Never Love a Stranger (29 page)
“An old woman—Mrs. Harris—about sixty-two—grey hair,” Sam told him.
He shook his head. “I didn’t see nobody of that description come out,” he said. “You’d better go ask the fire chief over there.”
We ran over to the fire chief and repeated the question. He shook his head. “No one like that came out,” he said. “But don’t worry, if she’s in there we’ll get her out.”
Tom turned to the house. “Maw’s still in there,” he shouted. “I’m goin’ to git her.” He started towards the house. A couple of cops grabbed him.
“You can’t go in there,” one of them said. “The firemen’ll get her out.”
“My maw’s in there,” he shouted, struggling to get himself loose, “in the third floor back. I gotta git her!”
“You can’t go, dammit!” hollered one of the cops.
Tom shook one hand free. He aimed a punch at the other cop holding him. The cop sidestepped it and hit Tom in the jaw with his fist. Tom went out on his feet. The cops lowered him gently to the ground. “We can’t let him in,” the cop said apologetically to some of the crowd that had gathered around. “He’ll get himself killed in there. The building’s going up like a matchbox.”
Someone in the crowd yelled. I looked up at the building. Elly had broken from the lines and was running towards the open door of the house. I looked over my shoulder. Sam was kneeling on the ground near his brother, his face streaked with tears. I turned and sprinted after Elly.
“Come back! Come back!” I yelled after her.
She disappeared through the door. I ran up the steps to the door after her. Just as I reached the door, a stream of water hit me in the back. One of the firemen had turned the hose on me. I stumbled through the doorway into the building. It was dark in the hallway filled with smoke. The water was spraying around over my head; I crawled under it to the staircase and ran up the steps.
“Elly!” I hollered. “Elly! Come back!”
There was no answer. I ran up to the third floor. Elly had just gone into the kitchen. I jumped through the doorway and grabbed her. I tried to pull her back. The flames were blazing all through the back of the flat. The smoke was so thick we could hardly see each other. She was coughing. “You gotta come back,” I said hoarsely, pulling her with me.
Her coughing had stopped. She struggled to keep me from pulling her with me. “Maw’s in there!” she screamed. “Maw, Maw, d’ya hear me? I’m comin’ tuh git yuh.” She raised her hands and scratched at my face. I tried to hit her but missed. Then she kicked me and broke loose and ran into the bedroom.
The flames sprang up behind her. Their hot, livid fingers burned at my face. I started to follow her. I could hear her screaming somewhere there in the dark: “Maw! Where are you, Maw?”
Then I heard a crash and a long scream that stopped in the middle. For a minute the fire in front of me died down, and I saw the wall between the rooms had fallen with part of the ceiling, blocking off the entrance. Then the flames sprang up again, and I turned to the hall, the scream still ringing in my ears. The hallway was blazing. I headed for the stairs and tripped on the top step and rolled down to the first floor. Bits of flaming wood were falling around me. I turned and ran down the last landing. The entrance was blazing in front of me but there wasn’t any other way to get out. A stream of water came splashing into the hallway. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled out into the street under it. In the street I got to my feet and ran towards the fire lines.
One of the firemen grabbed me. “You all right?” he asked harshly. “Yes,” I said, coughing.
He held on to me as I walked back to the lines. The crowd was being pushed back. “Back up!” the cops were shouting. “She’s going to cave in. Back up!”
I was near Tom and Sam. Tom was still stretched out on the ground but he was beginning to come to; he was shaking his head from side to side. He started to sit up.
Just then the building came down with a roar.
We looked at it. A cloud of dust hung in the air over it, occasional tongues of flame licking up into the black night sky. Tom got to his feet. He didn’t know that Elly had run into the building too. He stepped towards the building and roared, his head thrown back, shouting to the night sky: “They’ll pay for this, Maw. D’ya hear me? They’ll pay for this, every one of them! The lousy swine in the banks, the people who won’t let us live in better places! I’ll make them pay for this, Maw. It’s a promise. D’ya hear, Maw? It’s a promise.”
A cop ran up to him and tried to pull him back. Tom turned on the policeman. He grabbed him by the neck and began to choke him. The cop’s face was pasty white in the light of the fire. “You’re the first!” Tom screamed, a wild look in his eyes. “You’re the first, but you won’t be the last! Evvy one of you’ll pay!”
The coloured policeman we had first spoken to ran up to them. He tried to pull Tom off the other cop but couldn’t. Finally, he stepped back and picked up his club and brought it down on the side of Tom’s head. Tom went down like a felled ox. The other cop stood up, gasping for breath.
Two white-dressed men came up, rolled Tom on to a stretcher, and took him over to an ambulance. They put him in the back. Sam and I ran over to the driver. “He’s my brother,” Sam said. “Kin I go with you?”
The driver nodded. “Hop in the back.”
We got into the back of the ambulance. The intern sitting there looked at me curiously as we got in. “You look pretty well messed up,” he said.
I looked down at my new suit. It was dirty and torn and soaking wet. I would never be able to wear it again, but it didn’t register. I looked back at him dully.
“You the guy that ran in after the girl?” the intern asked. I nodded.
“You better let me have a look at you.” He reached behind him and picked up a stethoscope. “Take off your jacket.”
Automatically I took it off. I was watching Sam as he sat down near his brother. His face was frozen. The full realization of what had happened as yet had not permeated his mind. He didn’t cry, just sat there looking down at Tom. I think he didn’t even know we were in the ambulance with him.
I was soaking wet through to the skin. My face felt dry and burned, the hair on the back of my hands was singed and my hands felt hot. The doctor gave me something to drink after he had taken my pulse. I drank it.
“You’re damn lucky!” the intern said. “You haven’t got a serious burn on you.” The ambulance started off.
Two hours later in the hospital I was sitting outside with Sam, waiting for the doctor to come out and tell us about Tom. Tom had had quite a wallop over the head, and for a while they didn’t think he would pull through. As it was, it would have been better if he didn’t.
When we were ushered into the room, Tom was sitting up in bed crying. Long tears
began to roll down his cheeks. Sam, who until that moment had scarcely spoken, ran over to him crying: “Tom, Tom,” and put his arms around his older brother.
Tom looked at him, no recognition in his dim eyes. He just kept on crying, mumbling indistinguishable, incoherent sounds to himself. He pushed Sam away. “Go away,” he mumbled. “I want my mammy. Wheanh is she?”
I turned to the doctor, a question on my lips.
The doctor answered before I could speak. He shook his head. “I’m afraid he’ll never be the same. He’s had too many shocks. It did something to him. What he needs now more than anything else is rest and quiet.”
Sam had been standing just behind me when the doctor spoke. He had his back to us looking at Tom, but he heard every word the doctor said. That did it. He turned to me, tears in his eyes, his mouth twitching with controlled sobs. It took me back a long way, that look on his face—to another Sam who had turned to me in his time of need.
“Let ’er go, kid,” I said gently. “There’s times even men cry.”
He sat down in a chair and put his head in his hands, and his body shook with sobs. I couldn’t say anything to him, so I went over to him and stood there awkwardly with my hand on his shoulder. After a while he stopped and we went out into the hall. We sat down out there, not quite knowing what to do next.
About half an hour passed before he spoke. “Frank,” he said, his voice suddenly older, more mature, “kin you get me that job that you were goin’ to get Tom?”
I looked at him before I answered. “What about school?”
“I’ll get working papers. I’m old enough and I’ll have to do something,” he answered. “Can you get it for me?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“It’s strange,” he said, almost as if he were talking to himself, “just a few hours ago I had a home—and a family, and a place to go. And now I don’t know where to go or where to stay.”
“How about coming down with me until we can straighten things out?” I suggested.
He looked at me gratefully. Just then a tall coloured man came into the corridor excitedly. He came over to Sam. I recognized him as the preacher I had once met in the little church in the store.
Sam stood up as he came over to him. “Hello, Reverend,” he said quietly.
“Sam,” the Reverend said, and put his arm around the boy. “I heard about it and came over right away. You’re going to come over to my house and stay there. You’re not alone. You’ve always got the Lawd.”
“You know my friend,” Sam said, motioning towards me.
The preacher looked at me and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “we’ve met.” He held out his hand and we shook. “You did a very brave thing,” he told me.
I didn’t answer.
Together we walked down the hall. At the doorway we parted. The preacher took Sam into a taxi. He asked me if I wanted to be dropped anywhere. I thanked him and assured him I could get home all right. I watched the cab speed off into the night. I started for the hotel.
Elly and Maw Harris were buried two days later on a rainy Tuesday morning. The services were held in the little church, and then we rode out to the cemetery. As the earth began to fall on the coffins, the preacher closed his book and spoke. Sam and I stood near each other and I watched him. He was standing alone at the edge of the graves, the rain falling on his bared head. Tom was still in the hospital, and would be for a long time.
Thump—a wet clump of earth fell on the coffins.
The preacher stood there too, his head bared, looking up at the dark-grey sky while the rain beating on his face mingled with the tears in his voice. He looked like a big black ebony statue against the sky.
“Oh, Lord!” he cried. “Look down on us, thy people, who turn to Thee for strength and understanding and hope….”
That was the word I could hear ringing in my ears the next few days. It had a never- to-be-forgotten world of meaning—the way his rich baritone resonance had sent it winging on its way to the sky—the way Sam looked at him as he spoke.
Hope—that was the word. Where would we be without it?
RUTH
“
I
T
is strange,” Marty was thinking, “no matter what Jerry said, he still didn’t know Frank. Stranger still, none of us seem to think about him in the same manner. He was a
different person to each of us. Each of us saw him differently in the light of his own experience and knowledge. I wonder who is right? Perhaps none of us. I don’t know. Maybe Ruth did. She was the first to see——”
His thoughts were interrupted by Jerry asking him if he wanted a drink. He leaned back in his chair and watched Jerry mix the highballs. As he turned his head he noticed Janet looking at him. She smiled at him. He smiled back gently. Old friends—you knew them, knew everything about them, and yet had much to learn about them.
He took the drink from Jerry and drank it slowly, savouring the mellow smokiness of good Scotch, the carbonated water tickling his nose a little.
Janet turned towards him. “I wonder what Ruth thought about him?” she asked, putting her highball on the table and lighting a cigarette.
“It is odd,” Marty said, still holding the glass in his hand, “I was just thinking about that myself.
“I think that Ruth was the first among us to see the real person beneath Frank Kane. The first time she met him, the very first day I brought him home with me, she knew him
—and didn’t like him. She was a little afraid of him, in an unusual sort of way.
“She caught me alone for a minute. ‘He’s not like a boy at all‚’ she told me in a puzzled sort of way. ‘He’s more like a man. The way he looks at you, you feel old and aware of what you are.’
“Poor Ruth! In a way, he affected her more at that time than any of us. She was several years older than we were and much more adult than we knew. It was a long time afterward that she told me about him.
“You may recall that we had a girl working for us that summer. Julie, I think her name was—anyhow, it’s not too important. This girl was about twenty and good-looking in a sexy kind of way. Anyhow, Frank saw her and probably was ‘smitten with her charms’ as the poets say.
“That evening Frankie had given me a boxing lesson and a shiner, and Ruth was pretty sore about it. She gave him hell when he went home and regretted it the moment she closed the door behind him. ‘For after all,’ she thought, ‘the poor kid is an orphan and probably never had any friends.’ She came into my room to find out how I was getting along and stayed for a while talking.
“Later she left and went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. She let the water run for a few seconds to cool it, then drank a glass, and when she put the tumbler down she
“She was upset and a little nervous, so she ran from the door into the little hall near the kitchen and stood there, her back to the kitchen. At first she hadn’t intended to eavesdrop, but there was a mirror on the wall opposite her, which gave her a clear view of what was going on in the kitchen. She saw the door of Julie’s room open and Julie look out for a moment, then Julie stepped into the kitchen, followed by Frank.
“Julie let Frank out by the servants’ entrance, and at the door he kissed her. Ruth, watching, knew it wasn’t any kid stuff. This was the real thing. And though she tried to look away, she couldn’t. She was fascinated by the reflection in the mirror. To her mind it was the epitomization of the sordidness of sex, but it was also a trap into which she fell unknowing.