Going Down Fast (41 page)

“Come on, we will take the end stairs. Your teacher's crazy.”

She held Nancy by the cold tight hand and went at as quick a trot as she dared. No one was in sight but she couldn't be sure. When they finally reached the end stairway and started down, at the first turn they ran into thick black smoke. She stood still a moment in shock. The school was burning. This old firetrap. She could not see down the stairs and her eyes began to water.

Nancy burst into tears and hugged her legs. She tried to pull the child back upstairs, but Nancy clung to her legs and her warm tears went running down the nylons. Stooping, she gathered up Nancy, a bag of allwhichway bones, oh she weighed half a ton, and started down the corridor to the middle stairway. She heard something fall below.

Smoke was everywhere now thickening the air. Her eyes burned. The floor looked funny and hurt her feet through her soles. The bell began to ring again in one long ring that went on and on and on. It came at her from all sides. Nancy clung to her neck in a stranglehold while her big purse thumped against her side. Finally she thought to drop it, right in the hall. The bell went on and on boring into her head. Her side ached, her shoulder and back hurt from carrying Nancy and trying to hurry. The child's loosely dangling shoes kicked her.

She started down the middle stairs. The bell sang inside her head like a pain. Smoke whirled up the well. Then from the second turn she saw flames. She stopped, holding Nancy who clung to her neck, tough Nancy burrowing in and sobbing in deep shudders. The fire was orange and sometimes bluegreen in the old masonry, in the old wood whose layers and layers of varnish spat. The fire leaped and smoldered and hung in wreaths. Her eyes were running hard and she had to wipe them on Nancy's flimsy dress to see.

When would she no longer get shocks from neutral things, even from neutral things? Get moving again. They had been raised not to be frightened. Not to sit down. Not to cry.

Because of the firecat
.

There was no way through. She said the poem aloud to Nancy as she carried her down the corridor, aching. All the doors were closed. The last child was supposed to shut the classroom door. She could almost imagine classes in session. She set Nancy down. “Do you think you could walk now, babylove? Come on, give me your hand.”

But Nancy sank down crying. “Don't leave me, Miss Jameson, don't leave me here! I didn't mean to make you mad!”

She stooped and picked her up again, staggering. Smoke was thicker and acrid. Down where the first stairway lay, flames licked at the doorframes and seeped from the walls. Nancy's tears dried on her neck in the heat. The child began to cough, rubbing her face into her shoulder. She could not seem to think what to do. Her head ached. Her head was parched and the skin stretched drum-tight.

The bell stopped, abruptly. Sirens wailed and the fire spat, the itchy licking and high rumble of the fire. The floor smoldered in the hall. Below things fell. Outside men were yelling. The floor scorched her feet through her soles. She could hardly make herself keep walking. She felt as if she were sinking. The air was hot and hurt her face: She could not carry Nancy further. Her lungs burned and her throat ached and her back throbbed. Heat stretched her face tighter and tighter till it must split.

She pushed open a door into a classroom on the street side. Fifth grade, Miss Barnaby. On the board the founding of Chicago was pictured: Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the first settler, black like me. Here first and last ever since. Smoke was pouring from the heating duct. She dragged her way among the desks to the window. Found the window pole. Nancy's grip loosened on her neck and she sat the child limply at one of the desks.

Clambering on the ledge she pushed high the window. The metal of the outside grill was hot to touch. Then she dragged Nancy up. The wall was burning. The glassdoored bookcases with pictures of jet planes and cars and rockets showed flame. The glass was blackening and cracking. She held Nancy propped against her and looked over the edge. Straight down. She felt dizzy. Firemen were running hoses in through the doors. A hose was struck in a smashed window almost below. She yelled and could not hear herself. She yelled again.

The children were mostly lined up across the street and they were screaming with excitement. The older kids were out of control, dancing and clapping and singing and urging the building on. Even the shopkeepers were standing with big grins. Everybody hated this old school, this monstrous redbrick dungeon. They were cheering the flames and for a long time nobody heard her. Then a kid saw her and soon many of the kids were staring and pointing and finally some firemen saw and came running. Her face felt blistered. Her hands were flayed. The heat leaned on her, ate at her. Calling a warning she could not hear, she rolled the limp Nancy out the window and fell back. White firemen. She could not jump. Could not. Into space. Skirt flying up. Her dress was burning, the soft pink wool. Hideous odor of burned hair. Tried to crush it out between her hands, beating at the sparks.

Poor Paul, what would he do? He never had hated. Fire-wolf leapt. Flame in a sheet swooping.
Can't, no, please, can't!
She was screaming and ashamed, though she could not hear herself. She went twisting back and forth beating at herself. Had Nancy landed all right? Poor Paul, what would he … should have jumped. She could not stand it, could not stand it, mumbling
I'm sorry, I'm sorry!
Pulling herself up burning onto the burning ledge, she rolled over, and cold air burned her as rolling over and over she fell, heard wind and screaming, not hers, and fell.

Anna

Monday, January 12–Monday, January 19

Since she had gone to bed on the couch weary of waiting for Leon, every sound had torn her thin sleep. Now the scrape of his key in the lock woke her again. In the graying dark she watched him make his exhausted way to the bathroom to piss and cough up phlegm. Afterward he passed the couch and paused. She shut her eyes. She did not know why. She lay simulating sleep. Making an explosive noise with his lips he lumbered into the bedroom. Two thumps as he kicked off his wet boots. The rustle of the bed.

He must have been trying to see Caroline again: all night? It was bad, bad. She snoozed till the dank light of morning seeped through the room. At breakfast she looked through the paper for an apartment without success. Meetings in the afternoon and evening. In between she would hang around the office taking calls: no heat, pipes burst, children sick, eviction notices. The work was grim and slow, with a builtin futility that sent the staff into apocalyptic daydreams for relief, but the work was human and would do. Already their neighborhood was feeling the brunt of renewal. Rents going up, apartments being further subdivided into tiny partitioned holes, services cut back. The streets seemed visibly more crowded.

While she was sipping a second cup of coffee, to her surprise Leon came shuffling into the kitchen. He collapsed into a chair and blew his nose for several minutes.

“You've caught a cold.”

“So?”

His eyes showed bloodshot even through the shades he had put on, his nose was swollen, his lips cracked. She said, “Why don't you stay in bed today? Maybe you can shake it.”

“You'd like that, eh?” He squinted: elephant eyes red in his swollen face.

“I won't be here.” What was she suspected of?

He gave a dry meaningless chuckle that deteriorated into coughing. “What did you do with those antihistamines Murray gave you last winter?”

“What?”

“Those blockbusters he gave you?”

Was he thinking of Joye? blending them into some general wife-figure? “Want me to get something from the drugstore?”

“No use without a prescription.”

“Are you running a fever?” She reached out to his forehead.

He ducked away. “Let me along. Got things to do.”

Her trailing fingers had made contact long enough to tell that he was burning. After she cleared breakfast she picked up the mail from the floor where it slid through the slot. For her.

“What are you opening?”

“My check. The last from ISS. I had it sent here.”

“Yeah? You going to cash it?”

“This afternoon.”

The air felt soft and filmy. The streets were filled with a gray froth like dirty eggwhites. Beside her Paul walked head bowed, but he chose their erratic route. The snow and the dim light of the air were yellowed like old streets. Their boots sucked.

He was five days back from Green River and the funeral. “Caroline was there, with that prick she's marrying next Saturday. They're saying they been secretly married since Europe, and now they want to do it again in church. She came over waving a hankie and saying that Vera was the best friend she had.”

He walked through the gargoyle gate into campus. To their left a pond straddled by a small stone bridge where he sat down. The gray ice was puddled. Digging into the slush and leaning back, Paul lit a cigarette and winced. His face looked closed and young and weary. He kept rubbing his fists into his eyes. The whites were sore-red, full of blood. Around his wide sensitive mouth the skin was broken out. Past him rose the Gothic lace of the corner tower. The guardian of what is, what owns.

“Leon never did see her. I lost contact myself. He thought she tried to run me. Not like that. She sunk a lot of imagination into me. She didn't want enough for herself.”

“What did you want for her?”

“Not enough. In gradeschool she was already good. They couldn't tell because they were big on having kids draw blue sky and green trees and white sailboats, and Vera was too easy with her paints to stop with that. But the woman who taught art encouraged her. Then one time her homeroom teacher was asking the kids what they wanted to be and when she got to Vera, Vera said she was going to be an artist. The homeroom teacher stopped and raised her brows and did an exaggerated doubletake. ‘What's an artist, Vera, do you know?' Between classes Vera saw her out in the hall telling two other teachers about the funny colored girl who was going to be an
artist
. She walked like a little broomstick and she couldn't bear to be laughed at. The masks laughed at others, and if they didn't like them, well she made them to please herself.”

Sparrows hopping around some tidbit bared by the thaw. Paul stared at the gargoyle entrance, iron gates ajar.

“They're still saying it was arson, aren't they?”

“Fuzz are pinning it on the FBM. Harlan Williams said the school ought to be blown up, that parents should keep their kids home sooner than send them to that lousy indoctrinating firetrap to learn to be stupid and sick. The fuzz raided a garage and picked up some squirrel rifles and bowie knives and spread it all over the papers. Others say it was the Marauders—a teenage KKK. I talked to the janitor. He says if they're investigating they aren't trying very hard because nobody will listen to him. Something exploded but he says it was the rebuilt boiler. Construction graft, the Syndicate connection, and who cares how the job's done.”

“You went over and talked to him?” Before the funeral he had gone into a fury if anyone discussed the fire.

“Yeah, at first I wanted to shut it out. But I changed my mind.” He rubbed his gloved hands slowly. “It's an issue to organize around. I'm going to let them use me. That's what I belong to, where I start. I'm going to let them use me and her death.”

“Rowley called me. It hit him hard.”

“Yeah, he felt it.” He got up and they walked among the gray buildings and through a damp arch to the Midway. “He wanted to go to the funeral. I said no but I was sorry after. Would have introduced one note of truth.”

“Have you been seeing him?”

Paul made an ambiguous gesture. “He's useful. And he cared about her. He sees what I'm trying to do.”

Traffic on the Midway was heavy already. Soon she would have to leave for a staff meeting. “Come and see Leon. I can't get through to him.”

“No.” His voice clanked. “He doesn't see what I'm after and he should. I can't forgive him for being blind. And I just plain don't want to talk about her with him.”

“Paul, things are bad. He's sick and feverish. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard him using the phone. I'm sure he was calling Caroline—at three, four in the morning.”

“At the funeral she started to say he was bothering her, but I cut her short. What does he think it will do him?”

“He blames me in his head for the way she dumped him. That's why I have to move. I slept at my place just one night—it's spooky with the building empty and the heat off. Next day he made a scene. Claimed I was sneaking out to see Rowley.”

They drifted toward the fountain of time in shape of a half moon swarming with figures crawling out of and fading into the muck at either end, cast in crumbling concrete. It was obvious, pompous and fine to look at. They sat on the rim of the basin facing the centerpiece of mounted legionnaire. Beyond the fountain and fringe of trees stretched an expanse of wintry lagoon.

“You can't pull out. Suppose he is acting crazy. You can't up and leave him when he needs help.”

“But he doesn't want me there, Paul. At times he hates me.”

“He's sick over Caroline.”

“But I'm not doing him any good.”

“How do you know?”

She knew, sitting on the basin, that her friendship with Paul had lost its home and she was saddened. There were no natural ways left for them to meet. “Can I do anything for you?”

He shook his head no. But a minute later, “Vera left some things at the Art Institute—drawings, papers. I want them but I don't want to look at them yet. You could get them.”

She nodded. Just to the side of Paul the tall gaunt figure of Time peered from his hood like Lamont Cranston, the Shadow. “You think the way he eats us all he'd be fatter … It's late.”