Done for a Dime (35 page)

Panting, he dropped Manny’s body beside the discharge piping, eyeing how things stood and measuring it against the scenario he hoped to concoct. The boy had tried to hijack the truck, things went queer, he opened fire and got return fire. Everybody hit, bad. As a last gasp act, he’d dragged himself to the tanker, decided if he couldn’t blow up the truck where he’d wanted—the local branch of Frontline Financial, death to the predatory lenders—he’d just let the gas loose up here, let it flow into the sewers. He’d die watching the fires, foreshadow paradise.

A schematic of the bank branch sat folded up inside Manny’s backpack in the van. Ferry had given it to him earlier as they’d run through the plan, the one Manny had thought he was part of. Assuming flames didn’t take this whole area, there’d be that left behind. You couldn’t get everything perfect.

The tank had four compartments; Ferry opened the discharge valves one by one. The gasoline, nine thousand gallons, surged out onto the pavement like spillover from a dam, drenching Manny and knocking him onto his side, burying him and washing away his blood trail as it flooded the pump island, eddying here and there but most of it flowing on, downhill toward the sewer grates.

Ferry covered his mouth and nose with his arm as he ran from the fumes, heading for the bluff behind the gas station, scrambling up the tiered rock, the sandstone crumbling beneath his hands and feet as he dug for purchase. He slipped, fell, regained his feet, then finally reached the top. Below him, four of the empty houses now blazed hot, spreading to their neighbors, the string of fires creeping uphill as the nine thousand gallons of gas spilled down. People were already scrambling for cars, trying to escape those first fires near the bottom. That’d just continue as the new fires lit and the old ones spread. Every man, woman, and child on the hill, if they had any sense and two legs to carry them, would be heading for the safety of the bottoms. Either that or risk burning alive where they sat. They’d swarm the entrance for hours, keep the fire crews tied down.

He turned and scrambled down into the star thistle and lupine on the bluff’s far side, skating down the steep decline beneath the power lines and high-tension towers, tripping in coyote holes and ground squirrel burrows. His ankles buckled, knees, too, but nothing so bad he feared a break. Numb from adrenaline, he kept moving, tumbling twice headlong through the rocky weeds, cutting a gash in his face once but jumping right back up again to regain his feet and vanish farther into the dark ravines.

19

T
oby realized at last how much his father’s home was his own as he stood on the street with the rest of the crowd, watching it burn. Another morbid instance of déjà vu—like last night, and earlier that day, the police were there, but now it was firefighters inside the fence line. The police edged onlookers back as matters got worse. The fires had burned so hot and fast the houses were fully engaged by the time the fire crews arrived, and spreading to the next houses down.

The back addition of his father’s house—built not just for The Mighty Firefly but Toby, too—had gone fast. Only a skeleton of charred studs and headers and roof beams remained visible through the smoke. The front walls stood eerily whole, but the cinder blocks had acted like chimneys, ramping the heat inside till the roof caught and caved in. The fire spread to the whole interior then, the furniture, the old piano, his father’s clothes, the family pictures.

He felt a queasy kind of relief at having had the sense to remove his father’s horn from the place earlier in the day. But he’d left behind sheet music, reams and reams of it, including charts for tunes his father had written years ago for The Mighty Firefly: “Pump Action,” “Red Planet,” “Snakebit,” “Bone Deep,” dozens of others. He’d always wanted to rechart those numbers, add a little texture to the straight-ahead blues lines. A lost chance. One more thing to mourn.

Long Walk Mooney, his two men, and both Veronique and Sarina Thigpen had fled Miss Carvela’s when the first tower of flame had shot skyward in the night on this side of the panhandle. They knew. Just by direction, they knew. Toby followed, telling Nadya to stay behind, Dan to stay with her and Miss Carvela. “I’ll be back quick,” he’d said, meaning it at the time. Now he couldn’t tear himself away.

Once here, Mooney and his men had soon fled, knowing better than to stick around a crime scene, this one in particular. Sarina Thigpen had wandered off, she had no place here. Only Veronique remained, and Toby could hear her as she wept, no one but strangers to console her. Precious few of them. She stood up front, transfixed, shuddering as she watched the flames reduce her childhood home to ruin. Hardly half an hour before, she and Toby had squared off, blame and recrimination, no pity, just to claim it. A pointless feud, like all feuds.

Her voice as she mewled out her grief, it haunted him, a cry not just for what she’d lost, he supposed, but for things barely guessed at. He wanted to go over, lay his hand upon her shoulder, but he knew better. She wanted none of his pity. And a part of him knew that some of her tears were not for the memories but her pride. What stakes—how much money and what vindictive dreams—had she invested in that sad old house? He supposed he’d never know.

Word came about other fires, downhill, over in Baymont. Panic rippled through the crowd, an instinct of something horribly wrong.

Toby ran back the way he’d come, across the panhandle, into Baymont, then two blocks uphill to Home in the Sky. He could smell it then, not just the rising smoke from below but the heavy stench of gasoline, so thick it seemed to seep up from the ground. When he got to Miss Carvela’s, he realized there was no escape indoors. The smell hung everywhere.

“We have to get out,” Dan told him. “I don’t know what’s going on, but we have to get out.”

“Nadya’s where?”

“Up helping Miss Carvela. Look, I’m serious. The cellar reeks of gasoline. We’re not safe here.”

Toby headed for the stairs. “I’ll bring them down.”

He found Nadya with Miss Carvela in her bedroom. Nadya greeted him with a breathless look of relief, then nodded helplessly at the tiny old woman. “She won’t go.”

Miss Carvela clutched a decorative tin box to her chest, eyes locked on some invisible thing. Toby had some idea what the box contained—letters and photographs from decades ago, her fiancé, never forgotten—and as he came closer, she looked up suddenly, a steely defiance in her eye, daring him to take it from her.

“It’s dangerous here, Miss Carvela, we have to go.”

Her resistance softened. “You do, yes. Of course. But I can’t. This is my home.”

“You’re not safe here.”

“You should go, yes.” She waved her hand. “Both of you. Please.”

“Not without you.”

She dropped her gaze again. Dreamily she said, “I have lived in this house a great long while.…”

Toby knelt down in front of her, reaching for her hands to press his point, but she fought him off, clinging still to the small tin box.

“Miss Carvela, no. You know this isn’t right. You know.”

“I’m so tired,” she whispered. “I can’t tell you.”

A tremor shook the house, rattling the windows and joined by a dull hammering sound, like thunder.

“We’ll help you.”

“No.”

“You’re just frightened.”

“No, I am not.” The steeliness returned. “I assure you, absolutely, I do not fear—”

“All right them.” Toby moved to the bed, sat beside her. “We’ll wait with you.”

She looked at him with a helpless puzzlement, almost anguish. “You can’t—”

Dan bounded up the stairs, his footsteps echoing against the bare walls. Entering the doorway, he said, “The basement, it’s caught fire. We leave. Now.” He took one look around the room, strode forward, dipped his shoulder into the small woman’s midriff, and hefted her up like a large flour sack. “I’m sorry, ma’am. If I didn’t have to do this, I wouldn’t. You two, down the stairs. Now.”

Out on the porch, Dan put Miss Carvela down. She turned right around toward the house. He tried to grab her but she struggled free.

“Let me,” Toby said, following her back in.

She didn’t run to the stairs, merely claimed a picture from the entry wall. Holding it in one hand, the tin box clutched in the other, she studied the photograph while all around her black smoke poured from the heater grates.

“We’ll bring it along,” Toby said as he gathered her toward him, turned her around, and half pushed, half guided her out the front door onto the porch.

“Good Lord,” she whispered, looking out at the chaos of the neighborhood, smoke billowing from basement windows, cars edging downhill through crowds on foot.

“We need to get off the hill,” Toby told her, easing her down the steps. “It’s not—”

An explosion blew out a window in the house across the street. Flames shot up the outside walls through the shattered glass. Then a second blast followed the first, this one from somewhere deeper inside. The crowd in the street came to a halt, watching in stupefied horror as the figure of a boy appeared, maybe seven years old, trapped, outlined at the picture window and backlit by flames.

The boy’s father—backing a station wagon out of the garage—jammed the car into park at the sound of the first explosion. He barely got out from behind the wheel before the second blast knocked him to the ground. His wife came out of the garage screaming, holding an infant in her arms, following her husband into the yard, shouting, “The stove, good God, JuDon—” Then the two of them together glanced up, saw their boy, his clothes on fire, pounding against the windowpane. The mother let loose a chilling scream.

The father shouted at the boy, “I said wait for me, JuDon!” his voice filling the street. “In your room. Stay
in your room!
”

People in the crowd stood paralyzed, unable to believe what they saw. Dan snapped to, turned to Nadya. “You have to take care of her,” he said, gesturing to Miss Carvela, then taking off at a run down the stairs to the street. Toby followed.

Others responded. Men in the crowd scrambled down the sides of the house, pounding at windows, trying to smash the glass and climb in. Women came forward to restrain the mother, talk her down. The father tried getting in the front door, but the smoke held him back. He staggered off the porch, eyes dazed. Trying to return through the garage, he again met a wall of smoke, billowing out from the kitchen. The mother kept screaming, “JuDon, JuDon,” the infant in her arms now bawling, too. The father regained his bearings, ran around to the back of the house. Toby could see through the window, though, that smoke blocked that direction, too.

Dan searched a flower bed and found a rock the size of a melon. Running forward, he hurled it full force against the picture window. The glass broke, but a hole no bigger than a hand appeared. As Dan searched out another stone, Toby spotted a baseball bat on the porch. He went for it, scrambling on his knees as heat and smoke poured out the screen door. Back at the window, he couldn’t look at the boy—the sounds were horrible enough, the child still slamming himself, arms and body and head, against the glass. Toby lowered his head and began hammering with the bat against the glass where the rock had torn its hole. A crack formed. He hit it again, the crack split, the hole widening as he slammed the bat over and over at the glass, a mindless fury, till someone shouted, “Now!”

An army of bodies surged forward, engulfing him as they went for the glass, tearing away loose jagged shards and reaching in through the scalding heat for the boy. But the boy didn’t wait. He threw his body into the opening, clothes on fire as he tumbled past the outstretched arms and hit the ground. Dan lunged after him, covered him with his body to put out the flames, but the boy fought, kicked, screaming nonstop. He tore loose, jumped up, clothes still smoldering as he fled the yard, leaving bloody footprints on the pavement downhill till at last he collapsed in the middle of the street, rolling onto his back, the whole time crying out. Only then did Toby recognize the sickening, sweet smell, like charred meat, the boy left in his wake.

A woman with long beaded braids came running with a blanket. Dan, smeared with sooty blood, gestured for Toby to follow him as he stumbled down the street.

“We gonna carry him now,” the woman with the braids said. “Hold on to the edge, we’ll get him in the car.”

She laid the blanket out on the asphalt. The boy, skin blistered with burns, shook fiercely, going into shock. His father ran up: “JuDon, JuDon! It’s me! It’s Daddy! It’s me—”

“Help us get him on the blanket,” the woman said.

The father, eyes raw with panic, took one shoulder, the woman the other. Toby and Dan each placed one hand beneath a hip, the other hand lifting a leg beneath the knee. They eased the boy onto the blanket, their hands coming away with blood and scorched fabric and burned skin.

Another man appeared, nudging the father aside. “Go help your wife and get the car started,” he said. “I’ll do this.”

Toby recognized the voice. He glanced up. “Francis.”

Francis made no acknowledgment, just grabbed his corner of the blanket, nodded for the others to do likewise. “On three, we lift. One. Two.”

They hoisted the boy up and headed back uphill toward the parents’ car. The mother fought through the restraining arms of neighbors to greet the makeshift stretcher halfway, one hand still clutching the infant to her body, the other hand reaching for her son’s face, telling him in a choking voice, “You’re gonna be fine, JuDon. Listen. Listen. You listen to me, this is Mama, you listen, you’re gonna be fine fine fine now.”

At the car, someone in the crowd opened the tailgate so they could lay the boy out in the back. The mother crawled in after, the wailing infant gripped tight to her chest as she tucked into the small space and folded the blanket around her son’s body. The father climbed in behind the wheel and cranked the engine.

They backed out into the street and were gone, horn blasts sounding as they reached the fringe of the crowd and the other cars edging downhill. Dan and Toby and Francis, all the others who’d stayed behind, looked around helpless, suddenly returned to their own plight. Behind them, up the hill, smoke poured out of every cellar window in Miss Carvela’s house, flames darting out and licking up the walls.