14

IF A FLAME DOUBTED, IT WOULD GO OUT

“YOU THINK I’M SMART ENOUGH TO DO THIS?” ROGELIO asked him. He handed Jack Liffey a matchbook that promised a rewarding and fulfilling life after fourteen weeks of General Computer Repair School. To prove it, there was a picture of a grinning youth soldering something together on his kitchen table while a young woman looked on proudly cradling a baby. The scene had everything except a beaming Ike giving his blessing.

“I think you can learn the same stuff for free at JC.”

“Not in fourteen weeks.”

“What especially makes you trust an ad on a matchbook? If you look close, that’s not even a computer he’s working on.”

Rogelio ducked under the table and fed the cables from the Mac around behind the rear panel. “I dunno. I seen it on TV, too.”

Jack Liffey took the ends of the cables where Rogelio passed them up and bundled them with the PC cables. Marlena was trying to expand her Mailboxes-R-Us into a small service bureau, and she’d bought a secondhand Mac and PC and an old laser printer, and he and Rogelio were setting them up at the back of the shop where she used to keep the mailing envelopes, notepads, and cheap pens. It was good to be able to do a favor for her for once, but he didn’t know half as much about computers as she thought he did.

“Where did you learn electronics?” Rogelio asked.

“The army taught me everything I know.” Jack Liffey stretched a thick black power cord in two clenched fists. “Men, this is a power cord. Think of it as a pipe. Think of the electrons as little PFCs like yourselves running along the pipe. Voltage is how hard the men are running. Amperage is the number of men in the pipe. Resistance is how narrow the pipe is, which forces the little men to bend over and rub their shoulders along the walls as they run.” He couldn’t quite keep up the drill-sergeant voice, and he chuckled once. “A short circuit is when the little enlisted men turn and frag their officers.”

Rogelio had picked up a gray cord and was sitting in a lotus beside the table, staring at it, as if he might actually see the little men. “Cool. What’s inductance?”

Marlena bustled in with a white tub of the day’s mail. She was wearing a tight low-cut sweater and you didn’t have to know her all that well to see she was really glowing.

“The U.S. Army does not recognize inductance. It’s not a muscular concept.”

Marlena was showing quite a bit of chest muscle. She bent a little more than she had to to set the tub down by the letter boxes, and a bright red bra under the black sweater flashed at him like a traffic light. “Rogelio, you can go on to your game now,” she said huskily.

“Thanks.”

“Jackie can finish the computers.”

He figured people for miles around could hear the endearment she varnished over his name, but if Rogelio noticed, he was keeping it to himself as he grabbed his baseball windbreaker and saluted himself out the door.

He booted up, but as usual couldn’t get the computer to find the printer. “It’s right there, dammit. I can find it. Computer, meet the printer.”

He felt her hand hot on his neck and something large and soft pressed his ear, and he had to close his eyes and swallow.

“I forget how good you are for me,” she whispered.

She went into the storeroom off to the side and left the door open. No one in the shop could see her, but she was only a few feet away from him when she pulled the neck of her sweater to the side and showed him one cup of the lacy red bra. It was semitransparent, another purchase from Victoria’s Secret, and he could make out her dusky nipple clearly. She really had her pilot light going and it was having an effect on him, too.

“Querido … querido …” she mouthed softly.

She ran one finger softly around the shape of her breast, watching him. He smiled as she mouthed more words at him. He couldn’t make out the words but it hardly mattered. She kept her eyes on him with a kind of fixed ferocity and let her hand drift south. He was beginning to wonder if he ought to reciprocate in some way when the deep male voice boomed over his shoulder.

“Do not be affrighted, my child. The cleansing that is coming soon will be great, but all who have stayed in the light and gathered up their grace shall be saved. We have not shared Communion with you recently at the barn door.”

Marlena had stiffened like a deer hit by one clean shot, then turned away as if looking for a particular box of red pens on the shelf. Jack Liffey turned to see a gaunt man in a black robe and dog collar. He had one of those Swedish beards that ran in a thin line along the rim of the jaw, framing skin so white and pasty that blue veins showed in his cheeks. It looked like the wrong face had been poked into one of those photo props you saw in carnivals, with the bodies of princesses and cowboys.

“Our Redeemer’s tears are falling upon nations as the end days draw nearer and the world will be cleansed in a baptism of fire. My child, we miss your bright face in our congregation, among the righteous.” The preacher glanced down at Jack Liffey with an unyielding dark gaze.

“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.

COPS 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.

SHE 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.

THEY 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.

Inside GreenWorld’s fenced complex, the big rusting tanks were partially obscured by a plume of steam that drifted off the louvered tower and billowed east on what little of the evening onshore wind leaked over the mountains into the Valley. A red warning light on a tangle of pipes that stuck up four stories began to flash ominously, and then up at the top of a tall thin chimney there was a flare of burning gas so bright it hurt his eyes. The flame sputtered a bit and then flared brightly again and wavered upward in a picturesque pennant like Liberty’s torch. They could hear a faint rumble on the air. Then the flashing light went out and so did the flame and, a moment later, the sound. It was as if somebody had given up on a recalcitrant cigarette lighter.

“I read somewhere that belief is very delicate,” she said. She smiled. “If a flame doubted physics for just an instant, it would go out.”

He watched as the warning light came on once more and the flame tried and failed. “I’m rooting for physics.”

A young worker in a ponytail came out of the printing plant and sat on the trunk of a Thunderbird to smoke. He rapped the cigarette on his thumbnail a few times and then fiddled with it long enough to make it clear he was adding something to the tobacco.

“Thanks for not being sanctimonious with me, Jack.” She sighed once as if gathering some kind of newfound energy. “It feels like people have been doing things for me for years and years, and I guess I’ll be all right if I just give something back.”

“It’s a plan,” he said.

A battered black tank truck came around the corner, made a wide turn as it clashed gears, and rumbled right past them. There was no name on the door and it looked like generations of chemical spills had collected on the tank itself and crusted on the piping along its flanks. It wasn’t the shiny stainless-steel truck that Milo had described, but behind the wheel he’d seen the stout bounty hunter named Schatzi. Jack Liffey’s scalp crawled and he actually ran his hand over the fuzz that had grown back. The redhead wasn’t in evidence.

He thought back to that evening in his apartment and how Schatzi had talked so much about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He wondered if Schatzi had anything to do with Marlena’s goofy millenarian priest, but L.A. was full of people who talked apocalyptic stuff like that. Every few years some group or other gave away their possessions, put on white robes, and clambered up onto the roof to wait for Jesus, or the bolt of Holy Lightning, or the Martian spacecraft, or the Black Helicopters of the Next Life. They always assumed the next deal would come out much better for them, but he figured things could always get a lot worse and it was best to play the hand you had.

“Is it …?”

“Oh yes.”

The black truck idled at the gate a moment and Milo came out to look over a sheaf of papers Schatzi dangled out the window and then he unlatched the long gate and rolled it aside. The truck stalled once and then pulled inside. Evidently, he wasn’t much of a driver. Milo stared after the truck for a while and then closed up the gate and went back into his guard shack. Nothing further happened until seven-thirty, when one of the lights went off in the long window in the office block and a small balding man in a business suit came out and got into the BMW. It was RECLAIM, he thought. He needed to have a talk with RECLAIM soon.

The last of the daylight was fading away and they took turns doing the L.A. Times crossword in the faint light from a street lamp down the road. “Three letters for salt?” she asked.

“Tar,” he said.

“Tar?”

“They’re both nicknames for sailors.”

“Oh, crud.” She threw the paper down. “That’s ghastly. It’s too dark, anyway.”

Just after eight, a stake truck full of fifty-five-gallon oil drums arrived. As the stake truck pulled inside, the black tanker reappeared around the office building. He nudged her alert behind the wheel.

“Time to rock-and-roll.”

You could tell by the way the truck rode low on its springs, and by a heavy inertia that it suggested in its starts and stops, that it was loaded to the gills now.

“Don’t start up until he’s past. He’s not going to lose us in a forty-ton tank truck.”

When the dark truck rumbled past, they could feel its weight in the ground. It was still Schatzi sitting up stiffly in the high old-fashioned cab. She gave it a long count and then did a U-turn to follow him slowly to San Fernando Boulevard, where he turned north to parallel the freeway. She missed the light and then had to wait nervously as a flagman got in front of her while half of a big church approached up a side street. Jack Liffey couldn’t believe his eyes. A nave drifted slowly across their bow, towed by a big house mover bedecked with red flags. They stared straight into the right half of an American Gothic church that seemed to have been cut down the middle, complete with stained-glass windows and blond wood pews, all lit up by their headlights. A big sheet of plastic was nailed across like the plastic that sealed his missing windows. Running behind was a truck that said WIDE LOAD.

“Let’s not wait for the other half,” he suggested.

She maneuvered her way past the church despite an angry wave out of the wide-load chase truck and caught up. The tank truck was in no hurry and Jack Liffey had already noticed that it had four distinctive red taillights, round and bolted on the bumper like something from Pep Boys, so it was easy to follow on the wide city boulevard.

The truck stayed off the 1-5 all the way to the pass, trundling slowly up what was now called the Old Road. At Newhall, Schatzi had no choice and he ground onto the freeway at about forty. They stayed well back.

“Where do you think he’s going?” she asked.

“Somewhere where we’re going to be damned conspicuous, I’ll bet. When he pulls off, I want to take over.”

She nodded grimly and he could see her knuckles white on the wheel. She was as tense as he’d ever seen her.

But in the event, the truck carried on all the way to a busy truck stop at the top of the Grapevine, where it pulled behind the gas pumps and parked between a Shell tanker and a long refrigerator truck. A sign at the edge of the lot said mysteriously DO NOT SWAT. Schatzi got out and went into the restaurant. They parked two roads away in front of a closed motorcycle repair shop, where they had a good view of the truck stop.

“How long do you think he’ll be?”

“If he’s not out in half an hour, he could be a good long time. He may be waiting for the wee hours.”

He took the driver’s seat, and Faye walked to a 7-Eleven up the road. He left the car door open and wedged his foot against the trip button to keep the dome light off. Far away he heard the distinctive slap of a screen door closing. It was the kind of taut heat on the air that carried sound a long way, and a cicada was sawing away somewhere. She came back with sandwiches in plastic tubs and coffee in Styrofoam and tore into her food hungrily.

“Do you know why Milo launched this crusade of his?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m such an emotional wreck, either, or why Jimmy’s playing Jesus. I thought we were a normal family, dealing with everything the way normal people are supposed to, and then Milo got laid off and it was like a virus falling from outer space on all of us, like a time bomb going off in our DNA. Maybe we weren’t as normal as I thought we were. Or maybe there’s a lot of families so near the edge that all it takes is a little push to send them running for cliffs like lemmings, I don’t know.” She looked away and shrugged. “You can’t really talk seriously sitting in a car.”

So he let it go.

IT was a long wait. They took turns napping and he was nearly dozing on his watch when a little jolt of guilty electricity went through him as the dark truck’s headlights came on. It was three A.M.

“Here we go, Faye.”

He followed as the truck ground onto the freeway, surprisingly turning back south toward L.A. Traffic was light, running in dots and dashes in the darkness. Trucks with onions and tomatoes bound for the big produce market, a few beat-up commute cars heading into L.A. from beyond the farthest reaches of the sprawl, loners on the last legs of their thirty-seven-hour drive from somewhere. It was a time he’d always loved to drive, private and peaceful, the hour of the super-dependable, the outcast, or the fanatic.

There was a good thirty miles of high mountain pass between the Grapevine on the north end that led steeply up from the central valley and the more gradual descent into L.A.’s San Fernando Valley on the south, and it seemed Schatzi was going to take 1-5 all the way back to L.A., but at almost the last moment he pulled slowly down a ramp and turned west. At the bottom of the ramp, Jack Liffey turned out his headlights and waited. A two-lane road led off into a desolate canyon in the foothills. There were no shops or houses, only rolling hillsides that would be yellow and dry in the day, dotted with sumac and stunted live oaks. There was just enough moonlight to make out the silvery road leading off toward the taillights of the truck that dwindled ahead.

He started up the road slowly without lights.

“Whoa.” She clung to the dashboard.

“I can see well enough.”

He followed the road very slowly as it curved gently away from the freeway. On the left was a bland hillside that rose maybe a hundred feet above the road, and on the right there was a ditch of indeterminate depth that was to be avoided at all costs. At one point the truck seemed to stop for a while and he hung back until the lights started to dwindle again.

They smelled it before there was any other clue, a rich tarry odor on the air that prickled the nose with little hints of ammonia, old photographs, and rotting citrus. When the taillights disappeared around a bend, he stopped and opened the car door. The interior light showed a damp sheen that seemed to spread out from the middle of the road. He used his ballpoint pen to poke at a tiny gob of damp tar. The pen tip came up blackened and he sniffed it and tossed the pen away.

“I don’t want to drive on this much more.”

A dirt track rose shallowly up the slope to the left and he used parking lights to take the track very slowly up to a flattened dirt pad maybe fifty feet above the road, where he parked and shut the car off. They stepped out into the bloodheat air, and from the edge of the pad he could see the truck’s taillights winding up the canyon. There were no other lights. Even far above the road his eyes smarted from the chemicals.

“I know where we are,” he said softly. “Just over this hill is Val Verde.”

“What’s that?”

“Long ago it was the only rural black community in California. They came first to work in the oil fields around here. Then, back when all the big resort towns were still segregated, they put in little cabins and it became known as the Colored Palm Springs. The only whites who even knew of it were the Communists who used to come through to leaflet.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” she admitted.

“Once they broke the color bar at Vegas and Palm Springs at the end of the 1950s, Val Verde died a pretty quick death as a resort, but there’s still a lot of poor black and brown folks amongst the yuppies looking for cheap land.”

“And that truck is poisoning their environment,” she said indignantly. “Why are they doing it?”

“Money, of course. Disposing of toxic waste the right way is expensive. I’m sure GreenWorld is making a pretty penny taking the stuff off the hands of other chemical companies.”

“Bastards.”

After a while they saw the headlights of the truck coming back down the road. “I’m surprised he’s willing to drive over his own dump site,” Jack Liffey said. “Maybe he hit a dead end he didn’t anticipate.”

“Maybe he’s just too stupid to know the danger.”

The truck ground slowly past and stopped on a wide bit of road just fifty yards away. The big man got out and smoked for a few minutes. It was Schatzi all right, still wearing his suspenders. His cough echoed clearly off the hills. Then he fiddled with some controls on the piping on the flanks of his truck and drove away.

Jack Liffey drove down to where the truck had stopped. A puddle had formed, deeper than the chemical slick that had sprayed the rest of the road, and it was slowly spreading. “Have you got anything like a container in the car?”

“There’s a quart of oil in the trunk.”

“That’s it.”

He retrieved the yellow plastic bottle from a plastic bag and let it glug itself empty into the ditch. “Of course, this is toxic waste, too.”

Holding the bottle gingerly, he scraped it across the puddle again and again to scoop up what he could, then he capped it and wrapped it carefully in the cello bag that the oil bottle had come in.

The sky in the east was just beginning to lighten as they drove down out of the San Gabriel Mountains. When he got off the freeway at Victory, the early commuters waiting at the metered entrance looked just as bleary as he felt. The first sun was just peeking out between low office buildings. She let her hand rest on his for a moment.

“Jack, we’ve just spent the night together.”

He smiled. “I hope Milo doesn’t misinterpret.”

“I’m not sure he cares enough to care.”

“I’m going to put your family back together,” he heard himself promise. It startled him and he turned to look at her and he could see she was confounded, too. It had just tumbled out of him, like a sneeze or a long-forgotten name, but it seemed like the right thing to do.