Driving down toward Playa Vista into the morning overcast, he passed a tall man strolling along Jefferson in white bucks, carrying a banjo, and he wondered if the man had fallen asleep in a time vault for thirty or fourty years. L.A. was like that. On his left bulldozers were reshaping the last open wetlands for a big new plantation of condos.
Overlooking the site was the long cliff of Westchester, the south bank of the historic floodplain of the L.A. River until a big storm in the middle of the nineteenth century had diverted the main flow south toward Long Beach to leave only Ballona Creek flowing west. Few people in L.A. noticed the natural features that were still there beneath the grid of streets—like the slope a mile north at Rose that had been the north bank of the floodplain. He had once enjoyed knowing things like that, the broken geography under the asphalt and the lost flora and fauna, it was like getting a leg up on the massive denial that the city feasted on, but he was becoming tired of knowing too many things that did him no good.
The art school where Lewis taught one day a week was a post-modern assemblage of tinkertoys and kitsch, like the leftovers from several real buildings, and he parked right in front and tried not to look at all the in-your-face ugliness. Too many opinions, he thought. You didn't need to carry them around with you. You could probably make up as much as you needed as you went along.
“Lousy overcast,” he said to the blond secretary. She eyed him suspiciously.
“I'd like to leave some stuff for Mike Lewis.”
“He shares a box with the grad R.A.s.” She nodded to a rabbit-warren of boxes against the wall. The big one marked RA‘s’—someone had taken no chances with the apostrophe—was stuffed.
“It appears to be full.”
She took a long time seconding his opinion. “You can't leave it on the counter. It's against policy to leave mail on the counter.” She broke off, as if that settled it.
“Perhaps if we put our heads together,” he said slowly, “we can come up with a solution to this problem.”
“He's not in today.” She had rheumy eyes and he wondered if she was on some kind of slow-down drug. “He's in his office tomorrow at one.”
Mommas always told you that you got farther with politeness. “Is there some way I could leave a package this size for him? Just theoretically speaking.”
“I can't take the responsibility for accepting something.”
“What if you unlock his office door and leave it on his desk?”
“I'm not authorized to do that.”
“Is there someone who can?”
“Not now.”
He had a vision of this going on forever, an endless series of cavils and quoted regulations, their hair growing out and out over the years like Einstein's until it filled every crevice of the office.
“What if I sat down here, poured gasoline over myself and lit it?”
She glared.
He left the office and circled the building. In the back corner of the small campus he found a doublewide house trailer with Custodial over the open door. Inside, a squat Latino was loading bottles and cans onto a rolling cart.
“Companero, I'm trying to leave some papers for Mike Lewis who teaches here. I'm having a little trouble with the Dragon Lady.”
There was a hint of a smile hovering at the corner of the man's lip. Jack Liffey tucked a ten-dollar bill into the packet of papers.
“Do you think you could put it in his room for me?”
The janitor looked around quickly and then tucked the packet under some rags on the bottom of the cart.
“Is this a good place to work?” Liffey asked.
The janitor shrugged. “I had my own land in El Salvador. I didn't hold my hat in my hand.”
“I hope you get your land back, senor. Gracias.”
“De nada.”
Driving away, he saw a hillock of black trash bags piled in the corner of a mini-mall and he remembered the garbage strike. Flies were already dancing in celebration. It would only get worse.
He wondered if you could equate having your own land to having a secure job with a window office and a good salary, working alongside a few people you respected, doing something you were good at and recognized for being good at. Neither one had turned out to have much of a future.
On the other side of Jefferson three cop cars were askew and two old Mustangs were stopped with their doors open, a half dozen young black men sitting handcuffed on the curb. The cop cars were LAPD and a helicopter was circling, too, in case the suspects tried to levitate. Then he noticed one man being stripped by two of the cops, a pistol to his head. He had a vision of gang rape by the police, with the rest of the city commuting past to work, pretending not to see.
The arrest scene didn't matter, not really. The black trash bags didn't matter either. The Dragon Lady in the office. The styrofoam cups fouling the concrete river. Gorillas on fire. That was the problem, letting your attention be diverted by what didn't matter, getting scared by it, fouling up your consciousness with it. The world was getting fuller and fuller of stuff that didn't matter. Maybe he could help the kid, Tony. That might be something that mattered.
He dreaded seeing the mess in his office again but he had to dig out Chris Johnson's phone number. He was a former computer hacker and phone phreak who'd turned to designing video games a half jump ahead of the techno-cops from AT&T who'd taken a dim view of his work. Two years earlier a radio station had offered an old Porsche 501 to the ninety-seventh caller and Chris had blown away their tie line and placed every call from fifty through ninety-seven, just for good measure.
The air over the city smelled sweet for some reason, like animal fodder, as he got back to his own mini-mall. Perhaps it was a leftover of the rain. He smiled at Marlena sweeping her walk as he drove past to park in back and she blew him a kiss.
His office door was standing open again and he sighed. Maybe the burglars had come back and tidied it for him. His sarcasm abandoned him abruptly when he entered and saw the man standing in the shadows in the room.
“Worst mess I ever saw sans the aid of hooch,” the man drawled. “Looks like you turpentined a couple cats in here. Jack.”
He wore a big white cowboy hat and tooled boots, but he was small and weasely and didn't seem to belong in them. His body shifted rhythmically, like a mongoose in front of a cobra. Jack Liffey tried to remember exactly where his guns were. The Dreyse was in the car and the Ballester Molina he'd taken home. He wondered if he should bolt.
“You mind telling me why you're in my office?”
“I want you to think on the last couple days, pardner.” He sat down in the swivel chair and a gray light caught his face. Something was wrong with his eyes. “Somebody brought you something, I think.”
“A black figurine,” Jack Liffey said. “A bird of some sort.”
He calculated he could be out of the room in half a second, and then he felt something hard in his back, the size of a gun and with what felt like a lot of mass. A big gun.
“We know you're smart as a cuttin' horse. Just keep still.” A hand felt expertly down his legs, up hard enough in his crotch to cause a twinge, across the small of his back and under his arms. “I know you, you done some ridin' and ropin' in the big Nam, think you can't be scared no more, but don't you believe it.”
The Cowboy swiveled back and forth in a restless way. Liffey wondered if the one behind him was the dangerous one. He was shoved all of a sudden from the side and he stumbled into a corner of the office away from the door. The other man filled the doorway, backlit so all you could see was that he was big, a feature player, but without the gaudy clothing of the other man. He carried a little Mac-11 spray gun with the 32-shot magazine. There were sure a lot of guns about.
“You've got me confused with somebody else. I scare easy.”
The Cowboy took a hand-rolled out of his shirt pocket and lit it with a wooden match. The smell was unmistakably dope. He sucked deep and held it a long time, smiling. He didn't seem very interested in talking to Jack Liffey.
The big man stooped and picked up a little battery radio and tested it. A jazz station came on and he held it away from his ear as if it had stung him.
“It's your dime,” Liffey said.
“Well, you're just right upholstered with impatience, ain't you?”
The big man found an oldies station and seemed to relax as some Stones came on, “Wild Horses.” Couldn't drag him away.
“I got stuff to do today,” Jack Liffey said. “So why don't you guys come back some other time and we'll talk about whatever you've got on your mind.” If they were going to shoot him they'd have done it.
“You sure don't use all your kindlin’ gettin’ your fire started up. I want you to know we ain't kiddin’ around here. The men we work for pay more in sales tax on a bad day than you got in the world, and you don't even cut their shadow. Fact you'd have to stand in the same place twice just to cast a shadow they could see.”
The gaudy patter annoyed him, but it didn't seem like a good time to complain about it.
“We don't care what you do with the stuff you got, we just don't care, because you don't amount to grease on a flapjack.But don't make us care.” The Cowboy took out his own pistol now, a little .32 that belonged in a purse.
The big man was behind him again and suddenly Jack Liffey's hand was wrenched behind him and then he heard the screech of cloth tearing and his wrists were being tied together with what felt like duct tape as the Stones sang on.
“We're not in this fuckin’ business to have to give the same message twice, you understand? That Spic cunt fell in the river. That's the end of it. You understand that?”
“Sure, uh-huh. I'm on top of it.”
The big man thrust his knees suddenly into the backs of Jack Liffey's knees. It was an old playground trick, but if you weren't ready for it, there was nothing you could do but go down hard. He managed to break his fall a bit by angling his weight so his hip and shoulder hit at the same time. The big man taped his ankles, then flipped him over onto his back so he lay uncomfortably on the lump of his tied hands and taped his mouth.
The Cowboy stooped and dragged the little purse automatic across Liffey's cheek like a straight razor. “You best save your breath now for breathin'. Our friend here's meaner n'a sheared sheep.”
He tore open Jack Liffey's shirt, little pearl buttons spinning away on the linoleum as the cool air hit his belly. He could see the big man's shoes, Redwing engineer boots that badly needed oil on the scuffs. The music came up loud on the radio, Jim Morrison croon-talking his way through “The End.”
Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free?
From somewhere the big man produced a writhing snake, a big diamondback rattlesnake. He held it hard behind the head so the open jaws couldn't get at his fat fingers, and he let the tail dangle over Jack Liffey's bare stomach, the rattle just grazing gooseflesh. It rattled once vigorously and then just shivered, a light grating sound like sheets of paper rubbing over one another. He could only hear it in lulls in the music.
All the children are insane, waiting for the summer rain.
“The spic cunt, she had an accident. She had cooties. Believe it.”
His body went tense and his chest arched up. The big man lowered the snake so the body wound back and forth across Jack Liffey's bare chest. His neck ached with the effort of holding his head up to see. The snake was heavy and cool, as if dead, but of course it was cold blooded.
The killer awoke before dawn. He put his boots on.
If he got any more tense he would explode. The big man lowered the snake's head and it went out of sight behind a coil. He could see up close that the diamond markings were made up of the whitened tips of diagonal rows of scales. The big man withdrew his hand gingerly and the snake writhed slightly. It seemed to be resting before making up its mind what to do, the rattle quivering.
The long throbbing bell-like organ solo started up.
“Bye now.”
He saw their feet withdraw as one of the coils of the snake flexed lightly and resettled across his belly. He wondered if its strike was always fatal or if it would just make him very sick. He remembered being told to cut crosshatches with a razor and suck out the poison, and then he remembered being told that that was no longer the conventional wisdom, that cutting crosshatches would only spread the venom more rapidly. He thought they made snakebite kits with little rubber suction cups, but it was academic because he didn't have a snakebite kit. He was sweating with the strain.
The snake rose and fell with his breathing but all its other motions seemed to damp down. Most of its weight hung to the right side of his chest and he contemplated rolling slowly in that direction to encourage a departure, but wondered if disturbing the perch would touch off a strike. The strain got to him and he let his neck fall back, but he couldn't stand not seeing for long.
Jack Liffey began to rotate his trunk to the right by infinitesimal stages. The reptile's scales did not seem to have much bite on his flesh, and when he got to forty-five degrees he could sense the snake beginning to move.
The West is the best. The West is the best.
The snake slid to the floor in a rush and Jack Liffey spun and rolled away in the opposite direction, picturing the rattler coming alert the moment it touched down and coming after him. He bucked and writhed, hit his head hard on the corner of his desk and finally wrenched his bound hands over his buttocks and brought them in front of himself for defense.
The snake hadn't moved an inch. It lay in some sort of defensive posture with its head aimed square at where Jack Liffey waited.
He ripped the tape off his mouth, then tore at the duct tape with his teeth and finally twisted his hands free, scrabbling for a weapon. A baseball bat would be perfect, but he didn't have a baseball bat. He settled for a heavy gray homemade vase one of his low-paying customers had given him in gratitude.
The snake seemed to be mesmerized, and all at once Jack Liffey got mad and threw down the vase. He got to his feet, still bound at the ankles, and hopped forward until he came down hard on the snake's head several times. It made no effort to avoid him, and there was a solid gummy resistance under his shoes like stepping on a hose.
It was some kind of rubber snake and they'd made him look like an idiot. Which was the point. His vision went red. To make you look the wrong way, to make you afraid of the thing that was irrelevant, the thing that was coming from the wrong place.
He tore the tape off his ankles and waited for his heart to slow down.
The end of nights we tried to die. This is the end.
He knew he was way over his head now, up against some really dangerous people, but none of that mattered. They had fucked with his self-esteem.