Streets on Fire (18 page)

She alternated between reality and fantasy in a light-footed way that left Maeve dazed. Someone in a house nearby began to play B. B. King very loud out the window, “The Thrill is Gone.”

There didn’t really seem to be any danger. What Maeve sensed was an exuberance on the afternoon air, as if everything was going to be more animated than usual. Two young men in long dreadlocks tap-danced side by side on pallets laid down in the loading dock of some business, their shoes hammering in unison. Faces peered out bungalow windows, gently parting curtains and house plants. The two girls made their way west, keeping close to the locked and barred doors of the shops.

“This is exciting,” Maeve said, recovering some of her Nancy Drew courage. “I bet we’re going to remember this day all our life.”

“Stick together, we be safe.” They held hands, hiding in a doorway.

Overhead two police helicopters circled low, sweeping anemic searchlights left and right. It was still bright day and there didn’t seem much point to the lights, except maybe to point a finger. Higher up there were many other helicopters from news agencies and TV stations. Then all of a sudden there was a different helicopter very low at the end of the block, a big ugly black thing with no markings at all. Pods of weapons were slung off little wings in front. Its sound was hushed, a
thump-thump-thump
you could feel in your chest, like something out of another world, and it hovered in one place, bobbing its tail a little like a stick insect.

“That the big boss copter, like a dragon,” Ornetta observed.

“My dad used to work where they made helicopters,” Maeve said, as if this gave her some claim of power over the evil specter.

A gang of black boys, younger than Ornetta, burst noisily from between two houses, running hard and waving their arms with abandon. They turned along the shops and passed only a foot from the girls. One stopped to posture in Maeve’s face. “Do me, baby, the whole nine,” he said, waggling his tongue and leering, as if quoting somebody older.

“Get a life, boy,” Ornetta said.

“
O-bop-she-bam
.”

He hooted and ran on, and another boy sprinted past carrying a bright red one-seat kayak.

A voice spoke out of the sky, louder than any voice had a right to be.
“Get indoors, now! All of you boys! This area is under curfew!”

There was an insistent string dull
pop-pop-pop
from overhead, and Maeve thought she saw something gray steak down out of the sky at the running boys. A scream, and one was knocked off his feet. The kayak was discarded and the boys scattered. Two of them circled back to cart off the boy who had been knocked down. The big insect helicopter came even lower and trailed after the biggest band of kids, popping again and again from one of its outrigger pods.

“Woo,” Ornetta said in awe.

And then the hubbub was gone as quickly as it had come. The boys had vanished and the big black helicopter had gone on. The higher helicopters moved off to circle somewhere else, and the street whispered with aftertalk. An old woman came out on her porch and called, “You girls get on home now. This ain’t no time to be eyeballin’.”

“Yes’m.”

Maeve dallied long enough to pick up one of the gray blobs that littered the street. It was a very heavy beanbag in some kind of slick synthetic cloth, about the size of a coin purse.

“Must have been a dragon beanbag,” Maeve suggested.

Ornetta smiled. She led them down a cross street, and as soon as they turned another corner they saw police cars parked diagonally to block the width of the roadway.

They crossed and hurried into a quiet residential street of apartments and tiny court homes. A large crowd, mostly young Latinos, ran past on the other side of the street, hooting and roaring. Maeve wondered how well Ornetta knew her Aunt Taffeta’s neighborhood. They cut down a walking court between little Spanish bungalows surrounded by geraniums and out onto another business street.

A sedan came fast along the street and then screeched unexpectedly sideways to ram straight into the grillwork of a closed minimart, touching off a shrill alarm. It shocked Maeve deeply to see the crash. The car had wedged into the grille and all its doors flew open. Four young men in ski masks hurled out and attacked the remains of the security grille with crowbars. In a few seconds, glass smashed and the accordion grate came away from the wall. They piled inside the store.

From what she could tell through the masks, Maeve thought the slight-looking looters looked Vietnamese.

*

“Oh, yeah, I know the Sixteen/Eight Club,” the young man said with a rueful toss of his head. “I was
in
it.” Kirk Grosvenor had a big handsome square jaw, much like the Webber boys. He’d have looked like a first-round pick for pro running back—even with the gold ring in his ear—except for the little lower-lip triangle of beard that musicians call a jazz dab and painters an imperial.

“Back in high school I wouldn’t have been caught dead hanging with assholes like this.”

He meant the other two boys in the cluttered living room. Caught up in watching the television, they gave only perfunctory eye rolls.

“Ooh.”

Somebody had torched a gas station on Slauson, and it was hard not to pay attention as a glorious mushroom cloud billowed up over the Baldwin Hills, chasing even the news copters back. Up until that burst of fire, the announcer had been repeating the official mantra that the riots seemed to be easing up. On the way out to Simi, following the news on his car radio, Jack Liffey had heard that Abdullah Ibrahim had taken to the streets, hurrying from hot spot to hot spot to urge people in person to go home.

Secretly, Jack Liffey was pleased to have so much commotion going on. When he had nothing to distract him, he pictured Marlena lying with another man, talking to another man, holding hands. Not too vividly—he didn’t really picture a face or specific build—but vividly enough to do unpleasant things to his stomach.

A laugh suddenly dragged his mind back to the cluttered artists’ pad in the Simi Hills where he now sat.

“I was football, Presbyterian Youth League, prelaw, Bible clubs, the whole nine yards. But I’d always been interested in painting, and over my dad’s objection I went to Cal-Arts instead of Pepperdine, and the rest is just pure unadulterated depravity.”

His companions looked even more like young artists than Kirk Grosvenor, though some of that was undoubtedly suggested by the easels and canvases and pots of paint and clay sculptures on tall stools that disordered the room and the dozen spattered drop cloths that covered the flooring. It was an old canyon house up above the valley, with rounded rock below and rotting clapboard, needing a lot of work it was probably never going to get.

“I don’t think the Sixteen/Eights are anything much to worry about—but don’t go away unhappy. There might be a bit more to the story.” He thought things over while he ripped open a twist-off beer. “Every club had an older advisor called an Apostle who was sent down from the Pledge of Honor folks. They were the adult version of us, a lot like the PromiseKeepers or the old Shepherding Movement, if you remember them. I think the P of H was broken into what they called Belief Teams of a dozen or so, and each team had a leader called a Head Coach who reported to a higher group called a Roost that was run by an Umpire. Everybody’s got to invent some kind of goofy hierarchy, don’t you know. Eventually you’d get up to the Synod and the National Director. It was all about family values and stuff that seemed okay to me at the time, but it got a lot weirder when I got some perspective on it. Keep your kids off dope. Keep your woman in her place. Stuff like that.”

One of the other boys was watching him now. “Jesus, Kirk, I didn’t know you were into that.”

“Eat me, Don.”

The skinny boy named Don sneered, “Bunch of chubby white boys who live with their moms and wear Star Trek hats, I’d’a thought.”

“Little you know. A lot of them were jocks.”

“Same difference.”

Kirk Grosvenor sighed and shrugged.

“Was racism a part of it?” Jack Liffey asked.

He thought about it. “The topic didn’t come up much, but—”

“Whoa!” one of the boys exclaimed. The TV station had lost its signal, and the big set displayed the streaming static that TV techies called grass. He changed channel and they saw tan instant replay of the fireball from a circling helicopter near the same location. After the fireball collapsed, the gas station seemed to be settling in for a determined burn.

“I did hear some rumors… We talked a lot about committing to the seven great virtues, and we read the Bible and we made public pledges at rallies and handed out literature, stuff like that. But once in a while we’d hear about another group. It was called
DEL
, the Defenders of the European Legacy, but I heard mention of Gideon’s 300. It was supposed to be more activist, I mean
really
activist. But you know how rumors operate. If we couldn’t even get the name straight, how were we supposed to know what they did? Maybe they didn’t even exist.”

“You never saw any sign of them yourself?”

He paused to think it over. “Truth is elusive, man. What do you know for sure?”

“I know it’s not going to rain
up
.”

The boy smiled. “Here’s the best I can do. One day there was a guy talking about seeing an encampment of illegals over by Grimes Canyon. Some of the kids bitched about how dirty the Mexicans were up there, living in cardboard and black plastic, shitting in the hills and not paying rent.” He laughed. “Johnny Griffin, he had a big moral thing about paying your rent. I think his dad’s a slumlord. The hills are full of those poor Mexican strawberry pickers, killing themselves for peanuts or hanging out at Home Depot for day labor. I suppose Johnny wanted them to rent big condos down in Malibu, commute up to the Home Depot in their Lexuses, pay their rent regular. I seem to remember our Apostle taking a special interest and asking exactly where the encampment was. Anyway, pretty soon there was a brushfire in Grimes Canyon and two Mexicans died. Who knows? It could have been a cooking fire, like the paper said.”

“Oh, shit,” the boy named Don squalled. “Cooking!” He jumped up and ran to the kitchen.

“So who was your Apostle?” Jack Liffey asked.

“His name was Perry Krasny. He was the assistant football coach at the high school, and he coached Pop Warner, too. Pretty sinister job, if he
was
the point man for the American Nazis, but he didn’t really strike me that way.”

There was a sizzling from the kitchen and a puff of steam made its way around the corner.

“Here we go again,” the third boy offered. “Spaghetti al dentifrice.”

“Did Krasny ever talk to the club about race?” Jack Liffey wondered.

“Probably a little. That was another lifetime ago for me, though, man. The big thing with Pledge of Honor was that you have choices; everybody can choose the good over the bad. You know what I mean?”

There was a clatter in the kitchen and the third boy groaned.

“I argued with him once. I said what about some poor guy in China who’s never heard of Jesus, is he going to go to hell? And if he conceded that, what about the guy who’s raised a Muslim or Buddhist or something and he’s only heard of Jesus once?” He screwed up his face thinking, then took a long pull off his beer. “Perry said everybody in the world gets a chance to believe in Jesus, and God sees to it that when the chance comes, that person has a real option to believe. So if he rejects Jesus, it’s his fault. It seemed pretty lame to me, even then. I mean, weird coincidence that all these bright guys in India, given a real chance, turn Jesus down, and all these dimwits in Alabama accept Him.”

“Bad news, dudes.” Don appeared in the living room holding up a large serving fork that was poked into a solid mass of spaghetti the size of a soccer ball.

“Would you like some advice?” Jack Liffey offered.

“Oh, sure.”

“Next time put a splash of oil in the water before you cook it, and after you drain it, run tap water over it for a few seconds. It’ll wash off the starch and keep it from sticking.”

“And set the timer, dude,” Kirk said. “You could try that. Maybe that’d save the trips to Pizza Hut.”

*

“What that smell?”

Ornetta crinkled up her nose and Maeve sniffed the air, but by then it was so powerful there was nothing to do but make a face and pretend to retch. “That’s
aw
-ful.”

They peered around the corner near the projects and saw a big billow of jet black smoke reaching out sideways, like the paw of a giant black cat. It looked like Mussa’s Retreds had been raided and the old tires stacked into a barricade across Brooks and set alight in three or four spots. The barricade was just beginning to brew up with that dreadful pungency of old rubber.

The smoke got thick fast and two boys ran out of it smack into them, bowling Ornetta over. One stopped to apologize and help her up.

“Say, girl, you got a dollar I could borrow, just till I get home?” He danced from foot to foot, glowering at them. Maeve shuddered involuntarily.

“We got no money,” Ornetta said with determination.

“Aw, hasta la vista, baby.” He ran on, and Maeve came out of the anxious trance of immobility that had overcome her and pulled Ornetta back around the corner.

Ornetta seemed to have gained strength from standing off the boy. “I best get you home safe,” she said to Maeve, a kind of overblown adult authority in her voice.

Maeve smiled but took her hand as if accepting the smaller girl’s protection. “Please.”

It was still over 90 out, he was sure. His back ran with sweat and the crickets down the canyon were burring away so fast you couldn’t hear individual
cricks
. He’d read somewhere there was a formula you could use to calculate the temperature, counting the chirps per minute and multiplying by something, then dividing by something else. But, as with so many handy tricks, he had forgotten it.

There was a lot of dark hillside below him in Fry’s Arroyo, a side canyon off Simi; far behind him, low in the cleft of arroyo, shone the bright lights of the Simi Valley itself, like a peek into another world. A small plane circled out over that world, seemingly on guard to make sure none of LA’s troubles spilled into that happy enclave. Jack Liffey had hiked carefully out into a vacant lot on a weedy spur of the hill, where he had a view back toward the hillside houses.