~credence~ ~it is unwise to trust folks who kill mice~ ~wordwulf~ ~lo he has no wings~ ~they whisper in the dark~ ~ghosts & flying things~ ~the arrow finds its mark~ ~excerpt chapter nine~ ~children & dark angels~ Winter 1960 - 1961 Denver, Colorado February tenth, nineteen sixty-one, the day of Itsy’s death, began just as explained above. After a while, Daddy was passed out across the bed. Momma and us kids were in the kitchen trying to keep quiet, not that a bomb exploding would have awakened him. You never knew with Daddy though and we weren’t taking any chances. It was cemetery quiet until the door to our apartment crashed inward with such force that the chair under the knob broke in half and landed against the opposite wall. Thurman had returned. He stood in the doorway like a ghost thing. His skin was gray and black except for its eye and mouth holes. “We is on fire,” he said. “I come...” He fell forward and lay still as death on the floor. A wicked billowing of smoke belched from the hallway into the room in the aftermath of his entry. Momma moved his feet aside and I managed to close the door to protect us from the dark cloud in the hallway. Momma dragged our last chair from the kitchen, wedged it under the knob to hold the door shut. When I was in Montana in the third grade, I met my first girlfriend, Jackie. We had aced our spelling tests. The school we attended was three stories tall and had an interior fire escape constructed of fifty-five gallon drums welded together in a wide spiral. Students who got a hundred percent on the Friday spelling test were rewarded by being allowed to go up to the third floor and slide down and around, through the metal tube. It spit us out into the school playground and we were free to go home. My girl Jackie and I spent many a Friday afternoon standing on the corner, a length of precious golden chain, her necklace, swinging between us, our hands inches apart. While awaiting our turn to slide, teachers kept our minds occupied by lecturing on fire safety, what to do and not to do. Now I had a chance to test their wisdom. First thing I did was splash a pan of cold water in Thurman’s face. He jumped up from the floor and ran into the kitchen. Without so much as a word, he opened the window, climbed out onto its sill, and leaped into the void. I peered down and saw him spread out on the ground where he landed. He looked like a big dead bird. There were many people in the yard, frantic, shouting, and milling about. They went rushing to Thurman’s aid. My sisters were crying and Phillip’s eyes were so big, I thought they might just pop out of his head. Momma was shaking Daddy, urging him to get up, yelling in his face that the building was on fire. He replied to her pleas by cursing and swatting her away. I plugged the sink with a rag and turned the hot and cold water on full blast. “Jackie, get me towels, blankets, clothes, anything!” I barked to my younger brother. He brought the rags of our blankets and towels and I piled them in the sink under the running water. “Here, you guys,” I said to my siblings, “Take these wet rags and hold them over your mouths. Try to breathe through them. If your eyes are burning from the smoke, wipe them out with the rags.” The door opened with a whoosh! and smoke filled the room again before Momma managed to get up from the bed and slam it shut. She stood with her back braced against it and cried at the top of her lungs, “Tom, for God’s sake, wake up and help me!” Daddy tumbled from the bed, blinking his eyes rapidly. He held his hands up in a defensive posture. “What the hell?!?” There were flames licking up from the floor of the closet. Daddy got up and pulled the bed over to block the door. He hustled Momma into the kitchen. He saw what I had done with the rags and the water pouring from the sink. All seven of us kids were bunched up in a corner by the refrigerator. I was sobbing and holding the baby, forcing everyone to hold the wet rags to their faces. “Good, Tommy, good!” Daddy said. “Hold on son, I’ll get us out of here!” Momma was over looking out the window and Daddy joined her there. He yelled to the crowd of people gathered below to go and get the ladders from his truck. “We already did!” a man hollered back. “Folks are using them on the other side of the building. Hang in there! The fire department is on the way! They’ll have ladder trucks!” Smoke fingers crept and crawled up from the bottom of the walls, eerie hands reaching. The monster beast, all stone and wood, was groaning and belching fire, voices of the inferno scratching nails and the howl of timbers screeching. “We gotta get out o’ here before the floor caves in,” Daddy said to Momma. “I’ll carry Lily, she’s heaviest of the girls.” He touched Momma’s arm. “You get Linda.” He knelt down in front of Jackie and me. “Okay, guys, we gotta work together. Tommy, you carry Cheryl. Jackie, you get baby Nickie.” He reached out and drew Phillip toward him. “Phillip, you get in line between me and your Momma. Listen to me, everyone; here’s what we’re gonna do. I’ll go out the door first, then Phillip in between me and Momma. Jackie, you’re next and Tommy, you’re last. You guys hold on tight to those little ones! We’ll each grab hold of the one in front of us and we’ll go real slow. Do you understand? We can do this, I know we can. Don’t let go, no matter what happens. We have to try to get to the other side where the ladders are or down the stairs. I want everybody to holler real loud and stay in one spot if we get separated. We can do this but we have to stick together. Okay, let’s go!” Our fear was a palpable thing. We were chewing on the filthy wet rags as if they were a conduit to life itself. Each of us gripped the clothing of the one in line ahead and held on for dear life. Daddy moved the bed and the door creaked open by itself. Smoke poured in and we, the Sterner ants, poured out. We passed the community toilet in the hallway and, just as we did, the commode fell through the floor. A great gush of heat gasped from the hole where it had been. Daddy yelled for everyone to hold on but the roar of the inferno swallowed his voice, spit sparks back into our faces. It felt like forever but we finally reached the door to the stairs and the hallway that should take us to the other side of the tenement. Daddy touched each of us, did a head count with his hand. The smoke was so thick, I could barely see Cheryl clinging tightly to my body. “I’m gonna try to open that door!” Daddy yelled in my face, “You and your Momma have to keep everyone back against the wall!” Daddy wrapped a wet rag around his hand and opened the door to the junction between hall and stair. The door blew off of its hinges and into his body. “Back! Back!” he hollered frantically while he fought to protect them by blocking the blazing door with his body. Mercy was the door that would not latch or lock. I helped Momma turn our terrified human train around and led the way back to the door’s wide open hole of light. Daddy tightened his one-armed grip on Lily, let loose of the stair door and intense heat licked us in the tail. It’s a miracle we made it back to the apartment, each and every last one of us. I ran into the kitchen and threw soaked blankets from the sink to the floor. All the cockroaches in the world had risen to the top and were inches thick covering any and all flat surfaces. Smoke billowed from the door, filled the apartment and drew through the kitchen window like a chimney. Daddy took what was now a three-legged chair and braced it under the door knob in the bedroom. I wept openly while I forced my brothers’ and sisters’ faces into the soaked and teeming mass of bugs and cloth on the smoking floor. The floorboards in the bedroom died with a screeching moan and the crooked bed slid into the hungry mouth of oblivion, down the howling & smoking hole of the closet. The door wrapped around its holding chair, a grotesque monstrosity, a separate misery in its fiery death failing to keep us safe. “Stay there!” Daddy screamed as Lily and Linda fought to rise and escape the frenzied dance of the cockroaches. “Jackie, Phillip, hold ‘em down! Come here, Carroll and Tommy!” wordwulf Inquiries: wordwulf@gmail ©2014 graphic artwork music & words conceived by & property of tom (WordWulf) sterner 2014© ~also available at Amazon &~ ~momma’s rain @ smashwords~
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:42:41 +0000
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