Mitchell Smith (2 page)

The divorce had come, for Ellie, from a nearly cloudless sky-hazed only a little by their not having had children. A decision-to postpone-they’d both agreed to, Ellie then as ambitious as her husband, though less fitted for it. “I like you, El . . .” he’d said. “I probably still love you-but you simply don’t interest me anymore.” He’d said that as merrily as he’d joked and jibed with her for many years.

He’d smiled.

Ellie thought of killing herself with her service revolver; then, in a day or two, thought of killing him-but did neither. to her. In the Klein moved out, leaving the apartment.

In the years that followed, Ellie saw him eleven times—twice in the street (by accident), once on divorce business, and a number of times by waiting under a dry cleaner’s marquee across from his firm’s offices off Wall Street. She didn’t try to speak to him on those occasions of observation, didn’t let him see her-and finally, on the last of these, saw him walk from the building with a small, beautiful, dark-haired woman in a handsome charcoal silk suit.

On the day the tenement burned, a summer day and blazing, Ellie had left the Juvenile Authority office-had been there for an hour and a half talking with Elena Munoz about a boy named Elacio, who’d molested another, younger child-left the office, and was walking west on 109th when she’d heard a dying siren, saw in the next block a small gray-black plume of smoke, and went to the scene.

The Fire Department had been there almost an hour, the men hustling over a flooded street among pythons of hose, hurrying in and out through the building’s main doorway-and at the corner, by short extension ladder through a smashed-in second-story window-all of them clanking with tanks and tools. Four patrol cars from the precinct were now at the scene as well, and Ellie, in plainclothes so as not to overawe the children in her work-a blue print dress today-went over to the near car, showed her badge to a freckled sergeant, and asked if she could help. He, comfortable in the passenger seat, gave her a look at once surprised and bored, talked with her for politeness’ sake awhile, then went back to his notebook, jotting this and that.

Ellie wandered then across the street to join the casual crowd, and after watching the firemen at their duty for a few minutes, looked up the building’s side, along high rows of windows, some whole and neat, others charred and broken in or out. Then, in one of the neat ones closed to the level of a rust-stained air conditioner-she saw, or thought she saw, a very small brown face, eyes wide, peering down. Two windows away from this, to the left, through an empty window frame, smoke rolled out solid and black as a small tornado, but silent.

The firemen were busy in the street (one, a firewoman and fairly small, wrestling hose with the rest); the massive pumper-parked half-turned from the uptown corner stood unmanned, its nozzles dripping. Ellie ran back across to the fire captain, a short, wiry man with a neat mustache.

She interrupted him as he was talking on his hand radio, and when he turned from her still talking-he had a man, one of his men, down with chest pains on the seventh floor-she reached out and tugged at his rubber jacket “Goddamn you, lady,” he said. —Get your hands off me!”

And was not impressed when she showed her badge pinned now to the bosom of her dress. Indeed, he looked around for a cop to get this cop off his back. Like many firemen, whose jobs are—statistically—so much more dangerous, the captain had a certain contempt for policemen, and policewomen. Ellie persisted, pestering him about the small brown face.

She’d become child-sensitized in her work, and, perhaps because of her childlessness, was quick to assume a guardian stance.

The firemen, as it happened, had already cleared the building quite thoroughly-it was a smoky fire, not an inferno, though not much less dangerous for that-and two men were now bringing Richie Rollins down seven floors of smoldering stairs in the near pitch dark, carrying him on their shoulders while trying to keep his breather mask straight on his face. Rollins had peed on them, and was dying, his heart shaking uselessly in his chest.

The captain spoke to his building boss, who was on the third floor and climbing to help with Rollins, directing him to lower the man from the north-side corner window to save the time on the last two flights of stairs. The captain also had a problem with water. The pressure due to hydrant-opening by the foolish and broiling poor might not permit him to cope if the building burst into flame. He was calling in another alarm, therefore, simply for more hose length, and was embarrassed by the necessity, since this was only a shitty little fire, nothing special, isolated in this one building-no spread at all. He’d had no serious injuries, only one man, an inhaler, taken gasping away to Metropolitan

… a second, Packwood, who’d lost a fingertip in glass, and another man in the basement who’d sustained an electrical burn. This man had refused to come out of the basement work, so the captain assumed the burn was only minor—one of those flashy zaps that would happen when a person ripped live wires out of a roasting wall with a steel prybar or the backhook of an ax.

When this woman kept bothering him-raising her voice, gesturing more violently-the captain stepped away from her, over the jungle of hose, gesturing for someone to come deal with her.

One of the patrolmen in the cars had watched much of this-nudging his partner, who was reading a paperback Western, to make him watch, too.

“Look at this shit,” the patrolman said. “-Isn’t she a cop?”

As he said it-and out in the street Ellie began to shout, then reached again for the sleeve of the fire captain’s jacket-a fireman climbed down off Unit #557, came up to the policewoman, and took her by the arm.

I’m a police officer-“

I don’t give a shit what you are”-pointing to the fire captain. “-See that guy you been talkin’ to? Well, leave him the fuck alone.”

Ellie crossed the street, and thought of going back to speak to the sergeant-thought of looking for the firewoman … did, and didn’t see her. She stood at the edge of the marveling crowd, looked way, way up, and was certain she’d found the window again, it had the recalled small air conditioner, its side panels crinkled in to fit it to the window’s paint-flaked frame. She looked up at this window, seeing, in her peripheral vision, a silent column of smoke pouring out thick and slow from the window two down, on the left.

She stood and stared, feeling foolish, recalling the contempt in the fire captain’s glance, tugged from talking on his radio. She had just recalled this face, when, looking up, she saw for an instant another one remembered, tiny with distance, dark brown, barely visible through dusty glass, peering just over the air conditioner … gazing at the spectacle below.

Two, three years old. A baby. Must have climbed on a couch … a chair, to look out….

Ellie considered, standing jostled on the sidewalk in the searing sun, watching the movement, the bright noontime colors of the equipment in the street, and decided what to do. She ran out of the crowd and across the swollen vines of hose, behind a fire engine’s massive rear bumper, which—superb, polished, heavy-duty chrome reflected three blurred suns and the vista of the block in multiples curved in concert with its own rich curves, reflected her as she ran by, splashed a quick step up from the flooded gutter, on up the building’s stoop past two firemen coming out, through the door, and in. She dropped her purse at the foot of the stairs.

Ellie’d had no notion of the oddness of a burning world, its stink and dimness, its damp and surprising rearrangements. She climbed the first flight of stairs fast enough-past a fireman coming down, who turned to stare up after her, his air tank clanging on the cracked plaster wall beside him. He’d seen her rising to him, white lady’s face (firm jaw, long nose, pale blue eyes wide with excitement). Neat blue summer dress, stockings, blue highheeled pumps. -All brushed past, and, as he turned half around, the clang, and slender lady’s legs vanishing disembodied into a ceiling of smoke.

“You get the hell back down here . . . !”

High above him, fifteen feet at least, Ellie, climbing into a darker world, heard an echo of that call. She’d thought she could hold her breath for almost the whole climb-the window had been on the fifth floor-if she were quick. But effort and fear now neatly pulled her breath away as a couple of cheerful boys might yank an old woman’s purse from her, and taunt her, going. Ellie wheezed out the last of her precious breath (taken so long ago out in the hot and sunny street), held her throat with one hand as she climbed endless steps in darkness almost absolute, as though by that light grip she could control any substance going in or out-and doing so, put herself to climbing faster.

She knew she was past the second floor—certainly past the second-and had heard that in smoky fires the trick was to crawl, so got obediently down on all fours and continued with her climb, her hands soon slippery with ancient dirt, wet and dripping with hose water. Ellie could see no more, traveling in this fashion, than she had in that, but when she tried a little sipping breath, she was able to keep the dark stuff down.

Her hands then splatted on a landing, knee bumped a riser hard enough to bruise. -The third floor, she thought, surely, fumbled blind around a newel post, and recommenced her climb. Here there was glass, and Ellie felt its sudden bright bites into her hands and knees. Still on all fours, she straightened her legs to keep her knees up out of the slivers, and climbed that way for a number of steps on hands and feet, like a kindergarten child playing bear, her face down for dubious breathing, her buttocks in the air. Her hands continued to be cut, for she still went on them, not being able to bring herself to stand up into the all-smoke.

Even so, the smoke pressed upon her personally; it stopped her mouth like a large soft hand smelling of toasted wood, no matter how low she bowed. Crawling up steps, weary, slumped back now onto her sliced knees, she became so concerned with breathing she began to forget why she’d come in, began to doubt the reality of the day outside, the superb trucks and hurrying people.

She thought she heard shouts below her.

Sanchez and Potts, brown and black under their mighty hats, were coming up after her, furious-ordered in and up by the fire captain as he ran to kneel by his heart-dead man and puff and blow into his mouth while the resuscitator was hustled from the pumper . . . an ambulance far, far away, whooped down the avenue.

The parked policemen, not having happened to see Ellie’s entrance, stayed in their cars, or held casually the margins of the crowd, taking care not to stare at the dead fireman and his brothers and sister, all odd in black rubber with bright green stripes and numbers painted on it.

Ellie was halfway up to four, falling from side to side as she crawled up, in grave difficulty. Her lungs were hurting her, a pain lancing into them like a sharpened point, sticking into her every time she tried a breath.

She reached, after the longest time, the landing for four-slipped in water and recovered, but lost her shoe, hobbled, then kicked off the other and turned the stair’s corner to climb again. Seven stairs up, she screamed at last, a breathless bleat, and stood up into deeper darkness, screaming softly, fluttering her bleeding fingers before her eyes so as to be able to see anything. -She saw nothing at all but blackness so black she supposed something from the fire, some chemical, had made her blind and in panic began to run and stumble up the steps, thinking she might reach the roof of the building so far above her, break out of this darkness into light, regain her vision, and gratefully jump out and down into bright air. Now, failing held no terror for her.

She ran up, struck her face on an empty old fire-hose box bolted to the landing wall-she would never know what it was-and fractured her right cheekbone. She staggered away from this, felt a doorway, and pulled herself into the fifth-floor hall. Here her life was saved by a draft drumming up from a back stairwell forty feet away. It heaved the heavy smoke aside as it blew, and showed her dimly-seeing one-eyed now, her vision damaged by the blow that broke the bone-a long row of doors, most kicked open, several shut.

Down this shaded hall she ran, gulping air and smoke together, and then-the finest thing she was to do stopped, panting, thought . . .

and realized she was in the wrong corridor, going deeper into the building rather than parallel to its front. She remembered the possible child’s face for the first time in some time, turned around leaving a red handprint on a blackened door-and went back the way she’d come, into a feathery, drifting dark gray wall of smoke.

Men were shouting below her.

Potts and Sanchez, using their lamps, had found her shoe on the fourth-floor landing. Small, narrow, and blue, with blood on it.

Raging, they stormed down the corridor a floor beneath her.

Ellie, in this more likely hall, in air hot enough to sting like bees, breathed in smoke and stood the pain, felt blindly at doorways on her left along her way. Hot paint flaked under her fingers, the doors were wet sometimes with water, sometimes oven-dry, a little sticky soon from her cut hands. Many of these doors were closed. The second, third, and fifth were certainly closed. She heard an odd, deep humming, almost music when she couldn’t breathe, and when that music faltered in the least, she felt her heart commence to skip and pause. The sixth floor was also open. The seventh door was closed; she fumbled for the knob; the door was locked. Ellie wished that she could see. She kicked at it, tried to call, kicked again and fell, crawled a long way to the eighth, found the frame, reached up through darkness to the knob and tried it. Pushed, and the door opened, but not much. She shoved with her shoulder and then crawled in over a scorching floor to light at last, and raised herself on stiffened arms to take a breath.

Then a little child came out of the light, its diaper damp with shit, and grappled to her, small, potbellied, soft, and warm.

“You fuckin’ bitch!” cried Sanchez, Potts beside him, as they kicked and chopped their passage through the fourth, below. The small blue shoe was on their minds.