Streets on Fire

by John Shannon

  The biker glanced briefly at the mangled toppled bike, and there was an instant when he seemed to be considering the grievous loss.

  “Felony. Kidnap,” Jack Liffey reminded him.

  “I guess it’s even, man. And—uh—we didn’t touch that missing nigger and his girl neither.”

  “I never thought you did.”

  *

  “What are we going to tell your mother?” Jack Liffey said, when they were all back in the car and safely heading west on the 10.

  “I don’t know,” Maeve said glumly. She turned to David Phelps, in back. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the Lone Ranger,” he offered.

  She glanced briefly at her dad. “In this movie, I think you’re more like the Tonto.”

  “Sure, Kemo Sabe. Just take me home, please.”

  NINE

  Señor Coyote’s Swing Rope

  It was very late, he knew that much. His Timex had staggered to a halt about ten, as it did every once in a while, particularly when it might have been nice to know the time. He had to live with his intuition that it was about three a.m., at least until he caught sight of a roadside clock. Strangely, a cortege of big American cars roared past on the 10, honking and bedecked with black pom-poms and streamers of black crepe. On the rear window of the last car, a low-riding Oldsmobile, someone had scrawled Just Divorced in poster paint; blink and its gone. He had to smile. Celebrating social breakdown had reached the point where it was probably time to invest in bitter herbs and small arms.

  “So what are we going to tell your mom?” he asked, coming round to it again. Maeve was still so wired she looked wide awake. They’d dropped off David Phelps, and then roused the Learys, where they fetched Maeve’s tiny suitcase, mollifying the cousins as best they could. Poor Beth had found herself grounded for a month.

  Maeve gave an exaggerated wince. “Do we have to tell her anything?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “You and your rigid ethics,” she complained.

  “They’ve become somewhat more flexible over the years.” He rapped thoughtfully on the steering wheel. “Perhaps we can wait a little before giving her all the details. How do you feel about staying away from Bradley for a while longer?”

  She lit up. “I feel really great about it. You know I love being with my daddy.”

  Her affection eased his edgy mood. She could always do it to him, and she knew it.

  “Give it some thought to how we’re going to present this day of infamy in the long run,” he suggested. “I think I’ve got a bit of leverage now to see you more often—I mean after the run-in with Bradley—and I don’t want to squander it.”

  “That’s the kind of ethics I like.”

  “Not necessarily flexible,” he suggested. “Just kind of portable.”

  She smiled and rested her head against his shoulder, and went out like a light.

  *

  By the time they pulled into the driveway in Mar Vista around four a.m., Maeve was snoring away. He was surprised to see no lights on in the bungalow. He knew Rogelio was away, but Marlena usually left a few lights going for the bogeyman. Her Toyota wasn’t up the driveway either.

  He woke Maeve with difficulty. She was drooping so badly that he had to bear most of her weight up the steps. Intentionally, he made a bit of noise as they came in so Marlena wouldn’t be frightened if she happened to be there.

  “I’ll let you handle the mother issue,” Maeve said groggily.

  “Sounds good.”

  She went straight to her side room. Jack Liffey peeked into the master bedroom and found it empty. He drifted toward the fridge where they kept a notepad, all of a sudden repicturing the tears he had seen running down her cheeks in the bathtub before he’d rushed off to save Maeve. The last few hours had blown the image of a distressed Marlena right out of his mind. There was a folded note under the magnetic carrot.

  Jackie: I won’t be back for sometime couple of days, maybe Monday. Then we got to talk. Sorry.

  A chill blew through him, while guilt padded around him like wolves, nipping at his ankles. It could only be another man, he thought. He hadn’t been attentive enough. He hadn’t been loving enough. He hadn’t been asking after what she’d been doing the last few weeks. In the big picture, he hadn’t made enough of an effort to overcome their contrarieties, to listen to her reports on the soaps and the doings at the hidden flying saucer hanger in Area 51 and who really killed Jon-Benet Ramsey.

  He closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Daddy, where’s Mar?”

  Maeve stood behind him, woozy and innocent in her cottony pink nightdress.

  “I forgot,” he said evenly, as he pocketed the note. “She was going to visit some relatives.”

  “Who?”

  “You know what? I think she told me this morning, but your adventure has just burned my brain completely blank.”

  “You shoulda been a lawyer,” she said. “You always turn it around on me.”

  “I shoulda been a merchant prince. Then I could buy lawyers. Full board in the morning, pancakes and sausages.”

  She tiptoed up to kiss his cheek. “Goody. Good night, Daddy.”

  *

  The man with the salt-and-pepper beard slid into the booth at Sally’s, eclipsing a few of the bright lozenges that the morning sunlight was burning onto the red and white oilcloth. He laid a folded-open Simi Record on the table, as if casually. “Yo, Coach.”

  The place was busy as usual, and Perry Krasny just glanced at the paper, a glance that told him all he needed.

  S.V.H.S. STUDENT

  BADLY HURT IN

  SOLO CYCLE CRASH

  Norman Berquist, 17, a senior at S.V. High School, was badly injured in a solo motorcycle crash late last night…

  Maybe the little shit would think twice now before passing out his malicious atheist literature.

  “How’s the wife, Bri?”

  “Just fine, there, K.”

  “Have a cup of coffee.”

  “Sure.”

  Krasny waved for the waitress.

  “I’ll bet you still tell the kids you got that scar jumping on a grenade to save your platoon,” the bearded man teased.

  Something quite hard entered Krasny’s eyes. “What would you know about things like that?”

  “I know I’m getting worried about our affairs starting to snowball out of control.”

  The waitress ignored them and went on talking to a handsome man in a business suit. He looked like someone who hung out a lot at a gym. Krasny picked up his coffee cup to wave it, but the napkin stuck to the bottom and that seemed to infuriate him. He ripped the napkin free with his left hand and crushed it into a ball.

  “What have you done about the detective?” Krasny asked.

  “Well,” the bearded man drawled. “We could take care of him the old-fashioned way—” He glanced at the bud vase that held a single dusty silk chrysanthemum, picked it up and spoke into the flower as if it contained a microphone—“but that would be wrong.”

  *

  “I’m completely stuffed.” She pushed back from the table and gave a little involuntary belch. “Oops! That was a doozy.”

  “Excuse me is sufficient,” Jack Liffey suggested.

  “It’s funny. If you burp, you can say excuse me, and if you sneeze or yawn or hiccup. But if you fart, you’re just supposed to pretend it didn’t happen.”

  He gave it some thought. “I think Emily Post regards excuse me as inappropriate in a number of situations, such as keeling forward and ending up nose down in the soup.”

  “Changing the subject again. You know, Mark Twain wrote a whole book about farting? Did you used to light farts when in college? The bad girls do it at school, sitting up on the counter in the bathroom, right through their panties.”

  “I thought with all your adventures yesterday, you’d be a bit chastened this morning. How do you know what the bad girls do?”

  “What’s chastened?”

 
; “Subdued.”

  “No, I’m irrepressible.”

  He smiled. “I’ve noticed. And you change the subject pretty handily, yourself. We need a long hike to walk off all these carbs. There’s a canyon up toward Point Mugu that has a real waterfall.”

  “You’ve told me about it, but you’ve never taken me there.”

  “I save it for my best girlfriends.”

  “Then we’re there, Dad.”

  He was clearing the plates when he heard a clatter and rattle on the sidewalk in front. He wondered if Marlena had come back, and how he would handle it in front of Maeve if it plunged into emotional crisis. But he quickly decided that if that sound came from Marlena, she was dragging something pretty strange along with her.

  He peeked out the front and saw Genesee Thigpen pushing an aluminum walker ahead of her, with Ornetta skipping around her. There was an old black Mercury parked in front. He noticed someone had stuck split tennis balls on the rear legs of the walker to help it slide and cut down the noise somewhat.

  He hurried outside and greeted them, offering the old woman his arm. She clamped him in a startlingly strong grip.

  “What a wonderful surprise,” he said.

  “Gramma come early,” Ornetta explained, “so you won’t be got yo’ hat yet.”

  “We weren’t gonna book out for a while,” he answered, figuring he was probably getting the slang completely wrong. “My car’s still busy having it’s secret talk with the lawn mower.”

  Ornetta grinned and pranced toward the steps. Maeve came out and Jack Liffey introduced them.

  “Daddy told me about you. You’re the storyteller!”

  The girls smiled at one another, like lost Martians meeting on a far world.

  “Maevie, hi you!”

  They held hands and Jack Liffey was astonished how easy it could all be. Why did men have to circle around, sniffing butts and growling?

  The old woman let go of his arm when it turned out to be impossible to hold on and push the walker at the same time. She made her own way up the walk, step-step-slide.

  “Ornetta’s got something to tell you,” Genesee Thigpen pronounced between footfalls.

  “She’s already hinted to me I should check out the Sherry Webber end of things. I just haven’t had time to act on it.” He didn’t want to talk about the adventures in Claremont. “Can I get you some coffee? Some food?”

  “Coffee would be most kind.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “He’s at home. He wants Ornetta and me to stay with my sister Taffeta in Oakwood for a while.”

  Oakwood was a tiny African American enclave not far away in Venice, which, along with a section of downtown San Pedro near the shipyards, was as close as the realtors ever got to letting blacks belly up to the ocean. Everywhere else they were dammed back into the interior by elbow-to-elbow white engineers and dentists guarding the beach towns.

  “The cross-burning?”

  “Uh-huh, and other things. He wants us safe away from the house.”

  “What other things?”

  She abandoned the walker and took his arm to hobble up the steps onto the small verandah, where she chose to take a breather on the oak glide. He sat on a beach chair while she huffed a little, the glide swaying gently.

  “Threats. But we’re experts on that.”

  “I’ll bet. Let me get you some coffee. I warn you, it’s strong. Sugar or milk?”

  “Milk please.”

  “Coming up.”

  Inside, Ornetta and Maeve had disappeared into Maeve’s room and he could hear their voices overlapping eagerly behind the door. He was immensely pleased they got along so well and so quickly. But he knew the younger girl was sharp as a tack, maybe even sharper than Maeve, though the notion that anyone could be sharper than his daughter was hard for him to entertain.

  He carried out two mugs of French roast and sat gently in the folding chair as the old woman waited with her eyes closed.

  “Coffee is served, ma’am.”

  “It’s so good for Ornetta to be with someone near her own age.”

  *

  Ornetta giggled and leaned closer. “Señor Man think to hisself, Ima set this box trap in the garden and cotch up Señor Coyote, keep him from stealing my tomatoes the way he do.”

  Ornetta’s glee was breathtaking to Maeve. She rocked back on her haunches on the hooked rug, wiggling back and forth with an excess of pure energy, and Maeve recalled what her father had told her about the revolt of the rhinestone animals and the secret language of cars. She wondered where these fables boiled up from.

  The thin girl giggled again and moved her shoulders around until, in some way that it was hard to identify, her body language suggested a cocky coyote stalking up on a box-and-bait trap. Señor Coyote went for the bait and, of course, got himself caught when the box fell.

  “So Señor Man, he step right back from where he be hid and he go, ‘Yo, Señor Coyote, how you do in there? Gone and cotch yourself up outa your own greed, ain’t you? Ima just take and hang you up on this here rope by yo’ hind foot, and when I get back from the market, I believe I’ll have myself a bowl of coyote stew.’ And he go off to sell he tomatoes and buy hisself some stewin’ okra.”

  Half of Maeve’s mind was so enthralled that she kept giggling out loud, and the other half retreated to mull things over, the way her mind always did. She wanted to understand why she was so attracted to this girl who she’d just met, as if a giant magnet tugged at her from across the rug in some Looney Tunes cartoon. Some people had that appeal, just laid it on you without even knowing their power, and most others just didn’t, no matter how hard they tried. She had done her best to like Mary Beth, for instance, but it hadn’t really taken root. Something about the girl had been too lost and helpless and unserious.

  Maeve wondered if the attraction came from energy, which Ornetta had in surplus, but she didn’t think that was sufficient. She’d known other high-spirited girls who made her want to shrink right out of their presence, cheerleaders who were all bubble and enthusiasm but only about an inch deep. She didn’t think it was just self-confidence either. Her seatmate in homeroom, Nora Blackstone, was as confident as they come, and Maeve couldn’t stand her. But she couldn’t get enough of Ornetta—she felt that no matter how long she knew Ornetta, the younger girl would always have something delightful to tell her or show her or teach her.

  Ornetta swept her slight olive arm back and forth in the air.

  “And Señor Coyote, he be swingin’ on that rope way up in the air and laughin’ up a storm when he see Señor Squirrel come hurry up the path.

  “‘What you laughin at?’ go Señor Squirrel up to Señor Coyote.

  “‘Señor Squirrel, I ain’t laughin’ at you, no way. I just havin’ so much fun swinging back and forth up here on my fine swing rope. This the best swing rope I ever seen.’”

  “‘Ooooh,’ go Señor Squirrel. ‘Can I swing, too?’”

  *

  “I gather Ornetta told you that there was some trouble with Sherry’s family in Simi.”

  “She hinted. I have a hunch Amilcar asked her not to tell. She seemed conflicted.”

  “What Ornetta knows is a bit stronger than a hint.”

  “Okay.” He sat facing the old woman and gave her the time to gather whatever it was.

  “This is what I heard. Sherry has two brothers, one older and one younger.” She sighed. “They told Sherry that she was no longer their sister if she kept going out with a black man. They said something that day to threaten him, too, or maybe all this came from some of their friends; I don’t think Ami told Ornetta exactly what happened. But it really made him take stock. Ornetta just admitted this to me recently. Hold on.”

  “I’m holding.”

  She frowned and took a sip of the coffee, cradling it gently. “I’ve heard they’ve got some… organizations up there in that town. Maybe it’s serious, maybe not.”

  “Is there reason to think they might
be behind the cross burning on your lawn?”

  “In America there’s always reason to think, Mr. Liffey,” she said sadly.

  He saw that he was going to stay stuck at mister.

  “I grew up in the Communist Party, believing all my life in the solidarity of the working class,” she said with a fierce kind of determination. “And I saw it, I saw white workers come out in the streets for the Scottsboro boys and Emmett Till and a lot of other black folk. This is Detroit, you know. In the thirties those white workers were only a few years out of Tennessee and Arkansas.” She stopped and sighed again. “They did good, but I can see now that a lot of what we told ourselves in the Party was just self-hypnosis. Those working men needed a whole generous helping of nudge to get on track, and now that the Party’s gone nobody’s doing any nudging.”

  She thought about things for a moment while a flight of seagulls wheeled over the house, complained idly about the heat, and then took off inland. “I went to Mississippi with Bancroft for one entire year, Mr. Liffey. That was the year 1965. I went down there an activist from Detroit who just happened to be a Negro, and when I came back north I was a plain ol’ nigger driving. That mean, mean year did something to me inside. I hope I never again get that close to the face of a woman spitting hatred into my eyes.”

  He puffed his cheeks a bit. There was nothing you could say to that.

  “Have you been to Mississippi?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “When I was a freshman in college, a SNCC worker came and talked to us in the student union and invited us to join him in the voting rights program. You know, I was the first person in my family to go to college. I’m from a working class town too, and I had enough on my plate right then getting used to a strange new world that was full of kids who’d read all these books I’d never even heard of. But I always regret I didn’t go south.”

  “Oh, no sir, don’t you do that. You might have got yourself a headstone on some levee right now, marking where the good ol’ boys dumped your remains. Sometimes they picked on the white boys even worse, to send a message.”

  “How will I ever know now if I’d have had the courage?”

  “Some things just plain aren’t worth knowing, not if you’ve got a choice.”