Streets on Fire

by John Shannon

  “Sometime we ought to do a mural tour,” Maeve said. Boyle Heights had been the heart of the great mural revival of the 1970s, and there were scores of them scattered around on mini-markets and park walls.

  “Love to. You feeling any better about what happened, hon?”

  “No.”

  “You probably won’t until you talk to Bradley again and clear the air. That’s the way it usually goes.”

  He could sense her staring at him. “Were you that controlled and forgiving when mom told you what happened?” she asked.

  He sensed an intensity in her and realized this was no casual question. “What you want to know is didn’t I suggest that I might break every bone in his bleep body? Yes, I did.”

  “Dad, I know you love me. You don’t have to prove it by going apeshit.”

  “It’s just what I felt.”

  “It’s patronizing, though. Really. It’s not just that I’m young, is it? It’s that I’m a girl. I’ve got to fight my own battles some, you know.”

  He stole a peek. “Maybe if I’d seen you more often recently, I wouldn’t be so surprised by this brand-new, all-grown-up Maeve.” He bobbed his head back and forth a little, as if considering something. “So I’ve got to let go a bit, huh?”

  “That’s the ticket. Let me goof up. Let me pick up my own broken china.”

  “Pay your own college fees?” he tried out brightly.

  “Dad!” But he heard her giggle and then suppress it. “You’re impossible. I might even want to kiss a boy, you know?”

  That shut him up for a moment. He knew “dating” was coming soon, and he just hoped he liked the boy when it did. Please, please, not some dull sports-obsessed surfer with that horrible know-nothing suburban mushmouth enunciation and a grudge against everything. Uh, shr, dude man, tha’ss gnarly, fr shr. In his experience, there was simply no accounting for the men women fell for.

  “Or you might want to kiss a girl,” he said.

  “Or kiss a girl,” she agreed.

  “It wouldn’t kill me,” he said. “Whatever you choose.”

  “I haven’t tried girls, but thanks.”

  “Speaking of girls, how did you happen to stay friends with Mary Beth?” That seemed safe. “The only time I remember going out to Claremont to see Uncle Tom was when I was a kid.”

  “Don’t you remember we met them at the Fair in Pomona a few years ago?”

  “Oh,” he said. That explained it. That particular family excursion had come at an extremely low point in his life, after the big layoff, when he’d been tending a friendship with demon rum. He only vaguely remembered the county fair—heat, dust, cotton candy struck to his shirt and some strange agrarian event with teenagers in white shirts kneeling beside sheep with their eyes locked on a stern old man and their hands apparently up the sheep’s asses. It must have been the scotch.

  “We wrote each other for a while, and mom has taken me out there a couple times. Mary Beth and I are good friends.”

  *

  Maeve wasn’t sure exactly why she was lying so hard, but she had to lay the groundwork for the visit, without making her dad suspicious. On the phone Mary Beth had been astonished to hear from her. They had exchanged a grand total of one postcard after the fair, and that was three years past, and there had been exactly zero visits. She caught hold of herself and stopped explaining, figuring Nancy Drew would call it quits about then.

  “Tom was my uncle,” Jack Liffey said. “How does he have a daughter your age?”

  “His wife died, remember? He married again, with a younger woman.”

  “Okay.”

  She could see that he didn’t remember. Her dad had never been very good at relatives, or birthdays, or the names of her friends. He remembered movies, but he never remembered if he’d seen them with her, unless they’d been obvious kid movies. Whereas she remembered who she went with to every single movie, where they sat, what movie house it was, and what they’d done afterward. Her dad’s mental filing cabinet just seemed to index movies under: title—seen it—liked it/hated it. A guy thing, she figured. Their filing systems just worked differently. Women filed everything under people and guys under things. There was no question which was superior, more humanist, but it was probably in the genes.

  “Yoo-hoo, wake up, Dad. Indian Hill Boulevard means Claremont.”

  *

  He was surprised that Maeve had chosen Mary Beth as a friend. From what he’d seen dropping her off and having a quick coffee with the family, Mary Beth was a chubby, brooding, not-very-bright girl a year younger than Maeve. There was no accounting for tastes, he thought, and to be charitable, maybe there were things in the girl he didn’t see. After all, at one point in the fifties he’d probably seemed a pretty somber and anti-social kid himself. He hadn’t been very happy as a boy. He wondered why the human species had to go through so much trouble and pain growing up. Puppies got it right almost every time.

  Amilcar’s former roommate, David Phelps, was in the phone book, and it turned out to be upstairs in a cheap complex toward the larger town of Pomona, the kind of building with a balconied runway past all the doors. Heat radiated off every surface, and a lot of the windows had aluminum foil on them.

  “David Phelps?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Would it matter?”

  He had a big ring in the septum of his nose, spiky hair and a tattoo on the side of his neck that only the highest of turtlenecks would cover: it read AVENGE BAUDELAIRE.

  “It might.”

  “I’ve been hired to find Amilcar Davis, by his parents. My name is Jack Liffey.”

  The young man seemed to relax. “Sure. Come on.”

  Jack Liffey could see the place would take him a while to assimilate. There were books stacked all over the room, and the walls were a solid pastiche of posters, photographs, bits of butcher paper with scribbling on them and what looked like finger paintings.

  “Beer?”

  “No thanks. But cold water would be nice.” It was over 100 outside, and hotter in the baking air inside.

  “Can do.”

  “You have anything to do with that self-destructing art machine out in the quad?” Jack Liffey called toward the kitchen.

  “Harvat’s thing? Not a chance. That dude is the very oldest hat of the middling new hats. Jean Tinguely did all that decades ago. What a bore.”

  While the young man was banging through cupboards, Jack Liffey examined some of the wall sayings.

  THE PRACTICAL IS THE LONGEST DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS.

  EVIL BE THOU MY GOOD: AN UNSATISFACTORY ALTERNATIVE BECAUSE EVERY INVERSION RETAINS THE STRUCTURE OF THE MORAL AXIS.

  There was a Life photo Jack Liffey remembered from the late fifties of fraternity boys cramming themselves into a phone booth, and under it:

  YOU CONSTRUCT ELABORATE RITUALS TO ALLOW YOU TO TOUCH THE BODIES OF OTHER MEN.

  All by itself was a neatly lettered,

  WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO COMPLICATE THE CULTURAL SPACE, TO RENDER CRITICISM AS DIFFICULT AS POSSIBLE.

  He was back, holding out a glass. “That’s the last ice cube. This heat has overdetermined my old fridge.”

  Jack Liffey glanced at the tiny cube. “It deconstructs as I watch.”

  The young man smiled at that, but he didn’t bite. “Sit, please. I’m glad somebody is looking for Ami.”

  “Did you two get along?”

  The young man thought about it for a moment as they sat in noisy burgundy-colored bean bags. His spiked-up hair bobbed whenever he moved. “Yes, like brothers. The college put us together our freshman year, on the theory that grouping all the unusual students would insulate the rest.”

  “You’re unusual?”

  He smiled. “When they asked for hobbies, Mr. Liffey, I said ‘Being very gay.’ I could have said being subversive, too, but gay was fine for drawing their radar.”

  “I’m Jack.”

  “Ami and I got along fine, once I got over my own prejudice.
Not about blacks per se. But I’ve had this sense for a long time that the African American community has special trouble accepting gays. You know, there’s all that working-class macho to deal with, and the street culture, and then they’re already oppressed once, automatically.”

  “How did Amilcar deal with you being gay?”

  “Better than you.”

  “Did I say something?” Jack Liffey was a little taken aback.

  “You reacted when you saw me.”

  “Whoa. Isn’t it a little disingenuous to dress to shock and then be surprised when people are shocked? That nose ring does make you look like Ferdinand the Bull.”

  He laughed quite hard. “That’s the spirit, Jackie. Okay: Ami and I were very different. Maybe that’s why we got along so well. I’m doing cultural studies and he’s history. He wants to be a lawyer”—he gave a shiver of loathing—“probably a senator, and I want to be… oppositional. I think we both learned a lot from each other and respected each other. I grew up in Claremont, so you can imagine how little I knew about the black community before I met Ami. We even double-dated. He and Sherry got a kick out of being with me and Jeff. They were good folks.”

  There was a buzz from the back of the apartment, and he jumped up. “Oops, some art’s cooking. I’ve got to turn it over. Be right back.”

  Jack Liffey watched him swish a bit as he left, probably just twitting his guest. He got up and opened the door to get some air into the hot, heavy room and then studied the wall again. He could feel his shoulders sticking to damp geometric patches of his shirt.

  There was a tall red flocked dog on the floor with a printed notice above it:

  DISPLAYING A KITSCH ITEM AS HIGH ART IS NOT A CRITICAL COMMENT ON THE COMMODIFICATION OF ART BUT A MEANS OF RENDERING THE DISTANCE NECESSARY FOR THAT CRITICISM NULL AND VOID.

  He’d always disliked making fun of kitsch art, because it was making fun of ordinary people and their tastes, but he couldn’t quite discern the attitude here.

  There was a snapshot of a German-looking pub on an uphill cobbled street with the legend CAFÉ VOLTAIRE. Beside it was another of Phelps’ hand-lettered signs: DADA SMASHES THE WORLD, BUT THE PIECES ARE FINE.

  “Aha, Dada.” He was back, bare-chested now. Jack Liffey was relieved there were no nipple-rings. “That’s its birthplace in Zurich—I did a pilgrimage.”

  “I’ve always had a soft spot for avant-gardes, but not a very big one,” Jack Liffey said.

  The young man shrugged. “Without them, you’d still be square dancing and listening to cowboys yodeling.”

  “Fair enough. Were you double-dating when Amilcar had his run-in with the bikers in Fontana?”

  “Oh, yes. I think the whole incident has been overblown though. These Bone Losers are just local morons. They didn’t like seeing me and Jeff together any more than Ami and Sherry.”

  “What actually happened?”

  “Some insults from one of the guys sitting on a Harley with swastikas all over his arms, but they didn’t reckon on a thin black guy with a black belt. Ami got in his face and goaded him into swinging and then flattened him with one punch. The cops came and separated everybody and there was a lot of we’ll-meet-you-later-in-some-dark-alley swaggering. I hear one of the bikers had connections to the Fourth Reich Skinheads. Now those are guys that make your average biker look like a genius. If brains were shoes, they’d be naked all the way to their knees.”

  “Pogo,” Jack Liffey said. The second reference to Pogo in two days.

  “Actually, I think it was his pal Howland Owl. You know, when these Fourth Reich foreskinheads decided to go after prominent blacks in LA they sent bomb threats.” He laughed. “These guys were so out of touch, the only blacks they could think of were Rodney King and some forgotten rap singer. Imagine. Threatening to bomb poor Rodney King. These guys didn’t have a clue. I don’t think the Bone Losers even know where Claremont is.”

  “So you don’t think they had a hand in the disappearance?”

  “Nah. Life is never that obvious. I’d put my money on leprechauns first.”

  “What is your theory?”

  That slowed him right down. “How’s your water doing?”

  “It’s doing fine.”

  “Let’s stand on the balcony. This place is an oven.” They trooped outside. A half-dozen people were lying inert in the pool below or lying on chaises alongside it. Nothing in the world seemed to be moving in the oppressive air. “Okay, don’t overdo this. The weekend before they disappeared, he and Sher went home to South Central. He came back pretty pissed off.”

  “How did his parents feel about Sherry?”

  “Oh, man, they loved her, they had no trouble at all with inter-racial stuff. They’re saints, I mean it. You must have met his dad, a sharecropper’s kid who changed his life through the movement, a pal of John Lewis and Bob Moses. He left SNCC when Stokely started his Black Power stuff and refused to work with whites. Ami’s old man was the kind of guy makes you wonder whether there really is any need for irony in the world. He’s holy.”

  Something was still unsaid. “So?”

  “Amilcar came back pretty upset Sunday night. All he told me was, there’s some folks worse than the Nazis.”

  “Do you think it was Umoja? Reverse racism?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t know his old homies. He’d sure run into something.”

  “Did he have anything to do with drugs?”

  David Phelps turned and glared at him. “Man, you’ve got the wrong idea. Everybody’s got something to do with drugs, but if you think he was the big mule for the Crips out here in Claremont, you’re crazy. He didn’t touch anything beyond a little weed, like everybody else.”

  “I had to ask.”

  “He was more political than drugged up. Do you know who his namesake was?”

  “Amilcar Cabral? The African revolutionary. Probably his mom’s idea.”

  “Uh-huh. From Guinea-Bissau. Luckily Cabral died young so he didn’t have to see his name tarnished by later events. Look just inside the door, it’s a poster Ami gave me.”

  Jack Liffey stepped back into the blast of heat, and on a stub wall dividing the living room from a dining area there was a poster of a young African in guerrilla getup, with the legend:

  TELL NO LIES. CLAIM NO EASY VICTORIES!

  —AMILCAR CABRAL

  “I don’t know what happened, Jackie. I can’t imagine somebody driving out here from LA to get Ami and Sherry, but something did happen in LA that weekend. That’s all I know.”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  He gave the young man his card. Thankfully, he still had a few of the old ones from before Marlena had printed them up with the big eyeball on them.

  “If you do find him, man, give him a big kiss for me. But no tongue.”

  *

  The children huddled up close on the rec room sofa and he hugged one with each arm, immensely grateful that God had blessed him at his age. He had married late, choosing decent, quiet, loving and acquiescent Kelly Wade, almost twenty years younger than he was. She had borne him the decent family he knew he needed to ride out a lot of bad memories of Vietnam and two bad marriages. The commercial was still on so he opened his mouth and bellowed out:

  In the eyes of a ranger,

  The unsuspected stranger

  Had better know the truth of wrong from right,

  ‘Cause the eyes of a ranger are upon you,

  Anything you do, he’s gonna see.

  When you’re in Texas, look behind you…

  The kids perked up and joined in.

  ‘Cause that’s where the ranger’s gonna be.

  “Cool, Daddy.”

  And there they were, Cordell Walker and his loyal pal Jimmy Trivette, walking into a laundromat for some reason. It was a rerun but he couldn’t remember the plot. Somehow he’d gone into lecture mode and he couldn’t stop himself. “See how good they work together when they’re decent and Christian? It doesn’t matter they’re
different races. One to one, it’s like that. An African American and a normal American can be partners and respect each other. It’s only in groups people start whining and go bad.”

  “Uh-huh, daddy,” Ginny said, but her eyes were on the set, where Chuck Norris was high-kicking an evil-looking Latino in the face.

  “Perry.” His wife stood in the doorway, and his irritation flashed for a moment.

  “What is it? You know this is my favorite show.”

  “I’m sorry, dear. There’s a phone.”

  He picked up the cordless on the end table.

  “Yeah?”

  “K?”

  “Uh-huh.” He went very still inside, the TV flashing right out of existence, as still as he had gone on long-range reconnaissance patrols thirty years earlier, at the point of balance, ready to move.

  “The guy’s hired somebody, a detective.”

  “Is he heading our way?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Thanks. Keep me posted.” He hung up and set the phone down thoughtfully.

  “I’m really sorry, dear. He sounded insistent.”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “I mean, you know I wouldn’t cut in on—”

  “It’s okay, Kelly, okay.”

  “Daddy, he’s hurting the Mescan.”

  “The Mexican must deserve it,” he said absently. “Walker only hurts bad guys.”

  FIVE

  Can You See More Clearly From There?