“They’re blowing up the cars,” said Jasmine. “Come on, Auntie Ammy. We have to get out of here before this whole building goes up.”
In frustration, Auntie Ammy picked up the phone. She jabbed 911 with her long red-polished fingernails, and then listened, but the phone was dead.
“Okay,” she said. “Looks like we don’t have no option. Give me a couple of minutes to get dressed, and while I’m doin’ that I’ll say a prayer to Changó, because Changó can pertect us against fire.”
“Just hurry,” Jasmine urged her.
Outside, in the corridor, they heard the old woman shrieking, and somebody laughing at her—a loud, coarse laugh followed by whooping and shouting and repeated door-slamming.
“Wass wrong wichyou, granma? You doan like dancin’? How’s about I set fire to that ugly old dress of yours? Maybe you’ll dance better then.”
Jasmine pressed her hand against her mouth. Her natural instinct was to go out and confront the old lady’s tormentors, but she knew what would happen if she did. She and Auntie Ammy and the little baby boy would all be hurt, too, or even killed.
Quickly she changed the baby’s diaper and dressed him in his romper suit. She took a maroon shawl from the back of Auntie Ammy’s couch and wrapped it around him until only his face was showing. He didn’t cry, but he blinked at her unhappily, as if he were thinking about it.
Auntie Ammy came out of her bedroom in a black ankle-length dress. Around her neck she was wearing at least a half dozen brightly-colored bead necklaces, each of them representing a different Santeria orisha. Red and white beads for Changó, green and yellow beads for Orunla, blue and crystal beads for Yemayá.
“I called on Changó,” she said. “Kabio, kabio sile, come to my house and pertect us, Changó! Now we can go.”
They heard more screaming, coming from the next apartment. “Let’s use the fire escape,” said Jasmine. But as soon as they stepped out onto the balcony again, they heard laughter and shouting coming from the square paved area below. Jasmine looked cautiously over the railing. In the half darkness she could see six or seven youths, some of them white, some of them Latino. They were pushing a fortyish man and woman from one side of the square to the other, taunting them and spitting at them.
“Who’s the big man now? Who’s the big man now, huh? Bet you’re pissing in your pants, amigo! You want to see me screw your wife? How about that? You want to see your wife suck my nabo?”
Jasmine pushed Auntie Ammy back inside.
“Now what we goin’ to do?” asked Auntie Ammy, clutching at her necklaces.
Jasmine went across to the front door and placed her ear against it. All wrapped up in his shawl, the baby shook his head from side to side and said, “Wum wum.”
The corridor outside Auntie Ammy’s apartment sounded quiet now. No screaming, no shouting, no running sneakers.
“I can’t hear anything,” said Jasmine. She peered through the peephole but she all she could see was the cream-painted door to the opposite apartment.
“Wum wum,” the baby repeated.
“Sorry, sweet thing, I don’t know what you mean. A gah, yes. Mmm-mmm, yes. But what on earth is a wum wum?”
“Wum wum,” said the baby, and smiled at her.
“Maybe he’s tryin’ to tell us that it’s safe to go out,” Auntie Ammy suggested. “After all, this little fella can see things that nobody else can see. He got the perception.”
“I don’t know,” said Jasmine. “What if ‘wum wum’ means there are a half dozen young hoodlums right outside the door, waiting to jump on us, and we’re better off staying where we are?”
From the square below the balcony came the sound of breaking glass, and the fortyish man shouting, “No! No! Get away from her, you animal!”
“Don’t think we have a whole lot of choice, do we?” said Jasmine.
She passed the baby over to Auntie Ammy. Then—as quietly as she could—she drew back the heavy security chain. Next she turned the three steel dead bolts, and eased the door open.
Outside, it was still comparatively quiet, although she could hear water running somewhere. She could also smell smoke, much stronger than before. She waited for a few seconds, and then she put her head out, shining Auntie Ammy’s flashlight left and right. The green-carpeted corridor was deserted, although the door of the apartment one down from theirs was wide-open.
“Come on,” she said to Auntie Ammy. “It looks like they’re gone.”
Auntie Ammy was holding the baby tight against her shoulder. “If they’re gone, maybe it’s safe for us to stay.”
But as if to answer her, there were two more muffled explosions from the parking level. “We have to go,” Jasmine insisted. “This whole apartment block is going to burn down, and I don’t exactly hear the fire department speeding this way to put it out, do you? Hurry up, Auntie Ammy, otherwise we’re going to be barbecued.”
She took the baby. Auntie Ammy closed her apartment door behind her and made an elaborate performance of locking every lock. While she was doing so, Jasmine walked along to the open apartment door and peered inside.
“Hello?” she called out. “Is anybody in there?”
There was no answer, so she stepped inside. The bathroom was off to the right of the open front door, and it was the bathroom faucet that was the source of the running-water sound. The door was two or three inches ajar.
Jasmine said, “Hello? Is anybody in there? If there is, you really need to get out of here now. The whole building’s on fire.”
There was still no answer, so she pushed the door open a little wider, shining the flashlight through the gap. At first she saw only the sink and the mirror above it, which reflected nothing but the shower curtain with a pattern of white seagulls on it. But then she looked around the door, and shone the flashlight toward the bathtub. “Oh my God,” she said, and jerked backward, jarring her shoulder on the doorframe.
An elderly woman was lying in the tub, both of her arms upraised as if she were reaching for someone to pull her out. But her arms were burned scarlet, and her face was burned scarlet, too, and her pale blue eyes were staring furiously at the ceiling. She looked like an African juju mask, her mouth dragged downward in agony, her hair sticking up in blackened spikes. Her dress had been reduced to rags and ashes.
She must have climbed into the bath and turned on the cold water to numb the pain of her burns, but the shock had been much too severe and her heart had stopped.
Jasmine turned away. Auntie Ammy was standing right behind her. Auntie Ammy could obviously tell what Jasmine had seen by the look on her face.
“Is she gone?” she asked.
Jasmine said, “Yes.”
“Dottie Feinstein,” said Auntie Ammy, as if the name itself were a prayer, and crossed herself. “She was a dear, kindly woman.”
Another boom! from the parking level. “Let’s go,” said Auntie Ammy. “If I lose all of my holy things, that’s the will of the orishas. I know they’ll make it up to me.”
They walked quickly along the corridor. Jasmine stopped to knock at every apartment they passed, and shouted out, “Fire! You need to get out of here!” Strangely, though, not one door opened up, and nobody answered, except for one Hispanic-sounding woman who called back, “Go away! Vamos! You leave me alone!”
The residents had locked and bolted themselves in their apartments as if they were all in denial. This couldn’t be real. How could airliners drop out of the sky? How could the whole city go dark? How could the TV go blank and the phones go dead and the air-conditioning clatter to a stop?
They reached the door that led to the stairs, and pushed it open. The staircase was almost completely dark, and filled with smoke that made their eyes water. It echoed with shouts and screams from the square outside so that it sounded as if it were the staircase down to hell. Jasmine gave the flashlight back to Auntie Ammy and began to make her way downward, holding onto the handrail so she wouldn’t lose her footing. The baby started to
cough, and then he let out two emphatic sneezes.
When they reached the door to the front hall, Jasmine again handed the baby to Auntie Ammy. She opened the door very slowly, and then she peered out. The hallway was smoky, but there was nobody there. The door to the super’s office was open, but there was no sign of him, either. His chair lay tipped over on the floor, and a Styrofoam coffee cup had been spilled across the newspaper on his desk.
Jasmine beckoned to Auntie Ammy, and they hurried across the hall and pushed their way out through the revolving doors. The baby said, “Wum wum,” and looked up at Jasmine as if he were trying to tell her something really serious.
“Yes, darling,” said Jasmine. “You’re absolutely right. Wum wum.”
Outside, the night sounded like a zoo crowded with panicking animals. As they walked as quickly as they could down Ladera Avenue, they heard howling and screaming and desperate shouts for help. A young Hispanic man in a T-shirt stained dark with blood came staggering across the street, his arms held out in front of him, sobbing. He passed within fifteen feet of them, but he was blind, and he wasn’t aware that there was anybody so close.
“Where we goin’ to go?” asked Auntie Ammy. “Seems to me like every place is just as dangerous as every other place.”
“We need to find ourselves some wheels,” said Jasmine. As if to emphasize her point, they heard two more loud explosions behind them—from Aunt Ammy’s apartment block—and they turned around to see fire jumping out of the basement windows.
There were three automobiles parked in the street just ahead of them. Jasmine tried their door handles, but they were all locked.
“Can’t you jimmy them open or something?” asked Auntie Ammy.
“What do you take me for, some carjacking expert? I wouldn’t know how.”
They continued to hurry down Ladera until they reached South La Brea. Not far away they heard more baboonlike screaming, and the smashing of glass—dull, repetitive crashes as if somebody were using a sledgehammer to break everywindow in a whole apartmentbuilding. Sirenswhooped in the distance, but there was no sign of any squad cars.
About three blocks to the south, Jasmine saw a sudden flicker of intensely bright lights. They didn’t look like lightning—more like camera flashes.
“Think we’d better head in the opposite direction,” said Auntie Ammy, nodding so emphatically toward the lights that her earrings swung.
“Any special reason?”
“They ain’t natural, those lights. That’s reason enough.”
“What do you mean? What are they? They’re cameras, aren’t they?”
Auntie Ammy shook her head. “They ain’t no cameras. I seen somethin’ similar when I was a girl. They devils.”
“Oh, come on, Ammy. You don’t believe in devils, do you?”
Auntie Ammy looked up at Jasmine with her mouth pursed defiantly, so she looked as if her lips had been sewn together by a headhunter.
“Anybody who believe in good spirits gotta believe in the opposite. You wouldn’t have to say prayers to God if there weren’t no Satan, now would you?”
“I guess not. But I don’t believe that those are devils.”
“What do you want to do, then? Go find out for yourself?”
Jasmine hesitated. The lights were still flashing, like strobe lights. Then, carried on the wind, she heard the sound of people screaming, both men and women. A dreadful low screaming—more like moaning than screaming—the way that airline passengers moan when they think that their plane is going to crash.
“Okay, you win,” said Jasmine. “But I still don’t believe they’re devils.”
They started walking northward. A little farther on, they came across two abandoned cars by the side of the street, a Buick LaCrosse and a Honda SUV, but both of them were badly damaged. The Buick’s windshield was shattered and the driver’s seat was glistening with blood. Jasmine saw an erratic spattering of blood all across the blacktop, but there was nobody in sight.
Auntie Ammy looked down at the blood trail. “May the saints take care of whoever that was.”
They walked on. As they did so, more lights began to go out—up in the hills, and over to the east, toward Pasadena. The only other person they passed in the street was a grayhaired woman in a gray dress standing in the darkness in front of a single-story house. She was slightly stooping forward as if she were trying to focus on something in the middle distance.
Jasmine called out, “Are you all right, ma’am? Are you okay?”
The gray-haired woman didn’t answer, didn’t even wave her hand.
Jasmine said, “Maybe I should go across and see if there’s something wrong.”
“Let’s take care of ourselves first,” Auntie Ammy cautioned her.
A net curtain in the front window of the house was drawn aside, and a pot-bellied man in a white T-shirt stared out, although he didn’t seem to be looking in their direction.
“I don’t think they can see, neither of them,” said Jasmine.
“Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about that,” Auntie Ammy retorted. “Let’s keep going. Maybe we should try to walk to Hubie’s house.”
“Wait up a minute,” said Jasmine. “Do you see what I see?”
Up ahead of them, South La Brea curved to the left slightly, but a huge red-and-white truck had carried on, going straight ahead. It had mounted the sidewalk and jack-knifed into the whitewashed cinder-block wall in front of somebody’s house, and here it still was, its cab facing toward them, its trailer angled halfway across the road. Its head-lights were still on, but the driver’s door was open, and there was nobody in the cab.
Jasmine jogged toward the truck and gave it a slap of appreciation on its shiny chrome hubcap. It was a Mack Titan, the largest and most powerful truck on the road. It was loaded with steel construction girders—more than a hundred tons of them, in Jasmine’s estimation.
She looked around. There was no sign of the driver, and behind the cinder-block wall the house was in complete darkness. She went up the steps and knocked at the front door. There were no candles burning inside the house, no flashlights. She called out, “Hello! Is there anybody home?" but nobody answered.
Auntie Ammy was waiting for her outside the front gate, holding the baby.
“Nobody home,” said Jasmine. “Or if there is, they’re too chicken to open the door.”
She tried the next house, but that, too, was in darkness, although she thought she could hear somebody stumbling around inside, and somebody say, “Ssshh!”
“Hello?” she shouted, and knocked again, and yet again. But a half minute went by and there was no response. She came down the steps and walked back over to the abandoned Titan.
“Looks like finder’s keepers, loser’s weepers,” she said.
She climbed up into the cab. The keys were still in the ignition, with a bare-breasted hula dolly dangling on the key ring.
“What you think you doing, girl?” Auntie Ammy called up to her. “You can’t take this monster!”
“Why not? Don’t look like nobody else wants it.”
She swung herself into the driver’s seat. Scotch-taped to the sun visor in front of her were two photographs of the truck driver and his family: a broad-faced, suntanned man in a Mack truck cap, and a plump peroxide blonde in a sleeveless top, with a barbed wire tattoo around her upper arm. Two plump little boys were sitting in front of them, one of them giving a toothless grin.
Jasmine turned the key and the truck immediately rumbled into life.
“It’s working fine!” she shouted down to Auntie Ammy. Then she switched off the engine and swung back down to help her.
Auntie Ammy scaled the side of the truck as slowly and cautiously as if she were climbing the north face of the Eiger. “Don’t hurry me, Jazz! Don’t you go pushing me, neither!”
She went through an inelegant struggle to pull herself into the cab, her black-stockinged legs waving like an overturned stag beetle, but she eventually managed to sett
le herself into the passenger seat. Jasmine lifted the baby up to her, and, as she did so, the baby gave her another one of his grave, slightly frowning looks, as if he knew that something bad could happen to all of them, but couldn’t tell her what it was.
Jasmine climbed back into the driver’s seat and restarted the engine. She put the Titan into reverse and slowly backed up, using the rearview TV monitor to see where she was going. The tractor’s fender made a thick scraping noise against the wall, but gradually she managed to steer it off the sidewalk and maneuver it back into line with its trailer.
She shut off the trailer air supply to lock its brakes, and eased the pressure on the fifth wheel locking jaws by gently backing up a little more. Then she switched off the engine again and opened the door.
“What now?” asked Auntie Ammy.
“I’m just going to lose the trailer,” Jasmine told her. “We’re not going to get very far hauling a whole load of steel, are we?”
She walked back to the trailer. Usually she would have made sure that its wheels were chocked, but tonight she didn’t have the time or the chocks. She wound down the trailer’s landing gear, and once it had made contact with the road, she gave the crank a few extra turns so that it would be easier for her to unlatch the trailer’s kingpin from the cab’s fifth wheel. Then she disconnected the air lines and coupled them up with the dummy couplers at the back of the cab, and pulled out the electric plug. There was a smoky-smelling breeze blowing from the southwest, and from far away she could still hear people wailing, like damned souls screaming in hell.
She tugged the release handle to unlock the fifth wheel. A yellow taxi drove past very slowly, and she saw the driver staring at her, but he didn’t stop. In the ten minutes since they had escaped from Auntie Ammy’s apartment block, only three other cars had passed them by, and none of them had stopped, either. South La Brea was lined on both sides with single-story houses and apartments, but candles were twinkling in only a few of them, and the gray-haired woman in the gray dress was the only person they had seen on the street.
Blind Panic Page 20
