by John Shannon
“They must be after your granddad,” Maeve said.
“Then his heart go and save his life.”
They crawled to a hurricane fence on the side of the yard, just past a spindly little tree, where Ornetta put her back to the chain link and shoved hard with her legs to push the bottom of the fence out and up a foot. Maeve thought of the loose fence slats in Venice and wondered if Ornetta had found an escape route from every home she had ever known.
“Roll under, Maevie, and hold it up.”
She wriggled underneath and held the chain link up with both hands while Ornetta rolled through herself into the neighbor’s yard. They dusted themselves off and sneaked around the dark house to a hedge that divided back from front yard. Ornetta knelt and pushed herself into the hedge.
“Dirty old boogers,” Ornetta exclaimed softly.
Maeve wriggled in with her to look through the leaves and she could see a dark panel van out front with its sliding door open. The pulsing firelight was growing now, lighting up the van, and they could see a man kneeling inside wearing a black ski mask and aimed what looked like an army rifle at the house.
“I bet they’re waiting for him to come out,” Maeve whispered.
Something was moving in the vacant lot across the street, too, just at the edge of the long shadow cast by the van, but they couldn’t quite see what was there. Maeve looked hard, and it was like demons churning in the dark, one of them rising up out of a thick puddle on the ground.
*
“If it’s little kids, we won’t shoot ’em coming out. We’re not monsters, Jacko.”
Jack Liffey felt a wave of intense hatred. That anyone would make that the gauge of his virtue—not shooting children fleeing a fire.
He could see that the bungalow had caught fire now, flames licking up the siding and over the front eave. He had to believe the girls had escaped out the back. Thinking anything else was insupportable, unbearable. There were no sirens heading their way, and he doubted the fire department had any units to spare. For this night, smaller fires were going to burn until they ran out of fuel.
“Doesn’t it strike you that none of this has anything to do with advancing the white race?”
“Au contraire, Liffey. I know where we started out, and I know where things got complicated. There’s been a mistake, fuckin’ A right, but we all have to accept the consequences of what we do and finish them out. Even if they don’t look much like they did when we started.”
“Sure, I see that.” To keep him talking.
The noise of a helicopter swelled overhead; it seemed to be circling. The fire had attracted that much attention, at least. The man didn’t seem concerned, and when Jack Liffey twisted his neck around for a glimpse, he saw that Krasny was wearing a ski mask. Even the flesh that showed through the cut-outs had been blacked with burnt cork. Being caught on TV wasn’t going to worry Krasny very much. The license plates were undoubtedly off the van, too. He held a .38 snub-nose revolver in his free hand. Nothing fancy or high tech but perfectly adequate for putting a hole in you.
“So what happened? Did Amilcar give you some lip?”
“Not me, Brian. We were done up like this to put a little scare in the miscegenators, but the guy yanks Bri’s mask off and gets a good look, and then tops it by saying something foul about what he sees. Showing off for his girl. Leave it to a mouthy nigger to push his bad luck. Bri lost it and his pistol went off, and then poor Doug reacted and chopped them both down. What could a man do?”
“Yeah, the uppity ones are the worst.”
The weight intensified briefly, and he winced. A bright light came on from the helicopter and swept over the ground.
“I wonder what they think they’re going to do with that searchlight?” Perry Krasny said cheerfully. He sounded like he didn’t have a care in the world. “Maybe fly in a big magnifying glass and burn us up like ants?”
“Where are the bodies?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I always wondered what I’d do if I accidentally killed somebody. Bury the body in the hills? Cut it up and send it down the drain?”
He heard a snigger. “They’re in Rose Hills, with all the other dead meat. Nobody’s ever there at night. We dug down another couple feet and tucked ’em under a coffin waiting to go down. Can’t you just see the cops trying to find a couple extra bodies in a cemetery? Oops, not that one.”
“Clever of you.”
“No shit.”
The shaft of light found them for an instant, turning the world into glare, and then skidding off a bit; it wobbled around them as the helicopter circled.
A new shadow blocked his view of the fire. “Nobody’s coming out of there, K. Let’s beat it.”
“You a Christian?” Krasny asked Jack Liffey.
“Not much.”
“Make what peace you can. You’re gonna get to know the big answers real soon now. Best pray to your humanist vapors.” Jack Liffey’s arm was released and the pressure was suddenly gone from the small of his back. His heart thudding, he rolled onto his back and saw the hooded Krasny standing over him, aiming the pistol.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Sure we do.” The pistol jumped and Jack Liffey felt a searing pain, like a sword through his shoulder, and shouted out. Then forcing his eyes open in the face of the terrible burning pain, and he saw the pistol tracking toward his heart. The two men were silhouetted against the smoky brightness as the searchlight found them again, and he wondered if this was the last thing he would ever see, if the final image really did burn onto your retina. Not now, he thought, not yet. I want to find out how it comes out.
The light kicked up a notch and Jack Liffey sat up. He didn’t want it to happen lying down.
“This is for the dog, you fuck.”
Perry Krasny aimed his .38 straight for the heart and fired. There was no white tunnel, no kindly uncle waiting for him. In a burst of incredible pain, the world went right out.
*
Maeve shrieked and fainted. At that moment, the light from the helicopter had finally resolved what she was seeing across the street. She had made out a big man in a mask standing directly over her father, and then the big man had fired a pistol right into his chest. Ornetta held her tight, but with all the other noise she didn’t think the men had heard the outburst. She watched as two masked men sprinted back to their van and slammed inside.
Ornetta saw that the front of her house next door was engulfed by fire and a corner of her mind mourned for the dolls and books and especially an old silver pin from her mom, but she was happy Ban and Nana had got away.
“We’ll get you boogers one day,” she promised the receding van.
She was just about to look away, back to the empty lot, when she saw a big Chevy pull out of a driveway with no lights and block the van’s path. The tires of the van squealed and smoked, as if it tried to back away from the Chevy. Then she saw something that she didn’t understand very well until much later.
Little green fires made a line from the sidewalk toward the van, first one and then a second. It was all accompanied by a terrible cracking noise, she wasn’t sure what, like a powerful lawnmower blowing over an endless pile of twigs. The truck stopped moving as the tires seemed to deflate. She saw the silhouettes of men step into the street with their legs spread, four of them. They had guns that were spitting red now instead of green.
The sound was definitely a hammering of gunfire, going on and on, and she could see a lot of damage happening to the van. Windows were blowing out and metal was tearing open and the van was lurching and jumping. Two more shapes moved into the street, holding rifles down at the waist and firing away without stopping.
The helicopter with the light circled back around but a lot higher. In the weak light she could see it was definitely the Rolling 60s up there at the corner, at least a dozen of them, and every last one was firing some kind of weapon point-blank into the van.
“Got you, you old boogers,
” Ornetta said aloud.
TWENTY
Somebody Cared
Maeve wept in big convulsive sobs as she lay in a heap up against her father’s bloody shoulder. Ornetta had to tug her own leg free from where Maeve’s sharp knee had pinned it to the ground. Horrible dark blood was running down the man’s shoulder, threatening to drip onto Ornetta. She was petrified that this man was going to be dead before she even got to make him her daddy. She begged her genie to come save him, but his face looked terribly chalky white.
She heard a big pop and looked back at her house. The fire seemed to be dying down after charring the front pretty badly. Two helicopters were still circling overhead without making any attempt to intervene, and the one with the searchlight was concentrating on the torn-up black van at the corner. The men who’d shot it up were gone. The light flicked off all of a sudden and its helicopter scooted away.
Please, please, please, genie, she thought. Save this man.
*
Maeve heard Ornetta wail and realized she had better get some control over herself to take charge of things. She took several deep breaths to try to calm herself, then pushed herself up on her arms. She couldn’t help herself, she had to look with dread at her father’s face as she grasped Ornetta’s hand hard. She found it impossible to conceive a universe in which her father was an inert object—she almost pictured a casket, a cemetery, but her mind shied away quickly—instead of someone she could always watch as he went out into the world and bumped against it, someone to be consulted and listened to. The thought of her father set off a whole spray of images: him bending over with mock gravity to help her with an algebra problem, sawing a plank across two doors and wiping off the sweat with the back of his hand, hugging Marlena outside the motel at Sequoia and sticking up a V behind her head as she took their picture.
Jack Liffey’s face abruptly quivered in some kind of tic, as if he’d been stuck with a pin.
“Maevie!” Ornetta shrieked.
Maeve immediately put her hand against his neck. She tried to put it where she’d seen in movies and right away she felt a pulse thumping away inside, going pretty fast in a kind of hoppity beat.
“Oh, God, Ornetta, he’s alive!”
They hugged each other, and then Maeve noticed the place on his shoulder where thick blood was seeping out like pudding. She had two Kleenexes in her pocket, and she wadded them up and pressed them against the wound.
“Ornetta, give me that belt off your skirt.”
Together the girls cinched a tourniquet tight over the shoulder to hold the ball of tissue down, and then they knotted the ends up the best they could.
All of a sudden Maeve noticed a small hole and scorch mark on the pocket of his shirt. She felt a chill. She remembered watching the big man shoot him almost point blank in the chest and visualized a much worse wound hidden under there. She investigated gently with a finger in the hole and felt something odd. She reached into the pocket and found a big hunk of metal.
“What’s this?”
It was a shiny chrome rectangle with rounded corners, maybe two inches by four, and it was bent hard in the middle, as if somebody had tried to fold it over, with a big dimple pushed into the bend. It looked like there was a skooshed-up bullet stuck down in the dimple. She pulled back his shirt to see a bad purple bruise under the shirt pocket. His chest looked like it had been hit with a hammer and pushed in a little, but the skin wasn’t broken.
Wing flaps came out of nowhere and both girls jumped and cried out. A large black bird passed right over them and settled onto the open door of a VW that sat nearby. The big crow was so black they could barely make out its shape, and it watched them with glowing disdainful eyes. Go away, Maeve thought. It’s not time.
“I think he’s in shock. We’ve got to put his legs up.”
Maeve looked around and found a discarded plastic paint bucket, which she retrieved and rooted at his feet. Using both arms, she lifted one of his feet up to rest the heel on the bucket, but when she lifted the second leg the first one fell off. Ornetta was throwing rocks at the bird, which squawked at her once as a stone bounded off the car’s roof and then it flapped away.
“Black birds is bad news.”
Maeve enlisted Ornetta to hold both of her father’s legs together on the bucket while she tugged her dad’s leather belt out of his belt loops and strapped his legs together loosely.
“We need to get him to the doctor,” Maeve said.
“They a car right there.” Ornetta pointed to the VW she’d just hit with a rock.
“I can’t drive it. I’m sure it’s a stick.” She stared mournfully at the VW, wishing she’d been braver about driving lessons, but the responsibility of guiding all that noisy machinery around amid other noisy machinery had always frightened her, and she’d put off learning every time her dad offered.
She wondered where his old car was and the thought stirred a recent memory, a scrap of memory: the piece of metal she’d just found. Her eye went to it, discarded in the weeds by her dad’s hips. It looked just like one of the door handles of the old Concord. Funny how you could recognize something like that, even when it was mangled and far out of place. She could tell her mind wasn’t working very well, fastening on something as stupid as that.
Maeve scooted around on the ground and lifted her father’s head gently into her lap. The weeds around her smelled of urine and rotting garbage, and the air was full of the ashy smell of smoke. Grief took her for a moment. She used her blouse to wipe the sweat off his forehead and then clung hard to him.
“You’ll be okay, Dad. Ornetta and me’ll take care of you. I promise.”
She thought back, one by one, to all the bad things she’d ever thought about him and tried to undo every one of them so the gods would be on his side. There weren’t all that many bad thoughts, she hedged, just in case Somebody was listening. But she couldn’t deny that there were a few.
He had a temper, and it snapped out once in a while, but his flashes of anger passed quickly, and they were almost never at her. In fact, they were often at somebody hurting her. Actually, she offered up to whoever might be listening, my daddy is a pretty good man. That set her weeping for a while until she noticed with a chill that Ornetta was gone.
“Ornetta!”
Before she could jump up to go find her, she saw Ornetta coming across the street with a wheelbarrow. It was too big and heavy for the little girl but she was managing somehow and she trudged it right up into the vacant lot. The wheelbarrow contained two old-style metal roller skates, some clothesline, scissors, and a bottle of water.
“We can try,” Maeve said, divining the idea immediately and wiping away her tears.
Ornetta had apparently figured out that two girls their size would not get very far if they had to lift a wheelbarrow with a grown man in it. They tucked roller skates under the rear skids and lashed them on with clothesline.
Then it was a real challenge of geometry and strength to get her father up and into the body of the wheelbarrow. Finally, they did it by pushing the barrow over on its side, tying his torso to the bed of the wheelbarrow and then both of them leaning back with all their weight to tip it upright. One skate had slipped in the process and they had to retie it. Maeve tucked an old rag under her dad’s head for a pillow.
“How’d you think of this?” Maeve asked, somewhat in awe.
“The magic tell me,” Ornetta said proudly, and clapped her hand to her chest. Immediately she screamed and dropped straight down to her bottom, as if all the strength had gone out of her legs.
What’s the matter?” Maeve’s emotions, already on edge, soard up into panic immediately.
“It’s gone!” she fumbled around in her shirt, evidently hunting for her magic bottle. “Oh, no!”
Maeve knelt to hug her. “It’ll be all right.”
“No, no, we in bad trouble now.”
Maeve knew how much the girl relied on her sense of the magical and the comfort of her amulet, but they d
idn’t have time to hunt it down. She wondered if Ornetta would be able to carry on without it. She’d push the wheelbarrow by herself if she had to.
“Oh, we lost. We doom.” Ornetta was shaking her head back and forth, her eyes clamped shut.
Then Maeve had a brainstorm. “Ornetta! Look at me.”
The little girl stilled and opened her frightened eyes.
“You haven’t had the magic bottle since we got dressed so fast. You got us out the window without it. You got us under the fence. And you thought up the wheelbarrow by yourself. You don’t need the magic bottle anymore.”
The little girl’s hand still went uncertainly to her chest.
“You can make your own magic now.”
It took a moment for the idea to sink in, and then another minute’s arguing and reassuring before Ornetta smiled shyly and got hesitantly to her feet. “I try.”
Maeve was so proud of her that she wanted to hug her and abandon herself to weeping all over again, but they didn’t have any time to waste.
To keep Jack Liffey’s legs elevated, they made a big loop with clothesline and slung it around their necks. Then they lifted his ankles into the loop and adjusted the rope until his legs remained at half-mast.
“We do our best.”
Each of them took one rubber handgrip. They pushed as hard as they could. The wheelbarrow ran pretty rough across the weedy field, balking and fighting as they grunted and shoved. There was a tendency to circle left because Maeve was taller and stronger than Ornetta, but when they got onto the sidewalk and the skates settled onto smooth concrete, the wheelbarrow just took off with a raucous clattering and Maeve began to think that the whole crazy enterprise might just work. Once they got the thing moving it wasn’t hard at all to keep it going.
“Where’s a hospital?” Maeve asked.
“Drew-King that way,” Ornetta pointed southeast.
“How far?”
Ornetta thought for a moment. “I don’t know. Some miles I think.”
“Then we better get a move on,” Maeve said, but her heart sank. She had thought it was only a few blocks. She stared out into the threatening darkness, and the enormity of the task crashed against her like a wave. She hoped that somebody would see them along the way and take pity on them.