The Poison Sky (7 page)

“I'm not a book. I know how men think. My father sent me away when a guy spoiled me the first time.”

“I know that story, but you don't begin to know how I think.” And he didn't really want to deal with her sad story just then. Her father was a poor disoriented immigrant who'd grown up in a Sonoran village and couldn't really handle a world that was so much more complicated than his own father's farm, and he had driven her out of the family bungalow in Baldwin Park at fifteen and straight back to the biker who'd already taken what he could get, and then the biker had passed her around to his friends, and she'd learned to live with a particularly gruesome form of self-loathing until a cousin had taken her in and started restoring her to the human race. Jack Liffey took her face in both his hands. “What you have inside you can't ever be spoiled. That's the absolute truth.”

She took his hand and placed it against her breast.

“Do you still want me?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Come to my house tonight. I can't stay here.”

He wasn't really in the mood, but he could see it was going to happen, whatever he wanted, so he worked up enough enthusiasm to kiss her, and she kissed back hungrily.

“As soon as we feed Loco.”

“W
HAT
you laughing at?”

He pointed. He'd burst out laughing the moment he read it, lit by the orange street lamp at the corner. Neat sans serif lettering on the back of the bench spelled out
IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME NOW
. He didn't know whether it was political commentary on the homeless by one of the city's guerrilla artists, or just a teasing ad ploy for something incongruous, like the billboards an L.A. magazine had once put up hawking drive-through high colonics. A lot of people had taken them seriously, trying to figure how it was done.

“I don't understand.” She whisked her lap, as if she'd spilled ashes on her skirt.

“It's just the absurdity, I guess.”

“You can't live on a bus bench,” she complained.

People try, he thought. “No, you can't, you're right.” He liked her quite a lot most of the time, but their worlds didn't overlap by much and that made it hard sometimes. “How's your wrist?”

“It hurts.” She was aggrieved for some reason, and it made him feel helplessly insensitive.

H
E
walked gingerly, trying not to bump into a dog of some kind, the big flocked red ones on the floor from TJ, little porcelain poodles on the Danish Modern coffee table, plastic head-bobbing toys meant for the car window, stuffed-rag dalmatians, and a set of handblown glass Afghans like the ones you saw made at the crafts fair. Marlena liked dogs. There was even a real one, of sorts, a mewling Mexican hairless named Fidel. There had been three, but Raul had got distemper because his shots hadn't taken for some reason and Che had been run over by a Sparkletts truck.

Jack Liffey was happy he was wearing black shoes. The randy little Fidel invariably tried to mount his brown shoes.

“Would you get yourself some ginger ale, Jackito. I got to get ready some.”

“Hi, there, Comrade,” he said to Fidel, who was panting a mile a minute and eyeing his shoes, apparently unconvinced of their color. The dog yipped once and backed off all of a sudden, probably getting a whiff of Loco. The minute Marlena left the room, the dog went up to her sofa, lifted a leg, and sprayed it with a few drops, then fixed Jack Liffey with a stare, as if daring him to rat. “Whoa, little fella. Looks like you and I have something in common.” It was a point of honor in his life to challenge only what could hurt him, and he could see a bit of that ethos in the tiny canine, too, and he liked the dog a lot better for it.

“Never forget that dog is god spelled backward,” he said equably.

He bent to pet the dog, but Fidel yipped once and hurried off. Jack Liffey found a big ginger ale in the fridge and some ice and poured one for her, too. A memory of exquisite lovemaking was beginning to work on him. She still carried a lot of guilt about her sexuality, and she'd usually slam one foot all the way down on the gas and keep the other hard on the brake, and that made it all spectacular, somehow.

He leafed through a big picture book on dogs on the coffee table and learned that two dogs with well-defined territories would exhibit what was called “agonistic behavior” when they met on their boundaries. They'd turn their flanks to one another, offering neither to fight nor flee, a kind of posture of armed truce that entailed the least likelihood of attack. He wondered if it was possible for him to work out some kind of agonistic deal with fate. He'd like to approach the front door of his condo without worrying who had been there, or was still there, and once in a while he'd like to pass a dark doorway without feeling compelled to shout a challenge into the darkness.

She came in wearing mesh nylons, a black garter belt, some kind of complex semitransparent merry widow arrangement on top, and nothing else. “You like me?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. It was all so earnest and calculated that he had a little trouble not being amused.

“Is this equipment all new?”

“I been keeping it for you. It's not for nobody else.”

Luckily his tenderness took over and he started getting aroused as she cupped the underside of her breasts.

“You want me to do a strip for you? I do anything you want for you, Jackito.”

“That's very sweet,” he said. He felt stupid and confused and a little alarmed by her intensity, but they were both grown-ups, and if he didn't feel completely and overwhelmingly in love, she wasn't asking him for that. There it is, he thought—he could confront a scruple and dispose of it as decisively as anyone.

“I
guess I'd better change my brand of deodorant,” he said. He sat up on the edge of the four-poster bed and pulled on a T-shirt, but he could see she wasn't ready for jokes about what had happened to her. He felt a need to shift gears. He wanted to shake the feeling that he had just taken advantage of a woman he didn't quite love enough, at least in the big scheme of things. But you never got to live in the big scheme of things, he thought. You lived in the right now, and the right now was always full of adjustments, and properly adjusted, he did like Marlena quite a lot.

He touched her cheek and she pressed into his palm.

“You said they used a name like Ethel.”

“Uh-huh. It was strange, maybe it wasn't a name.”

“Would you remember if you heard it again?”

“I don't think so.”

“Maybe Ethel Somebody is the Aimee Semple McPherson of her day. She's founded one of these new religions that we're all drowning in,” he said, and saying it changed something, left him feeling as if he was falling through a crust into a different place and being forced to notice the difference.

“They scared me.”

“I don't know what it was all about, Mar.”

H
E
parked up the road from the big yellow toyland of the Theodelphian Elect and watched a guy in cowboy black, like Johnny Cash or Roy Orbison, including the ten-gallon hat, walking along Melrose digging coins out of the fringed leather pouch at his waist and feeding the parking meters. Meter after meter he went, like Millet's Sower, seeding each one with a little pivot at the waist, a poke with a quarter, a twist of the knob, and then on to the next. Jack Liffey had heard of him, Johnny Meterman, bane of the parking enforcement corporation, but he'd always thought he was a myth. Go go go, he rooted. It made perfect sense, and it was one of the few vocations he'd ever seen that did.

“You wanted to be dealt in,” he said to Faye Mardesich. “All you have to do is go in the reception center and tell them you're lost and you want to be found. You can play lost, can't you?”

She started laughing, stepped it up a pitch, and then had a little trouble climbing off. “How little you know, tough guy.”

“You think I'm a tough guy?”

“Ooo-la-la. Don't disabuse me, all right? I need that strength. Jack, I
am
lost. It's just that other women my age go bats and don't even know it's happening until some bartender shakes them awake at two
A.M. YOU
know what it means to be supported and have nothing of your own? I am the original soccer mom, and now Jimmy doesn't even need me. I didn't used to be stupid, I used to think I was smarter than Milo, but your brain goes to mush if you don't use it.”

She looked at her hands for a bit. He didn't really want to hear this, but she was paying.

“One by one, all the things you're supposed to get comfort from fail you. It's like being in a peewee-league version of Chekhov. Everybody's unhappy and nobody gets what they want and nobody knows what's going on.”

“Nobody ever gets just what they want, Faye.”

“Yeah, I know. Some people do okay settling for third or fourth best. Maybe that's all wisdom is.”

A yellow Cadillac pulled up and turned in, its bow wave opening a channel among the kids in the yellow cadet suits who were flowing into the courtyard of the Theodelphian compound. The windows were smoked.

“You know what starts getting you, Mr. Tough Guy? It's when the box boys at the supermarket don't even look at you anymore. You're not even worth a mental undressing.”

She seemed plenty tough and self-possessed to him.

“So, yeah, I can play like I'm lost.”

“I'm convinced. If you turn out to want to stay in that place until light rays come out of your eyes, just give me a sign and I'll stay out of it.”

She snorted. “The day I believe in crap like that you can tie my tail to the old oak tree.”

The marquee had changed and now said:
“THE SCIENCE OF THE THIRD HEAVEN BEGINS WHERE MATERIAL SCIENCE LEAVES OFF.”
—
DL.
He wondered if they changed the sign every day, and then he wondered what had gone wrong with the first two heavens.

“There's a coffee shop up on Santa Monica. Wingo's. I'll meet you there at noon. That ought to give you time to find out what they do with new initiates.”

“Are you going in, too?”

“You could say that.”

H
E
watched Faye Mardesich storm away from the car with a fierce sense of mission, and he wondered how on earth she was going to convince anyone she was a helpless waif. But that was her problem. He was going inside the compound, too, and that was going to be
their
problem. Handcuffing Marlena to his bed—the thought put him into a slow cold fury and he knew he wouldn't let up now until he'd evened the score.

He opened the trunk and got out a greasy jumpsuit that he used whenever he had to lean over the engine and wiggle wires until it started. He contorted himself around in the front seat to put it on and cinch it up over his street clothes. The painters working on the front of a 99-Cent store up the street had gone on coffee break somewhere and he picked up their stepladder and carried it toward the yellow compound.

A young Latino in the guard shack eyed him as he turned in.

Jack Liffey nodded. “The big guy needs his frammis fixed.”

The guard shrugged back and Jack Liffey joined a couple of yellow cadets heading for the big lagoon in the middle of the compound.

“You gotta keep incarnating until you feel the burn,” one of them said.

“Yeah, I guess that's the signification.”

Verily, Jack Liffey thought. If you lived here, you'd be home now.

5

ROOM 101

H
E PICKED OUT AN INNOCENT–LOOKING GIRL IN THE HALL
way. “Hey, where's the big guy's office?”

“You mean Hedrick?” Her eyes went wide, like a young deer in the headlights.

“Uh-huh.”

“He's on band three.”

“I don't know my way. Show me.”

She peeked at her wristwatch as a bell rang and other cadets streamed past—the place reminding him more and more of a junior high school. “I only got five minutes before my level-ten impression.”

She had a round unformed face and pouty lips, and reluctantly she beckoned and led him up a dank stairwell where he had to maneuver the ladder around the turns. A paint can would have been a lot more convenient prop.

“Been here long?”

“A couple months.”

“You know my pal Jimmy M?”

“I only know the girls. I'm not past the Archetype of Forms yet.”

“Oh, sure.”

“It's just up to the top and to the right. I got to go.” She slid past him and fled down the stairwell.

“Have a nice day,” he called. At the top, he poked into a room filled with people sitting at tables with head-phones on. Now and again one of them pushed a button on a console. If they'd been talking back he'd have figured it was a language lab, but there was no provision for talking back.

“Have a nice day,” he said again, but no one looked up.

There was a big alcove off the end of the hall with a couple of ordinary-looking secretaries typing away. He cocked his head at the door between them. “That Hedrick's?”

An olive-skinned secretary nodded. “That haircut doesn't suit you,” she said.

“I can't afford haircuts,” he said. “You must be a worrier.”

“I am. Are we repainting? Goodman didn't tell me.”

“It must have slipped his mind.” He shouldered open the door and walked straight into an office the size of a retail store with a half-dozen windows to the outside. The only furniture was gaudy pillows arranged in little shoals here and there, like the conversation pits they'd inflicted on upscale suburban homes in the sixties. One little clique of pillows was occupied by a large bald man in a bright yellow robe surrounded by telephones and laptop computers with their screens up. He looked up as Jack Liffey set the stepladder down, a man in his late forties with every bit of hair shaved off him, even the eyebrows.