Five years later, I woke with my bed on fire.
Serry shouted through my door. “Sue! Sue!” she called. “Get the hell out of bed!”
The sheets licked up from the floor to the mattress, and the wall next to me was a belching hole of flame. Smoke poured through the narrow crawlway between my building and the next on a clustered stretch of flophouses down back of the Tornado, which wasn’t the Thunderbolt and wasn’t the Cyclone, but still drew crowds down Neptune Avenue.
My first thought was that I had got my room lit in my sleep by way of a smoldering cigarette. As the flames tore apart my wall I realized something more had happened, something that was eating the building to ash.
Old instincts kicked in and I leapt across the room, tumbled through the door, caught myself rolling down the stairs, and flopped open on my back looking at the ceiling with the steps against my head.
Serry was kicking my shoulders, saying, “Get up, get up,” and I pushed myself standing, feeling that the steps here, the wall here, was cool despite the heat above. A little scrunched man, one of the dwarves called Mr. Shift, at the bottom of the stairwell shouted to move! Move! With him was Puzzle the Ape-Man, staring up at me through the hair over his eyes.
Serry and me ran down the stairs as something above us roared. When we hit the bottom floor cats dashed over my feet in a stream from the basement, and we followed ape and dwarf while the scaffolding caved, pushing us out into the street where fire trucks swarmed the neighborhood with bleary screams.
Winter in New York doesn’t mean snow til January, so in early December all you got was cold and bite. Ice burned in the wind and I knew I would regret running outdoors in bare feet. All around folks in their underclothes poured out of buildings. On the boardwalk, the few remaining rides stood against the skyline like camp lights. We gathered beneath them while the police slammed their cars in a crisscross to break up traffic across the crumbling corners of the peninsula.
I shouted at Serry “What is this? What is this?” as we cut through the fractured mobs, following the dwarf and the ape. Fingers were pointing up and past us and I felt something like the sun as we ran down Neptune and across 17th. We turned a corner and ran headlong into it. My eyes went blind with heat.
The Tornado was on fire.
The coaster’s rails twisted upward in melted curls where the structure had cracked and collapsed. Fire hoses could do little except contain the inferno before it spread to the surrounding slums. Flames crawled across the rooftops, over and behind us from the way we’d come.
I looked to Serry, to Puzzle and Mr. Shift. They looked back at me. A crew of paramedics emerged from the fire. They rolled a stretcher between them, carrying a contorted lump of coal that used to be alive.
“Everything underneath the coaster’s burnt to shit!” one man called out. “Anything else is gone. We heard this one screaming.”
“Won’t be screaming any more,” sighed another, then: “I’ll bring the wagon around.”
One hand of the burned figure curled as it reached into the air. The rest was blackened. This thing was small, not dwarf-small but close enough. Scraps of an ugly bright green pea coat peeked from beneath the ashes. I could still see the horrible mash of peacocks patterning the fabric, and loops and repeated plumes in a checkered grid.
The coat had belonged to our boss, Old Nan.
As we stood there, me and Serry and Puzzle and Mr. Shift looking down at her burned-out pieces, one of the tubby stagehands turned to his friend.
“Christ,” he said. “Looks like the cops’re rounding up everyone for questioning. I don’t need that shit.”
Footfalls echoed on the walk behind me. I turned around to see Serry and the dwarf and Ape-Man scrambling, cutting away and back into the crowd.
I knew bad when I saw it. The eye opened. I chased Serry through the streets.
* * *
Old Nan did not live by the waterfront. She had an apartment two blocks north among the warehouses and vacant lots. I ran now through the narrow alleys and heaps of garbage, while ahead of me Serry and the others splashed through mud and the city. Even after I lost their sound, I followed.
Each of us on the show went to Old Nan’s only once, after the first six months if you hadn’t been fired or mangled in the wheels of the coaster. You made it that far and the other carnies would jeer you for your ‘date with Nan,’ and offer fair warnings that a strong stomach was needed in order to survive.
Mine had been on a Sunday afternoon in early fall, when the gray skies and rain-stained buildings mixed with the leaves that only fell purple, making the rest of the city beautiful but Coney Island a sad waste. It was the end of our season. Still, we would milk it a little longer, and if I couldn’t find work till January there was a sideshow down in St. Petersburg that had an open call.
But that was some time off, so first I had my date with Nan.
She’d opened the doors and handed me a glass of wine before I stepped through, told me “Mind the cats” with instructions to dodge the shit on the floor.
“One just made a mess,” she said, which I took to mean many cats had made many messes. With the stench rising, I knew I’d be getting drunk.
Nan served tripe for our main course, while a cat Nan called Lucky took a dry, crumbly shit on the table next to me. Meanwhile Nan sat and talked to me about her grandchildren, her two ex-husbands and the third deceased. She said I looked good now that I was more inked up, like she hadn’t been paying attention to the new tats she’d helped pay for in the months I’d been there.
As I adjusted to her crypt’s casual decay, our conversation wandered. She leaned forward and stared at me like an owl.
“You know, Sue,” she said. “You’re not like some.”
“How’s that?” I said.
“These folks are jackals, Sue,” she said. “Always remember. You’re dealing with animals. You never let them know where you keep your money or your housekey. I don’t even keep my till at the sideshow office after dark.”
“That right,” I sad.
“Everything I have is in these walls, Sue,” Nan said, leaning back in her chair. “No bank! No accountant! You can’t trust a fuckin’ one. ‘Scuse me. But . . . you know. Lockbox in my bedroom.” She patted a silver chain around her neck. “And I have the only key.”
And we both howled at that, and then she swore up and down she’d kill a child at that moment for one cigarette, so I cigged her and we smoked. I stumbled home drunk and forgot most everything for weeks after.
But now, as I splashed through the alleyways between Mermaid and Neptune, I remembered pillow talk with Serry during the in-between days. Maybe I’d joked getting past old Nan’s million shitting cats for her silly bedroom lockbox. Hell, maybe the joke had truth in it too.
Maybe a shadow crossed over Serry’s eyes, and maybe one week later some new folks started at the show, which seemed odd so late in season. And maybe one was an ape-man and the other a dwarf, and maybe Serry had seemed to know them a bit already. Maybe them three whispered thick off by themselves some nights when I walked home.
And maybe all this flashed through my head, so neat and clean that I could not doubt. And now I ran crosstown to Old Nan’s place, to prove what I already knew.
Nan’s door hung open like a mouth with a broken jaw, her cats out on the front steps with flat light in their eyes as I approached. I pounded up the stairs and they scattered and headed south to mix with the cats from my own apartment building, who even now were forming tribal bands to slink through the dark parts of Coney Island.
And I entered Nan’s house, sticking to the darkness like Coney Island cats, with my fur up and a low growl in me, ready to be claws and teeth when the moment struck.
* * *
I got my Bowie knife nowhere specific. It had been a gift from a man whose face I don’t remember, when I got called up for my first war. He showed it to me with some sort of glee, as if the idea of cutting throats made him stiffer than any woman.
I remember the women in the mountains where I’m from. That he might choose death before sex didn’t surprise me.
The knife carried no history, just some huntshop special wrapped in low-grade leather with the tag still attached. It seemed simple and unlike the mystery I thought awaited me past basic. The year and a half of my first war, the knife stayed sheathed. Perhaps I pulled it out to pop a beer, if I remembered to carry it at all.
It gathered dust most of the time I was home as well, along with the rest of my old gear. The week I got called up again, I’d been sorting through my steamer trunk while Laura avoided me in the kitchen. I found the knife, and watched it wink in the twilight of our bedroom creeping full of cold.
I’d wandered outside and found an old oak tree, then began throwing the knife against the trunk while the hardness inside me began to breathe. I threw until I couldn’t see, until the dusk had turned to dark. When I packed for true I made sure the knife was in my bag.
It was my second war that I began collecting operating tools. So did every man, although they wouldn’t tell you. Knives and blunts and bits of hurt I found in one village or another. For every bit of ink on me, I did things to feed those long strange years.
I hadn’t even realized till I got running across the neighborhood toward Nan’s, but somehow that mountain huntshop Bowie knife had made it to my hand when I began chasing Serry through sidestreets. It might not have been till I crept down Old Nan’s front hall that I felt it in my fist clutched reverse, teeth out, while my other hand reached into the dark.
It may not have been till I heard sounds of movement that I felt my grip tense round the hilt, and not till I was running across the apartment that I felt the old stirrings. Then I was in Nan’s room.
The room was hung with floral paper withering from the walls, photographs, and framed crochet. A lockbox sat on the bed, and the dwarf named Mr. Shift stood above it with a hammer meant to break it open. His eyes swung up to squint at me, while another shape rushed forward.
I slammed the ape-man Puzzle in what I believed to be his guts. This was something I could do, back then, when the training hadn’t fully left me.
Puzzle doubled over, vomiting into his pelt. I kicked him in the face and head. Serry was shouting somewhere. I looked up and the lockbox was gone and dwarf legs hung out the bedroom window. I realized Serry shouted not at me but Shift, about to scamper off with the spoils.
I crossed the room to grab him back, but misjudged his weight and wound up getting pulled through with him, falling outside into garbage. Shift was already up and running past me, but I rolled on him, pushing him to the ground.
He spat tobacco juice and mucus, but I’d had worse. I held the knife to him and he sneered. The street light revealed weird scars across on his face from many knives that had come before.
“What’ve you done?” I said, grabbing round his neck to keep him.
“We’ll cut you in!” he said. “Lemme up, we’ll cut in you in for nothing!”
“You lit her up, you little shit!”
“So what?” Shift spat. “What do you care?”
“She did nothin’ to you,” I said. “Nothin’ to you and now she’s gone.”
That’s what I think I said. Perhaps I only hit him, over and over.
“You don’t know shit,” he whispered through bleeding teeth, an eye weeping down his cheek. “That place was due for torching. Nothin’ in it worth keeping.”
“Worth a lot more than what was in that old woman’s lockbox,” I said.
He shook his head like I was stupid.
“That’s what you think this was? Over a lockbox? You’re an idiot.” He grinned. “You got no idea. You know how much that property’s worth? How much we got paid to torch it? Stealing the lockbox was just a put-on. That show was dead.” He grinned. “Except to trash like you.”
I felt blind hate. I had no room in me for him. The Bowie hung above his eye.
* * *
Serry stood at the mouth of the alley as I came out. I handed her the lockbox. It was warped shut from where I’d bashed in Shift’s skull.
“You keep that,” I said.
Serry looked at it, then back at me.
“I’m sorry, Sue,” she said.
“You wanna explain this to me?” I said.
She looked at her feet, and up again.
“It was good money.”
We took separate sidestreets, and neither she nor I looked back. Only darkness saw us leave.
New Dead Families 