Wanderville

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ISBN: 978-1-101-61917-9

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Michael

New York City, Lower East Side, 1904

J
ack didn't notice the smoke until there was far too much of it.

It must have been creeping in under the hall door into the front workroom, where he waited between bundle runs. But there was always a little bit of haze in the air here at the factory—four lousy rooms in a tenement, really, but still they called it a
factory
. There was always dust and cigarette smoke; the garment cutters smoked more than anyone. That was what his brother said, at least. Daniel was the cutters' apprentice, and he'd gotten Jack the delivery job now that Jack was eleven and strong enough to carry a whole day's worth of piecework bundles on his back.

Daniel was sixteen and he made good money. He wore his hair slicked back under a bowler hat that he brushed clean every night.

And now it was Daniel who pushed open the hall door to the workroom, bellowing the way he did whenever Jack slept late. It took Jack a moment to realize that his brother was shouting, “
Fire!
”

“Fire in the back!” The smoke, an angry, dark bloom of it, seemed to burst through the door with Daniel. Two of the seamstresses stumbled in after him, red-eyed and gasping for breath.

Jack stood, his legs suddenly shaky.

“Where's the fire pails, Jack?” Daniel was scanning the room. “And what are
you
doing up here?”

Jack had been taking a break by the front window as usual. In the rooms where his family lived, the only two windows faced an air shaft, where there was nothing to see except brick and, occasionally, a morning cascade of slop from the chamber pots of the fifth-floor tenants. But here the window had a view and he'd watch the traffic below—peddlers' wagons and hot-corn vendors and all the fellows' bowlers bobbing along through the crowd. Sometimes there'd even be motor carriages, black and spindly, making their way up Baxter Street.

“N-nothing,” Jack stammered. He'd fetched a bundle of shirtwaists from a shop on Mott Street to be pieced, and next he had to haul some overcoats over to Orchard to be finished. “I mean, I was waiting. . . .”

Daniel wasn't listening. He spun around until he spotted the fire pails filled with water, three of them on a shelf behind the heating stove.

Jack looked back the way Daniel had come, down a corridor that was usually a dim cave. Now there was a terrible glow, with the lace curtains in tatters of flame and one of the garment racks fully ablaze. He couldn't see into the back rooms, but he could hear shouting and a wild clamor of footsteps thudding the floorboards.

Daniel shoved past him carrying two of the pails, but then he stopped at the doorway. “Cripes,” he said under his breath when he saw the flames in the hall. “You'll have to help me, Jack.”

Jack's mind raced. How could he possibly help? “With the pails?”

Daniel nodded. “Get that last one and wait here,” he commanded. Then he headed down the hall into the smoke and disappeared into one of the back rooms.

Jack turned to grab the last of the fire pails. One of the seamstresses had already fled, but the other had stayed behind, trying to gather her things and fumbling with her workbag. It was the woman he called Mrs. Buttonhole—after her task, sewing buttonholes on shirts—and usually she was cross and officious. But now her ruddy face was white with fear as she began to stumble down the hallway.

“Boy!” she cried out. “Where's the fire escape?”

Jack realized with a sickening feeling that the fire escape was in the back. And so was the fire.

“Wait!” he cried, setting down the pail. “Take the front stairs!” He ran over to the front stairwell, which was dark and steep even when there wasn't smoke. “This way,” he called out to Mrs. Buttonhole, who rushed over and began to make her way down.

“Come on, boy!” she shouted up when she reached the second floor. “The whole place is catching fire!”

But Jack was hurrying back to retrieve the last pail.
Help Daniel
,
he thought.

“Jack!”
His brother's voice came from down the hall. “Where are you?”

“Here!”
He needed Daniel to know he hadn't left. That he would help him. “I'm here!” Jack called out again. “I've got the water!”

By now the smoke was so dense he couldn't make out the window at the end of the hall, but somehow he found the doorway his brother had gone through. “Daniel?”

The first thing he saw was one of the wicker workbaskets nearby, which stood burning with long and rasping flames. Instinctively Jack swung the fire pail. A soft hiss rose up from the scorched basket as he doused the flames.

But it made little difference. All the smoke seemed to be coming from another fire, a bigger one. Jack couldn't even see the far end of the room he was in, but he knew there was another doorway there. And he knew that Daniel had gone through it.

Help him!

Jack needed to find another fire pail first or else he'd be no good to Daniel. He went back into the hall and turned every which way, looking for something else he could use, his eyes burning more and more with each step. As he searched in the near-dark, he would have lost his bearings completely if not for the heat he could feel coming from one direction: the back of the shop.

He kept calling his brother's name, his lungs aching with the thickness of the smoke, but the only voices he could make out were coming from below, on the second floor. “Anyone up there? The stairs won't hold!”

Jack staggered to the front room and toward the only light he could see—his
window, with all of Baxter Street below. He could hear cries down on the street. “Fire! He's trapped!”
They called in different languages. “
Fuoco!
”
the Italian peddlers yelled.

He just needed to climb down to the sidewalk and lead the firefighters around back, where they could help his brother put out the fire. That's what Jack kept telling himself as he pulled himself through the open window and up onto the sill, barely allowing himself to relish the newfound feeling of air in his lungs. There was a ledge below—maybe he could lower himself down to it, and then to the next ledge below that, and then finally drop down to the awning on the lowest floor. Or he could jump.

No, he
had
to jump.

The fire had spread to the front room. Inside, just behind the window where he sat, the piles of fabric on the worktables were smoldering. The walls were peeling, the air turning liquid in the awful heat.

Directly below Jack's feet was the awning for the ground-floor storefront. Two stories down. Or would it be three stories he'd fall if the awning didn't hold? Either way—

Jack braced himself and pushed away from the windowsill. Away and down onto Baxter Street.

Later he could barely remember how it felt to hit the awning, which immediately collapsed like an old hammock but had broken his fall enough that he'd suffered only a scraped shin and a sore shoulder.

And then somehow after that he was on his feet. He'd searched the crowd on the sidewalk for Daniel, for his tall, thin form and his black hair so much like Jack's own. But a policeman had taken his arm and was leading him across the street, looking straight ahead the whole time.

“Where's my brother?”
Jack kept asking. “My brother, Daniel.”

But the officer wouldn't turn his head, not even to answer.

Sometime after Jack had been brought home, another policeman came up the stairs with the news about Daniel. The man stayed in the dark hallway and spoke to his parents across the sagging threshold of their small tenement apartment. Jack watched them from the mattress where he lay. The officer spoke too softly for him to hear, but he knew what the words were.

His mother swayed where she stood, and his father seized her arm to steady her.

“
Mein lieber Sohn
,” she sobbed. “My son!”

Jack did not get up from the mattress. He flung his arm over his face and pressed it hard against his stinging eyes.

Hours later, he could still feel himself falling.