Smoke

 

 

PENGUIN CANADA

SMOKE

 

 

ELIZABETH RUTH
is the author of the acclaimed first novel
Ten Good Seconds of Silence
. She lives in Toronto.

ALSO BY ELIZABETH RUTH

Ten Good Seconds of Silence

Bent On Writing:

Contemporary Queer Tales (ed.)

Smoke

ELIZABETH RUTH

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published 2005

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © Elizabeth Ruth, 2005

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from the following songs:
The Green Door:
Words and Music by Bob Davie and Marvin Moore. Copyright © 1956 by Alley Music Corp and trio Music Company. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
Folsom Prison Blues:
Written by John R. Cash © 1956, 1984 Renewed. HOUSE OF CASH, INC. (BMI)/Administered by BUG. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

 

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Ruth, Elizabeth

Smoke / Elizabeth Ruth.

ISBN 0-14-301624-5

I. Title.

PS8585.U847S66 2005 C813'.6 C2005-900290-5

 

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
www.penguin.ca

 

Dedicated to the memory of Mona and Milton P.

And to Shannon Olliffe with love

The story I do not tell is the only one that is a lie.

Dorothy Allison

May 1958

The boy jolts awake in his bed. He finds the bright flicker of fire and the blur of searing heat. Orange and blue flames surround his mattress like expatriates at a flag burning. He is the flag. He screams but his voice is as distant as a fox caught in one of his father's traps out in the backwoods. It's him sounding desperate, helpless. His mother's hands wave frantically about. “Oh my God, Thomas! Do something!” His father covers him with his own nightshirt to trap the flames, lifts him from hell, runs him down the hall, drops his burning body into the white enamel bathtub. Water, water, to sizzle, fizzle and stub him out. Extinguish him. But he is too burnt already, for water. The pungent smell of singeing hair and skin is overwhelming, the stink of near-death—a halfway place—and then the agony of consciousness.
Am I dying?
the boy thinks. His father is sharp and in charge: “Goddamnit, Isabel. Get Hank. Put out that fire. NOW!” Fear clogs his father's throat, making him gag while he speaks. “Son? Can you hear me? I'm taking you to the hospital.” Then his father, usually bold and unflinching, vomits beside the bathtub. This is when the boy knows; this is when he understands that he won't survive. All sound and smell rescinds, voices fade and light is replaced by a blanket of merciful darkness.…

H
E OPENS ONE EYE
to foggy vision and a shadow moves about the room. The smell is of bleached sheets. Stale chemicals. Burnt skin and hair. An acidic paste coats his dry mouth. His face is an open wound. He moans and a familiar voice interrupts. A man's voice, but not deep.

“Hang on, son. You're going to be all right.”

Dad?

The body leans closer. Rubbing alcohol, stale blood. Aftershave.

No. Someone else.

The touch is cool. It lingers on his arm. A soft, reassuring hand.

T
HE DOCTOR FEELS
the fine bristles of the brush graze his palm. He sees that water in the basin at the side of the bed is peppered with bits of flesh. Skin floats to the surface and gathers around his wrist. “I know it hurts,” he says. “But the morphine should help. Your swelling has come down and I need to prevent infection. Just hold still now.” The boy parts his charcoal lips. His cheeks are red and glossy, leaking fluid. One side of his face is covered in blisters. “Looks like there might be some skin loss.”

“Leave me alone.”

The doctor leans back, pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “I'm afraid I can't do that. Listen, I want you to try and forget what I'm doing and just follow my voice.” The boy nods gingerly. “All right then. Did I ever tell you about the Purple Gang? Not a very fearsome name for a gang, I know. But they made up for it with their strong-arm tactics.” The doctor works fast to clean the wounds, moves his hands quickly over the boy's forehead and rests his fingers along the hairline. The skin here is white and when he touches it the boy doesn't react. Nerves have been damaged. “It all started at the Old Bishop School,” he says. “A trade school in Michigan. There were four Bernstein brothers. None of them studied much, though folks said that Abe made good grades. He was the brains behind most of their operations. At first they committed petty crimes—terrorized the Jewish quarter where they lived by stealing from shops and rolling drunks. But unlike most youngsters, those boys grew bolder with time. They blackmailed locals and extorted protection money from friends of their father. They fought with rival gangs and before long they had other young toughs working for them and a junkyard in Albion, the Riverside Iron and Metal Company—a front for their headquarters. Abe, the oldest, was the quiet one of the lot, kept to himself most of the time. He just stood back counting the money while Joe, Raymond and Izzy were busy breaking bones.”

“Don't.” The boy flinches, shrinks from reach when the doctor adds pressure to his scrubbing and peeling.

“The world had gone topsy-turvy, son. When the prohibition went into effect, let me think … January of 1920 if memory serves, it was a chance to earn big money. Gambling, handbooks—that's horse-betting parlours—and of course, the booze. A good man found himself going against his conscience to keep food on the table. A bad man didn't look so bad any more, and women— women behaved as they pretty much pleased—drank, smoked, acted free and loose. But it was those border-town brats, the Purple Gang, who controlled us all; ran booze across the river from Canada and sold it as far away as Chicago and Philadelphia. Rum-running. They were famous for hijacking; interrupting a load and leaving a string of dead bodies in its wake. Took good-quality Canadian whiskey and cut it, sometimes three ways. Imagine. Operations were set up all over the city, went on round the clock supplying the blind pigs—illegal saloons. Those brothers built themselves up from penniless Eastern Europeans to swashbuckling leaders of a hard-line American mob. Oh, they were fearless.”