Streets on Fire (19 page)

Kirk Grosvenor had led him here on his motorcycle, pointed out the particular stucco ranch house and then roared away on the outsized Kawasaki. The building the boy had fingered was two houses west from where he clung now to a big sumac bush, and it looked bright and conventionally suburban. Still, if the house had been any closer to the big city, no schoolteacher could have afforded it. There was a lot of glass and a flat roof and a deck out over the canyon and, amazingly enough, three men on cheap patio chairs on the deck, sipping beer from cans.

“Certissimo,” a voice barked above the general drone. At least that’s what it had sounded like. He could hear the natter of their voices, but the still air must have been against him because he could not make out much of what they were saying, except in snatches. He would have to work himself closer.

He intended to work his way along a line of low bushes that marked the outer rim of the yard. Unfortunately he would have to crawl to keep his silhouette down, and that would pretty well write off his slacks. He grimaced and sank to his knees as he left the shelter of the big sumac. The dirt seemed fairly firm. He was near enough a steeper slope that he didn’t like the thought of a chunk of land giving way. There was a smell of sage on the air, and astringent dust. He moved in as close as he could and looked around for a moment to orient himself. Far in the distance the V had widened slightly, and he registered the bright necklace of the freeway crossing what little he could see of the valley.

“Trust the niggers to burn down their side of town again. Every ten years.”

“Bri, don’t use that word in my home. For God’s sake, we’re not
racists
.”

There was a laugh. “Yeah, we just don’t like Afro humans very much.”

A bright light came on suddenly in the nearest house. Jack Liffey froze, then scuttle behind one of the squat bushes to minimize the glare washing over him. He heard a faint squeal and peeked through the foliage to see into a glass box where a man and woman had just spilled out of some interior room. They appeared to be wearing each other’s underwear, the woman in striped boxers and the man chasing her around a sofa wearing panties and a black bra on backwards. The men on the patio next door couldn’t see into the room so no one bothered to pull the curtains.

“I buddied with some smokes in ’Nam. They should just have their own homeland so they can deal with all that victim shit in their own way.”

The man in the bra caught up to the woman. They wrestled and groped for a while, the woman playing keep-away with something small in her hand. It was hard not to watch, and hard not to let it send him off into thoughts of Marlena, playing similar games somewhere. He felt sick.

“Course, you know if they dropped a half million humans into Watts, the whole place would be prosperous as shit in five years.”

Jack Liffey could see the three men on the deck fairly clearly now, faces lit by weak carriage lamps at the corners of the railing. One had a tidy salt-and-pepper beard and his shirt hanging open in the heat. Another man was a few years older, huge as a mountain, with a buzz haircut like a Marine recruit, resting his penny loafers, sockless, on a small redwood stool. The third man was only visible as a shoulder beyond the other two. A smallish German shepherd wandered up to the big man for a pat and ear scratch and then, disturbingly, took a step toward the railing and oriented his body toward where Jack Liffey crouched. He remembered how much trouble he’d had hearing them, the sounds of their conversation simply not emanating toward him, and he hoped his scent hung immobile on the air as well. The dog froze in a pointing posture, staring straight at him. He held his breath, but the beast seemed disinclined to do anything more.

“Sometimes I give up hope, man,” the bearded man whickered. “The whole joint’s just going backward. The papers and TV are all run by Jews. They can’t say a bad word about the queers and foreigners. They think abortion is just a great thing:
Kill
those babies. You know, I sit down to read a article in the paper, and after the first three words, I swear I know exactly what it’s going to say. I don’t think any of those liberal jerkoffs ever had a new idea in their life.”

The big man with the buzz cut emitted a sound only vaguely like a laugh. It seemed to Jack Liffey that the others treated him like the top dog, and had called him K, so he was probably Perry Krasny. “There’s no reason to get downhearted, my friend. We’ve got clubs all over the country, kids turning to the Bible, taking the pledges. And they’re recruiting other kids. All we have to do is offer some leadership and take them forward a step at a time.”

“I guess you’re closer to all that.”

They droned on. The dog snapped once at what must have been a flying insect, but its head came back to stare fixedly toward Jack Liffey.

In the nearer house, the woman tipped herself forward and abruptly stood on her hands, and the man began to tug the boxers off her. Jack Liffey closed his eyes and tried not to listen too hard to the men on the deck, as they bandied their half-truths, quarter-truths and no-truths about cultural purity and social breakdown across the hot evening. Driving up here, he hadn’t known what he had in mind beyond identifying Krasny’s house and maybe getting a peek at him, and now that he’d had his peek he had even less idea what to do next.

Jack Liffey missed a few exchanges and then Krasny started pontificating again. “Don’t forget who’s the good guys here. No matter what happened with the prob-
lem
. We didn’t mean for it, you know? It’s not like we did something for personal gain. It was just an accident, the prob-
lem
. Now there’s a little more we got to deal with.”

“Aw, man. This is so
fucked up
.”

“Don’t use that language. My kids are right inside.”

Then they spoke softly for a minute, and he couldn’t make out what they said. In the nearer living room, the upside-down woman had spread her legs wide like a scissors and the man leaned forward to put his head between the blades. Jack Liffey lay flat on the dirt and stared out over the canyon, away from the houses, nausea making him feel wretched. He wondered how to get out of there without upsetting the dog and without looking at the lovemaking again.

*

“Woo, that was some talking-to,” Maeve said.

“We be okay.”

They lay in twin beds five feet apart in a dark hot stuffy bedroom, and it was far too early to go to sleep. “I’m glad
you
think so,” Maeve said. “I don’t have to go on living here.”

They had tried to slip in the bedroom window after their escapade, but something had already roused the old women, who had worked each other into a complete tizz searching the house and the neighborhood for them. Ornetta and Maeve had stood side by side in the dining room for the tongue-lashing, and Maeve would have been sent home on the spot except that her father hadn’t answered his telephone.

Then they’d all eaten in grim silence, baked chicken in some thick batter made to seem like fried, and some heady boiled leaves that Maeve had never had before. It hadn’t been the moment to ask what they were. Then the girls had been sent to bed.

“I ain’ sleepy.”

“Me neither. You could tell me a story.”

There was quiet for a moment. “I got one about the bad time after the slave time. This from Ami and it don’t got very much magic in it. You want to hear it?”

“Oh, yes,” Maeve said eagerly.

“You know, this is after the Sybil War. Slave time be over, but Ami say those Robert E. Leegrees just kick they slaves out on the road after Mr. Lincoln say they free.”

A siren wailed along their street in Oakwood. Ornetta touched the charm under her nightie but kept right on going.

“People had to learn to live by bein’ smart,” she said grimly.

Ornetta told of a man named Richmond and his terrible hunger after walking for many days toward the north without food, but Richmond had always been a trickster, even in slave time, and he saw his opportunity at a house where two other freed slaves had been put to work chopping wood. They told him the owner was a fair man and gave a good meal for a day’s work, and his wife was already frying up a huge chicken. So Richmond hired on too, and chopped his cord of wood, and at dinner he told the family that he had a perfect way to divide up their fat hen.

“‘You is good folks in the heart to take us in. This first division be easy to compute. You the master and the head of this fine house and so the head belong to you for sure. Next, you the wife and always right next to the master, so you get the neck, right next to the head. And my two brothers here, they got a long way to go to shake the dust of slavery off they shoes, so they get the two feets to help them out on they journey. And me, I’m just a poor ol’ colored tramp, so I just take the onliest part that’s left.’ And he grabbed it up and jumped out the window and ran.”

Maeve laughed for a while, her belly heaving against the hard bed, and then she started crying a little, she wasn’t sure why.

*

In the end, he had to peek into the house again. Who was it said there were four things that you were a lot better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt? Freckles seemed harmless, he thought. And he was too far away to see them anyway.

“I talked to our pal at Rosewater about him.” The voices drifted across the night.

“It makes me nervous thinking there’s a detective out there heading toward us like a missile.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jack Liffey’s spine prickled, and his eyes came back to the deck where the men sat stewing in their malice, the dog a gunsight aimed straight at him. Rosewater was where his friend Art Castro worked, a big-time detective agency with a classy office in the Bradbury Building downtown, the kind of place where they loaded you up with expensive electronic toys to monitor corporate crime and sent you down to the Minors if you didn’t get results.

“He’s not really a detective. Got no license or nothing. He just hunts for missing kids.”

“Uh-huh. And we know some.”

Too many pennies were dropping at once. Jack Liffey was focused on every word, but lying deep under that attention a wrath rose up in him. He wondered who in Rosewater would finger him for this bunch. There was too much history between himself and Art Castro to figure him for it. He tried to picture the other faces in that posh office suite, room by room, and which of them even knew him by name. That was one trouble with going up against people like this, he thought, Pledge of Honor probably had friends everywhere.

“I’m not a big fan of trying to scare people off. Even if you do, maybe the old coon just hires somebody else. I think, if they’re getting this serious about the prob-
lem
, we got to go to the root, do something about the old coons themselves.”

“I’m not going into darktown while this shitstorm’s on.”

“What could be a better time, Bri? Lots of cover. If his house burns down and somebody shoots him twenty times, it might have been anybody.”

And the dog chose that moment, as if stirred by the talk of a detective, to start to gnar softly.

“What is it, Rex?”

The dog came to the very edge of the deck, at its nearest point to where Jack Liffey crouched maybe thirty yards away. A steady growl emanated from the back of its throat now, eyes boring into the night. There was only a three-foot jump from the deck down to the hillside.

“Must be a skunk.”

“Uh-
uh
. Rex alerts on bigger game.”

He could hear the chairs scrape as the three men stood up, but his eyes were caught on the enraged and trembling dog, as he squatted transfixed behind his bush, like a deer in the headlights.

*

“Ow.” Maeve held out the needle and squeezed a big drop of red-brown blood out of her index finger.

Ornetta took up the needle without hesitation. She poked herself stoically and smiled at the blood that ran quickly down her brown finger. Then they pressed their fingers together.

“Always and forever, we be together, and one for all, all for one.”

Maeve repeated it word for word.

“Now we blood sisters.”

They hugged, careful to keep their bleeding fingers away from their nightclothes.

“That makes Mr. Liffey my daddy too.”

“And you can call him Dad, like me.”

“I guess we best clear it with him first,” she said, realistic in her new kinship. “And Nana your nana, too.”

“What is it, Rex, a prowler?”

Even the crickets seemed to have stilled as all Jack Liffey’s concentration focused on the angry dog eyes across far too little space.

“You strapped, K?”

“There’s a thirty-ought with a night scope in that case.”

It was much too late to be the meter reader. Jack Liffey knew he had to take off running very soon now, but there wasn’t much to be said for trying to sprint back across the empty lot toward his car. The dog would have him in three bounds. He had a chance to get away if he giant-stepped recklessly down the alluvial hillside. Just possibly he could stay ahead of a dog that was fighting its own way down the steep loose turf. But then what?

Unfortunately then-what waited too long.

“
Romp
, Rex!”

The dog was suddenly a blur of action. It hit the dirt below the deck smooth and fast. Jack Liffey had barely stood up and turned on his heel when the dog was on the far side of him, slewing up soil as it came around like a dirt bike.

“
Lash
, Rex!”

The beast froze a few inches from him, growling angrily and steadily.

Lash
, he thought. He hoped to hell it meant Stop in dog.

“Brian, go on in and tell Maureen and the kids to go to her sister’s.”

He chanced a look back at the deck just as the bearded one handed off a rifle to go in the door. The rifle was taken by the quiet one, who he’d only seen as a shoulder, and this one tugged up the bill of a baseball cap, came to the rail, and aimed the bolt-action rifle rather vaguely, a scope sight on top and a big infrared illuminator on the side. The huge man with the buzz cut boosted himself over the railing to hop down to the dirt. He moved pretty nimbly for such a big man. Jack Liffey’s mind thought up tales and discarded them as fast as they came. They would have his wallet in a few seconds anyway and know who he was.