Streets on Fire (6 page)

She started at the top, reading where it seemed important, skimming a lot. She had taken Mrs. Beard’s speed-reading class, and though she loved words and resented the very concept, she did find the skill useful.

Cowabunga! she thought an hour later. She started taking notes on her own pad.

*

AB-IB THREATENS

LAPD LAWSUIT

That explained a lot of the uproar in the African American community that he kept running into, Jack Liffey thought. The police review board was up in arms, the chief had apologized profusely, and the two officers involved had been suspended pending an investigation. But the great pitcher Abdullah Ibrahim was not to be mollified. He said it was only because he was famous that this incident had come to light at all and he wondered how many more illegal chokeholds were still being used throughout the city. Frequent references were made to a previous police chief who had notoriously insisted that chokeholds only affected African Americans, not “normal” people.

Jack Liffey flipped through the paper, but he could find nothing about a cross-burning on Brighton Street. There seemed a conspiracy of silence around the other incidents, too: the burned-out police substation Ivan Monk had mentioned and the other fires he had hinted about. Jack Liffey knew the newspaper had a policy of minimizing riotlike incidents since the big one in 1992. He wondered if somebody in authority really believed it was gangbangers reading the
LA Times
who spread the impulse to riot; that was a little like hiding the thermometer when it got hot. But it was a lot easier to edit the news than address the underlying social problems.

“You’re up late, punkin.”

She yawned and stretched. “I must have needed the sleep. Are you going soon?”

“Take your shower. There’s no rush. Kathleen said it was okay for you to stay out there with Mary Beth for a couple of days.”

“Oh, great. Thanks.”

“It’s a lot hotter out there in what they call the Inland Empire, so dress warm.”

She wrinkled up her eyes. “Shouldn’t it be, dress cool?”

“Ouch. Probably. That’s what comes of reading science fiction instead of Charlotte Brontë.”

“I happen to know you have a master’s degree in English Literature, Daddy,” she insisted.

“And look how I’m using it.”

For probably the twentieth time in his life, at the exact same spot in the East LA freeway tangle, Jack Liffey got caught in an abrupt exit-only lane and almost found himself hurtling down the offramp. He accelerated his clunky Concord back on between a couple of eighteen-wheelers, and was happy when neither of them blew an air-horn at him.

“Man, it’s getting hot,” Maeve said.

“Sorry, the air’s on the fritz.” That wasn’t strictly true; he couldn’t remember whether the air conditioner in his Concord had ever worked.

He did another hard lane change, and finally settled into a lane that he was pretty sure continued on toward Claremont. The I-10 east of the LA River had been cobbled together out of three other routes, and you had to change lanes like a madman, hard north and then hard east to stay on it. One inattentive moment and you were heading for Bakersfield or paying a surprise call on the decaying frame houses of Boyle Heights.

He saw the tops of these big old houses drift past. A lot of them had been built in the mid-nineteenth century by a spooky Russian sect called the Molokans. Before long all the spare rooms had been rented out to Mexicans fleeing the downtown slum then known as Sonoratown. Then, by turns, these same uplands east of the river saw LA’s first tiny black ghetto, its first artisan suburb on the Redcar line, and its first sizable Jewish community. Finally, beginning in the 1930s, the big aging houses had been chopped into apartments and filled to overflowing with Mexican Americans retreating northward in the city before the press of the great Anglo migrations out of the Dustbowl and the Midwest. He had once been deeply into LA lore, but he was having trouble now finding a purpose for it all. He did know this: Close your eyes for half a generation and your community sneaked away somewhere else.

“Sometime we ought to do a mural tour,” Maeve said. Boyle Heights had been the heart of the great mural revival of the 1970s, and there were scores of them scattered around on mini-markets and park walls.

“Love to. You feeling any better about what happened, hon?”

“No.”

“You probably won’t until you talk to Bradley again and clear the air. That’s the way it usually goes.”

He could sense her staring at him. “Were you that controlled and forgiving when mom told you what happened?” she asked.

He sensed an intensity in her and realized this was no casual question. “What you want to know is didn’t I suggest that I might break every bone in his
bleep
body? Yes, I did.”

“Dad, I know you love me. You don’t have to prove it by going apeshit.”

“It’s just what I felt.”

“It’s patronizing, though. Really. It’s not just that I’m young, is it? It’s that I’m a
girl
. I’ve got to fight my own battles some, you know.”

He stole a peek. “Maybe if I’d seen you more often recently, I wouldn’t be so surprised by this brand-new, all-grown-up Maeve.” He bobbed his head back and forth a little, as if considering something. “So I’ve got to let go a bit, huh?”

“That’s the ticket. Let me goof up. Let me pick up my own broken china.”

“Pay your own college fees?” he tried out brightly.

“Dad!” But he heard her giggle and then suppress it. “You’re impossible. I might even want to kiss a boy, you know?”

That shut him up for a moment. He knew “dating” was coming soon, and he just hoped he liked the boy when it did. Please, please, not some dull sports-obsessed surfer with that horrible know-nothing suburban mushmouth enunciation and a grudge against everything.
Uh, shr, dude man, tha’ss gnarly, fr shr
. In his experience, there was simply no accounting for the men women fell for.

“Or you might want to kiss a girl,” he said.

“Or kiss a girl,” she agreed.

“It wouldn’t kill me,” he said. “Whatever you choose.”

“I haven’t tried girls, but thanks.”

“Speaking of girls, how did you happen to stay friends with Mary Beth?” That seemed safe. “The only time I remember going out to Claremont to see Uncle Tom was when I was a kid.”

“Don’t you remember we met them at the Fair in Pomona a few years ago?”

“Oh,” he said. That explained it. That particular family excursion had come at an extremely low point in his life, after the big layoff, when he’d been tending a friendship with demon rum. He only vaguely remembered the county fair—heat, dust, cotton candy struck to his shirt and some strange agrarian event with teenagers in white shirts kneeling beside sheep with their eyes locked on a stern old man and their hands apparently up the sheep’s asses. It must have been the scotch.

“We wrote each other for a while, and mom has taken me out there a couple times. Mary Beth and I are good friends.”

*

Maeve wasn’t sure exactly why she was lying so hard, but she had to lay the groundwork for the visit, without making her dad suspicious. On the phone Mary Beth had been astonished to hear from her. They had exchanged a grand total of one postcard after the fair, and that was three years past, and there had been exactly zero visits. She caught hold of herself and stopped explaining, figuring Nancy Drew would call it quits about then.

“Tom was
my
uncle,” Jack Liffey said. “How does he have a daughter your age?”

“His wife died, remember? He married again, with a younger woman.”

“Okay.”

She could see that he didn’t remember. Her dad had never been very good at relatives, or birthdays, or the names of her friends. He remembered movies, but he never remembered if he’d seen them with her, unless they’d been obvious kid movies. Whereas she remembered who she went with to every single movie, where they sat, what movie house it was, and what they’d done afterward. Her dad’s mental filing cabinet just seemed to index movies under:
title—seen it—liked it/hated it
. A guy thing, she figured. Their filing systems just worked differently. Women filed everything under people and guys under things. There was no question which was superior, more humanist, but it was probably in the genes.

“Yoo-hoo, wake up, Dad. Indian Hill Boulevard means Claremont.”

*

He was surprised that Maeve had chosen Mary Beth as a friend. From what he’d seen dropping her off and having a quick coffee with the family, Mary Beth was a chubby, brooding, not-very-bright girl a year younger than Maeve. There was no accounting for tastes, he thought, and to be charitable, maybe there were things in the girl he didn’t see. After all, at one point in the fifties he’d probably seemed a pretty somber and anti-social kid himself. He hadn’t been very happy as a boy. He wondered why the human species had to go through so much trouble and pain growing up. Puppies got it right almost every time.

Amilcar’s former roommate, David Phelps, was in the phone book, and it turned out to be upstairs in a cheap complex toward the larger town of Pomona, the kind of building with a balconied runway past all the doors. Heat radiated off every surface, and a lot of the windows had aluminum foil on them.

“David Phelps?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Would it matter?”

He had a big ring in the septum of his nose, spiky hair and a tattoo on the side of his neck that only the highest of turtlenecks would cover: it read
AVENGE BAUDELAIRE
.

“It might.”

“I’ve been hired to find Amilcar Davis, by his parents. My name is Jack Liffey.”

The young man seemed to relax. “Sure. Come on.”

Jack Liffey could see the place would take him a while to assimilate. There were books stacked all over the room, and the walls were a solid pastiche of posters, photographs, bits of butcher paper with scribbling on them and what looked like finger paintings.

“Beer?”

“No thanks. But cold water would be nice.” It was over 100 outside, and hotter in the baking air inside.

“Can do.”

“You have anything to do with that self-destructing art machine out in the quad?” Jack Liffey called toward the kitchen.

“Harvat’s thing? Not a chance. That dude is the very oldest hat of the middling new hats. Jean Tinguely did all that decades ago. What a bore.”

While the young man was banging through cupboards, Jack Liffey examined some of the wall sayings.

THE PRACTICAL IS THE LONGEST DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS.

EVIL BE THOU MY GOOD: AN UNSATISFACTORY ALTERNATIVE BECAUSE EVERY INVERSION RETAINS THE STRUCTURE OF THE MORAL AXIS.

There was a
Life
photo Jack Liffey remembered from the late fifties of fraternity boys cramming themselves into a phone booth, and under it:

YOU CONSTRUCT ELABORATE RITUALS TO ALLOW YOU TO TOUCH THE BODIES OF OTHER MEN.

All by itself was a neatly lettered,

WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO COMPLICATE THE CULTURAL SPACE, TO RENDER CRITICISM AS DIFFICULT AS POSSIBLE.

He was back, holding out a glass. “That’s the last ice cube. This heat has overdetermined my old fridge.”

Jack Liffey glanced at the tiny cube. “It deconstructs as I watch.”

The young man smiled at that, but he didn’t bite. “Sit, please. I’m glad somebody is looking for Ami.”

“Did you two get along?”

The young man thought about it for a moment as they sat in noisy burgundy-colored bean bags. His spiked-up hair bobbed whenever he moved. “Yes, like brothers. The college put us together our freshman year, on the theory that grouping all the unusual students would insulate the rest.”

“You’re unusual?”

He smiled. “When they asked for hobbies, Mr. Liffey, I said ‘Being very gay.’ I could have said being subversive, too, but gay was fine for drawing their radar.”

“I’m Jack.”

“Ami and I got along fine, once I got over my own prejudice. Not about blacks per se. But I’ve had this sense for a long time that the African American community has special trouble accepting gays. You know, there’s all that working-class macho to deal with, and the street culture, and then they’re already oppressed once, automatically.”

“How did Amilcar deal with you being gay?”

“Better than you.”

“Did I say something?” Jack Liffey was a little taken aback.

“You reacted when you saw me.”

“Whoa. Isn’t it a little disingenuous to dress to shock and then be surprised when people are shocked? That nose ring does make you look like Ferdinand the Bull.”

He laughed quite hard. “That’s the spirit, Jackie. Okay: Ami and I were
very
different. Maybe that’s why we got along so well. I’m doing cultural studies and he’s history. He wants to be a lawyer”—he gave a shiver of loathing—“probably a senator, and I want to be… oppositional. I think we both learned a lot from each other and respected each other. I grew up in Claremont, so you can imagine how little I knew about the black community before I met Ami. We even double-dated. He and Sherry got a kick out of being with me and Jeff. They were good folks.”

There was a buzz from the back of the apartment, and he jumped up. “Oops, some art’s cooking. I’ve got to turn it over. Be right back.”

Jack Liffey watched him swish a bit as he left, probably just twitting his guest. He got up and opened the door to get some air into the hot, heavy room and then studied the wall again. He could feel his shoulders sticking to damp geometric patches of his shirt.

There was a tall red flocked dog on the floor with a printed notice above it:

DISPLAYING A KITSCH ITEM AS HIGH ART IS NOT A CRITICAL COMMENT ON THE COMMODIFICATION OF ART BUT A MEANS OF RENDERING THE DISTANCE NECESSARY FOR THAT CRITICISM NULL AND VOID.

He’d always disliked making fun of kitsch art, because it was making fun of ordinary people and their tastes, but he couldn’t quite discern the attitude here.

There was a snapshot of a German-looking pub on an uphill cobbled street with the legend
CAFÉ VOLTAIRE
. Beside it was another of Phelps’ hand-lettered signs:
DADA SMASHES THE WORLD, BUT THE PIECES ARE FINE
.