Streets on Fire (22 page)

What was left of the Concord tumbled side over side one more full revolution and then hit roof first with a dull final crump against the culvert, trembled a little in a death throe and fell back into the shallow basin below the road. It sat in suspense for a few moments, shining nobly from within, and then fire licked upward from the torn rear quarter. Not an explosion, but a steady increase until flames shot forty or fifty feet in the air, lighting up the hillside. He saw one sad torn door lying short of the burning hulk, a door he had spent some time hunting down in find-it-yourself junk yards. There were probably a few other random pieces of Wisconsin engineering up and down the ravine.

Rest in peace, my old friend, he thought sadly.

*

Maeve could tell by the smaller girl’s breathing that she had fallen off to sleep. They were only a few inches apart in the bed, and she could feel the girl’s heat. It was unbearably distressing for her to imagine Ornetta lost in that big threatening world of New York, so she imagined her instead sitting cross-legged and bright-eyed in a green park, recounting for even smaller girls the tale she had just told Maeve, of Abba-Zabba and the Thieves. She wondered what it was that gave some people such resilience that they remained kind and cheerful, while so many others, exposed to the same abuse and loss, turned mean.

That was what it was, she thought—why she was drawn to Ornetta so much more than to Mary Beth. There was so much to learn from Ornetta, who took into her heart what she had to from the big mess around her, transformed it into something magical and endured the rest with courage and grace.

Then she remembered something her dad had told her once, a flash of gruff wisdom from his own father, he had said. She had always retained the words, even the tone of voice he had used, and now she knew just what the words meant. She had been asking him idly about how you decided the really big things in life whenever you came to one of those crossroads. He had spoken in a slightly different voice, probably a mannerism of his own father’s that he attached unconsciously to the words.
Always pick the path where you can see farther
, he had said.

The glare from his burning car had lit up the small bowl of hills like a stage with the players about to enter, and luckily enough they had indeed come hurrying in from the wings. A couple of good Samaritans in an old Jaguar had stopped within minutes of the crash to see if anyone was lying hurt near the wreck. Not long after that a pumper and a fire rescue truck had wailed up, with a half dozen firemen jumping out to drench the burning car and the brush around it with two small hoses. They were soon joined by a big Highway Patrol cruiser and a Sheriff’s car. Two more sedans parked off the road, and before long a whole crowd was combing the roadside where the ravine fanned out into a small floodplain near the road. He didn’t see any of the men of Gideon’s 300.

Jack Liffey considered playing the wounded driver and staggering out of the brush to let them whisk him away in an ambulance. But there would have been too many questions to answer, and the people in the house up the hill would have simply denied everything. So he stayed in a crouch behind a big bush, with emergency radios crackling on the hot dry air and crisp nearby voices calling out for wounded survivors. One radio was so clear he could make out every word. A dispatcher was urging the firemen to hurry up so they could get the trucks back on call—everybody else was down in LA, lending a hand with a hundred separate storefront fires. Apparently the rioting was beginning to rival 1992 uprising.

Voices called out, fussed about the skunk smell on the air, queried each other, joked awkwardly; then a phalanx of volunteers responded in concert to the deputy’s instructions and started a slow uphill sweep. Jack Liffey crept back to a much denser clump of shrubbery.

He burrowed into a small sumac, where a freshly fractured bough looked like it had taken a shot from his car, and he noticed a glint of metal on the ground, a shiny oblong. He felt a pang when he recognized the flat paddle as the recessed door handle of his car. It had ripped away clean. He bent down, picked up the token and tucked it into his shirt pocket, more sentimental about the old car than he had realized. After all, he excused himself, the old Concord had given its life so that he might live.

As he heard the search draw near him, Jack Liffey crashed about a bit and came out of the sumac. “Nothing in there,” he announced matter-of-factly, “except a dead skunk.
Damn
.”

A square-jawed man in a sheriff’s hat looked a little startled, then sniffed him out.

“Sorry if I drifted into your bailiwick,” Jack Liffey said. “I’ll try over to the side there.”

“You do that, friend.
Well
to the side.”

Then he was up the embankment and walking down the road, as if heading for one of the parked cars. There was no sign of the enemy. He turned a bend and saw that it was only a mile or so down to the first lights of civilization. He picked up the pace, still a little worried that one of Krasney’s boys might drive up behind at any moment, and realized just how weary the night had left him. Fear and tension did that to you. With a sharp, sudden stab, thoughts of Marlena reappeared all at once. He hadn’t thought about her for hours.

The image of her with another man dropped on him with a vengeance and immediately hollowed out his sense of well-being at the narrow escape. He came to a dead stop for a moment, feeling sick to his stomach again, and then pushed himself on. He could feel the last of his elation collapsing, and he did what he could with it, throwing his head back and reciting aloud what he recalled of Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” the only poem he had ever memorized.

“…And mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,

And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

The dirt alongside the road turned into a paved sidewalk as civilization drew nearer, but the gloom wouldn’t leave him. It wasn’t really her affair that ate at him. He could and would get past that if Marlena came back.
If
.

The shock of loss seemed to have changed utterly how he felt about her—stunning him like the high-amperage jolt off a power tool. It demolished in one instant all of his ambivalence, to leave his own cravings stumbling around in a haze of tenderness for her big promiscuous heart. He had an overpowering urge to make it all work out, but he was powerless. It was not up to him.

He glanced around at the hillside against the velvety moonless sky, feeling as lost and helpless as a newborn. It was the defined horizons that were gone, Jack Liffey thought, the sense that he existed at the center of a small, secure, comprehensible world with love in it. When that was gone, all you had left was a kind of agitation, a desperation to find something solid. He walked with his eyes closed for a moment, lurching when one foot went off the sidewalk.

He yawned uncontrollably and realized how deeply exhausted he had become; his thoughts had become nearly incoherent. He passed the first outlying houses of a subdivision that crowded up to a concrete block wall. The wall ran ahead to a big, bright, empty cross street. The windows of the houses were all dark and brooding. He could barely keep his eyes open.

At low points in his life, driving through unaccustomed towns or along unfamiliar streets, he had often imagined himself penniless and homeless and thought,
There
, that would be a good place to crash for the night, a refuge where he could store up whatever discarded food he could gather from Dumpsters and live for a few months: protected from the elements, out of sight, unlikely to impinge on other lives and draw notice. He felt the tug of such a place now, a hollow between a bus shelter and the block wall, protected by some overgrown ivy and shin-high wild geraniums. The summer night air was still blood hot and his resistance to the call of sleep melted away.

Jack Liffey slipped behind the bus shelter and lowered himself slowly into the ivy, crunching and crackling. His horizon collapsed to little more than a ragged line of geraniums surrounding him, and then even that tiny world winked out.

*

“Girls, rise an’ shine for breakfas’. Sleepyheads don’t catch no trains.”

Maeve opened her eyes and wondered what trains Ornetta’s aunt was talking about, but then she decided it was just an expression.

“Skip the train. We can catch the jet plane a little later on,” she whispered, and Ornetta giggled.

Maeve and Ornetta talked for a while, recounting their dreams.

“Little gals, let’s get our bottoms wigglin’.”

“We up, Aunt.”

They got out of bed and dressed. The tongue-lashing of the night before seemed to have evaporated as completely as their dreams, and the whole bustling household was bright and amiable for breakfast. Maeve was pleased. In most of the families she’d known, there would have been a good half hour of harrumphing and recrimination in the morning, and an apology of some kind would have been expected from the kids.

“Your daddy doesn’t answer his phone, honey, and we have to get home to Bancroft while we can. Curfew starts again at noon. What do you want to do?”

“I can just take the bus home.” She was not about to suggest her other home, with her mother and Brad.

Ornetta’s grandmother smiled mildly. “I really don’t think there are going to be any buses running today. And I couldn’t let you go off by yourself. I’d never forgive myself if something happened to such a sweet girl.”

“I’ll come with you then. Dad probably got up early to do something about his job. He usually does find the people he looks for, you know. He’s really good at it.”

“That’s good to know. I guess you’d better come home with us, then.”

*

He dreamt of space aliens creeping up on him with big sparkly ray guns, filling him with dread and then awoke with the sun catching him from just over the houses, low in the southeast. He was sore all over, and it took him a moment to shake the vivid busy guilt-ridden dreams and remember where he was.
Skunk
, he thought. Why hadn’t he dreamt of skunk? The smell was still overpowering.
Marlena
. That was overpowering, too.

There was a Quicki-mart across the street, and it was lucky he carried a spare twenty in his pocket for emergencies. He bought every roll of paper towels and every six-ounce can of tomato juice they had in the cooler from a reluctant olive-skinned clerk who stood back at arms’ length to take his money. Behind the store he opened the little cans, one after another, and rubbed the juice into his trousers and legs. He’d read about bathing dogs in tomato juice to neutralize the skunk smell, and it seemed to be working. Luckily they were charcoal colored slacks and the residue didn’t show too badly when he wiped himself down with paper towels. It made him look like a wino, but it did take care of most of the stench, leaving him smelling like spaghetti Bolognaise.

Back outside, he saw that his bus bench had been taken over by a raggedy woman who was wearing too many layers of clothing and tending a shopping cart chock full of random stuff. He was wary of striking up a conversation, but she smiled pleasantly when he sat down and asked him if that bus went to Idaho.

“I really doubt it,” he said. Of course, just about every bus line in the country connected ultimately with every other one. That was the theory he was operating on, anyway, though getting to the Westside might not turn out to be much easier than Idaho. He’d have to ask the driver how many changes it would entail.

“No skin off,” the woman said agreeably. “They don’t like me there, anyhow.”

“Where are you trying to go?”

“Do you hear?” she asked suddenly, cocking her head.

He listened, but there didn’t seem to be anything unusual on the air, just distant traffic noise from the freeway and a few birds twittering. “What?”

“That buzz.”

He looked for power lines or anything that might be responsible for a buzz. He couldn’t see anything and he couldn’t hear it.

“That’s the sound of people changing their minds,” she explained.

“Ah.” He nodded. Actually, it was the sound of schizophrenia, he thought sadly. How diabolically clever the country had been to close down the asylums and turn all the voice-hearers and tinfoil-hat wearers out onto the streets with referrals to local outpatient clinics, and then just not build the local clinics. What a great con trick, a real swindle on the weakest among us, he thought. And, as usual, in the richest country on earth, no one seemed particularly interested in rectifying a problem that only affected those who didn’t vote. On the plus side, he decided, if you absolutely had to find a plus side, it was a kind of gift of event-filled freedom to people who were well equipped to turn it into a fabulous personal narrative.

“They land up there every night,” she said breathlessly, nodding to the very hills where he had landed the night before. He didn’t really want to know who
they
were.

*

“Genny, hon, listen to this!” Aunt Taffeta fiddled with the knob of the old tube radio on the kitchen table, but she’d lost the station.

“What was it?”

“Turn on the TV, quick. They done took away that Ab-dullah—you know, the baseball man—in a amble-ance.”

Genesee Thigpen went alert suddenly where she sat. “I already told Ban we were on the way. I hope it’s not some-thing bad.”

*

He was the sole passenger on the MTA bus. At first he had sat half way back, but he’d found his mind going into overdrive writing a letter to Marlena. It had been a letter full of self-recrimination and pleas for another chance, touching on every single occasion he could recall in which he had not attended tenaciously enough to her wishes. Since he couldn’t actually write the letter down, the exact text plagued him like a cold sore taunting his tongue, and he went over and over the wording until he decided he had to do something else with what mental energy he had or he would go nuts and start hearing people changing their minds.

He had then moved forward to the seat nearest the driver, diagonally across the aisle, facing the big
PLEASE REFRAIN FROM TALKING TO THE DRIVER WHEN THE BUS IS IN MOTION
sign, which they had both been ignoring for a while now. She was short but very strong looking and wore a British bush jacket with all the pockets. When he’d mentioned coming down out of Simi, something about her reaction had suggested she didn’t like the place much, and they’d struck up a conversation that had taken itself off into the realm of racists and homophobes.