Sundance (20 page)

“In the basket, like I said.”

“Not to her door?”

“Did once, but she got mad and wouldn't open it.”

“So you've spoken to her.”

“Sure, and she said use the basket.”

“You have one of her notes?”

Phyllis patted a dress pocket. She drew out a flimsy envelope. Inside was a folded scrap of paper.

“From this morning.”

The handwriting was raw, nervous, more scratch than penmanship. But a few cursive letters could have been made by Etta's hand. It was two years since her last letter, and any number of things may have affected it—injury, alcohol, madness. Or she might have disguised it intentionally.

He looked to see the things in the shopping bags on the sidewalk. “Any of this hers?”

“Most of it. Sending it over soon's I get upstairs.”

“I'd like to add a note.” Han Fei nodded, and Longbaugh was glad for his sanction.

“Can't see why I shouldn't let you, Mr. Harry. You seem a nice, polite fellow. Can't promise she'll respond.”

“If she is who I think she is, she will.”

“If it ain't, here's hoping you didn't come too far.”

Phyllis loaned him a pencil and he turned over E's note to write on the blank side.

“Ask her if maybe she wants to start doing some of her own shopping,” said Phyllis with a sniff.

Longbaugh considered the words he might use. His eyes ran to the second-floor window. Curtains shifted with the breeze and he thought he saw someone. He looked at the blank paper. It was important to get it right. Then he knew it wasn't. If Etta was there, any words would do.

He wrote:

E.

It's Harry. I'm here.

He folded it and offered it to Phyllis. She nodded for him to follow, looked directly at the shopping bags on the sidewalk, and left them there. Longbaugh stifled his amusement and carried the bags after her. He nodded at Han Fei to see if he would join them. Han Fei shook his head with an emphatic no. The bigoted Samaritan would never allow him to cross her threshold.

Longbaugh followed Phyllis up the stairs, rebalancing the shopping bags as she searched for her key at the door. He blinked at the time it took her to find the key, then get the key into the lock, then get the door open. He followed her into her kitchen. Phyllis took her own sweet time sorting fruit and vegetables from cans. He looked out Phyllis's window, hoping to see past the curtain into E's rooms. Laundry hung from her clothesline, and he had to keep moving his head, as the wind moved the drying clothes and blocked his view. This time he saw that, among other garments hanging over the street, there were shirtwaists drying on the lines. He looked back to watch Phyllis arrange the cans in the basket to balance the weight. He watched her rearrange the cans. He bit his tongue. Finally she was done and he added his note, then covered everything with a napkin and tucked it around the cans. Then it was time to pull in her laundry and take it off the line. There were only a few things, but he saw that some were large, intimate items. He did not offer to help. She leaned out the window and pulled off the
wooden clothespins, and he was grateful that she piled her things without folding them. She tied the basket to the clothesline and he stepped up and pulled on the rope loop to send the basket over the busy street to her window.

Phyllis patted his arm. “Not so fast, you'll tip it.”

She took over from him and the whole business slowed down. He watched the basket's rhythmic passage above the carts, the neighbors, the traffic, toward a place where the world had been kept out. He watched the basket grow smaller among the hanging clothing on other clotheslines, as it passed over her sidewalk and neared her building, watched it clear the windowsill and part the curtains. Phyllis stopped pulling when the basket was well inside and could no longer be seen.

The curtains settled. Now they moved only when nudged by a breeze. He waited. An automobile driver sounded his horn at a hound who had stretched out in the middle of the street. A deliveryman unloaded boxes in front of a pharmacy. A trolley clanged. Another man called his dog, who was finding the middle of the street somewhat noisy with that horn blowing in his ears.

As he waited, he decided he was being overcautious, he would stop all this nonsense, march across the street, up the stairs, and knock on her door. He would convince her of his identity and she would open up to him. It was what he should have done in the first place, this entire exercise was unnecessary. If Etta was there, then she wanted him to come for her. This adventure with Phyllis was just more overthinking.

Phyllis seemed to read his mind. “Give her time. She'll get around to sending thanks, but sometimes it's a while. I think she puts the cans up first. Generally, I brew a little tea, and by the time it's cool enough to drink, the basket's back. You want tea?”

“No, thanks.” His eyes moved to Han Fei, down on the sidewalk. Han Fei was looking at the entryway to E's building across the street.

Longbaugh did not know what to do. Every passing minute caused him to doubt that Etta was there. He looked again at Han Fei, wondering if his young friend was right and this E might not be his wife. Han Fei continued to stare at the building's front door. Longbaugh caught
something in Han Fei's intensity and looked there as well. He could not see what Han Fei saw, with the angle and shadow. Han Fei turned his head and their eyes met. Longbaugh was surprised by the boy's anxious expression. His focus now split between actively waiting for the basket and wondering what had unnerved Han Fei. His eyes went to the second-floor window. Nothing had changed. His eyes went to the entryway. This time he saw someone move in there. Not Hightower. But someone familiar.

Han Fei called up, a warning: “Cowboy—”

“Coming down,” said Longbaugh.

“See him?”

“I see someone.”

“Know him?”

“Couldn't say.”

“Not the big one.”

Longbaugh put his hand up to hold that thought and ran from Phyllis's kitchen and down the stairs. He came out onto the street and looked into the entry of E's building. Whoever it was remained in shadow. Then, for an instant, the shadow was backlit by the flicker of a match, and Longbaugh saw the young man's face illuminated as he used the match to light something. The young man looked up and threw the thing over his head, as if he stood at the foot of a staircase. The young man turned and came out quickly, looked around, and registered Longbaugh's direct gaze. The young man jolted. In that first moment, he thought the young man ran because he had been recognized. He knew him all right, Black Hand, the tall, lanky pimply one. Longbaugh had neglected to shoot him that night because he was reminded of Billy Lorigan. The bullet he had aimed over that pimpled head had sent him running away, in just the way he was running now. Longbaugh took a step after him and froze. Remembering Etta and the basket.

He looked at the second-story window. Curtains fluttered. It was not the breeze. Something was happening. The basket pushed through the curtains and out over the street, jerking along on the clothesline.
The instant before it happened, he knew, as the basket inched, he knew, as he looked at the young man running, he knew, he knew the flicker and he knew what had been thrown at the second-floor landing, but before he could turn and run, he was clapped to the ground as a huge invisible hand pressed his body against the sidewalk and held him flat. Smoke and flame shot out the windows, an obscene yellow-and-gray tongue, the closest laundry flying sideways. The end of Phyllis's clothesline was blown free and momentarily arched high in the air like the curl of a whip, the basket shivering, suspended, then all of it dropped straight down, along with splinter-projectiles of brick and glass. Rolling to his belly to protect himself, Longbaugh twisted his chest toward the second floor, arm up against incoming shards, mouth open to warn her, too late now that the dynamite had hurled everything out onto the street. Any garments still pinched by clothespins now hung limply, helplessly burning and waiting to fall.

The street froze, followed by pandemonium as vendors rushed their carts in all directions. A few people ran toward the blast, but most ran the other way. He charged the building's entry, where a cloud rose out of the doorframe like cigarette smoke from an open mouth. He dove into a dense wall of fume through which he could neither see nor breathe. After a few bullheaded steps into darkness, he fell to his knees, coughing, eyes streaming, lungs burning for air. He tried to turn back but he had lost his sense of direction. He crawled toward where the light was brightest. A hand grabbed him and pulled him in the other direction, and he was back out the door, on the street, where life was visible. He did not know the man who had saved him, and although he looked around later, he did not see him again. He thought about the light he had crawled toward and realized it was something burning.

He saw the wide-open mouth of the crying baby before the sound punched its way through the oatmeal mush in his ears, saw the dog frantically barking before hearing its sharp yaps, saw the expression of terror on the face of a woman before he heard her screams. Small piles of laundry blackened and curled on the street as the flames gradually went out. It did not appear that great damage had been done down here,
despite the litter of detritus, that the neighbors' responses were more about the shock of having their private lives butt up against impossible violence.

He looked up. Smoke was clearing around the building, revealing a hole in the sky of flags, and beyond that he saw blue with occasional clouds. He looked to the damage of the second-floor room, where no one could have survived. He himself was stunned, emotionally numb, as now he was convinced it had been Etta. He felt something on his cheek and touched it to find tears. His cool intellect determined that his eyes watered to clear smoke and debris, and as he thought it, he knew it to be only partly true, as an expanding hole of mourning spread beneath him and consumed his intellect and walled him in, rising so quickly over his head that he expected it to fold over and swallow him in darkness. He saw the basket on fire near the gutter. Any note she may have written in response was now ash, the last chance to know if it had been his wife. On the far sidewalk, Phyllis spoke to a policeman. She apparently had not seen him there in the gutter, even as she looked wide-eyed in his direction. Through the bloated deafness in his ears he thought he heard her say, “He was just there. I think he went inside.” He may have been reading her lips.

Grief choked him, dragging a heavy cloak of apathy down on his limbs. Whatever interest Longbaugh had had in what might come next had been blown to shreds. Police rushed in from all directions, and his animal instinct for survival filled him as he looked for an escape. But just as quickly that instinct deserted him, and he fell back to apathy. The weight was too massive, he could not rouse his body to save himself because he had lost the desire to care. They could have him, the police, Siringo, anyone. If she was gone, then what difference did it make? He would remain there in his immobile gloom, and when they came to ask questions, he would tell them all of it, and they could have the rest of his wasted, lonely, useless life, because why the hell not? It had been just a matter of time, she had evaded the fire at Triangle, but not this one. He came alert for a heartbeat and realized he had been staring at something on the street beyond the basket. As he cocked his head and
focused he saw it was a soft lump of clothing, not fallen laundry but human, with a shoe and legs and arms, and he recognized Han Fei, with his face down in the street. Anger rose in his gorge, the lethargy of surrender abandoning him. He refused to believe he could lose two of them in the same blast, refused. He lurched to his feet and was staggered by the resurgent pain in his side. He drew a full breath and strength gradually returned to his legs. He walked, a wooden man becoming flesh. He knelt down by the body. Han Fei's back and hair were white with ash and debris. Longbaugh brushed much of it away and rolled him over carefully, expecting the worst. Han Fei rested in peaceful silence, Longbaugh falling again under that dark cloak, heart sinking to the street, until Han Fei's body tensed, seized, his eyes jerked open, and he sneezed and coughed. Longbaugh laughed aloud.

He spoke and barely heard his own words through the thrum in his ears. “Can you move?”

Han Fei squinted at him, blinked a half dozen times, moved his tongue around the inside of his mouth, then spit out something black. He shrugged.

“Try your fingers.”

Han Fei moved his fingers, then his hands and arms.

“Good, well done.” Han Fei smiled as if the compliment was for a major accomplishment. “Now feet.”

Han Fei wiggled his toes under shoe leather, then made circles with both his feet. He bent his left leg to bring up one knee.

Longbaugh looked up. Phyllis waved at him from across the street, “Mr. Harry, Mr. Harry!” He scooped Han Fei up and carried him away from Phyllis. He stopped to look down into the burning basket. If there had been a note, it existed no longer, as even the cans were scorched. Longbaugh turned in a circle looking for Hightower. He did not see him.

They sat side by side on a train crossing the Brooklyn Bridge back to Manhattan, Longbaugh propping up the boy in a seated position, leaning him against his side. His hearing was improving, particularly in his right ear. They exited the train but Han Fei faltered and Longbaugh
picked him up and carried him to Doyers Street in Chinatown. Han Fei drifted in and out of consciousness, but came awake long enough to guide Longbaugh to a bright blue door. Longbaugh carried him up narrow stairs to his family's rooms. His mother bubbled and clucked, calling out in rapid Chinese through an open window to her sister, Han Fei's auntie, at another open window in a different apartment across the narrow air shaft. The room then swarmed with women, now giving orders, now carrying tubs of water and assorted ointments. Longbaugh stayed long enough to see that Han Fei was in good hands, and he slipped out. He reached the street but met Han Fei's auntie rushing toward him carrying bandages and towels. He nodded to her and tried to vacate the doorway to let her through, but she blocked his path.