Streets on Fire

by John Shannon

  Every hair on his body stood abruptly to attention. An animal squeal right there had torn the quiet, coinciding precisely with something soft under his foot, something that yanked away and then hissed angrily at him. As his heart thundered, his mind fastened on the dog he had hurled out into space, but quickly he realized that squeal had nothing to do with a dog, not even the vengeful spirit of a dog. Whatever it was waddled away into the brush, leaving a glimpse of white fur, a stripe—and then, unmistakably, he knew what he had stepped on. A smell billowed over him like rotten fruit, like death, like a chemical plant gone up in flames—in fact, like nothing else on earth. He had been skunked.

  His legs, his right leg in particular, had been sprayed point blank and that sweet caustic smell, which he had never minded that much as long as it was faint and distant, off in the brush along the highway as his car roared past, was now so strong that it made him ill with revulsion.

  He sat down and started to take his pants off, but thought better of it. Down in civilization he would be better off stinking of skunk than running around in his underwear. And by now it was on his skin, too, so he would stink for the foreseeable future. He was a walking beacon for a quarter mile around to anyone with a nose. He leaned back to get his own nose as far as possible from his legs and retched into the dirt. Fortunately, he hadn’t eaten in a long time and it remained dry heaves.

  Just as he stood up, a dark van came fast around a spur of hillside, the kind of sudden ominous digression you experienced in a nightmare, and it squealed to a stop directly above the culvert. That dark rectangle sat there now, completely out of place, a poisoned shape against the rounded innocent slopes. He heard the far door open, and then saw a figure in a cap come around to stare uphill. The figure carried something in each hand, and a bright flashlight came on and began to probe and flit. Jack Liffey ducked deep into the recesses of a mule fat bush, just as the man must have caught wind of him.

  “Aw, Jesus H. Christ,” Doug complained into the hot pungent night.

  *

  “And then Robin went back to her bedroom to get the birthday cake with the sixteen candles on it, and she saw that her big poodle had eaten about half of it. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you she’d baked the magic powder she got from the rabbit into the cake.”

  This was the third time Maeve had been forced to loop back through her improvised story. Storytelling wasn’t anywhere near as easy as Ornetta made it seem, but the girl was being very patient. She had turned on her side in the bed and seemed to be rapt. She had listened without interrupting for almost ten minutes.

  “And so—poof—he wasn’t a poodle any more. He was a handsome prince with a big chin and long curly hair, and he was grinning at her and promising to carry her away because of all the kind things she did for him earlier.” She knew she hadn’t told it very well, but Ornetta smiled.

  They heard noise in the house and listened intently. They were worried; the older women. They both seemed to have aged another ten years over the day, worrying about the riots, then fretting about the girls, in addition to carrying all the unspoken worries about Bancroft Davis, who was staying all by himself across town now and had a heart condition. It was not a good night to need medical help from the outside world.

  “Maybe I could have your daddy as a kind of back-up daddy?” Ornetta suggested, as if dropping her expectations a notch.

  “I’m sure.” Maeve wondered how she herself would have responded to so much loss, if it would have left her with the feeling that she needed a backup for every relative. A grandma, a just-in-case grandma, maybe a third-stringer. “I’ll tell him we’re already sisters.”

  She looked at the tiny spot on her finger, where she had pricked it to mingle her blood with the younger girl’s.

  “I wish there was some easier way to be blood sisters,” Maeve said. “It stings.”

  “I guess it gotta hurt,” Ornetta said in a small voice. She seemed to know.

  *

  With his getaway blocked at the embankment, Jack Liffey had retreated a safe distance up the ravine. For the moment, Doug seemed content to wait, as far from the skunk smell as possible. Now and then he washed the beam of his powerful flashlight idly up the canyon, with side trips probing the slopes.

  The man from the deck had disappeared, ominously, so there were now two more of them on the loose somewhere. Jack Liffey wondered if one or both were working their way down through the canyon foliage. He listened but could hear only crickets and faint traffic, and the buzz of a light plane far out over the valley. Then he heard a gunshot, close below him, and his whole body convulsed in reflex.

  Doug had both arms straight out, and he appeared to be aiming a big pistol, cop fashion, alongside the flashlight. The man’s arms ratcheted up a few degrees and he fired again, then lifted and fired again, apparently firing blindly at likely bushes. There wasn’t much chance of getting hit, but Jack Liffey hugged the ground to make as small a target as possible. There was one zinging ricochet off rock not far away, and after eight shots, the pistol fell silent and the flashlight went out.

  These guys were really nuts, Jack Liffey thought. He stared hard. It seemed the man was dialing up a cell phone.

  His ear caught a strange sound far up the hill, a foomp like the slam of a big air-tight door. He squirreled around in a squat and focused on the row of houses up there. Nobody on deck. Before long there was a glow at the very top of the ravine, near the drain pipe, throbbing to light up the weeds at the edge of a vacant lot. The glow pulsed yellow like a Boy Scout campfire off in the woods. He heard a car start up somewhere in the direction of the luminescence, every sound proposing a direct personal threat. A chill tapped at his neck as paranoia took hold and he snapped around, but Doug still stood on the road, talking now on his cell phone.

  The sound of the car engine dipped lower in strain, as if working hard against resistance, and then a large shape made its way slowly into the vacant lot: a car shadow with glowing windows. It was hard for him to believe his eyes. In terrible slow motion, a car with a fire brewing up inside it was rolling across the sloped lot. It looked like a second car was pushing it. The car tilted down abruptly where the lot ended, hung for an instant and pitched off into space. It was a white car with darker fenders on one side. It was his Concord.

  The car didn’t fall far before its front bumper caught on the dirt and threw it sideways, to tumble side over side with an enraged momentum, tossing off sparks. The roof hit, then a big hop. The crashing and banging of each impact filled the night with gathering discord. He could picture a huge Looney Tunes fireball heading straight for him as if a living creature, eating up everything in its path. He looked around hastily, but all he could do was shelter flat in a small outcrop of rock. He went down on his stomach, keeping his neck wrenched up to watch, mesmerized by the terrible downward crash and somersault that was coming his way. He had always assumed that real cars going over real cliffs did not explode the way they invariably did in films—an effect that was undoubtedly touched off by a half stick of dynamite strapped to a gallon bottle of gasoline—but his car was already on fire. What would happen if the gas tank ruptured on one of its impacts? He tried to remember the last time he’d filled up.

  All of this ran through his mind in a fleeting instant and then that crashing doom was very close. He clasped his arms over his head and felt a shock in the earth, far too close, heard a horrible rasp of metal rending and then felt the breeze of the poor dying Concord passing directly over him. He sat up quickly and noticed that Doug and the van had skedaddled.

  What was left of the Concord tumbled side over side one more full revolution and then hit roof first with a dull final crump against the culvert, trembled a little in a death throe and fell back into the shallow basin below the road. It sat in suspense for a few moments, shining nobly from within, and then fire licked upward from the torn rear quarter. Not an explosion, but a steady increase until flames shot forty or fifty feet in the air, lighting up the hillside. He sa
w one sad torn door lying short of the burning hulk, a door he had spent some time hunting down in find-it-yourself junk yards. There were probably a few other random pieces of Wisconsin engineering up and down the ravine.

  Rest in peace, my old friend, he thought sadly.

  *

  Maeve could tell by the smaller girl’s breathing that she had fallen off to sleep. They were only a few inches apart in the bed, and she could feel the girl’s heat. It was unbearably distressing for her to imagine Ornetta lost in that big threatening world of New York, so she imagined her instead sitting cross-legged and bright-eyed in a green park, recounting for even smaller girls the tale she had just told Maeve, of Abba-Zabba and the Thieves. She wondered what it was that gave some people such resilience that they remained kind and cheerful, while so many others, exposed to the same abuse and loss, turned mean.

  That was what it was, she thought—why she was drawn to Ornetta so much more than to Mary Beth. There was so much to learn from Ornetta, who took into her heart what she had to from the big mess around her, transformed it into something magical and endured the rest with courage and grace.

  Then she remembered something her dad had told her once, a flash of gruff wisdom from his own father, he had said. She had always retained the words, even the tone of voice he had used, and now she knew just what the words meant. She had been asking him idly about how you decided the really big things in life whenever you came to one of those crossroads. He had spoken in a slightly different voice, probably a mannerism of his own father’s that he attached unconsciously to the words. Always pick the path where you can see farther, he had said.

  SIXTEEN

  Wonder Woman

  The glare from his burning car had lit up the small bowl of hills like a stage with the players about to enter, and luckily enough they had indeed come hurrying in from the wings. A couple of good Samaritans in an old Jaguar had stopped within minutes of the crash to see if anyone was lying hurt near the wreck. Not long after that a pumper and a fire rescue truck had wailed up, with a half dozen firemen jumping out to drench the burning car and the brush around it with two small hoses. They were soon joined by a big Highway Patrol cruiser and a Sheriff’s car. Two more sedans parked off the road, and before long a whole crowd was combing the roadside where the ravine fanned out into a small floodplain near the road. He didn’t see any of the men of Gideon’s 300.

  Jack Liffey considered playing the wounded driver and staggering out of the brush to let them whisk him away in an ambulance. But there would have been too many questions to answer, and the people in the house up the hill would have simply denied everything. So he stayed in a crouch behind a big bush, with emergency radios crackling on the hot dry air and crisp nearby voices calling out for wounded survivors. One radio was so clear he could make out every word. A dispatcher was urging the firemen to hurry up so they could get the trucks back on call—everybody else was down in LA, lending a hand with a hundred separate storefront fires. Apparently the rioting was beginning to rival 1992 uprising.

  Voices called out, fussed about the skunk smell on the air, queried each other, joked awkwardly; then a phalanx of volunteers responded in concert to the deputy’s instructions and started a slow uphill sweep. Jack Liffey crept back to a much denser clump of shrubbery.

  He burrowed into a small sumac, where a freshly fractured bough looked like it had taken a shot from his car, and he noticed a glint of metal on the ground, a shiny oblong. He felt a pang when he recognized the flat paddle as the recessed door handle of his car. It had ripped away clean. He bent down, picked up the token and tucked it into his shirt pocket, more sentimental about the old car than he had realized. After all, he excused himself, the old Concord had given its life so that he might live.

  As he heard the search draw near him, Jack Liffey crashed about a bit and came out of the sumac. “Nothing in there,” he announced matter-of-factly, “except a dead skunk. Damn.”

  A square-jawed man in a sheriff’s hat looked a little startled, then sniffed him out.

  “Sorry if I drifted into your bailiwick,” Jack Liffey said. “I’ll try over to the side there.”

  “You do that, friend. Well to the side.”

  Then he was up the embankment and walking down the road, as if heading for one of the parked cars. There was no sign of the enemy. He turned a bend and saw that it was only a mile or so down to the first lights of civilization. He picked up the pace, still a little worried that one of Krasney’s boys might drive up behind at any moment, and realized just how weary the night had left him. Fear and tension did that to you. With a sharp, sudden stab, thoughts of Marlena reappeared all at once. He hadn’t thought about her for hours.

  The image of her with another man dropped on him with a vengeance and immediately hollowed out his sense of well-being at the narrow escape. He came to a dead stop for a moment, feeling sick to his stomach again, and then pushed himself on. He could feel the last of his elation collapsing, and he did what he could with it, throwing his head back and reciting aloud what he recalled of Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” the only poem he had ever memorized.

  “…And mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,

  And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

  The dirt alongside the road turned into a paved sidewalk as civilization drew nearer, but the gloom wouldn’t leave him. It wasn’t really her affair that ate at him. He could and would get past that if Marlena came back. If.

  The shock of loss seemed to have changed utterly how he felt about her—stunning him like the high-amperage jolt off a power tool. It demolished in one instant all of his ambivalence, to leave his own cravings stumbling around in a haze of tenderness for her big promiscuous heart. He had an overpowering urge to make it all work out, but he was powerless. It was not up to him.

  He glanced around at the hillside against the velvety moonless sky, feeling as lost and helpless as a newborn. It was the defined horizons that were gone, Jack Liffey thought, the sense that he existed at the center of a small, secure, comprehensible world with love in it. When that was gone, all you had left was a kind of agitation, a desperation to find something solid. He walked with his eyes closed for a moment, lurching when one foot went off the sidewalk.

  He yawned uncontrollably and realized how deeply exhausted he had become; his thoughts had become nearly incoherent. He passed the first outlying houses of a subdivision that crowded up to a concrete block wall. The wall ran ahead to a big, bright, empty cross street. The windows of the houses were all dark and brooding. He could barely keep his eyes open.

  At low points in his life, driving through unaccustomed towns or along unfamiliar streets, he had often imagined himself penniless and homeless and thought, There, that would be a good place to crash for the night, a refuge where he could store up whatever discarded food he could gather from Dumpsters and live for a few months: protected from the elements, out of sight, unlikely to impinge on other lives and draw notice. He felt the tug of such a place now, a hollow between a bus shelter and the block wall, protected by some overgrown ivy and shin-high wild geraniums. The summer night air was still blood hot and his resistance to the call of sleep melted away.

  Jack Liffey slipped behind the bus shelter and lowered himself slowly into the ivy, crunching and crackling. His horizon collapsed to little more than a ragged line of geraniums surrounding him, and then even that tiny world winked out.

  *

  “Girls, rise an’ shine for breakfas’. Sleepyheads don’t catch no trains.”

  Maeve opened her eyes and wondered what trains Ornetta’s aunt was talking about, but then she decided it was just an expression.

  “Skip the train. We can catch the jet plane a little later on,” she whispered, and Ornetta giggled.

  Maeve and Ornetta talked for a while, recounting their dreams.

  “Little gals, let’s get our bottoms wigglin’.”

  “We up, Aunt
.”

  They got out of bed and dressed. The tongue-lashing of the night before seemed to have evaporated as completely as their dreams, and the whole bustling household was bright and amiable for breakfast. Maeve was pleased. In most of the families she’d known, there would have been a good half hour of harrumphing and recrimination in the morning, and an apology of some kind would have been expected from the kids.

  “Your daddy doesn’t answer his phone, honey, and we have to get home to Bancroft while we can. Curfew starts again at noon. What do you want to do?”

  “I can just take the bus home.” She was not about to suggest her other home, with her mother and Brad.

  Ornetta’s grandmother smiled mildly. “I really don’t think there are going to be any buses running today. And I couldn’t let you go off by yourself. I’d never forgive myself if something happened to such a sweet girl.”

  “I’ll come with you then. Dad probably got up early to do something about his job. He usually does find the people he looks for, you know. He’s really good at it.”

  “That’s good to know. I guess you’d better come home with us, then.”

  *

  He dreamt of space aliens creeping up on him with big sparkly ray guns, filling him with dread and then awoke with the sun catching him from just over the houses, low in the southeast. He was sore all over, and it took him a moment to shake the vivid busy guilt-ridden dreams and remember where he was. Skunk, he thought. Why hadn’t he dreamt of skunk? The smell was still overpowering. Marlena. That was overpowering, too.

  There was a Quicki-mart across the street, and it was lucky he carried a spare twenty in his pocket for emergencies. He bought every roll of paper towels and every six-ounce can of tomato juice they had in the cooler from a reluctant olive-skinned clerk who stood back at arms’ length to take his money. Behind the store he opened the little cans, one after another, and rubbed the juice into his trousers and legs. He’d read about bathing dogs in tomato juice to neutralize the skunk smell, and it seemed to be working. Luckily they were charcoal colored slacks and the residue didn’t show too badly when he wiped himself down with paper towels. It made him look like a wino, but it did take care of most of the stench, leaving him smelling like spaghetti Bolognaise.