Streets on Fire (13 page)

A tug on the big rope yanked her a foot out of the corner of the rustic pine room where she’d retreated. The air was full of cigarette smoke and the smell of stale spilled beer. Greek snored on his back on the floor and Lunchmeat was sitting on a worn leather ottoman, absently flipping the other end of the rope as if he was about to start up a skip-rope contest.

She would need all her wits about her now, she thought. She had already wound two turns of the rope around her waist without him noticing. She had a plan, actually a very simple plan. She would get him back outside and ask him a barrage of questions about motorcycles until she found some way to entice him into occupying both his hands with one of the bikes so that he dropped his end of the rope. That would give her a chance to pirouette slowly and wrap the rest of the rope around herself and then bolt out into the darkness where she thought there was a ravine with a small stream and a lot of plants that might give her shelter until morning.
Unless
—she thought with a shudder—he had his way with her first.

She thought of Brad again. Even though he had slapped her in a moment of anger and deeply disturbed her childhood faith in human goodness, yet even now she couldn’t believe that anyone would be so depraved as to take sexual advantage of a girl like herself. There was even an undertow of guilt whenever her thoughts lit on the subject because of various idle sexual fantasies she had had over the years. But the reality turned out to be pure abhorrence, nothing at all like the fantasy.

“I want to go home,” she blurted out, her voice a lot smaller and shakier than she’d ever heard it. She had a feeling that it might be good not to let on how frightened she was, but the words had just spilled out of her.

He flipped the slack rope absently and a traveling wave crossed the room and buffeted her as it arrived. “I didn’t mean none of this to happen like this but, sheesh, I just don’t know what to do now. You look like a good kid, Nancy.”

The name threw her for a moment, and the adjective. “You’ve never heard of Nancy Drew, have you?”

“Huh? You somebody important?”

“No, no.” She figured being somebody important would only make things worse. “My dad is poor but he’s a detective, you know. He doesn’t ever give up when he’s after something so you don’t want to do anything to hurt me.”

“Dont be kickin’ at me, kid,” he said dully. She could see that appreciating the consequences of his actions was probably not Lunchmeat’s strong point.

“Back home in Fon, we was just gonna have us some fun scarin’ you. Girls like you is always tryin’a pump our gas and shit. But this pal of ours in the police called up and said the black-and-whites was coming and we had to book it, and then Greek gone and got himself so fucked up on dust I don’t know what to do.”

“Just let me go. I’ll say I was lost all night in the hills. Honest.”

He made a face. “I wish I could, Nancy. I really do. But it’s all turned into a big fuckin’ deal somehow and maybe I best just throw you off Icehouse Canyon.”

A chill went all the way up her spine and clasped the back of her neck. If he meant what he seemed to mean, it stunned her that he would suggest something like that so casually. Neither of them seemed to want to talk for a while. Greek snored away with a steady ripping sound, and another biker lay face down on a sofa, as still as death. The dark hot world outside the unscreened window was absolutely silent.

“How come you’re not married?” Maeve asked. It had taken a big act of will to gather herself together bit by bit.

“I was once, but my old lady went and found somebody else. I would of jumped him, beat his brains out but they took off for parts unknown and only left me a note. I’m not a bad guy. I just never had no chances.”

“Did you love her?”

His face screwed up and he chewed and worked his cheeks, as if, in order to consider a question like that, he had to fire up an engine that didn’t get a lot of use. “Yeah, well, I guess so,” he essayed finally.

“I’m sorry.”

“She was pretty as a picture ’til she let herself go and got fat.”

“What’s your real name?” Maeve asked.

“Ratke,” he said. “Phil Ratke, recording treasurer of the Bone Losers.”

“What do you do, Phil? I mean, your job.”

He gave another absent-minded toss of the rope and she felt the wave reach her like the swell off a powerboat coming across a river to bang into a seawall. “My dad was a puddler at Kaiser. He was in the steel all his life. I had me two years in there, too, before they closed down and sent us all home. I sold paint for a while, but a big Home Depot come in and killed the paint store.”

“Couldn’t you move to the big store?”

“Nancy, do I look like the kind of guy they want at the desk, selling lawn chairs to Joe Suburb?”

“Sure.” The Nancy business was beginning to embarrass her, but she didn’t see how she could fix it.

He frowned. “Naw, you know I ain’t. After that I drove a bus till I busted one up and they found out I’d had—ah, about two sniffs of beer in the twenty-four hours before. I ain’t worked steady in a year now.”

“What did you study in school?”

The question occasioned another long hitch in the machinery.

“I mean, when you were in school, what did you want to be?”

“I wanted’a be me. I dunno. I guess I wanted to be a rich retired golfer.”

Maeve chuckled softly. “Do you play golf?”

“Fuck, no. I just don’t wanna do nothing but ride my bike.”

“What about motorcyle repair?”

He shrugged. “Them Japs—it’s all electronic ignition and shit. Takes a computer to change the fuckin’ oil. Pardon my French.”

“Could you show me some more about those great American motorcycles?” she asked, as if casually.

“You want to look at the bikes?”

“Sure. I may as well learn something.”

He looked at her anew, as if changing his mind about something. “You’re one tough kiddo, Nance.” He took another turn of rope around his beefy forearm and nodded toward the door. “Why not? I never showed you the real jewel out there, the finest riding bike they ever built.”

“Is it yours?”

“Naw. It’s Jake-o’s. He’s the Supreme President of the Bones, but he’s gone off on a little vacation to Quentin.”

They went out into the spooky dark of the yard, and then he reached back in the door to open the blinds and let a light spill over the bikes. Far away she heard an owl and then a train whistle down in the valley, like an eerie reply to the bird. The air was still hot and dry with a gusty wind full of grit that she recognized as a Santana blowing west off the desert.

“Living out here is bad for your skin,” she said.

“So’s dyin’ out here,” he said and guffawed a little. She felt a chill, but decided she didn’t want to explore that subject.

“Which one’s the super bike?”

“Over here.”

It was sitting by itself under a canvas tarp. He threw the tarp off and she saw an older-looking motorcyle with a windshield and a huge molded seat. Big metal containers hung on both sides of the rear wheel like saddlebags.

“That’s a 1963 Electra-glide.”

“It’s a panhead engine, isn’t it?”

“Wow, girl. You pay attention.”

Then the night was torn open by an explosion very close, and her head snapped around to see the 1963 Electra-glide recoil from the blast and lean away from them. The seat was torn up and the motorcycle seemed to consider toppling onto the dirt, but thought better of it and righted itself.

“On your face, asshole!”

She knew that voice. “Daddy, no!”

She heard a
ka-chunk
that she recognized from a hundred cop movies as the sound of a shotgun being pumped. The explosion came again and she saw the middle of the motorcycle disintegrate. She expected to see it explode in fire, but it didn’t. What was left of the frame just fell over with a sad crash of metal. She couldn’t see her dad, but it was definitely his voice.

“On your face
now
!”

*

He saw a biker the size of a middle linebacker standing there with a tarp dangling from one hand. He saw a big rope around his daughter’s waist and a droop of the rope going back to the biker. He had fired away from the biker, but it was a near thing in his head. David Phelps stood nearby with the aluminum bat at parade rest. The motorcycle had offered a convenient target for his wrath. It was an emblem that some deep reserve of self-mastery told him he could ventilate a bit just then, take his own edge off his fury and feel some satisfaction without spending the rest of his life in prison. Those two shots had shaken up his psyche, though in a new way. They had blasted away the initial rage at seeing his daughter tied up, but they’d also initiated something new in him that he had not anticipated, a swelling bloodlust that picked him right up off the surface of the earth and seemed to want a whole lot more out of him.

The biker went face down slowly, and the barrel of the shotgun dug into the back of his neck. Jack Liffey found that his own scratchy throat was bugling some terrifying cry that he did not even recognize as human speech. There was a bleat in his left ear, perhaps his daughter, and a further human noise on the right, but he was up on a knife-edge now, far above them all. He hung there in a fiery place where he had never been.

He liked it a lot. The shotgun in his hands begged to be fired, rumbled and trembled and squirmed and pleaded with him.
I’ve got all this pent force
, it swore to him.
Release me, let me show you. You’ll just love what I do
. The hillock of flesh was face down in the dirt as if just finishing off a push-up. Jack Liffey wasn’t given to extravagant acts but there was a dark urge propelling him toward this one, toward that wretched being at his feet. He felt the trigger flex. He teetered. Go, go! Suddenly a sharp blow knocked the shotgun sideways and the instrument fired deafeningly out over the canyon. Jack Liffey found himself trembling, his head woozy, and gradually he became conscious of David Phelps clinging to him from one side and Maeve from the other.

“He didn’t hurt me! I’m okay, Daddy!”

“Oh, man,
please
don’t kill me.”

As his vision started back from the pink, Jack Liffey started to laugh. The earth firmed up. It was all clear as a snapshot and it was absurd. His daughter, a fat rope around her waist, clung to one of his arms, and a flamboyantly gay young man with a baseball bat clung to the other, while a tattooed mound of Jell-O lay at his feet, groveling shamelessly.

“‘What we have here,’” Jack Liffey said as he squeezed back into a more normal frame, “‘is a failure to communicate.’” The prissy words of the weasely little guard in
Cool Hand Luke
were all that came to him just then.

“Uh, anything you say, man.”

Maeve started pleading rapidly, trying to take all the blame. She had been totally dumb, she insisted, she’d set out to play at Nancy Drew and intruded on the privacy of the bikers; it was her own butting in that had created such a terrible misunderstanding. Jack Liffey hushed her with a finger to his lips.

“You’re not Nancy Drew?” The biker seemed confused, but the shotgun was back on him and then his eyes only had time for the weapon.

“Let him be, man,” David Phelps said. “Ease off.”

“Sit up, but don’t get up,” Jack Liffey said. “This isn’t over.”

“Anything, ah, sir,
really
. I didn’t do nothing to the kid.”

“He didn’t, daddy. They just scared me, honest.”

Jack Liffey took the heavy mooring line in his free hand and looked dubiously at it.

The biker rolled his eyes. “Just a game, sir.”

“
Please
, Daddy. Don’t hurt him.”

“We’ve got a couple things in the balance here,” Jack Liffey uttered. His voice was almost lethargic. “We’ve got felony kidnapping of a girl. Do they give the death penalty for that anymore? I can’t remember.” He glanced at the motorcycle. “And we’ve got a wounded piece of metal, result of the discharge of a shotgun—maybe more to come. I don’t know what sort of jail I get for that, not very much if I reckon the sensibilities of most juries. Maybe a medal. But I’m feeling magnanimous here all of a sudden. That’s ‘forgiving’ in little bitty words. We might just call all this even. What do you say?”

The biker glanced briefly at the mangled toppled bike, and there was an instant when he seemed to be considering the grievous loss.

“Felony. Kidnap,” Jack Liffey reminded him.

“I guess it’s even, man. And—uh—we didn’t touch that missing nigger and his girl neither.”

“I never thought you did.”

*

“What are we going to tell your mother?” Jack Liffey said, when they were all back in the car and safely heading west on the 10.

“I don’t know,” Maeve said glumly. She turned to David Phelps, in back. “Who are you?”

“I’m the Lone Ranger,” he offered.

She glanced briefly at her dad. “In this movie, I think you’re more like the Tonto.”

“Sure, Kemo Sabe. Just take me home, please.”

It was very late, he knew that much. His Timex had staggered to a halt about ten, as it did every once in a while, particularly when it might have been nice to know the time. He had to live with his intuition that it was about three a.m., at least until he caught sight of a roadside clock. Strangely, a cortege of big American cars roared past on the 10, honking and bedecked with black pom-poms and streamers of black crepe. On the rear window of the last car, a low-riding Oldsmobile, someone had scrawled
Just Divorced
in poster paint; blink and its gone. He had to smile. Celebrating social breakdown had reached the point where it was probably time to invest in bitter herbs and small arms.

“So what are we going to tell your mom?” he asked, coming round to it again. Maeve was still so wired she looked wide awake. They’d dropped off David Phelps, and then roused the Learys, where they fetched Maeve’s tiny suitcase, mollifying the cousins as best they could. Poor Beth had found herself grounded for a month.

Maeve gave an exaggerated wince. “Do we have to tell her anything?”