Streets on Fire (16 page)

“It sure does. What’s under the hood?”

He shrugged. “They weren’t into engines so much. It’s meant to cruise real slow. I’ve got the standard straight six with a three-speed. They did change the linkage to make the three-on-the-tree into a floor shift.”

“Did you have it back east?”

He shook his head. “I let Burk drive it when I was at college.”

“You’re certainly a good brother.”

One detail caught Jack Liffey’s eye before he left, a discreet decal in a corner of the back window that read 16/8. It reminded him for some reason of the sinister 88 skinhead kids used as a private code. The eighth letter twice, HH, for Heil Hitler. But 16/8 worked out to—what?—PH. Acid-base?
Peter
Hitler? Probably just a parking spot at the high school.

“Thanks for your time, Rolf. What have you been studying?’

“My major was history. I did history of religion, with a senior thesis on the holiness movements.”

Jack Liffey pointed at his ’79 AMC Concord. “You think these customizers could have done anything with mine?”

The young man wrinkled up his nose. The car was so beat up it was barely recognizable. In addition to the plastic windows, both right fenders had been replaced with junkyard cousins primered orange. “I don’t think they’d try.”

“Maybe they could lop the roof off, channel it drastically and make a planter out of it.”

*

The car radio, stuck for years on all-news KFWB-AM, informed him that an appellate judge had just thrown out Abdullah Ibrahim’s lawsuit against the police, on the grounds that peace officers were now protected absolutely by some new reasonable-belief statute that had dribbled through the legislature. But Ab-Ib’s lawyer was vowing to refile on new grounds. The newscast then switched over to a woman reporter whose voice went up into a hysterical register trying to shout over a lot of sirens wailing past her. Something about a massive tactical deployment by the LAPD to head off trouble. The sirens gave the broadcast an end-of-the-world feeling that made him anxious, so he switched it off.

He’d seen two massive LA uprisings in his lifetime, 1965 and 1992, and he didn’t even want to think about another one. The civil unrest—yet another of the resident euphemisms—had disturbed something very deep inside him, a despairing sense that serious injustices went on and on without anyone caring enough to address it.

But mostly he tried to ignore the pain, just like everybody else. He would have been perfectly happy to pay more in taxes to feed the homeless, but no one had ever asked him, and he didn’t know what else to do.

Already in a funk, he found his thoughts trending toward Marlena again. Why had his life become so strange?
Where
did it become so strange? Could he go back and reorder it, just a little?

As he pulled off the freeway at Washington, a car came up beside him and a blacked-out window rolled down. A young African American put his whole torso out into the afternoon, wrapped in a Hawaiian silk shirt with big pineapples, and shouted, “It’s Uzi time!”

There was no cross traffic; Jack Liffey jumped the red light and get out of there. Far away, he thought he heard gunshots.

*

“Your daddy pretty cool.”

It was only eight or nine blocks from the little house in Oakwood to the beach, and they walked in the gathering heat, carrying towels and paperbacks and sunblock and a little plastic cooler with Seven-Ups and apples. Maeve was happy she’d thought to bring along her swimsuit. Her dad had agreed to let her spend a day and night with Ornetta’s aunt, joining Ornetta and Mrs. Thigpen in their retreat.

“He not with your momma?”

“No, they’re divorced.”

“Uh-huh. You think they get back?”

“He lives with another woman, and my mom’s remarried. For a while I really wanted them to get together again, but I’m kind of used to having them in two places now. It means I’ve got two families instead of one.”

“Nana and Ban my family. Nana not my momma, you know. My momma live in a big castle in New York. I only be here since March.”

She said it matter-of-factly, but Maeve could feel something wrong underneath. She took the tiny dry fist and they walked hand in hand. Maeve sensed that family was something to be avoided for the moment.

“Do you like LA?”

“Sure. Everybody here livin’ large.” She seemed to reconsider something that was warring in her. “It hard to come from outsides. Girls I know over on Sixty-two Street, you know, you can’t just cool out. You got to stay on top or they rank you down. You different, I can tell.”

Maeve felt a squeeze of her hand and her heart went out to the girl. “I like you, too, Ornetta.”

Ornetta smiled and looked up at her, a good three inches taller. “You safe, like a sister.”

*

Brian Franchino reacted a little as Perry Krasny stepped out onto the patio high above the canyon with a big SSK assault rifle. The rifle had a silencer on the nose like a big soup can. There were houses on both sides of them along the high ridge road, and a faraway V in the hills revealed tracts out in the Simi Valley. Krasny stood breathing heavily for a while and then aimed the rifle outward at a high angle and began to fire methodically. “Get some, motherfucker, get some,” he chanted as he fired. Only a muffled popping could be heard, on and on to a steady tempo, and in between the ka-ching of the brass ejecting to skitter across the redwood deck.

“Jesus, K! What are you doing?” Franchino came to his feet. He remembered that the man’s wife and kids were away somewhere. Maybe he got like this whenever he was alone. The nearest houses below were several miles away, but those 7.62mm assault rounds would carry.

Krasny said nothing, simply went on firing until the rifle’s bolt clicked open on an empty magazine.

“Those shells, they got to come down out there, K.”

“Bullets come down, Bri,
rounds
come down. Shells stay right here.” And indeed the bright brass casings made a little scatter to his left. He set the rifle down and took a pull of his beer. “Fear not, tenderhearted friend. The odds are very slim that anyone will be hit. Just a broken window, a mysterious hole in the stucco. An angry god working his malign will from up in the clouds.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you got all your oars in the sea.”

“Oh, I know what I’m up to. I’m practicing for the next stage of our nation’s perilous journey. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll do all the dirty work that’s necessary, and I’ll do it forever, at least until the people catch on. Think of the thousands of years the Europeans have had to work on the moral outlines of their nations, to expel the foreigners, to fight their border wars. We got started late is all.

“I’ll do whatever it takes for this new white nation to be born, and if they take me to some Nuremburg afterward and try me for war crimes so they can dip the new Euro-American state in bleach and pretend that none of this bad shit ever happened, then I’ll still do the whole filthy job with no regret. Two hundred years from now we’ll be known by some as the Washington Lincolns of Euro-America, the guys who built it and held it together.”

Krasny said all this without real rancor. He spoke in an amiable tone with a palm flat on his chest as if pledging allegiance. Far away out in the canyons there was an animal whoop with a rising trill at the end:
whoo-up whoo-up
.

“Coyote,” he said. “I love coyotes, but they got to go, you know. They get in the way. If these brown and black people get too uppity after we give them their own places then they got to go, too. We can nuke the whole lot of them. An idea like that hasn’t hurt the Israelis, has it? Let them walk tiptoe over on the other side of the border, man, that’s what I say. A few more wars where we kick the stuffing out of our neighbors and we expel a few million blacks and browns to these states of their own, and everything calms down and we become just like any other European country, a big respectable white nation with safe streets and a little criminal past."

“And the meantime we got to pay the rent and such.”

“The meantime. Remember, when you’re having a bad time and it seems like all the liberals on earth got it in for you and some particular pussy wiseguy calls you a name to piss you off, remember, it takes forty-two muscles to frown about things—like you’re doing right now—and only four to pull the trigger of a decent sniper rifle.”

“Ooooooh!”

The 747 settled heavily toward them, drifted sideways a bit, and then corrected with the dip of a huge wing, swelling ominously like a dream, only fifty feet above them.

“All
right
! Come
on
!”

“Do it! Do it!” A woman in a gauzy white dress at the edge of the grass danced forward and punched her fists alternately up into the path of the jet. Two young men lay on their backs in the flight path and let out cries of delight.

Jack Liffey felt the rumble in his feet, and the air weight of the big jet seemed to wallop them as they craned their necks. Its turbulence buffeted the airport fence just past them, and moments later the tires touched down with a puff of gray smoke. Later, the angry howl of reverse thrust.

“Outasight!”

“What hath man wrought?” Mike Lewis remarked mildly.

He stood on the low grassy hill that ran down the center of the little park they were gathered in. He jotted something on a clipboard.

“At the risk of seeming droll,” Jack Liffey said, “what notes are you taking?”

“It’s a 747-300,” Mike Lewis said drily. “Korean Air. No contrails.”

A woman’s voice at Mike Lewis’s house had told Jack Liffey on the phone where Mike usually hung out for a while after teaching his morning class in urban studies at the little architecture college down the road from LAX.

“Some months ago, I noticed the airplane groupies that gathered here. Right at the end of runway 24-R. It’s the age of spectacle, after all. It was toward the end of winter back then, with a damp onshore breeze huffing and puffing into the dry air off the desert and the planes were all leaving big spiraling condensation trails from their wings. All of a sudden, that day, I heard a sizzling sound. At first I ignored it, but on the next landing I heard it again. It was well behind the jet and there was a track of vapor shooting back the opposite direction with a kind of crackling noise. It was like a bottle rocket.”

“So?”

“As far as I know no one has ever described the phenomenon. Even the engineers I ask are mystified. I’ve observed it maybe three more times, when conditions are just right.”

“Are they right today?”

“Too dry.”

“So why are you here?”

“Look around this grassy knoll, Jack. The human comedy is sufficient onto itself.”

The woman in her filmy Isadora Duncan gown pranced along the sidewalk, giving high knee kicks, as if intoxicated by the airplanes. The two young men on their backs offered each other high fives now and then. An old man in a pilot’s uniform leaned dreamy-eyed against the fence at the base of the landing light.

“Isn’t calling this a ‘grassy knoll’ a little sacrilegious?”

“Have you ever seen the one in Dallas?”

Jack Liffey shook his head.

“I don’t know who first called it that; it’s no such thing. It’s just a road embankment down to an underpass, not even vaguely like a knoll. But what’s your question for me? You only come to see me when some aspect of LA’s grand comedy has you mystified.”

“Sometimes I come to borrow something from you.”

“True.”

A smaller jet wobbled out of the haze and thundered overhead. “737,” Mike Lewis said. “With those flattened-off CFM engines. Very quiet and fuel-efficient.”

“Does the number sixteen-slash-eight mean anything to you?” Jack Liffey asked. “Let’s say, relating to high school kids.”

Mike Lewis wrinkled up his face.

“Uh-oh,” Jack Liffey said. “You’ve got that you-must-be-just-off-the-bus look.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to keep up. The Sixteen/Eight Club is the high school wing of the Pledge of Honor movement. You know, all those earnest fathers and husbands who gather in sports stadiums to reaffirm their Protestant values. Like most neo-conservatism, it’s mostly a phenomenon of the suburbs.”

“Would those values include racism?”

“Not openly. They’re very genteel this time around. They talk about one-to-one ‘reconciliation.’ Which means, of course, no affirmative action. The whole movement is really a stalking horse for the Christian Right. It’s against women’s rights, gays, and cultural relativism or any other sort of relativism. Part of the famous culture war. Basically, they’re against anything that changed in the sixties.”

“Civil rights
was
the sixties.”

“It’s possible one of the clubs might just spiral away into some kind of weird neo-racism. If you take earnest well-off white kids who don’t even know how privileged they are and add a pinch of demagoguery, who knows where it might go? Times change. If you remember, thirty years ago a lot of those kids wanted to be Red Guards and make a revolution. How much sense did that make?”

“Weren’t you an SDS leader?”

Another jet came over and they both craned their necks. “An old DC-9,” Mike Lewis explained. “Wait’ll you hear the engines. They’re from the era before noise-abatement.”

The DC-9 touched down and when it reversed thrust the small plane sounded twice the size of the 747, with a crackling howl so loud he wanted to hold his ears.

“At least we stopped a war,” Mike said. “This isn’t just a theoretical question, is it?”

“Simi Valley.”

“Okay. I’ve got some kids in my Cal-Arts class tonight who hail from that neck of the woods. I’ll ask them about it. Call me late.”

“Thanks, Mike.”

“Look!” The lady in white pointed off to the east now, into the city. A large column of black smoke rose into the air.

“I wonder what that is?” somebody said.

“That’s the look of history,” Mike Lewis said somberly, pocketing his pencil.

*

A troop of little girls in Brownie uniforms, all carrying pirate flags marched northward along the sidewalk that ran at the top edge of the beach. The girls parted for a young man on a skateboard, who was twirling slowly and playing “Guantanamera” on an electric guitar, the speaker strapped to his back. On another skateboard to the side a goateed man without legs propelled himself along with little leather paddles. A male couple stood in the sand in skimpy bathing costumes and held elastic clown noses out of the way as they kissed. It was Venice Beach, being itself.