2

FRIGHTENED COMMUTERS PULLED TO THE SIDE TO get out of harm’s way as we followed the rocket’s red glare.

“Faster!” Mandy screamed, shoving my protective arm off her clavicle. “He’s going to kill himself!”

I used my now-free hand to wipe the sweat off my dripping forehead, then swallowed the smear of lipstick she’d left on my teeth as we cleared another block.

The rocket’s fire snuffed out. Smoke plumed.

“This is our chance!” I said. “Get in the back seat!”

“But I’m wearing a skirt!”

“Do it or he dies in his cockpit!”

She gave me a look that made my five o’clock shadow burn. Clunky heels hit the ceiling as she climbed over, belly first.

I’d like to say I didn’t look in the rearview mirror.

But I did.

And I discovered Mandy Jefferson wore no panties. I found this glistening fact somewhat distracting, but still managed to pull next to the rocket car. In his control bubble, Peter was desperately pulling at levers and mashing pedals as we raced past Grace Methodist Church and headed for the curve at Overhill Drive.

“Jump!” I screamed and nodded at the empty passenger seat.

“I CANNOT ABANDON MY VESSEL!”

God, everyone in L.A. sounded like a movie script, especially when their balls were retracted.

“Peter, there’s a dead-end parking lot with an old transformer station. Just aim the ship that way and get ready to launch!”

Peter glared. “YOU ARE MY ENEMY AND THE ENEMY OF MY ORDER!”

“Then jump in here and kick my ass. Just don’t kill anyone to do it, okay?

“Do as he says!” Mandy said, sticking her head up from the back seat.

“Peter? Can I call you that?”

“MY ETERNAL NAME IS NOVA.”

I honked to get a Chevy with a Nixon/Agnew bumper sticker out of my way. “Nova? You got about one minute to point this thing at the station and jump in here. That is, if you have the courage to do it. Think: what would Captain Kirk do?”

His eyes narrowed. “STAND BY, INFERIOR!”

My day could not get any better. “Standing by at fifty-five miles per hour. Move!”

Peter kicked a pedal and the bubble retracted from the throne . . . and got stuck halfway down. The wind jerked Peter as the transformer station came into view, but his gloved hands maneuvered the rocket car to the right so it would hit the gray structure.

“Hurray!”

He yanked open the cockpit bubble. “IF I PERISH, I WILL—”

“Shut your mouth and toss your ass!” I screamed, bringing Lilith close, hoping I could turn her back to the street and away from the rocket car’s certain doom. “NOW!”

Peter yanked out the last cable, stood on the precipice of the bubble, and dove for the window. His helmet came through and his gloved hands scrambled for something to hold as I peeled back into traffic. His boots dragged against the asphalt like a grindstone. “I’m slipping!” One gloved hand and then the other purchased only air as we crossed Overhill.

I shot out my right hand and grabbed him, but his weight dragged Lilith toward the rocket car’s path. My left hand wound us back—

—and his glove slipped out of my right. “No!” I said as Peter slid out the window.

“Mine!”

Mandy’s burgundy nails dug into the soft flesh of Peter’s wrists, freeing me enough to pull a hard left. “You’re mine! Now!”

BOOM!

I slowed down and made an easy right on South La Brea Avenue. Mandy let go and Peter plopped out the window. I exited Lilith and saw the smoke cloud above the station’s demolished walls. “Well, Pete,” I said. “I’d say the maiden voyage of your rocket car will make the history books.”

I walked around Lilith to find a throwaway scene from some B movie from the Parkway Drive-In of my childhood. On the concrete, Mandy cradled Peter’s head as she pulled off his mask; the pictures I’d taken were stashed under her plaid rump. “Oh god, honey, can you breathe?”

Peter’s sweaty, mustached face was free, his glassy eyes starting to focus as he sucked in air with a wheeze through clenched teeth. “It was written in the cosmos that you would save me, Mandy. And you have.”

“Well, let’s not fuss about that right now. What matters is you’re safe.”

“And I’m late,” I said. It was nearly noon. “I hate to drop you off in the aftermath of a rocket launch, Mrs. Jefferson, but I think my work here is done.” I nodded to the dirty pictures under her ass.

“Don’t leave me, Mandy!” he said, gripping her shoulder with rocket gloves I swore had been stolen from a foundry. “Not for this inferior.”

I smiled. Good on you, Pete. Fight for your gal. Call me names. Make me less of a man. Whatever you need to do.

“What, him?” She gave me a scathing look that nearly melted my eyeballs. “He’s just an investigator. I was funning you, Peter. That’s all. We can rebuild us. You just have to listen to me.”

“So,” I said. “About the other half of my payment.”

“You’ll get it in the mail, Mr. Brimstone,” she said, sharp and swift as a career knifeman tossing his first blade.

I smiled. Hard. “No, Mrs. Jefferson. I won’t. If I don’t get the check I know you have in the inside pocket of your coat right now, I never will. The fire department and the cops are going to be sending out search parties for the person responsible for that explosion, and near as I can tell no one will fit the APB other than good old Peter, even without the bug mask. I have a spare pair of duds in the trunk that can replace his spaceman suit. Plus, I’ll be happy to throw in a quick lift for the two of you to that school of yours if you’ll be so kind as to hand over—”

She tore an envelope out of her coat and tossed it to me. “Help me get him inside.”

I TOOK THE LONG WAY AROUND INGLEWOOD TO PS 109 WHILE MANdy and Peter got him out of his Commando Cody get-up and into a spare pair of black slacks and a brown shirt I’d worn while casing the electronics shop Peter and his buddies had turned into a HQ for their science-fiction double feature sex-and-magic club.

“Suck in your gut. God, Peter, what am I going to do with you?”

I turned the volume up to drown out her voice, but not loud enough to kill the itching sound of a siren on my tail. I kept things nice and easy, even knowing I was doomed to Cactus’s wrath for being late with every minute I wasn’t at the hall for his big event. When doomed, try to enjoy the ride. Waylon Jennings sang ol’ Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” just as we pulled up to the school’s parking lot. And I saw something that made me happy as hell.

A handful of black children were enjoying lunch on the school steps as the typical shouts and screams of public school littered the air. Turns out the L.A. Superior Court had a decent bone in its body. While I was hunting sex krakens in the Valley, they’d killed all attempts to keep these kids away and desegregated the schools of the city. The black kids looked wary as white kids ran around and controlled the jungle gym, the swings, and the baseball diamond. I’d fought in Korea and seen nightmares come alive that would scare the guts out of Audie Murphy, but looking at those kids enjoying their sandwiches, surrounded by kids whose parents, just two months ago, were up in arms about how integration was a tool of the devil— well, those kids on those steps were, for me, the emblem of courage in a world that wants us to be cowards by daylight and complacent by night.

“Ain’t that a sight,” I said.

“Yes. Nigger children. As if my day wasn’t rough enough.”

I had no idea how much restraint I possessed until I heard Mandy’s voice. The voice of a teacher. The voice of someone preparing kids to be grown-ups. I swallowed the ice in my throat and she kept going. “How am I supposed to teach children with no letters or math?”

I rested my shoulder on the seat, turned, and smiled. “I will say this once. I’m friends with Gus, the janitor at this school. We’re members of the same bowling league. Real stand-up guy, Gus. Mentors black kids at the YMCA, teaches them boxing, like he learned it in the Army, back when they thought blacks needed a strong Southern man to push their platoons around like they were plantations, back when he wasn’t considered a real American like you or me, just because of the color of his skin. He’s a great guy to know, Mandy. I bet he’d help you start an after-school program to assist anyone who can’t read and write as if they were taught in a white school. I bet he’d be a great ally in the challenge ahead.”

Her forehead crinkled. “Why would I ever do that?”

“Just an idea. You don’t have to take it. But if I find out that you’re slacking, that you’re not treating those kids as the future of this country, if you show the kind of race favoritism that makes our country a joke after liberating Hitler’s concentration camps, well, then I might have to let your principal have the photos I took.”

She grabbed her ass, then pulled out the folder. “I still have them.”

I nodded. “And I have the negatives. I can make a wall mural of them if I want and hand them out with your address, just so everyone in Inglewood knows that Mrs. Jefferson’s husband needs to get his shaft wet in the cosmos.” Of course, I didn’t have the negatives. The dark room I sent the film to was holding onto them until I paid off a debt I’d forgotten about thanks to getting Lilith’s windshield fixed . . . but the vagaries of my fiscal life didn’t seem prudent to share at this juncture.

She slapped Peter so hard I felt my own molars scream. Peter shook in my dark clothes, one size too small for his frame. “Don’t just sit like a mole on a hill, Peter. Do something!”

Pete flinched, then tossed a right that looked like he was throwing a softball. He tagged my face and I winced.

I hissed. “Good shot, Pete. I deserve it. Now why don’t you help your wife out of the car and try and lay low before the cops drag you in for questioning about your use of rockets as sex gear.”

Peter scrambled out of the car. “Come on, Mandy! Lunch is almost over.”

Mandy bared her teeth. Some of her lipstick had smeared across them like blood. “Never took you for a nigger lover, Brimstone.”

I sighed. “I never took you for a sexually regressive bigot who clearly wants to be her husband’s mother. But, here we are.”

She raised her hand.

“I owed your husband a shot. But if that racist hand hits me, I’ll start the battle cry, ‘Teacher has no panties.’” I covered my mouth with my hand. “What would your students think, Mrs. Jefferson?”

Her hand shook, Peter beckoned, and she clenched her manila envelope with her burgundy talons before rolling out of Lilith in a huff. I peeled out gently, knowing the fuse was lit for my ass-kicking at the Legion Hall, and worrying about the future.

By the time I’d circled back to Slauson and Harcourt, the fire department was already extinguishing the rocket car, two LAPD squad cars flanked the wreckage, and I was glad that all eyes were on the fiasco and fire and not the Dodge Dart that had run beside it. I pulled an illegal U-turn and replayed my drive to the hall, this time without dragging the tin cans of Peter and Mandy behind me.

The parking lot had become a mini-Woodstock of longhairs and megaphones. I pulled into the lot to find Cactus waiting. The fury of his gaze had dropped to sub-zero temperatures, akin to the Chosin River that gave our platoon frostbite.

Outside Lilith, the protesters chanted “No more Nixon! Election Fixing! Cambodia bombing! Baby Killing!”

I stepped out of Lilith. “I thought the bombing campaign was done.”

“Kids are still dying,” Cactus said. “So, they keep protesting. And you’re late.”

“Cactus, I would have been on time if I hadn’t been chased by that amazing machine you saw blasting the street.”

He stepped forward and I shut up. “Didn’t ask for excuses. Don’t care who popped you a weak fist, either. Come on. You need to bear witness.” He marched toward the protesters. I followed.

The bearded man with the American flag T-shirt and megaphone blasted stats on casualties and horrors that were becoming fodder for gory headlines and evening news broadcasts, so much so that I was glad I still enjoyed news via the wires. But it wasn’t just Vietnam that was bad. My last case before Mandy arrived involved a kid named Roger who had run away from San Diego to become a rock-and-roll star. His sister believed his taste in music was touched by Satan himself and found my ad in the Free Press. I hunted for the kid in the strip’s motel alleys and gutter bars and found him with a girl his age, a needle in his arm, and downers down her throat: two beautiful corpses wearing black T-shirts with band logos and soiled flares. Not a taste of magic around it. No Satan needed to be a casualty in the aftermath of the peace and love generation. Then you read in the L.A. Times about Latino laborers murdered by the Sausage King’s warehouse in East L.A., the rising tide of White Nationalism brewing around integration of schools, and the tired old lines about black violence, black rape, and black fears coming out of the children of GIs who broke down the doors at Buchenwald and you wonder, what in the hell kind of short-term memory loss does this city have?

A ripe avocado smacked my calf, and I turned.

Long-haired folks, some with mustaches, filled the ranks. All draft age or younger, some carrying placards high, armpits sweated to darkness on T-shirts that declared everything from KILL TRICKY DICK to LED ZEP, a British rock band that did a great job of exploiting black American blues. A couple of armpits stuck out because they were locked down by arms pinching skateboards to their ribs. They were younger, quieter, but no less present. Like kids following their big brother and sis into the fray.

The chanting grew, and I wondered if the radicals and freaks who hated the state would endure longer than those dropping out of the mainstream and finding the death blossom of youth in some sleazy motel named after a dead president or violent ends at the hands of cops who cause Latino and black mothers to mourn. Whatever else the 1970s were becoming, they were first and foremost a graveyard of idealism akin to what I saw in the 1950s, with hate for Freedom Riders tearing people apart. Plus ça change, the French say. Here’s hoping the kids with megaphones and placards would keep fighting against war and the other horseman of the apocalypse I saw every day in this beautiful veneer of a city: bigotry, abuse, and damnation.

When a Honey Gold apple smacked my cheek harder than Peter’s punch, I snapped back to the moment. The hall was a single story of gray brick but with nice, big windows up top that allowed the L.A. sunshine inside.

Cactus walked past a grizzled vet, a guy with hell in his eyes and fruit stains on his shirt, and his campaign medals attested he was, honest to god, a doughboy from the Great War, as well as the “good” one twenty years later. Made him seventy if he joined when he was sixteen. The disgust on his face could fill the sewers of hell. He looked at me—wearing an orange-and-brown polyester suit and brown-and-white wingtips, slightly scuffed—comparing my attire to his immaculate dress greens and spit-polished boots that had likely walked through more battlefields than anyone in a nuclear blast radius.

“Death merchant!” screamed a young woman who, I presume, lobbed the apple. Her dark wire-rimmed glasses hid her eyes. Freckles spread across her cheeks. “You’re responsible for My Lai! War criminal!”

That stung. “Never served in ’Nam,” I said. “But you’re right. Charlie Company should be drawn and quartered for what they did.”

“Charlie Company?” she said. “It could have been anyone created by the military-industrial complex!” Despite her vitriol, I was taken by the tall guy with a thin blond mustache standing silent behind her. His loose flannel shirt and smooth tan pegged him as “Native to Cali.” Fit as a career surfer and stoic as a Greek philosopher, he placed one hand on the angry woman’s shoulder. She quieted and sighed.

But his hands twitched as he touched her, with the precision of a metronome. Like his hand was a ticking stopwatch.

“Just get out! Stop killing!”

I turned back to the vet near the door but caught sight of something else that stuck out like weeds on a ceiling. Big guy, hard face with shark eyes, just standing in the middle of the screamers. Hair was long, but ragged. Scars on his arms. He was stewing in place, seemingly feeding off the rage of the protestors but doing nothing himself, like a doppelganger to the Gentle Blond Giant with the deep, dark tan.

A biker?

“You with them,” the old timer said, “or you with us?”

I smiled. “I’m with Cactus.” An orange crashed into my spine and I pushed my way into the dark of the hall.

I realized how strange it was that Cactus would ask me to witness his event. Maybe he just wanted to see me pelted with a poor man’s Santa Fe salad.