On the Nickel (11 page)

His whole body moved fretfully now, foot to foot. All she could think was that this was some poor puppy who'd been kicked badly when he was little. And for some reason she still had an urge to try to save even the worst of the lost ones. ‘I don't know what you want me to say, sir. Your manner is scaring me.'

‘I want you to say the truth. Your very own dumb ideas of the truth.' He brought a switchblade knife out of his pants pocket and her neck prickled as he held it up between them and snicked it open. ‘This is my truth.'

It made her too terrified to move, and then angry that he'd do this to her. ‘Why is a weapon the truth to you? If I had a gun, I could hurt you even more, and it wouldn't change anything about me or you.' For the first time in her life, she actually considered the idea of getting a little gun. Just for men like this.

He grinned and let the knife sag. ‘Oh, it wouldn't change anything, you say?' he said. ‘How you forget about Indiana Jones pulling out his big pistol against all them waving swords on the bridge. Life is all about relations of power, sugar. Having the most pow'ful weapon is what wins ever' time.'

‘No!' she said with determination. She grasped for an idea that had come to her but was so easily dispelled she almost couldn't hold onto it. ‘Life is about holding out a hand of help. Good people do it for anyone who needs it. You need it, too.' She didn't actually hold out a hand – wouldn't that be insane? – but it made her wonder how sincere she was. The idea made him cock his head in a strange way.

‘They tell me I'm a sociopath, missy,' he said. ‘Psychopath, they used to call it. My juvie counselor said so over and overtimes. That means they should have strangled me at birth.'

‘No,' Maeve insisted. ‘No one on earth is hopeless.'

‘Get away from that girl, you Satan!' The strawberry woman at the shelter had come out the gate, and she began yelling back toward the shelter for help.

The man's eyes went to the woman for just a moment, as if to fix her in memory for the future, and then back to Maeve. Something strange happened within his eyes, and then he laughed and drove the knife hard an inch or two into his upper thigh.

Maeve gasped.

‘We decide what hurts us,' he said. ‘And what doesn't.' He yanked the knife out and walked away without delay, not even limping.

I
t's lucky you're not a horse,
Jack Liffey thought, looking down at Loco basking in a trapezoid of winter sun in the back yard. They shoot horses, so they say. The dog had worn one of those plastic lampshades for a while to keep him from gnawing at his leg stitches, but that was before the chemo had killed his appetite, even for chomping on himself. Now the ordeal was over, and he was getting his relish for some foods back, even sampling dry food, which he would never touch before.

Staring at the dog lying there lazily, experiencing a pang of affection, Jack Liffey had what he knew was a meaningless premonition that Loco would die in the near future, despite all of the – what did they call it? – heroic measures. Cancer. It seemed like half the women he'd ever met had either died of it or were fighting it. Gloria had had her own bout with breast cancer just before they'd met. Breast cancer was the plague of our time, he thought. Aside from AIDS, of course. He was a gimp now himself. When you got stuck in disability thinking, everything in the world seemed to suggest disease.

The phone rang in the house and brought him alert as he heard Gloria answer it. Your other senses were supposed to sharpen to make up for the missing ones, and he was doing his best to listen for nuance these days. But the voice was coming through too many walls where his chair sat above the top step of the porch. Before long she brought the cordless out with her, pressing the speaking end to her thigh to suggest confidentiality.

‘I think it's time you know about this, Jack.'

No worry about nuance here, he thought, as he nodded pensively. Maeve was eloping? The police were sending Gloria to New York? His health insurance had been canceled?

‘It's your old friend Mike Lewis. Get out your pad and I'll translate.' She brought the phone up to her ear. ‘Mike, I'll let you talk directly to Jack, then he'll give me a signal, and I'll read you what he writes back. It'll take some patience. Does that dog hunt for you?'

Jack Liffey could just hear the reply, the voice of a tiny man in a bottle. ‘Of course. I love Jack. Don't tell me this has all been Maeve's doing?'

‘Jack hasn't been in the picture, I'm afraid. You get to start from Go.'

She handed him the phone, and he listened, as Mike Lewis told him that his sixteen-year-old son Conor had been missing for about five days now, presumed headed for Hollywood, a bit peeved and rebellious, to try his chances at the music business. A few days ago, Mike said, he'd thought he was relaying this message to Jack through Maeve, but apparently that wasn't quite the case. He should have suspected.

‘Ack-ack!'

Gloria grabbed the phone away. ‘Write,
pendejo.
Stop that
acking.
Mike, I'll tell you in a minute what he's scribbling furiously right now, but you can probably guess some of it. She's a headstrong girl and I'm sure she meant well, trying to spur Jack into action.'

‘There really shouldn't be any danger,' Mike said. ‘It's not like Conor stole the family Porsche, or joined some death cult out in the desert. He's a pretty sensible guy, but he does have an empathy overload that tends to draw him to three-legged cats.'

‘Then he'll get along fine with Maeve.'

‘Incoming,' Gloria announced on the phone. She pursed her lips as she read over the reproach in the first sentence, directed at herself, then read out the rest, word-for-word. ‘Over,' she said evenly.

‘Jack, I'm really sorry,' Mike said. Jack had the receiver, but she could hear the tiny voice clearly. ‘She said she was going to tell you about it and you couldn't really talk right then, but she said you were getting better and you'd love an easy job to get you going again.' Mike Lewis told him as much as he could remember, including the fact that he'd faxed Maeve the photo and other information about Conor.

Jack Liffey rapped the phone on his forehead in frustration, then handed it back to Gloria and went off into scribbling at a white heat again.

‘Me again, Mike. How's your wife taking it?'

‘Pretty hard. She's his stepmom and that's more hurtful, somehow, but I cooked up my own wild oats when I was his age, and I think he's going to be fine. His aren't really that wild at all, if I'm right.'

‘It's a rougher world than ours was,' Gloria said. ‘The city parks where I ran barefoot long into the dark, you'll stab yourself to death on used syringes now.'

‘Yeah, somewhere deep in the funhouse they're making the children give up their innocence. I think we had a window of about fifteen years after World War Two that were different from everything that came before or after. That whole cohort of dads came home hating what they'd seen in the Depression and the war and wanting to make a protected world for their kids. And they damn well did their best – as long as you weren't black, of course, or some other kind of outsider. It was a model railroad and Erector Set kind of world for a long time, the Fifties and most of the early Sixties.'

She couldn't help thinking of her first lover, the cop Ken Steelyard, and the huge model train layout he'd worked on for thirty years in his basement in San Pedro. He never acknowledged it, but part of his pleasure had obviously been playing God over that tiny little world that he could still control, the Twin Peaks and Western Railroad in imaginary Colorado.

She felt a tug at her skirt.

Gloria read it off, and Mike talked to him once more, mainly apologizing for not guessing what was going on. Jack Liffey just handed her the phone and nodded, and she talked to Mike a little – she'd never met him in person but what she'd heard she liked – and she said goodbye for Jack and then endured his angry glare for a while.

‘I was about to check up on her, Jack. I think Mike is right. There's no real danger, and she's got to try this business on her own for a while. She idolizes you so much that if she doesn't find out how boring and shitty your job is, she'll never even go away to college.'

He wrote three words: CHECK UP NOW!

She thought for a moment about how exhausted she was but then nodded. For the first time, she felt a bit of remorse. ‘OK, I should have rode her harder. Let's make a trade. Can I get a psych therapist in to start working on you?'

He shook his head angrily. They both knew that getting him to accept mental help was like pulling teeth without anesthetic.

Jack Liffey thought he detected a hint of amusement on Gloria's face, and he felt overwhelmed by things, unable to check up on them, exiled to his customary inner prison, paralyzed and mute. He was deprived of so many simple faculties, basically reduced to a jellyfish in a chair. Maybe it was time to treat it all as a joke, he thought. Nothing more tragic and existential than that.

‘Ak-ak.'

‘Oh, Jackie. I do love you.' Gloria ruffled his hair.

I'm not a cat,
he thought.
Though I shouldn't mind, I guess.
A cat was a remarkable being, a castaway from some other world – bred down over millennia to be something quite unlike its hunter-killer species-being, yet still disdainful, still authentic in some way. Proud and fierce – despite being relegated to a fondle-object and stuck with some ludicrous name. Mieumieu, Booties, Annie Oakley, Griddlebone, and so much worse.

Art Castro was the only person he'd ever let use the revolting nickname Jackie (except Gloria, now), and he'd had to grit his teeth at it sometimes. Something about them both demanded indulgence to their foibles. Perhaps a general sense of desolation about them – a life interrupted by something and never properly restarted.

Which led him to tell himself to stop whining. He still had his sight, his hearing, his touch, some of the function of his dick, and all his taste buds. To assuage the other losses he began to hanker after spicy sausage, an old indulgence. A gift to his body. He'd have to get Gloria to buy some dry Genoa salami, some German liverwurst, Argentine Chorizo, Chinese
lap cheong,
even that South African stuff,
boerewors.
His mouth was watering already. Was this the way the devil worked to distract you?

It was only a few blocks to the big downtown library with its pointy tile tower where scores of the homeless – fairly smelly, having splash-washed in the public bathrooms – snoozed over the comfy chairs. Maeve spent several hours there, killing time by looking at a huge photo exhibit of street pictures of Broadway, which was now a part of Latin America, with all its old-time department stores and movie palaces turned into Swap Meets, a term that had just come to mean a collection of small shops. Then she did some research on G-8 summits for her International Relations class so she didn't feel like a total truant, and she helped an incredibly timid Japanese tourist find the section of Japanese books. He bowed and thanked her profusely in words she couldn't understand.

In late afternoon she emerged to find two helicopters circling low overhead with their blinding searchlights illuminating the block where she'd parked. She waited back in the shadows as sirens wailed and police cars came on so fast from so many directions that they almost collided. At the far end of the block a dark-skinned man wearing the top of a pink bunny suit was waving a shotgun in the air and shouting.

A cop came up from behind Maeve, unnoticed, and shoved her face hard against a building, then pushed her into an alcove.

‘That wasn't necessary,' she complained. Why did they always need to hurt?

‘Shut up. Stay there.'

She clearly heard her dad's voice in her head, insisting that there was almost never a point to antagonizing a policeman. She decided, for once, to follow the advice she seemed to carry around now that she didn't have his real voice in her life any more. The cop had his pistol out, but there were plenty of officers down near the pink bunny so this one seemed to take it as his primary responsibility to bully Maeve.

‘Don't move!'

She had yanked her head around to see.

‘The children! The children!' the bunny man seemed to be howling.

She could see one officer near the bunny man go down on a knee with a strange gadget like a salad shooter in his hand. The device jerked upward a little, and the pink bunny screamed and fired his shotgun high into the air. Maeve winced, expecting return fire, but miraculously they all held off as the shotgun fell to the ground, and the man in the bunny suit collapsed like a sack of old bricks.

‘Moke is down and clear,' her cop said, touching a microphone pinned to his chest.

Squawk.

Maeve sat down in the alcove and encircled her knees to suggest she was no danger to anybody, and he finally wagged a finger once at her and moved off toward the ruckus to get his share of whatever glory was going. Luckily her car was parked nearby. She waited a minute or two, then walked very slowly toward it and then very slowly drove away in the opposite direction. She wondered if she'd just seen a Taser in action. They said it was better than getting shot, but they also said it had killed more than 150 people. It disturbed her personally ever since she'd found out her dad had been water-boarded six months back, another sort of high-concept demonstration of official bullying. All legal, apparently, under the Patriot Act.

She felt a little trembly – that kind of treatment disturbed her deep down – but drove back to the Catholic Liberation shelter in the waning light, past scores of men drifting along the roadway or sitting on the curbs. A different black woman let her in the gate, the heavyset woman she'd seen at night when she'd dropped off Felice and Milie. She settled back down on to her folding chair, breathing a little hard, as if just getting up had been a chore.

‘Your friends done came back.'

‘Felice and Millie?'

‘Yeah. They be pretty upset. The little squirrelly cat with the N'awlins voice, he be hittin' on Felice most all they whole walk home.'

‘You know him?'

‘I seen him some. He seem to think the shelter his personal ho' junction.'

‘Can't you do anything?'

‘Sister dimed him once, but you know the cops, they make a face and take down your words – maybe – but they don't stay round. We need a really tough armed guard.'

‘You look pretty tough. I'm sorry, I don't know your name.'

‘Kenisha Duncan.'

‘Mrs. Duncan, I'll bet you scare that little funny-eyed man more than you think.'

She smiled. ‘He scare
me,
girl. He best scare you. They's long ho' trains in this world dead and gone to hell ‘cause of men like that. He got the awful power of violence. You know that, don't you?'

‘I don't believe in hell but I believe in sociopaths. I guess that man likes to hurt women. And he probably only fears somebody who can hurt him.'

‘Say amen. Girl, do me a favor real quick.' Kenisha Duncan looked around furtively and saw no one at the wired windows of the shelter.

‘Course.'

‘Slip yo'self out the gate. They's a small sack on the ground just by the twisty wheel of that honey-bin.'

It couldn't be anything positive, but Maeve undertook to do it anyway. Everybody had needs that should be honored. The sun was low in the west, blocked by the wall of downtown's high-rises, but the sky was still light enough out not to be too frightening. She found the paper sack right away behind the overstuffed dumpster and could tell by feel that it contained one of those flat bottles of booze. She didn't look, feeling it would violate the woman's trust. Kenisha had two long slugs of whatever it was, and then she had Maeve put the bag back at the front caster of the dumpster.