The Poison Sky (23 page)

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.

I
T
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.

15

SEND THE GUNSELS PACKING

I
T WAS ALMOST EIGHT BY THE TIME HE'D RETRIEVED HIS
own car and fought his way south with the commute traffic to Culver City, and he could barely keep his eyes open. For a while he had worried at it, wondering what he'd been thinking about when he promised to put the Mardesiches back together, but now there was only a heavy stillness inside him. Weariness was in charge, and trying to get his mind to budge in any direction was like trying to shift a huge soft mass that flopped back over your wrists wherever you pushed. He was too old to go all night without sleep.