The Poison Sky Read online

  He wondered if Jimmy Mardesich was embarked on what Kerouac had called the Holy Boy Road. If he was, his mother might not be able to get him back as easily as she seemed to think. He’d be too busy burn, burn, burning like a Roman candle or something.

  3

  TOO MUCH BELIEF

  PERRY MUTH SAT ON THE FRONT EDGE OF THE SOFA THE way big guys did when they pretty much wanted to be somewhere else. His bulk cut deeply into the gold pillows. “Mom, please.”

  The thin woman hovered in the doorway holding a big flour-dusted wooden spoon like a scepter, rapping it absently on a knuckle to give off little white puffs. She looked like a goddess setting up to make some decision that would alter worlds. “We don’t have any secrets in this family,” she said imperiously.

  Oh, yes we do, the boy’s eyes said. He was handsome in a wholesome-looking all-American way, with blue-green eyes and a square jaw, and he wore a jacket with white leather sleeves and a big VN patch on it. Jack Liffey was glad to see they still had letterman jackets, though he wasn’t quite sure why. He’d never had enough of a stake in the way things were back that far to want very hard for them to stay the same.

  “If you could just tell me the last time you saw Jimmy.”

  Things had gone strange from the first, with Faye Mardesich striding up to the front door with him, blinking as the porch light came on and introducing him to the family, and then offering no rationale at all for her retreat to the car.

  “Practice last Thursday, after school. He’s offense and I’m defense, and guys from the two squads don’t usually hang together, but Jimmy and me did. You know, offensive players are your uptight kind of guys. They always want to keep things neat and all in order, and we’re a lot more hang-loose.” He grinned. “We like to bust things up. That’s what defense is all about, messing up the neat lineups and things. Anyway, right after practice Jimmy told me he and his girl had a fight and he was going over to NoHo to see her and straighten it out.”

  “What’s Noho?”

  “Would you like some juice, Mr. Liffey? As a good Mormon family, we can’t offer you anything stronger.”

  She hadn’t budged and didn’t really seem to be offering him anything to drink. Probably it was just her oblique way of trying to nose out if he was a good Mormon, too, or a good anything. He was beginning to see why the boy liked to bust things up.

  “No thanks.”

  “NoHo’s over in North Hollywood. They tried to make this arty area, you know like SoHo or whatever in New York. Most of it’s pretty lame but there’s some places you can go.”

  “Where would Jimmy go?”

  “Jill hangs at a girls’ coffeehouse called the Broom Closet.”

  “What’s Jill’s last name?”

  “Annunziata.”

  “Was anything bothering Jimmy in the last few weeks?”

  The boy thought about it for a while, visibly torn between talking and not talking. Jack Liffey made a mental note to find him again when Mom was absent. “I think it was pretty hard to miss that he and Jill were going off on different paths.”

  “What paths were those?”

  He was like a dog out at the end of a taut chain, but still a few inches from the bone. “I’m not sure.”

  The mother stirred again. “You haven’t gone drinking with Jimmy Mardesich, have you?”

  “No.” A tiny thrill of rebellion seemed to seize the boy, wholly against his will. “Drinking isn’t the worst thing in the world, Mother. If Charlie Manson’s family was LDS, you’d probably worry about him poisoning his body with stimulants.”

  She came a step into the small living room, but apparently decided this wasn’t the time for a real showdown. “Stimulants and disobedience may have been the start of all that evil behavior, how do we know? You have to be respectful of your body.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Does this mean anything to you?” Jack Liffey showed him the paper with the number 88 on it.

  A cloud crossed the boy’s face. He threatened rain but couldn’t let it happen. “Huh-uh.”

  “Who’s Marta?”

  “She’s a friend of Jill’s.”

  “Why do you think Jimmy would have a note to call her or see her?”

  He shrugged his big defensive lineman’s shoulders. “Maybe he was trying to get her to talk to Jill for him.”

  “Do you think Jill would be at the Broom Closet tonight?”

  “Sure, probably. It’s over on Lankersheim. I can show you.”

  “No, sir,” his mother said emphatically. “You have homework to do here, young man.”

  The boy thought about it for a moment before succumbing. Jack Liffey could see that the power arrangements in this family were due for a big change soon. He was amazed the mother couldn’t see it, too, and opt for a small mid-course adjustment before it was too late. Perry Muth looked like a good kid, but you could never tell where an adolescent would spin off the merry-go-round if he was driven to take the leap. Maybe this was the one who’d spin up into city hall tower and start shooting the clerks. He was the nicest boy, the neighbors all said.

  “I want to thank you for talking to me.” He left one of his cards, printed up by Marlena a year earlier in a burst of optimism about his business. Outside Faye was standing on the far side of his car, smoking a skinny pastel cigarette. It gave him a pang. He dreamed now and again that he’d started smoking again, which filled the dream with waves of guilt and humiliation.

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “I gave up years ago, but all this has brought it back.” She grinned. “It’s like meeting up with an old lover for a forbidden fling. What did you learn?”

  “That kids get pissed off if you don’t treat them with respect.”

  “You just now learned that?”

  “Everything gets harder to remember.”

  FAYE directed him east along Magnolia and they passed a small knot of picketers in front of what looked like a warehouse, strutting in and out of the yellow funnels of the streetlights. The signs said things like PORNOGRAPHY EXPLOITS WOMEN and THE BODY IS THE TEMPLE OF YOUR SPIRIT, distant echoes of Perry Muth’s mother. One tall sign carried aloft by a minister pointed the wrong way to read. But Jack Liffey’s eye was drawn to a woman in a flesh-colored body stocking with black lingerie over it. She carried a sign that said FUCK ME—I’M A SLUT. A more matronly woman beside her carried a pink plastic dildo the size of a fire hydrant. He couldn’t quite work out the point of view of the demonstrators, but he did know this area was called Porn Alley, the center of the blue film industry for the whole country.

  “Land sakes,” Faye said as they passed.

  “You can say that again.”

  “Land sakes.” She laughed. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Every once in a while you get bushwhacked by the peculiar in this old town.”

  “My daughter and I trade examples we find of L.A. oddity. It’s a sort of game.”

  “How old’s your daughter?”

  “Thirteen in a month. She lives with her mom but I see her as much as I can.”

  “I hope she turns out okay for you. I never used to worry about Jimmy going bad. I worried about him feeling inadequate because he tried so hard and just couldn’t get As, but he didn’t have a single nutty gene anywhere in his DNA.” There was a moment of quiet. “Now I’m worrying a bit.”

  “I know what you mean. There’s just too much random in the world.”

  “You hit the nail right on the head.”

  Magnolia was one of those commercial wastelands that festered out along the big L.A. thoroughfares, constantly in nondescript transition from something to something else. Atlas World Famous Sausages was next door to Gurjian Rug Cleaners, and then Mr. Radiator/Señor Radiadores, Greenglow Hydroponic Vegetables, Abbarotes Tijuanas, the Great Wall Bar with the Institute of Paralegal and Metaphysics upstairs, Cash for Your Car bedecked with colored pennants and big dollar bills, Golden Touch Fire and Motoring Advice, a weedy lot with a big billboard
that said STILL GUILTY, and then a welter of color called Almost Humanoid Pottery. When he drove past a liquor store, prosaically named Art’s Liquor, it was a mercy.

  “Random,” she said, “is what’s preying on me. Random killers and random muggers and random this and that.”

  They passed the Bahia Caporales, Joey’s Tattoos and Truck Lettering, a little theater doing Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, and a fern bar called Molly’s Toucan Play That Game. Just random places.

  THIS time she was coming in, too, but separately, and after she’d agreed to give him a ten-minute head start. The Broom Closet was a coffeehouse and bookstore that exuded the New Age through every pore, like righteous indignation. He slid in past a skinny dark woman with green hair browsing the bookshelves at the door who excused herself and duckwalked out of his way rather than be touched. Just inside was a big sign that said AN YE HARM NONE, DO WHAT YE WILL. The walls were lavender where they weren’t covered with wavery watercolors of women blessing someone just out of frame. Display cases of trinkets sat around for browsers, but no one was browsing. A dozen women chatted away at round tables, mostly in long dresses with a lot of jewelry. The woman at the coffee counter thought about it for a moment before pointing out Jill Annunziata, who was sitting with two older women sipping what was undoubtedly bat-wing tea.

  She had Big Hair, jet-black and shiny and plumped out to the sides as if hit by sheet lightning, and her face was so regular and sharp-featured and beautiful it hurt your eyes. She wore turquoise on an overlarge plaque suspended around her neck and on every finger, and she had a calm about her that seemed to infect the other two women, who banked a little this way and that as she talked to them. She saw him coming across the room and took them all to silence with some gesture so small he couldn’t make it out. A New Age noise began to wail softly from a sound system, like a sinus being rasped away.

  “You’re looking for Jimmy,” she pronounced, before he could introduce himself.

  Of course, he thought, what else would a fiftyish male be doing there? But he could see she liked to play at omniscience. “Am I going to bark like a dog when you snap your fingers?” he said.

  She waited a long time, on the edge of a smile. “We don’t play tricks like that,” she said equably after he had been made to wait a suitable stretch. “Please sit down.”

  “But we could, couldn’t we?”

  Jill Annunziata dismissed the other two, but so politely and so subtly that they seemed happy to leave.

  “Everything you think you know about Wicca, what you call witchcraft, is wrong.”

  “I think it’s a way of insulating yourself from misogamy and male authoritarianism and also staying well away from the fixation on guilt that informs most Christian faiths.”

  She did smile, and he almost had to look away. “Well, maybe not everything. But you’re still on the other side.”

  “My insolence is just a bad habit. I don’t really make fun of anyone’s faith to their face.”

  “And in private?”

  “In private I never stop laughing,” he said.

  Her face had returned to its neutral gaze. Her eyes looked amused, but the rest of her wasn’t ready to sign on.

  “Just imagine a God who wants a lot of people to troop into a big room and sing His praises for hours on end,” he said. “Would you want that? I can’t imagine a God who’s that much more vain than I am.”

  She laughed easily and a waitress, or acolyte, brought strong black coffee, which was just what he wanted without actually ordering it. Of course.

  “The word wicca is really the same as the common English word witch and it traces to an Indo-European root that means to bend or change. We try to bend the sad and cruel around us. In general, we’re life-affirming. We try to stay in touch with the divinity that exists all around us in nature and science, in wind and mountains and bodies of water, and some of us believe we can change our own consciousness by using ritual and our own willpower plus herbs and a positive frame of mind. If we align ourselves with the most likely paths people’s lives may take, we may even be able to influence others or alter events. We believe that whatever you do comes back to you threefold, so we wouldn’t want to do anything dark or angry. No one I know believes in anything like a being such as Satan. Does that ease your mind?”

  “My mind is just fine.” He sipped the coffee. It was dark, burned, and strong, and he liked it. The women at the next table were slowly laying out tarot cards and overdoing their responses. They were too emotional, too underlined, outsized. That’s what a man would think, he thought.

  “Are you a policeman?”

  “I’m just a poor agnostic who looks for missing children.”

  “You’re a cult deprogrammer.”

  “Not that either. I’ve never made anyone go anywhere against their will. Jimmy’s mother asked me to try to find him and find out if he’s okay, that’s all. Can you tell me where he went?”

  “Are you asking if I know it, as you mean knowledge, or if I can divine it?”

  “I’ll settle for what you have. I’m not finicky about epistemology.”

  From somewhere she had brought out a small glass vial of amber-colored liquid and she toyed with it absently with one manicured hand. Her filmy dress rippled with every move.

  “I don’t know where he is, but he’s all right. He’s a high-minded person.”

  “Did you have a fight when you last saw him?”

  It was the first frown he’d seen on her face and the effect was startling, giving him a sudden heartache, as if his big clumsy paw had bruised something helpless.

  “He was upset because he wanted to test the waters in my covenant for himself. I had to tell him he wasn’t really ready. He wasn’t. He was full of confusion and anger at his father, amongst other things.”

  “Other things?”

  She shrugged.

  “He didn’t threaten anything or say where he was going?”

  In the corner of his eye he saw Faye come in and browse the magazines. The stretchy top that she wore looked as out of place as a zebra on Wilshire Boulevard.

  Jill Annunziata sighed. “He said he would show me he was ready. I honestly don’t know what he meant. I don’t read minds. My beliefs may seem quaint to you, Mister…”

  “Jack Liffey.”

  “Mr. Jack Liffey, but I don’t engage in trickery. In what we call the Burning Time, they killed tens of thousands of decent women just like me for trying to worship and heal in their own way. We’re just thankful that Pat Robertson and the pope no longer have that kind of power.”

  He saw Faye drift to the coffee counter and begin talking to the woman there.

  He showed Jill Annunziata the “88.” “Do you know what this is?”

  She grimaced. “If it’s his, it’s only a joke.”

  “But you know what it is.”

  He could tell that she really didn’t want to say, but she seemed to decide it would be worse not to. “H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. The ‘88’ stands for ‘Heil Hitler.’ There’s a handful of skinheads at school who bought ink stamps like that and went around stamping things. They’re just sad, unloved boys. Jimmy isn’t like that and he had nothing to do with them. If anything, he probably took it away from someone.”

  “Would I find Marta here?”

  “Marta Rodriguez?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Is there some coffeehouse that specializes in her religion?”

  Her smile threatened to return. “Quite a few of them. She’s Catholic.” She got out an ordinary address book and gave him Marta’s phone number. Across the room Faye Mardesich was in animated conversation with the two women who had been sitting with Jill. The wailing music broke off and a hypnotic drumming started up.

  Jill Annunziata leaned across the table without warning and dragged her forefinger lightly across his forehead to leave a trail of musky scent from her vial.

  “I hope that do
esn’t turn me into a frog.”

  This time the smile broke through the clouds. “It’s musk and rose and cherry. They’re all oils that relate to love. You will look more warmly on every woman you see tonight, and if you are open to it, you will fall in love and marry one of them.”

  “I predict that a girl who looks like you is going to get in a lot of trouble rubbing love potion on men my age.”

  “Blessed be.”

  HE waited outside on Lankersheim, watching the sporadic traffic. All of a sudden he noticed a sooty homeless man up the street who stood with his feet set wide in a planter in front of a dentist’s office. His craggy face was so filthy he looked like he’d just ridden a tramcar out of a coal mine, and he was hurling blades of ice plant torn from the planter at the passing cars. Now and again a driver stopped and got out and glared, but saw the tattered clothes and dirt-encrusted hands and decided there was nothing to be gained by picking a fight. Jack Liffey eased his way up the block to talk to the man.

  “What’s up, man?”

  “I testify there is nothing anyone can do against me in the flesh!”

  “Is somebody trying to hurt you?”

  “I set myself against them all, every one! They can’t harm me!”

  “They’ll harm you, old man, if you keep throwing things.”

  He hurled another stalk, but it skimmed harmlessly across the pavement ahead of a Toyota four-wheeler.

  “Can you make a finger?” Jack Liffey asked, and he demonstrated, thrusting his middle finger angrily at the Toyota.

  The old man watched him, fascinated.

  “Come on, curse them. You’re all bastards!”

  The old man worked one hand into the proper gesture with his other hand, tugging the fingers into position one by one as if he had arthritis. He kept glancing at Jack Liffey as a model.

  “Bastards!” Jack Liffey shouted at an MTA bus that rumbled past.

  The old man took up the shout, too. “Bastards! Make your plans for my internal organs, will you! Take me to hospital, gang up on me! Bastards!”

  “You can’t touch us! You’re all swine!”

  “Swine! Swine!” the old man picked up.