Streets on Fire

by John Shannon

  There it was. He was so stunned he couldn’t quite take it in. “We were okay,” he said lamely.

  “No, we wasn’t. You didn’t want me to talk about the Church and Revelations and what my personal savior means to me.”

  No, I didn’t, he thought. “But I accepted that you believed in it. I never attacked you.”

  “You didn’t want me to talk about Sally Jessie neither.”

  That, too, he thought. “I listened to you. You listened to me.”

  The helicopter on TV seemed to be taking evasive maneuvers, perhaps taking ground fire, and the image switched to a talking head in the studio, a handsome middle-aged man in a polo shirt.

  “We didn’t talk about nothing that mattered.” There was a plaintive note in her voice now. “And we didn’t vibrate together, you know it.”

  Resonate, he thought.

  “All we had was we liked to please each other in bed, that’s all, but I found a man who shares the whole earth with me and makes me happy.”

  “I saw in you a woman with a huge warm heart, Marlena, and I love her… you,” he said.

  She swallowed hard and a tear dribbled down her cheek. “I can’t talk about this no more. It’s gone and happened. I got to go try it with this man. I’ll go stay at his place for a few weeks, give you time. Please don’t be mad at me.”

  “Tell me one thing, Mar. Did this guy give you the black eye a week ago?”

  She shook her head hard. She wasn’t a good liar, but for the first time he couldn’t tell. The revelation of her having a lover had shifted his footing so much that he was lost in his own hurt.

  She put a slip of paper down. “You can call here and leave a message, but please don’t come look for me. I’ll call you soon.”

  “Mar!”

  She was up and walking out, but she stopped at the urgency in his voice.

  “Marlena Helena Cruz Granados, I love you more than I can say.”

  She sobbed and ran. He stood up, then froze and sat back down, as if a horse had kicked him in the chest. He sat that way for a long time, overwhelmed with grief and hurt and something like shame, and then on the TV a new shot of a burning post office caught his eye and he turned the sound back up to hear the crackling of fire.

  “Go on, fuck it, burn!” he said out loud. All that disorder seemed to validate something in him.

  TWELVE

  Gideon’s 300

  “The fence pull open.” Ornetta tugged out two loose palings at the bottom of the back fence so they could slip through and out into the alley. It was late afternoon. Genesee Thigpen and Aunt Taffeta had been watching the big events on TV so intently all day that they’d never got their naps, and both of them were conked out now on the old sofa, heads together against the big lace antimacassar. The girls had thrown an afghan over them.

  It was with a sense of high adventure that they now turned west up the alley toward the plume of smoke in the distance. Oakwood had a different sound to it, less car traffic and more of a human sussurus, as if people were there somewhere, just out of sight, rushing around in groups and grumbling about life. The girls heard gunshots and, far away, a siren.

  The half-paved alley was an obstacle course of weeds and old newspaper, a rotted mattress, a litter of food wrappers, an engine block, and a beat-up hubcap sticking up like a crashed flying saucer. The whole thoroughfare was stank of pee.

  Graffiti on an old garage said VENICE SHORELINE CRIPS and some other words that neither of them could make out. Ahead, just before the alley met the street, there was a social circle of older black men sitting and standing around a big orange cable reel that lay on its side as a table.

  “They okay,” Ornetta reassured, but Maeve saw how cautious she was as they approached.

  “Cool the fever and ease the pain,” an old man said to the air as he handed a big bottle to another man.

  “You know what Night Train say to me? She say, ‘You never be alone as long as I’m alive.’”

  The men laughed softly.

  “Hey, girls, your momma know you outa your crib?”

  “Ima just buy some bread for Gramma,” Ornetta said.

  “I think they be shuttin’ the stores up, hon. You take care now.”

  The street was empty, and all the shops they could see had been gridded over. Plywood BLACK OWNED signs were out in force, one cleaners taking a big risk with MINORITY OWNED. Maeve wondered if that one was a Korean trying to fudge. She noticed a lot of fresh graffiti saying AB-IB RULES! A big billboard on the roof had been whited out hastily and DON’T DIS DR. KNUCKLES was hand-lettered across the fresh white.

  They heard a rattle, and an old woman with a shopping cart full of video cassettes wheeled fast along the cross-street. “They be startin’ takin’ the stuff,” Ornetta observed.

  A lowered car went by in fits and rumbles, with hands coming out all the cracked-open windows making cramped gang signs.

  “That’s they brains showin’,” Ornetta observed softly, and Maeve giggled.

  Ornetta tapped the charm she seemed to wear under her shirt. “Magic powers, you keep us safe here. Keep off them bangers and fools.”

  “What have you got there?” Maeve asked.

  “I can’t show. It secret.”

  A deep explosion went off on the next street, making them both flinch. “M-80,” Ornetta said matter-of-factly. “Some fool trippin’ on the noise.”

  She alternated between reality and fantasy in a light-footed way that left Maeve dazed. Someone in a house nearby began to play B. B. King very loud out the window, “The Thrill is Gone.”

  There didn’t really seem to be any danger. What Maeve sensed was an exuberance on the afternoon air, as if everything was going to be more animated than usual. Two young men in long dreadlocks tap-danced side by side on pallets laid down in the loading dock of some business, their shoes hammering in unison. Faces peered out bungalow windows, gently parting curtains and house plants. The two girls made their way west, keeping close to the locked and barred doors of the shops.

  “This is exciting,” Maeve said, recovering some of her Nancy Drew courage. “I bet we’re going to remember this day all our life.”

  “Stick together, we be safe.” They held hands, hiding in a doorway.

  Overhead two police helicopters circled low, sweeping anemic searchlights left and right. It was still bright day and there didn’t seem much point to the lights, except maybe to point a finger. Higher up there were many other helicopters from news agencies and TV stations. Then all of a sudden there was a different helicopter very low at the end of the block, a big ugly black thing with no markings at all. Pods of weapons were slung off little wings in front. Its sound was hushed, a thump-thump-thump you could feel in your chest, like something out of another world, and it hovered in one place, bobbing its tail a little like a stick insect.

  “That the big boss copter, like a dragon,” Ornetta observed.

  “My dad used to work where they made helicopters,” Maeve said, as if this gave her some claim of power over the evil specter.

  A gang of black boys, younger than Ornetta, burst noisily from between two houses, running hard and waving their arms with abandon. They turned along the shops and passed only a foot from the girls. One stopped to posture in Maeve’s face. “Do me, baby, the whole nine,” he said, waggling his tongue and leering, as if quoting somebody older.

  “Get a life, boy,” Ornetta said.

  “O-bop-she-bam.”

  He hooted and ran on, and another boy sprinted past carrying a bright red one-seat kayak.

  A voice spoke out of the sky, louder than any voice had a right to be. “Get indoors, now! All of you boys! This area is under curfew!”

  There was an insistent string dull pop-pop-pop from overhead, and Maeve thought she saw something gray steak down out of the sky at the running boys. A scream, and one was knocked off his feet. The kayak was discarded and the boys scattered. Two of them circled back to cart off the boy who had been knocked dow
n. The big insect helicopter came even lower and trailed after the biggest band of kids, popping again and again from one of its outrigger pods.

  “Woo,” Ornetta said in awe.

  And then the hubbub was gone as quickly as it had come. The boys had vanished and the big black helicopter had gone on. The higher helicopters moved off to circle somewhere else, and the street whispered with aftertalk. An old woman came out on her porch and called, “You girls get on home now. This ain’t no time to be eyeballin’.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Maeve dallied long enough to pick up one of the gray blobs that littered the street. It was a very heavy beanbag in some kind of slick synthetic cloth, about the size of a coin purse.

  “Must have been a dragon beanbag,” Maeve suggested.

  Ornetta smiled. She led them down a cross street, and as soon as they turned another corner they saw police cars parked diagonally to block the width of the roadway.

  They crossed and hurried into a quiet residential street of apartments and tiny court homes. A large crowd, mostly young Latinos, ran past on the other side of the street, hooting and roaring. Maeve wondered how well Ornetta knew her Aunt Taffeta’s neighborhood. They cut down a walking court between little Spanish bungalows surrounded by geraniums and out onto another business street.

  A sedan came fast along the street and then screeched unexpectedly sideways to ram straight into the grillwork of a closed minimart, touching off a shrill alarm. It shocked Maeve deeply to see the crash. The car had wedged into the grille and all its doors flew open. Four young men in ski masks hurled out and attacked the remains of the security grille with crowbars. In a few seconds, glass smashed and the accordion grate came away from the wall. They piled inside the store.

  From what she could tell through the masks, Maeve thought the slight-looking looters looked Vietnamese.

  *

  “Oh, yeah, I know the Sixteen/Eight Club,” the young man said with a rueful toss of his head. “I was in it.” Kirk Grosvenor had a big handsome square jaw, much like the Webber boys. He’d have looked like a first-round pick for pro running back—even with the gold ring in his ear—except for the little lower-lip triangle of beard that musicians call a jazz dab and painters an imperial.

  “Back in high school I wouldn’t have been caught dead hanging with assholes like this.”

  He meant the other two boys in the cluttered living room. Caught up in watching the television, they gave only perfunctory eye rolls.

  “Ooh.”

  Somebody had torched a gas station on Slauson, and it was hard not to pay attention as a glorious mushroom cloud billowed up over the Baldwin Hills, chasing even the news copters back. Up until that burst of fire, the announcer had been repeating the official mantra that the riots seemed to be easing up. On the way out to Simi, following the news on his car radio, Jack Liffey had heard that Abdullah Ibrahim had taken to the streets, hurrying from hot spot to hot spot to urge people in person to go home.

  Secretly, Jack Liffey was pleased to have so much commotion going on. When he had nothing to distract him, he pictured Marlena lying with another man, talking to another man, holding hands. Not too vividly—he didn’t really picture a face or specific build—but vividly enough to do unpleasant things to his stomach.

  A laugh suddenly dragged his mind back to the cluttered artists’ pad in the Simi Hills where he now sat.

  “I was football, Presbyterian Youth League, prelaw, Bible clubs, the whole nine yards. But I’d always been interested in painting, and over my dad’s objection I went to Cal-Arts instead of Pepperdine, and the rest is just pure unadulterated depravity.”

  His companions looked even more like young artists than Kirk Grosvenor, though some of that was undoubtedly suggested by the easels and canvases and pots of paint and clay sculptures on tall stools that disordered the room and the dozen spattered drop cloths that covered the flooring. It was an old canyon house up above the valley, with rounded rock below and rotting clapboard, needing a lot of work it was probably never going to get.

  “I don’t think the Sixteen/Eights are anything much to worry about—but don’t go away unhappy. There might be a bit more to the story.” He thought things over while he ripped open a twist-off beer. “Every club had an older advisor called an Apostle who was sent down from the Pledge of Honor folks. They were the adult version of us, a lot like the PromiseKeepers or the old Shepherding Movement, if you remember them. I think the P of H was broken into what they called Belief Teams of a dozen or so, and each team had a leader called a Head Coach who reported to a higher group called a Roost that was run by an Umpire. Everybody’s got to invent some kind of goofy hierarchy, don’t you know. Eventually you’d get up to the Synod and the National Director. It was all about family values and stuff that seemed okay to me at the time, but it got a lot weirder when I got some perspective on it. Keep your kids off dope. Keep your woman in her place. Stuff like that.”

  One of the other boys was watching him now. “Jesus, Kirk, I didn’t know you were into that.”

  “Eat me, Don.”

  The skinny boy named Don sneered, “Bunch of chubby white boys who live with their moms and wear Star Trek hats, I’d’a thought.”

  “Little you know. A lot of them were jocks.”

  “Same difference.”

  Kirk Grosvenor sighed and shrugged.

  “Was racism a part of it?” Jack Liffey asked.

  He thought about it. “The topic didn’t come up much, but—”

  “Whoa!” one of the boys exclaimed. The TV station had lost its signal, and the big set displayed the streaming static that TV techies called grass. He changed channel and they saw tan instant replay of the fireball from a circling helicopter near the same location. After the fireball collapsed, the gas station seemed to be settling in for a determined burn.

  “I did hear some rumors… We talked a lot about committing to the seven great virtues, and we read the Bible and we made public pledges at rallies and handed out literature, stuff like that. But once in a while we’d hear about another group. It was called DEL, the Defenders of the European Legacy, but I heard mention of Gideon’s 300. It was supposed to be more activist, I mean really activist. But you know how rumors operate. If we couldn’t even get the name straight, how were we supposed to know what they did? Maybe they didn’t even exist.”

  “You never saw any sign of them yourself?”

  He paused to think it over. “Truth is elusive, man. What do you know for sure?”

  “I know it’s not going to rain up.”

  The boy smiled. “Here’s the best I can do. One day there was a guy talking about seeing an encampment of illegals over by Grimes Canyon. Some of the kids bitched about how dirty the Mexicans were up there, living in cardboard and black plastic, shitting in the hills and not paying rent.” He laughed. “Johnny Griffin, he had a big moral thing about paying your rent. I think his dad’s a slumlord. The hills are full of those poor Mexican strawberry pickers, killing themselves for peanuts or hanging out at Home Depot for day labor. I suppose Johnny wanted them to rent big condos down in Malibu, commute up to the Home Depot in their Lexuses, pay their rent regular. I seem to remember our Apostle taking a special interest and asking exactly where the encampment was. Anyway, pretty soon there was a brushfire in Grimes Canyon and two Mexicans died. Who knows? It could have been a cooking fire, like the paper said.”

  “Oh, shit,” the boy named Don squalled. “Cooking!” He jumped up and ran to the kitchen.

  “So who was your Apostle?” Jack Liffey asked.

  “His name was Perry Krasny. He was the assistant football coach at the high school, and he coached Pop Warner, too. Pretty sinister job, if he was the point man for the American Nazis, but he didn’t really strike me that way.”

  There was a sizzling from the kitchen and a puff of steam made its way around the corner.

  “Here we go again,” the third boy offered. “Spaghetti al dentifrice.”

  “Did
Krasny ever talk to the club about race?” Jack Liffey wondered.

  “Probably a little. That was another lifetime ago for me, though, man. The big thing with Pledge of Honor was that you have choices; everybody can choose the good over the bad. You know what I mean?”

  There was a clatter in the kitchen and the third boy groaned.

  “I argued with him once. I said what about some poor guy in China who’s never heard of Jesus, is he going to go to hell? And if he conceded that, what about the guy who’s raised a Muslim or Buddhist or something and he’s only heard of Jesus once?” He screwed up his face thinking, then took a long pull off his beer. “Perry said everybody in the world gets a chance to believe in Jesus, and God sees to it that when the chance comes, that person has a real option to believe. So if he rejects Jesus, it’s his fault. It seemed pretty lame to me, even then. I mean, weird coincidence that all these bright guys in India, given a real chance, turn Jesus down, and all these dimwits in Alabama accept Him.”

  “Bad news, dudes.” Don appeared in the living room holding up a large serving fork that was poked into a solid mass of spaghetti the size of a soccer ball.

  “Would you like some advice?” Jack Liffey offered.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Next time put a splash of oil in the water before you cook it, and after you drain it, run tap water over it for a few seconds. It’ll wash off the starch and keep it from sticking.”

  “And set the timer, dude,” Kirk said. “You could try that. Maybe that’d save the trips to Pizza Hut.”

  *

  “What that smell?”

  Ornetta crinkled up her nose and Maeve sniffed the air, but by then it was so powerful there was nothing to do but make a face and pretend to retch. “That’s aw-ful.”

  They peered around the corner near the projects and saw a big billow of jet black smoke reaching out sideways, like the paw of a giant black cat. It looked like Mussa’s Retreds had been raided and the old tires stacked into a barricade across Brooks and set alight in three or four spots. The barricade was just beginning to brew up with that dreadful pungency of old rubber.