Streets on Fire Read Online Free Page B

call it. He’d bet nobody had ever called Oxford the Claremont of England.
    It was summer and there weren’t many kids around. Still, something was going on out on a big grassy no-man’s-land that seemed to separate a couple of the colleges. Yellow crime scene tape from tree to post to tree cordoned off the middle of the quad where there was a complicated machine the size of a Greyhound bus, bristling with big cams and gears and belts. Maybe thirty young people stood outside the tape, well back from the machine. Jack Liffey parked and ambled closer across the springy crabgrass.
    The leader seemed to be a man who was older and hairier than the rest, wearing a sheepskin vest and standing in front of a portable console of buttons and knobs. There was a video camera on a tripod and everyone else seemed to have a still camera.
    “Flag up!” someone cried, and sure enough a girl on the far side of the quad raised a red flag.
    “Fire in the hole!” somebody else called, which gave Jack Liffey a real chill; it was the traditional warning for blasting. In his limited experience—a few days caught up in Tet in Saigon—it meant a grenade or C-4 going down into a basement.
    “Roll tape,” the hairy man called out, “Phase two self-immolation.” He stabbed at a button on his console and all eyes were on the machine. Belts ground up, wheels spun, a mirrored ball sent sun sparkles everywhere and, he wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he heard a deep groaning emanate from the machine.
    “There it goes there it goes!” somebody called excitedly as a puff of dark smoke spurted out the side. A big cogwheel spun up into the air, a double-jointed mechanical arm reached out and then flung off its own forearm, and a section of the machine began to bob insanely, like a pigeon strutting along a windowsill.
    Cameras ticked and flashed all around him as the near half of the framework tilted and then collapsed on itself.
    “All right !”
    A titter of laughter and then applause spread through the group. The older man pushed another button. “Cut! Okay, let’s put it back together.” He had a pronounced Eastern European accent.
    A few young people offered him handslaps and then they stepped over the tape to flood toward the hapless machine. Jack Liffey directed his steps toward a young woman in a yellow tank top who seemed to be in charge of the video camera.
    “Art project?” he asked.
    “Uh-huh. We can only test it in small bites until the big performance in September.”
    “You like destruction?”
    She shrugged. “It’s a job. Most of them are volunteers but I’m paid for the summer. Harvat can get big corporate grants for anything he wants. Like Christo.”
    Christo was the man who wrapped buildings and mountains and had littered the Tejon Pass north of L. A. with several hundred giant blue umbrellas a few years back. There didn’t seem any point mentioning people downtown who were going hungry, and he didn’t really suppose any more people would be fed if the avant-garde gave up their art happenings.
    “It is social criticism,” she added defensively.
    “Of what?”
    “I’m not sure. The object of social criticism is getting a lot harder to identify these days.”
    “We have met the enemy and he is us,” Jack Liffey said.
    “Derrida?”
    He shook his head. “Pogo.”
    *
    She hid out in the garage, tears still streaming down her cheeks. Something about the slap had made her feel terribly weepy. She knew it was way out of proportion, but she felt a dreadful guilt inside. Any physical blow was like a murder to her, and somewhere deep in her psyche she felt that you had to have done something really bad to merit a slap.
    Well, the hell with Bradley Bartlett, Maeve tried out. He’s nothing to me . But that didn’t really help much. Part of her knew that it wasn’t really a simple question. In a funny way what was happening inside her had a lot less to do with her stepfather than with herself, her protected life.