Streets on Fire (17 page)

“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.

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.”

There it was. He was so stunned he couldn’t quite take it in. “We were okay,” he said lamely.

“No, we wasn’t. You didn’t want me to talk about the Church and Revelations and what my personal savior means to me.”

No, I didn’t, he thought. “But I accepted that you believed in it. I never attacked you.”

“You didn’t want me to talk about Sally Jessie neither.”

That, too, he thought. “I listened to you. You listened to me.”

The helicopter on TV seemed to be taking evasive maneuvers, perhaps taking ground fire, and the image switched to a talking head in the studio, a handsome middle-aged man in a polo shirt.

“We didn’t talk about nothing that mattered.” There was a plaintive note in her voice now. “And we didn’t vibrate together, you know it.”

Resonate
, he thought.

“All we had was we liked to please each other in bed, that’s all, but I found a man who shares the whole earth with me and makes me happy.”

“I saw in you a woman with a huge warm heart, Marlena, and I love her… you,” he said.

She swallowed hard and a tear dribbled down her cheek. “I can’t talk about this no more. It’s gone and happened. I got to go try it with this man. I’ll go stay at his place for a few weeks, give you time. Please don’t be mad at me.”

“Tell me one thing, Mar. Did this guy give you the black eye a week ago?”

She shook her head hard. She wasn’t a good liar, but for the first time he couldn’t tell. The revelation of her having a lover had shifted his footing so much that he was lost in his own hurt.

She put a slip of paper down. “You can call here and leave a message, but please don’t come look for me. I’ll call you soon.”

“Mar!”

She was up and walking out, but she stopped at the urgency in his voice.

“Marlena Helena Cruz Granados, I love you more than I can say.”

She sobbed and ran. He stood up, then froze and sat back down, as if a horse had kicked him in the chest. He sat that way for a long time, overwhelmed with grief and hurt and something like shame, and then on the TV a new shot of a burning post office caught his eye and he turned the sound back up to hear the crackling of fire.

“Go on, fuck it, burn!” he said out loud. All that disorder seemed to validate something in him.

“The fence pull open.” Ornetta tugged out two loose palings at the bottom of the back fence so they could slip through and out into the alley. It was late afternoon. Genesee Thigpen and Aunt Taffeta had been watching the big events on TV so intently all day that they’d never got their naps, and both of them were conked out now on the old sofa, heads together against the big lace antimacassar. The girls had thrown an afghan over them.

It was with a sense of high adventure that they now turned west up the alley toward the plume of smoke in the distance. Oakwood had a different sound to it, less car traffic and more of a human sussurus, as if people were there somewhere, just out of sight, rushing around in groups and grumbling about life. The girls heard gunshots and, far away, a siren.

The half-paved alley was an obstacle course of weeds and old newspaper, a rotted mattress, a litter of food wrappers, an engine block, and a beat-up hubcap sticking up like a crashed flying saucer. The whole thoroughfare was stank of pee.

Graffiti on an old garage said
VENICE SHORELINE CRIPS
and some other words that neither of them could make out. Ahead, just before the alley met the street, there was a social circle of older black men sitting and standing around a big orange cable reel that lay on its side as a table.

“They okay,” Ornetta reassured, but Maeve saw how cautious she was as they approached.

“Cool the fever and ease the pain,” an old man said to the air as he handed a big bottle to another man.

“You know what Night Train say to me? She say, ‘You never be alone as long as I’m alive.’”

The men laughed softly.

“Hey, girls, your momma know you outa your crib?”

“Ima just buy some bread for Gramma,” Ornetta said.

“I think they be shuttin’ the stores up, hon. You take care now.”

The street was empty, and all the shops they could see had been gridded over. Plywood
BLACK OWNED
signs were out in force, one cleaners taking a big risk with
MINORITY OWNED
. Maeve wondered if that one was a Korean trying to fudge. She noticed a lot of fresh graffiti saying
AB-IB RULES
! A big billboard on the roof had been whited out hastily and
DON’T DIS DR. KNUCKLES
was hand-lettered across the fresh white.

They heard a rattle, and an old woman with a shopping cart full of video cassettes wheeled fast along the cross-street. “They be startin’ takin’ the stuff,” Ornetta observed.

A lowered car went by in fits and rumbles, with hands coming out all the cracked-open windows making cramped gang signs.

“That’s they brains showin’,” Ornetta observed softly, and Maeve giggled.

Ornetta tapped the charm she seemed to wear under her shirt. “Magic powers, you keep us safe here. Keep off them bangers and fools.”

“What have you got there?” Maeve asked.

“I can’t show. It secret.”

A deep explosion went off on the next street, making them both flinch. “M-80,” Ornetta said matter-of-factly. “Some fool trippin’ on the noise.”