Streets on Fire

by John Shannon

  “Jesus, K! What are you doing?” Franchino came to his feet. He remembered that the man’s wife and kids were away somewhere. Maybe he got like this whenever he was alone. The nearest houses below were several miles away, but those 7.62mm assault rounds would carry.

  Krasny said nothing, simply went on firing until the rifle’s bolt clicked open on an empty magazine.

  “Those shells, they got to come down out there, K.”

  “Bullets come down, Bri, rounds come down. Shells stay right here.” And indeed the bright brass casings made a little scatter to his left. He set the rifle down and took a pull of his beer. “Fear not, tenderhearted friend. The odds are very slim that anyone will be hit. Just a broken window, a mysterious hole in the stucco. An angry god working his malign will from up in the clouds.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you got all your oars in the sea.”

  “Oh, I know what I’m up to. I’m practicing for the next stage of our nation’s perilous journey. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll do all the dirty work that’s necessary, and I’ll do it forever, at least until the people catch on. Think of the thousands of years the Europeans have had to work on the moral outlines of their nations, to expel the foreigners, to fight their border wars. We got started late is all.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes for this new white nation to be born, and if they take me to some Nuremburg afterward and try me for war crimes so they can dip the new Euro-American state in bleach and pretend that none of this bad shit ever happened, then I’ll still do the whole filthy job with no regret. Two hundred years from now we’ll be known by some as the Washington Lincolns of Euro-America, the guys who built it and held it together.”

  Krasny said all this without real rancor. He spoke in an amiable tone with a palm flat on his chest as if pledging allegiance. Far away out in the canyons there was an animal whoop with a rising trill at the end: whoo-up whoo-up.

  “Coyote,” he said. “I love coyotes, but they got to go, you know. They get in the way. If these brown and black people get too uppity after we give them their own places then they got to go, too. We can nuke the whole lot of them. An idea like that hasn’t hurt the Israelis, has it? Let them walk tiptoe over on the other side of the border, man, that’s what I say. A few more wars where we kick the stuffing out of our neighbors and we expel a few million blacks and browns to these states of their own, and everything calms down and we become just like any other European country, a big respectable white nation with safe streets and a little criminal past."

  “And the meantime we got to pay the rent and such.”

  “The meantime. Remember, when you’re having a bad time and it seems like all the liberals on earth got it in for you and some particular pussy wiseguy calls you a name to piss you off, remember, it takes forty-two muscles to frown about things—like you’re doing right now—and only four to pull the trigger of a decent sniper rifle.”

  ELEVEN

  The Look of History

  “Ooooooh!”

  The 747 settled heavily toward them, drifted sideways a bit, and then corrected with the dip of a huge wing, swelling ominously like a dream, only fifty feet above them.

  “All right! Come on!”

  “Do it! Do it!” A woman in a gauzy white dress at the edge of the grass danced forward and punched her fists alternately up into the path of the jet. Two young men lay on their backs in the flight path and let out cries of delight.

  Jack Liffey felt the rumble in his feet, and the air weight of the big jet seemed to wallop them as they craned their necks. Its turbulence buffeted the airport fence just past them, and moments later the tires touched down with a puff of gray smoke. Later, the angry howl of reverse thrust.

  “Outasight!”

  “What hath man wrought?” Mike Lewis remarked mildly.

  He stood on the low grassy hill that ran down the center of the little park they were gathered in. He jotted something on a clipboard.

  “At the risk of seeming droll,” Jack Liffey said, “what notes are you taking?”

  “It’s a 747-300,” Mike Lewis said drily. “Korean Air. No contrails.”

  A woman’s voice at Mike Lewis’s house had told Jack Liffey on the phone where Mike usually hung out for a while after teaching his morning class in urban studies at the little architecture college down the road from LAX.

  “Some months ago, I noticed the airplane groupies that gathered here. Right at the end of runway 24-R. It’s the age of spectacle, after all. It was toward the end of winter back then, with a damp onshore breeze huffing and puffing into the dry air off the desert and the planes were all leaving big spiraling condensation trails from their wings. All of a sudden, that day, I heard a sizzling sound. At first I ignored it, but on the next landing I heard it again. It was well behind the jet and there was a track of vapor shooting back the opposite direction with a kind of crackling noise. It was like a bottle rocket.”

  “So?”

  “As far as I know no one has ever described the phenomenon. Even the engineers I ask are mystified. I’ve observed it maybe three more times, when conditions are just right.”

  “Are they right today?”

  “Too dry.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “Look around this grassy knoll, Jack. The human comedy is sufficient onto itself.”

  The woman in her filmy Isadora Duncan gown pranced along the sidewalk, giving high knee kicks, as if intoxicated by the airplanes. The two young men on their backs offered each other high fives now and then. An old man in a pilot’s uniform leaned dreamy-eyed against the fence at the base of the landing light.

  “Isn’t calling this a ‘grassy knoll’ a little sacrilegious?”

  “Have you ever seen the one in Dallas?”

  Jack Liffey shook his head.

  “I don’t know who first called it that; it’s no such thing. It’s just a road embankment down to an underpass, not even vaguely like a knoll. But what’s your question for me? You only come to see me when some aspect of LA’s grand comedy has you mystified.”

  “Sometimes I come to borrow something from you.”

  “True.”

  A smaller jet wobbled out of the haze and thundered overhead. “737,” Mike Lewis said. “With those flattened-off CFM engines. Very quiet and fuel-efficient.”

  “Does the number sixteen-slash-eight mean anything to you?” Jack Liffey asked. “Let’s say, relating to high school kids.”

  Mike Lewis wrinkled up his face.

  “Uh-oh,” Jack Liffey said. “You’ve got that you-must-be-just-off-the-bus look.”

  Mike rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to keep up. The Sixteen/Eight Club is the high school wing of the Pledge of Honor movement. You know, all those earnest fathers and husbands who gather in sports stadiums to reaffirm their Protestant values. Like most neo-conservatism, it’s mostly a phenomenon of the suburbs.”

  “Would those values include racism?”

  “Not openly. They’re very genteel this time around. They talk about one-to-one ‘reconciliation.’ Which means, of course, no affirmative action. The whole movement is really a stalking horse for the Christian Right. It’s against women’s rights, gays, and cultural relativism or any other sort of relativism. Part of the famous culture war. Basically, they’re against anything that changed in the sixties.”

  “Civil rights was the sixties.”

  “It’s possible one of the clubs might just spiral away into some kind of weird neo-racism. If you take earnest well-off white kids who don’t even know how privileged they are and add a pinch of demagoguery, who knows where it might go? Times change. If you remember, thirty years ago a lot of those kids wanted to be Red Guards and make a revolution. How much sense did that make?”

  “Weren’t you an SDS leader?”

  Another jet came over and they both craned their necks. “An old DC-9,” Mike Lewis explained. “Wait’ll you hear the engines. They’re from the era before noise-abatement.”

  The D
C-9 touched down and when it reversed thrust the small plane sounded twice the size of the 747, with a crackling howl so loud he wanted to hold his ears.

  “At least we stopped a war,” Mike said. “This isn’t just a theoretical question, is it?”

  “Simi Valley.”

  “Okay. I’ve got some kids in my Cal-Arts class tonight who hail from that neck of the woods. I’ll ask them about it. Call me late.”

  “Thanks, Mike.”

  “Look!” The lady in white pointed off to the east now, into the city. A large column of black smoke rose into the air.

  “I wonder what that is?” somebody said.

  “That’s the look of history,” Mike Lewis said somberly, pocketing his pencil.

  *

  A troop of little girls in Brownie uniforms, all carrying pirate flags marched northward along the sidewalk that ran at the top edge of the beach. The girls parted for a young man on a skateboard, who was twirling slowly and playing “Guantanamera” on an electric guitar, the speaker strapped to his back. On another skateboard to the side a goateed man without legs propelled himself along with little leather paddles. A male couple stood in the sand in skimpy bathing costumes and held elastic clown noses out of the way as they kissed. It was Venice Beach, being itself.

  “Let’s go over there,” Ornetta pointed to a bare spot on the busy sand.

  They strolled past a Latino family who had set up a temporary altar on a group of ice chests, bedecked with gaudy figurines and photographs and candles in cups, and were busy lighting the candles as fast as the wind blew them out.

  “Mescans be somethin’ else,” Ornetta said softly.

  “They might be Mexican Americans,” Maeve corrected primly.

  “I don’ mean no dis. I ain’ no African. I jus’ mean they sure like they Catholic shit.”

  They laid out their towels side by side and Maeve stripped down to the tiny black bikini that had made her mother scowl heavily at her. Her father hadn’t seen it yet.

  “I wanna get one of them,” Ornetta said, “but I gotta get me some bosoms first.”

  Ornetta’s shift came off to reveal a skirted green-and-yellow one-piece that made her look even younger than she was. Maeve noticed she wore some sort of charm on a string tucked down in the suit.

  “Your breasts will come pretty quick. But it’s not much fun when boys stare at you all the time.”

  “Boys is a bunch of dogs.”

  Maeve thought of her two days with Beth. “Have you ever read Nancy Drew?”

  “Who that?”

  “She’s a girl detective. The books have been around for a long time.”

  Maeve noticed four young black boys in baggy gangbanger shorts below the knee trending toward them across the sand. They were probably fifteen and had identical zigzags cut into the sides of their fades. Maeve could feel herself going tense as they got close.

  “Uh-oh,” she warned Ornetta softly.

  “Sweet thang, come to daddy!” a boy proposed, winding down to a hover near Maeve. The boys formed a circle around the girls, making faces, leering a little, and shifting their weight constantly as if they were too restless to settle.

  “Go away,” Maeve said brusquely. “Leave us alone.” She crossed her arms over her breasts and wished she had bought a more modest suit.

  “Whoa, what’s your trip? Peace out, ho, we just tryin’a be friendly.”

  “I’m not a ho.”

  “Uh-huh, you go and buy that li’l fuck-me thing just to cover your booty, huh?”

  Ornetta touched her charm and made a derisive noise.

  “Who you making noise at, little girl? I’ma tryin’a get over with the bitch that’s showin’ out.”

  “You talk like a low-down dog. Why don’ you go hang with the other dogs.”

  “Whoa, you a trip. Look at you, girl.” He put his arms on his hips and turned to face Ornetta, which was a great relief to Maeve. “I bet your momma so black she got to wear headlights all night long.”

  “Well, your momma so black they gotta paint a white line down her so all the mens in your hood know where to drive.”

  Despite themselves, the other boys grinned and stifled laughs as they bobbed and rocked.

  “Well, your momma so ugly they keep her at the zoo,” the boy insisted.

  “Your momma, the gorilla threw her outa the zoo, make room for a warthog.”

  “You keep ragging, little girl, it’s gonna be me and you.”

  Ornetta seemed to have held her own about as long as she could, and Maeve could see her starting to wilt as she clutched at whatever necklace she wore. Maeve put her arms around her.

  “Shame on you, you boys. Scaring little girls.”

  “You ain’t even worth beatin’ on, you skinny-ass bitches.”

  As the boys pranced away, Maeve had the feeling that probably none of the ragging had been all that serious. It was just so ugly and so different from her experience that it left her feeling helpless and deeply disturbed.

  “I shoulda called me a big magic rassler, beat they ass.” Ornetta said definitively.

  Maeve was about to ask about this strange statement when someone shouted nearby and they both looked up at a large group of people pressing close into a tight group. Then she noticed groups just like it in the distance—everybody on the beach seemed to be clumping up—and through the forest of legs of the nearest group she made out the focal point, a big portable radio on the sand.

  “Ornetta, look.”

  *

  National Guard armored personnel carriers rumbled up what the announcer said was Alondra Boulevard in Compton. Young soldiers sat on the APCs, out in the open, looking grim in their flak jackets. The picture went out of focus for a moment and the announcer yammered away without saying anything new, so Jack Liffey muted the sound.

  The frightening note he’d found tacked to the door—this one definitely not from Marlena—lay on the coffee table in front of him but he had stopped looking at it long ago. He had been watching the television with only one short break for almost two hours, since a minute or two after getting home. The one break had been to take a phone call from Maeve that she was back at the house in Oakwood after a day at the beach and perfectly safe, nothing for him to worry about, and an outgoing call to Redondo reassuring Maeve’s mother. The rest of the time had been an uneasy channel-surf through the local stations, which had all abandoned their regular programming to show film of a supermarket fully engulfed in flames. It was probably the worst trouble spot, because you saw it over and over from different angles; accompanying the footage were calming statements from the mayor and police chief, troop deployments, aerial views of crowds running through the streets, and endless repeats of Abdullah Ibrahim, in his Dodger jersey and white Muslim cap, pleading for peace. It came on yet again, and Jack Liffey dialed up the sound because he liked the baritone voice.

  “…Salaam, which means peace, and I ask all my brothers and sisters to increase the peace today, whatever their religion or race, whatever their outrage, whatever their demand, whatever their past of oppression or sorrow. Please stay at home today, brothers and sisters; please treat all people with the same respect you would show your own mother, your own sister, your own little brother.”

  His hand shook a little with emotion, rattling the paper he was reading from, and he looked up.

  “I love this town. I love all of its people, may Allah be praised. Do not harm even a fly in my name, I beg of you. Salaam aleikum.”

  It was hard not to like the man. Jack Liffey tried another station. Fox had a helicopter hovering over the looting at a strip mall. A few foreshortened figures darted out into the afternoon with lumpy, stuffed shopping bags. When the camera zoomed in, the looters were revealed to be, as they had been in 1992, brown, black and white. There did not in fact seem to be all that much looting or burning, but there were two or three hotspots and after two major LA uprisings in living memory, the newspeople and the authorities were understandably excitable.r />
  His eye caught on the note resting beside the 7-Up can and it brought him back, a chill running up his spine anew. HELTER-SKELTER. The stubby felt-pen letters were not so much drawn as slashed across the face of a dollar bill. It was the expression Charlie Manson had thought signaled the coming race war. Scrawled after the words was a crude drawing of a cross in flames.

  He sensed an earthquake-feeling sense of alarm gathering in himself. The sight of looting left him skittish and deeply disconsolate, as he had been for weeks in ’92. And now there was this damn note on the door, as if the whole urban disturbance radiated from some evil locus near him, maybe even because of him. He wondered if the note had come from the same people who had burned the cross on Bancroft Davis’s lawn. Something terrible was out there, that was for sure, stamping and wheezing in the darkness.

  A car came up the driveway and he snapped alert, tingling. By the time he got to the front window, it was out of sight and he hurried to the side room, nearly tripping over Maeve’s little suitcase. It was Marlena’s Nissan. She got out, looking like she’d seen a ghost, and his heart thundered. He could tell she sensed him in the window, but she wouldn’t look up to meet his eyes. She didn’t carry any luggage as she walked toward the back of the house.

  He decided it was best to wait where he was, for whatever it was. She came heavily into the utility room at the rear and then in through the kitchen, and he was back by the TV when she found him.

  “Hi, Jackie.” Her voice was curiously dull, almost without affect.

  “Hi, Mar.”

  There was a long silence as they watched each other, then she sighed. “We got to talk.”

  He killed the sound just as the TV helicopter spied out another source of fire and scudded away after it.

  “Sure.” He had thought his foreboding couldn’t get any worse.

  She sat primly at the far end of the old sofa and stared out at the room. She sighed again. “I better just get it out. I found somebody else that makes me happy, Jackie. You know we wasn’t working.”