Paradise Alley (67 page)

Dolan was already grabbing an ax from the side of the Black Joke engine, running into the boardinghouse after the boy. Tom and Snatchem running after him, though Tom did not know why he should ever care what that lunatic did. He ran after him as he would any other member of the company, he and Snatchem both shouting at Dolan to come back—

“Stop, stop, ya crazy bastard! Ya don't know what's in there! Let 'em find their own friends—”

But Dolan was already inside. They had no choice but to run on after him—pausing again almost as soon as they got past the door, Snatchem cursing fervently.

“He'll be the death of us all!”

They had been to enough fires to know when a house wasn't safe. Even in the hall they could see that the damage to the boardinghouse was much worse than it had appeared from the outside. What was worse, the whole edifice was not really one building but two, the whole thing hastily cobbled together with some boards and bricks, a few slatherings of plaster. The only thing keeping it up at all was how the two sides leaned into each other, but now the fire had undermined even that, having eaten through the middle walls.

The burned side—the half they were in—looked as if it could slide right off and collapse in a heap at any moment. It even
felt
unsteady—the floors and ceiling, the doors and banisters in the close stairs hall reverberating with every step they took. And worst of all, they could detect a whiff of fire, hidden somewhere—and still burning.

But Johnny Dolan was already running up the steps, after the Portagee boy. The whole staircase wobbling with each stride he took. Snatchem looked at Tom and shrugged—and then they both started to run up after him.

“Hold up—hold up for us, at least—”

They slipped and scrambled along—not so much as daring to hold on to the banister once a long chunk of it fell away into ash, crashing down to the first floor. When they reached the third story it was no better. The floor honeycombed now with holes where the fire had burned through, the feeble, cracked slats clearly visible underneath.

They had to pick their way down the hall in nearly total darkness.
Even Dolan moving more slowly now—though the olive-skinned boy continued to race nimbly on ahead, down to the gable he had pointed out. They caught the scent of the fire again, too—very strong now, coming from somewhere just under the floorboards, or maybe the eaves above them.

“Jesus, but we could fall all the way to hell—”

“Here—he stuck!”

The Portagee boy was pointing to where a ceiling beam had fallen across a door, knocking it down and wedging it in place. Underneath it they could see a pair of blackened feet. Snatchem cursed.

“Ah, but your friend is dead already, bucko—”

But even as he spoke, one of the feet moved, and a low groan came from the body underneath the door. Moving closer, they could see a slight figure, not much older than the boy who had summoned them. His feet were not burned, but the deep, coal-black color of his skin. The boy naked under the door that trapped him, still lying on the remnants of the cheap boardinghouse bed he had been sleeping on when the beam collapsed.

He only groaned, and opened his eyes for a moment when they arrived. The boy who had brought them stroking his close-cut hair, while he spoke torrents of Portuguese to him. The boy under the door only groaning some more, until Tom thought that he was making a great effort just to breathe. He was obviously in terrible pain—likely as not a dead man already, his innards crushed under the beam and the door.

But you never knew.
He had seen them pull out people with all sorts of injuries. Sometimes those who only seemed to have taken in a little smoke, or suffered a slight bump on the end, keeled right over in their arms and died. And other times men and women who were a mass of contusions, or shrieking in pain from their burns, would come around the firehouse in another couple of weeks' time, grinning the gloating, defiant grin of the survivor. Boasting,
Remember me? Good as new!,
although they rarely were quite that.

“Stuck, are ye?”

Johnny Dolan was looking all around the blackened gable room, trying to size up the situation. Finally he just picked up his ax and struck one, swift blow at the beam. They could feel the entire house move beneath their feet.

“Jesus, Johnny, ye'll kill us all!”

“No. No, not this time—”

He seemed almost to be in a trance, flailing at the beam again with his ax, oblivious to where they were, or to how the floor itself was slanting and slipping away with each blow. Until they stood on it like sailors on a listing ship, barely able to keep their balance.

“Goddamnit, ya fool, it's
useless!
Ye'll knock the house down before ya cut through that log!”

The beam did seem impossibly large, but it proved to be dry-rotted at the core—and after no more than half a dozen strokes it broke in two. The Portagee boy hastening to push it away, and pull the door off his friend. The injured boy's naked form pitifully cut and flattened underneath it—Tom guessing from the look of him that he had broken at least half a dozen ribs and maybe a leg, if he was lucky.

“Easy there! Easy with ‘im!”

The Portagee boy was already hauling his friend up. Tom tried to slow him, knowing from experience how damaging it could be to move them too quickly.

But there was a disturbing noise growing all around them now—a sort of rustling sound. That part of the ceiling where the beam had been wedged in place suddenly gave way, a large patch of plaster and dust and crumbling shingles falling through—and with them came thousands of cockroaches, many as long as a man's finger, dropping to the floor and scrambling away.

“Ah, Christ!” swore Snatchem. “It's up there! It must be up above us!”

The fire burst through before the words were out of his mouth, peeling back the rest of the ceiling like the top of a tin can. The five of them already moving back down the hallway as fast as they could go, Dolan slinging the injured boy over his back like a sack of potatoes. The smoke hurtling down the hall after them, then down the stairs. Whole sections of the roof falling past them in flaming sheets, chunks of the floor and the stairs disappearing under their feet even as they ran.

They made it down to the last flight of steps—able to see only a foot or two ahead of them now, and barely able to breathe at all. Hoping there was not some gaping hole before them. The fire was right on their heels, though, and they had no choice but to throw themselves
halfway down the stairs—Tom saying a quick prayer to the Virgin that they wouldn't go through to the basement.

The floor held, and they were back in the front hall—but not out of the building yet, still engulfed in the smoke and dust. Tom had heard of firemen who had died in just such a situation, a few feet from safety but staggering helplessly in the wrong direction—

They dropped to the ground and began to crawl toward where it seemed that the door had been. Clutching to the hem of each other's pants—Dolan in the lead, Tom only hoping he knew where he was going. He had no good idea himself, by now—the smoke choking him, making it impossible for him to open his eyes. Trying to keep his head as low to the ground as he could. Hunting for the drafts of cool, clean air to be found there—

Then a dozen hands were on him, lifting him up and out of the smoke, back into the dark, frozen world by the nighttime river. The bright, orange sky wavering above him. He had all he could do to drag himself to the curb next to Snatchem. Still choking out the smoke, gulping down the gorgeous Croton water the steward handed him.

“All that—for a nigger sailor?”

Many of the other firemen still incredulous over what they had done. Not over him, or George so much. That was expected, following another man into trouble, no matter what he did.
But Dolan.
The man had never shown any inclination before toward heroism—a hazardous tendency in any company, particularly when there was a large enough crowd watching. They looked him over warily, none of them able to quite fathom what had gotten into him—and particularly for this boy.

“Still, ‘twas a damned bold thing.”

“Oh, aye, brave as a robin—”

Tom didn't think he understood it, either. He kept watching Dolan, who was still carrying the boy he had pulled out of the gable. He would not let himself be attended to until he had laid him out on a blanket, along the chassis of the Black Joke's machine. Pulling another blanket up over him, and a fireman's coat. Getting the steward to give him a cup of brandy—holding it to his lips, helping him suck it down.

The boy had trembled and lain still. His eyes still open, twitching back and forth, his mouth opening from time to time as if to say
something, though no words would come out. Dolan had stared down at him, as if studying him, for a long time. Then the police had come to take him away to the hospital, and Dolan had turned abruptly and walked off, letting someone drape a blanket over his shoulders.

They had gone to Udell's restaurant afterward, once the engine was cleaned and put away. Finn McCool had had a toast and a good word for every man in the Black Joke, and Tom had been singled out for saving the hydrant, and Dolan for his heroic rescue, and all the food had tasted better than anything he had ever had in his life—fresh coffee, and buttercakes, and hot mutton pies.

Afterward they had sung endless choruses of “Hunt the Buffalo,” the strange, slow song that was all the firemen's favorite, played at every hop and chowder:

Come all ye likely lads that have a mind for to range,

Into some foreign country your situation to change;

In seeking some new pleasures we will all together go,

And we'll settle on the banks of the pleasant Ohio.

And we'll range through the wild woods and hunt the buffalo;

And we'll range through the wild woods and hunt the buffalo.

If by chance the wild Indians should happen to come near,

We'll all unite together with heart and cheer;

We'll march through the town, boys, and strike a deadly blow,

And we'll drive them from the banks of the pleasant Ohio—

But the best part of all was when he had gone home. The sun was only just beginning to rise and Deirdre was still in bed, after being up half the night with the baby herself. He had slipped in beside her, and they had made love slowly and wantonly. She had smelled the smoke on him and wanted to know what had happened, but he had only hushed her and held her close to him. She had felt so good, so warm to him after the brutal night air down by the docks, smelling of boiled soap and washing lye, and milk. After a little while the baby had cried and she had gotten up to feed her, but Finn had given Tom the day off from his City job, and he had been able to stay in bed. Luxuriating in its warmth, and the lingering smell of her between the covers—

He had been unsure, at the start, of how Deirdre might be in bed, knowing that she had been educated by the Sisters. He had heard stories of how such girls were, how they would only do it with a sheet between them, and never on a saint's day. He had been uncertain of how to approach her at all, considering how beautiful she looked, and somehow it had still seemed an impertinence even after they were married.

But she had welcomed him to her from their first night together—as grave as she was in all things, but passionate and yielding as well. Unbending as Deirdre could be outside the bedroom, he took refuge in her there. Nestling his head between her breasts in the darkness, marveling over the hardness of her swollen belly, during her many pregnancies.

Their life in bed had sealed the bond between them. It had affirmed his faith in her, to let her make him what she would.

Then how? How was it that she would have wanted him to go away to such a thing as this war? Or that he would have wanted to go?

He could not remember when they had finally come to fetch him off the field outside Fredericksburg. His only memory, hazy at that, was of the wagon on the way back to Washington City, nearly breaking his back on the rutted, frozen roads. Drifting in and out of the relapsing fever for the next four months, lying on a bed with filthy sheets in the overcrowded army hospital.

He did not know how he had survived any of it. The other men crying constantly in their agony. The simpering Yankee gentry visiting in the daytime, peering avidly at their wounds, and praying loudly in the middle of the room. The whores who posed as nurses at night, offering to do all kinds of things, whatever the men could bear and then some, for a few coins.

Yet it was in the hospital that he thought he understood at last. Lying in the bed, with nothing to do but think, in those times when the fever receded—thinking on Deirdre, and himself.

In the end, he knew, he had gone to the war because he had wanted to go.
His own confession, exchanged with her.
He had wanted to see the elephant. To take his leave from working every day, leveling the land in the park, and staying sober save for the beers he could sneak with Billy Dove.

He liked the company of men—

He had to admit that now, he could no longer blame it only on her. And in the end he had only gotten what he deserved, after all, for helping to ship another man into servitude.

Her brother.
Johnny Dolan. That was when the whole rift had first opened between them. It had been as Deirdre had said she wanted it, sure enough. She had agreed to it all beforehand, that it was the best way to save Johnny from the hangman—to get him out of the City.

But he knew that she had never really forgiven him for it, and after all, he was the one who had taken care of it all. Going down to The Sailor's Rest, and speaking to some of his old
b'hoys
from the Break o' Day Boys. It had been simple enough, they were always on the lookout for new bodies. Ruth had seen to getting Johnny down there, to the docks. All he had had to do was to get the boat, with Billy Dove, and row it out to them.