Dangerous Games (7 page)

“What's the game?”

“The next letter street. You have to name a tree or a flower beginning with that letter. Or an actress, a city in Europe. Whatever.”

“We're coming up to L,” she said. “Let's name felonies.”

He laughed. “How about just character flaws? That'll give me a chance to play.” He wasn't sure she saw the taunt in it.

“Okay. Come on.”

“I've got one. We both say ours when we hit the L overpass.”

They reached the overpass, a forlorn bridge with no connecting roads on either end. The whole alphabet of mile-apart overpasses had been a conceit of the days when L.A. was planning to build a giant regional airport out here, 80 miles from LAX, but it had never happened.

“Lying was too easy,” she said. “Lethargy.”

“Lacerating wit,” he said.

She frowned but gave it to him. By the time the letter streets petered out at S—with spite and sanctimoniousness—they seemed to be friends again.

“Tell me about
Wuthering Heights,
Jack. I've never read it, and it might be important if Luisa reacted so much to it.”

“Do you mind a little run-up?”

“Of course not. I could stop for a late bite, too.”

“There's a nice restaurant and saloon at the top of the grade. Not far, I'll tell you.” He thought about it for a while and decided he really was over his snit. “When I was in the radar trailer in Thailand, there wasn't much to do, so I decided to perfect my education. They would chopper in damn near anything you wanted, so, methodically, I went through at least one book by every great nineteenth-century writer. Every culture … Well, the major cultures. I didn't read any Bulgarians.

“I started with the French and pretty soon discovered that they all wrote the same book. It was astonishing, really.
Père Goriot, The Red and the Black, Nana.
A callow youth comes to Paris from the provinces looking for money and social position and sex. And he gets it all. It's a subject that's just inconceivable in Victorian England. The English novels were much more polite and prudish. They were mostly about disappointments and misalliances or about kids being oppressed, Dickens. Stiff upper lip. All but one of them. There was this blinding flash, like a meteor across the whole of English literature. The passion in
Wuthering Heights
just burned to the ground any book you put next to it. Intensity—betrayal and longing and revenge and love turning to hatred. It's not what they call a guy book, but even a jaded techie draftee was shaken a bit by it, after all those books about good manners.”

“So what would it do to a provincial Indian girl?”

“A girl who has no reliable resources for even puppy love …” He made a face, as if he'd smelled something bad. “Don't blame literature. This kid is already primed to shoot herself straight through the heart. Unless she's tougher than we think. Some kids are amazingly resilient.”

“I'd rather not count on it.”

“Then let's find her before
Wuthering Heights
strikes.”

Dear Diary,

Keith has been making me feel safe. He said last night that he respected me too much to sleep with me until we was united in a bond of blood so this morning we both cut our hands & signed our names on a piece of paper in our own blood & then we put the note in a wine bottle & launched it afloat into the ocean near the beach house where we stayed all night for a party I didnt like too much. He said that this moment marked the precious time that we will always remember at the beginning of our new relationship.

But Keith can be moody too & after breakfast at a little place on the coast he got cold and angry all at once & looked at me hard. I thought about that moment all day & could not figure out what I had done unless it was when I mentioned how I didn't really like the kinds of jobs I had to do for Rod. I was wondering if I would ever have as happy a morning ever again in my life or if it was all over but then his mood changed & he was sweet again.

SIX

Our Relationship Is Teething

“Can I help you, Maevie?” Her mother's voice came softly through the flimsy door.

“No, I'll do it myself.” She had locked herself into the upstairs bathroom and was on her knees beside the toilet with her jeans down and her shirt off. The illustrated instructions they'd given her were taped on the wall in front of her. The transparent bag that dangled from her side was almost full and pretty much the color she expected, somewhere between light brown and gray, the color, in fact, of liquid shit.

You can get used to anything, she told herself. There was a clip on the bottom of the bag which she slid off gingerly and let the contents drain noisily into the toilet. That's an interesting smell, she thought, wrinkling her nose. It was more like cowshit than human for some reason. She reclipped the bag and could have left off there, but she wanted to see everything.

Making a face, both at the general tenderness she felt and the idea of what she was doing, she peeled the bag gently off and saw her new stoma for the first time. After cleaning it up with a wet rag and being surprised that there was almost no sensation in the thing—it looked like a big wrinkly nipple that had drifted preposterously across her body to the wrong place. There was a kind of medical gasket around it, where she would reattach the bag.

“Jesus,” she said. “All right, if you and I are going to be together for a while, you need a name.
Squirt
popped into her head, but it was too cute, and she dropped it immediately. She thought of an old boyfriend who was snubbing her, but Dick wasn't a very good idea either. She'd just read
The Tin Drum
and decided Oskar would be perfect. “Okay, Oskar, you and me are going to get along. You can refuse to talk and you can beat your little drum whenever you see something you don't like.”

Oskar chose that moment to fart loudly, and a foul smell emanated through the bathroom.

Maeve shut her eyes, counted to ten, and began doing up the bag again.

“Hey, Beto.”

“
Qué hubo,
Thumb?”

Beto Alvarez was in his messy office in the
Centro,
his feet up on the beat-up old steel desk, reading a book, with all the kids out front playing ping-pong or caroms or chess. The clatter and roar of so much play was audible even down the long corridor. Thumb sat down on a rickety folding chair.

“
Aquí nomás.
I'm reading that textbook, like you said, I got up to the Hayes-something deal, in the South.”

“Tilden.”

“Yeah, that's it. Where they fucked over the niggers, huh?”

Beto brought his feet to the floor and sat up straight in that earnest way he always had.

“Do me a favor, Thumb. Say blacks. You may not be thinking beyond the
barrio
right now, but if all of us people of color stay off in our own
vecinos
and dis each other all the time—you know, it's always niggers and gooks and japs and
we're
greasers or spics, that's us,
esse
—we gonna stay weak. Those Bushes and their friends gonna do a Hayes-Tilden on us all over again.”

“Seems like they doin' it to us already,
carnal.
”

Beto got that crafty look in his eye. “So tell me how they're doin' it, Thumb. How are the rich
gabachos
screwing you right now?”

“I don't know—they send the big blue gang to beat on us. They keep all the good stuff and the good jobs for theirself.”

“You all ready to take a job programming computers? Maybe put on a white coat and cure somebody's disease?”

“Man.”

“Do you remember Chairman Mao?”

“He was that fat Chinese Communist guy.”

“
Simón,
good. I'm not saying he was the greatest. Dude had a lot of problems, but he said some good things. One was, ‘No investigation, no right to speak.' When you're ready to tell a bunch of those angry kids out there
exactly
what they need to do to change things, then you're ready. Knowledge is power, my friend. You can't have too much knowledge.”

“
Chingao,
I'll keep reading on that book, and you keep ranking on me, just like this, and if I don't beat you to death first or shoot you in the
cojones,
we get over.”

Beto looked like he wanted to laugh but decided against it. He just fastened his eyes on Thumb, keeping his gaze fixed in a benign deadpan.

Finally Thumb grinned. “I got a favor to ask,” he said softly.

“Uh-huh.”

Thumb produced a small box, the size of a book, wrapped round and round with silver duct tape. “Don't ask me no questions and keep this for me.”

Beto examined it skeptically. “Promise me this isn't
yesca
or
coca. No drogas.
”

“I swear on
mi madre. Absolutamente no es drogas.
”

Beto reached out and took it, weighing it for a moment in his hand. “It's heavy, man.”

“
Carnal,
if you're going to X-ray it or shit, just give it back. It's a favor to see if you really trust me and I can trust you.”

“
Qué pues.
I probably shouldn't do this, but you've got a lot of potentials. Okay. Consider it our secret.”

“
Viva la raza.
”

“
Si,
man.
Viva el pueblo.
”

“We don't hire a lot of
guys
here, not unless you can really hold your wood.”

Jack Liffey knew exactly what he meant, but why give him the satisfaction? “Oak or mahogany?”

“Very funny.”

Jack Liffey wasn't sure what he'd expected—probably a fat old man in suspenders smoking a cigar—but it was practically a kid sitting at the little card table in an inner room. He had a bad complexion with lumps everywhere, a spot band-aid over what was probably a recently popped zit on the side of his nose. A long sideboard made up of industrial shelving beside him held cardboard banker's boxes and upright magazine files full of papers plus a very old computer with a small greenish monitor. It looked like the whole business could be cleared out in about five minutes, or just abandoned if it came to that.

“Hell, at my age I'm lucky when I get it up at all,” Jack Liffey said. He set his business card down in front of the kid. The card was becoming embarrassing. An old girlfriend who'd run a print shop had made a thousand up for him years ago and not only did it have a big eyeball on it, like something in the movies, he had to write in his new phone number by hand. “I'm looking for a runaway girl. If you'd be kind enough to look in your files.”

The office of Intercontinental Talent was up a metal staircase only a little fancier than a fire escape, on a short dead-end street in an industrial area of Van Nuys. Still, the sign on the door had looked respectable enough. There had been no receptionist in the empty waiting room, just a few bus station benches and a big sign:
Models: First fill out the form, THEN “ring” the bell and wait.
He could identify no particular reason that irony should attach to the verb, which referred to an ordinary pushbutton like a doorbell—and he assumed it was just another instance of the indiscriminate proliferation of quotation marks like “fresh” fish and “gourmet” salads that had crept onto menus everywhere.

The only wall art facing the plastic benches was a fairly demure poster of a large-breasted woman in a cocktail gown receiving a statuette. It wasn't one of the awards he knew—the Oscar or the Golden Globes. Maybe something the porn industry had invented to mimic the mainstream awards. The Randy or the Roger.

“What's this lost girl's name?” the kid at the card table asked him.

“Luisa Wilson. She's a Native American about eighteen. She'd have been in here in the last two weeks.”

“
About
eighteen, like, doesn't cut it in this biz, bro. Sticky, the underage thing. Remember the whole Traci Lords thing.”

“She's eighteen, no worries. Long dark hair. Very striking.”

He shook his head. “Nah. They're
all
striking, believe me, but that one ain't been in.”

“Could you just check your records, as a favor to me.”

“Whoa, dude. No strongarm, okay. I tell you, I ain't seen her, I ain't seen her.”

“You do sign up women for sex films?”

“We prefer to call it the adult entertainment business. And we usually say girls, you know? No dis intended.”

“Son, I don't care what you call it. This girl has a mother who's worried about her, and I just want to talk to her. I'm not here to make trouble for her or anyone else in the sex business. No dis intended.”

The boy frowned and got his back up a bit. “Hell, man, I'm proud of our business. You take your regular Hollywood movies, now—they put a girl who's sexually active in the story, even a little bit, they got to find a way to kill her off in the first reel or make her pay for it somehow. She doesn't get the desirable guy or the good job or the happy life. She's got to be punished for liking dick. Our girls like it right out in the open, and they get to live all the way through the show.”

Jack Liffey laughed. “I never thought about it that way. As long as they don't get AIDS.”

Clouds crossed the boy's brow. “We're real responsible about that. They get monthly tests and a lot of shoots use rubbers now.”

“I don't need a deposition. Let's say Luisa Wilson didn't come here. Where else would she go in town looking to get into the adult business?” Adult business: he could give the kid that much.

“There's really only four agencies that serve the professional producers, but there's plenty of amateurs, too, these days. Everybody thinks it only takes an old VHS camera and a couple kids willing to screw to make some hot movie and make a million bucks. But the product usually looks like shit, and they always get beat trying to distribute. That end's all sewed up. Still, they keep on trying, like swarms of bees trying to get into the honey tree. There's wannabe adult business all over the place. But if your girl got smart, she only came to us or one of the other places.”

He gave Jack Liffey a flyer with the addresses of three more modeling agencies along with some general advice on AIDS and staying out of trouble on the streets and how to find a place to bed down for those just off the bus. It looked like something they'd hire winos to hand out to lost-looking kids on Hollywood Boulevard. He found himself folding the flyer a couple of times before putting it into his pocket, as if it might soil his shirt.

“Do you know the name Little Deer?”

He whistled. “Jeez, do I? She was the real thing. Like a Marilyn Monroe or something. She's retired now, far as I know.”

“Do you know how I'd find her?”

“Naw, but I think she directed a few times at the end of her career. The smart ones do. You might try the Liberty of Speech Coalition.” The effort of being helpful was starting to show.

“What's that?”

“Some of the old-timers financed a lobbying and legal group to look after their interests. Every redneck that gets elected D.A. anywhere in America tries to beat up on the biz to score points with his local Talibans.”

The bell buzzed, and the boy perked up.

“You ever performed?” Jack Liffey asked him.

“Aw, man, take a good look at me. All I could be is a stunt dick, and I'm no woodsman.” He winked. “But I get a little on the side now and then, so don't worry.”

Jack Liffey just wanted to get away from that office and take a long shower to wash off anything that might have stuck to him.

“Thanks.” He reclaimed his card. For some superstitious reason, he didn't want his name hanging around that office. In the waiting room now there was a very insecure-looking girl in a falling-off bright blue sundress. She had obviously augmented breasts, and clutched a clipboard that held the information form. She smiled hopefully at him as he came out.

“I'm nobody at all, hon.”

He almost turned back at the door to suggest she go home to Iowa, but it wouldn't help and there were probably a hundred like her arriving every day.

“Jack! Long time no see!” Babs leaned out the kitchen window, looking a bit less like Veronica Lake after the two kids in quick succession. She still had the long silver hair, though.

“Hi, Babs. Is Chris here?”

“He's out in the back. He's tending the computers and kids.”

They had made the detached garage of the little Lakewood house into their computer room. It was quite a retrenchment from the glory days when Chris had lived in a huge place in the Hollywood Hills and co-owned a computer game company called Propeller-Heads. The big shakeout in the game industry had killed all that. He knocked beside the open door.

“Jack, good to see you. Come on, come on.”

The former garage was half filled with a profusion of old computers wired together, and Chris Johnson carried a baby in his arms, while a two-year-old puttered with some toy trucks on the floor. Jack Liffey noticed that the reset buttons of all the computers had been removed or covered over.

“The online nursery business died?”

“Just about all online business died. Except porn, of course. I set up Web sites for folks now, and host them. Babs is studying architecture.”

The boy on the floor started making thut-thut-thut machinegun noises.

“How would you like a
jackliffey.com
?” he suggested.

“I don't think so, Chris. I don't have a computer. I don't even have a cell phone. It's good to see you and Babs are still together.”

Babs had been in a lesbian relationship when Jack Liffey had first dragged her into helping with one of his jobs, and he had introduced the two of them, without any ulterior motives whatever. He had to admit Chris Johnson was a pretty charming character—he had the sort of buoyant energy and confidence that always attracted dogs and children—and he wasn't bad looking in the bargain. He was so blond he was almost transparent, and he still had the football body he'd once worked at in order to play wide receiver for a college team. Babs had startled Jack Liffey back then by latching onto Chris almost immediately, abandoning in the process a long-time girlfriend. Jack Liffey had been afraid he'd get in dutch with the whole lesbian world, but nobody seemed to object.