Streets on Fire (27 page)

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.

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 didn’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.

Over the first few blocks, their world, which had been very small while they were focused on getting Jack Liffey into the wheelbarrow, enlarged enormously to include noises and dangers that were all around them in the darkness. Not far away, they could hear the roar of a lot of people and the sounds of breaking glass. Metal rang against metal. Gunfire rattled. The crowd noise swelled and ebbed, like waves on an urban beach. The girls eyed one another but neither felt like commenting on what they heard.

Before long they had given up the sidewalk and were pushing the wheelbarrow in the street, near the curb, to avoid the ups and downs of the sloped driveways. It didn’t seem there was going to be any traffic to worry about on Brighton, anyway. The old metal-wheel skates made a regular rattle and a loud
rat-a-tat
across the cracks.

“I need a rest,” Ornetta said, after several blocks.

“Sure. This is hard work.”

They let the wheelbarrow roll to a stop, they allowed Jack Liffey’s legs to drop so they could unhook and rest. Maeve felt the pulse in his neck again. It seemed pretty fast and his skin was still clammy. The night was so dry and warm that it was frightening to feel his skin cold like that. Maeve tried not to think too much about the dangers out there. Mostly she’d been trying to focusing her mind on the thirty feet in front of the wheelbarrow.

She could see how frail Ornetta was, bent forward to catch her breath, but she pushed away the feeling that the whole project was hopeless. She longed for one of the girl’s stories, but Ornetta needed her breath for the effort.

The unseen crowd roar swelled again and the sounds of destruction seemed to reach a crescendo.

“We better go,” Maeve said.

Ornetta nodded. “Wish we had Mr. Genie to help.”

They lifted Jack Liffey’s legs back into the loop of clothesline that dangled from their necks. It took a good push to get the wheelbarrow going again, as if he had gotten heavier in the wait.

Maeve grunted with the effort and tried to think of something besides her fears. “This looks like a nice neighborhood.”

They had just crossed 80th Street, and the old houses were much bigger, all the lawns green and manicured. It looked like a picture in a magazine of some prosperous town back east.