diet-
ician
. I'll make cheat words just like you.”

“Perfectly legal.”

He watched Maeve slap down her letters and scribble her score with triumph, and then discreetly he watched the masses shift under Marlena's blue print silk blouse as she slipped a hand in at the neck to readjust her bra straps in the heat. His mind was on her big, ultrasensitive nut-brown breasts, where it seemed to be spending a lot of its spare time lately. The idea of the ardent and affectionate lovemaking that awaited him was like a bright lantern in a dim valley.

Thut-thut,
the basketball went on and on outside, an atomic clock kept out in the condominium's courtyard by the Bureau of Standards. A yardstick for setting all the other instruments that measured the gnawing away of their minutes. In fact, a strange form of mortality had crept up on him that very morning when he'd gone to the supermarket and found people staring left and right in puzzlement. He'd ignored whatever it was, left it sizzling at the corner of his consciousness, until he went to the cornflakes and found, where the familiar yellow boxes should have been, a phalanx of Liquid Plummers. His hand had frozen in midair. The vengeful modernizers had got to the supermarket and reshelved everything following some obscure new logic. In that moment he'd had the vivid insight that knowing where things were and where they belonged was one of the very few methods of fending off death, and like all of the others, it could be taken away far too easily. He'd broken out in a cold sweat.

“Twenty-six points,” Maeve announced. She looked up and glanced from one to the other of them. “You know, since Mom went and married Butt-head, why don't
you two
get hitched?”

His eyes went to Marlena and he could see her distancing herself quickly in self-protection—the animal inside backing away from the deep brown eyeholes. Maybe it was an artifact of that insistent timekeeper that bounced away out in the courtyard, over and over, or the obits in the paper, the unsettled arrangement of the supermarket, all the rattles of mortality reminding him that there wasn't all that much time left to him, that there wouldn't be too many more brass rings drifting past, and none of them would ever be absolutely perfect.

“Sure,” he said, smiling as he watched the big earthy kindly Latina stare fretfully back at him. “Why not?”

M
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OEL

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