The Lake on Fire

by Rosellen Brown

A few men were left, milling, stamping their feet. They looked insulted not to be taken.

  “What? What?” Asher demanded of one of them, pulling at his sleeve, one of the empty-handed left-behinds. “Why were they—”

  “No goddamn jobs is what. We got used and they threw us the hell away, that’s what.”

  Asher leaned in. The man, in a scuffed old suit, dusty here, shiny there, and stretched out in the knees, muttered on and Asher tried to make sense of it. “How did you get used?” Used? They were still here.

  But they were the builders! They were the men in the bunkhouse, men who filled in the swamp, who made the Fair out of wood and staff, plastered the faces of the buildings, laid the paths, planted the thousand trees, proud of their work, they had told him. Satisfied, for all it had tuckered them out. For this they had gotten themselves beaten? For wanting to use those ropy arms, those backs that never tired? He looked for the man who had found him first and brought him into the bunkhouse, who loved to hear him read from the Bible, but no one seemed to remember him. That meant there must be a lot of hardworking men who had been forgotten.

  Someone was shouting about a meeting tonight. “We’re organizing, we’re not goin’ away like fuckin’ sheep!” A thin stream of blood trickled down his cheek. He took off his cap and thrust it like the stick he didn’t have. “They want us to disappear. You don’t throw men away like rubbish. You don’t take their labor like it comes free and just turn your back.”

  Asher peered up at him and the man goggled his eyes, mocking. “What.”

  “What? Nothing. I only—”

  “Count yourself lucky, kiddo. You don’t need a job. Just wait and see what’s waitin’ for you when you do! Ought to rot, the whole damn lot of ’em.”

  Asher shuddered and stood as tall as he could manage. “Can I come to the meeting? Tonight?”

  The man looked him over and laughed one short burst. “What the hell, why not? 295 Division, upstairs. Come one, come all, all hands on deck. You get yourself there, we might even have cookies.”

  HE FOUND 295 Division the way he found his way everywhere: walked, stole a ride on a trolley, no longer afraid to dangle off the back, mouth open to the breeze. Dodged foot traffic, horse traffic. Distance was never a problem, it was a voyage, and a hundred things amazed him on the way: three men in red capes who stopped in the middle of the street to stand on their hands and walk, their capes fallen over their heads. A horse gone wild, dancing—it looked like dancing—front legs raking at the sky. A load of lumber fallen off a wagon, splayed across the street. He went around it. A dozen men—eleven, actually—assaulting the ground with picks and shovels, all dressed alike in what might be prison uniforms. They were singing or—he listened carefully, cocking an ear—grunting out a rhythm. So much happening at once, he was going to live forever!

  There was an upholstery shop at 295 Division, with a fat mustard-colored sofa and a matching chair crowding its window. Voices came down to him; the meeting had started. He took the stairs by twos, tiptoed in and found a seat on the aisle nearest the door. Hot room, low ceiling, so many men—he counted forty-four plus a large, tan sleeping dog—given to muttering to one another without lowering their voices. The speakers poured forth heated words and pounded the table. One smashed it so hard with his fist the dog jumped to his feet and looked around alarmed. Laughter, a stroking from above and the dog subsided. “A good hard knock might calm you down like that,” someone shouted to the flustered speaker.

  Their words sailed past Asher, most of them, but some he caught: Socialists shared everything and did not believe in disruption but in something called evolution. “People need to learn, they need to be led to understand.” Anarchists refused what was offered, would not be bought, would not compromise, that filthiest of words. (Words could be filthy? Asher saw books with soiled pages, rucked up, dirt-stained.) “Revolution, not evolution!” Only the lily-livered gave in. He tried to imagine liver—he saw it stretched out on a plate—with lilies growing from it. Silliness from adult men.

  A very tall, very thin young man, afloat in a long black overcoat, with some kind of accent deeper than his own, began softly and ended up shouting, “And the church! The Romish church, the Protestants in all their useless variety! The church keeps us in bondage! How can the world not see it, how the blind lead the blind, the apologists make excuses and meanwhile our children starve!” Asher wanted an explanation but could not ask. Who was apologizing, and for what? His mouth tasted like road dust. He was used to learning from books—books with clean pages—not from all those syllables rushing forward so fast in this ragged assortment of voices. Anyone could tell they were bitter, though, all of them, because they didn’t have work to do. Or they were paid in pennies while the rich wallowed in their palaces. He knew: His sister needed two jobs or they would be living on the street. Some of them wanted to make an army to march on—who? That was never clear. “Capitalism is the tyrant!”

  But where, where would they find it to wrestle it to the ground? Asher closed his eyes and thought as hard as he could. The parties he worked at, Sundays. The fresh flowers in silver bowls and whipped-up cream and books in the library so clean because they had never been touched. The crowds of visitors at the Fair, spreading around their coins by the handful, like farmers seeding their fields. What they called capitalism, wasn’t it everywhere? How could they live without it? But the capital was in Springfield, what did that have to do with all this ruckus?

  He blinked with effort. All he knew was that their fury gave off heat, a kind of roiling, something like motion. Men stood and clapped and sat and murmured to their neighbors, not polite, not too nice to disagree. They were desperate. That was a word he knew and liked: It had despair in it, or almost. Chaya used that word, or used to. It meant, We are drowning, we are dying. He and Chaya were not dying any more but that made him feel a kind of shame. He had, they both had, gone blind and deaf to their dying.

  The last man to speak was large, he looked like he could move boulders. He had been taken by the police at the gate to the Fair! Asher felt a thrill at that. The man’s head was bandaged, one of his eyes flamed with blood. He shouted, hoarse-voiced, “Many words begin with a d—there’s disaster, right, boys?” A sort of cheer, not gleeful. “There’s debt. It’s debt that devours us, and never so much as today.” He waited for another round of enthusiasm. “And there’s death, y’know. There’s always death, they give it out like medicine on a goddamn spoon. But I have a different d word, fellas.”

  “What?” the whole room clamored. “What’s the word?”

  “Defiance! We will defy our masters. We will defy the bastards who want us to keep our mouths shut. Well, down with ’em, I say. Into the lake with the bloody lot of ’em and we’ll stand on the moving sidewalk we built—we built it, remember that!—and we’ll watch ’em sink.” The sound of all those men clapping sounded like wind, like rain, a great storm breaking. But he did not say how they would muster the bastards into the lake. And there were no cookies.

  The meeting done, no one seemed to notice Asher. He wanted to ask a hundred questions but he was too small, he was invisible, lost between their milling bodies and the chairs pushed crooked from their rows, and, disappointed, he went down the stairs and out. Started the walk home—it was dark now—vowing to find some books to help him make sense of the -ists and the -isms, Socialist and Anarchist, Marxist and—why had someone hooted at this?—something called a Social Democrat. So he was a Proletariat? Everyone had nodded at that word. It did not seem to be something you had to join up for. He wished he had dared to tell the bandaged man that he had been there, had seen him clubbed and kneed and shoved into the police wagon howling, that it had made the bloodied man a hero. So rarely afraid to speak up, tonight Asher was too awed to say a word.

  23

  GREGORY HAD a surprise for her. “This will please you, I think, Chaya. Just you wait!” He handed her up to a seat in a hack and told the cabman to go a few blocks north and anot
her few west. Like her own block, the houses here were sad, wooden fronts sagging, brick fronts grimy, chipped and unadorned. What a decadent city this was. It was a rigged game, whether one chose to play or not. There ought to come a huge wave off the lake to drown it all, sinners and saints and especially the ones who owned their souls, to even the score.

  “Here,” Gregory called to the driver, and the horse stopped as suddenly as if his nose had hit a wall. Chaya saw a plain brick building, three stories tall, its front stoop and cornices half fallen in, most of its windows gaping uncovered. She followed Gregory into its murky hallway, where the rankling smell of mildew mixed with the residue of some cooking disaster that must have charred the bottom out of a good-sized pot.

  Then, after a long climb, with an exclamation of triumph, he managed, by feel alone, to find the keyhole, and with a click and a push, the door opened and he made a bow of welcome. “Dear lady, my new abode.”

  Oh, Gregory. Her eyes welcomed the light, though the windows were shadowed with old grime. In that light she saw a room as worn and decrepit as Mrs. Gottlieb’s parlor, but rescued, incongruously, by a few furnishings he must have carted from home: a solid, shining, mahogany breakfront with silver drawer-pulls, two commodious leather chairs in a luscious forest green, a round table with the scalloped feet of a lion. On a scuffed pine dresser, a nicked enamel pitcher, a nicked enamel bowl. Such effort to abandon his fate, which would not abandon him! Such desperation to belong. She was embarrassed for him.

  He was as proud as a poor man who had moved up to better rooms. They were passing each other, Chaya saw, bitterly amused, one rising while the other fell.

  Gregory bounced gently on the bed like a boy, grinning. Lifted a dented kettle he might have bought from a junkman on Maxwell Street, then remembered he had no water unless he went downstairs to pump it. Only the pile of papers and the shiny maroon pen on the table betrayed his difference from his neighbors. He didn’t ask her what she thought about it, only combed her face for a response. Had he known her true opinion, he’d have been more surprised than he was when she came into his arms as if to congratulate him.

  How strange that she found this folly endearing—that he could be so earnest and so entirely wrong. He was no prince after all. He was more flawed, he was more human, and, it seemed, he needed her approval more than he needed his comfort. How vulnerable he felt when she took his head to her breast and cradled it there against her long file of buttons, which ground themselves into his sweet cheek.

  He unfastened those buttons very slowly, concentrating, his fingers too big to slip them easily through the little loops that held them. She should be raising her arms to embrace him, should be caressing his dark head, his neck, his shoulders that suddenly seemed wide and looming, helping him out of his own complex clothing as he was relieving her of her multiple layers of skirting. He stopped to press his lips to every limb he bared, but she stood inert as the heavy green pitcher on the ledge behind him. This is, she did not quite think but felt, panicked, what I am not allowed until—unless!—he is my husband. This is what they warn us against, doing what we are doing. His fingertips, warm palm of his hand, tongue inside her mouth as if it were her own, this time no surprise. She stood in a pile of undergarments, her feet catching in the folds, ruining them with her shoes.

  Then—his bed stretched behind them, a shore too far to be reached—he laid her down. Every part of him pressed against her as if they had never been meant to be separate, and he was somehow on her, in her, none of him rough and raw but amazingly smooth, for all his force. She let herself be stunned. Naked, he was so young, so oddly delicate. There were hollows where his neck met his chest. Bony legs—boy legs—twined with hers. His fingers trembled, touching her. She couldn’t believe how much she wanted to take him into her.

  She had not realized how curious she had been about what the whole world found so compelling that men killed to have it, forced women to lie down for it against their will, that kingdoms rose and fell with the movement of flank against flank—they were only thighs, after all, hairy and hairless; her breasts tipped the color and shape of almonds in their skins, not lush enough to fill his hands; flat belly against flatter; and then, in the dark, the places she hardly dared name. Lying beside Gregory finally, in the deep shelter of his arm, she recognized how hungry she had been, not to feel what she had felt—astonishment and pain and finally the dark swell of something like an itch she could not touch or even find while he fell away from her, damp, breathless, shrunken—but to know what she knew now. Still, the great world-mystery was not quite solved: There must be more to it than this baring of what is never seen, and then that tearing, and a gasp, his gasp, like the pain of mayhem wrung from him. Later she would know. Now she would sleep, and Gregory too, his breath subsiding.

  My impoverished lover—lover, my fool!—will we have to line up together at the Pacific Mission for our dinner, thin gruel and a stale roll? She hoped he would not be laughed at too harshly while he pursued this foolishness. She kissed his temple, on which the comma of dark hair she loved lay stuck to his damp skin. It would be all right soon enough: Let him pump his water in the yard on a chill December morning, carry his nostril-filling bowl down two flights, sloshing high against its sides, and if he put his foot down wrong in the dark, into his hands and onto the immaculate knee of those tan trousers he had folded so neatly today. Such guilt! Such good intentions! He would never last as a pauper, and when he failed at it—when he reverted—she knew she would be relieved.

  ASHER STAYED away, and stayed, and stayed.

  Misery and exhilaration swept Chaya as if she were swimming through changing currents in a pond. It would do no good to look for him, she knew, because she had done that before and Asher was a tomcat—for many months he had been vaulting fences, lunging down alleyways like a chased thief, running below everyone’s vision, stealing to put the world right. He knew the grip-cars, he knew the horse cars: The city was far more his playground than hers. But he had come home at night; when she returned from her job at the buckeye, she had kissed him in his sleep. All she could do now was worry and wait.

  One evening a rumor passed along the street that a small boy had been killed nearby at one of the many deadly crossings of train with street traffic. These were the times when four or five such catastrophes might occur in a day, most frequently involving the young and, to themselves, invincible, who believed they could outrace anything on wheels.

  Chaya ran to the precinct house and threw herself upon the police officer in charge. He was a large Irishman with eyebrows as furry as chenille and hands the size of dust mops who, unfortunately for himself, had been standing at the door looking morosely out at the rain. He caught her full weight against his chest, which was, painfully for her, armored with double rows of buttons, and soothed her gently, an amazing kindness in a man so mountainous. Calmly, he reassured her that the boy had actually not been a child but a diminutive Chinaman, probably, to judge by his clothing, here to work at the Exposition, whose builders seemed a congress of every nation in the world. Only then did her breathing return to a normal rhythm that could sustain her. But though he wasn’t hers, who, she wondered miserably, would there be, so far from home, to claim the poor man’s body or even to know his fate and mourn for him, however the Chinese people mourned? She was very susceptible to feeling just then.

  The policeman asked her for a description of her missing boy. He seemed as sympathetic as one could wish. What would she say?

  Ten-year-old prodigy. Dark-haired. White-skinned. Small-boned. Delicate-featured. Sometimes clean. Smarter than you are. Reads. Calculates. Possesses a memory of inhuman capacity. Indeterminate commitment to the rules of civil law: steals modestly. Sleeps where necessary. Lies when expedient. Unforgiving when angered. Circumcised. Answers to Asher, though may not answer at all. Please return to grieving sister.

  “STILL GONE, the little bounder!” Sara said, clicking her teeth. They were leaving work; it was still light outs
ide, which shocked Chaya every time, as though it were an aberration. “I’ve had times I’ve wished my brother would disappear, but I didn’t really mean it. But Chaya, he’ll be all right out there. He is quicker than anyone who might want to do him harm, you must know that. He will sneak through any fence.”

  They walked together a while, melancholy, agreeing that life was so unpredictable they felt like bits of branch spun round in a river, helpless. “Should I be spending all my time searching for him?” Chaya begged of her friend. “I think that I shouldn’t be so happy with Gregory right now. It makes me feel selfish.”

  Sara’s freckles had vanished, these days, under a light veil of powder. She had grown up and had grown pretty since her fireman, Joe Scully, had come into her life. She wore her hair in a womanish roll with a becoming fringe. “You don’t even deserve an answer to that. You are doing what you can. You have too much conscience and it does you no good, nor Asher either.”

  Chaya made herself change the subject to the only thing Sara cared about these days. “How are things with Joe?”

  “Oh, my father has begun to object to him,” her friend said, almost gaily. “He told me a fireman is as bad as a gambler, and I’ll lose him to a burning house some day. But I said, ‘Then I’m a gambler too and I’ll take my chances on him!’” She laughed. “If we had to get everybody’s blessing, do you think there’d ever be any new babies made? How do you think the world goes round?” She was going to be contented, Chaya could see, because—if her luck held—she would make her own path. Sara had only agreed with her about how helpless they were, buffeted in the stream, because she wanted to oblige her in her misery.

  She couldn’t remember how the world went round, in fact. Asher gone, it had stopped for her and she feared it might never start up again. She was the guilty one, who—thank Gregory, thank her unsanctioned distraction—had allowed her sister-concentration to lapse. “You will be out of your father’s house soon,” she told Sara, hugging her goodbye when her crowded car pulled up beside them.