Streets on Fire (28 page)

“Rich folks live here. Maybe you and your daddy could come live here, near me.”

“I’d love that,” Maeve said. “But we’re not rich.”

“Let’s swap who we is,” Ornetta said, on some inspiration. “I be white, and you be black.”

“Use your magic,” Maeve said. “Let’s both be something new, maybe blue polka-dot.”

Ornetta laughed softly, but a near burst of gunfire made her flinch. There was a sharp scream somewhere, which broke off abruptly, and then maniacal laughter. A block ahead they could see a man pacing on a roof with a big rifle. They decided to turn the next corner to move east away from the man with the gun. They turned south again along Budlong, just a block from the big thoroughfare of Vermont that they were trying hard to avoid. The mob sound was fading behind them, but from time to time they heard a whoosh of a vehicle racing along Vermont, or the sound of something breaking, or the thud of some heavy object hitting another heavy object.

A half-dozen dogs ambled toward them down the middle of Budlong. A big yellow one like a police dog had his tail straight up in the air, and Ornetta stamped a foot. “Scatter, you dogs.”

Maeve experienced a terrible daydream of the dogs attacking them suddenly, as if the animals sensed that the normal order had been lifted for the night and the city left up for grabs. In her head, she saw the animals racing straight at them, jaws open to bite, but in real life the dogs just sniffed at them and one growled deep in its throat. The animals steered clear of where the girls rattled along with their odd burden.

Soon the girls had passed out of the ritzier area of Vermont Heights back into a neighborhood of small bungalows. One little turreted Spanish stucco house was on fire, blue flames licking out the tiny windows that spiraled up a turret, but nobody was there to fight it.

Two blocks ahead of them they saw something going on in the street, and before long they could make out a barricade across Budlong. The road was blocked by three cars, a toppled Dumpster, a tangle of palm fronds and some smoking trash cans. It looked like people with rifles were crouched behind the barricade to defend their neighborhood. There was even a flag of some sort, tacked together out of colored cloth. The girls talked it over and concluded they had better slide over to Vermont to avoid the barricade.

“Those peoples skitzing and I don’t want no part of ’em.”

“Good idea.”

They turned east and approached Vermont cautiously, staying near the curb. It was a lot brighter and busier than the residential streets. They rested a moment at the corner to inspect the wide boulevard, and in the distance up to the north, they saw some of the crowd that they had been hearing. A solid mass of people had spread out into the roadway, like an army trying to besiege a fortress but caught in a bottleneck. Closer by, looters in ones and twos stepped out of broken storefronts and hurried away with their prizes.

They were blacks and Latinos of all ages, intent on their own pursuits, mostly laden with boxes and shopping carts and avoiding eye contact with one another. So much lawless activity frightened Maeve deeply, but she made herself concentrate on her immediate surroundings. Her father needed her to be strong now.

“Recess over, sister.”

The girls guided the wheelbarrow along the curbside lane of the wide avenue, swinging out a little whenever they met a spill of broken glass or a mound of debris. Most of the shops had been grated over or covered with plywood that said
AFRICAN AMERICAN
, but even some of these had been ripped open and people came out of the gaps and hurried off with unlikely loads. Two young men stepped over a broken-out window frame, carrying between them an old-fashioned brass cash register with the cash amounts on little flags. An old woman in a flowered housecoat scudded along furtively close to the buildings with a floor lamp in each hand. A little boy dragged along two red wagons piled with canned goods, shedding a can here and there where one of the wagons bounced. Once in a while, a car rocketed past, its lights out.

One thin woman dragging a big sealed carton snapped at them, telling them to get on home, but nobody else seemed to notice that two young girls were pushing an unconscious man down Vermont Avenue in a wheelbarrow. Three boys wearing green bandannas raced out of a gap between buildings and turned down the sidewalk toward them, their hands full of candy bars. They glanced in passing at Jack Liffey.

Across Vermont ahead of them, Cheung’s Used Cars was alight with burning vehicles. Somebody had torched every single car in the lot, and something out in the middle was blazing brightest, so glary that it was hard to look at, the flames licking up into the colored pennants overhead. Maeve wondered if cars really exploded the way they were always doing in the movies, and Ornetta must have had the same thought because they hurried up to get past.

“My arms hurting,” Maeve said.

The girls stopped to rest in front of a storefront with a hand-lettered sign saying
THE UPPER ROOM C.O.G.I.C
. There was a lopsided cross drawn on the painted-over window, with ray-like lines meant to suggest a glow. On the shop next door the same hand had drawn a crude piecrust with similar rays coming out of it and the words
BEAN PIES
. She imagined a pie full of long green beans, but she couldn’t believe that was what the sign referred to. She was so scared she thought of banging on one of the doors to ask for refuge, but she knew they had to get her father to the hospital.

“We gettin’ stronger,” Ornetta said bravely.

Maeve stooped to pick up a Baby Ruth a looter must have dropped, the wrapper unbroken.

She bent it in half, back and forth until it broke, and they shared. Maeve thought it tasted delicious, so sweet it made her teeth hurt. She wondered if, for the rest of her life, every time she saw a Baby Ruth she would recall this night.

A car engine revved and a station wagon with a window smashed in swung back and forth recklessly down Vermont. The way it was swerving, the driver had to be drunk, wrenching the steering wheel back and forth. The recklessness intensified the sick feeling in Maeve’s stomach, the way heedless craziness always did, and then she felt a stab of real fear as her mind worked out the geometry of the next couple of swerves and she pictured the car careening right into them.

Ornetta waved her arms and shouted at the driver. Maeve got in front of the wheelbarrow and held out her palms as if to deflect the car with her body as a last resort. The swerves became so violent and screechy that it was a wonder the car didn’t roll over. Maeve was paralyzed on the spot and she couldn’t even close her eyes as the car bore down, roaring as if stuck in a lower gear. At the last instant the big station wagon swung its tail again, dragged sideways noisily a few feet and then angled away from them. Just as it turned away, something sailed out the window toward them, struck and skidded near their feet. The explosions began almost at once, and both girls screamed and threw their arms around one another.

The banging went on and on, assaulting their ears, and Maeve just let all the terror pour out of her in a loosed flood of wailing.

Maeve began to recover first. “Hush, hush,” she kept saying as she clung to Ornetta. “It was only firecrackers.”

Maeve was ashamed of herself, but she shook with convulsions now and she had to sit down on the curb and try to breathe deep. Ornetta kicked angrily at the dead string of firecrackers.

When the panic finally started to wind down, Maeve noticed that her father’s head was rolling back and forth on the lip of the wheelbarrow. The sight was like a shot of oxygen. She hurried to him and knelt to hold his head still.

“Daddy, don’t worry. We’re getting you to a doctor. We’ll be there soon. I promise.” She looked around wildly for any kind of help at all, but the street was deserted now, utterly empty. “Oh, Ornetta, he needs help!”

Ornetta was already up, tucking her neck into the rope. A feeling of hopelessness was back, but there was nothing to do but keep going. She joined Ornetta and they leaned hard into the wheelbarrow. It seemed glued in place and it took a strong push and grunt to get it started forward again. She’d almost forgot how loud the roller skates were. The clatter echoed now in the empty street.

Soon they heard another sound over the rattle of the skates. It was a throaty rumble, like a big airplane flying very low toward them. The girls glanced at each other.

“What’s that?”

They couldn’t see anything in any direction, and then Maeve realized that she felt it in her feet as much as hearing it. Finally Ornetta pointed excitedly down Vermont. They hadn’t seen anything sooner because there were only little slit headlights. As the first of the monstrous things sped closer, they could see more like it behind, a convoy of some kind of military vehicles heading toward them. They looked a little like tanks, olive green with sloped sides and big black tires. There were lumps and projections all over the strange vehicles and big olive backpacks hung off most of the bumps. Two soldiers in visored helmets and puffy jackets rode on the top of the first vehicle, their rifles gripped tightly. Without even slowing, the armored car blew right by them through the intersection where the light was blinking red.

The ground trembled as the next one approached and they could see just how fast it was going. One of the soldiers glanced curiously at them, and Maeve waved for help, but the soldiers made no response and the thing flashed past. Three more of them were coming on, spaced out by half a block, and each one had two men riding on top, neither of whom even looked at them. As the next one approached, the girls yelled and jumped up and down, and a soldier noticed and called something down a hatch. Then he looked back and shrugged as the vehicle went by. On the last one, a really young soldier flashed them a V-sign and grinned, and then the convoy was receding north on Vermont, showing tiny slitted taillights.

“Motherfuckers,” Ornetta said softly.

The curse shocked Maeve. It was the only curse she’d ever heard Ornetta use, and the word seemed too old and too crude for her, too far from the world of magic amulets. “I can’t
believe
they just left us here.”

“Hey, girls!” A head poked out the window of an apartment above the shops. It was a big black woman in a slip, clutching a sandwich. “What you young ladies doing out there?”

“We got to get her daddy to the hospital. He hurt
real
bad.”

“Aw, honey. You two in a bad way. Wilson, c’m’ere.”

A thin old man in a T-shirt stuck his head out beside her.

“Those girls got them a hurt man in that thing, say her daddy he need a doctor.”

“Can you drive us?” Ornetta pleaded.

“We ain’t got no car. It broke down for good last month.” The man and woman talked to each other, too low for the girls to hear down on the street. “You wait there,” the woman called down. “Lemme get dressed. Ain’t a fit night out for girl or beast to be all alone.”

For the first time in hours Maeve’s spirit lifted a little, and she felt warm tears of gratitude rolling down her cheeks. Somebody cared.

They emerged from a featureless door between the boarded-up shops, the woman first. She wore a leather jacket despite the warmth of the night and went straight to Jack Liffey and felt his neck.

She was a big woman, but her weight didn’t make her seem fat. Her size, and the confidence she projected from within, made her seem to Maeve like a perfectly natural part of the whole scene, even an inevitable part, a landmark. “He need a doctor, all right, but I think he’ll make it,” she decided after a moment. “Now, you girls move aside. Wilson gonna push that thing.”

“We can get to Chester house and get his truck,” the man named Wilson offered. He was wiry and thin and his hair was graying, but he looked strong.

“I’m Mrs. Leta Lee,” the woman explained as the man hooked himself up with the rope that held up Jack Liffey’s legs without asking any questions. “That’s Wilson Lee. What’s your names?”

“I’m Maeve Liffey. This is my father, Jack.”

“I’m Ornetta.”

Wilson hefted the wheelbarrow rather than pushing it along on its skates. His arms were stringy but very strong, and you could see each long muscle tensing a little under the skin as he pushed. The reprieve from all that clattering noise was a mixed blessing because it meant they could hear the rattle of gunfire from all around them.

“You two must be pretty strong. How far you come?”

“Sixty-two and Brighton,” Ornetta said.

“I declare! You gonna be famous.”

Wilson turned hard left in the road and set out diagonally across the avenue, and they followed. “We best get off Vermont,” he said. “There plenty more army coming.”

“Say on the TV the National Guard’s comin’ to seize this part of town, street by street. Don’t say who from.”

“We can help push,” Ornetta insisted.

“Wilson strong, honey. He be working in a rubber factory twenty-seven years.”

They heard and felt another rumble behind them, exactly like the convoy of armored cars. The sound seemed to race north on Vermont, and Leta Lee did her best to ignore it.

“Wilson was vice-president of the union,” she said. “That lowdown-dog company threw him on the street after twenty-seven years of work and didn’t give him
nothing
. They shut down and move the whole thing to China.”

“My daddy was laid off, too,” Maeve said. “He couldn’t find another job.”

“Is that the truth? Wilson had him some troubles that way, hisself.”

“It doesn’t put no food on the table to be complainin’,” the man said. “I get my Social Security in a couple years.”

The man looked down at his burden. “Where your daddy work?” Jack Liffey hadn’t moved in a long time and Maeve was afraid to look at him too closely.

“He used to be a technical writer in an aerospace company, but when he couldn’t get another job he became a detective,” Maeve said proudly. “He always says he isn’t really a detective, he just finds missing children. His last job was looking for Amilcar Davis. That’s Ornetta’s uncle.”