Terminal Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

who had grown great breasts prematurely and had everybody lusting after her. Carol’d had large buttocks, too, and he and a friend had privately named her MNA, for magnisimus novisimus agmen, which was as near as their crude Latin dictionary could get to “greatest rear,” though in fact it meant greatest rear platoon, or, quite literally, “greatest newest line of march.” He was amazed that after so many years, stuff like this was still banging around in his head.
    “It’s here if you want it,” Marin said, turning away in tight pedal pushers to show a fairly nice newest line of march herself.
    “The kid is sulking,” Dan said. “I won’t call him out right now, he’ll only clam up. You take him away from the house and see what you can get out of him.”
    “I’ll be happy to.”
    “And get this”—he waved a fork with his mouth full. “You’re not going to believe it, it’s old home week. The cop on the case is Ken Steelyard.”
    That rocked Jack Liffey back in his chair a bit.
    “Not the one from Seventh Street School?”
    041058
    “How many you think there are in this town?”
    Ken Steelyard was the most unlikely person from his grade school days to turn cop he could imagine. They had still been fairly close friends for a while at the beginning of junior high, but the last Jack Liffey really remembered of the tall, skinny, sad, and troubled boy was when he had secretly piled all of his possessions, including an ungainly hi-fi console, onto a Greyhound bus and taken himself off to Fresno by himself at age fourteen. When his mom and new stepdad found him, they dragged him home, but for some reason he and Jack Liffey hadn’t stayed close after that.
    “I’d figure him for the guy who goes up on the roof with a high-powered rifle and starts shooting innocent pedestrians.”
    Dan chuckled. “He straightened up, I guess.”
    “I guess I ought to go to some class reunions, but I can’t bring myself.”
    “I went to one ten years ago. You get to know what the guys are up to.”
    “Yeah, I want to see a reunion, but only through about ten panes of one-way glass.” How many times could you stand to explain how you got laid off from a nice aerospace job all of a sudden, in the middle of a normal life, and then got drunk a lot and lost your marriage, and in trying to dig yourself out, you fell into hunting down missing children as a living? It was probably a lot easier to introduce yourself if you were a success of some kind.
December 14
    When the world around you is in decline in every respect, to excel becomes much simpler, sometimes no more than a basic kata. Last night, after the task of the day, at midnight I constructed a private willed space. I stood against a closed metal grate in the entry of a cheap souvenir shop on Hollywood Boulevard. I remained there until dawn, passed by hookers, by waifs, lost runaways, drug dealers, by pimps and undercover police. For the first time in thirty years I rediscovered what it meant to be both aware of your surroundings and unaware at once. The pain was lessened somewhat, too. I simply was. I was aware of what passed as nothing, as ghosts of this sad underlife. Almost no one saw me there, enfolded in stillness, and the few who did went on quickly.
    The right and wrong ways of behaving are both contained within the trivial. At first, there were distracting thoughts. Then I found the place, on the outer margin of the world, above an infinite cliff. I could have grabbed bullets out of the air with my bare hands. Readiness. I knew: All movement is ritual. Like a new kind of breathing, almost peace.
    Father, my obligation to you is heavy. Honor is everything.
    I am completely at one with your memory and will serve you as if I, too, am already dead. I rush to my death freely. I must act again, for you, according to the code. I will keep ahimsa in mind. Hurt no one who does not hurt me.
    Be sincere and hard and quick. Loyalty. Justice. Bravery.
    Honor holds off