Streets on Fire (2 page)

“Danny Lyon,” Jack Liffey said appreciatively.

Bancroft Davis placed one very dark, wrinkled finger under a guarded determined young man’s face at the lunch counter. This one looked a little older than the others, with a pipe in his fist and the beginnings of a mustache. “Me. This was a SNCC sit-in at the Toddle Inn in Wavecrest, Mississippi. Not the first time I went to jail, not the last.”

“I’m impressed. I was a sophomore in college, but I wasn’t brave enough to go to Mississippi Summer.”

“I wasn’t brave enough either,” Bancroft Davis said. “I was a sharecropper’s boy, already thirty years old and trying hard to emulate all those confident college boys down from the North like Bob Moses, scared out of my wits. You do what you have to, and later you wonder how in the Lord’s name you did it.”

A woman who looked even older than the man wheeled herself into the living room in a sparkling chrome wheelchair.

“My wife, Genesee Thigpen. This is the man Ivan sent. Jack Liffey.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Her grip was strong, despite a stringy weak look to her arms. “You’re studying my husband’s trophy gallery.”

“The newspapers said he’d been a
CORE
leader here in LA, but they didn’t say anything about SNCC.”

A gentle smile passed between them. “They probably didn’t mention the Communist Party, either,” she said. “That was my bailiwick. Ban and I met at Ann Arbor. We had just formed the Du Bois Club and I was secretary. I arranged a speaking visit for this big rough denim-wearing hero from the civil rights war who blew into town like a typhoon.”

“Denim-wearing indeed. I figure the Levi Company still owes us a big commission. Please sit down, Mr. Liffey.”

Jack Liffey settled into a black leather Eames chair and decided not to fight the “mister” at this point.

“When we went out on that campus speaking tour that fall, the college students we saw all wore slacks and tweed sport coats. Have you ever looked at photographs of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, Mr. Liffey? That was 1964, and they all look like Minnesota Lutherans on the way to Sunday meeting in their sport coats and skinny ties. We wore jeans down South so we wouldn’t stand out, and we continued to wear them in the North as a badge of our struggle. Within two years every student in America was wearing jeans and boots—one of the big unheralded results of the civil rights movement.”

It took him a long time to bend and sit on the sofa, and then he rested both palms on his walking stick and looked up with a grave, enough-chit-chat expression.

“Ivan Monk told us he was committed to another job that he could not get away from, and that you would be better for this investigation in any case. You’re good at finding missing kids, he said. And you’ll be better off where the trail begins out in Claremont. Amilcar always said the colleges there only have about a dozen black students, most of them exchange students from Africa.”

“It’s probably a little better than that,” Jack Liffey said. “There’s six colleges in the town. I already know the TV news version of their disappearance. What don’t I know?”

“Did the TV mention they’d had a run-in at a blues club with a motorcycle gang from Fontana?”

“Endlessly. Interracial couple harassed by skinhead bikers. The TV fed on that for a week, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere. The fact that you’re hiring a detective probably means you don’t think the police did their job very enthusiastically.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Liffey,” Genesee Thigpen put in. “There’s a man there in Claremont, Lt. Calderón, who kept us well informed. We know they tried, even the FBI tried for a few weeks, but the locals don’t have the resources or persistence of a big city police force.”

“It’s been two months now. What do you think happened?”

“I don’t think they just eloped,” the woman said, with a hard edge. “That’s what some of the police concluded. From the beginning, everybody except Calderón publicly discounted any thought that their disappearance had anything to do with race.”

“Mr. Liffey,” the man said, “at Claremont you will meet people who almost universally
think
they are not racist. It’s not quite the same thing as not
being
racist.”

“Yes, sir, I believe I know that.”

The little girl came barreling through the room with a whoop and hurled herself onto the old woman, who rocked back and looked like she’d have a hard time looking after an energetic child.

“What is it, Ornetta?”

“I just wanna be with you.”

Genesee Thigpen brushed a soothing hand over the girl’s head and shoulders, and the child quieted.

“I’m not free of it myself,” Jack Liffey said. They all knew what
it
was, except perhaps the girl.

They went quiet for a moment. It wasn’t a topic anyone in America dealt with very well, and he figured he’d better meet it head on.

“Let me tell you one reason I know my own failings, before you decide whether to hire me. Several years ago I was working in aerospace out in El Segundo and I was a bit more interested in science than I am now. One evening I was watching a Nova program on particle physics. I was talking to my daughter at the same time, so the TV only had part of my attention. Then all of a sudden my eye caught a black face talking about neutrinos, and I had to look immediately at the type at the bottom of the screen-you know, telling who he was. You see what I mean? I’d just sat through a dozen talking heads without giving who they were a second thought because they were white or Asian, but a black face? Unconsciously I had to check his credentials right off.”

Bancroft Davis smiled. “Mr. Liffey, there are a lot of people around here who’d say nothing in this country has changed, whites are all the same no matter what they tell you, and conditions haven’t gotten a bit better since slavery. Some of the militant kids say things like that. I’d like to take those kids on a tour of Mississippi in 1947. I believe there are seven identifiable degrees of racism, and being snubbed is always better than being lynched. According to Ivan, you’re not so bad, and that’s good enough for us right now. You’re hired if you want the job.”

They talked a while longer, covering the background. Their son had maintained his contacts in the local community and he’d come home every summer. He’d been an A-minus student, studying American history with his eye on Stanford Law, or Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. The girlfriend’s parents had been sweet kindly people up in Simi Valley, a little uneasy that their daughter had a black boyfriend.

“Can I ask an uncomfortable question?” Jack Liffey said, as he was winding down.

“If you can’t, you’re not much of a detective.”

He smiled. “Touché. You both seem pretty old to be the parents of a twenty-year-old.”

The little girl perked up.

“Amilcar was adopted, Mr. Liffey,” Genesee Thigpen said. “As was his older sister, Ornetta’s mother. We put off children because of our political work and then I found out it was too late for me. Also, since we seem to be sharing, we’re married but I kept my family name on political principle. I didn’t leave the Party until after Poland, and I was well known under the name Thigpen. Why did I wait so long to leave? I don’t know: inertia? Hope? I got tired of the road to socialism always turning out to be lined with Russian tanks. Oh, yes—Bancroft never joined. He was always too independent-minded and skeptical. And that’s all of our skeletons.”

“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather share skeletons with,” Jack Liffey said. “Ornetta, please come sit on the porch and tell me the rest of your story about the rhinestone animals.”

She skipped out the door as he said good-bye to the elders, and then he got to hear a remarkably peculiar and inventive tale about imaginary animals fighting back against oppressive human masters who expected them to do chores they hated. He kept thinking of his fourteen-year-old daughter, Maeve, and how she would like this bright little girl.

*

As he walked down to the car, he heard sirens in the distance, several of them. They sounded more like fire trucks than police cars or ambulances. There must have been quite a fire somewhere, but he couldn’t see any smoke against the bright cloudless sky. Maybe it was just the mounting heat that made him think of fire. He waved back to the little girl, who gave an oddly foreign-looking wave in reply, holding her arm straight out and closing her fingers against her palm.

He wished he’d left the car window down. Baking heat tumbled out the door when he opened it and he swung it a few times to whiff some fresh air inside. He couldn’t roll down the far-side windows because the whole right side of the car had been crushed in a partial rollover and where the windows had been was now plastic and duct tape. One of these days he’d get the money to fix it up or replace the whole car, but the truth was he’d got used to it that way. My God, he thought, working out the dates, the old AMC oncord had been like that almost two years. There was a security in letting it go to seed. It was such a ghastly junker that no one in his right mind would try to steal it.

On his way home along Slauson, sunlight seemed to bleach every corner of the universe to a painful brilliance. Just at Crenshaw, he saw a black man in a spiffy polo shirt standing alongside the road juggling what looked like hand tools. He slowed the car to check it out and saw the tools pass behind the man’s back one by one and then heave up into the air: a big roofing hammer, a battery-powered drill that he gave a whiz every time it hit his hand, an awkward carpenter’s square and a small chain saw. He could tell by the angry buzz in the air that the chainsaw was actually operating. Worth two points: He and Maeve had a running contest of pointing out LA oddities to each other.

A car honked behind and he drove on. When life became too strange, it made you uneasy; he yearned for a world that he could ignore more often. So much raggedness made him feel old and tired.

*

“
Young lady.
”

Maeve Liffey didn’t like the sound of that as she turned back in the living room, carrying the old manual camera that she and Dru had been using to learn about f-stops and shutter speeds. The tone surprised her. Brad wasn’t a complete jerk-off, and he didn’t usually try to discipline her. He had only been married to her mother for nine months, and he was still a bit uneasy in his stepdad role.

“Yes, Brad.” He didn’t really like being called Brad, but he could hardly insist on Dad.

“The back gate was open and the twins could have got out.” The twins were his three-year old boys, Bert and Bart; she sometimes figured he remarried only to get free babysitting.

“I’m sorry. It must have been my friend Dru, when she left. I asked her to shut it.”

“That’s as it may be, but I made a special point of asking
you
.”

“I’m
sorry
. Really. I’ll double-check from now on.”

“They might have wandered away and been hurt. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ground you for the rest of the week.”

Blood rushed to her face. She could feel it, but she tried to establish control, the way her dad had shown her. Three… two… one…
reconsider
. “Could we wait and talk about it when Mom comes back? I think this is threatening to get out of proportion.”

“Young lady, are you questioning me?”

“Am I a
serf
in this house now?” It just burst out of her unbidden. “Have I no right to speak up for myself?”

He was stewing. She could see emotions seething right behind his face, and his hands were trembly. It could probably have gone either way. She felt a terrible fear rise in her, as if she had torn something that could not be undone, but she didn’t see where there had been any choice.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I know you worry about your boys.”

But it was too late. His arm came out of left field, an astonishing act, like an object suddenly levitating in front of her. Her cheek stung and her head snapped back. Already tears were prickling behind her eyes.

“Go to your room!” He looked frightened, too, but he did not know how to step back across the brink.

Eat shit and die
, she thought. You’ll never ever be my dad. She had never been hit before, not once. And she had a dire premonition that her mother would take his side in this, even though she wouldn’t really be comfortable with it.

When the king is unjust
, she remembered reading somewhere,
it affects the whole kingdom.

*

A box fan was roaring away, exhausting the hot air out his front door and his girlfriend’s nephew Rogelio was dangled over the fender of a 1972 Chevelle SS in the drive, muttering at his friend Solomon and at the big carburetor.

“Trouble?”

“Man, don’t never use a four-barrel. You know? Hey, Jack.”

Rogelio had a dependent hangdog manner that made it hard not to tease him, but Jack Liffey liked him a lot. The young man was kind to a fault; Jack knew he’d had the decency to turn down the mild sexual experimentation Maeve had offered him a year ago. Maeve was a precocious
almost fifteen
, in her words.

“I always prefer a supercharger for an AMC car,” Jack Liffey said.

Solomon cackled a little and held out a palm for a greeting slap. Jack Liffey obliged.

“Where do you get high octane for that thing?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Every time you get gas, you got to buy these cans of booster to high it up. That’s not the problem here, though.”

“Mar in?”

“Yeah.” As if just remembering something, Rogelio tried to straighten up and banged his head on the raised hood. “Ooh,
hurt
. When you see her, don’t get too disturbed. She fell down moving boxes or something at church and hit her face. She got a bad shiner.”

“Were you with her?”

“Naw, Catholic’s still good enough for me.”

“Thanks.”

Marlena had taken to going to a big fundamentalist temple in Hawthorne called the Church of the Open Barn Door. It didn’t make him very happy, but it seemed to soothe something needy in her. He found her hanging laundry on the lines out back over the scruffy lawn, and the tight black skirt stretched over her ample rump set his libido thrumming right away.