Terminal Island (18 page)

Dec 21 Late

Nemesis indeed. He is not a stupid man, but he is not self-contained, as a warrior must be. He has little capacity for stillness. He talks far too much. And he speaks more from the mouth and head, not the belly. Doesn't understand that something that is not done in this instant will never be done.

Yet there was something in him that made me wary, something that may prove formidable. He believes he has a moral code.

Fifteen

Duels

“So, the seascape is back,” Jack Liffey observed.

The anxiety-inducing abstract painting was gone from the far wall, and the badly executed beach scene had returned to its accustomed place.

“Was that other one one of those novelty paintings done by a chimpanzee?”

But Dicky Auslander wouldn't be drawn. “Have a seat, Jack.”

The potted plant was about a foot farther away from the short sofa now, so he didn't have to duck under it. Thanks for small favors, he thought.

“How have you been?”

“Fine.”

“Anxiety?”

“From time to time, mostly in the middle of the night. I take one of the tranqs when I have to.”

“Everything okay with Rebecca?” he asked lightly.

“Sure.”

Auslander looked skeptical. “She called me this morning,” he said with a studied neutrality.

“Am I supposed to mail the key back to her?”

“She was just worried about you. Apparently your job redounded on her some.”

“Redounded?
You've been doing those ‘Word Power' things in
Reader's Digest
again.”

“Transferred some of its effects to her.”

“I know what it
means,
Dicky. I think Becky's pretty much decided to live in a safer universe than I offer. I must admit her house is badly trashed—quite a substantial redound, in fact—and it did result from my job. A couple of valuable paintings were wrecked, too. Even nicer ones than that sea foam. Maeve never did really take to her, you know, and I've got to trust Maeve. She's got better instincts than me.”

Auslander made one of his puckered-up faces. “You really are kind of optimism-challenged, you know that, Jack? Don't you think you're jumping pretty quickly to the assumption that the whole relationship with Rebecca is finished?”

“Why don't you let us work that out? She dropped some pretty broad hints. What I'd like is for you to suggest to Dr. Shaheed that it's time to reinflate my left lung. I'm feeling lopsided and short of breath a lot, and I think I'd like to get back to jogging.”

“Isn't that a medical decision?”

“Not entirely. He said it also depended on getting my … how did he put it? My psyche back into trim, whatever that means. I feel pretty trim.”

“Well, you're not. I don't usually make categorical judgments, Jack. But you're a mess, and if you think your psyche is in fine trim, then you're only hiding some big problems from yourself. You're anxious to the point of detonation, your whole outlook is as brittle as a dry twig, and you're hiding everything away in a cloud of hostility.”

“You finally noticed the hostility. I was wondering if I'd have to bring in a bazooka. Dicky, I'm here only because I have to be, you know that. You give me bad marks and they yank my disability, and maybe the feds come and arrest me. I want to turn the page and get on with my life. I think I can be of use in this thing I'm involved with. I don't know if there are higher purposes in life. But this is my purpose, it's what I do. It's the best I can do, and I want to do it.”

“Are you
absolutely
sure you can handle what you're doing?” He tented his fingers in front of his chin in that self-satisfied gesture that drove Jack Liffey mad.

“Dicky, there's only one thing in life that I'm absolutely sure of. I'm absolutely sure no woman is ever going to look down in bed and say to me, ‘My, what a lovely scrotum you have.' ”

In the end, Dicky Auslander had given up and scribbled a prescription for more Ativan and sent Jack Liffey on his way. Dr. Shaheed wouldn't see him for another day, so he had to go on living with the feeling that he was unable to get a single good breath. The VW engine started right away, first twist, one of its glories. He'd had several VWs in his life, and some did while others didn't; in his experience, no amount of mechanical jiggery-pokery would transfer an engine from the one class to the other. It was very good to have some things you could count on.

On the way down La Brea he looked up at the crystal blue winter sky and saw some planes engaged in that newfangled type of skywriting—
skytyping,
he thought it was called. A rank of five planes flew side by side, and some computer mechanism linking them dot-dashed their smoke trails to spell things out fast. This one had only gotten about halfway: “You do not meet beautiful women at the Laundromat.…”

He wanted to know where the beautiful women were, then, but by the time he got home, he forgot to look up again. Loco was waiting for him at the door like a real dog, even scratching and mewling from the inside as the key was fighting its way into the lock. Jack Liffey knelt down to give him a hug. Loco seemed to have finally made the full transition from coyote to dog. He had even discovered that the patio door had been left open six inches for him, and he had deposited a neat pile of dog shit on the morning's sports section of the
Los Angeles Times
left out there for that very purpose.

“Good work,” Jack Liffey said. “I'm going to renew your contract, as they say in this town. Right now I have to thaw you some ground round in the microwave until I can get to Pet World. That work for you?” Loco studied the frost-covered Styrofoam package held out to him and didn't seem to object.

They waited in the little Echo for a while as a noisy streetsweeper pulled past on the opposite side of the road, making its scraping-a-dishpan sound. Maeve had hinted to Ornetta that her grandfather sometimes made nasty racial comments, but she definitely hadn't explained that he was actually the generalissimo of all the racists. She didn't want Ornetta spooked. Nor had Maeve suggested to her grandfather that the friend she was bringing was African American. She hoped she was doing the right thing, but she didn't see how anyone, even that crusty old man, could fail to succumb to her blood sister's winning ways.

“Look!”

Ornetta pointed along the road. It was an optical illusion: a big factory had apparently pulled up stakes and was drifting slowly through their field of view, heading for a better location. Two blocks away in the channel between San Pedro and Terminal Island, a giant container ship was skulking silently past, stacked to the heavens with bright green containers labeled “Evergreen.” It rode so low that they couldn't see the ship at all below the seawalls, only the huge rectangle of containers.

“I wonder what's in there?”

“Everything from push-up bras to Mickey Mouse telephones,” Maeve said. “I don't think we make anything in America anymore.”

Ornetta picked up a little brown bear Maeve kept on the dashboard, flipped it over to read the label, and frowned mildly. “We're still the world headquarters of stories and shit.”

Maeve smiled. “I'll bet you're right. We've got the movies and music and books and TV. My dad said once that we've ransacked the world for all their raw material in tales and legends in order to colonize the world's imagination.” She wasn't entirely sure what it meant, but it sure sounded good.

There was a deep blast of a horn from the ship, and both of them jumped a little.

“Whew, that thing got a voice on her,” Ornetta said. “I'll keep my own imagination for myself, thank you.”

Finally they got out, and Maeve put on her best brave front, leading Ornetta to the door, where she knocked softly.

“Who's there?” a gruff voice called through the door.

“It's Maeve, Granddad, and my friend. Like I said on the phone.”

“Can't be too careful these days,” he said, and they heard a chain coming loose and then a whole bunch of locks.

“Whoa, New York,” Ornetta observed. “People over there spooked just like that.”

“Grandpa had a bad experience. A burglar tied him up and destroyed all his papers and books.”

“Whoa,” Ornetta said. It had been her favorite word for a day or two, ever since her grandfather had used it on seeing their painted nails.

The door came open, and his baleful eyes stopped immediately on Ornetta's face.

“Hi, Gramps. Mr. Declan Liffey, this is my blood sister Ornetta Boyce.”

A strange little smile slowly crept into his features, as if he knew something were being put over on him. “Blood sisters, eh. Hello there, Ornetta.” He squeezed Maeve's shoulder and accepted a hug and then put a hand out to Ornetta, who shook it.

“Maeve didn't tell me she was blood sisters with a colored girl.”

Maeve started talking fast, hoping to bury the echoes of that phrase he had just used. “Yeah,” Maeve said, “we made a pact just before we had to save my dad's life.”

“I see. Come in and sit down. Can I make you some tea? Or get you Cokes?”

“Do you have Diet?” Maeve asked.

“I'm sorry, I don't.”

“Let's all have tea,” Ornetta said. “I don't get to drink it much. My grandma says she doesn't want me to have the caffeine and the tannin.”

“Do you think tannin is bad for colored people?”

Maeve cringed, but Ornetta was taking it in her stride so far.

“It's just Grandma's old-fashioned ideas. Tea's not for young folks. I think we're supposed to be having sarsaparilla or something.”

“Let's all be old folks,” he said.

Maeve was tense as a whip, but so far it seemed to be almost working out. When he left the room, Ornetta turned to catch her eye and whispered, “We got here a Simon E. Legree?”

Maeve made a skeptical face and shrugged. “I don't know.” She looked around and noticed now that all his books and papers were gone. She'd been so preoccupied with worry about the meeting she hadn't even noticed. She remembered how crowded the place had been, like the burrow of one of those compulsive hoarders you read about in the paper. “Granddad, what happened? Everything's gone.”

“Some Jap in a black bodysuit tied me down and shredded all my papers. It was twenty years' work he destroyed. I'm not sure I've got the sturdy oats to start over again.”

“That must be terrible.” Maeve had a vague idea what he'd been working on and didn't ask, but apparently he couldn't let it lie. He wasn't like that.

He clattered a bit in the kitchen, probably a teakettle. “It was a history of the white race, all the way back to the Stone Age. You got your Malcolm and your King, Ornetta. I figured I could do some of the same for us white folks.”

Ornetta's eyes got busy, and Maeve could practically see her pondering things and finally coming to a decision. Her decision seemed to involve letting things sit for the moment.

“All our history books have been written by ob-FUS-cators,” he said. “They tell you how bad slavery was, how guilty we whites should feel. They never tell you that most of the slaves were happy as clams. They had better jobs and better food than they would have had in Africa. Better health care. A chance to learn a trade.”

Maeve took Ornetta's hand hard and made a horrified face. She didn't even know what she meant by it, but she was just about ready to run screaming out of the room. Her dad had warned her.

“You think you'd like to be one of those slaves, Mr. Liffey?” Ornetta asked neutrally.

“I don't know. Some days, it seems it might be a pretty good life. No decisions to make, no worries. A lot of friends around, singing and dancing every night.”

Maeve gasped softly, but Ornetta shushed her with a big finger wag. Ornetta's face wore a fiercer aspect: she had taken over now.

“It seems to me all civilizations have risen and fallen strictly on their homogeneity,” Declan Liffey said. “That's my theory. Everybody likes to live with their own kind, even animals. Just look at your high school cafeteria. I'll bet everybody sits with their own.”

“I sit with an Armenian girl,” Maeve said defiantly, “and a Latina and a girl whose parents had to bring her away from the civil wars in Somalia. She's the most beautiful girl in Redondo High.”

Ornetta shook her head to discourage this frontal assault.

“You must be exceptional. That's not the general experience, I can assure you. Europe was lucky to have a whole string of Nordic invaders waiting in the wings to take over every time the darker peoples sneaked in from the Middle East and North Africa and caused a decline. God bless the Goths and Vandals for sweeping down from the their strongholds to revitalize the European stock.”

He strolled into the living room carrying a big tray with a teapot and three delicate teacups. “Nobody has to agree with me. I know I'm an odd man out in this liberal-dominated world, and I'm used to it, but I'm not going to lie to you.”

“It's good to know what a body thinks honestly,” Ornetta said. “Lots of folks, you're never sure.”

Maeve hoped she didn't mean her blood sister. They talked politely for a while about the schools they went to compared to what it had been like in his high school, in the late 1930s. He'd gone to two schools in the midwest, but both had been places where anyone but a Pole or a German or a Bohemian had been an outsider, even an Irishman like himself. There had been no people of color within five hundred miles.

Maeve wondered what it would be like to grow up in such a whitebread universe. It sure wouldn't equip you for dealing with differences. “Ornetta is a famous storyteller,” she blurted.

“Famous?” he said. “At your age? That's a true feat.”

“Maeve is just being kind. I had one story published in a magazine.”

“And she's been entertaining people with stories over the Internet for two years,” Maeve insisted.

“A new electronic Uncle Remus?”

“Well, he was a white man really, but he had a good heart,” Ornetta said.

The two of them watched each other for a few moments, like boxers in their corners, wondering if the other knew how to counter certain punches. Finally he offered them his wan smile, which Maeve was beginning to suspect held within it some kind of surreptitious need to feel powerful.