Salamanders
by Pete Murphy
Chapter One
...After the Fire
I woke in a half-dream, the sun shooting into my eyes, looking for the
Naked Traveler, still amazed about the wooden fish that wriggled away. He hadn't come. Instead I got a weird
vision of Pilot thirty years ago: A kid running out of his house with his arms
on fire, before any of that business last year, long before El Yoyo.
Somewhere along the line I'd promised my
painful self I didn't ever want to think about him again. Or
Finn. Or Zack. That was a year ago, spring, when I was
quite content sleeping in my closet, thank you, thinking I'd never be bothered
again, believing it was gold not talking to too many people, and maybe I'd be
left alone to get my life somewhat ordinary.
I feel strange now, changed. Hearing the birds awake and alive makes me
feel it's all starting to be over with, "moving out of me" they say,
the pain I mean. "A year's enough time, Oliver," they tell me.
I'd gotten tired of the darkness in the fall and asked them to bring the
lamps back in, an extra for the corner near the balcony, and a desk, and a
mirror. That made them happy. Progress makes them feel happy. I think the
mirror did it. Good for them. I just got tired of the
goddamned dark.
I guess they feel I've come out of whatever
madness they thought I was in.
And I like my room now. It's very small and the
bed's soft. I've spent all my winter months lying on
that thick cotton-quilt slab hoping to die before spring. They'd
decided I could be away from the hospital, brought me here, around November. I've definitely grown out of my closet. My old soft chair is
there beside the bed. The bullets are still in it. An old floor lamp stands
behind it in the corner. I sit there sometimes and read.
On the other side of the bed is a nightstand where I keep some books
and a picture of Billy and Connie sitting in the creek, Zack watching them from
the bank. Somebody put a lamp there I like, a little one with no plastic on the
shade. The only other bit of furniture is this desk, another floor lamp beside
it near the balcony doors.
I've kept the hat. It has its own spot here on the desk, next to a picture
of Finn and Zack and Sully hand-feeding the goats at
the pond. The hat is crumpled, chewed on. The teeth
marks in it and the long section of brim torn and lying away from its seam lend
it a history only I could care about, or wonder over. I think of him... Reynard
- I've learned to think of him only as Reynard -
well...I think of him often.
This hat's become a piece of me.
There's this mirror here now too, on the wall in front of me above the desk. I
look at my face sometimes while I'm thinking how to
write it all down.
The creases at my cheeks are lopsided, uneven. The one on the left is
longer, deeper, starts under my mouth and runs all the way up the side of my
nose. The groove on the right side is short, shallow, stays at the mouth, but
the scar on that cheek seems to make up for the imbalance, giving it...purpose,
I suppose. It crawls down from under the eye, diagonally across the cheek, and
disappears at my jawbone an inch or so under the ear. My eyebrows seem to dip
more in the center than they used to. Three long deep furrows crease my brow
and two smaller ones squirm beneath them. They bother me. I scrub my forehead a
lot, believing too much dirt and oil settles in those cracks. My skin there got
red from the scrubbing until they convinced me to stop it. I don't
know why I'd gotten into that.
The hospital did a pretty good job eliminating
most of the burnt tissue scars. The little that remains on the lower right side
of my face is very faint. No beard will grow there, but I've
never wanted one anyway. My left hand looks a little messed up, but the fingers
work okay. My chest looks hardened, glassy, dead.
When I relax here and stare at this face in the mirror, inches away, it
looks painful. If I force a smile it gets worse. They
say that too will change. It's like when Thanksgiving comes to you sitting alone
in the corner of a bar looking at the Christmas tinsel over the mirror, knowing
it's been there all year and will stay there until it crumbles and someone
decides to clean it off.
I am here, somewhere, behind the look of it.
I know about the pain thing: The little finger of my right hand is half gone. It was hard getting used to writing like that, my
hand wanting to fall forward at a strange angle.
Back in the summer Connie'd asked me if I
wasn't getting bored. I told her I'd found a strange
sense of strength in boredom. I'd fought it all my
life and now finally saw its importance. She asked me again about the lamps and
I told her just to keep the goddamn things out of here.
Now I keep them on all night, even when I sleep.
It was in February I decided I needed to know it all again, and should
write it all down. It was really Connie's idea. It didn't
take me long to agree. I guess the last letter from Philip did it. It jolted
me.
Jessie says it did me good. I was discovering. And
being discovered.
I ask her, "Sorta like a virus?"
Sometimes I can make her laugh. I like that.
But...I know this: We are not legends. We are real.
I guess I should say more about the letter from Philip that jogged me
awake after eight or nine months and made me want the lights back
on. It was short, with a thirty-five year old clip from the Philly
newspaper about Pilot, when he was a kid. Mainly what Philip said was the kid
"ran out of the house with his arms on fire". The paper didn't say anything like that. Philip got
this from Liz Hickey, daughter of Harvey, who filed the report back in 1950.
He's dead now, but apparently Philip got the daughter to dig
into her father's old notes and found out old lady Leeks, across the street,
saw the kid's dog, a little brown and white mutt, running out the door behind
the kid onto the upstairs landing, the smoke pushing out behind them as they
ran down the steep wooden steps into the yard, the dog trying to grab him by
the pantlegs, wanting to help somehow, as "old lady Leeks" remembered
it, the kid rolling around on the ground trying to put the fire out, the fire
spreading from his shirtsleeves onto his teeshirt, the kid desperately trying
to yank his clothes off, the dog running around the kid yapping, waking the
neighbors with the commotion, bringing them all out of their houses to watch
the top of the house burning off and the screaming up there. Many of
them cried, helpless, watching it, shivering in their robes.
The police found the kid huddled with his dog about a block away,
trembling behind some hedges, still wearing his pants, shoes and socks.
Some of the neighbors said the clothes he'd
shed smelled of gasoline. No one seemed to have any thoughts about that, or why the kid was dressed at two in the morning.
That's the way Harvey, dear old dead
Philadelphia Inquirer
Seven people were found dead last night after a fire swept through the
second floor of a west Philadelphia four-plex at 5837-39 Hickery Street.
Investigators say the fire started about
Mr. and Mrs. Henry Falgroth and a visiting friend, Elizabeth Grant, 38,
died of smoke inhalation in one upstairs apartment. Mr. and Mrs. Francis Boggs
and two of their three children, who lived across the hall, were the first to
succumb to the fire. Five people in the downstairs apartments escaped unharmed.
Assistant fire chief Garland Phelps has stated he believes it to be
arson and could give no information about suspects. In his words, "The top
of the house was gone before we got there. It was too fast. A gasoline fire,
for certain. The walls are all red pine. Burns like kerosene. Lucky the kid was
out, if you call that lucky."
The oldest of the Boggs' three children, 9 years old, survived the
fire. He and his dog had made it out of the house just in time. Firemen found
him dazed among the bushes in the next block after they'd contained the blaze
to the first floor. He was taken to the hospital, treated for shock, and placed
in foster care as a ward of the state.
* * *
Ignorance sticks to my skin like a wet fog. When I remove my clothes I
feel better for the moment, but the fog now covers all of me and soon the soot
and mist weighs me down and I cannot breathe. My pores become clogged. I go to
the bathtub down the hall and fill it almost to overflowing and slip in and
under and realize I cannot hear. I know the water is cascading onto the floor
but I cannot hear it. I can see the water around my hands but hear nothing.
Water is important. I must drink a lot of it and bathe often.
Everything incidental to the void must be washed away. Everything. I must be
nothing before I can be. I must not
see what I hate, nor what I love. I must be certain I cannot. Being is emotionless:
black and white. I must slip deeper into the void.
Darkness. I neither hear nor see, but I can smell the ignorance. It is
my own. I must bathe again.
Breathing must become more familiar, no longer a second nature, but the
first. I breathe deeply. The air is cold and my lungs are awake now and I am
aware of them. They must be aware of me.
My body comes awake. I itch. Something is wrong. I can still feel an
unknown obligation. Perhaps to stand, perhaps to do nothing, I do not know, but
it lurks, trying to live. I cannot let it. There can be no preconceptions.
Ever. There can be no rules. I am alive. My body is awake. My mind stirs. I
must leave it alone.
I am here.
It is spring again.
* * *
El Yoyo foster
home, March 1956
The Kids
I asked Freddie to be careful. "Billy's younger than us. He
scares easy."
"Nah. It'll be okay, Oliver. He ain't that much younger."
"It's too dangerous, too scary for him."
"Nothing to it. You just hold on to the pulley real tight,
don't let go till you hit the water. I'll be in the quarry with the truck tubes
watching him ride it down. He'll love it. I've done it lots of times."
"I don't know, Freddie. That pulley ride's got to be like
jumping off a small mountain. He'll be shoving himself across the slope and
down that hill straight out across the quarry pretty fast. Even if he can hang
on, he'll probably shit his pants before he gets to the water. Maybe somebody
else'd go with you. Maybe Zack or Connie."
"They don't want to go. Who are you, my nanny?"
I didn't answer. Freddie would do what he wanted. He walked toward
Morgan's Stream, going to get Billy.
"Take a smaller tube!" I called. "He won't get his
arms around that truck tube!"
Freddie didn't answer.
#
I'd liked being alone.
This thing last year came at me like a bat nibbling at the inside of my
head. So many questions. So many faces. It was chaos. A snarl, a grumble, a
bluster about somebody else's business. Not mine. Not ours. It had nothing to
do with the Salamander Gang.
And everything. It had everything to do with us.
I guess the best way to tell this is to start at the beginning, but I
don't know where that is, exactly. It had to do with Billy and Freddie trying
to scuffle with something that just went wrong. They just got into the wrong
hustle. Freddie was always a fuck-up anyway. Even at nine years old, back at El
Yoyo, he'd pick the wrong play, sneer at anything that didn't help him win.
Billy had no business being with Freddie, trying to be his pal thirty
years later. It was a Billy mistake. He trusted everybody too much, figured
life was still a game you play like wrestling with the goats or throwing Connie
into the neighbor's corn silo. He giggled at everything. We'd laugh at his
giggling. Even Zack, who usually only grinned, laughed at Billy's giggle.
Anyway, they didn't know who they were messing with. Freddie knew
better. He just didn't care. Maybe it was me. Maybe I could have kept a closer
watch on the kids after we left El Yoyo, when we got old enough, when
somebody'd decided we were all grown up and ready to handle life the way it
came, including Pilot. I have no idea. All I know is I'm alive and some are
dead and...
None of it seemed to go right.
It must have started, for me at least, in early March a year ago. Yeah.
Spring, a year ago. I've been here a year.
But Freddie and Billy had already got it started a couple days before
that, messing with some guys they never should have messed with.
#
The Snatch
It was gray there, and dark, big, black, with fat pieces of fire
spitting up only occasionally about two hundred feet above it all. From an
airplane it might have looked like a five square mile spider web of pipeline
and cables connecting about three dozen old flat-roofed sheds and cinderblock
one-story buildings with tall stacks, two of which, toward the west, burned
constantly and lit the sky in bright billows of fire and spark.
But on the ground toward the east the huge empty parking lot adjacent
to the highway shoulder seemed asleep, watched over only by a few tall mercury
vapor lamps: old, dim, purple, set in a straight line along its middle. Closer
to the buildings: just darkness and shadow.
Freddie Pebbles had his old maroon Pontiac squeezed between the cyclone
fence and concrete wall, facing the highway. He tapped the dashboard with the
tips of his fingers, stared into the rearview mirror. A light rain blurred the
back window. About fifty feet behind him a cup-sized disk of hazy moonlight
bounced off the cyclone fence. After a while the moonbeam broke as a little
crouching figure darted through it. Freddie reached over and opened the
passenger door quietly. The interior light did not go on.
Billy slipped in and eased the door closed, grinned at Freddie.
Freddie smiled back. "Gonna work, Billy?"
"Gonna work, Freddie." Billy rubbed his hands together, still
grinning. "Got enough nails under that car to sink a ship." He looked
at Freddie and laughed quietly, covered his mouth with both hands.
Freddie looked out at the highway. "Now we wait. Watch. Wait for
the pigeons. It'll work."
The pigeons were about two hundred yards to the north in a late model
black Nissan, also waiting, backed up to one of the middle buildings, next to
two old company trucks. The driver lit a cigarette, cupped the match to hide
the flash, sat back, blew the smoke across the windshield. The other man fanned
the smoke away with a callused hand. The driver wore glasses. He sighed before
he spoke.
"Hector, you worry too much. You keep that up, you'll die. You get
an ulcer? Bam. That's it. You'll go before your time." He looked at
Hector, then back toward the highway, adjusted his horn-rims. "It's all
set. All arranged, top to bottom. An easy one."
Hector shrugged. "Just not right, sitting here. This is
dumb."
"That's our job. We're sitting here because that's what we were
told to do. You worry every time we pick up Bags' money."
"Not here. Out there." He pointed. "In the middle's
better."
"The middle of the parking lot, Hector, is all lit up, out in the
open, the highway right there. Look at it. Must've been a hundred cars pass
since we got here."
"We'll get hit here. Out there's safer. We'd see all around us.
Not like this. It's dumb."
"Just leave this the fuck to me, will you please?"
"You don't tell me to shut up..."
"I'm not telling you to shut up, it's just..."
"...college boy." Hector smiled.
George made sucking noises with his teeth and adjusted his glasses. He
pointed. "Out there, Hector, a night watchman sees us, we're done, we go
home, no package. Everybody else sees us waiting, just sitting. Waiting for a
fucking bus? The man knows how to find us. That's his job. They told him. It's
all arranged. All planned. Top to bottom."
Hector shoved a stick of gum into his mouth and stared through the
blurred windshield at the headlights passing in the distance.
"Dumb."
An open Jeep pulled off the highway from the north, drove to the center
of the lot and stopped under one of the purple lights, about a hundred yards
from the black Nissan. After a few minutes the lights on the Jeep went off and
a tall man in dungarees and khaki short-sleeved shirt with buttoned pockets
stepped out. He had broad shoulders, solid forearms, and wore gloves.
He pulled a small canvas suitcase from the Jeep, set it on the ground
at his feet, leaned back against the fender and lit a cigarette. He did not
seem bothered by the soft rain.
"We're on," said George, and started the Nissan. Hector
straightened. George pulled the Nissan out of the shadows, spinning his wheels
on the wet concrete. He drove across the open lot and stopped in front of the
Jeep, perpendicular to it, as if to block it. Both men got out of the car.
George walked toward the highway side of the Jeep. Hector made a wider sweep,
looked around.
"Come over here," George said.
The tall man pulled off one of his gloves, stooped, picked up the
suitcase and walked around the rear of the Jeep. Hector hobbled behind him. His
right leg seemed stiff, out of sync with the rest of his body. They came up
facing George.
"Now smile pretty," George said.
"Yeah. You too." The tall man handed him the suitcase with
his gloved hand. Slowly. His other hand kept balling to a fist then out again
and back.
"They're shooting my bad side, you know," George said. He
didn't smile, took the handle, watched the fist.
"Well...unfortunate."
Hector spun slowly, squinted into the darkness, made a quick full
circle, blinked harder through the rain beyond the light, checked the highway.
His eyes came into the lamp-glow again and he glared at George.
The tall man got into his Jeep, nodded at them, backed up a few feet,
smiled at George, and headed back the way he'd come. George and Hector got into
the Nissan and headed south, toward Philadelphia.
"What is that, getting shot on your good side?" Hector asked.
"We were having our pictures taken across the road. For Pilot, to
verify the exchange."
Hector's mouth fell open. His chewing gum bounced out the left side of
his mouth.
"I didn't want my picture taken."
"Too late."
"You didn't tell me." He groped around his lap for the gum,
popped it back into his mouth.
George sniffed. "When you worry too much you start thinking."
"Well...shit." Hector leaned his head against the window,
watched the windshield wipers. "Dumb."
They drove south about four miles. George pulled onto the shoulder of
the road and stopped.
"What now? More pictures?"
"Something's wrong. I think we're getting a flat."
Hector sighed.
They got out of the car and checked the rear tires.
"Well..." George adjusted his glasses and opened the trunk. Hector
pulled out the jack and got it set just right under the bumper on his side of
the car. George watched him, shook his head.
"Hector, what are you doing?"
"I am jacking the car the fuck up!"
"The flat is on my side."
Hector walked around to look.
"How nice," he said, and shot George his glaring grin.
"Two flats. Two." He stuck two fingers up at George's face. George
adjusted his glasses.
A car pulled off the highway behind them. It rolled down the shoulder
and crunched to an easy stop about ten yards back.
Freddie rolled his window down, stuck his head out into the rain,
yelled "You guys need help?"
George felt inside his coat for the gun.
Hector said, "I only see one in there."
"Yeah. Me too."
They walked toward the Pontiac. Hector hobbled off the shoulder onto
the grass and up the other side, tried to see through the darkness and the rain
into the waist-high weeds at his left as he walked, missing little Billy
sliding through it on his stomach, quiet and quick, like a salamander. Freddie
still had his head out the window. The rain got harder. George was about
halfway between the cars when Freddie yelled, "I was asking, you need any
help?"
"Appreciate it," George called, getting closer now.
Freddie pulled his head into the Pontiac and got the wipers to a faster
speed. George was near the window. Hector had almost reached the headlights.
The rain was beating down really heavy now and the sky lit up and seemed to
roar as lightning cracked and Billy cranked the Nissan to life.
Hector spun, started running back, cursed his leg. George had his gun
out. Billy and Freddie seemed to hit the gas pedals at the same time. The
Pontiac's wheels spun in the loose gravel and Freddie hit the brake and then
the gas again -- tap-danced them both -- shot past Hector, almost hit him, then
Freddie got too close to the Nissan too fast and was slamming into it, pushing
it when a bullet shattered the rear window and hit the dashboard a little to
his right. Freddie had his traction real good now and could hear the Nissan's
flat tires flapping in its wheel wells and the gravel banging against the front
underside of his Pontiac and they were hitting thirty, thirty-two, the old
Pontiac trying to shove that little footless Nissan down the road when Freddie
yelled out the window "Hit the highway! Billy! Hit the highway!" but
knowing Billy couldn't hear him with the noise and saw them in the rearview
running way back there now but still too close and heard their guns BAM! BAM!
and couldn't see Billy's head, the little fart apt to be scrunched way down
trying to reach the pedal, hugging his chest close to the wheel, elbows out,
trying to control that mother with Freddie ramming it further along the
shoulder in the driving rain. Freddie checked the rearview, couldn't see them
anymore, screamed "Gotta do it now!" through the windshield, pounded
on the horn, hurt his hand, pulled his foot off the gas. The Nissan bucked to a
stop and Billy jumped out. Freddie shot the Pontiac out onto the highway and
screeched -- slipped sideways -- up next to him. Billy jumped in with the
suitcase, laughing like hell. The old Pontiac spun wheels, fishtailed, and shot
down the highway with them cackling, squealing, screaming and laughing into the
rain.
George hunkered on the shoulder near the highway, tried to catch his
breath, bent over, clutched his knees, spit up. Hector was in the grass near
the high weeds leaning back on his elbows, the rain pouring onto his face,
breathing hard, glaring at George.
"Christ," George said, coughing up now. "Who would've
figured that? It was all worked out! All arranged! All set! Top to
bottom!"
"Dumb."
#