Streets on Fire (25 page)

Loud banda music thumped away its polka-like beat, the bass notes hammering up into his chest, and a fancy purple truck with huge knobby tires and desert lights came into sight, giving chase to the Pontiac. Two Latinos stood in the bed, gripping the light bar and aiming handguns over the cab. They seemed to be firing their revolvers methodically at the Pontiac on all the heavier beats of the music. Jack Liffey crouched low in the seat, as if that might protect him. The chase rounded a corner two blocks on and the dull woofer beats and gunshots trailed them for a bit, like something unpleasant left on the air. The strange pursuit stirred some memory, maybe from a film, but he couldn’t place it.

Streetlights were winking and coming on, glowing spots in the still bright evening, as he rounded the corner at Brighton and saw the twin row of skinny fan palms stretching away to the south. He was two blocks north of the Davis house and he pulled to the curb, killed the engine, and scrunched down in the seat to look things over. The only other car on Brighton was a beige 1962 Comet a half block away. He knew no one was in it because it was upside down, like a bug waving its legs at the sky, and the roof was crushed flat—another reminder that all was not well in South LA.

Further east a fat column of very black smoke rose angrily like the funnel of a tornado, something very big and toxic ablaze. The main drag of Vermont was only two blocks east of him. All the doors on Brighton were shut, all the windows shuttered or curtained or dark. He had half hoped to see sandbagged gun emplacements protecting the neighborhood, manned by the Rolling 60s Crips, but there was nothing.

There was a heavy thumping on the air and then he saw it, a helicopter coming over low. It was either TV or police, and it had a big dark sphere suspended between the skids, like a grasshopper trying to loot something valuable. For an instant he saw a dull red glow off the sphere and he could only guess that it was some kind of infrared surveillance equipment. That was the LAPD’s signature, all right, too much technology and too little contact. What could they possibly do from up there, drop warning leaflets? Launch air strikes on looters?

Suddenly he saw fiery green dashes rising lazily to the helicopter and the machine tipped up to show its belly and scooted away to the east. Surprisingly easygoing, the line of green flashes tilted east to follow the chopper, as if it just wanted to tap the machine on the shoulder to remind it of something but couldn’t seem to catch up. The last time he had seen something like that he had been on leave in Saigon and had got caught up by accident in the Tet offensive. He could not imagine how someone in South Central had come upon tracer ammunition, but he knew the green color was a signature of the AK-47.

He wondered again—now that he was here—what good it was going to do to barge into Bancroft Davis’s house and offer up a strange alarum from outer space. “Some white men in a racist group called Gideon’s 300, or maybe they’re called the Defenders of the European Legacy—anyway, they may be driving over here from Simi Valley in the midst of this riot to try to kill you.”d Davis would probably just shrug it off, or at most he would be vigilant for a few hours and then go to sleep. Would they come at all? Jack Liffey wondered. The trek would be just as hard for them as it had been for him, maybe even worse.

He could wait in the house alongside Davis, of course, furniture against the windows to seal them inside like Davy Crockett and Sam Houston in the Alamo, armed with his single .45 automatic pistol, as Krasney’s boys sneaked up on them from all sides with rifles, Molotov cocktails, rocket grenades and bazookas. Who would notice a single house torched suspiciously that night?

On the other hand, he thought suddenly, he could use the only real edge he had. They would never expect somebody to set an ambush for them out on the street. Three doors up the block from the Davis house and across Brighton, there was a vacant lot. Probably an old burn-down that no one had bothered to rebuild. The city had a policy now of tearing down abandoned structures before they could become crack houses, so the whole of South LA had a scattering of abandoned weedy lots like this one.

He could see that the curb ramped down in front of the lot where a driveway had once been, but he decided to wait where he was until the evening got a bit darker. He hunkered down below the seatback as a band of young men, maybe twenty strong, trotted past ahead of him toward Vermont. One boy waved a purple Lakers banner, but a couple of others seemed to be carrying rifles and they definitely weren’t the rooting section.

He didn’t think he had ever before gotten himself into a situation quite as ludicrous as this: a white man in an old VW with Rustoleum red fenders parked in the heart of a full-bore riot in a black area to defend a black man from some other white men who were—perhaps—sneaking up on the neighborhood. It was like zebras trying to slip into the middle of a high school prom to stage a duel. In a book, you wouldn’t believe it. That was the difference, he thought: fiction had a meaning and life didn’t. And because it didn’t, it never worried a whit about plausibility. It could be every bit as absurd as it wanted to be, just as outlandish and meaningless. An incident jumped up out of the muddle, no reason really, and the light of history flashed on it for a moment and then it was gone.

Randomness, my old friend, he thought. If that mob of kids had followed the Lakers banner down the cross-street just twenty feet behind him, instead of the far street ahead of him, they would probably have noticed him and trashed his car, with him in it, and whatever he might have represented as Bancroft Davis’ savior would have evaporated in that simple accident of route. The same fate could strike Gideon’s 300, too, of course, the whole gang of them could be squeezed into the back of a dark van heading his way, bustling and restless in there like circus clowns, and the van could blow a tire right in front of a mob looting a sporting goods store and a dozen hunting rifles could fill the van with holes in a simple excess of enthusiasm.

When the blow was truly aimed at you, he thought, there was nothing much that could come between you and the pain. He guessed the point was to find a way to be at peace with that. And suddenly he was thinking of Marlena again.

The sense of loss flooded back in, just when he’d started feeling he belonged to the world again. Things still existed out there but he was no longer part of them, cast out of the fraternity of the ordinary and the happy. The last time that had happened, losing his job and family, he had gone on a binge of coke and booze for almost a year. It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. The job had gone first, and it was mostly the binge that had cost him his wife and family, but the point was, he knew better now. There was nothing to be gained by a retreat into blotto. He’d eaten the apple of knowledge, or the apple of something or other—maybe just shame. The escape was worse than the fate, and you had no choice but to take your loss neat.
Marlena.
He loathed self-pity and what it did to him inside, but he hadn’t found the way to clamber up out of it yet.

Two men carrying a sofa dashed back from where the mob of boys had gone, and he saw how much darker the night had become. About half the streetlights had been shot out, and color was fading out of the world to leave mostly shapes and shadows. Another helicopter was circling, flicking its searchlight around on the ground like a hiker looking for a lost trail. As the reddish smudge faded out of the western sky, here and there he could see faint light inside a few houses, leaking around blinds or through curtains. The neighborhood was inhabited after all.

He didn’t turn on his headlights as he started the noisy car and putted noisily to the vacant lot, then swung around quickly and backed up into the weedy quarter acre. His head bobbed as the car jounced across uneven ground and crunched through rubbish. He stopped just deep enough into the lot so he could still see the Davis house three doors down, killed the engine and yanked at the handle to pop the trunk in front. Chris had folded up the old tarp and thrown it in for him. He got the tarp out and spread it over the back half of the car, jiggering it so he could still get in the door and leave his window clear for air.

He figured he was now invisible, with the tarp blocking any illumination that might backlight him through the rear windows. He retrieved his .45 from the glove box and wedged it under his thigh where he could get to it quickly and settled in to watch the house. It was full dark now, and he could see the faintest yellow glow spilling from the front and side windows.

Three teenage girls with cornrowed hair sauntered casually up the road as if the city wasn’t burning all around them. They carried lumpy shopping bags.

“You a caution, Bea.”

“Mama gon’ bust my booty for this excursion.”

They moved on, leaving an odd sense of normality on the air that lasted until a deep explosion went off somewhere not very far away, near enough that he could actually feel a shock wave as a faint puff on his cheek. A Molotov cocktail, or maybe just cooking gas, the vapors slowly diffusing out into the air in some confined space until they reached just the right ratio of combustible gas to oxygen, the flashpoint. He could sense how disturbed he was inside, under his enforced calm. It was the result of so much dream-state threat, like the hangover of an earthquake—what should be stable and certain in the world around him no longer so. A car in a dream become a bright plastic toy tractor, carrying him unstoppably toward a cliff. His bedroom walls developing ragged holes to reveal
out there
a bright alien world. A water tap turning itself on and off. Awareness that his own existence had become as tenuous as the daydreams.

He slid down until the back of his neck rested on the hot plastic seatback. The angst of two days had left him exhausted, all the way down to the bones, but still strangely wired. His eyes had adjusted completely to the night out there and he was satisfied he had the catbird seat. Nothing was stirring at Bancroft Davis’ house or anywhere else in the neighborhood. Overhead, pinpricks of light circled, and the sound of gunfire and sirens continued, but all faraway for the moment, almost consoling.

He awoke with something hard against his forehead, his heart thudding.
Shit
.

“Yo, Arnold. What’s your bidness here?”

Jack Liffey didn’t do anything for a moment. His consciousness gathered toward a central redoubt from a number of outlying posts, like Keystone Kops retreating in disorder into a very small space. It didn’t take him long at all to figure he’d fallen asleep at the switch, inexcusably dreaming he was awake, and now there was something, probably a pistol, against his forehead. Luckily the accent and diction did not suggest Gideon’s 300.

His heart thumping away erratically, he turned his head slowly. A few inches away he saw a 9mm Glock, a weapon made largely of plastic, which accounted for the fact that it hadn’t been cold against his skin. Holding the pistol was the guy with the teardrop tattoo and all the earrings. He even remembered the name: BigLenin. The Rolling 60s Crips.

“Boo-yah,” the young man said, the formulaic mimic of a shotgun blast. “It so damn easy to smoke a cave boy like you this night. One-eight-seven and the pig be busy elsewheres.”

One-eight-seven was cop talk for homicide. The young man wore one of those tight head covers, silky black, with a loose flap over the nape of the neck, like something for the Foreign Legion. It was a pretty good sign of the gulf between the communities, Jack Liffey thought, that he didn’t know what it was called, he had never seen one in a store, nor did he know what store he would go to if he wanted to buy one.

“I’m here to guard Bancroft Davis. You’re right about the dangers of the night. Some Klansmen are on their way here to kill Mr. Davis.”

“You just trippin’.”

“Same guys who burned the cross on his lawn. I know you remember that.”

“Big,” someone called. “It’s five-oh on the way.”

A siren swelled and then diminished almost immediately.

“Peace out. They not comin’ into the land of the hard tonight.”

Jack Liffey decided to take a chance. “I could use your help guarding him.”

“We got better shit to take care of, Arnold.” He smiled, without much humor in it. “I recently acquired a fine DVD machine and there a whole lot of movies out there for me.”

“Hey, this man fought all his life for civil rights, down in Mississippi. Against fat white sheriffs.”

BigLenin looked to one of his friends, as if seeking corroboration.

“Word is born,” somebody said. “The man was down, back in the Martin Luther King time.”

“Well, I can’t see no crackers making it over here tonight in they rusty ol’ pickups.”

“I did,” Jack Liffey corrected him.

A finger came out and nearly touched his nose. “Then you better watch the man’s back, Arnold, and don’ be goin’ to sleep out here. We hold you responsible, since you got nothin’ better to do. You strapped?”

“An old forty-five. You want to offer something better?”

“Yo, Road Dog, lessee the MAC.”

“Aw, Big—”

“Stay true, Road. Plenty more where that.”

All he could see of the second man was an arm, light coffee color with tattoos all over it. The arm handed something angrily to BigLenin who dropped it in Jack Liffey’s lap. It was a little Ingram MAC 10, like some ugly square toy, not much bigger than his pistol, looking as if it had been made out of old beer cans in some rural province of China. It was dented and scraped and had seen a lot of abuse. He could tell by the weight when he picked it up that it was loaded; a gray plastic magazine sticking well out of the handle. If he remembered right, it held thirty-two 9mm rounds.

“You ever tested this?” He had the feeling it would blow up in his hand if he tried to use it.

“Gimme the jammy.”

BigLenin grabbed the submachine gun out of his hands, held it casually overhead and with one roaring squeeze sent five or six rounds straight up. The barrel only stuck an inch out of the receiver, so short that the noise was earsplitting. For an instant, Jack Liffey worried about the police, and then he realized that this was get-out-of-jail-free night, the law having retreated to other parts.