Despite the prickly heat the sky was clear, and crisp shadows stretched across the street before them. Two blocks away McKennah Tower caught the last of the light and glowed like oiled ebony. The sparks fell from the welders’ flames as if the sunlight was being sheared off by the slabs of black glass.
“Did you ever find Corcoran?” she asked.
“We had a chin-wag, like my mother used to say.”
“And you lived to tell about it.”
“He’s a sensitive person deep down. He’s just misunderstood.”
Carol laughed.
“I don’t think he did it,” Pellam said. “The arson.”
“You really think that old woman’s innocent?”
“I do.”
“Unfortunately, one thing I’ve learned is that innocence isn’t always a defense. Not in the Kitchen.”
“So I’m finding.”
They continued slowly along bustling Ninth Avenue, dodging the hoards of workers from the main post office and discount stores and fashion district warehouses and greasy-spoon restaurants. In L.A. the streets were impassable at rush hour; here, it was the sidewalks.
“He seemed smart, Ismail,” Carol said after a moment. “Had spirit. It’s a crying shame it’s too late for him.”
“Too late?” Pellam laughed. “He’s only ten.”
“Way, way, way too late.”
“Isn’t there a program or something you can get him into.”
Carol apparently thought he was kidding and burst out laughing. “A program? Nope, Pellam. No program, no nothin’.” They stopped in front of a store selling exotic gypsy dresses. Carol, in her fat-hiding clothes, looked wistfully at the outfits on the anorexic mannequins. They walked on. “His father’s dead or gone, right?”
“Dead.”
“His mother? He called her a cluckhead. That means she’s a crack addict. No other relatives. You showed some interest. That’s why he attached himself to you. But you can’t give him what he needs. Nobody can. Not now. Impossible. He’s making gang contacts now. He’ll be jumped in in three years. Five years from now he’ll be a street dealer. In ten he’ll be in Attica.”
Pellam was angered by her cynicism. “I don’t think it’s that bleak.”
“I know how you feel. You wanted to let him stay with you, right?”
He nodded.
“I used to be optimistic too. But you can’t take ’em all in. Don’t even try. It’ll only drive you crazy. Save the ones you can save – the three-, four-year-olds. Write off the rest. It’s sad but there’s nothing you can do about it. Forces beyond our control. Race’ll be the death of this city.”
“I don’t know,” Pellam said. “Making this film, I see a lot of anger. But not angry blacks or whites. Angry people. People who can’t pay their bills or get good jobs. That’s why they’re mad.”
Carol shook her head emphatically. “No, you’re wrong. The Irish, Italian, Poles, West Indians, Latinos… they were all despised minorities too at one time. But there’s one insurmountable difference – it may have been in steerage but their ancestors booked passage to the New World. They didn’t come on slave ships.”
Pellam wasn’t convinced. But he let it go. This was her world, not his.
I be his friend…
He was surprised at how bad he felt about the boy.
“I hear so much rhetoric,” Carol continued angrily. “ ‘Ghettocentric.’ ‘Fragmented family units.’ What incredible bullshit you hear. We don’t need buzzwords. We need somebody to get the fuck into these neighborhoods and be with the kids. And that means getting to them in the nursery. By the time they’re Ismail’s age, they’re set in concrete.”
She looked at him and her eyes, which had grown icy, softened. “Sorry, sorry… You poor guy. Another lecture. The thing is, you’re an outsider. You’re entitled to a certain amount of optimism.”
“Bet you’ve got a little left, though. To stay here, I mean. Do what you’re doing.”
“I really don’t think I’m doing very much.”
“Oh, that’s not what your neighbors say.”
“What?” Carol laughed.
Pellam tried to remember. The name came to him. “Jose Garcia-Alvarez?”
Carol shook her head.
“I taped him for my film. Just last week. He spends every afternoon in Clinton Park. Shares his Wonder bread with a thousand pigeons. He said something about you.”
“That I’m a fiesty bitch probably.”
“That he’s forever grateful. You saved his son.”
“Me?”
He told the story. Carol had found the sixteen-year-old boy, strung out and unconscious, in a tenement that was just about to be torn down to make way for McKennah Tower. If she hadn’t called the police and medics the teenager might’ve been crushed to death by the bulldozers.
“Oh, him? Sure, I remember that. I wouldn’t exactly call it heroic.” She seemed embarrassed. Yet part of her was pleased, he could see. She suddenly grabbed Pellam’s arm to stop at a shoe store. It was an upscale place, doing no business whatsoever. Joan and David Shoes, Kenneth Cole. A single pair probably cost a week’s paycheck for most of people walking past. The owner was praying for gentrification and couldn’t hold out much longer.
“In my next life,” Carol said, though whether she was talking about being able to afford the svelte rhinestone-studded black heels she looked at or fit into a dress that would go with them, Pellam couldn’t guess.
Halfway down the street Carol asked, “You married?”
“Divorced.”
“Kids?”
“Nope.”
“Going with anybody?” she asked.
“Haven’t been for a while.”
Eight months to be precise.
If you could call a lusty night in a snowbound Winnebago “going with.”
“You?” He didn’t know if he should ask. Didn’t know if he wanted to.
“Divorced too.”
They dodged around a hawker in front of a discount cosmetics store. “Yo, bee-utiful lady, we make you mo’ bee-utiful than you already be.”
Carol laughed, blushing, and continued quickly past him.
A block farther she nodded at a shabby tenement, similar to Pellam’s.
“Home sweet home,” she said.
Carol gave a quarter to a panhandler she greeted as Ernie. They stopped at the deli, exchanged a few words with the counterman and walked to the back of the store. She held up a can of coffee and a six pack of beer. “Which one,” she mouthed.
He pointed to the beer and he could see that that was her choice too.
Not too distant kindred souls…
Her apartment was next door, a decrepit walk-up with beige and brown paint slapped over dozens of generations of other layers. They walked up the stairs. He smelled old wood, hot wallpaper, grease and garlic. Another firetrap, Pellam thought in passing.
On the landing she abruptly halted, stopping him on the step below. A pause. She was debating. Then she turned. Their faces were at the same height. She kissed him hard. His hands slid down her shoulders into the small of her back and he felt the ignition inside him. Pulled her even closer.
“Turiam pog,” she whispered, kissing him hard.
He laughed and cocked an eyebrow.
“Gaelic. Guess what it means.”
“I better not.”
“ ‘Kiss me,’ ” she said.
“Okay.” And did. “Now, what does it mean?”
“No, no.” She laughed. “That is what it means.” She giggled like a girl and stepped to the door closest to the stairs. They kissed again. She dug for her keys.
Pellam found himself looking at her. And as she bent forward, glassesless, squinting her bad eyes to open the lock, he saw an image of a Carol Wyandotte very different from the stony, hustling Times Square social worker. He saw the sad pearls, the sweatshirts, an elastic-shot cotton bra, the fat at her throat that Fiber-Trim would never melt away. Whose nights were filled
with the tube, in a room peppered with Atlantic Monthlys and Diet Pepsi empties, dresser filled with more cotton socks than black pantyhose. The Archway cookies packages she’d automatically tucked out of sight when guests walked into the kitchen, a fat person’s instinct.
Don’t do this for pity, Pellam thought to himself.
And in the end he didn’t. Not at all.
Eight months is, after all, eight months.
He kissed her hard and, when the last deadbolt clicked, he pushed the door eagerly open with his booted foot.
SEVENTEEN
On the west side of Manhattan near the river was a forlorn triangle of a tiny city block that contained seven or eight old buildings.
To the west, where the sun was now setting, were vacant, weedy lots, the highway and, beyond, the brown Hudson River. To the east, across a cobblestoned street, was a low row of apartments, gay bar and a bodega in whose window was a display of filthy pastry, sliced pork and custard. This was the Chelsea district of New York, the bland, harmless cousin of Hell’s Kitchen, which was just to the north.
The tricorner building at the northern-most end of the block ended in a sharp prow. It was a shabby place to call home but the residents had few complaints about their apartments and they didn’t know that there was really only one major problem here, building code violation: Gallons of gasoline, fuel oil, naphtha, and acetone were stored in the basement. The explosive force of these liquids was sufficient to level the building and to do so in a particularly unpleasant way.
This particular apartment was a spartan place and contained minimal furnishings – a chair, cot, two tables and a battered desk covered with tools and rags. There was neither an air conditioner nor a fan. The TV, however, was a thirty-two-inch Trinitron and it sported a remote control that was ten inches long. On this screen at the moment was an MTV music video, the sound off.
Sitting immediately in front of the flickering screen, which he paid little attention to, Sonny was slowly braiding his long blond hair. Without the benefit of a mirror, the task was taking him longer than he wanted. No damn mirror, he thought angrily. Though the problem really was his shaking hands. Damn sweaty, shaking hands.
At one point he looked up – toward but not really at the TV screen – and paused. He leaned toward fifty-five gallon drum filled with acetone and knocked several times, listening to the sonar echo of the thump. It calmed him somewhat.
But not enough.
No one was cooperating!
The incident at the gas station had scared him and fear was a feeling he wasn’t used to. Arson is the safest crime there is for the perp. It’s anonymous, it’s secretive, and most of the evidence is disposed of by God’s own accomplice – the laws of physics. But now people knew what he looked like. And on top of that, he’d heard that that little chicken fag from the building – Alex – had seen him and had tried to deal him to the cops.
And there were still three more fires to go until the big one. He removed the map, now tattered, from his back pocket. He stared at it absently.
Yeah, the gas station was bad. But the most troubling was the fire at the hospital. Because it had given him no pleasure. Fire had always calmed him down. But that one hadn’t. Not a bit. As he’d listened to the screams, cocked his head and heard them mix with the rustling roar of the flames, his hands had kept trembling, his high forehead continued to sweat. Why? he wondered. Why? Maybe because it was a small fire. Maybe because there was only one fire he truly cared about, the one that would star him and the faggot Joe Pellam Buck. Maybe because everybody was after him.
But he had a feeling there was more to the sweat and agitation than that.
His heart stuttered a bit more when he thought that he now had to spend even more time stopping his pursuers – when he could be planning the big fire. Rockin’ and rollin’ with the Antichrist.
Knock, ping. Knock, ping. Like sonar in a submarine movie.
Sonny’s head of half-braided hair leaned against the big drum. He thumped it again with a knuckle. Knock, ping.
A bit calmer now? He thought so. Maybe. Yes.
Sonny finished braiding his hair and spent a half-hour mixing soap and gas and oil. The fumes were very strong – as dangerous as the fire the juice produced – and he could only work in small batches or else he’d pass out. When he was finished he took several incandescent light bulbs and put them on the table. With a diamond-bladed saw he carefully cut through the metal collar where the glass bulb met the screw base. He heard the hiss of air filling the vacuum. He sawed a wedge out – just big enough to let him pour in his magic juice. Not too full. That was the mistake a lot of amateur arsonists made. You had to leave a little air in the bulb. Fire is oxidation; like an animal it needs oxygen to live. He sealed the V-shaped hole with superglue. He made three of these special bulbs.
Caressing the smooth glass, smooth as the skin on a young man’s ass…
His hands began to tremble again and the sweat poured from his face like water from a shower nozzle.
Sonny stood and paced frantically.
Why can’t I calm down? Why why whywhy? His thoughts swirled. They were all after him. They wanted to kill him, stop him, tie him down, take his fire away from him! Alex, the fire marshal, that old faggot lawyer that Pellam kept hanging around. Pellam himself, the Antichrist.
Why wasn’t life ever simple?
Sonny had to lie down on the cot and force himself to imagine what the last fire would be like. The big fire. That seemed to be the only thing now that relaxed him, gave him any pleasure.
He pictured it: A huge space, filled with ten, twenty thousand people. It would be the worst fire in the history of this fiery city. Worse than Triangle Shirtwaist on Washington Square, the worker girls trapped inside the sweatshop because the owners didn’t want them to use the johns during working hours. Worse than the Crystal Palace. Worse than The General Slocum burning in the East River, killing over a thousand immigrant women and children on excursion; in its aftermath the entire German population of the city, too sorrowful to remain in their old neighborhood, relocated en masse to Yorkville on the Upper East Side.
His would outdo them all.
Sonny pictured the flames rolling past him like glowing surf, surrounding the masses, caressing their toes.
Flames rising to their heels. Then their ankles.
Oh, can you see the exquisite flames? Can you feel them?
With these questions in his thoughts he realized he hadn’t calmed. He realized that he’d never be calm again.
The end was closer than he’d thought.
He crawled into the living room, pressed his head against one of the drums.
Knock, ping. Knock, ping.
He’d stayed the night.
Pellam had been operating under well-established protocol, which meant that after they’d wakened at ten last night, starving, thirsty, they went out for omelettes at the Empire Diner on Tenth Avenue and then he’d taken her back to her apartment, where they’d made love once more and lain in bed listening to the sounds of New York at night: sirens, shouts, pops of exhausts or guns, which seemed to grow more and more urgent as the night grew later.
He never even thought of leaving without saying good-bye.
It was Carol who broke the rules.
When he awoke – to Homer Simpson’s loud Siamese wail – she was gone. A moment later the phone rang and through her tinny answering machine speaker he heard Carol’s voice ask if he was still there and explain that she’d had to be at work early. She’d call him later at his apartment. He found the phone and snagged it but she’d already hung up.
Barefoot, in his jeans, Pellam wandered over the scabby hardwood floors, mindful of splinters, toward the bathroom. Thinking that she’d sounded pretty brusque on the phone. But who could guess what that was about? The aftermath of an evening like last night’s was wholly unpredictable. Maybe she’d already convinced herself that Pellam wasn’t going to call her again. Maybe she was seared with Catholic g
uilt. Or maybe she’d just been sitting across her desk from a hulking eighteen-year-old murderer when she’d called.
Pellam tested the shower but the water was ice cold. Pass on that. He dressed and stepped out into a gassy, clear morning, scalding hot. Took a cab to his place on Twelfth Street. He climbed the steps of his apartment, watching two energetic youngsters, names razor-cut in their hair, streak past on skateboards.
He decided he wanted a bath and a cup of very hot, black coffee. Just sit in the tub and forget arson, pyros, Latino thugs, Irish gangsters, and lovers with enigmatic attitudes.
Climbing the dim stairs slowly. Thinking of the bath, thinking of soapy water. The mantra worked. He found he could forget it all – he could wipe all of Hell’s Kitchen out of his mind. Well, almost all. Everything except for Ettie Washington.
He was thinking of all the flights of stairs Ettie had climbed over the years. She’d never lived in an elevator building, always walk-ups. She climbed stairs for seven decades. Carrying her baby sister Elizabeth. Helping Grandma Ledbetter up and down dim stairwells. Lugging food for her men until one left her and the other died drunk in the Hudson’s sooty waters, then for her babies and children until they were taken from her or fled the city, and then for herself.
“… That’s a word for us here in the Kitchen. ‘Anonymous.’ Lord. ‘Ignored’ is more like it. Nobody pays attention to us anymore. You got that Al Sharpton fellow. Now he’ll go to Bensonhurst, he’ll go to Crown Heights and raise some hell and people hear ’bout it. But nobody ever comes to the Kitchen. Even with all the Irish here the St. Paddy’s Day Parade doesn’t even come over this way. That’s fine with me. I like it nice and private. Keep the world out. What’s the world ever done for me? Answer me that.”
Ettie Washington had told the glossy eye of Pellam’s Betacam that she dreamed of other cities. She dreamed of owning stylish hats and gold necklaces and silk dresses. She dreamed of being a cabaret singer. The rich wife of Billy Doyle, a highfalutin landlord.
But Ettie recognized these hopes as illusions only – to be examined from time to time with pleasure or sorrow or disdain then tucked away. She didn’t expect her life to change. She was content here in the Kitchen, where most people cut their dreams to fit their lives. And it seemed so unfair that the woman should have to lose even this minuscule corner she’d been backed into.
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