Streets on Fire (15 page)

She thought about things for a moment while a flight of seagulls wheeled over the house, complained idly about the heat, and then took off inland. “I went to Mississippi with Bancroft for one entire year, Mr. Liffey. That was the year 1965. I went down there an activist from Detroit who just happened to be a Negro, and when I came back north I was a plain ol’ nigger driving. That mean, mean year did something to me inside. I hope I never again get that close to the face of a woman spitting hatred into my eyes.”

He puffed his cheeks a bit. There was nothing you could say to that.

“Have you been to Mississippi?” she asked.

He shook his head. “When I was a freshman in college, a SNCC worker came and talked to us in the student union and invited us to join him in the voting rights program. You know, I was the first person in my family to go to college. I’m from a working class town too, and I had enough on my plate right then getting used to a strange new world that was full of kids who’d read all these books I’d never even heard of. But I always regret I didn’t go south.”

“Oh, no sir, don’t you do that. You might have got yourself a headstone on some levee right now, marking where the good ol’ boys dumped your remains. Sometimes they picked on the white boys even worse, to send a message.”

“How will I ever know now if I’d have had the courage?”

“Some things just plain aren’t worth knowing, not if you’ve got a choice.”

They heard a burst of giggling from the side room. The old woman sipped tentatively at the coffee and, seeming to approve of it, took a long drink.

“As long as they appear to be happy in there together, could you do me a favor?” Jack Liffey asked. “Tell me about Mississippi.”

*

“Señor Man he come back from the market on he mule, and he eyes bug out real big and he be, like, ‘Oh, I so sorry, Señor Coyote, I lef’ you hangin’ up there in the hot sun all day long, and you gone and shrunk down to a teensy morsel of yo’self.’

“But then Señor Man had him a nice small bowl of stew that night anyway, even if it tasted kind of funny for Coyote.”

Maeve giggled and nodded. “Let me try to tell one now.”

He headed west out the Reagan Freeway, which most folks still called the Simi Valley Freeway. There had once been a Nixon Freeway, too, until the days after Watergate when it had quietly reverted to being the Marina Freeway. In general, LA didn’t seem to like naming things after people, the way Eastern cities named so many of their bridges and buildings and roads, perhaps because a lot of folks here were sensitive about the big ego bruise of Hollywood.

The Reagan ran down the center of a valley that was wall-to-wall white flight. Art Castro, who’d lived out here for a year—until the lights came on and he realized he was miles from anyone else who spoke Spanish—called it the land of earth tones and left turn arrows. Now Jack Liffey saw what he meant. Those sandy, lizardy colors were everywhere, on minimalls, freeway sound barriers and endless reaches of two-story homes. He bet the glut of left-turn arrows was out there too, making even tiny alley intersections into eight-ways and slowing traffic to a crawl—something else urban folks didn’t like very much about the suburbs.

He merged right as he saw his exit approach, thinking it might have been easier just to move out here and go with it all—lawn sprinklers and chain restaurants and band saws in the three-car garages. It probably brought you face to face with something elemental in yourself when you knew there was no place further to run. Marlena, he thought all of a sudden. He saw her naked beside a strange man, and all the hair on his shoulders and neck stood on end. Is that what her note signified?

Then he was distracted by the abrupt approach from behind of a station wagon recklessly sluing across the freeway. When the vehicle blew by him he saw three pairs of bare buttocks flattened against the window glass. It was the next stage up from mooning. Pressed ham, the frat boys had called it when he was in college. He gave them Nixon’s stiff V-sign out the window but he doubted anyone was looking.

As he pulled off at the bottom of the ramp, he saw a pair of really big vultures circling over the housing tract where he was headed, presumably awaiting the death of the human spirit out here. The house was two stories of earth tone—thank you, Art Castro—one of those unnamable colors caught between peach and beige. There was the obligatory Sam Spade fanlight over the upper window and the usual post-modern refusal to lay anything out in graceful proportions.

In the driveway, though, there was a hole into a different reality: a 1950 Mercury coupe in deep candy maroon, lower and squatter than he remembered, with a Dartmouth decal in the rear window. He hadn’t seen a car like that since high school in San Pedro, where the Yugoslavs and the surfers had scorned them as taco wagons or bean bandits, but he had always responded with a little catch in his heart. He loved the very idea of a customized low-rider; it was so nutty and unfunctional. None of his friends had ever had one. Did anybody still did this to cars? He supposed all the handiwork of the fifties and sixties had to come to rest somewhere.

As he walked up the drive, Jack Liffey heard a repeated metallic
ka-ching
from the back yard, which sounded familiar but which he couldn’t quite place. There was no fence, so he walked around the side of the house to see a blond teenager in a strap undershirt speed-pressing a fairly light barbell. He was surrounded by workout equipment under a patio awning, but he wasn’t particularly bulked up.

“Hello. Are you Burkard Webber?”

The boy was a little startled and he let the weights dangle. “Yes, sir, I am. Can I help you?”

That decorous politeness alone was a pleasant surprise. The boy had a big square jaw and a handsome curl of blond hair that swept back off his forehead like some lost Kennedy. The girls would be after this one, Jack Liffey thought. There was a squeal out in the backyard and he noticed a little boy and girl sitting at a tiny tea table, arguing over a stuffed purple lizard.

“My name is Jack Liffey. I’m a detective looking for your sister.” He left what sort of detective ambiguous.

The boy went very grave and set the barbell down on a mat. “I’m glad you’re still looking. You’re always afraid these things get forgotten.”

“Can you tell me about the last time you saw her?”

“I only saw them for a minute. She came by with her boyfriend to talk to my parents about their plans for the summer.”

The boy used a grease pencil to mark off his exercise on a big white sheet of foamcore leaning against the house. Handsome, polite, and systematic. Blend in the Mercury out front, and Jack Liffey felt he could have dropped through a crust of time into an
Ozzie and Harriet
episode. He chose his next words carefully, a bit off base for the times, not politically sensitive but not quite openly bigoted, either.

“That would be the colored boy from Pomona College?”

The boy didn’t react. “Ami Davis. We talked for a few seconds about what the Lakers were going to do without a shooting guard.”

“Did your parents get along with Davis?”

“Sure. You mean because he was black? This isn’t Alabama, Mr. Liffey.”

“And did you and Rolf get along with him?”

“He was a nice guy.”

It wasn’t quite an answer. “
Was
?”

The boy shrugged apologetically. “They’ve both been gone a long time now. I’ve adjusted to thinking Sherry may be dead. We may never know.”

There was a wail from the tea party, and Jack Liffey watched the two little kids toss the dinosaur up in the air and try to grab for it. “Your sister and brother?”

“No. I’m watching them for Mrs. Holtz across the street.”

“What does babysitting go for these days? I remember charging fifty cents an hour.”

The boy smiled in a bland sort of way. “Oh, I don’t charge. It’s a favor.”

“That’s good of you.” It was
Ozzie and Harriet
. “Are there a lot of coloreds in your high school?”

“There’s maybe six. One girl’s in AP English with me.”

Jack Liffey sat on the weight bench, where a much heavier bar rested crosswise on the bench-press rack. A medallion on a chain dangled from the end of the bar, and he picked it up to inspect it: a circle enclosing the petals of a rose enclosing a heart that had a cross inscribed in it. On the back, raised lettering had eroded from long friction against his chest.

“Ah,” Jack Liffey said. “You’re a Luth-e-pan.”

The boy smiled again. “They all wear off that way. My family’s Lutheran and I guess I used to be. I’m in a Bible-reading club at school where we take the Gospels a little more to heart than the Lutheran pastor does.”

Jack Liffey wondered if that meant they always kept three long nails at the ready. “A Bible club is a real change from when I went to high school. Are most of your classmates religious?”

“Only a small minority care enough to do anything. Have you read the Bible, Sir?”

The little kids had gone into a tug-of-war over the toy and were leaning back and really getting into it. The screams became unbearable, so Burkard Webber hurried down the grass and squatted to separate the two. He seemed to have a genuine rapport with the children, and he rested a hand on each of them as he talked. When they were calmed down, he came slowly back across the grass.

“I’ve read a fair amount of the Bible,” Jack Liffey offered. “Once somebody gave me the revised translation, and I realized how much easier it was to follow the stories when they’re not in King James English.”

The boy seemed pained.

“You don’t really think God spoke seventeenth-century English?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Don’t most scholars think the King James’s panel made a fair number of mistakes translating all that Aramaic and Hebrew?”

He was probing just enough to see where the boy lived, but he didn’t really want to start a holy war with a seventeen-year-old.

“We believe God can inspire a translator every bit as much as a writer. ‘He is the Rock, his word is perfect; for all his ways are judgment: a God of truth.’ Deuteronomy 32:4.”

No wonder the Lutherans weren’t strict enough for him, Jack Liffey thought. But he could see he’d gone far enough. “Sure. Your parents still go to the Lutheran church?”

“Oh, yes. They’re German Lutherans through and through. Our name was actually Weber”—he pronounced it
vayber
—“until Grandpa decided to Americanize it during World War One. He called it The Great War.”

“Where was that?”

“Wisconsin.”

“Did you grow up there?”

“No. I was six when my folks left Racine to come out west. Rolf remembers it better. He was ten.”

As if on cue, an older boy trundled open the sliding glass door and looked out. He was just as blond and just as clean cut, wearing crisp chinos and a blue button-down shirt.

“Rolf, this is a detective looking for Sherry.”

“Jack Liffey.” They shook hands solemnly. The older boy seemed even graver and more reticent than his brother. “Were you here when Sherry and Amilcar came to visit in June?”

He nodded. “I’d just got back from college. They only looked in as a courtesy. They were on their way to spend the weekend in Ojai.”

That was new. “You’re sure about that?”

“I think that’s what they said.”

“You wouldn’t have any idea why Amilcar told his niece later that he’d had a hard time out here?”

“Gosh, no.”

“Maybe they argued with your parents?”

He shook his head, hiked a leg of his chinos, and sat on the edge of a folded Ping-Pong table. He had so much neutral languor he seemed drugged. “It couldn’t have been much of an argument in the two minutes they were in the house.”

“Are your parents around?”

“They’re in Europe right now. They didn’t want to go, but the trip had been planned for more than a year and it didn’t look like anybody was going to find Sherry right away. We know where they are every minute if we have to reach them.”

“Our mom and dad have gotten pretty heavy into genealogy,” Burkard added. “They’re looking up the village where the family came from.”

“So as far as you remember, Sherry and Amilcar drove up, parked their car, got out, said hello, and left for Ojai.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s about it.”

Jack Liffey tried a few other tacks but was just as becalmed whichever way he steered. Apparently the infants had started up their tug-of-war again without anyone’s noticing because all of a sudden the big lizard was in two pieces and a cloud of feather stuffing filled the air.

The Webber boys both hurried down to take care of the situation and he watched their kindly interventions. They looked like Jan and Dean, tidy and sober, polite and reserved, Christian and proper. Whatever they were hiding, he couldn’t quite see these two spitting rude names into Amilcar’s face or lugging a big wood cross into South Central and torching it up.

He asked to use the bathroom and got lost on the way, long enough to check out a bedroom with a Dartmouth pennant, a rack of slot cars and sports equipment, a lot of computer gear, a short surfboard and a very big black Bible. No Nazi flags, no lightning bolt posters or bed sheets with eyeholes.

“I guess I’d better check Ojai. Is that your Merc out front?’

Rolf grinned a little, his first display of emotion. “Cool, huh?’

“Did you customize it?”

“Oh, no. I bought it that way. It’s been around for a long time.” He walked Jack Liffey around front and plucked an errant leaf off the hood. “Chopped and channeled. You know how they do it?”

“Uh-uh.”

“The last owner told me. He was a policeman who bought it out of impound, but he’d worked on cars when he was younger. They cut off the roof and shorten all the roof pillars about six inches. That’s
chopped
. Then they channel it. That means they cut a slice all the way around the car about here.” He indicated about mid-thigh. “They remove six inches of sheet metal and weld what’s left back together. Then they sand it out so good you can’t see where the weld went. It changes the whole look of the car.”