Streets on Fire (24 page)

“You’re going to have to put up with no fuel gauge,” Chris Johnson said. “This one still has the big lever to switch over to the reserve tank. It’s got about fifty thousand miles on the engine.”

“That’s not bad, if I remember right,” Babs said. “About half its life expectancy.”

“Cheap to rebuild,” Chris Johnson said.

“I’ll get under it and get dirty,” Jack Liffey said. “If you two will hand me the parts and give me moral support.”

All of a sudden, Babs turned and stared hard at Chris Johnson for some reason. “You have the most amazing yellow-gold aura. I know it’s not cool to say it, but I can see these things.”

Neither of the men had any idea how to respond to that.

“The brightest aura I’ve ever seen.”

“What about mine?” Jack Liffey asked, to ease Johnson’s embarrassment.

She cocked her head at him, tucking her tongue into the corner of her mouth, and studied him for a moment. “Pretty weak, I’m afraid. A bit blue. I think your soul is wearing out.”

“I probably need my fifty-thousand-mile rebuild.”

“Must be.”

He rolled up his sleeves. “Let’s put this puppy together.”

*

Genesee leaned in and loosened her husband’s top shirt button, supporting herself on the walker, and Bancroft huffed and puffed on the sofa and motioned the girls back to give him a little room.

“Would you like some water?” Ornetta asked.

He nodded with his lips tight. Ornetta hurried away toward the kitchen and Maeve saw the old man and woman exchange a look that meant, Let’s keep it light and not worry her.

“It’s heart, isn’t it?” Maeve said very softly.

“Shhh.”

Bancroft Davis took a tiny pill out of a little bottle and put it under his tongue.

“He’ll be okay, honey. Why don’t you go…” But she couldn’t think of something to tell Maeve to go do.

“I won’t say anything,” Maeve whispered.

The woman nodded. “It’s too much excitement going on.”

Ornetta came back with a tall glass of water, and her grandfather drank some of it and pretended it was just what he needed. He smiled, as if relaxing, but Maeve could see the tension in the way he held his chest. Ornetta seemed to sense something too.

“I seen all the weeds taking over my magic garden, Nanny. Can we go fix it up? I promise we stay in the yard.”

Maeve could see the woman considering and then reluctantly opt for the lesser evil. “But just in the back, okay?
Promise
. And you come straight in if you hear any ruckus nearby. You hear, girl?”

“Yes’m. We seen plenty enough trouble already.”

And they had. Bancroft may have seen some of it on TV, but they’d passed through the thick of it. Driving east from Venice, they had passed a big grocery store called Buddha Market that was being thoroughly looted. It was on the flank of the Baldwin Hills, just as Slauson descended into the West Bank of Crenshaw, an area that was slightly better off than the flats further east.

Only one lane of traffic had been crawling past the market because an MTA bus lay on its side in the street with every window broken out, so they had a good long look at what was going on. People had been spilling out the shattered doors of the market and fanning out in all directions, carrying boxes and bags or pushing shopping carts heaped with goods. It was like watching ants rescue eggs from an anthill that was slowly being flooded. And the market was being flooded for some reason. A wet mush oozed out the doors, apparently made up of paper goods and vegetables and other lumps carried along by muddy water.

Farther on, a small video store had been emptied out already and the sidewalks sparkled with broken glass. The shell of a burned out police car rested near the curb. As if the vehicle hadn’t already suffered enough, a circle of men were peeing on it as a young man wearing a green bandanna over his face was beating it to death with a street-side trash can. Genesee Thigpen had driven grimly on toward home, her hands stiff on the wheel, not saying a word.

Groups of people had stood around everywhere, seemingly waiting for something. Throughout the entire trip, Genesee and her passengers had seen only one other police car, parked discreetly near a closed-up strip mall, with a video camera sticking out the window.

“This my garden,” Ornetta said when they got outside, and then softly, “It’s his heart, huh?”

“I think so,” she said. “But it looks like he’ll be okay.” She wondered if being indefinite about it dodged the moral dilemma at fibbing to her sister. It was the kind of thing her father worried about a lot, and she was beginning to see that things weren’t always so black-and-white, just as he insisted.

Ornetta beckoned and Maeve joined her at a lean-to roof off the side of the house where an old wheelbarrow was stored, loaded up with a number of gardening tools. They heard the slow bop-bop-bop of a semi-automatic weapon somewhere, but they exchanged a glance that managed to exclude the sound from Genesee’s instructions about nearby ruckus.

“Give me a hand, Maevie.”

They each took a handle and tugged the wheelbarrow out of its shed. Together they pushed it across the bumpy lawn to the flowerbed, which had become choked with weeds. “These my snappy dragons. I tell you ’bout the day the snappy dragons had to guard the king’s Easter eggs?”

*

Please please don’t make any final decisions until we talk again
, he wrote on the pad. He added some more, mostly self-recrimination, anything he could think of from the
mea culpa
letter he had churned over in his head, but soon he broke off and left the pad in the center of the kitchen table.

He had got the old VW going without much trouble and insisted on leaving Babs behind with Chris, though she wanted to come along to help him. Oddly, they seemed to have taken a shine to each other. Chris turned out to be a collector of old
Wonder Woman
comics.

Mar Vista was outside the curfew zone so he hadn’t had any trouble getting home. The instant he’d come in the door, Loco had started going bananas out in back; eventually Jack Liffey took some dog food out and tried to feed him. Mostly Loco just stiffened his front legs, hunched back on his rear legs and barked up angrily at him, probably accusing him of neglect or worse. Too late, he noticed the second burrowed-out escape route by the fence. Loco gave him one last tongue-lashing, scrabbled through the tunnel like Steve McQueen making the Great Escape and headed off down the alley at flank speed in that strange half-sideways coyote lope. He didn’t look back. Evidently the dog had held off the getaway until he had a witness, out of some canine spite. Another loss, Jack Liffey thought, but he just didn’t have the energy to go after the dog. Loco would either come home to eat or he would not.

Back in the house, he realized that Marlena’s Chihuahua was gone too, presumably at her new love nest, which was just as well. If the rabid little rat-dog had started going gaga, as was its wont, he might have stored it in the microwave as he had fantasized so often.

He changed his pants, picked up his .45 automatic from the hollowed out
Oxford Companion to American Literature
where he stored it and then went back to the kitchen and grabbed a hunk of cheese out of the fridge and chewed on it to discover just how hungry he was.

He tried to call Bancroft Davis again, but it was about as effective as talking into the toaster. The phone didn’t even buzz back at him. It was remarkable, he thought, how dependent everyone had become on the magic of sending the voice miles and miles over wires. With the phones down, getting a simple message of warning ten miles across the city was an ordeal.

As he’d guessed, where Washington Boulevard passed under the 405 into the curfew zone, the underpass was blocked with yellow sawhorses. They were taking the curfew seriously. A number of cars were lined up to plead their case with a couple of bored cops. Mostly the cops were turning people away, but once in a while in the queue ahead of him, they would swing away a sawhorse and let someone pass. It was only mid-afternoon, so he guessed they were letting people with the right address go home.

When he worked his way to the front he dug out his driver’s license. It still listed his residence as the condo in Culver City, and for the first time he realized he’d probably be back in it for real pretty soon. You can go home again, he thought. You may have to.

“Going home for the night?” the cop asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Any guns in the car?”

Jack Liffey laughed. He hoped his sudden shiver hadn’t shown. It was hard to keep his eyes away from the glove box. “You must be kidding.”

“We got reports from previously reliable sources.”

“Reports?”

“About white vigilantes, thinking this is a pretty good opportunity to hide in the bushes and notch up a few Nee-gro scalps.”

It was hard to read the man’s attitude.

“Is that a suggestion?”

“Oh, no, sir. Of course not.”

Jack Liffey was thinking Gideon’s 300.

“Have a good evening, sir. Sunset is at seven thirty-five. Don’t be caught outside after that. You
will
be arrested.”

“I’ll stay indoors with my sniper rifle.”

“That’s the ticket. Be discreet.”

Jack Liffey saw a guy in checked pants sitting along Slauson with one of those glass crack pipes in flagrant use, puffing, then grinning up at any traffic that passed, like a child acting out. There wasn’t much traffic, but where it bunched up at a bottleneck to creep past a toppled bus, it almost seemed a normal volume. Traffic also slowed to gawk at a burnt-out police car. Too, there were more intimate signs that something was amiss: at red lights, cars wouldn’t stop parallel, but one or the other would lag back; no one seemed to want to make eye contact. And for the most part the flow stayed well away from the curbs to avoid the broken glass spilling into the streets. The last of the sun glittered orange off this snowfall of glass in his rear-view, and he guessed he had about forty-five minutes of light left.

He had the windows down against the oppressive heat, and he could hear automatic gunfire rattling away not too far from him. For some reason, he didn’t think it was aimed at anything, just fired aloft out of emotional abandon, like New Year’s Eve in the Middle East. But he had no real reason for feeling that way.

Idling at a light, he could hear a lot more gunfire, farther away, overlapping and counterpointing, making a kind of running sound track to the evening, but the VW engine was so loud it drowned out most of the battle sounds when he started up again. A whole row of storefronts had identical tidy
BLACK OWNED
signs in the windows, and he wondered if that might not strike a roving band of looters as suspiciously corporate. A sudden chill overtook him, and he downshifted and floored the balky old VW when he caught sight of a big teenager in sweats heading fast for him, waving a baseball bat. The hurled bat clanked off the engine cover. He figured he’d just missed becoming an item on the evening news.

He saw a big ladder truck parked diagonally by a freshly burned out fried-fish storefront and the firemen were standing around, pointing at a number of smoldering studs and talking them over, as if some might be more interesting than others. A couple of cop cars watched over the firefighters like mother hens. Up here on the flank of the Baldwin Hills, it was still largely the land of those with jobs and futures. He’d read that Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw was the largest middle class black community in America. But his expedition soon took him down into the plains of despair, South LA proper, and the difference was stark. A lot more of the storefronts had been abandoned, boarded up for years, and the nail salons and music shops gave way to storefront churches with hand-lettered signs:
MOUNT HEBRON FULL LIVING GOSPEL MISSIONARY CHURCH
.

A minimall had been trashed and looted, the metal grills ripped open as if by a giant, and down here on the flat there were no longer attendant police vehicles. People were no longer waiting around on the street corners for trouble either; they were running, either toward it or away from it. At the limits of his vision there was a lot of rapid movement, as if he were driving through a big track-and-field meet. Three boys raced straight across his bow and disappeared between houses. A lone young man sprinted through a small park carrying a big clumsy cardboard box in front of him, contents unknown. A motley pack of dogs of all sizes trotted along the sidewalk, a big German Shepherd eyeing him like an angry cousin of the dog he had killed in Simi. Rex; he remembered the name. One white mutt skulking back in the pack might even have been Loco, but if he’d got this far already, Jack Liffey figured he must have taken a taxi.

All of a sudden he noticed that the traffic had thinned to nothing, and he began to feel terribly conspicuous on Slauson. At the first opportunity, he zigged south a few blocks to 60th Street, which ran parallel, and headed straight toward the old man’s neighborhood. Even with the window open, the old VW was like an oven, and he wrenched the wind-wing around as far as it would go to direct moving air on him.

His SOS mission was beginning to seem a pretty bad idea, and he wondered what good a warning would do in any case. He couldn’t picture Bancroft Davis going to the mattresses, crouching there at his front window with a long rifle ready for bushwhackers. But delivering the warning was an unequivocal duty, he knew that much,
and
it kept him from thinking about Marlena.

He found himself obsessively complying with all the laws of the road, though there was virtually no chance of getting a traffic ticket. It felt as if he were honoring a pact with a very grouchy god:
I will do nothing whatever wrong and you will ignore me
. The VW puttered along at 25 mph and made a full shift down to first stop at every stop sign.

He held up at one corner when he caught sight of a blur to his left and the blur became a low-rider racing along the cross street, a dark Pontiac from the late fifties, the windows so blacked out it might have been driverless. He heard the old automatic transmission throb a gear change as the car accelerated across the intersection. Then he heard and finally saw what must have occasioned the flight.