Streets on Fire Read Free

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