Streets on Fire (30 page)

The hospital complex was so large they started seeing it far in the distance. The wail of the motorcycle’s siren shut down as it passed the bright red
EMERGENCY
sign, but if the point was to avoid attracting attention, it didn’t work. Trucks with big TV dishes sticking up and TV channel logos on their sides were parked all along the road. The Suburban pulled up to the glass doors of the emergency room, but as soon as the side door came open, men with cameras came running from every direction.

“It’s the wheelbarrow girls!”

“It’s them!”

“Hey, girls, look over here!”

It wasn’t too long before Jack Liffey was ambulatory—as the hospital types insisted on calling it when you could walk under your own steam. The first thing he did was ambulate his way to a linen closet and steal a second gown to put on back-to-front over the first one to cover his bare, chilly ass. He could appreciate the desire for quick access to your body in a hospital, but since nobody was checking out his ass for anything in particular, he figured his dignity took precedence.

Then he ambulated right up the fire escape to find Bancroft Davis who he’d discovered was flat on his back in a room almost directly above his own, recovering from a heart attack that he’d suffered on the climactic night of what was being called, variously, the Ab-Ib Disturbances, the Ab-Ib Uprising, or just the Ab-Ib Riot, depending on your perspective on law and order.

The first day Jack Liffey had gone up the stairs, Bancroft Davis had been sleeping, and the second day, he’d been out for tests, but on the third day Jack Liffey finally had the old man conscious and smiling weakly up at him. They both had time on their hands and he could plague Bancroft Davis to his heart’s content with questions about life on the front lines of the civil rights crusade.

“I’ll deny I said it, but it’s true: I was a quarter inch from getting a gun, those days. The only thing that probably stopped me was it was about as easy for a black man to get a pistol in Mississippi as buy himself a nuclear warhead. There’s one white woman just now let out of federal prison for supplying self-defense to some brothers way back then.”

A young nurse leaned in, noticed Jack Liffey and frowned. “Not visiting hours,” she suggested.

“I’m not a visitor,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m a noted cardiac surgeon.”

That puzzled her, because he wore hospital gowns and had his arm in a black sling, but for some reason she withdrew.

“I thought they gave all of you nonviolence classes.”

“I had the classes, but we don’t all live up when the sheets and rifles come out.”

“Fair enough.”

“You know, the dean of all that non-violence is right here in LA, Rev. James Lawson at Holman Methodist. He’d read Gandhi as a young man and then he’d been a Christian missionary in India, and he taught Martin about non-violence and Martin thought it was the right thing and had him teach us. Lawson was the coolest, calmest, most peaceful man I’ve ever met.”

An older nurse with fiery red hair peeked in. “You again. Mr. Davis is supposed to have complete bed rest.”

“Give me five minutes.”

“
Two
. Just this once.” She ducked out.

Two weeks earlier, Davis had been reluctant to talk to Jack Liffey about those days with Jack Liffey, like a war veteran nursing his stoic memories deep in some private place, but he had loosened up for some reason—maybe the brush with death.

“One demonstration, I put my body in front of a white SNCC worker the Klanners had singled out to beat on, and they started beating on me, too. We both went down and got in the fetal position the way we were taught, and we were getting kicked pretty bad when Lawson ambled over and started talking to the Klanners—just boys really, but
big
boys—about their cars. Their
cars
: how much extra horsepower they got out of using hot cams! They were so startled they began talking to him like human beings, and we got up and went on with the march. Man, he was something. Cool as a cucumber.”

“Like your granddaughter.”

He beamed. “And
your
girl Maeve. The wheelbarrow girls.” He chuckled. “Somebody ought to go and get that wheelbarrow and make a shrine out of it.”

“It’s yours to enshrine. It came from your back yard.”

“I don’t know how those little girls got you all the way to eighty-seventh and Vermont.”

“I looked on a map,” Jack Liffey said. “It’s almost two miles. Of course, they had another six miles to go to get here. When I get out I’m gonna look up the folks that helped.”

“I heard there were a half dozen cars driving around looking for you, but mostly over on the other side of Vermont where the helicopter camera lost you. Nobody official helped.”

“Nobody official helped,” Jack Liffey agreed. “That’s why I want to thank the unofficials.”

“You do that. But you know what I learned from Jim Lawson?”

“That’s exactly what I want to hear from you.”

He smiled. “Doing the right thing is never a mystery. You never have to explain to people why you’re doing it—even your enemies. You just do it, and they know.”

The door opened, and the redheaded nurse came back. “I’m afraid you’ll have to return to your place now. Whether you’re a famous surgeon or not.”

Jack Liffey took Davis’ leathery dry hand and squeezed it once. He hadn’t told him what he knew about Amilcar and Sherry yet, and he didn’t look forward to it. He had told the police; they were checking the dates of burials at Rose Hills, trying to decide which graves to dig up. And he had told Genesee Thigpen; it was she who had asked him to wait until after Bancroft recovered from the balloon angioplasty that they had scheduled to open up his coronary arteries.

“Have your procedure and get better,” Jack Liffey said. “We’ll talk some more.”

“Please. Then you can tell me the truth about Amilcar.”

“Everything I know,” Jack Liffey said, staying as expression-less as he could.

*

That afternoon, Chris Johnson came to visit with a radiant-looking Babs in a long gypsy dress. They were holding hands, and Jack Liffey had a hard time not noticing.

“We got the VW back,” Chris announced. “They traced it to me, since you neglected to change the registration in the few hours you had it. It used to have a pretty good stereo and a rear seat and a battery, but other than that, it’s pretty much okay. You still want it?”

“Yeah, I’ll pay you what it was worth when it was whole. When I can.”

“No hurry, man.”

For a while, they made delighted noises about his new permanent nickname, the Wheelbarrow Man, a name he had already heard several hundred times too many.

“So,” Jack Liffey said. He pointed to where they were still holding hands. “I thought you were… uh…”

“You noticed,” Chris Johnson said drily.

“I hit both ways, and Andy and I weren’t working out,” Babs explained. “Thanks to you, Chris and I fell in love.”

“And you and Dot?” Jack Liffey asked him.

“Things change, man. What can I say?”

Poor Dot, he thought, with her house full of potted plants for her ex-lover’s web site. Poor Toni, alone on her MTA bus, undone by her own good deed. But a lot of human sympathy seemed to have drained out of him for the moment. If he could lose Marlena so abruptly, everybody would just have to fend for themselves.

“It’s an uncertain world,” Jack Liffey said resignedly.

“You can bank on it.”

*

And he still had Marlena to deal with. Someone on the phone had announced that Marlena was coming up to see him “with a friend.” He put on a real shirt and motored the head of the bed up to a right angle. He wished it could be Maeve instead, but her mother had discovered all, including the escapade in Fontana, and had grounded her for four or five years without possibility of parole. Maeve called him every day, however, and he’d had a pretty good first-hand account of her wheelbarrow trip, plus giggled previews of a few new oddities that she was saving up for him.

She had also told him about the metal oblong from his pocket, and they had laughed about the loyal old Concord saving his life, the door handle turning a deadly bullet into two broken ribs. Actually, as he told her, it was the second time the car had saved him from the fanatics of Gdeon’s 300–who, it turned out, had expired themselves in a hail of gunfire that was generally attributed to the Rolling 60s Crips. He wished he still had the door handle as a souvenir, but it had gone the way of all mementos of chaotic days. What was that Chinese curse?
May you live in eventful times.

He knew how lucky he was, to be alive still and to have Maeve as a daughter.

This, he thought, was the first detective job he’d ever had that had actually taught him a positive moral lesson, instead of battering his ethics to the ground with a club. Even if he’d learned the lesson second-hand, from Maeve’s phone calls. What he’d learned was simple, really: If you really need help, go to the poorest of the poor. They don’t think twice.

He thought of the Reverend Lawson:
You never have to explain to people why you’re doing the right thing. They know.
It seemed to be part of the same lesson, but he couldn’t quite put it together.

Then the door came open a little and Marlena peeked cautiously into the room. “Jackie, you decent?”

“Many people have wondered,” he said, but he wasn’t actually feeling very witty. The instant he saw the rich brown skin of her wonderful face, he wanted her desperately.

“Maybe it’s not a good time, but I want you to meet my friend Willis Eversharp. Willis, Jack.”

They eyed one another. He was too young by maybe a decade and too handsome, with one of those chiseled faces that Marlena watched on soap operas. The man stuck out his hand and Jack Liffey thought, what the hell, and took it.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” the visitor said. It almost seemed he was about to add
Sir
.

“Willis.” It was all he could muster, his heart sinking slowly in the west.

“We found Loco, Jackie. He come home with his tail between his legs and dug right back under the fence again, looking pretty sheepish. No telling what he done.”

“If he’s one of the dogs who ganged up on Maeve,” Jack Liffey said, “his ass is toast.”

“I don’t know how to find out.”

“Me neither. He’s part coyote and he’s always had a pretty big disloyal streak.” He realized what he’d just said and winced. “I didn’t mean anything.”

“That’s okay.”

He tried again. “Willis, could you give us a couple minutes? I won’t make this painful.”

The man bobbed his head. “I’ll be right here, hon.” He nodded to Jack Liffey and went out the door, trying to make as little noise as possible, and Jack Liffey decided her new beau might not be such a bad sort.

“You happy, Mar?”

“I’m very happy, Jack. Him and me always like to do everything together—you know, church and lots of other stuff.”

Some of the “other stuff” didn’t bear thinking about. Implicit in what she said was the fact that there were a lot of things Jack Liffey had never done with her, and attending that gaga fundamentalist millenarian church was certainly one of them. They did everything but hurl snakes. “Tell me one thing—and I want you to swear on Jesus. He didn’t give you that black eye a couple weeks ago.”

“Honest, Jackie, I swear on my holy faith.” She raised one hand and put the other over her heart. Actually, over her breast, he thought, but he tried not to think about that. “It really was a stupid accident. Willis is very sweet with me.”

He shut his eyes and nodded. “Okay. I’ll just say this once. I still love you very much, Marlena, and I miss you, and I want you as a friend and a lover both, and if I knew how, I’d fight to the death to get you back, but if you’re sure about this and you’re happy and you need this guy, I give you both my blessing.”

“Oh, Jackie,
thank you.
That’s so sweet.” She bent and hugged him, and the smell of her had him on the edge of tears.

“You’d better go now.”

*

He was still pretty shaken and depressed an hour later when Genesee Thigpen came in with Ornetta.

“I’ve got to talk some things over with Bancroft,” she explained. “Ornetta would love to sit with you for a while, Mr. Liffey.”

“I’d love to have her.”

The girl came shyly to the bed and felt his forehead with a small gentle palm. “You warm,” she observed happily.

“I sure hope so.” He remembered he’d been in shock the last time she had seen him.

“We owe you some money,” the woman said.

“Don’t worry about that now.
Please
.”

“Okay, but we remember our debts and we pay them.” She rested a hand briefly on Ornetta’s shoulder. “I’ll be back shortly.”

“Uh-huh. It okay, Nana.”

The woman left and Ornetta boosted herself into the stiff visitor chair. She got right to the point. “When we was together, Maeve promised you could be my sort-of daddy. Maeve and me blood sisters. We touched blood.” She showed a finger, but there was nothing to see.

Jack Liffey smiled. “How about uncle?”

The girl seemed to relax all at once. She gave a short laugh. “Uncle Jack, uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

“You remember the first time we met?” he asked. “You were sitting in the front yard and you told me about the revolt of the rhinestone animals.”

She beamed.

“Nice story,” he said simply.

“Do you know about the mean ol’ dogs?” the girl offered. “And the magic wheelbarrow?”