On the Nickel (6 page)

I'll have a little of that,
Jack Liffey thought,
whatever it is. It must be good to escape contingency for a while.

Gloria held the control lever down to send the power-lift of the van grumbling down to the curb, and when it stopped Jack Liffey unhooked all the shock cords and wheeled himself off the shelf. She carried the bags of food and he fought his rubber wheels across the ragged Bermuda grass of Greenwood Park toward a picnic table that didn't look too hacked up with carved graffiti. Across the way, young wannabe gangsters were sitting in the baseball bleachers passing around a slim dark Sherman, probably laced with something, and punching shoulders playfully.

‘You know, I could get used to doing all the talking,' Gloria said as she started to dig into the food bags for their picnic. ‘It's a little creepy sometimes when you nod and smile like crazy, but I think I could just go on yakking for years – it suits me well. When I run out of cop stories, I'll tell you all those yarns from my aunt up in Owens. Paiute nonsense about how the gods hide themselves inside animals and rocks and trees. I wonder if there's some shaggy little god hiding out in Loco?' She laughed.

REALLY WORRIED ABOUT MV SORRY.

He smiled tightly and showed her the notepad.

‘Aw, shit, Jack. Give it a break, please.'

He shook his head as she started to set out burritos and chips and salsa.

‘Remember that bushido guy? It was when we first met? The guy that killed Ken Steelyard and almost killed us. I never forget that he said the secret to being a great warrior was deciding you were already dead. I don't mean Maeve's dead, but there's something to just relaxing into what's inevitable, OK? What she's doing she's doing. It's already a happening thing. And your fatherly concern ain't going to undo a bit of it. You got to decide she's running with the native sense you taught her and won't do stuff too stupid. And I promise I'll do what I can to watch over her.'

He nodded his thanks, but he was obviously still fretful.

‘I probably shouldn't tell you this. I caught her with those business cards off her computer again:
Liffey and Liffey, Investigations,
with the big stupid eyeball from some old black-and-white movie.' She smiled. ‘But I really think she's safer than if she was trying to protect herself in a suit of armor. I got a cop on her – though I know it worries you.'

EXPLODING WITH FRUSTRATION.

She reached over to press a strong hand on his arm. ‘I get it, Jack. You're the original guard-all-the-gates dad, but I think that time's probably about over. Get with the new program. For right now, you get to park in the gimp spaces and let others help you out.'

‘Ak, ak!'

‘Come on, lighten up. The salsa is the fresca kind you like. I made it with lime juice. You can still enjoy your senses.'

He ate a few chips, scooping up the terrific homemade salsa, and then gave in to his worried nature again and wrote painstakingly.

WHAT'S UP WITH MIKE LEWIS' SON? I KNOW MIKE CALLED IS MV LOOKING FOR HIM?

‘So you know about that. You've got a sixth and a seventh sense, don't you, Jackie? Like Loco.' They both looked over at the rented van, but despite the front door standing open, Loco was sound asleep on the front floor mat. He usually went pretty far under when he slept these days, either still recovering from the last of the chemo – or dying. Damn, he'd thought it.

ARGH! HAVE TO PROTECT MV.

‘And we will, Jack. I promise. But your love is kind of a one-note fortune-teller of loss, it's so gloomy. You know that?'

There was an outcry from the bleachers, but it didn't seem serious, and when they looked over, nothing seemed amiss.

IS THAT THE GREENWOOD KLIKA?

Greenwood was the gang Maeve had been involved with.

‘Jack, Jack, use your eyes, not your fears. The oldest kid over there is about fourteen. They're taggers, wannabes. Bangers don't sit out here in the afternoon.' She knew he was thinking of Beto, the Greenwoods' leader and Maeve's Svengali.

I'M SORRY, IT'S LIKE ALL THE AIR'S BEEN SUCKED OUT OF MY BRAIN.

He wrote fast.

‘It can't be easy to lose your voice, I know. Right now, you've got to learn to lean on me,' Gloria said. ‘Lean as hard as you have to.' All she could see in his face was shadings of desperation, and it made her sad. ‘I don't have your expertise with your daughter, but I'm off shift today and tomorrow, and I'll track her for you, wherever she goes. I'm good at that.'

GOD BLESS YOU. I BLESS YOU, GL.

‘In my mind, you and that god guy are just about equally doofus. Maybe equally demanding. But there ain't no philosophers going around claiming Jack is dead.' She laughed. ‘Just don't impose any of those giant losses on me.'

He thought he saw her touch the pistol in its waistband holster at her skirt, just a brush as if for reassurance. ‘Jack, I can deal with the real world. It's my profession. I think I can even change your goddam luck for you. But don't make me deal with you losing heart. The way your fading dad does. It's too much like my own relatives.'

I HAVEN'T GOT ANY GODS FOR YOU – DARK OR LIGHT.

‘I know that. But I got a few Paiute gods left over and I may call on them. You're too fragile now to call on anybody. That's why I'm here for you.'

He almost smiled.

ONCE IN A GREAT WHILE I STILL BUY THE CATHOLIC LIBERATION NEWSPAPER. JUST TO SEE IF I CAN STILL BE TOUCHED BY PEOPLE SO DEVOTED TO THE POOR.

‘Don't do it. Leave all that touching of shit to me.'

He tried to enjoy being out in the park with Gloria in the afternoon – the wind, the noises of the kids across the way, traffic, passersby, sensations of life going on willy-nilly to punctuate his involuntary silence. It had been a strong bright day and should have filled him with self-awareness, the way that clarity tended to do, but he found he was watching what was happening around him as if it was all on TV, most of the feeling missing, his participation totally missing, except a faint rasp that he could sense now and then as air rushed through his airways. He tried to remember if tomorrow was the day the physical therapist came to give his legs and feet their range-of-motion exercises, a humiliating series of twists and tugs punctuated by such expressions as, ‘Now let's do our best to flex that pinkie – oink, oink, oink, on the way to market.' He desperately wanted his voice back, if only to bellow an insult.

Yet Gloria was a nourishing presence, he never doubted it, and after watching the physiotherapist once, she reproduced many of the same exercises, with a lot less of the boiled twaddle. Gloria was certainly trying hard for him. He wished he could turn a page and recover some sense of hope in himself. Turn to challenge that dark ogre that he felt pushing him down deep into his own body, away from the surface, away from life. He knew he needed to do something about the rage that had taken him over so completely.

A bird cried joyously overhead, and he took it for a sign. But a sign for what? Give life another try? He put everything he had into the will to move his right leg, and he may have managed a millimeter of a twitch, maybe not. He knew his attempts were not currently part of the clinical picture. If any sensation and movement returned –
if –
he had been told, it would be a glacial process, the beginnings of his real counter-revolt against the rebellious provinces, gaining a tiny tremor or a centimeter of attentive skin a day. The trench warfare of his Great War.

Gloria told him that their neighbors were reporting in now and then that they were praying for Jack, lighting candles for him at Our Lady of the Assumption. He was in no position to refuse their spiritual ministrations, and he decided to dedicate each prayer, if he heard about it, to a specific body part. Old Señora Mendoza's candles were for his left ankle. Señora Preciado's rosaries could fly into his butt where he occasionally felt a throb of sensation from the chair. If Gloria only knew a Paiute shaman, he would offer up his vocal cords to a meso-American god. A Ghost Dance – that was what he needed. To bring back his buffalo and all the dead warriors.

Maeve had had a horrible evening, frightened now and again once things got dark, despite herself. Old Hollywood was full of really dangerous people who could overtake you faster than fate. Guys with Mohawks and knives, guys with tattoos on their necks saying
Vainglory
who could hurry up behind you and tap you on the shoulder and say ‘Your turn to bend down, ho' bitch!'

She'd avoided them all – the green-haired beanpole at Hollywood and Vine and the little insinuating Asian guy at the Highland Center and even the smooth-talking business suit who'd promised her a ‘dead-easy' part in a reality TV show if she'd only have a drink with him. Nobody had even looked very closely at the photo of Conor Lewis that she held up, and she was getting a bit crestfallen about her own delusions of being a detective. It was a city of way too many millions of people – ten million or more, if you counted out to the far boundaries of habitation. What did one person matter in all that? Who could care about one sad story in that immensity of sorrow?

In shop windows she saw dozens of homemade missing person signs and thought of making one for Conor and Xeroxing up several hundred copies, but nobody seemed to be looking at the other sad pleas, either. The signs seemed about as effective as the lost-cat posters on telephone poles, or the famous milk carton photos.

Maybe the new version of these was the ubiquitous sign she had started seeing at every Freeway offramp.
Lose your accent. Speak English like a native.
She wondered who on earth those were meant for. Would-be actors? Or just Mexican laborers tired of being treated like shit?

A bare-chested man with big rings in his nipples strode toward her, muttering something that sounded like the blood of the lamb. Just as he reached her, his head snapped around to glare, and she smiled as unthreateningly as possible. ‘I
do
fear you,' he challenged. ‘It was all slick before
you
came.' And he hurried on.

An old black woman in a flowery print dress had her back to the traffic, apparently staring in the window of a T-shirt shop that specialized in Draculas and rock stars. At first Maeve was about to approach her, and then she noticed that the bulky woman was ranting softly into her fist as if it were a microphone. ‘And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having
two
feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.'

Maeve gave her a wide berth and was just about ready to give up the search on Hollywood Boulevard for the evening when she felt a tug on a fold of her shirt. It was a little girl who couldn't have been much more than nine, skinny and dirty looking, barefoot, her thin dress ragged. In her free hand she dangled a naked pink plastic doll that dragged one foot on the sidewalk.

‘Hi, honey. Can I help you?'

‘Millie needs to eat.'

‘Are you Millie?'

‘Huh-uh.' She picked up the doll, utterly without a hint of affection for it, as if it were something she had just found in the gutter.

‘Hello, Millie,' Maeve said to the doll. ‘Is your mommy hungry, too?'

‘Don't be a pill, girl. There's a place to eat right over there.' She pointed across the street to a shabby-looking diner, narrow as a shotgun shack, which was named Old-Time Movies Cafe. It was at the corner and on the side street just off Hollywood Boulevard the brick was painted with big portraits of W.C. Fields, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and John Wayne. Somebody, undoubtedly after the original artist, had painted a cartoon talk balloon out of John Wayne's sneer. It said: ‘So I walk funny. What's it to you, Pilgrim?'