Short Stories: Five Decades (66 page)

The car spurted down the street. Alex wiped his face with a shaking hand. “Oh, Jesus,” he said to himself as he walked back across the completely dark lawn to the house. He heard a sparrow cheep in the three o’clock morning hush and he nearly cried under the peaceful trees.

Once in the house, though, he became very businesslike. He went upstairs to where he had set out buckets of naphtha and brought them down in pairs. He tore down all the drapes from the ground-floor windows and piled them at the farther end of the long hall that ran along one side of the house. Then he took all the linen covers off the furniture and piled them on top of the drapes. He went down to the cellar and brought up three egg boxes full of excelsior and put the excelsior on top of the piled cloth. It made a heap about seven feet high at the end of the hall. He worked grimly, swiftly, ripping cloth when it wouldn’t give way easily, running up and down steps, sweating in his overcoat, feeling the sweat roll down his neck onto his tight collar. He soaked every piece of furniture with naphtha, then came out and poured ten gallons of naphtha over the pile at the end of the hall. He stepped back, the acrid smell sharp in his nostrils, and surveyed his work with satisfaction. If that didn’t work you couldn’t burn this house down in a blast-oven. When he got through with it, the home of the Littleworths would be hot. No mistake this time. He got a broom and broke off the handle and wrapped it heavily with rags. He soaked the rags with naphtha until the liquid ran out of the saturated cloth to the floor. He whistled comfortably under his breath “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight” as he opened the window wide behind him at the end of the hall that was opposite the huge pile of cloth and excelsior. It was a narrow hall, but long. A distance of thirty-five feet separated him from the pyre at the other end.

“There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight,” he sang under his breath as he took out a match from the dozen he had lying loose in his pocket. He stood next to the open window, prepared to jump swiftly out as he struck the match, put it to his heavy torch. The torch flared up wildly in his hand and he hurled it with all his strength straight down the hall to the pile of naphtha-soaked cloth and excelsior at the other end. It landed squarely on the pile. For a moment nothing happened. Alex stood, ready at the window, his eyes shining in the fierce light of the flaring torch. Alex smiled and kissed his fingers at the other end of the hall.

Then the whole hall exploded. The pile of cloth became a single huge ball of flame and hurtled down the hall like a flaming shell to the open window behind Alex. With a scream sick in his throat, lost in the immense roar of the exploding house, Alex dove to the floor just as the ball of flame shot over him and through the window to the pull of the open air beyond, carrying his hat and his hair, like smoke going up a chimney to the pull of the sky.

When he came to there was a dusty burned smell in his nostrils. Without surprise he saw that the carpet under his face was quietly afire, burning gently, like coal in a grate. He hit the side of his head three times to put out the fire in what remained of his hair, and sat up dully. Coughing and crying, he dove down to the floor again, escaping the smoke. He crawled along the burning carpet foot by foot, his hands getting black and crisp under him as he slowly made his way to the nearest door. He opened the door and crawled out onto a side porch. Just behind him the hall beams collapsed and a column of flame shot up through the roof, as solid as cement. He sighed and crawled to the edge of the porch and fell off five feet to the loam of a flower bed. The loam was hot and smelled from manure, but he lay there gratefully for a moment, until he realized that something was wrong with his hip. Stiffly he sat up and looked at his hip. Flames were coming out through his overcoat from inside and he could smell his skin broiling. Neatly he unbuttoned his coat and hit at the flames, curling up from the pocket where he had the dozen matches. When he put out the fire on his hip he crawled out to the lawn, shaking his head again and again to clear it, and sat behind a tree. He slid over and went out again, his head on a root.

Far off, far off a bell clanged again and again. Alex opened his eyes, singed of their lashes, and listened. He heard the fire trucks turn into the street. He sighed again and crawled, clinging to the cold ground, around the back of the house and through a bare hedge that cut his swelling hands, and away from the house. He stood up and walked off behind a high hedge just as the first fireman came running down toward the back of the house.

Directly, but slowly, like a man walking in a dream, he went to McCracken’s house. It took forty minutes to walk there, walking deliberately down alleys and back streets in the dark, feeling the burned skin crack on his knees with every step.

He rang the bell and waited. The door opened slowly and McCracken cautiously put his face out.

“My God!” McCracken said and started to slam the door, but Alex had his foot in the way.

“Lemme in,” Alex said in a hoarse broken voice.

“You’re burned,” McCracken said, trying to kick Alex’s foot out of the doorway. “I can’t have nothing to do with you. Get outa here.”

Alex took out his gun and shoved it into McCracken’s ribs. “Lemme in,” he said.

McCracken slowly opened the door. Alex could feel his ribs shaking against the muzzle of the gun. “Take it easy,” McCracken said, his voice high and girlish with fright. “Lissen, Alex, take it easy.”

They stepped inside the hall and McCracken closed the door. McCracken kept holding on to the doorknob to keep from sliding to the floor from terror. “What do you want from me, Alex?” His necktie jumped up and down with the strain of talking. “What can I do for you?”

“I want a hat,” Alex said, “and I want a coat.”

“Sure, sure, Alex. Anything I can do to help …”

“Also I want for you to drive me to New York.”

McCracken swallowed hard. “Now, look, Alex,” he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand to dry the lips, “let’s be reasonable. It’s impossible for me to drive you to New York. I got a four-thousand-dollar job. I’m Chief of Police. I can’t take chances like …”

Alex started to cry. “I’ll give it to you right in the guts. So help me.”

“All right, Alex, all right,” McCracken said hurriedly. “What’re you crying about?”

“It hurts. I can’t stand it, it hurts so much.” Alex weaved back and forth in the hallway in pain. “I got to get to a doctor before I croak. Come on, you bastard,” he wept, “drive me to the city!”

All the way to Jersey City Alex cried as he sat there, jolting in the front seat, wrapped in a big coat of McCracken’s, an old hat slipping back and forth on his burnt head as the car sped east into the dawn. McCracken gripped the wheel with tight, sweating hands, his face drawn and pale. From time to time he glanced sidewise fearfully at Alex.

“Yeah,” Alex said once when he caught McCracken looking at him. “I’m still here. I ain’t dead yet. Watch where you’re goin’, Chief of Police.”

A block from the Jersey entrance of the Holland Tunnel, McCracken stopped the car.

“Please, Alex,” he pleaded, “don’t make me take you across to New York. I can’t take the chance.”

“I gotta get to a doctor,” Alex said, licking his cracked lips. “I gotta get to a doctor. Nobody’s gonna stop me from getting to a doctor. You’re goin’ to take me through the tunnel and then I’m goin’ to let you have it because you’re a bastard. You’re an Irish bastard. Start this car.” He rocked back and forth in the front seat to help him with the pain. “Start this car!” he shouted.

Shaking so that it was hard for him to control the car, McCracken drove Alex all the way to the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn where Flanagan lived. He stopped the car and sat still, slumped exhausted over the wheel.

“O.K., Alex,” he said. “Here we are. You’re gonna be a good guy, aren’t you, Alex, you’re not goin’ to do anythin’ you’re goin’ to be sorry for, are you? Remember, Alex, I’m a family man, I’m a man with three children. Come on, Alex, why don’t you talk? Why would you want to hurt me?”

“Because you’re a bastard,” Alex said painfully because his jaws were stiffening. “I got a good mind to. You didn’t want to help me. I had to make you help me.”

“I got a kid aged two years old,” McCracken cried. “Do you want to make a orphan of a two-year-old kid? Please, Alex. I’ll do anything you say.”

Alex sighed. “Go get Flanagan.”

McCracken jumped out quickly and came right back with Flanagan and Sam. Alex smiled stiffly when Flanagan opened the door of the car and saw Alex and whistled. “Nice,” Flanagan said. “Very nice.”

“Look at him,” Sam said, shaking his head. “He looks like he been in a war.”

“You ought to a’ seen what I done to the house,” Alex said. “A first-class job.”

“Are you goin’ to pass out, Alex?” Sam asked anxiously.

Alex waved his gun pointlessly two or three times and then pitched forward, his head hitting the dashboard with a smart crack, like the sound of a baseball bat on a thrown ball.

When he opened his eyes he was in a dark, meagerly furnished room and Flanagan’s voice was saying, “Lissen, Doc, this man can’t die. He’s gotta come through, understand? It is too hard to explain away a dead body. It can’t be done. I don’t care if he loses both legs and both arms and if it takes five years, but he’s got to pull through.”

“I should never’ve gotten mixed up in this,” McCracken’s voice wailed. “I was a damn fool. Risking a four-thousand-dollar-a-year job. I ought to have my head examined.”

“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” a strange professional voice said. “That is a well-done young man.”

“It looks to me,” Sam’s voice said, “as if he’s marked special delivery to Calvary Cemetery.”

“Shut up!” Flanagan said. “And from now on nobody says a word. This is a private case. Alexander. The lousy Greek.”

Alex heard them all go out before he dropped off again.

For the next five days, the doctor kept him full of dope, and Flanagan kept Sam at his bedside with a towel for a gag, to keep him quiet when the pain became too much to bear. He would start to yell and Sam would shove the towel into his mouth and say soothingly, “This is a respectable boarding house, Alex. They don’t like noise.” And he could scream all he wanted to into the towel and bother no one.

Ten days later the doctor told Flanagan, “All right. He’ll live.”

Flanagan sighed. “The dumb Greek,” he said, patting Alex on his bandaged head. “I would like to kick him in the belly. I am going out to get drunk.” And he put on his derby hat, square on his head, and went out.

Alex lay in one position for three months in the furnished room. Sam played nursemaid, feeding him, playing rummy with him, reading the sporting news to him.

At times when Sam wasn’t there Alex lay straight on his bed, his eyes half-closed, thinking of his poolroom. He would have a neon sign, “Alex’s Billiard Parlor” going on and off and new tables and leather chairs just like a club. Ladies could play in “Alex’s Billiard Parlor” it would be so refined. He would cater to the better element. Maybe even a refined free lunch, cold meats and Swiss cheese. For the rest of his life he would be a gentleman, sitting behind a cash register with his jacket on. He smiled to himself. When Flanagan gave him his money he would go straight to the pool parlor on Clinton Street and throw his money down on the counter. Cold cash. This was hard-earned money, he nearly died and there were days he’d wished he could die, and his hair was going to grow in patches, like scrub grass on a highway, for the rest of his life, but what the hell. You didn’t get nothing for nothing. Five thousand dollars, five thousand dollars, five thousand dollars …

On June first he put on his clothes for the first time in three months and twelve days. He had to sit down after he pulled his pants on because the strain hit him at the knees. He got completely dressed, dressing very slowly, and being very careful with his necktie, and then sat down to wait for Flanagan and Sam. He was going to walk out of that lousy little room with five thousand dollars flat in his wallet. Well, he thought, I earned it, I certainly did earn it.

Flanagan and Sam came in without knocking.

“We’re in a hurry,” Flanagan said. “We’re going to the Adirondacks. The Adirondacks in June are supposed to be something. We came to settle up.”

“That’s right,” Alex said. He couldn’t help but smile, thinking about the money. “Five thousand dollars. Baby!”

“I think you are making a mistake,” Flanagan said slowly.

“Did you say five thousand dollars?” Sam asked politely.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Yeah. Five thousand bucks, that’s what we agreed, isn’t it?”

“That was in February, Alex,” Flanagan explained calmly. “A lot of things’ve happened since February.”

“Great changes have taken place,” Sam said. “Read the papers.”

“Stop the kiddin’,” Alex said, weeping inside his chest. “Come on, stop the bull.”

“It is true, general,” Flanagan said, looking disinterestedly out the window, “that you was supposed to get five thousand dollars. But doctor bills ate it all up. Ain’t it too bad? It’s terrible, how expensive doctors are, these days.”

“We got a specialist for you, Alex,” Sam said. “Nothing but the best. He’s very good on gunwounds too. But it costs.”

“You lousy Flanagan,” Alex shouted. “I’ll get you. Don’t think I won’t get you!”

“You shouldn’t yell in your condition,” Flanagan said smoothly.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “The specialist says you should relax.”

“Get out of here,” Alex said through tears. “Get the hell out of here.”

Flanagan went over to the dresser drawer and took out Alex’s gun. Expertly, he broke it and took out the shells and slipped them into his pocket. “This is just in case your hot Greek blood gets the better of you for a minute, Alex,” he said. “That would be too bad.”

“Lissen, Flanagan,” Alex cried, “ain’t I going to get anything? Not anything?”

Flanagan looked at Sam, then took out his wallet, threw a fifty-dollar bill at Alex. “Outa my own pocket,” he said. “My Irish generosity.”

“Some day,” Alex said, “I’m going to give it to you. Wait and see. Remember.”