Streets on Fire (23 page)

“Look, there’s no point being coy here,” she said when she seemed to decide she could trust him. “I’m gay. I’ve got pretty strong feelings about any place where the words
family values
really mean a bunch of mental defectives want to beat me senseless.”

He laughed. “You look like you can hold your own.”

“How do you think I got this way? I take tae kwon do. When the Sex Nazis come to my door, I’m going to take at least one of them with me.”

“You ever hear of Gideon’s 300? Pledge of Honor?”

“Naw. I don’t take much interest in what those people call theirselves.”

“These guys don’t like you much and they don’t like blacks,” he said. “Last night they blew up my car. And today they’re promising to kill an African American who’s a friend of mine.”

It hadn’t taken him long, once his doleful self-absorption had wound down a bit, to recall the threat to Bancroft Davis. He realized he had to warn the old man and, if possible, get him away from the Brighton house where the Krasny legions could put their hands on him all too easily. He’d tried to phone from the first bus stop and got the same peculiar honking tone he’d heard after the ’94 earthquake when everyone in the Eastern United States had phoned LA to see how their friends and relatives were doing and had jammed the circuits for days. He wasn’t too worried about connecting up with Maeve, she’d be okay in Venice, but Bancroft Davis was an old man who was all by himself in a small house while a handful of gun-toting fanatics were planning to take him out. For some reason, his head bobbed a little as he suffered a vivid sense-memory of his flaming car thudding down.

“You serious?”

“I need to get into LA to warn the man.”

“You may not get much past Van Nuys on the bus this morning. I don’t think anything’s running into LA It’s like ’92. The freeway’s open, but only because it’s an interstate. They say the cops got all the offramps blocked so you got to go right on through to Orange County or more.”

That might just keep Gideon’s 300 out of town, too, he thought, but he couldn’t count on it. It was a big town, and everybody had a secret shortcut somewhere.

“Got any suggestions? I’ve got to get there.”

“We could commandeer the bus and crash the barricades, but I don’t really recommend it.”

“It’s a thought.”

She ground to a stop at the curb just past a busy intersection. An old man on the bus bench shook his head, and she shrugged and started up again. “Do you have any idea how bored I get? Even the flakes that get on and torment you break down to the same half dozen types, over and over. I could use some standing up for what’s right. You’re for real, huh?”

“I know it sounds strange.” He decided to take a flier. “The guy I’m talking about is named Bancroft Davis. He was a well-known civil rights leader.”

“I don’t know the name, but I’m going to take a tiny chance on you.” She pulled the bus over to the curb at a fast-food shop and yanked the brake. “Come on.”

She went straight to a pay phone. “Babs, this is Toni. You always liked
Wonder Woman
. Well, I got your chance for you at last.”

*

“Have you tried the cops?” Babs asked him.

Jack Liffey shook his head. “First off, who’s to say they’d believe me? Second, I bet they don’t have anybody extra to spare right now to guard a single old man.”

Babs had been waiting for the bus at Sepulveda and Victory, parked in the lot of a coffee shop in a rusty little Geo Metro. She offered an absolutely astonishing resemblance to Veronica Lake, tall and willowy with long platinum hair. It was ironic, he thought, that of the roommates, Antonia was about five-three and drove a giant MTA bus, and Barbara was at least five-ten and had to jackknife herself into a Geo Metro. She turned out to be a junior high English teacher. She had heard of Bancroft and was gung-ho to help.

“You’re probably right about the cops being preoccupied. The reason I’m off today is they shut all the city schools. With the busing, even up here a lot of our kids come from the curfew zone.”

“Curfew zone?”

“You been out of touch, I’ll bet. The borders are the 10 freeway on the north, the 405 on the west and south and the 710 in the east.”

“That’s a lot of area to shut down. That’s the whole middle of the basin.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why did things suddenly turn so much worse?”

“You
have
been out of touch. Abdullah Ibrahim died this morning.”

“Oh, Jesus. Not another visit from the cops?”

“An ambulance was called to his home to get him. That’s all we know so far.”

“Is there looting yet?”

“According to the radio, the curfew is just preemptive. But I think it’s worse.”

“Can we get into the curfew area at all?” He might have to rethink his mercy mission if a full-bore riot was on.

“The town’s not really shut up tight yet. It’ll take a while to sink in, but the freeways are locked up.”

“Laurel Canyon? Beverly Glen?”

“I bet they’re both backed up solid.” She smiled. “But I know a route. Let’s
do
this thing.”

“You’re Wonder Woman,” he said. “I’m just Tonto.”

“Now
that’s
a mixed metaphor.” She backed out of the slot in the parking lot with a jerk of the clutch.

“Actually, it isn’t a metaphor at all,” he said, “but who am I to contradict an English teacher?”

“You’re even literate. Where on earth did Tony find you?”

“At the bus stop, of course.”

She laughed. “Of course. Let’s
ride
, Tonto.”

“Ever been over on this route, Tonto?”

“I think I prefer Jack,” he told her. She had wrenched the little car through a number of inexpert maneuvers above Ventura Boulevard until they ended up on a street called Woodcliff, and the Metro was now winding up the Santa Monica Mountains, still on the Valley side, past plain-looking tract houses, the more expensive cliffhangers thumbing their noses from farther up.

“And I’m Babs, but I really am into the Wonder Woman thing. I’ve collected the comics and memorabilia for years.”

He had a lot on his mind and he wasn’t really in a chatty mood. He looked at his watch. The crystal was shattered and the hands had stopped somewhere in the early a.m. He tried to remember how it had got that way, and all he could recall was hitting the dirt pretty hard just before his car tumbled past overhead. It was only a Timex, but he had a feeling that the fates were piecemeal stripping away everything he possessed. Soon he would be as naked, pink and propertyless as a newborn, sitting out there squalling on the highway just as an acid rain started up.

“This road goes up to Mulholland, and then you jog over a bit and find Roscomare to take you down into Bel Air. I used to do a lot of subbing, and if I had to get over the hill at rush hour, this would work better than anything else.”

“Everybody in town’s got a secret route or two,” he said.

She ground the gears whenever she had to downshift for the curves. “I guess LA’s that kind of town,” she said.

“What time is it?”

“Almost noon,” she said.

She dropped two gears going around a tight turn and his head jogged hard when second took hold, but he still decided not to offer to take the controls. He glanced at the watch again, a reflex. It was still broken.

“There are problems with the early Wonder Woman,” Babs said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “But she was strong and smart and self-sufficient, and she stood up for women.”

“Is that a problem?”

“No no no, not that. But she did have some pretty dainty friends. Etta Candy was her best girlfriend. She was addicted to eating sweets all the time and saying things like
woo-woo
a lot.”

He thought about it. “Woo-woo. What an innocent era.”

She shrugged. “Hold on. In the fifties this creepy Freudian psychologist Dr. Wertham came along and launched a national crusade against Wonder Woman. She was a castrating woman, he said. Unnatural. Obviously a man-hating lesbian. He went after Batman and Robin, too; they were obviously queers. The result was the horrible Comics Code. Diana Prince, Wonder Woman’s real name, had to surrender her Amazon powers and run a dress boutique, if you can believe it. Thank God for the women’s movement. They brought the real Wonder Woman back in the seventies.”

“It was a pretty bad time, all that Cold War hysteria to be just like the neighbors,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“Every time I hear somebody waxing nostalgic about the fifties, I think of what it must have been like to be black or a political dissident.”

“Or a woman,” she added. “Think of all those poor actresses who had to play ditzoids their whole careers. Needless to say, lesbians didn’t even exist.”

Speaking of the Cold War, he thought—noticing just then an old air raid siren over the hill ahead. The Metro putt-putted over the top at Mulholland and they were on the LA side of the hills now, passing the siren on its pole, sad brown paint peeling off its little conical hat. The old sirens hadn’t been fired up for twenty or thirty years; they just waited there, dead and forgotten, all over the city. He’d grown up with the ones near his San Pedro school detonating with a rising scream at precisely ten a.m. on the last Friday of every month. And then there were the teachers unexpectedly yelling “Drop!” into submissive classrooms. People talked about the trauma of all that atomic fear, but nobody he knew had taken it very seriously. How often could kids get worked up about adults crying “Wolf!”?

“Did you have drop drills?”

“I’m too young. And I was back east, where they used to call it Duck and Cover: put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye.”

He chuckled. “The Cold War was pretty funny, given enough perspective. I remember when the Cincinnati Reds had to change their name to the Redlegs. I wonder why people were so damned
frightened
of things that were different. Still are. This country is about as rich and powerful as it can get. What on earth do they think is going to go wrong if some people somewhere worship Allah or two women live together?”

“Thanks for that one. I don’t know either.”

Coming down the south flank of the mountains, there were a few turns where they had a good view out over the city. Three or four massive vertical plumes of black smoke rose into mushrooms like votive offerings, a familiar sight now.

He was going to need a car, so he had her drive him to his friend Chris Johnson’s place in West Hollywood, where he knew there was an old VW up on blocks. As soon as Johnson’s parole officer had let him off the hook for his phone hacking conviction, he had bought a T-1 line and launched an internet nursery business called greenthumb.com, whereupon he’d stored his old car and taken to driving around in a big beat-up Ford three-quarter ton.

On the way up the cracked walk to Chris’s door, they could hear the popping of distant gunfire and a number of sirens heading off on missions. As they waited by the door, neither mentioned the commotion, as if they’d lived for years in Beirut.

“Hi, Chris. This is Babs.”

They were both a little stunned by the room. Where Jack Liffey remembered a welter of electronics and computer monitors there were now hundreds of little plastic pots with house plants in them. The air smelled like wet mulch.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said.

“You always seem to live your work,” Jack Liffey said. “What does Dot think of all this?”

“You should see her place. She has the tropicals. Most of the business is drop-ship, which means other people do the storage and shipping for us, but I like to keep my hand in with some of the local deliveries.” He sniffed. “Nice pants, dude. Want some parmesan?”

“I had a run-in with a big tomato.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s this one called?” Jack Liffey pointed to a row of what looked like frozen green flames, about a foot tall.

“That’s a sansevieria, snake plant. It’s actually a succulent and it’ll survive almost any sort of neglect.”

“I know the wild plants out on the chaparral, like sagebrush and creosote bush and buckwheat. Knowing house plants is a little too much like cooking quiche.”

“Just not a houseplant kinda guy.”

“I need to make a phone call rather badly. Down into South Central. Is there any way you can get me through that strange busy signal?”

“So you want me to violate my parole and hack into the phone system so you can share smoochies with Maeve?”

“Something like that.”

Johnson frowned at him. “You would. Unfortunately I can’t. The circuits got overloaded early this morning and they all went blooey.
Blooey
: That’s a technical term in the phone biz, Jack. The cell networks are down too. I’d like to help you, but you just can’t comb a hairy ball smooth. That’s another technical expression.”

“If anyone can get technical, you can.”

Chris Johnson expressed his regrets at the demise of the Concord, and they trooped out to the backyard where a big rounded hump under a tarp sat beside the driveway, up on four concrete blocks. The rest of the yard was jammed with more potted plants, some of them under a gauzy net that cut down the sun. “You’re welcome to take Mr. Volks on approval, but you’ll have to put him back together. I had a guy drain the gas, and pull the carb and plugs and battery when I stored it. I know the theory of how it goes together, but I don’t work on cars. You’re always in some uncomfortable position and you always seem to need some tool you don’t have.”

“I’m not sure I could do it,” Jack Liffey said. He turned to Babs. “Know anything about working on cars?”

“You kidding?” she said.

“Just hoped.”

“I know VWs from the outside,” she said. “I mean, I can tell you the year. My family had a string of them.”

“That’ll be useful if we have to go on
Jeopardy
!” They had assembled around the car, and she lifted the tarp like a coroner trying to establish the cause of death.

“’62,” she said right away.

“How can you tell?”

“Tailights are bigger than the tiny little oval ones, but smaller than the later fat ones. Door handles still have the big square button instead of the trigger. The ’63 had a crease in the engine cover for a bigger engine. This is still a twelve hundred engine. They made so few changes every year that it doesn’t take much to date a Beetle.”