The Poison Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

on with your life and did the best you could day to day, and in a poor light it passed for strength.
    A boy was coming along the sidewalk toward the car and Jack Liffey rolled the window down. The boy was hardly twenty and his yellow tunic was permanently food-stained, as if it was the only one he had. A bad case of acne had left him scarred and shy. He glanced furtively at Jack Liffey watching him as he approached the old car.
    “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” Jack Liffey said earnestly, and the boy glanced away and sped up half a step.
    T HIS time he drove into the Valley over Laurel Canyon. He thought he’d miss the worst of the commute traffic but a flatbed had apparently collided with a green Camaro convertible on one of the tighter curves and dumped three pianos onto the road. The drivers were shouting at each other over a shattered upright that was propping up a baby grand. Other cars had to eke past on the shoulders and a woman with long red hair was leaning far out of the mashed convertible and pounding away on the keyboard of the baby grand.
    • • •
    “J IMMY’S a California boy,” she said, indicating the shelves built into the walls for sports equipment, a shorty surfboard, a bright blue snowboard, balls of various types, and an odd racket that he guessed was for something like lacrosse. He’d thought only rich kids at prep schools played lacrosse. For some reason, Faye Mardesich was wearing a baseball cap backward and when she had led him down the hall he read it: WHAT PART OF “BALL-BUSTING BITCH!” DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?
    The boy had the back room, on the far side of the house from his parents and away, too, from his dad’s postmodern sanctum. They’d passed the father’s den on the way and he’d glanced in at the piles and piles of books on the floor, each book dangling a limp tongue of a bookmark. As they’d contemplated the father’s study, Faye Mardesich had remembered she was carrying a beer bottle for each of them, and she’d thrust one into his hand, but he’d managed to lose it along the way. It was too much trouble to explain that he didn’t drink.
    There was a CD player on a shelf of the boy’s room and the usual CDs with the usual dark and riddling titles like Factory of Funk and Shrieking Death Angels. Jack Liffey’s eye caught on one disc by a group called the Hot Bleeding Assholes. A lot had changed since his day and the Shirelles and Bell-Notes. His eye also caught on a black fielder’s mitt, and he wondered when they’d started dying them black and why. It smelled right, though, that same oily animal aroma.
    “He’s not brainless, but he and his friends are afraid of being seen to know things, if you know what I mean.” She held up a Game Boy player with something like contempt. “If I could only harness the hours he sat at the dinner table playing this beeping thing.”
    She took down a Van Nuys High School yearbook and thumbed through it while he poked at what passed for a desk. There was a laptop, but when he fired it up he couldn’t find anything on it but games. A blue Post-it above the desk said Marta Monday. He put it in his pocket.
    “Oh, man,” Faye Mardesich said mournfully into the yearbook. “So much is the same, it really takes me back. We thought our problems were so gigantic back then. How were we supposed to know we were happy?”
    “Are you happy now?”
    She laughed softly. “I know I won’t fall off the edge of the world if some handsome boy ignores me. I know pain goes away. I know things that I can do to entertain myself. That’s as close to happy as anybody needs to get.”
    “Sounds okay to me,” he said absently. He poked at a pile of discarded letters, shoved anyhow into a drawer, and pocketed a folded sheet of paper that was separate and caught his eye for some reason.
    “Wish I could take that frame of reference back with me and do high school all over again,” she said.
    He pressed an ink stamp onto a scrap of paper. It was