The Poison Sky (15 page)

The boy was faintly surprised, but without embarrassment. “I didn't know that. There's still a lot I have to learn. Do you think I would learn more by going back to Van Nuys High School to get my D in remedial math? I never could understand geometry. Or chemistry. I wasn't good for much in school.”

He made no excuses and didn't seem chagrined by his failures.

“And magic will make you feel important,” Jack Liffey suggested.

The smile again. He turned slowly to see if anyone was eavesdropping through the open door, and then he nodded. ‘That's their weakness here, most of them. They want easy enlightenment, from a magic spell, and they want it quick. It's why I've just about exhausted what I can learn here.”

It was stunning, the self-composure. The boy had just admitted that major changes were brewing in his belief structure and it hadn't distressed him a bit.

“Your mom is out front. Would you talk to her a little?”

“Not right now. Please come through for a moment. I need a calmer place.”

He led Jack Liffey into the inner office, past rows of white filing cabinets, and out French doors into a courtyard dominated by an immense pepper tree. The feathery leaves and little red seeds and the medicinal smell reminded him of his youth in San Pedro, where big pepper trees had lined much of his walk to high school.

“You've been hired to snatch me back and deprogram me, haven't you?” the boy asked.

“Not exactly. I can't compel you to do anything you don't want to do, and I won't try to.”

They strolled along a terra-cotta walk lined with tidy vegetables and low-lying flowers like the tranquil courtyard of a Spanish mission.

“We've had science for hundreds of years now, but people still want magic, don't they? They want some pure and meaningful thing to stick up out of all the material fog in their life. Isn't that an urge for the good?”

“It's none of my business what people want as long as nobody's exploiting them.”

The boy looked up suddenly, as if he had just had an idea. “You know the sort of world we should be building? One that makes it easy for everybody to be kind. Everybody wants to be kind, but the world makes it hard.”

Jack Liffey tried to remember where he had heard something like that. He thought it might have been the Catholic Worker people.

All of a sudden the boy stopped and turned to face Jack Liffey. He was a good inch taller, and all of his serenity had become focused into a kind of shy intensity. The boy's hands lifted, as if on their own, and reached out to press softly against Jack Liffey's temples. His fingertips pushed under the watch cap and they were smooth and soft, like a baby's bottom.

“I can feel your goodness inside. Bless you with all the force of life, Jack Liffey.”

It was the Holy Boy road all right, he thought.

10

THE WARRIOR CLASS

A
N OLD MAN STOOD BY THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY WITH A
cardboard sign. He wore a threadbare dark suit and there were no buildings for miles, no turnoffs and no abandoned vehicles he could have clambered out of, as if he had grown spontaneously on one of the orange trees that lined the road. He aimed the sign hopefully at the car but Jack Liffey was the only one who looked,
WILL WORSHIP FOR FOOD,
it said. The man had one of those scooped-out Okie-faces from a Dorothea Lange photograph. Sorry, man, Jack Liffey thought as he whizzed past, I'd rather not be worshiped.

Jack Liffey's forehead still burned from where the boy had touched him. It was a pity he wasn't on crutches, he thought, so he could hurl them down and shout his elation. Still, he could joke about it all he wanted, but he figured everybody had a right to a shot at the sacred, as long as he didn't take it out of somebody else's hide.

It was a strange hour of the weekend on that road, with the Sunday drivers finally arrived wherever it was Sunday drivers dawdled off to, and the churchgoers and Sunday brunchers back in their homes, and the high school kids not drunk enough yet to go careening down the farm roads, so the only vehicle traffic as far as the eye could see along the two-lane highway was a single rattletrap stake truck loaded with watermelons.

“This is where they shot the orange-grove footage for
Chinatown,”
he said. “It pretty well mimics what your neighborhood probably looked like in the 1930s.”

Faye Mardesich perked up a little at that and looked around, but in general she was not at all happy about going home empty-handed. He'd convinced her to wait it out by promising he'd stay on top of the boy's whereabouts. He'd already struck a parallel deal with the boy, handing over his business card—a trifle reluctantly because he'd caught sight of the big embarrassing eyeball Marlena had insisted on printing on it—and the boy had agreed to call and let him know where he went when he moved on from the Theodelphians.

“I'll bet retreating to a sanctuary like that can be really satisfying,” Maeve offered. She was trying to ease Faye's mind in her own way. “Being a teenager can be such a drag. You know, there's all that ego all the time and all the fuss of worrying about being popular. It must feel good just to bug out and sit down in peace to read the heavy thinkers.”

“I'm not sure Goodman Hedrick qualifies as a heavy thinker, but I appreciate what you mean.”

“I can't picture Jimmy sitting down with a difficult book of any kind,” Faye Mardesich said. “I really can't.”

“Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with reading things,” Maeve offered generously. “Maybe it's just getting away from other people for a while and thinking.”

“And maybe you find out eventually that it's just a grander kind of ego,” Jack Liffey said. He'd had an ex-nun as a girlfriend for a while, and she'd still carried a lot of the holy about with her, and one day she'd said to him, “You're really working overtime to be decent today. It's what you've got instead of God, isn't it?”

Maeve was starting to say something earnest and urgent when he felt the steering wheel change. That was the thought that came into his head, but really the word
change
didn't do it justice. Suddenly there was no sensation at all of being able to direct the car. The wheel was flaccid and ineffectual, like something in a dream. He was off the gas immediately, but they were still doing about fifty on the two-lane road and he could see the old car angling gradually down the crown of the asphalt. There was a gravel shoulder, then a deep dry ditch and the orange grove beyond.

“Brace yourselves,” he snapped.

The outside tire was nearing the ragged edge of the pavement. Irrationally, he tried to will the steering to work again and spun it to the left but it did nothing. He put on the brakes lightly and that only speeded the drift to the side, so one wheel crunched off onto gravel.

“Daddy!”

Faye Mardesich put her palms hard on the dashboard. He couldn't remember if the rear seat belt worked but he knew Maeve would be wearing it if it did. A crow fluttered up off the shoulder ahead, squawking mightily, and he thanked his stars the phone poles were on the far side of the road.

He could tell they weren't going to make it. As a last try, he yanked on the hand brake. It only worked the rear wheels and he hoped by some strange vectoring of forces, it might just slew the car back onto the road, but it didn't. Faye shrieked as the first wheel went over the edge of the ditch. He felt the vehicle lean sharply and then bang down as the underside hit, then something bad and loud and disorienting happened all at once as his head snapped forward into the rim of the useless steering wheel.

When things came to rest, he found he was staring at the open glove box and his shoulder was pressed hard against Faye. He could smell her musky perfume. The car seemed to be on its side and he'd fallen half out of his belt against her.

“Maeve, are you okay?”

“I don't feel so hot, but I'm okay.”

“What do you
mean,
you don't feel so hot?”

“My stomach is upset. I hate roller coasters.”

“Faye?”

“Ooh. I think I've got the window knob under here. There's gonna be a hell of a bruise. What happened?”

He got himself oriented and used the belt to pull himself up and look over the situation. The car lay on its right side in the ditch but was not badly damaged, and Faye seemed to be okay where she lay against the door. There was no blood.

“The steering went out. Just like that.”

“I'm glad we weren't in traffic,” she said.

“Or coming over the hills.”

He used the wheel and the window opening on his side to haul himself up and get his shoulders out of the car. Then his foot found purchase against the side of the passenger seat and he boosted himself straight up until he got his entire torso out the window. He could see that the car stuck up visibly from the ditch. Somebody would be along to notice them. A smell of gasoline prickled in his nose and he decided it would be a good idea to get them all out pretty quick.

He scrambled out and leaned as far back in as he could.

“Give me your hands.”

He took Faye's hands and helped her torque herself around. She stood straight up on the passenger door with her head out the driver's window. She smelled it, too, and tucked up a leg to climb the seats and dashboard with some urgency. She was heavy but her dancer's strength helped her wriggle out in one fluid motion. Maeve hadn't moved.

“Punkin, can you get into the front seat?”

“Wooo. I almost threw up there.”

“Never mind that now. I want you out here in the fresh air.” He hung back inside and nudged her leg where she lay crumpled nearly upside down in the back. “Let's go, soldier.”

“Let me just be here a sec.”

“Not right now, Maeve Mary. Just swing your legs down and stand up.”

“Oooh, two names means you're serious.” She stirred finally and started readjusting to the unfamiliar orientation of things.

He got a good look at her face when she wrested herself upright and saw tears streaming down her cheeks.

“You hurting, baby?”

“I don't think so. It's just a funny peculiar kind of crying, like the midnight sillies you get when nothing's really funny.”

He helped her into the front seat, and she was so light he lifted her straight up and out and swung her around onto the bank of the ditch. Faye reached down to give him a tug away from the car and the gasoline smell, and they all retreated to the road and then to a culvert where there was curbing to sit on. They felt themselves for bruises and scrapes.

Faye winced at a spot on her side. “That won't be pretty tomorrow. That's my first accident since Jimmy was just learning to drive and wanged into the neighbor's trailer with me in the car.”

A small yellow school bus approached and they all stood and waved. It pulled over to the side of the highway and switched on all the red lights as a dozen pairs of eyes gawked out the windows. The door hissed open and a heavyset woman in a leather jacket cranked on the hand brake and came to the door.

“That you folks' car?”

“Yeah, we lost the steering. Have you got a phone?”

She nodded. “You're in luck. I just saw Clyde giving a ticket back there, he's the deputy today. Hope you're good for the Breathalyzer.”

He guessed she'd meant it as a good-natured warning. A small boy with leg braces came up behind to peer around her.

“I'm okay. Why don't you call him.”

While she was calling, he noticed the name on the bus,
MASSIMO'S ORGANIC SCHOOL FOR THE CHALLENGED
. He didn't even try to work it out.

• • •

T
HE
name tag said
CLYDE D. BOLD
and the paunchy middle-aged man wore a sombrero that didn't look much like a regulation part of his khaki uniform, but they were so far out of the Ventura County seat that he could probably get away with any eccentricity he wanted. Jack Liffey passed the routine Breathalyzer and the deputy separated them off in different spots so he could get their stories one by one and make sure they were all on the same page. Then he had a look at the car.

“Hey, pardner, come here.”

Jack Liffey joined him in the ditch. Most of the gas smell was gone.

“You got you some enemies?” The deputy pointed to a metal arm that was hanging loose by a front wheel. “Somebody pulled the cotter pin off this here linkage.”

“Maybe it wore out. The car's pretty old.”

“Trust me, they don't wear out and they don't just fall off. Never seen it. Somebody's gone and bent the ears straight with pliers and pulled it most off and then it was just a matter of time till the link fell off this doohickey.”

It was not a good time to explain his occupation, or what they'd been doing in Ojai.

“This car's old enough to vote,” Jack Liffey said. “And it's got two hundred and fifty thousand miles on it. I'll settle for wear and tear.”

“There's a first time for everything.” The deputy squatted down, took a small cloth bag out of his shirt, and started rolling a cigarette. “Since you wasn't so drunk you couldn't hit the ground with your hat, and your passengers' stories all hang together, I guess I'll just write it up as a accident. Unless you got a objection.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Keeps the paperwork simple. I'll call you a tow.”

Jack Liffey sat beside Faye on the curbing as Maeve followed the deputy to his car to peer over his shoulder at all the electronics and gadgets in the big Crown Victoria.

“The steering was sabotaged,” he said softly to Faye. “I think it's another message to me to mind my own business, but I really don't get it. The Theodelphians are famous for getting upset if you pry into their affairs, but I can't believe they did this just because I talked to Jimmy. Did Jimmy ever do drugs?”