“Hello, Vince. Maybe. May have to put some barricades up if this crowd builds up.”
“Jesus, it’s going up like a matchbox! Whose place is it?”
“Ely Collins’ widow.”
“Oh yeah? Jesus, that’s tough. Did she get out okay?”
“Nobody home.”
Flames lapped at the dark sky. Windows were smashed. Hoses snaked around and there was a lot of shouting. There were people running up all the time, and now it was Tiger Miller, the newspaper editor. Lot of nervous drive to that guy. He showed up everywhere. Vince had always liked him. “What started this fire, Mort?” he asked point-blank. He seemed a little out of breath.
“Beats me,” Whimple said. The guy worked his jaws funny. What was up? “She probably left something plugged in or something.”
“Sure. Like a Christmas tree,” Miller suggested.
Then Vince heard it behind him somewhere: the Black Hand. And with that, he suddenly remembered that the friend who had talked Wanda into joining the weirdies at Bruno’s house was Widow Collins. It was all falling into place. Jesus Christ, he’d stumbled onto something! “Hey, you mean this is one of those Black Hand jobs?” he asked Whimple.
That stung the mayor somehow. Vince felt people cluster at his back. “Naw,” Whimple grumped. “That’s got all cleared up.” And he walked away. Aha.
Just then, a couple women jumped out of a car and came busting through the crowd. He recognized Widow Collins. The other was a young girl. They went flying right at the blazing house. Vince shouted at them to stay back. Tiger Miller chased after them. The door was already busted in. All three disappeared into the house. Smoke seeping out like a kind of sweat. Vince hesitated just a moment, then, with three or four other guys at his heels, followed them in. Darker inside than outside. Spotlights beamed through the front windows. Living room wet and the windows broken, but no flames here yet. The smoke stung, but it wasn’t too bad. Made him think of the mine disaster—had a brief flash of panic, then it lifted. He felt at home. The women were grabbing things off the walls and out of closets. Miller and the other guys were helping, loading up and running out. The widow headed for a back room and Vince followed. Bedroom. Fire there all right. Still, goddamn it, he almost enjoyed it. A spray of water slammed through a broken window. “Load me up!” he cried. She looked up at him, her face wild with shock—Jesus Christ! she’s really mad! She yanked stuff out of closets and drawers, dumped them in his arms. He was crying from the smoke. “Let’s get outa here!” he shouted. He staggered out under his load, coughing like a sonuvabitch. Somebody had spread a blanket out front near the street, and he dumped his armful on it. Ground was wet and soggy from all the water flying around. Vince dipped his handkerchief in the mud, tied it around his face. People watching agog. Lot of them now. Real community function. He recognized buddies from the mine, business guys off Main, teachers from the school, they were really piling in. Weird light from the flames playing on all their gaping faces.
Going back in, he met the rest coming out, all loaded down, all gagging. Widow Collins leaning on Tiger Miller. Didn’t see the girl. Pushed on in. He heard a crash to the rear, felt a puff of hot air in his face. Christ! what an idiot! maybe he was all alone in here! But then he saw the girl, sitting on the floor behind a stuffed chair with an armful of pictures and crap. He tried to grab the stuff away from her, but she wouldn’t let go, so he just grabbed her up, loot and all, lugged her out of there. About Angie’s age, he guessed, though she didn’t have what Angie had, and for a minute there it was like his own house was burning, the house it took him seventeen goddamn years to pay for and all afternoon to paint the front side of—he felt the pain of these people’s loss, just like it was his own, knew the emptiness that would come over them when the shock was gone, and, Jesus, he felt sorry for them and let the tears, pricked out of him by the smoke, flow freely.
On the way in this time, he’d noticed something somebody had dropped by the front door, so, on the porch, he set the little girl down, picked the thing up. Just a shoebox wrapped with newspaper. The girl slumped in his arms as he helped her down the steps, and Widow Collins, standing like something dead over her sad heap of dumped possessions, watched as though she wasn’t seeing anything. Oddly, she held a little porcelain Sacred Heart Madonna in her hand. Friends circled her, a lot of them bawling. Vince wiped his own eyes with his shirtsleeve.
The street was packed with townsfolk. He saw guys like Hall, Smith, Mello, Johnson, Baxter, Lucci, nodded to all of them. Lucci asked him if this was a Black Hand job, and Vince told Georgie that’s what he’d heard. He listened to his answer travel out in waves through the people. He spotted Whimple and Miller in a huddle near Widow Collins, Ted Cavanaugh there, too, and he wandered over, not out of a sense of seeking importance, but because there was something reassuring about them. Cavanaugh tossed him a nod. Old football buddy.
“What do you have there, Vince?” Tiger Miller asked.
“Hunh?” He’d forget he was carrying the box. “I dunno. Found it by the door there.”
He started to hand it over to Widow Collins to put with her things, but Whimple grabbed it out of his hands. Tore off the paper, opened the box, which was partly burnt on the inside somehow, turned stone white and fainted dead away, knocking two guys down as he fell.
There were screams and the crowd pressed on all sides.
Vince took up the box from where it fell, shook out on the blanket what was inside. A carbonized human hand. One finger missing. Same finger that Vince had lost. He felt dizzy and sat down.
People shrieked out what it was. Some girl started to vomit and Tiger Miller held her head. Widow Collins grabbed up that thing and held it high. “Ely!” she screamed. A piece of it fell off and everybody ducked. Jesus, the whole place went crazy! People wailed and hollered and people prayed and people got sick and people shouted and pushed, going in every direction at once, man, it was awful! Vince stared at his own hand with the little finger gone, feeling like he’d just seen an apparition. Widow Collins went completely off her bat, bleating out crazy stuff about the end of the world and the horrors of the last times, and her daughter was howling and groveling around in the stuff on the blanket something terrible. Vince, sitting still, glanced up and noticed that Ted Cavanaugh was looking down at him. Somehow, oddly, that calmed him for the moment. He sighed, got to his feet.
“Vince, you usually home weekdays?” Ted asked.
“Sure.” He realized, standing, how much he was trembling. His throat was parched and his chest hurt.
“I may drop by sometime during the week, if you don’t mind.”
“Any time.”
Cavanaugh left him then and he felt alone and the scene was just too wild for him. He had to get out of there. He pushed and bullied his way through the crowd. They seemed to respect him. He broke free, made his weak knees hold long enough to get him down the street a half block or so, then sat down against a tree. He looked back at the crowd, at the house burning. No stopping it. It was burning clean to the ground. The noise was farther off now. He began to feel a little better. The roof collapsed on part of the house, sending a big orange cloud billowing up into the black sky like a message. The sweat was cold on his face. He rubbed his hand to be sure of it. Did old Collins have a finger gone? He couldn’t remember. He did recall, though, that the Preach didn’t get burned in the disaster, but died trapped with Mario Juliano and the others, with Lee and Pooch. So what did she mean it was Ely’s hand? Anyhow it was so small, looked almost like a woman’s hand, and Ely Collins was a pretty big man.
There were a lot of guys back there in the crowd that he knew and could kid around with, but for some goddamn reason he was scared to go back. Scared of the panic maybe. At home, there would be Etta and maybe Angie, but he didn’t know if he could make it. He felt weak and the street looked treacherous. He wiped his mouth, discovered he still had the muddy handkerchief tied around it. He took it off. Felt better then. Felt freer.
&nbs
p; Damp was creeping up his ass. He stood. He was stiff from all the day’s work, but not so shaky now. Then he noticed Guido Mello and Georgie Lucci leaving the scene. They lived near him. He waited for them. Mello was a chubby type, mostly nose, not too bright but a willing sort who always did his share. Worked as a garage mechanic now. Lucci, one of Vince’s boys in the mine, was tall, something of a clown, but goodnatured; Vince had felt a lot closer to the man since the disaster, since Ange Moroni’s death, and he and Sal and Georgie quite often did things together now.
“Hey, whatsa matter?” Georgie asked. “You shit your pants back there?”
Vince had been noticing the smell, too. At the streetlight, they looked: all over his ass. “Jesus, there must have been something by that tree where I sat down,” he said. He took a branch from a tree and scraped off what he could. Mello and Lucci laughed like idiots and made dumb cracks about it.
The rest of the way back to their neighborhood, of course, they talked about the fire and the hand. “You think you know what the fuck is happening in the world,” Vince told them, “and then suddenly you find out there’s a lot more going on than you ever guessed.” They both agreed. They were pretty shaken up too. They talked about the mayor fainting away and Widow Collins going off her nut and about the end of the world and Bruno.
“Hey, you remember when we stole that wine?” Mello asked.
Lucci laughed. “What wine?” Vince asked.
“Once when we was kids,” Mello said, “we stole a case of communion wine outa the church. Me and Georgie and Mario Juliano and his brother and a couple other guys. There wasn’t nobody else in the place except for Bruno. He was a kind of Father’s helper back then.”
“Jesus!” snorted Lucci, “you remember how he puked all over the Father?”
Vince laughed with the others. “You mean on the priest?”
“We talked him into going with us,” Lucci explained. “He hung back but you could see the poor sonuvabitch was lonesome and wanted to go, so we sorta dragged him along.”
“We took the wine out to the outdoor basketball court,” Guido said, “and opened it. Mario Juliano had snuck some alcohol outa chem lab just in case we couldn’t get the wine, and now he slipped a load into Bruno’s wine.”
“Christ, he got happy as a fucking lark,” laughed Georgie. “And five minutes after that he was out on his ass!”
“Then we went and told the Father,” said Mello, “and he went out and found old Bruno stretched out in the middle of all that stolen wine. He tried to bring Bruno around—”
“And that’s when he got puked on,” Georgie said. They all laughed. It was good to have something to laugh about. “The Father really gave that poor bastard hell. I don’t think he ever showed his face around the church again!”
Etta had already gone to bed when Vince got home, but he woke her up to tell her about it. He couldn’t get over how that hand had been missing the little finger just like his own, and he repeated that detail several times over, until Etta told him he’d better try to forget about it. He was too tired, too excited, too shaken up, and he slept badly, but his dreams were pretty good. Several times he was in Italy with his Mama and she was very grateful. Some problems about how he got there, or how he would get Etta and the kids over, but it seemed like all of these would get worked out. That morning, he got up with Etta and Angie and went to Mass.
He calmed down, but the hand kept haunting him. Like somebody was trying to tell him something. Like maybe his days were numbered or some goddamn thing. He tried to keep busy and when the good weather kept up Monday, he crawled back up the ladder to pick up where he’d left off with his paint job. But Sal Ferrero, his arm still plastered up in the cast, dropped by, having missed the fire, and Vince came down to tell the story. He tried to explain about the hand, but Sal only laughed. “Go ahead and laugh, you bastard,” Vince said, “but I got a feeling if I go back down in a mine, it’s gonna get me, that’s all.”
Sal told him about his boy Tommy making sergeant in the Air Force, and asked how Charlie liked the Marines. “He’s only wrote us once,” Vince said. “He said he managed to get his ass in a sling right off the first day, but they were gonna let him come home Easter anyhow. That goddamn wise-off. He’s lucky they don’t flog anymore.”
“Charlie’s okay. He’ll make out.”
“Yeah, Sal, that’s what I’m afraid of. Anyhow, he finally admitted there was worse food in the world than his old lady’s cooking.”
“That’s a helluva grand thing to say. I suppose Etta loved that, being compared to the—”
“Shit,” Vince laughed, “she bawled like a baby. And now she don’t talk about nothing except Easter.”
Etta brought them out a couple beers and joked about them being loafers and they both ought to break their necks instead of only their arms. Sal kidded back it was anyways better than breaking the old universal digitary, wasn’t it? and Etta went back in laughing her big laugh.
Then, over the beers, he and Sal started chewing over the old days, about how it was to be an immigrant kid in a place so loose and without any history, about the almost daily fights with the Polacks and hillbillies and Croats, nobody understanding anybody else, about how the old folks were always saving up to beat it back to the old country, how really it kind of scared them over here sometimes, and about how the Klan started up when they were just kids, he and Sal, and all that rum and Romanism crap and the stinkbombs they set off in the church.
Sal related again how his old man came out of a tavern one night and ran into a whole goddamn mob of hillbilly Americans fitted out like spooks, and how they took him out to a tree and said they were by God going to string him up, and they even tossed a rope over a branch before they finally let the poor guy go. The hillbillies stripped him and chased him bare-ass down Main Street with firecrackers and shotguns, a real goddamn party. And then Vince told Sal again how he and Angie Moroni and Bert Morani stood off seven goddamn sonsabitches out back of the high school one night after football practice, and how Bert got clobbered with a piece of lead pipe and died. “Jesus, Sal!” Vince said. “I’m the only one left!” The idea sent a windy chill through him and called up again the specter of the black hand.
Sal started in then on how it was down in the mines in the old days, about the crazy things he and Ange and Vince used to do down in those gassy deathtraps, not an ounce of goddamn sense, and so on. He and Sal had talked about these things hundreds of times, so now Vince just sort of tuned out. He sat there on the soft earth in front of his car, his back to the front fender, sipping the cool beer, smoking the cigar, feeling a little drowsy in the noonhigh sun, staring up at the front of his house. Bright yellow here on the front side, sun beating off it, ground out front turned over, the little picket fence, white and cheerful.
“You know, Sal,” Vince cut in suddenly. “I’m just for the first time in my goddamn useless life getting to feel like I live here!”
Sal stared up at the house too then. “It sure has took us a long time to come home, Vince.”
They sat there staring awhile, finishing the beer, and listening to the sparrows fussing over their heads. Finally, they stood, shook left hands on account of Sal’s fractured right, and Sal walked off, both of them saying they sure were damned glad they had had this talk, and how things were bound to work out for them in the end.
But then, goddamn it, the next afternoon he stopped by the garage where Guido Mello and Lem Filbert were working, and he got depressed again! Lem had got out of the mine just in time, and the only occasion he’d gone back down was to help with rescue parties in January. He’d come on his brother Tuck pasted up against the roof by a buggy, split clean in two, and since then he couldn’t talk enough about what a rotten job coalmining was, and how any man had to be a fucking idiot to go down in one of them fucking holes just so some fucking out-of-town rich bastard out in the East could live it up on fucking twenty-dollar dinners and hundred-dollar whores. Sure made a man feel pretty sick of
being what he was, okay. Vince told Guido and Lem that he for one had seen his last of it, he was through. Lem said that at last he was getting some fucking sense, and Vince went away from there feeling just pretty miserable, because he knew it was all a goddamn lie. Lem and Guido were just young guys, hardly in their thirties, they didn’t know what it meant.
He tried to explain it to Wanda that night, it being one of their Tuesdays, but it was useless. As always. It really burned Vince how he had felt such a tremendous goddamn sympathy for her after the disaster, helped her all he possibly could, even gave her a little money now and then that he couldn’t afford, listened respectfully to her problems—mainly that: at least he listened to her—and now, when he was having problems, all she could find to yap about was talking with spooks and having wienie roasts out on some goddamn hill and building up that nut Bruno like he was a goddamn saint or something. Vince was almost positive that bastard was getting into her now. Boy, it really pissed him off!
There he was, the whole stupid scene: stretched out chilly bare-ass on her lumpy bed in that drafty dusty shanty, still sweaty from just having made it with her, feeling so miserable he thought he was for Christ sake going to cry—and all she could find to say was, “Y’know, Vince hon, what if Lee’s right here in the room with us now, lookin’ on, whaddaya think he’s thinkin’?”
“Oh Jesus GOD!” Vince roared. He shoved her away, sat up abruptly on the edge of the bed, began pulling on his undershirt. “He’s probably thinking what a goddamn idiot you are to be screwing around with those lunatics!” he cried.
That woke up the baby in the crib and it started raising a ruckus. ‘Now look whatcha went and done!” whined Wanda. She sat up and her poochy belly wrinkled up like a washboard. She sure had one baggy stomach for such a skinny little girl, Vince thought angrily. The brat’s screams were getting on his goddamn nerves. He kept imagining neighbors busting in on them, subject of a number of nightmares he’d had since this thing got started. He stamped over, shook the crib. It howled worse. The three-year-old appeared in the doorway. “Now, Davey, you git back in bed, y’hear? It’s late,” said Wanda, pulling the sheet over her belly, but letting her tits dangle. The kid stared hard at Vince’s crotch. “Least ye could do,” Wanda complained, “is put your pants on.”