Streets on Fire

by John Shannon

  He could see that the curb ramped down in front of the lot where a driveway had once been, but he decided to wait where he was until the evening got a bit darker. He hunkered down below the seatback as a band of young men, maybe twenty strong, trotted past ahead of him toward Vermont. One boy waved a purple Lakers banner, but a couple of others seemed to be carrying rifles and they definitely weren’t the rooting section.

  He didn’t think he had ever before gotten himself into a situation quite as ludicrous as this: a white man in an old VW with Rustoleum red fenders parked in the heart of a full-bore riot in a black area to defend a black man from some other white men who were—perhaps—sneaking up on the neighborhood. It was like zebras trying to slip into the middle of a high school prom to stage a duel. In a book, you wouldn’t believe it. That was the difference, he thought: fiction had a meaning and life didn’t. And because it didn’t, it never worried a whit about plausibility. It could be every bit as absurd as it wanted to be, just as outlandish and meaningless. An incident jumped up out of the muddle, no reason really, and the light of history flashed on it for a moment and then it was gone.

  Randomness, my old friend, he thought. If that mob of kids had followed the Lakers banner down the cross-street just twenty feet behind him, instead of the far street ahead of him, they would probably have noticed him and trashed his car, with him in it, and whatever he might have represented as Bancroft Davis’ savior would have evaporated in that simple accident of route. The same fate could strike Gideon’s 300, too, of course, the whole gang of them could be squeezed into the back of a dark van heading his way, bustling and restless in there like circus clowns, and the van could blow a tire right in front of a mob looting a sporting goods store and a dozen hunting rifles could fill the van with holes in a simple excess of enthusiasm.

  When the blow was truly aimed at you, he thought, there was nothing much that could come between you and the pain. He guessed the point was to find a way to be at peace with that. And suddenly he was thinking of Marlena again.

  The sense of loss flooded back in, just when he’d started feeling he belonged to the world again. Things still existed out there but he was no longer part of them, cast out of the fraternity of the ordinary and the happy. The last time that had happened, losing his job and family, he had gone on a binge of coke and booze for almost a year. It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. The job had gone first, and it was mostly the binge that had cost him his wife and family, but the point was, he knew better now. There was nothing to be gained by a retreat into blotto. He’d eaten the apple of knowledge, or the apple of something or other—maybe just shame. The escape was worse than the fate, and you had no choice but to take your loss neat. Marlena. He loathed self-pity and what it did to him inside, but he hadn’t found the way to clamber up out of it yet.

  Two men carrying a sofa dashed back from where the mob of boys had gone, and he saw how much darker the night had become. About half the streetlights had been shot out, and color was fading out of the world to leave mostly shapes and shadows. Another helicopter was circling, flicking its searchlight around on the ground like a hiker looking for a lost trail. As the reddish smudge faded out of the western sky, here and there he could see faint light inside a few houses, leaking around blinds or through curtains. The neighborhood was inhabited after all.

  He didn’t turn on his headlights as he started the noisy car and putted noisily to the vacant lot, then swung around quickly and backed up into the weedy quarter acre. His head bobbed as the car jounced across uneven ground and crunched through rubbish. He stopped just deep enough into the lot so he could still see the Davis house three doors down, killed the engine and yanked at the handle to pop the trunk in front. Chris had folded up the old tarp and thrown it in for him. He got the tarp out and spread it over the back half of the car, jiggering it so he could still get in the door and leave his window clear for air.

  He figured he was now invisible, with the tarp blocking any illumination that might backlight him through the rear windows. He retrieved his .45 from the glove box and wedged it under his thigh where he could get to it quickly and settled in to watch the house. It was full dark now, and he could see the faintest yellow glow spilling from the front and side windows.

  Three teenage girls with cornrowed hair sauntered casually up the road as if the city wasn’t burning all around them. They carried lumpy shopping bags.

  “You a caution, Bea.”

  “Mama gon’ bust my booty for this excursion.”

  They moved on, leaving an odd sense of normality on the air that lasted until a deep explosion went off somewhere not very far away, near enough that he could actually feel a shock wave as a faint puff on his cheek. A Molotov cocktail, or maybe just cooking gas, the vapors slowly diffusing out into the air in some confined space until they reached just the right ratio of combustible gas to oxygen, the flashpoint. He could sense how disturbed he was inside, under his enforced calm. It was the result of so much dream-state threat, like the hangover of an earthquake—what should be stable and certain in the world around him no longer so. A car in a dream become a bright plastic toy tractor, carrying him unstoppably toward a cliff. His bedroom walls developing ragged holes to reveal out there a bright alien world. A water tap turning itself on and off. Awareness that his own existence had become as tenuous as the daydreams.

  He slid down until the back of his neck rested on the hot plastic seatback. The angst of two days had left him exhausted, all the way down to the bones, but still strangely wired. His eyes had adjusted completely to the night out there and he was satisfied he had the catbird seat. Nothing was stirring at Bancroft Davis’ house or anywhere else in the neighborhood. Overhead, pinpricks of light circled, and the sound of gunfire and sirens continued, but all faraway for the moment, almost consoling.

  He awoke with something hard against his forehead, his heart thudding. Shit.

  “Yo, Arnold. What’s your bidness here?”

  Jack Liffey didn’t do anything for a moment. His consciousness gathered toward a central redoubt from a number of outlying posts, like Keystone Kops retreating in disorder into a very small space. It didn’t take him long at all to figure he’d fallen asleep at the switch, inexcusably dreaming he was awake, and now there was something, probably a pistol, against his forehead. Luckily the accent and diction did not suggest Gideon’s 300.

  His heart thumping away erratically, he turned his head slowly. A few inches away he saw a 9mm Glock, a weapon made largely of plastic, which accounted for the fact that it hadn’t been cold against his skin. Holding the pistol was the guy with the teardrop tattoo and all the earrings. He even remembered the name: BigLenin. The Rolling 60s Crips.

  “Boo-yah,” the young man said, the formulaic mimic of a shotgun blast. “It so damn easy to smoke a cave boy like you this night. One-eight-seven and the pig be busy elsewheres.”

  One-eight-seven was cop talk for homicide. The young man wore one of those tight head covers, silky black, with a loose flap over the nape of the neck, like something for the Foreign Legion. It was a pretty good sign of the gulf between the communities, Jack Liffey thought, that he didn’t know what it was called, he had never seen one in a store, nor did he know what store he would go to if he wanted to buy one.

  “I’m here to guard Bancroft Davis. You’re right about the dangers of the night. Some Klansmen are on their way here to kill Mr. Davis.”

  “You just trippin’.”

  “Same guys who burned the cross on his lawn. I know you remember that.”

  “Big,” someone called. “It’s five-oh on the way.”

  A siren swelled and then diminished almost immediately.

  “Peace out. They not comin’ into the land of the hard tonight.”

  Jack Liffey decided to take a chance. “I could use your help guarding him.”

  “We got better shit to take care of, Arnold.” He smiled, without much humor in it. “I recently acquired a fine DVD machine and there a whole
lot of movies out there for me.”

  “Hey, this man fought all his life for civil rights, down in Mississippi. Against fat white sheriffs.”

  BigLenin looked to one of his friends, as if seeking corroboration.

  “Word is born,” somebody said. “The man was down, back in the Martin Luther King time.”

  “Well, I can’t see no crackers making it over here tonight in they rusty ol’ pickups.”

  “I did,” Jack Liffey corrected him.

  A finger came out and nearly touched his nose. “Then you better watch the man’s back, Arnold, and don’ be goin’ to sleep out here. We hold you responsible, since you got nothin’ better to do. You strapped?”

  “An old forty-five. You want to offer something better?”

  “Yo, Road Dog, lessee the MAC.”

  “Aw, Big—”

  “Stay true, Road. Plenty more where that.”

  All he could see of the second man was an arm, light coffee color with tattoos all over it. The arm handed something angrily to BigLenin who dropped it in Jack Liffey’s lap. It was a little Ingram MAC 10, like some ugly square toy, not much bigger than his pistol, looking as if it had been made out of old beer cans in some rural province of China. It was dented and scraped and had seen a lot of abuse. He could tell by the weight when he picked it up that it was loaded; a gray plastic magazine sticking well out of the handle. If he remembered right, it held thirty-two 9mm rounds.

  “You ever tested this?” He had the feeling it would blow up in his hand if he tried to use it.

  “Gimme the jammy.”

  BigLenin grabbed the submachine gun out of his hands, held it casually overhead and with one roaring squeeze sent five or six rounds straight up. The barrel only stuck an inch out of the receiver, so short that the noise was earsplitting. For an instant, Jack Liffey worried about the police, and then he realized that this was get-out-of-jail-free night, the law having retreated to other parts.

  “It be tested.” He tossed it back into Jack Liffey’s lap, still warm. “You get Mr. Bancroft through the night, Arnold, and maybe you a honorary niggah.”

  NINETEEN

  Boogers

  The pack of feral dogs strutted down Brighton at cruising speed with outriding scouts glancing warily left and right. He wondered if it was the same pack he had seen earlier. If it was, it was gaining constituents, a good fifty strong now. They seemed proud and confident, as if this very night their species had finally reached critical mass and they were on their way to supplant humans as the rulers of South Central. The biggest dogs, the rottweilers and shepherds, held to the front of the big ragged wedge like an officer corps.

  One dog out at the edge moved faster than the others. Jack Liffey barely believed his eyes when he turned his attention to it. He had seen three-legged dogs before, usually tripodding along in some hamlet where he had stopped for gas, unfortunate beasts who had been wounded in some accident. He watched intently as this black terrier, with its tail up like a question mark, bobbed around awkwardly in a wide half circle and then bobbed back, and sure enough, against nature and physics, it was a two-legged dog. Only the left front and right rear legs remained, and the animal obviously had to keep up a good head of steam to stay upright. It sprang along faster than the others, circling and panting heavily, a living rollerblade.

  One of the pack leaders barked once in Jack Liffey’s direction, a casual warning, and he was happy to be inside a car where he could lock the door and roll up the windows if he had to. They did not seem to sniff him out, though, probably because the air was alive with the tang of fire, feathery wisps of ash drifting here and there on a faint erratic breeze. The pack went on past, with the two-legged dog circling around at the rear, almost toppling as it leaned, and then it bounded hard into catch-up mode. There was some sort of moral about brute determination there, he thought.

  The smoke built up like a dreamy fog on the air, haloing the few streetlights that had not been shot out. He wondered what was burning, though it was probably just the usual furniture and liquor stores, schools and post offices. Untrimmed palm trees went up like torches if you could get a flame up into the thatch.

  He guessed it was only about eleven, but he was still having a hell of a time staying awake, waging that almost unwinnable war against lead weights suspended from his eyelids. If only he could nap for a few minutes. In frustration, he slapped his cheek. The blow was harder than he’d intended and his ear rang. Brilliant, he thought in annoyance. Liffey vs. Liffey, stopped by the ref, TKO in one. Then he recalled there was no such thing as a TKO any more. The people who ruled boxing had done away with the distinction, and it just went into the books as a normal knockout now. Then he was bent over watching a prizefight far below him, tiers of seats all around filled with yelling fans. It seemed a bit like a movie he’d seen before… and then he awoke with a start as a door slammed.

  Not again, he thought. But there was no one at the car window this time, and his mind could take its time coming into focus. Down the road, he saw Bancroft Davis in a flannel robe and his wife leaning against one another in their driveway, as they stumbled urgently toward their Mercury. Shaking his head to clear it, he almost went to help them when he noticed dim faces in the front window of the house, which threw him into confusion. One was their little granddaughter Ornetta, but he figured he had to be fast asleep still because the second face in the window looked exactly like Maeve’s. He felt a chill—but surely, he thought, they were still over in Oakwood. They wouldn’t have come back into the heart of the riot.

  The old couple got into their big car, and still Jack Liffey hadn’t moved. The car ground once and quickly kicked over, and as it backed out, he realized he was really and truly awake. Where were the two of them off to on a night like this? The old man had looked pretty unstable, and he remembered how shaky Genesee had always been, pushing a walker ahead of her. It had to be something damned urgent to force them out into this deadly night, of all nights, and leave the children behind.

  The Merc left at a good clip. The girls’ faces were gone from the front window, and he wondered if they had been a hallucination. It was possible. A number of images he’d seen in his dream still hung with him, a dog glaring at him, a woman with her hair on fire. Before he could make up his mind to go over to the house and investigate, he saw a dark van, drifting slowly down Brighton without headlights, and a shudder of alarm worked its way across his shoulders. His hand found the little spray gun BigLenin had given him, and a finger went into the trigger guard. His thumb felt out the tiny little safety and snicked it off. He hadn’t done much to help so far, but now might be his chance. As long as he didn’t use the MAC-10 to blow away a neighbor out on patrol or local kids scavenging for loot.

  He was almost positive he had seen that van before, blocking his escape from the Simi ravine. Dark and featureless, like a messenger from some far more evil world, it rolled deliberately past him, making almost no noise and hesitated just where it shouldn’t, in front of the Davis house. He was out of the VW, his heart racing, just as a wine bottle wrapped in a flaming rag arced high toward the house, then another. He took off toward the van as the first Molotov burst against the clapboard siding of the bungalow and flared orange. And then Jack Liffey was flat on his face. Someone had body blocked him from the side. The MAC-10 was no longer in his hand and a knee dug very hard into the small of his back. He felt his arm wrenched up behind him.

  “Be cool there, Mr. Rootietoot.”

  He knew the voice. A horrible sickness clenched the pit of his stomach, and his mind automatically pictured Perry Krasny behind him, the shoulders of a Brahma bull and all that weight. No wonder they’d come down the block so slowly. The big man must have been reconnoitering Brighton on foot, a flanking patrol, some sort of Ranger training.

  “The old people aren’t in the house,” Jack Liffey said quickly. “There’s only kids in there.”

  “Uh-huh, sure. Forgot the milk for the morning coffee, did they?”

/>   “They drove away in a hurry just a minute ago. I think the man was sick.”

  “We’ll just wait around and see what comes running out then.”

  “God damn”—Jack Liffey wriggled and fought, but the man’s weight was far too much for him—“There’re kids in there!”

  Through weed stubble he could just see the front of the house start to flame up.

  *

  Maeve and Ornetta had tugged on their clothes after they’d awoken to the clatters and bangs of the aftermath of the heart attack. They had emerged to help Genesee get Bancroft Davis up out of bed and into a bathrobe, but she had ordered them to stay in the house and used some superhuman reserve of strength to support her husband down the porch and toward the car.

  Ornetta clung to Maeve’s hand and breathed hard, close to sobbing. Maeve clasped the smaller girl against her to comfort her just as they heard the breaking glass and a kind of whoomp sound, like nothing either of them had ever heard. An orange glow flickered through the front curtain. It took only one peek to know what it was. “Let’s get out!” Ornetta shrieked.

  They ran into the bedroom and Ornetta grabbed a big metal loop that stuck out of the wall beside the window. She tugged hard but had to wave to Maeve for help, and the two of them heaved together until it gave all at once, like a cork coming out of a bottle. The sash was already up and Ornetta pushed hard on the ornate burglar bars with both hands. The bars swung open with a rusty creak like an old gate and both girls climbed out into the darkness, right past the wheelbarrow and garden tools.