Streets on Fire (9 page)

Mary Beth laughed at the quip, but that wasn’t exactly Maeve’s attitude. Actually, she was pretty confused about the subject, all in all. One day she’d shown up in Mar Vista unannounced and walked in on her dad and Marlena with the radio going loud. They’d been on the bathroom rug and they had their mouths in places she couldn’t quite believe, something she’d thought was pretty much theoretical, and they seemed to be having fun doing it. She thanked whatever stars there were that her dad hadn’t felt compelled to have a little “talk” with her afterward.

They pushed on again in the bright sun, and before long they turned off the highway and pedaled into downtown Fontana to begin scouting the streets. It looked like a real disaster of a town, with about half the shops boarded up and nobody at all out on the streets. Even the shops that were open didn’t seem to sell anything anybody would want: gingham doll supplies, bowling trophies, used bathtubs.

“Pardner, what happened to this place?” Maeve asked.

“They used to have a big steel mill, I mean a
giant
one. Kaiser Steel. It closed down a long time ago.”

The girls stopped and rested against the curb, sweat pouring off them. They needed Cokes. “It’s funny companies can do that, isn’t it?” Maeve said. “People work someplace all their life, and the company just pulls up one day and goes somewhere where people have to work cheaper.”

“I never thought about it.”

“They did it to my dad. He had two weeks’ warning that they were going to treat his life like Kleenex.”

“What did he do?”

“Well, it sure changed him. I mean, it almost wrecked him. I’ll buy you a Coke.”

“Thanks. Diet.”

Now that she’d grown used to the changes in her father—as well as the wholesale changes the divorce had brought to her own life—the calamity of that period wasn’t quite so devastating. But it had sure seemed so then. From an unquestioned sense of security in a stable family in a big house, she went to an almost constant churning and unease, two semi-families and two smaller houses. She knew she’d never feel quite as trusting and peaceful again.

They found a dusty convenience store. Then they rode their bikes slowly up and down the dispiriting streets of the town, sipping their drinks, past Bud’s Market and a closed hardware store and an empty place where a store had burned down to look like a gap in a denture.

Maeve declared that she was a cavalry scout and she would have no trouble tracking the Indians, though she was really doing nothing more esoteric than keeping her eyes peeled for big motorcycles, which she couldn’t seem to find anywhere. Finally, in desperation, she led her scouting party to a dive called the Bar-66 where the main street hit the highway and she plucked up her courage. There were no windows, and a rusty swamp cooler was buzzing away on the roof. At least there was no
GIRLS-GIRLS-GIRLS
sign. Somebody in there would probably know about the Bone Losers if anybody did.

Mary Beth absolutely refused to go in with her. “We’ll get raped or something,” she objected. So she hung back in the weeds by the big metal pole for the bar’s sign and watched over their steeds.

Maeve pushed in through a set-back door that swung open with a little squawk into darkness. As her eyes were adjusting, she heard a clack of billiard balls and a scratchy jukebox playing country music. The first thing she made out was a waterfall beer sign; then, as her vision adjusted, antlers on a sad, molting deer head; and then a heavyset woman behind the bar, leaning forward wearily with her head down on the bar surface. Two young Latinos were pacing around a pool table to one side.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Maeve said to the woman. The woman looked up blearily and took a moment to focus. She wore a print dress and looked exactly like a kindly Barbara Bush.

“You’re too young to be in here, honey.”

“I don’t want to drink anything. I just want to ask directions.”

The woman appeared to ruminate for a moment before deciding not to throw Maeve out.

“¡
Chingate
!” a pool player barked.

“¡
Pendejo
!”

“¡
Borrachito
!”

“
Usted dos
, try to be grownups!” the woman snapped at them.

“
Bruja
,” one muttered, but they subsided and went back to their game.

“What is it, honey? Speak up.”

Maeve winced as the Latinos broke a rack hard. They hadn’t even noticed her. “My cousin told me to meet him in front of the place where the Bone Losers get together. Is this it?”

The woman eyed her for a moment, as if she could see right through the subterfuge. Maeve wondered if she was making her tale too complicated once again.

“No, this ain’t it. They ain’t one whit welcome here. And, little honey, you don’t want to go messing with the Bones.”

“That’s just where I got to meet Stan.”

Stan? Where had that come from?

“They got their own clubhouse up on Sierra, but I tell you, girl, you call up your Stan on the telephone right now and tell him to meet you at the county library, right in front of the biggest stack of storybooks you can find.” The woman looked around, as if she’d misplaced a drink.

“I don’t know his number. But thanks.”

“Sweetie, them Bone Losers, some of ’em think a girl your age is just asking for it if she tells ’em the time of day and ain’t wearing no Arab veils.”

“Girls shouldn’t have to hide in the attic just to prove they’re not asking for sex,” Maeve insisted.

“Some little girls don’t rightly know what they’re asking for these days, hon. They play with it a bit and end up pullin’ a sorry train.”

“I’m not playing with anything.”

She tried to hurry out, but she found the two young Latinos blocking her progress. She’d been wrong about them not seeing her.

“Hey, you want to play with us,
perra
?”

“We got lots of balls for you to play.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You got some nice
chupas
, girl.” He cupped his hands and leered.

“We play any game you want,
funciete
.”

“Get out of my way.”

“So, go be stuck up, bee-yitch.”

Out front she came to a halt in the bright sun with her heart pounding. She could feel her face flushing and sweat prickling out all at once. There hadn’t been all that much animosity to the confrontation, but it was the first time anyone had ever called her the b-word to her face, and there was such freight to it that her knees trembled a little. She couldn’t imagine any of the boys she knew referring so vulgarly to her breasts or using the b-word like that. She’d always known that there were a lot of different little worlds out there, and some of them didn’t overlap very much with hers. But coming face to face like this with one of these harsher provinces, she was beginning to wonder if she had what it took for her Nancy Drew mission.

“Hey, Maevie, what’s going on?”

“A couple of guys in there started coming on to me, that’s all.”

They mounted their bikes. Mary Beth was still thinking it over. “How old were they?”

“Don’t even go there.”

“That’s really acrylic. Some busters did that red-heat thing all around me at the mall last month. They’d get in front when I walked and wiggle their tongues, and I thought I’d just die. I wish I was braver but I don’t know what to do. I want to just stick up my nose the way women do in the movies, but my heart starts to trip.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen my dad tough things out, but he says he’s just as scared as anybody and it’s all a trick. I think it must be a guy thing.”

“Maybe it’s being too stupid to see what’s gonna happen.”

Maeve decided Mary Beth simply didn’t realize that she’d just dropped a big insult on her father, so she let it go. She knew which way to direct the hunt now. She’d seen a Sierra Avenue at the edge of town. Her racing bike drew ahead easily, and Mary Beth pedaled hard to catch up.

“I went on a hike with my brother a couple years ago up Icehouse Canyon,” Mary Beth started in. “We got to this place where you have to go along a cliff, and I got halfway along and then I just froze up solid. I couldn’t budge an inch. I looked down and it was pretty far. It would have broken half my bones if I fallen. I thought they were gonna have to get the helicopters. Bucky kept begging me to be courageous but I couldn’t unlock my hands from this little tree that held me up, and finally he had to come back and hold my hand and make me move.”

Mary Beth made a dismissive sound.

“Not that he’s such a wonderful big brother and all, but he knew Dad would blow times ten if I got hurt.”

“I always wanted a big brother, but I ended up with two little stepbrothers,” Maeve offered.

“You like them?”

Maeve considered, but since they were both in a confiding frame of mind, she grimaced. “Not much. They’ve both got mean streaks for such little kids. They torture insects. And they keep trying to peek at me in the bathroom.”

There wasn’t much question which house it was as they headed out the ragged street on the farthest edge of the town. There were a half dozen big shiny motorcycles on the dirt in front where grass should have been, the kind of motorcycles with weird high handlebars and teardrop gas tanks with flames painted on them and seats like tractors. The old clapboard house hadn’t been painted in a long time, and a lot of shingles were missing from the roof. Out here it was a long way from house to house, and the previous one had had chickens and even a pig in back.

Seeing the pig, Maeve experienced a momentary sense of complete dislocation. Only that morning she and Mary Beth had sat out at a swimming pool with a maid bringing fresh-squeezed orange juice and smoked salmon on bagels; now, a world of chickens and pigs. She smiled to herself. Plus
hogs
—she’d read that was what the bikers called their Harleys, or at least they had at one time. You couldn’t keep up on every subculture. Her dad tried, but he got the school slang hilariously wrong all the time. He still tried to use words like “reeks” and “ugmo.”

She motioned Mary Beth to keep riding past all the glinting machinery, and they pedaled up to a big eucalyptus tree that had dropped a lot of its bark and filled the air with medicine smell. The tree was the first of a long row of eucalyptuses that spread away at an angle for maybe a half mile toward the mountains that were faintly visible in the smog. They parked their bikes behind the trees and peered around a trunk to watch the clubhouse.

“You sure that’s it?” Mary Beth asked breathlessly.

“Can’t you see? The Indians are home.”

“You think they live there or it’s just a clubhouse?”

“Don’t know.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

After all her talk about courage, Maeve found she couldn’t back down now. “We’re not doing anything wrong.”

But that wasn’t going to last long, she thought. There was a low chain-link fence around a back yard, separating the weeds and dirt inside from the weeds and dirt outside. There weren’t any more houses behind this one, just a dry wash, a heap of trash out on the hot plain and the faint mountains beyond.

“I bet we can peek in a back window,” Maeve said.

“I dunno.”

“I’ll do it. You keep lookout.”

“Okey-dokey.”

Maeve knew if she hesitated now she’d never do it. She walked casually out along the eucalyptus treeline, which she guessed had been planted as a windbreak, though there was no evidence of any fields or groves to be protected. The house had two back windows, both curtained, but there might have been a little gap in one. She glanced back at Mary Beth, who was holding a hand hard over her mouth as if trying to keep herself from screaming, and then she stepped between two of the trees and sauntered confidently toward the fence.

*

“Two-four-six-eight, LAPD’s never late!”

“One-two-three-four, break down your wooden door!”

That seemed to be the chant anyway, as the small parade of African American protesters with homemade signs made its way down Slauson, working themselves up into a rage. Almost all of them were men.

REVENGE AB-IB
! a sign said.
STOP KILLER COPS
!

There were fifty or sixty of them, marching in step to the chant, and all of a sudden they did something Jack Liffey had never seen demonstrators do. At some signal they broke into a stutter-step, then a high kick with the right leg and a hard stomp downward. They did it again, then took a few normal marching steps, then in perfect unison performed another pair of the Zulu high war kicks with the left leg. They must have practiced it for quite some time to get it right. He’d seen it in an old film once, and he’d thought how heart-stopping and intimidating it was.

The parade neared the vendors of cheap carpets and sweet-potato pies at the corner of Crenshaw, and they reverted to an ordinary walking pace, chanting their two-four-six-eight again, normalizing the scene so abruptly that it was as if the war-kicks exhibition had all been a hallucination. They came abreast of a few stone-faced policemen who were stopping traffic on Crenshaw to let them pass. One of the cops was black, but it took a moment to work that out because of the big plastic face shield he was wearing.

Suddenly there came a cry and the demonstrators high-step-stomped through the intersection, shouting something he couldn’t make out. Even here in the world of cell phones and MTV, the Zulu strut carried a kind of bizarre menace, as if thrusting onlookers into a dimension where your ordinary defenses might not work.

Jack Liffey would have given a lot to have access to the thoughts of the black cop. Was there an inner blink, a wish to identify? As the marchers moved on, he thought about the inspiration for the event. He wondered what Ab-Ib was like as a person, if the knuckleballer had a social conscience or just wanted to milk the incident for publicity. That curiosity had almost been enough to make Jack Liffey pick up the sports pages that morning, but not quite.

*

“Maybe it’s just made up.”

There were a dozen chunky boys in the schoolroom when he came in, most of them seniors and juniors. For some reason the club had had trouble this year recruiting the younger boys. They all had dog-eared Bibles open, and Gary Chapman, the Reader Trustee up front, looked relieved that the man had arrived.