Streets on Fire (29 page)

“He find him?”

“We don’t know,” Ornetta said. “Ami, he disappear with his girlfriend in Claremont. Didn’ you hear?”

“I might of, hon. I’m not sure.”

A low-riding Buick rumbled around the corner ahead, the headlights flashing once as it drifted toward them. Maeve felt a chill of fear. As the big, dark car neared, she could just see a young man’s face inside. He had rings in his ear and a blue bandanna on his head.

“What’s your bidness in this ’hood?”

“We gettin’ this man to the hospital,” Leta Lee said with immense authority. “He hurt bad. You gentlemen could give us a ride, get you a reputation for years to come.”

“Save that shit, Mama. Check it out, we don’ be transportin’ no peckerwood nowhere.”

“It’s the right thing to do, son,” Wilson Lee said.

“Get yo’ bitch ass out of here, old man.”

The car accelerated away, hands coming out both sides to flash their strange gang finger signs as the car turned down an alley.

“Kids got awful mean somehow,” Leta Lee observed.

“Some of ’em,” her husband agreed. “We know plenty of good kids. Honor they mothers and stay in school to be somebody.”

“Yeah, we do.”

“Leta, look at this.” His voice had gained a new edge, and his neck was craned to look behind. The whole side street behind was filled with dogs, little dogs, big dogs and very big dogs, just standing there at attention watching them. There were so many animals that they spilled up onto the sidewalks. It almost looked like a conscious maneuver, soldier dogs flanking out to the sides to keep the humans from doubling back.

“I ain’ never seen nothing like that before,” Leta said.

“We seen some of them back on Budlong,” Ornetta said. “Maybe they followin’ us.”

“There’s lots more now,” Maeve said.

“Let’s jus’ walk,” Wilson said, a guarded worry in his voice. He set the wheelbarrow down to readjust his grip and lifted again with a little grunt, and for the first time Maeve could tell it was a strain for him.

“You can just push it along on the skates like we did,” she said.

“This way quicker,” he said, picking up his pace. “You girls get up front of me. And somebody tell me what them dogs is doing.”

“They’re not doin’ nothing,” Leta said. “Just lookin’.” But there was a catch in her voice right at the end. A moment later, she added, “Some of ’em walkin’ slow now.”

Maeve glanced back. The dogs in the middle of the street were pacing forward deliberately. One tiny dog ran out of the pack and stood to the side yipping like a cheerleader. The gunfire had retreated into the far distance now and the tiny dog’s complaint went on and on.

“Don’t like this much,” Leta said. “They all be comin’ now.”

The one yelper stopped abruptly and then all they could hear behind was an eerie sandpapering, dozens of paws padding along the asphalt. Leta Lee turned back and put her arms on her hips and stamped her foot.

“Shoo, you dogs! Git!”

A few of the smaller dogs in front hesitated, but the pack flowed around them, advancing relentlessly. Leta caught up, and pressed the girls ahead of the wheelbarrow. Maeve walked backward a few paces. The streetlights were broken here, and in the gloom the dog pack looked like a big lumpy blanket gliding a foot above the ground, taking the shape of the curbs and the piles of rubbish that it flowed over. She remembered her awful daydream of a dog attack and hoped she wasn’t responsible for its coming true.

The pack held to a kind of seething, stewing progress, dogs at the sides trotting forward a little faster than their kin and then holding up and merging back in. One funny looking dog out at the edge moved along fast with peculiar pogo-stick hopping.

“Still comin’, Wils.”

“Uh-huh. Le’s turn the corner there. We see if they maybe go on straight.”

They turned south on Hoover, both of the girls backing up apprehensively ahead of the wheelbarrow. They weren’t far up the street when they saw the first dogs come around behind them. There didn’t seem any question where the dogs were headed. Now and then there was a little yip or growl on the air, but mostly they were deadly quiet, stalking, offering only the pattering-rain sound of their paws on the street. The pack flowed around onto Hoover like a military column, those on the outside picking up the pace to keep up. Maeve saw the bounding dog at the margin of the pack again. She thought it was missing a leg.

“Maybe we should try to get in one of these houses,” Maeve suggested.

“We’re close to Chester’s,” Wilson said. “Your daddy need help real soon. I don’t think we got time to hunker down.”

He didn’t mention it, but Maeve could see that her father had gone a whole lot paler, almost as if he’d been spray-painted white.

“Leta, y’all brung your little piece?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Get ready to give it to me.”

“I don’t know if I could of use it. You ain’ never used it neither.”

“No problem.”

A low growling began to spread through the pack, rolling like waves from side to side. When Maeve glanced again, the dogs had got a lot closer to them, only a few seconds’ hard run behind Wilson Lee. Some of the dogs were snapping their jaws. It was like mousetraps going off. Maeve had never heard dogs do that before.

“I don’ know ’bout this, Wils.”

The growl changed pitch to a snarling sound and built up steadily until it seemed almost like a single angry rasp from a single giant dog. Some sort of climax seemed to be at hand. There was a lot more jaw-snapping, as if the dogs were passing through a swarm of flies.

Maeve noticed that Ornetta’s eyes had grown big. She took her hand and gripped it hard. “Use your magic wish.”

“Turn in that alley,
now
,” Wilson Lee commanded.

You could almost touch dirty brick buildings on both sides. The pavement was half eroded away and the surface of the alley was weedy and full of trash. The girls turned into the alley first, then the woman and finally Wilson Lee, the wheelbarrow bouncing a little on the uneven paving. He set it down about thirty feet up the alley, then took a little silver pistol from Leta and stepped quickly back to stand at the entrance. He spread his legs, doing his best to block the whole space, and his wife went to stand right behind him. The girls huddled together by the wheelbarrow and then hugged each other across it while Maeve kept one hand on her father’s shoulder.

The mid-sized dogs in the front of the pack came around toward the alley like an implacable military column. They advanced on Wilson Lee, snarling, but unaccountably paused a few feet away from him as more dogs flowed up behind them.

“Dogs, it’s me and you,” he said.

Wilson Lee fired the pistol once into the ground ahead of the dogs. As small as the little pistol was, it sounded terribly loud, the shot crashing and echoing off brick, but the front dogs didn’t do any more than break off their snarl for a few seconds, then start up again. Maeve felt herself shaking with fright, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Dogs shoo now,” Ornetta said in a small voice. “I magic-order you.”

It didn’t seem to be working. Maeve looked up at a louder snarling, and she could see a wave of animals building up beyond Wilson and Leta, barking and jumping in some kind of primeval frenzy, forcing the dogs in front forward whether they wanted to advance or not. She saw the head and neck of a shepherd, snapping its black muzzle and a Rottweiler emitting a continuous howling and even a furious white mongrel that looked a lot like her dad’s Loco, but she knew it couldn’t be. Little pit bulls were burrowing through the bigger dogs, yapping to get at the humans. There was even the strange bounding dog that she remembered, held tight to one side by the press of the pack.

She saw Wilson aim the little pistol straight at the biggest dogs and she closed her eyes. Two horrible shots rang out in the brick space and then a yowl of pain. She had to look. The big Rottweiler lay in front of the pack thrashing its legs, and the other dogs set on their wounded comrade instantly, tearing and feeding like cannibals. The sound of the feeding frenzy became so savage that it filled her consciousness. Only this horror existed on the whole earth.

Something in her insisted that these animals had never been pets. She couldn’t believe a tame animal would ever become so bloodthirsty. They were demon dogs; they had burst straight from the gates of some hell hidden beneath the streets of the city.

Wilson fired again and again.

“You girls run!” he shouted, as he and Leta linked arms to block the alley. But there was no way the girls could comply. They were both limp as old rags, shaking uncontrollably as they gripped hands across the wheelbarrow.

Then there was a fierce honking and a car engine gunning. Maeve looked up to see, beyond their defenders, a big Chevy Suburban with its bright lights full on drive right into the dog pack. A dog squealed, hit, and the pack parted a little. The car kept honking its horn and bullying itself into the dog sea with little spurts of acceleration. A black man almost as old as Wilson stuck his head out and shouted at the dogs at the top of his lungs. The dogs turned angrily to bark at him and some of them leapt up at the car window. Others got their heads down and stretched their forelegs to snarl and threaten. The Suburban skittered forward and back unpredictably, still honking and gunning its engine.

“You got that wheelbarrow man in there?” the man shouted.

“We sure do,” Wilson replied.

“Well, back up, man. Give me room!”

Leta Lee grabbed up both sobbing girls with superhuman strength, and Wilson hefted the wheelbarrow and pushed it forward to where the alley widened into a parking lot. The Suburban’s engine roared and it humped into the alley to fill the whole space. It roared again as it came forward, scraping a bumper along one wall, and finally it stopped with its swing door just clear of the brick building. A woman in back of the van threw the door open. They could hear a frenzy of dogs barking and leaping at the back of the vehicle, but none of them seemed brave enough to dash underneath.

“Get him in here. We been looking
all over
t’other side of Vermont.”

“How you know?” Leta asked as she and Wilson fought the knots that tied Jack Liffey to the wheelbarrow.

“The girls and they wheelbarrow be on the TV.”

A colorful panel truck came roaring down the alley ahead of them, striped red, green, black. It stopped a few feet away, and a big bearded man in an African cap stepped out just as Wilson wrestled Jack Liffey out of his wheelbarrow. The dogs seemed to be barking harder, as if working up their nerve.

“That the wheelbarrow man?” the newcomer called.

“Uh-huh. He need a hospital so clear the damn road.”

“Salaam. We’ll get you all there.”

A pit bull finally shot under the Suburban and emerged toward Wilson Lee, who was preparing to lift Jack Liffey. The dog barked maniacally as it charged in a blur of little legs, Leta Lee caught the animal with a full kick and sent it keening a long way into the parking lot. They moved Jack Liffey into the back of the Suburban as gently as they could. Just before clambering in, Ornetta waved shyly to the other vehicle. “That the Mwalimu man,” Ornetta said. “I been at his Umoja place with Ami.”

They wedged Jack Liffey feet first into the long bench seat at the back, and Maeve and Leta knelt against him to hold him there.

“You all buckle up or hang on. This alley rough.”

The door slammed and the Suburban bounced hard over ruts as Maeve rested her face against her father’s legs. All of a sudden she was trembling all over like some vibrating machine gone out of control. Her mind relaxed its terrible vigilance and everything just poured out of her. She wasn’t sure how long she rode that way, sobbing and shaking. Before long the ride smoothed out, and her knees were hurting on the floor.

“Sit up, hon. It’s okay now.”

She lifted herself onto a corner of the seat, still shuddering, and settled beside her father’s feet. Leta Lee stayed on the floor, holding Jack Liffey. There was no other place to sit. Maeve rested her head against the window to try to stop the trembling.

“Not long now, folks,” the driver said. “You girls truly somethin’, you know?”

“’Course we are,” Ornetta said. “We got magic.”

“Some brave girls,” Wilson Lee said, looking back at Maeve over the short middle seat. Maeve could see his wife reach behind herself without looking to put her hand on his arm. The woman’s eyes were fixed on Jack Liffey.

“You a brave strong man, Wilson,” Leta Lee said proudly.

He laughed softly. “You know what was the onliest thing I was thinkin’, lookin’ at those dogs and near peeing myself? I couldn’t stop thinkin’ of Buckwheat rolling his eyes and saying, ‘Feets, don’t
fail
me now.’”

“You the man.” The driver laughed and reached back blindly with a flat hand and they shared a high five.

The big van drove fast along a wide empty street, following the striped panel truck that seemed to be escorting them, and as the drive went on and on, Maeve’s distraction cleared enough to realize she and Ornetta would never have got this far, not in a million years. Two girls pushing a heavy wheelbarrow: It had been crazy to think they could do it alone. She wanted to say something, thanks or praise or just a burst of relief, but her whole body was wobbly and weak and she couldn’t get her voice to work.

They came to a roadblock where the wide street went under the 105 freeway. There were rows of blue sawhorses, then big gray jail buses, and one police car after another with policemen standing everywhere. The Umoja truck was already there, the driver arguing with a California Highway Patrolman. He must have said the right thing, because a police car pulled out of the way to open a space for them, and Mwalimu waved and pointed them on into the gap just as a patrolman jumped onto his motorcycle. The motorcycle cop headed off with lights and siren going as their new escort.

“Ain’t this jim-dandy,” the driver said.

They turned onto 120th Street following an arrow sign that said
HOSPITAL
, and Maeve saw a dilapidated group of buildings like an abandoned school, all boarded up and grown over with chest-high weeds. A high chain-link fence sealed it all in; it looked like it had been closed up for years. There was a beat-up mural on the wall and a big sign on the central building that said
LOS ANGELES DESTINY CENTER
. Maeve thought of her father and she felt herself make a little noise; it might have been a laugh. She filed the sight away in her head: a real hundred-point oddity. He would love seeing
DESTINY
when he got better. She didn’t really want to look at him just then, though, or feel that clammy skin.