Streets on Fire

by John Shannon

“Listen to this! It’s da bomb!”

  Mary Beth squatted cross-legged on the other side of the old pink 45rpm record player with its fat spindle. The Leary home on the suburban edge of Claremont had central air, so at least they were comfortable hanging out in Mary Beth’s bedroom.

  On the turntable was “Mony Mony” by Tommy James and The Shondelles. Mary Beth had been slamming through a stack of her dad’s R&B 45s like “Silhouettes” and “96 Tears,” playing about thirty seconds of each one before getting bored and whacking down another one.

  That restlessness made Maeve nervous too. It seemed to suggest that the girl had never felt comfortable in her life, had never let herself settle into a rhythm. Unease was woven into the whole fabric of her life, Maeve thought. She looked around. Her cousin had collected a number of things willy-nilly, just because she could afford them, without knowing or caring enough about any of them. There were rows of ignored dolls in national dress, bags of POGs, an elaborate Victorian dollhouse, even a trunk of Archie comic books—another hand-me-down from a father who had inherited the Chevy dealership in town from his own father.

  Mary Beth’s dad, too, seemed to spend his time on restless, barren projects, staring at his computer, moving his money around from investment to investment, or exercising in a half-hearted way with the expensive equipment in the back yard. Mary Beth’s mother lolled on a chaise by the pool reading romance novels.

  Out the full-length window, Tom Leary now held a set of light-looking barbells over his head, pumping away at great showoff speed for about thirty seconds. Then he stopped to rub his pot belly.

  “I like this song,” Maeve said.

  “Yeah.”

  But it was gone, wrenched away to make room for “In the Still of the Night,” by the Five Satins.

  Maeve was beginning to wonder if she’d made a bad mistake. Three days, she’d told her dad. Come get me Saturday. Of course, it might have been worse. She might have been forced to listen to Mary Beth’s new CDs. The girl’s tastes seemed to run to Top 40 bubblegum like ’N Sync, while Smashing Pumpkins was about as mainstream as Maeve’s listening ever got.

  But then she got lucky. “I read a Nancy Drew the other day,” she offered casually.

  Mary Beth just lit up. She bounced and boiled with enthusiasm. “Yo, Maeve, you’re gonna just expire when you see this!” She skittered across the room on her hands and knees like a startled spider and pulled open the doors of a walk-in closet to show off a free-standing bookcase. “I got Trixie Belden, the whole set!” she exclaimed. “And The Three Investigators. But this is best.” She pointed to the two bottom shelves. Maeve crawled over with her and plucked The Secret of the Old Clock off the shelf.

  “While I’s done sowed all mah wild oats, I still sows a little rye now and den,” Maeve read aloud.

  “Can you believe this?” It was good to find something Mary Beth actually cared about, and she figured she’d better appear more knowledgeable than she was if she wanted to use Nancy Drew as a lever.

  “In the fifties they censored out the guns and the liquor and even the coffee,” Mary Beth said. “Look!” She flipped madly through another book to find a favorite passage.

  “Have you ever thought you might want to be Nancy Drew?” Maeve essayed cautiously.

  “I don’t think I’m brave enough, but maybe I could be her best friend Bess.”

  “Oh, really?”

  *

  Coming back in on I-10, the 10, as people in LA said, the traffic slowed maddeningly into a snarl about El Monte, and eventually a line of fizzing flares funneled everyone into the far left lane. A gigantic sparrow the size of an elephant, evidently meant as a movie prop or some kind of advertising display, had got stuck under an overpass on its flatbed truck, the top of the bird’s papier-mâché head shredding a bit against the bridge. Several men stood around arguing and tugging on ropes, trying to extricate the bird. A family had piled out of a wrecked station wagon off to the side, and several kids were screaming at one another or bawling.

  It was hotter than he ever remembered the city getting this time of year, and he had half a mind to take advantage of the stop-and-go to lean across the front seat and rip the plastic off the passenger side windows. It was only August, and the worst wasn’t usually until September.

  Maybe the thing on the flatbed was meant to be a wren, he thought, as he inched up to it. It was hard to tell. He didn’t know very many birds once he’d exhausted the obvious ones like seagulls and owls.

  As he’d left Claremont, he’d stopped at a Chevron station to call Bancroft Davis and ask him to arrange a meeting with Umoja, and he’d rung up a pal named Mike Lewis who lived in Pasadena. Mike had been home and willing to receive guests, allegedly hard at work on his next book. Mike was a social historian who’d been lionized after his first big book on LA, even got a MacArthur grant, but the next book had gone after the boosters and developers and they’d come back at him mercilessly, even yanking a university job he coveted.

  Mike’s house was a pretty little bungalow overlooking the Arroyo Seco. Across the street, a crew of workmen with a small crane were excavating what appeared to be a statue of the Virgin buried in the yard. The beat-up old Buick was gone from Mike’s drive, in its place was a workaday new Toyota Celica. Jack Liffey could see he hadn’t gone extravagant with his three hundred grand from the MacArthur, but Mike had never cared much for machines or other possessions. As if to prove the point, he was visible in the kitchen window hammering hunt-and-peck at an old upright L.C. Smith typewriter, the sleeves of some loose white gown flapping away like mad.

  “It’s me, Mike,” Jack Liffey called through the open window. “I’ll let myself in if there’s no dog.”

  Mike Lewis beckoned. There was no dog, but in the front room there was a really stunning blonde in a white Arab djellaba that matched Mike’s. She sat cross-legged in front of a portable light table that was glowing up at her.

  “Hi,” he said. “Mike waved me in.”

  “That’s okay. I’m decent.”

  Mike had slipped in under the civic radar to teach urban studies part time at an assortment of small art colleges. He’d collected quite an arty following among his students.

  “You can say that again.”

  She smiled. “I’m China Cho.” There was only the faintest suggestion of Asian features in her face. “Mike’s my teacher.”

  “Jack Liffey. I guessed that.” He’d guessed a bit more. Mike had been married four times, and in fact they’d met because Mike’s wife number four had been a friend of Jack’s wife one. Mike always had a woman around somewhere. All colleges were steeped in hormones, and art schools were probably at the top of the charts in that department.

  China Cho was arranging big two-by-two slides from a Rolleiflex or Hasselblad, so big that he could make them out pretty well standing above the lightboard. They showed bare breasts with ornate tattoos. Some were dragons, butterflies and flowers, one was a whole seascape of Japanesy waves, and another was with a helix of barbed wire. One breast with a painful-looking nipple ring seemed to be inscribed in Arabic, round and round.

  “I’m trying to come up with an organizing principle,” she said, as she swapped slides around. “A tattoo taxonomy. Color or subject matter or quantity of design—which comes first?”

  Or size of breast, he thought. “This your art project or are you in the business?”

  “The tattoo business?”

  “I’m not sure what I meant.”

  “Call it body art. I’m in photography. I got interested in these because I’ve got a pretty good one myself on my right breast. Would you like to see?”

  “I think I’d better give it a miss.”

  She laughed, and it was hard to discern how serious she had been.

  “Jack, come on in here!” Mike Lewis called.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “Likewise, I’m sure.”

  Mike opened a tiny desktop fridge and tossed him a Vernor’s ginger
ale. “Rent plantations,” he said out of the blue.

  “Pardon?”

  “All those separate little cities on the Eastside, that’s all they are. No industry, no commerce, no tax base, just thousands of rental units for Latinos. It’s no wonder those cities fight each other to offer cheap land to auto malls and big box stores just to get a little sales tax into the city. The whole city structure is so irrational.”

  Jack Liffey nudged aside a book and sat on a kitchen chair. “If it were rational, what would you have to write about?”

  “Unfair. Remember when we protested ’Nam? Our dads said we were just spoiled kids, and we replied, ‘When a finger points at an evil, you just study the finger.’”

  “I went, Mike. I was the evil.”

  “That was an abstraction—”

  “Don’t apologize. I shouldn’t have gone, but I didn’t do too much harm. I just made it possible for others to do harm.” He decided the moral balance needed adjustment. “By the way, how does it feel being rich?”

  Mike Lewis grinned. A big fan was pumping air in through the open window and they heard the sudden groan of a diesel engine from outside. He glanced at the crane working on the statue of the Virgin across the road. “You mean the MacArthur? It gives me time to work. I love having undisturbed time. Normally I won’t take grants, I don’t even believe in them. Why on earth should social critics expect to be subsidized? But this one came unasked. Siobhann called to congratulate me, by the way.”

  She’d been the wife Jack Liffey had known, returned now to Ireland with their two kids. They talked about her and the kids for a few minutes as the desiccating heat screwed up another notch and they both sucked on the ginger ale cans.

  “Tell me about Umoja,” Jack Liffey said. He’d already explained his new job, hunting down the missing boy and girl.

  “Black nationalism,” Mike Lewis said thoughtfully. He half rotated once, very slowly, in the desk chair. “They have to be situated in that historical current.”

  Jack Liffey feigned a groan. In fact, he had come because he wanted Mike’s take on Umoja and its background, all of it. Still, he felt he had to pretend to demur a bit on so much abstraction. Mike would plow on regardless.

  It was Mike’s thesis that black nationalism only really gathered force when white society turned its back on African Americans. In the 1920s, with the Klan on the attack—even electing governors in Colorado and Oklahoma—the black community turned to Father Divine and Marcus Garvey and Back to Africa.

  “Nationalism went on the decline in the 1930s,” he maintained. “The textbooks won’t say it, but it was at least in part because the Communists built these huge national campaigns for black issues. Defending the Scottsboro lads. Bringing blacks into the CIO unions. Organizing poor black and white sharecroppers together in the South.

  “Then, toward the end of the Civil Rights Movement, things turned around again. I think leaders like Stokely and Malcolm saw that they’d got about as far as white society was prepared to let them. And really, Jim Crow in the South didn’t matter much anymore. Much of black America had migrated to the industrial North, and that’s where the struggle was. They were the heart of the unions, trying to resist union-busting for the next fifty years. They pretty much lost that one, too.”

  “So nationalism comes back again?”

  “Ask yourself why. Is there anybody doing one thing for the inner-city poor?”

  There was a crash outside and they glanced out the broad window. Across the road a number of workmen peered down into the pit where the crane’s cable disappeared.

  “Oops. Dropped the Virgin,” Jack Liffey said. “I hope they get her out of there safely.”

  “Out? They’re not taking her out. They’re burying her.”

  “Did she just die?”

  “That house is owned by a rich guy who belongs to some Catholic sect that thinks the world is about to end. Something about Our Lady of some kind of rose and this old woman on Long Island who saw visions.”

  “I’ve heard of her. But still.”

  “The guy believes the Pakistanis, or maybe the Iranis, are about to nuke the Christian world. You know, the Islamic bomb.”

  Jack Liffey couldn’t help chuckling. “So a big statue of the Virgin will survive. That’s a comfort.”

  They glanced at one another. “You still wonder why the blacks give up on us from time to time?” Mike Lewis said.

  “Tell me about Umoja.”

  “Umoja, sure. They’re a lot like Ron Karenga’s group. They’ve got a storefront, they give breakfasts to poor kids, they wear dashikis, and they teach black kids pride. They give classes on African history and African languages. Off the record—they don’t know very much about Africa, but they try hard. There’s a lot of do-it-yourself ideology about Egypt as the root of civilization and some invented stuff about the ‘African philosophy of life.’ I can understand a people that was so badly used working up their pride, but some of the history they believe is pretty touch-and-go. The Egypt stuff is pure bunk. It’s not all that many steps from an ‘innate African worldview’ to ‘they’ve-all-got-rhythm,’ you know?”

  “I was in Africa for a couple weeks,” Jack Liffey said. “I worked a fiddle to come home the long way from ’Nam. It was nice to go into a dance club and see that a whole cross-section of Africans couldn’t dance for shit.”

  “You’re Irish,” Mike Lewis said. “And you quit drinking.”

  “I reconsider that every time I have to listen to you.”

  *

  Her palms throbbed and ached where they pressed down on the low racing handlebars. Maeve didn’t like racing bikes. Back home in Redondo, she rode her mom’s old British bike that had nice ordinary handlebars and a nice comprehensible lever marked L-M-H on the handgrip, but here she had to settle for Mary Beth’s brother’s hyper-expensive Peugeot racing bike with low bars and so many levers she had no idea what gear she was in. Robert—they called him Bucky—was away back east in a summer catch-up session at some expensive eastern college for rich dummies. Mary Beth was riding her own mountain bike with straight handlebars that would have been a lot more to Maeve’s liking.

  A truck woodshed past on Arrow Highway, rocking the two girls in its wake. Thank heaven she’d brought jeans, Maeve thought, or the sharp seat would have defeated her. They were both dressed in torn jeans and baggy T-shirts.

  She thought again about poor Mary Beth’s parents. Staying in the Leary home, Maeve had learned that she had begun maturing in ways she hadn’t been aware of. For the first time in her life she found herself observing a couple of grown-ups more or less for what they were. Mary Beth’s parents weren’t just another mom and a dad, relatively interchangeable with all moms and dads. They were in fact jerks, a bit like some of the jerks her own age. They sat around their pool, drinking and arguing and wasting their lives, talking about nothing but shopping and TV and sneering mercilessly at the neighbors.

  “Slow down, you got the racer,” Mary Beth complained.

  “You mean Rocinante?”

  “Huh.”

  “Don Quixote’s horse.”

  “Erf, who’s that?”

  This unexpected growing up seemed to have done some-thing to her feelings for Mary Beth, too. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have liked the girl very much, if she’d just met her and they weren’t related. Mary Beth had almost no attention span and wasn’t all that bright by the standards Maeve usually used. But she did have a big welcoming heart and she laughed at Maeve’s jokes. Also, even though Mary Beth seemed a bit of a scaredy-cat at first, she always seemed to pluck up her courage and give things a go. Maeve decided that she liked her cousin despite her faults.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Anyway, Don Quixote was a man, she thought. “I’ll be Calamity Jane and you can be Annie Oakley.”

  To let Mary Beth catch her breath, Maeve slowed a bit as they approached a derelict motel called The Old 66 Wigwam with separate cabins shaped like teepees. The plaster was beginning to
peel away from the framework of the teepees, and a few of the poles sticking up on top had fallen at funny angles. She would have to remember this for her dad. Two points at least.

  “What are Calamity and Annie planning to do out here?” Mary Beth asked.

  “We’re going to hunt down the enemy Indians and spy on them.”

  Maeve felt uncomfortable about using that description. She didn’t really want to make Indians the bad guys, and she knew she probably should probably call them Native Americans in any case.

  “Tribe has abandoned teepees, gone on warpath,” Maeve offered as they both gawked at the motel for the last time and pedaled on.

  “What tribe are we after?” Mary Beth asked gleefully, getting into the spirit of things.

  “A band of Apaches called The Bone Losers.”

  *

  His appointment with Umoja wasn’t until four, and he stopped off briefly at the house to change his sweat-soaked shirt. There he found a note on the fridge.

  I’m at the church this afternoon, she had written.

  The church. The definite article said a lot. She was spending more and more time at The Church of the Open Barn Door, down in the low-rent area of Hawthorne. Father Paul Something-or-other had started out preaching off the back of a truck in a used car lot in the 1960s and ended up building a big domed stadium. Jack Liffey had met a few of the Open Doorites, and done his best to like their cheerful, clean and energetic working class bearing. They were millenarians, but they made no real attempt to predict when Jesus was going to be touching down again.

  He strolled out into the back yard to offer Loco a hug and gave a groan when he saw a burrowed-out spot that it was almost finished under the wire. It was hard to keep a half-coyote down. Loco was staring sheepishly in another direction, and was ridiculously affectionate in response to a few pats, then frowned a bit as Jack Liffey piled some loose concrete blocks over the escape tunnel. Loco seemed to take it in stride, though, Jack Liffey thought.

  Back inside, he swung open the fridge and eyed a few bottles of beer off to the side that looked pretty lonely. He hadn’t had a drink in over four years. Though his first marriage had gone under to it, he wasn’t really an alcoholic; he’d given up cold turkey one day just to prove something to himself. He’d also given up drugs and tobacco and beef and even the hard-edge mystery stories he’d once loved. It was all a matter of making it damned clear to your ego, or maybe it was your id, that gratification was not in charge. But now he wondered if it might not be a good time to ease up a little.