Come Sunday

by Bradford Morrow

  What he saw by the door handle was more than he might have wished for, given the way his fortunes had failed over the last hours: it was ajar, held ajar by a crushed cigarette pack, and he pressed the heavy door which gave way into a cloud of musty smoke. He coughed, and fumbled at the bank of light switches, flicking them up and down but, like the buzzer, they were disconnected. Eyes smarting, he could see the stairway and next moved toward it concentratedly, and noticed that smoldering odor, foul and stubborn, now mixed with an atmosphere of—by agency of his accelerated memory—his grandmother’s nannyplum tea, and then as he ascended quiet as a cat burglar landing by landing, his fingers running along the time-smoothed metal of the handrail, what came to mind was the contradictory tangle of motives that clustered to bring him inside this building, where he didn’t know his way around, and put him at real risk of being caught (just when he ought to be stowing out for Lisbon or Panama City)—and why? to ask Hannah questions he’d already divined answers for? or was it just the curiosity of seeing for himself the circus he’d used for leverage, blackmail, waystationing? Lupi might be up there, also, and if he was would be worth killing, Krieger reckoned, although he had no weapon and was not by nature inclined to kill.

  The smell was thicker on the top floor. Urea; oats; dung threaded with hay. Krieger moved with great caution, saw no one. The dog’s bark broke a simulacrum of peace. Krieger spread himself against the nearest wall. Two more yelps, silence. He considered this for a moment, concluded it was not a watchdog as its bark was too self-pleased and soprano, then skipped quickly to the double doors behind which the sound had come and closed his fingers around the handle.

  By now he had heard them, the other noises, disturbed by the dog into deep-pitched lowing like an electrical transformer shorting out, or the glissando of the lowest notes on a tuba. “Semper Fidelis” and “Stars and Stripes Forever”: with the last vestiges of these barbaric melodies playing through his head, doubling, redoubling, Krieger crossed the border into another desolate, but madly colorful, country. Raucous wilderness annexed onto his own and it stretched out, its stench so pronounced his forearm came up to cover his nose as he stared across the length of the ceiling, thousands of square feet of flat clouds, still flocks of birds and the multitude of tracklights, shades varied as those down the barrel of Olid’s kaleidoscope.

  “Hey mister,” Henry emerged from the shed at Krieger’s left. Krieger hadn’t noticed him.

  “Well, hello there.”

  “You’re not supposed to be in here who’re you?”

  “Department of Health, Animal Rights Division.”

  Henry said, suspiciously, thinking that he had seen this face somewhere before, although he could not place it, “I’m just a hand.”

  “Hand … fine, well now, can you tell me where I can find let me think” (tapping thumb to the bridge of his nose) “—Ms. Burden, yes a Ms. Hannah Burden?”

  “She ain’t with you?”

  “No, no.”

  “Then how’d you get in here?”

  “I was let in, downstairs, it’s all prearranged you see, I’m scheduled to have a meeting with Ms. Burden, need to find her right away, you see, something about farming restrictions, that sort of thing, entrepreneurial-legislative, nothing of course for you to be concerned about.”

  “Well you might find her out in the bunkhouse.”

  “The bunkhouse, and where would that be?”

  Both doors to the corrugated-tin-sided bunker on the roof were locked. Krieger, having left Henry in the urine-sweet loft, first knocked lightly and then, raising no response, attempted to kick them in. The broadening breeze rumpled his hair and cut erratic through his clothes; in the midst of his wild exit from Berkeley house he had been forced to abandon everything but the freshly pressed suit he had worn down to breakfast in expectation of having a relatively formal conference with his customer, who Krieger presumed would address him with the touch of Old World manners Corless had come to enjoy.

  It looked and smelled as if it was going to snow. Few, few shall part where many meet, the snow shall be their winding sheet, and every turf beneath their feet shall be a soldier’s sepulcher.

  “Hey mister whatsername?” Krieger turned to see Henry had followed him outside, and the double-barreled shotgun upraised comfortably in Henry’s arms with an aim directed imperceptibly above Krieger’s head defied the cool with which Krieger said:

  “Yes? and may I ask what the fucking firearm is all about, bub? I assume you have a permit because if you don’t your ass’s going to be in a sling.”

  Henry’s stare did not vacillate. “It’s Sunday,” he said.

  “So what,” and Krieger was walking obliquely toward him.

  “You say you’re with the Board of Health what’re you doing work on a Sunday for, sounds pretty fishy to me, and anyways what you kicking the door for?”

  Krieger passed him, teeth clenched irate and eyes narrowed into a look of painful insult, flouting Henry’s weapon and his questions. If there were more time Krieger knew that he would be tempted to accompany the man back into the cattle loft where, by alternately fulminating and reasoning with him, accenting the whole with non sequiturs and quotations, he might learn some useful information for the future. However, he knew the axis itself was turning dangerously and it was time to vanish. “These sons of bitches first they evade their taxes, I mean are you people incorporated here? and if not you have any concept what kind of unincorporated business tax must be owed, operation this size, I can’t begin to guess, five-six figures, you’ll be hearing …” as Krieger’s arms flailed where he hurried for the stairwell only fractionally worried a blast might at that moment erupt to spray his back with a pool of pellets.

  “Stop, you.”

  “You’ll be hearing from me. I don’t like the looks of this place.”

  “I said stop.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  An orange flicker chewed at the air. A hot roar centered a cloud. The fire was still a tight bundle of flame surrounding the cigarette smoldering there in the burlap, lurching playfully off its surface. On the wall there was a poster. He’d never noticed it before. L’eau qui chante et qui danse. The water that sings and dances. A man and a woman were seated at a small round table, a bottle of mineral water between them—the poster was old, older perhaps than Krieger himself. Already the smoke from the fire had begun to darken the paper. Sing and dance, he thought; sing and dance away.

  And as Krieger reached into the little bonfire at the bottom of the stairs, coughing in the heavy smoke, and began to fling the burning burlap sacks about, mindless as a child hypnotized, fascinated, delighted by the spreading fire, he could think of no appropriate quote from that massive stock so long ago memorized out of Bartlett’s. When he saw that it had built into a formidable blaze as a result of his work he fell out into the street making sure that the door was securely drawn closed in its jamb.

  8.

  FIRE SPEAKS JARGONS all its own, but it is not selfish with its tongues. Like a master linguist it converses easily with whatever or whomever it happens to encounter along the way, always speaking the dialects of territories through which it travels. Like some irrepressible gossip it is not to be snubbed or spurned, deaf and blind as it is to the subtlest condescension, to whom jibes and jeers mean nothing when weighed against the thrill of moving among the company of others. Like an epicurean aesthete it runs its fingers appreciatively over the surfaces of everything it admires. Sometimes patient, sometimes not, it becomes a part of its environment with the alacrity of a quick-change artist; wondrous pantomime it plays oak for oak, glass for glass, flesh for flesh, before insisting the game be played in reverse so that flesh, glass, and oak try to mimic flame. Prickly to the touch, and sinuous, let it be said it has its vicious side. But it is never disloyal to the elements with which it communicates: with the dense it is persistent, with sluggards slow, and with the volatile explosive.

  The metaphor itself was beguiled then. Soon e
nough, none of the individual voices in the corridors and rooms on the lower floors could be picked out and separated for translation. Instead, what could be heard, if there had been anyone there to listen (there was no one), was the overriding accent of fire itself. This was to be so efficient a manifestation of the thoughts of the building that no matter how many different notes were struck or topics offered, the whole would not degenerate into quibbling but emerge into the declaration of a unified theme. And though, of course, all of the inanimate constituents involved in the growing document could not “know” the meaning of their labor and sacrifice, there was, as there is always in the heart of any fire, a sense in the singularity of direction, as it leapt up farther and farther from earth only in order to drag everything back down.

  This is what was happening.

  The burlap feedsacks which Hammond had neglected over the past few days to put out in the garbage burned hot and pure. Whiskers of flame caught along the thick paint on the walls, chawed through the molded tin ceiling to get at the buttresswork and supports. They moved vertically up the staircase and by airshafts, and horizontally through struts, doors, drywall. Upon hitting one of the gaslines on the second story, the speed and ambition of the fire were increased. The line burned out in an explosion which rumbled through the girders like a drowned vesper bell. A grand old furnace was sent into splinters and with it glass in doors throughout the central section of the structure blew. Still, because the course along which the flames fed was toward the core of the building, this salvo did not shatter the windows facing the streets. In stale offices it grew stiffer, working through file cabinets, across the tops of desks, melting a plastic pencil sharpener, blackening memos, eating a wall calendar, cracking into a closet to reduce an umbrella to ash. It brawled and broiled, mad and constant. Full of its own strength it began to breach the ceilings that stretched out between it and the sky.

  Henry heard nothing and as yet neither smelled nor saw the smoke which ran like dye into vents and cracks.

  But the conflagration could not keep itself a secret for many minutes more, and when a section of floor fell through under the weight of a row of linotype machines, the animals upstairs started together in a jittery run then abruptly halted, each with its head cocked sideways on a massive neck. Henry set down the shotgun, which he had busied himself cleaning to pass time after Krieger had left. When he pushed open the double doors he encountered a wall of noxious brown; the heat rose and after he closed the doors he realized his hands were scalded.

  “Maddie?”

  He had seen a fire once before, a barracks gutted in high wind one Texas evening. Brigade lines made up of all the young enlisted men, buckets slopping water onto the wet hollow, the sergeant’s face lit up like a pomegranate under the harvest moon. Two men died trapped in there before pumpers arrived to soak the glow of cinders and metal ribs of the quarters.

  “Maddie?”

  The freight elevator on the west wall was either jammed or had fallen to the bottom of the shaft. Sensing which direction would lead them away from incipient danger the cattle had skittered heavily to the far side of the pasture, east, and as they did the lights went out. Under miasmal diffusion let down in shafts from the central skylight, Henry jogged, coughing with fright, the length of the loft to the service elevator. A familiar sound followed his turning the key and pressing the button—a series of clicks and the hum of cables. These noises came as such relief: not all the electricity in the building had been blown out yet. Somewhere far below, he heard the first sirens converge upon the block.

  Weight capacity for the elevator was twenty-two hundred pounds, and since most of the animals weighed roughly half that amount it wasn’t stress on the equipment that made Henry nervous. The cabin was square and small. “Come on, girl,” Henry urged. She lunged shoulder first at the compartment then immediately reversed, panicked, bellowing loudly, and stamped her hooves on the floor of the elevator which wobbled under the strain of the weight and violence of the activity. Henry stroked her along the flat plane between her ears in an attempt to pacify her; the dog having some notion of what Henry wanted her to do helped marshal her into the cabin and Henry closed his eyes as the cage slid shut and after a repetition of the clicks the elevator started uncertainly down.

  When they reached the first floor and emerged into a damp, chilly loading area, Henry began to wonder whether he had made some kind of mistake in judgment upstairs and had acted prematurely. Perhaps the fire had been confined to the loft corridor. Still, he knew, it would be better to move them down here and hope that no one would find them.

  He left Leonie and went back up. The heat was intensifying and the air was thinner. Smoke rushed in thick bundles, multicolored, over the cattle’s backs. The floor made a sound that was like gulping. Henry cupped his arm over his mouth and nose and walked forward toward the nearest animal, the lame calf. One by one he brought them all to safety. On the last trip, as the elevator cage clanged to and Henry pulled the lever, he witnessed a ripple roll like some soft wave presaging high tide, heard the plump enigmatic snap of superheated steel quip at the first jets of water that had begun to shower. Henry had never been in an earthquake but he imagined that the new roar which carried on its crest to this remote edge of the pasture must be something similar; it was as if he were under the wheels of a subway train, sparks cascading and railroad ties ringing, and presently the cabin seemed to break loose of its hectored cables, caught again and bobbed against the shaft’s walls. Reverberations were heard throughout the length of the seemingly endless journey down, and the animal powerfully pushed forward when they reached the ground floor. Terrible tart smoke had found this corner of the building, too, and it was then Henry sensed what was inescapable—there was a paradox—inescapable fact he had no choice but to open the door onto the loading dock and let the animals make their own strange steps to safety and freedom. What would become of them, of him, there was no way to predict.

  He flung the doors open and they cantered outside, moved down the inclined plane where they found themselves in an empty back lot. Around the corner from them men in bright yellow and blue waterproof suits moved across the asphalt strewn in hoses. Fourth and fifth alarms had already been sounded as the building’s structure began to convolute under the diametrical influences of white heat and stone-cold water.

  The cattle moved away from the growling gable and the dog loped along beside; Henry followed at a cautious distance, having no idea whether to bind his fate with theirs, wherever that might lead him, or give himself over to a meaner instinct that proposed he run as far and fast as he could in the opposite direction. As yet they had not been observed, but once they reached the end of this alley and turned left into the street this anonymity would be concluded. Tails switched, dignified gleaming bodies gently touched one another, and behind this family that clopped like a benevolent race come back out of time to visit the island that once was theirs, Henry lingered for another moment before marching out to the sidewalk, arms swinging at his sides, to join them where they were, there on the cobble-patched gutter, less frightened than he, and indifferent to the devastation left behind. That mask of confidence he set on his face meant in its own manner to preclude anyone’s approaching him with a question like, Look here now, what is this supposed to mean? However, the attention of the crowd that had gathered deep into the adjacent streets focused high on the swordlike plumes of water that showered across the structure at two tons per minute from each bright nozzle held forth into the green-and-black air.

  Krieger watched the fire with all the others, from a comfortable distance of a half a block. As with many phenomena he knew how this worked, what he witnessed here with his fellow spectators; there was still something—a dust-filmed pane on his retinas—that prevented him from feeling the impact of what he saw. It was a powerful deprivation, this distance that grew out, an empty form, between one Krieger in the body and the other Krieger out there slogging away, kicking and punching through life. He looke
d at the faces of the men and women in the crowd that began to gather and recognized in their profiles the horror and fascination, too, and he gazed up again at the palatial cloud that rolled away into the sky, opulent as blackberry jam, and he wanted to step out before all of them to make his rightful claim that what they were experiencing together was of his own making, something he had been obligated to create.

  At nine hundred degrees a flame remains red, he could tell them. Twice this and fire burns to peach orange and pale yellow. Twenty-five hundred degrees and everything blanks out to white, not bone but the radiant white of a glass of milk held up in the sun. He took several steps forward, pulling at the sleeves of a few people in the crowd, to edge a little closer. He tried hard to believe he’d never been so alive as at that instant, though he couldn’t take it into himself like a physical thing and couldn’t feel it for the great flood of sensory excitement he knew it must somehow be down in the tissues of his own body He rubbed his chest with his hand in a circular movement. He pulled on his slender nose, and chewed at his knuckle. Across his face was extended a tight smile and his eyes were dancing. Nevertheless, the Krieger up there of black smoke and fire, and the Krieger of plumes of water which misted and shot in funnels from the cherry-pickers, the Krieger of continuous sirens and distorted cries through megaphones, so prominent and effective, could not be reached by the Krieger who stood below, feeling himself a neglected element, not even a significant point of reference in the equation.