The Poison Sky (2 page)

In a moment a heavyset woman hove into sight from a different direction.

“Mrs. Mardesich?”

She nodded gravely and waved the notebook she was carrying. “You Jack Liffey?”

“Uh-huh.”

She glanced back thoughtfully the way the man had gone and then seemed to make a decision. “Let's go to Emily's. I'll buy you a cup of coffee. Can you drive?”

He felt like saying he'd been driving since he was sixteen, but he let it lie.

“C'mon. The world all makes sense, I promise.” She put a confident hand on his shoulder and squeezed in a mannish way, like a football coach reassuring the new placekicker. “Call me Faye. This place must seem bughouse looking down from the outside.”

“I try not to look down on people,” he said.

“Well said, Jack. Can I call you Jack?”

“Oh,
hell
yes.” He decided to go with the flow.

She laughed and gave him a one-arm hug. Out front, she squinted a bit at his beat-up '79 Concord as the passenger door fought against her tugs. “I see we're flush with success,” she said.

“My Rolls is in the shop.”

“Don't worry; if I'd wanted a big Beverly Hills detective, I'd have called one.”

Jack Liffey wasn't even sure there were such things as big Beverly Hills detectives. He wasn't even a detective in any strict sense. He had blundered into his calling as a finder of missing children after his aerospace job had evaporated at the end of the 1980s. Finding missing kids didn't pay all that well, as callings go, but it was a genuine service to the world and it was better than frying hamburgers.

“Someone recommended you highly.”

“Who's that?”

“I'd rather not say right yet.”

Emily's was a busy coffee shop with garish blue-and-red plastic seats and a permanent aroma of chicken fat. He really only liked the darkest French roast he could get, but he let her order him a coffee and declined anything else. For herself, she ordered a Spanish omelette and Emily's West Virginia muffins with red-eye gravy.

She had addressed the airy diminutive waitress as Tinker Bell, and he couldn't figure out whether it was an endearment or an insult. Faye Mardesich seemed the kind of woman who would make up pet names for lots of things and make them stick.

“Our household must look pretty dysfunctional to you.”

“I wouldn't know.”

She stopped playing with the little stand-up plastic ad for strawberry waffles. “Milo lost his job at Lockheed five years ago. He was internally famous as the guy who'd designed the struts on the front landing gear of the L-1011. They were revolutionary and saved Lockheed a lot of money. All he knew in life was mechanical engineering. He went to the headhunters and the agencies and I helped him send out over two hundred resumes. Mostly they didn't even have the courtesy to reply. He got a couple of temp jobs with the old subcontractors he knew, but nobody's hiring aerospace full-time, not around here. When it became pretty clear that the job blight wasn't temporary, he started taking it hard. It affected all of us. He'd been making the high seventies and now he felt like a bum. He drank and didn't come back some nights. He started yelling at Jimmy and he'd never even raised his voice to the boy before. Mostly he just withdrew. That was up to about a year ago, but, you know …” She considered a moment. “I think I preferred then, with all the melancholy introspection.”

She ran down and he decided to let her go at her own pace. His eyes strayed to a haggard-looking woman who was making her way from table to table. She wore a green bandanna over her hair and carried a bundle in her arms. She seemed to be showing a card at each booth and he guessed it said something like
I
Am Deaf Please Help.

“I think I get the back story,” Jack Liffey said finally, to save her the trouble. “I was a tiny morsel of the peace dividend myself. But why did you prefer the period with the melancholy introspection?”

She decided to carry on not answering for a while but it didn't make her uncomfortable. She was one of those people who always seem to be at ease with themselves, even when they fidget. It made him think she'd had a happy childhood in a big family.

Tinker Bell brought the food, curtsying as some kind of private joke, and Faye Mardesich tucked in hard. He sipped at the atrocious coffee that tasted like they'd melted plastic toys in the pot. Once she'd taken the edge off her prodigious hunger, she slowed down and waved a fork in the air as if beating time.

“Okay, I'm over the hump here. Milo's gone into a manic phase and it's like living with a Martian. He's teaching himself French critical theory.” She laughed scornfully and shook her head. “He talks about structural change and reading texts and, oh yeah, ruptures in the historical process. I keep wondering if somebody makes trusses for history.

She chuckled at her own joke. “Don't get me wrong. I'm not rejecting the intellect. It just doesn't make any sense in his life. It all started after he got a job as a night security guard, which seemed to put him out of kilter with the rest of the world. He's an engineer at heart, for God's sake, not a critical theorist. He
loved
engineering.” She toyed with another shovelful of the omelette but seemed to have lost interest.

“He used to talk with real enthusiasm about how much he liked being challenged to take some practical device and make it
work
and bringing all his knowledge of science and materials and
leverage
to bear on the problem and conquering it. And now he's reading French philosophers in his guard shack and writing essays on the autonomy of the critic and sending them out over the Internet. I'm all in favor of people trying to reinvent themselves, but this is a pathology.”

She torqued herself around to scratch her back the way a man would, and the effort yanked open her blouse for a moment to show a black lace bra just barely containing an ample breast. She laughed at herself and buttoned up in a matter-of-fact way.

“I
am
a mess. I haven't even talked about Jimmy yet. Milo is just the context for the problem—” She waggled her eyebrows for an instant. “I'm beginning to sound like Milo. Let's set the
problematic
here,” she said with a derisive flex of her lips. “Our son's run away from home. Jimmy is seventeen and I can't blame him for getting fed up, but he's not really seventeen, if you know what I mean. He's, maybe,
twelve.
He's so sweet it's eerie, he's unfailingly polite and helpful. He doesn't have a mean or rebellious bone in his body. Jimmy's just a big vulnerable kindly kid, trying to hang on to his merit badges, and anybody with an ounce of hurt in him out there can make a meal of the boy.”

“When did he go?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“You reported him missing?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “One runaway kid. They're not gonna mobilize the SWAT team.”

“Where do you think he'd run?”

But the woman in the bandanna had finally made it to their table. She tipped her bundle forward to display an emaciated baby to Jack Liffey. He stared until he saw a flicker of movement in one tiny clutched hand, little more than a tremor. The woman set a card on the table, and a dried sprig of some herb. The card said,
Heather is Good Luck the world over. It is Traditional to warrant the Luck with a small Donation. The Romany have unforeseen Powers.
Heather didn't grow in Southern California, so it was probably just crabgrass. He had a folded dollar bill ready and he opened his fingers to offer it. Surprisingly, her dry hand clutched his wrist and turned his hand over.

She stared into his palm for a moment with spooky deep black eyes that had tiny specks in the pupils. Her voice came out as a croak, a word or two that he could not decipher. Then suddenly the dollar bill was gone and a flimsy slip of paper was in its place, like a fortune from a Chinese cookie.
You have a heroic dimension, but you will have to pass through much suffering.

When he looked up she was moving away.

Faye Mardesich took the note in two fingers with curiosity and read it.

“It's for someone else,” he said. “Where would Jimmy run to?” The dried weed was still on the table, and he picked it up and put it into the empty ashtray.

Faye Mardesich studied both sides of the paper, as if a more careful look might yield up her son's whereabouts, then she dropped it.

“Naturally I've checked his friends and their friends. I think they genuinely don't know. I didn't like to go into his room because I value privacy, but I had to. I found a couple of porn magazines.” She shrugged. “That doesn't bother me. It was rawer than the stuff I saw his age, but the world is moving that way.”

“Straight or gay?”

“Straight, except for some lesbian scenes. You guys all like to watch girl-girl stuff.”

“When we're not chaining them up.”

She let it go. “And I found this.”

He knew what it was right away. The cover of the dog-eared pamphlet asked:

Is Your Soul Ready for the Next Stage in its Journey?

In each generation a few are within reach of the next Forward Thrust of evolution. Come in now for a simple and totally free appraisal of your spirit's readiness for The Leap.

It was from the Theodelphian Elect, and gave an address on Melrose. They used almost as many extra capitals as the gypsy woman.

“Do you know them?” Her voice sounded chastened.

“Oh, yes.”

“Are they dangerous?”

He opened the tri-fold and saw the complex diagram he'd seen many times before, a kind of stepladder labeled
Soul's Work
that led upward from the core of the earth, through the
Breath of the Passions,
and then up through dozens of rungs with names like
Universal Vitality
and
Thinking 4,007 Times Faster Than Thought
and
Assuming the Voluntary Body,
steps whose meaning and internal logic had always escaped him. He knew that even the top step with all the yellow rays shooting out of it, a plateau called the
Germ of the Form,
was only the beginning of another ladder to another plateau. The whole course of metaphysical study led upward more or less as long as your money held out.

“Dangerous like the militias, no. This might not mean anything at all. They leave these everywhere. Do you have any reason to think he's mixed up with them?”

She rested her chin on her palm and for the first time he sensed a particle of vulnerability in her. “He's my son, Jack. I've had to pull him out of ponds since he was two. He's as bright as two dim bulbs but he's far too good-hearted and brave and headstrong for his own good. This stuff is perfectly calculated to suck him in. All you have to do is make Jimmy feel special, or maybe just
useful,
and he's yours.”

It was best she didn't know too much at this stage, he thought. The Theodelphians weren't the strangest cult in L.A.—that distinction probably went to the Scientologists, who started you out with a kind of bland debased Freudianism and launched you quickly up through the technobabble of interplanetary wars. And the Elect weren't as old as the Rosicrucians or Madam Blavatsky, but they made up for whatever they might have lacked in ripeness or luster with the naked use of sex to draw adolescents into their orbit. That fact was what he was holding back from the boy's mother.

“I need to look over Jimmy's things.”

She nodded. “Milo can't deal with any of this, but he's working swing today, from four to midnight. Come by this evening and we'll go through Jimmy's room.”

As they stood up, she picked up the crabgrass from the ashtray and put it in a fold of Kleenex in her purse. “You never know.”

In the car she gave him a check for a hundred dollars to get him started. It was more than he usually got. On the way back to her house they passed a barefoot man with a ragged straw hat like Van Gogh's. He was leading a big goat on a leash. They both watched the man for a while, but there was absolutely nothing sensible you could say about something like that.

She hesitated as she got out of the car in her driveway. “Jack, I've got to find my son, but in a larger sense I'm doing this to keep my spirits up. You know what I mean?”

“Lots of people are hurting,” he said.

“The way I keep things from getting me is I keep moving.”

H
E
went straight back over the hill to Chris Johnson's place in West Hollywood. That part of town was filled with hundreds of little boxy houses from the forties, most of which now had false fronts with outsized French Provincial details or overtall doors. Russian immigrants recently had begun moving into the area known as Boys-town, and there had been a number of culture clashes with the gays and trendies who'd traditionally populated the place.

Chris Johnson's little box was still a little box, as unassuming as you could get, which was probably the idea.

“Dude, long time,” he said with a kind of dry smirk.

“It's been about two weeks.”

“Damn, I'm getting that disease … you know, the one that begins with
A.
”

“Arteriosclerosis.”

“That's it.” He stepped aside to reveal the welter of electronics that filled his stucco box. “
Come,
as Commander Picard says.”

“Who?”

“Don't shit me. You know
Star Trek.
” Chris Johnson was tall and athletic looking and so fair you could just about see through him.

Jack Liffey swept a hand to indicate all the electronics. “I thought you were warned off this stuff.”

“The conditions of my parole state that I may not possess a telephone or a modem. They do
not
say I can't have a computer.”

“I need some research. A modem would have been essential.” Jack Liffey looked for a place to sit and settled for a wooden stool. For some reason Chris Johnson had glued a lot of aluminum foil to the ceiling and the wrinkles made a mad glare of little multicolored lights.