Terminal Island Read Online Free Page A

admonished.
    “They’re my one lapse into junk food. I can’t help it. Brad and Mom have built a whole cuisine out of Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tart au gratin, Pop-Tart mousse, Sauerkraut and Pop-Tarts. Anyway, you eat Big Macs.”
    “Only when I’m traveling. You know why I go into McDonald’s on the road, don’t you?”
    “It’s quick and predictable?”
    “I suppose that’s part of it, but here I am, in Lodi, sweaty and road-weary because the car hasn’t got an air conditioner. I’m disappointed because some runaway kid has eluded me or cursed me out or waved a gun in my face, yet my spirit lifts because I know with absolute certainty that I can stroll into this McDonald’s and for a few bucks I can purchase thirty seconds, maybe a full minute, of politeness from a teenager.”
    She wrinkled her forehead a moment, as if she’d lost her sense of humor somewhere, and then laughed softly. “It’s true, isn’t it. But if it’s politeness you want from us, you’d better avoid goths. The whole getup’s supposed to be a thumb in your eye.”
    “They take it all seriously?”
    “Some do. You were a beatnik, weren’t you?”
    “I suppose so, but I wouldn’t have liked being called one.”
    “I don’t think they mind the word at all. It’s a style. There’re maybe twenty of them at Redondo High. Some play Dungeons and Dragons, some go to the raves and listen to death metal or speed metal. Mostly they seem unhappy and kind of lost, but they read a lot, even good stuff, though mostly with dark themes. Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Blake. There’re even a couple of Latino goths. It fits right in with all that Day of the Dead stuff in their culture.”
    The toaster chirped and a brown Pop-Tart, leaking red, rose slowly like a ghoul from its grave. “Want half?”
    He made a face. “I haven’t had one in fifteen years and I still have a distinct memory of the taste. It was like sucking chrome off a bumper.”
    Cops with fizzing flares were funneling the traffic at the bottom of the Harbor Freeway into a creeping clog and by the time he neared the offramp at Channel, he could see why. Two immense belly-to-the-ground pigs were glaring and snorting at a ring of blue-clad cops who were trying skittishly to pen them in. One cop even had his pistol out.
    Freeze, motherfucker! Jack Liffey thought.
    Pigs always turned out to be a lot bigger than you thought, and these looked huge, prehistoric, the size of his car. Just as he angled down the ramp, both pigs squealed on some unheard signal and charged, setting off a panic among the retreating cops, but he didn’t get to see the sequel.
    Then he was coming up Gaffey through the gap in Goat Hill into San Pedro proper, toward the old downtown that had defined his youth: the Warners Theater, the war surplus, the hobby shop, and only two blocks farther down Sixth Street, the harbor itself, which had once had a ferryboat across to Terminal Island. Then there were the shipyards and the dark glamour of Beacon Street, the tattoo parlors and mission hotels and a bar named Shanghai Red’s, where men had once actually been shanghaied. Urban renewal had knocked down a lot of it before the fashion had shifted in the nineties to trying to preserve a cardboard cutout of the past. Pasadena had started the trend by pouring new boutiques and Starbucks and all the ordinary mall stores like Banana Republic into the historic storefronts, as if repopulating the world from outer space.
    He tended to avoid San Pedro as much as he could. It was a great place, one of the few LA districts with real character, but there were just too many of his own ghosts, too many spots where he’d messed up a young love or lost a friend or stepped on some Latino’s spit-shined shoes and had to run for his life. They didn’t call them gangbangers then, but they were. The Latinos in gray checked Pendletons buttoned to the neck and the Yugoslavs in gray felt car-coats with names and designs, just like the Pharaohs in