Streets on Fire

by John Shannon

  A cheap old transistor radio was fizzing softly on a side table, and the man bowed for a moment to put his ear near it and then came upright.

  “Kidogo is out right now, but he’ll be back shortly. I assume it is he you wish to meet.”

  “It is he,” Jack Liffey repeated.

  The man smiled. “I have a doctorate—in what we used to call Black Studies, from the University of Michigan,” Mwalimu wa Weusi said.

  “Then you probably knew Amilcar’s mother in Ann Arbor.”

  “Oh, yes. Even though we were on opposing sides of a very old dispute. We had one common point, in both claiming W.E.B. Dubois. Beyond that, Ms. Thigpen always put the working class and the writings of a dead German Jew ahead of her people.”

  “I’m not sure you can call Karl Marx Jewish.”

  He shrugged. “Race is always a bit of an artifical construct, isn’t it? Obviously I have European blood, too, but this country sees me as African American completely and forever. As long as they do, I haven’t much choice.”

  Which deftly avoided the issue of anti-Semitism, Jack Liffey thought.

  “You will admit it’s curious that Amilcar’s family chose to send a white man to investigate his son’s disappearance,” Mwalimu wa Weusi added.

  “I caught the case from an African American detective. He punted when it looked like he might have to interview some neo-Nazis out in the Inland Empire.”

  “Did you get along well with them?”

  Jack Liffey smiled. “I don’t think I’d like them any more than you would, but the trail seemed to lead more in this direction. Reports suggest that Amilcar and his girlfriend had a bad experience right here in LA the weekend before they disappeared.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. Perhaps Kidogo can help you.” He raised a finger for silence and then dipped his head again to the radio.

  “Not yet,” he said, after a moment, sitting back up with a grave look. “Abdullah Ibrahim is about to give a press conference,” he explained.

  “Is he one of yours?”

  “He’s NOI, but we honor him. He made his fortune but he didn’t move out to Malibu to swim with movie stars.”

  “NOI?”

  “Nation of Islam.”

  “Ah, of course. Did they ever adopt orthodox Islam? I can’t remember.”

  “After Elijah Muhammad died, his son Walid moved them in that direction, but Farrakhan won the internal struggle and took them back to that inventive tale of the evil scientist Yakub who conjured up the white race by accident. I believe Farrakhan reports that this all took place after he visited Elijah on a flying saucer.”

  He didn’t crack a smile and Jack Liffey couldn’t work out his attitude. They sat in silence for a moment. Generally silence did not make Jack Liffey uncomfortable—it provided a nice edge when he was questioning people—but this time it did. “Tell me about gangsta rap,” he inquired. “I saw your sign out front.”

  “Whatever the sign says, I would defend it in the white media. But just between us I think it’s obscene nihilism. Glorifying a thug life. There’s something quite abhorrent about watching a people dance to their own degradation, all for the profit of white music executives.”

  “A lot of young people seem to respond to it.”

  “Yes, the white press always argues that the gangsta images are simply holding up a mirror to reality. But a drowning man doesn’t need a mirror. He needs a hand, a way out, a swimming lesson.”

  The answer was so studied that Jack Liffey guessed it was part of a canned response he had given often.

  “We have to get our own community together before we can meet the world on its own terms. Once we do, we can define our own interests for ourselves and offer our own cultural truths to the world. African Americans have been behind just about every great form of art this country has produced—jazz, blues, rock.”

  “Not cinema,” Jack Liffey offered. “The Jews did that.”

  Their eyes met and he thought he sensed a spark of amusement. “Yes, they did,” the Mwalimu conceded. “And as a people, the Jews have suffered greatly over a long period of time. Pogroms, the Holocaust—we appreciate all that, but we are no longer in a period when alliances are of much value to us. We are about self-reliance now.”

  “More power to you,” Jack Liffey said. “But I’d like to share jazz, if you don’t mind, even if the Irish seem stuck with Riverdance.”

  *

  Maeve Liffey sat on a folding Samsonite chair in the middle of the living room with a big fat rope tied around her waist. It looked like the kind of rope they used to moor ocean liners, and it had about thirty feet of slack wending across the floor to where the other end was tied around the toilet in the bathroom. It had taken two of the overmuscled bikers to cinch up the knot against her belly so she had no illusions about working it free in some moment of opportunity.

  “So you looked in the window and you liked what you saw?”

  It was the huge one who’d hauled her inside, whose name she’d heard as Lunchmeat. A skinnier and fiercer one nicknamed Greek sat in a beanbag facing her. He had the word UNEMPLOYABLE tattooed across his forehead, with a swastika under it.

  The initial panic had almost made her faint as she’d tried to dig in her heels outside, but Lunchmeat had lifted her off the ground with one hand and carried her inside like a tote bag. Her panic had now given way to a kind of frantic calculation of possibilities. It was hard to discern what went on in their heads. She felt like a dog in a room full of humans, trying desperately to read their unspoken intentions.

  “No, I don’t,” she said.

  “You don’t like us?” big Lunchmeat said, with mock wounded vanity.

  The TV was blaring away in the background, identical twin women bragging about how they had fooled their husbands and swapped beds at will. The husbands were much less cheerful about it, and the big security guards restraining the husbands looked a lot like the bikers.

  “What’s your name?” Lunchmeat asked.

  “Nancy.”

  “Nancy what?”

  “Drew.”

  Lunchmeat bulked over her and bent way forward sniffing at her hair. He had the reek of an old ashtray.

  “Don’t little girls smell nice. Ain’t even no perfume to it. Greek, come smell her.”

  The thinner one launched himself toward her and buried his face in her lap. She went rigid as he nuzzled where he shouldn’t, and a chill taking her whole body.

  He pushed back up off her knees. “Ain’t like no woman yet, not even a little bitty can of tuna fish. You peeking in our window to work out what fucking a bunch of us is gonna feel like?”

  “No!” She realized she’d better come up with something plausible fast.

  Lunchmeat took a fistful of her hair and sniffed it some more. “Nice. Umm.”

  “You know,” Greek said, “you come into our place, we can do what we want with you. It’s the law.”

  “It is not.”

  “Course it is. We talked about it back in social studies in high school. Guy breaks into your place, you can shoot him. I remember one ignoramus asks, ‘What if the guy’s only half in the window?’ and the teacher goes, ‘Just shoot the inside half.’” He guffawed.

  “That’s not true.”

  “So we get to do what we want with you and then shoot you. No point wasting it, huh, girl?” When she let herself look at him she could see he was eyeing her breasts. She was mortified that she’d worn the sexy lacy bra that she had sneaked out to buy when her mom was busy.

  “I didn’t break in,” she insisted.

  “You’re in now.”

  “What you after if it ain’t a good time?” Lunchmeat asked.

  There was nothing to lose now, she thought. “I thought you might be holding Amilcar Davis for ransom.”

  “Milk-car?” Lunchmeat said quizzically.

  There was some sort of outburst on TV and a guy across the room hollered, “Look at that! Motherfuck!” but no one was paying
attention.

  She could see understanding dawning on Greek.

  “She’s talking about that nigger who was double-dating with the queers.”

  “Man, one of those guys must have been personally related to the President,” Lunchmeat said.

  “He means the cops been here three fuckin’ times already, pussy, even the Feds.”

  “There’s a big reward,” she improvised. She almost went for a million but thought it was probably over the top. “A hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Fuckin A,” Lunchmeat said. “For that, I’ll turn my own ass in,”

  “Too bad we ain’t got him.”

  “If you aren’t holding him, I was mistaken,” she said, in a brave stab at normality. “I’m really sorry. You can just let me go and I’ll forget it and look somewhere else.”

  “What’re you worth?”

  “My dad’s poor,” she said quickly. “He’s laid off.”

  Lunchmeat had moved around in front of her but she saw his keen interest collapse, as if he’d just pawed through the stolen wallet and found only a few singles. Wouldn’t a rich girl say the same thing? Maeve thought. This guy was really not very bright.

  “Then we got to have some fun with you,” Greek said. “Cash or gash, that’s the rule.”

  *

  He’d imagined Kidogo showing up in his own set of multi-colored robes, but in fact he dribbled his way into the office nonchalantly in a purple Laker suit that was soaked through as if he’d been playing all afternoon. He fit the costume. He was thin and at least six-nine, and the ball kept rapping down on the floor like a finger hammering on the same bruise.

  “Habari gani?” the Mwalimu greeted him.

  “Mzuri sana. ’Sup? I heard you wanted to see me.”

  “Amilcar’s father asked us to talk to this man. His name is Jack Liffey and he’s looking for Amilcar.”

  The young man’s eyes didn’t come around, but he nodded. “Anything for the man Ban. Let’s go out in the court, white person. ’Stoo hot here.”

  Jack Liffey followed him along the hallway, Kidogo dribbling slowly all the way, and out into a small asphalt yard, just big enough for a half-court, with a hoop set above a blank wall. At least it was marginally cooler here. The young man kept his eyes averted, and Jack Liffey reflected that diffidence and homicidal hatred could look a lot alike.

  “How’s your basketball skills?” the young man asked.

  “Just south of nonexistent.”

  The young man sent him a no-look one-bounce pass, a little harder than necessary. “If you can put it through, I’ll answer a question.”

  “Hell, with my height I ought to get a stepladder.” He took a shot, a real air ball that arced over embarrassingly short. He hadn’t touched a basketball in probably twenty years and he realized that he’d seen so much expert play, at least as often as he’d stumbled across it on TV, that his subconscious had forgotten that the ball had any weight to it.

  Kidogo took a step to reclaim the ball.

  “So don’t answer the first question,” Jack Liffey said. “It was, What’s the square root of thirty-four?”

  Kidogo smiled, despite himself, went up on a jump and put the ball through without touching net. Then he retrieved the ball and bounced it to Jack Liffey again. It took him two more tries to get it through the hoop, inelegantly, with a high bounce off the rim.

  “The last weekend Amilcar was home, there was some sort of problem here in LA. Maybe a run-in. People on campus said he was pretty upset about it.”

  Kidogo took two steps and leaped, swung around in midair, and did a reverse slam dunk.

  “Nice,” Jack Liffey offered.

  The young man still hadn’t made eye contact. “The trouble wasn’t here. I saw Ami that morning at the bookstore, Eso Won, and everything was fine. Him and Sherry were gonna have dinner with me and my woman at Elephant Walk in Leimert Park, but he called about five. It was from a pay phone, I think. I could hear traffic. He was angry and he said he couldn’t make it. They were going home to Claremont.”

  “Do you know where he’d gone after you saw him in the morning?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you tell the police this?”

  “They never asked.”

  “Is there anything else you know that could help?”

  He seemed to think about it for a moment. “You must think you one tough motherfucker.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Pushin’ in here, askin’ questions where you ain’t—say—real welcome, you hear what I’m saying?”

  “You know, up to now I’ve found African Americans almost faultlessly polite to me all my life. It’s usually the white racists who can’t manage civility.”

  “Must be they little bitty dicks,” Kidogo said, but there wasn’t any real menace at work. The chip on his shoulder was just something he had to wave around a bit to prove something to himself. Jack Liffey felt sorry for all the pain his attitude was going to cause him for the rest of his life.

  “I’ll tell them that, if I see any.” He could see he’d got all the information he was going to get.

  “I don’t hate whiteys,” Kidogo said, all of a sudden. He lofted another swish through the net and met Jack Liffey’s eyes for the first time, a neutral expression that suggested he had expended all the patience he had available. “I just want a situation where we can be with ourselfs and make our own decisions for ourselfs without some white muckty-muck coming and telling us what’s good for us to be down for.”

  “I hope you find the world where that’s possible, I really do,” Jack Liffey said.

  *

  It was late but still a bright dusk as he got home, one of those hot California summer evenings that swore to you they’d never pass away until all your dreams were fulfilled. If only his dreams were still simmering away on the back burner.

  Water was running, and a steady discharge of steam seeped out under the bathroom door. She usually bathed first thing in the morning. He turned the knob softly and saw Marlena’s strong brown shoulder in a fog of bubbles rising off the tub. She appeared to be scrubbing hard at her privates.

  “Eeep.” It was a tiny squeal of surprise and two fingers went to her lips as she sat back.

  “You forget. I’ve seen that lovely body,” he said.

  A froth climbed her breasts like frosting on a cake, and she tried to smile at him but something was wrong.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Just then the phone rang, and she said “Please get it,” so peremptorily that he thought she might be expecting word of a death.

  “Is this Jack Liffey?” a man asked.

  “Speaking.”

  “Jack, this is Tom Leary.”

  It took Jack Liffey a moment to focus and make the connection—his cousin out in Claremont—and then sense the note of tragedy in the man’s flat suburban voice.

  He nearly shouted into the phone. “Is Maeve all right?”

  “I don’t know. It took a long time for Mary Beth to tell us what happened.” He hesitated.

  “Please.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Maeve’s got caught up with some motorcycle types out in Fontana and she hasn’t come home yet.”

  Something heavy and cold sank to the pit of Jack Liffey’s stomach and kept right on going down.

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Right away. They just called me to say they checked and nobody was at the clubhouse Mary Beth described. She’s a little hysterical right now, but she swears that’s where Maeve was. The girls were playing some kind of detective game, and Maeve was peeking in a window when a big guy with a beard caught her and took her inside. I’m sorry. It took a while for Mary Beth to bicycle back here and tell us.”

  “Was this the Bone Losers?” Jack Liffey asked.

  “Yeah, that’s the name she used.”

  How on earth? he wondered. She must have seen his paperwork, but what was she up to?

  “I’m on my way.” />
  He swung open the bathroom door. “Maeve’s in trouble. I’ve gotta go and I’m taking the Franchi.” The Franchi was a big black twelve-gauge shotgun she kept under the bed. It had a pistol grip, operated either as a pump or semi-automatic and was a lot more intimidating than his pistol. He noticed that she was crying as she sat helplessly in the bath, but he didn’t have time for that.

  Jack Liffey drove east on the 10 as fast as he and the Concord could bear, panic and dread gnawing at his stomach. This had always been the nightmare: something gruesome swooping down out of nowhere to gobble up his helpless daughter. But what had she been up to, playing detective? Kathy would certainly blame him for that. Far off to his right, he noticed dark columns of smoke rising up and shearing off westward at several points in South Central, offerings unacceptable to the gods.

  EIGHT

  A Failure to Communicate

  She had no idea where she was. With the scratchy fat rope still tied around her waist, she had been carried into a beat-up van and driven miles to a piney little house up a canyon where a lot more of the weird motorcycles were parked.

  They were effectively lashed together, she and the beer-smelling gorilla named Lunchmeat, standing outside among the bikes. She tried to imagine him as a child, smaller but still chunky, holding back his tears as he was being beaten and thrust away by a boozy father as big as he was now. She couldn’t really do it, and she couldn’t picture where he lived, either, though she tried to imagine him in a cheap apartment with his possessions stashed around in old fruit crates, and his shirts hung on nails hammered into the walls. He was too far outside her experience, but she needed to imagine who he was. She knew her safety might depend on figuring him out.

  The nearest lights she could see from the yard were far out in the valley, obscured by haze. A big road was out there, too, probably the 10, with pinpricks of light crawling along it.

  “‘The darkness drops again! But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle!’”

  The skinny one named Greek had his head thrown back, his arms flung outward, and was bellowing some poem into the night, lit up where he stood by the yellow light spilling from a window. Sweat was dripping down his stringy hair and flew off as he tossed his head. On the way up the canyon, Greek had sat beside her on the floor of the van, and she had tried not to watch him rip a small piece off a Chore Boy copper pan scraper, stick it into a weird glass pipe with a little yellowish rock and smoke it hard and fast.