The Poison Sky (24 page)

Both Loco and Marlena were in the kitchen and they looked up with identical scowls.

“Morning,” he said.

Loco gnarred softly in the back of his throat, and Marlena probably would have done the same if she'd known how. “Good morning,” she said with a frosty tension in her voice.

He sensed something was wrong but he had no energy for it. He set the plastic bag containing his loot of toxic waste on the table. “Don't anybody touch that,” he said with his last flicker of energy. “It's dangerous.”

“Do you want some coffee?”

“I have to sleep. Sorry. Talk later.” He staggered down the hallway to the bedroom, where the bed had been made tidily for the first time in weeks. He kicked off his shoes, and was astonished when he didn't drop off the instant he hit the bed surface. He was still wired, and some strange brain chemical was fizzing away, keeping him going on nervous energy.

“Jackie.” He sensed her in the doorway. “Were you with her?”

Her?

“Staking out … toxic dump,” he managed to say.

He felt the bed give as she sat, and his hand was plucked up into the air. He opened one eye to witness her smelling his hand carefully, thrusting her nose along the fingertips.

“Don't do this,” he said.

“I can't help it.” She seemed about to weep, but mercifully he fell sound asleep.

H
E
awoke in a sweat with a hot light pouring in the bedroom window. Loco was beside him, half asleep but still watching with a slitted eye to ward off any retribution for partaking of the forbidden bed. It was just past noon.

“Partner, you take chances.”

Marlena had left a small plate of flan on the night table for him. She knew he loved it, but it was subsiding to a puddle in the heat. He passed the yellow mess across to Loco, who roused and sniffed it suspiciously, then licked once and made a face, if a dog could be described as making a face.

“Hey, that's good stuff. But I suppose I wouldn't like your kibbled kidneys either.”

He showered and made coffee, changing his mind about four times along the way on how to deal with Marlena's jealous snit, and finally decided just to leave it alone. She had a forgiving nature, even if there was nothing to forgive. He dug through his medicine cabinet and came up with a little yellow plastic tube that had two Tylenols rattling inside. He dumped the pills and then downloaded an ounce of toxic sludge into the container. In another mood, the irony would have entertained him: whoever tested the sample might report that someone had adulterated the poisons with a little Tylenol.

A crossing guard flagged his car down at Overland with an octagon-shaped stop sign as a gaggle of little kids crossed to the boop-boop of the east-west light. The north-south signal went
bleep-chirp.
Something at the edge of his consciousness seemed wrong and then he noticed that the crossing guard had a guide dog and he held his gaze off in no particular direction, the way blind people often did. At the far curb the last of the little kids announced loudly that they were all across. They trooped up Overland toward the rec center as the crossing guard's dog came about on the sidewalk like a tug with the
Queen Mary
in tow and waited diligently for the next green. Jack Liffey believed wholeheartedly in affirmative action, but this seemed a particularly dubious application.

As he left Culver and passed into L.A., he had that strange steely taste he got in his mouth whenever a police car was pacing him, but he watched carefully in the mirror and there were no police cars, not even a plain-wrap, unless the cops had started using cement trucks. He decided it was just a taste after all and he needed to clean out his coffeepot. He couldn't think of the last time he'd done more than rinse it under the tap.

He found he was squinting as he drove, his eyes burning, and then he realized that only a few blocks away buildings were fading out into the ocher air. It was one of those days where the parking-lot exits of all the big aerospace companies would be posting a first-stage smog alert for the next day, but what could you do, bicycle thirty miles to work? On a day like this, the city lost its ring of mountains completely and seemed to have been whisked up out of its basin and dropped back into the flattest reaches of the Mojave, where it belonged.

Downtown didn't even show up until he turned off the Santa Monica Freeway and headed up the harbor into the small nest of skyscrapers that L.A. had thrown together in the 1980s out of insane jealousy of New York. He looped around the downtown and came down the east side into the Nickel. An old guy with one tennis shoe and one bare foot was banging on the wall of the Grace Mission with a coffee can, but no one paid any attention.

A bored-looking woman with a pencil in her hair sat behind the chicken-wire hatch, and she told him Jimmy was out.

“Ya think he stays in here hanging around the Polo Lounge?”

He asked a number of people on the surrounding streets, showing them Jimmy's photo, and finally a midget waved his arms in an animated way and said he knew “Cousin Jimmy,” and he thought he was preaching over in Indian Alley.

Cousin Jimmy. Already he was preparing the ground for his TV ministry.

The alley ran uphill shallowly off Fifth, just enough of a slope for an overpowering reek of urine to flow downhill around him off the blue plastic hogans and lean-tos. One forlorn seagull came streaking out of the alley as if chased. At the entrance, an old man sat against the brick of an abandoned building with his head slumped forward, rocking lightly, showing the back of a neck that was fantastically crosshatched by cracks and wrinkles. A woman sat dully beside him, her hand wrapped with bloody gauze. About fifty yards up the alley, he saw a half-dozen middle-aged Indian women sitting in a semicircle of boxes and pails and battered folding chairs. Jimmy Mardesich faced them, half sitting on the detached fender of an old car that was propped against the wall. He wore a Hawaiian shirt with yellow pineapples against red, and his Latino bodyguard hovered nearby.

“I can't offer you a thing.” Jimmy's reedy voice drifted down on the heady air with its usual serene tone, like a heavy dose of Quaaludes. “Everything you need you have within yourselves already. It's all there in your heart or your soul or your mind—whatever you choose to call it. All you need to do is detach yourself from the baggage that's dragging you back toward doubt and let out your ability to love yourself. You've already learned the lessons you need from all the things you've experienced and you only need to tap into that wisdom and appreciate who you are. It's not always easy, I know that. For many of us, it's only when we've come to the end of the path of self-destruction that we're caught on, that we're ready to turn and move in a new direction. I realize that, and I make no effort to force-feed anyone beliefs that don't make sense. What you hear has to set up rhythms in your own heart before you hear it properly and use it. But some of you may be ready right now, and if you are, I'm here to try and help you find your way back to God, or back to that sense of comfort and safety you felt in your first home, or to that warmth you feel when you genuinely help your fellowman.”

He went on and on like that, and Jack Liffey was torn between the desire to go bang the boy's head a few times to wake him up and send him back to high school and a kind of reluctant forbearance because of the obvious urge to something generous and virtuous that was welling up in the kid. He wondered if he really was witnessing the first ministrations of somebody who would found a new religion, an Aimee Semple McPherson or a Joseph Smith launching the New Thing right before his eyes, and he could tell his grandchildren,
Honest, I was standing right there in the alley that day
…

The boy had definitely found a Sinai to test himself on. An old woman with a reddened leathery face watched him with curiosity but the rest seemed more taken by the things they saw in the distance or on the ground at their feet. It was not even clear if any of them understood the words he was using. One old man sat cross-legged on the ground, almost within reach of Jimmy Mardesich, arranging and rearranging small bright objects on the pavement in front of him.

“And what if there is no big floaty place above the clouds filled with saints and angels with white wings and harps, what if this life is all there is and we all reap what we sow right here and now? If that's true, if the here and now is all we're going to get, is it any reason to make ourselves even unhappier than we are in the here-and-now? Joy is a state of mind, it's unique to each of us, and all you need to do to help find your own joy again is to remember one splinter of happiness from your past, one little ray of sunshine, and build it up again. Think back, get in touch with it, and detach yourself from everything that's denying you that feeling now.”

A man with long shiny hair in braids came out of a plastic lean-to and glowered at the boy, the Latino bodyguard watching him like a hawk. He said something too soft to hear and strutted away down the alley. As he passed Jack Liffey, the man with the braids muttered, “Pecker Christer greaseball.” Jimmy hadn't even noticed and the mild, imperturbable voice droned on and on.

The old man sitting on the ground finally seemed to decide he had achieved the perfect arrangement of bottle caps and stones and cigarette wrappers, and he looked up hopefully like a bower bird expecting a mate. The piss smell was getting to Jack Liffey and he pulled out. He'd look in tomorrow, and when he did, he'd probably find the boy troweling in the cornerstone of a shrine to himself—the Church of the Big Floaty Place—or pounding on foreheads to hurl out devils, or patiently explaining to the homeless how to levitate. There were some processes that you had to let work themselves out on their own. He just hoped the boy didn't stumble into something he couldn't handle.

• • •

O
UTSIDE
the Nickel he started trying pay phones until he finally found one that still had its phone book inside the dangling fiberboard clamshell. There was no listing under the federal government for a local office of the Environmental Protection Agency and he had to settle for the city Environmental Affairs Department, which he knew had moved into the old city hall into offices the mayor's staff had fled during the big earthquake retrofit.

He realized he'd never actually been inside it—that wonderful L.A. version of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus that he'd probably seen several thousand times embossed on police badge 714 opening
Dragnet
and he'd seen destroyed almost as many times by Martians and giant lizards. Some of his image of city hall still had to come from his imagination that day because the top half of the tower disappeared up into the smog. Inside there was a four-story Byzantine rotunda full of colored tiles and mottoes on the walls and then the elevator took him up to an ordinary hallway in two shades of institutional beige.

A bit of cardboard taped by a door said
Environmental Affairs,
and he had a momentary image of a man and woman coupling in the woods but he guessed the people inside had already heard that joke a few times too many. A low wooden fence penned him in a reception area, and mostly empty desks filled the rest of the open space. A young woman with a crooked nose had her feet on an open lower drawer as she read a tabloid paper that seemed to be called
Moxie.
He saw a big headline saying:

EXTREME SKY SURFER

PECKED TO DEATH

BY STARVING CROWS

It seemed to be illustrated but he couldn't make out the picture. He tried the clearing-the-throat trick and when that didn't work, he announced himself, “Hello there.”

As she looked up, he saw a second headline:

NAKED MAN

THROWS LARD

ON INTERSTATE

She offered him a pleasant enough smile and he decided he liked the crooked nose. It made her look congenial, the way imperfection always did.

“They're all at a conference. I'm just holding down the desk.”

“You like that paper?”

She glanced at
Moxie
and seemed to look at it in a new light, as if seeing it for the first time. “I dunno. It's not highfalutin, like some of them.”

She brought her feet to the floor and tugged demurely at an extremely short red skirt. “Where else would I learn that Japanese people got yellow skin because they eat so much fish? I always wondered.”

“Actually, I don't think that's true,” he said. “Many scientists feel that it's because they're genetically descended from bananas.”

“Wow, cool.”

“I like your nose,” he said.

For just a moment there was a reflex to cover it. “Really?”

“Really. It makes you look friendly.”

She smiled warmly. “My little brother hit me with a cast-iron skillet, rigged it up on a rope to fall when I opened the door, the jerk. What can I do for you?”

He set the Tylenol tube on the wooden rail, on one of his business cards.

“I believe this is toxic waste that a company is dumping illegally. You might want to have it tested, and then I'll tell you who's doing it.”

She eyed it suspiciously. “I dunno.”

“It won't bite. Just pass it on to somebody when they get out of their conference, okay?”

“How do they reach you?”

He showed the card. “They can call the number here or they can fax me.” It was Marlena's fax number. “I'm not highfalutin either.”

O
UTSIDE
city hall there was a small commotion. Somebody had left a large dead thule elk on the grassy knoll that led up to the building. A half-dozen rubbernecks and two puzzled cops stood around it. One of them was laboriously copying down the message that was hand-lettered on a placard attached to the beast's antlers.

NATURE WILL BE BACK, AND SHE'LL BE PISSED