Sundance

by David Fuller

  Her body tensed. “Triangle?”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Shirtwai—” The words caught in her throat and she swallowed. “Shirtwaist, Triangle Shirtwaist.” Even with her eyes in shadow, he was aware of a liquid glint.

  “Someone said it was a fire.”

  Abigail leaned backward as if she could put distance between her spoken words and her physical self. “March twenty-fifth, two years ago, 1911. Late Saturday, Saturday afternoon, at, um, four-thirty. Etta . . . Etta was there that day. I know you weren’t here, you couldn’t know, but everyone, everyone remembers where they were when it happened.”

  Her voice cracked and she pushed by him and inside. She smelled of soap and work sweat, the aroma of everyday oblivion, and it struck him that the word “triangle” snapped her out of unconscious daily existence into a fraught world he had yet to understand. She went to the door of the room she shared with her husband and closed herself in, and he heard the lock turn. He stood in the silence of the hallway. With bright sunlight falling through the door at his back, the light graded to black along the walls and he was unable to make out the staircase beyond. He knew better than to wait for her.

  She did not serve supper to the boarders that evening, so they followed Levi’s lead and served themselves. She did not join them at the table, and he did not see her at all that night. He grew weary of pretending to ignore Robert Levi’s glower. Levi peppered his meal with occasional gibes. “Better food than in prison.” Longbaugh concentrated on his plate. When Levi said, “We come by our supper honestly,” Longbaugh excused himself and went outdoors.

  He wandered the neighborhood, the island a meadow of lights, abristle with electricity. Heat came off the sidewalks despite the long-absent sun. She had planted the Liberty toy and the olive ribbons two years before. Things may have changed since then. Perhaps she didn’t wish to be found. He chose to quash that frustrating inner voice. He had an obligation to know the truth. As he took the next of his small steps, he would seek out Queenie, then work his way to Giuseppe.

  He stopped at a newspaper kiosk and bought a dime novel about the Cassidy gang, along with two pieces of hard candy. Wandering home, he left one of the candies on the post outside the boardinghouse, although that night he had not seen the Chinese boy.

  He stayed up late, engrossed in the dime novel, sitting up in bed by a side table lamp, chuckling at the adventures attributed to him. He was entertained to know he had been heroic and dastardly, trigger-happy and dreamy, sentimental and cold-blooded. Perhaps the Kid in the book was, as Mina seemed to think, the ideal Black Hand adversary. He thought he would have been less amused had he read it when he was younger, before his visit to Rawlins.

  He heard a noise on the other side of his door. His eyes twitched to the wardrobe where his holster and sidearm hung. A second sound and his body coiled. He watched the doorknob for movement, listening with his skin. Then the unexpected, a newspaper sliding under the closed door. He watched it inch in, then stop with three-quarters of it showing. Soft footsteps padded away in the hallway. He swung his legs and his feet hit the floor, he bent and took up the paper, a copy of the New York Times. It had yellowed. He read horrifying words, then ran his eyes to the nameplate for the date: March 26, 1911. A newspaper more than two years old. The day after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

  The headline was stacked three lines high in the center of the page:

  141 MEN AND GIRLS DIE IN WAIST FACTORY FIRE; TRAPPED HIGH UP IN WASHINGTON PLACE BUILDING; STREET STREWN WITH BODIES; PILES OF DEAD INSIDE.

  A photo beneath the headline had a caption: “The Burning Building at 23 Washington Place.” The photo was poor, framing only the upper floors, making it impossible to understand the building’s height. A ladder rose from the middle of the photograph, but its reach was shy of the roof by three floors. In a small box in the photograph’s corner: “Windows marked X from which fifty girls jumped—south side of building.” A column of smaller headlines ran down the middle of the page beside the photo: “The Flames Spread with Deadly Rapidity Through Flimsy Material Used in the Factory. 600 GIRLS ARE HEMMED IN. When Elevators Stop Many Jump to Certain Death and Others Perish in Fire-Filled Lofts.” The headlines went on, but his eyes blurred as Mary’s words came back, followed by Abigail’s words. Etta had been there.

  He returned to the newspaper and read through the entire piece. Certain paragraphs gripped him and rang in his head, and he went back and read them a second time. The horror did not lessen with subsequent readings.

  “Nothing like it has been seen in New York since the burning of the General Slocum. The fire was practically all over in half an hour. It was confined to three floors—the eighth, ninth, and tenth of the building. But it was the most murderous fire that New York has seen in many years.”

  “The girls rushed to the windows and looked down at Greene Street 100 feet below them. Then one poor, little creature jumped. There was a plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it, wrecking it and breaking her body into a thousand pieces.”

  “One girl, who waved a handkerchief at the crowd, leaped from a window adjoining the New York University Building on the westward. Her dress caught on a wire, and the crowd watched her hang there till her dress burned free and she came toppling down.”

  He read and reread deep into the night and did not look up until sharp dawn light flared in the window.

  • • •

  IN THE MORNING Longbaugh avoided his fellow boarders, leaving early through the back door. He made the long walk to the Hotel Brevoort. He was tired and sick at heart, and he carried the two-year-old newspaper folded in his suit’s side pocket. He claimed a small table in the café. He left the old paper where it was and perused that day’s newspapers one after another for references to the more than two-year-old Triangle Shirtwaist fire. He found none.

  He was not clear in his mind as he read of the tragedies and triumphs of the previous day. The fire fell to the back of his thoughts until some offhand reference, often to strikes or working conditions, reignited his indignation. He nodded off at one point, awoke with a jolt, and did not know how long he had dozed.

  He set down the newspaper. He closed his eyes and they burned. Images of fire curled in and scorched his mind’s eye, and he could not escape the image of the girl with the handkerchief, caught on the wire, and then his brain could handle no more and he let go of her so she could fall.

  He was surprised to learn that life could go on. He heard conversations around him. They washed by, frivolous, yet charged with a kind of importance for their simple confirmation of everyday existence.

  To his left he heard someone mention the Castles in The Sunshine Girl, and a minute later heard, on the other side of the room, something about Irene and Vernon in that Sunshine play. This coincidence of timing triggered his imagination and he began to listen. It was barely midmorning. Men were drinking their breakfasts, talking business, talking politics, bragging about their aspirations, underreporting their failures. Lubricated with drink, their voices waxed bold and supercilious. He overheard “Kaiser Bill,” and the name sparked a debate by the front door, glowed and flamed near the windows, then spread unevenly across the room, where here he was a tyrant, there war was unlikely, behind him the war would stay on the Continent, and back at the front door Wilson would keep us out. This was a new phenomenon to him, a conversational virus infecting a big room, running here and there until the fever crested and played out. When German politics faded, there was a run on the new renaissance. A smaller trend burbled about how senators being elected directly threatened the survival of the timber industry, the steel business, and the whiskey trust. Then a wave on modern technology, it had peaked and everything was already invented, so don’t invest in research, until at another table, invention was in its infancy, so invest all you’ve got.

  Across the room he overheard the words “. .
. not staging another Wild West Show.” Longbaugh leaned forward to locate the source. He narrowed it to the two men aiming spears of tobacco juice at a spittoon. Etta had written him about seeing a Wild West Show. It had made her laugh.

  He realized he wanted this diversion. Triangle burned too brightly in his mind, he feared for her safety on that day, despite the fact that it was well in the past. He found the Wild West Show idea interesting, his world brought east and dramatized.

  Longbaugh approached the spitting men. “Did I hear you say something about a show?”

  The fatter one folded tiny pink hands over a warm belly and eyed him suspiciously. “Something.” He scrutinized Longbaugh through one open eye.

  “Never seen one,” said Longbaugh with open hands, apologizing for his naïveté.

  “I gather you are unfamiliar with the West, sir,” said the fatter one.

  “Unfamiliar?”

  “Everyone in New York first encounters the West in Buffalo Bill’s show.”

  “I see,” said Longbaugh, not surprised, considering all he had encountered about the East Coast’s fascination with the West. “And where will it take place?”

  “You’re asking a man fresh out of that business.”

  “So you don’t know, or there’s no show?”

  “Hasn’t been a West show in New York since . . .” He nodded as if counting the years in his mind. “Well, a few years now. Whenever the Bills were in Madison Square Garden last. That’s also when the Millers took their show to Europe.”

  “Bills?”

  “Buffalo and Pawnee, the Bills, surely you’ve heard of Buffalo Bill Cody?”

  Longbaugh snorted inside. “Surely.”

  “The Millers got their horses and stagecoaches confiscated by the British, someone over there thinks there’ll be war. I was this close to investing in that one.”

  “You can invest in a show?”

  “You can, and I did. ’Twas my business. But my new passion is song and dance, pretty girls showing a bit of ankle. Pretty girls don’t need stables or shovelers.”

  “Although . . .” said his friend wittily, and they laughed together.

  “Not all pretty girls drop their flops onstage,” said the fatter one.

  “Just their frocks,” said his witty friend.

  “From your lips.” The fatter one returned to Longbaugh. “That’s the future, my friend, that’s where the money is.”

  Longbaugh dropped coins beside their glasses. “This round’s on me.” He picked a red apple from the bowl on their table, polished it on the side of his trousers, and headed outdoors.

  He stopped on the sidewalk, about to bite the apple when he saw the hotel doorman shooing a small boy. The boy simply moved to another location whenever the doorman had to go back to hold the door open for an incoming gentleman. After which the doorman’s artificial smile vanished and he charged the boy again, who simply ducked and moved. Longbaugh saw it was the Chinese boy.

  Longbaugh tapped the doorman on the shoulder. The doorman turned and was abruptly professional. “Yes, sir?”

  “That’s okay, he’s mine.” The doorman looked at him as if he were out of his mind, but Longbaugh tipped him, and the man knew better than to argue with a customer. He returned to his post.

  Longbaugh approached the Chinese boy. “You waiting for me?”

  The Chinese boy nodded. “She’s going over the line, cowboy,” he said with a seriousness reserved for dire news.

  “Who’s going over the line?”

  “Lady at your house.”

  Despite his confusion, Longbaugh held his tongue.

  “Going to meet someone.”

  “A man, you mean,” said Longbaugh.

  “Yes.”

  “Abigail is going to meet a man who is not her husband.”

  “Yes.”

  Longbaugh nodded. He rolled the apple in his palm. “And you know this how?”

  “I know the man.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  The Chinese boy spat.

  “I see.”

  “Hates Chinks. Hates immigrants, but he’s got it special for me. Got a bar on the Bowery. Was a ward boss, but even Tammany’s sick of him. Small brain, big mouth.”

  “Let me guess. You were following him, keeping an eye on him.”

  “Saw him talking to her. Outside a lecture hall. She was afraid to go in, and he got friendly. Made a time to meet her.”

  He looked at the boy, thinking him wise beyond his years. Then thought he was probably early teens, making him short for his years. Longbaugh waited, but the Chinese boy seemed to be finished. He continued to roll the apple in his palm.

  “You want me to do something?”

  “She seems nice. He’s not.”

  “So I should stop it?”

  “You like her. So help her.”

  “Help her, or mess with him?” said Longbaugh.

  The Chinese boy shrugged. Either way.

  Longbaugh scrunched his nose. This was not his business. This was not the Chinese boy’s business. This was nobody’s business but Abigail’s. And her baffled and jealous husband’s.

  “Why don’t you just tell the guy’s wife?”

  Han Fei looked at Longbaugh as if he was a fool. Longbaugh understood. No one would listen to him. A Chinese boy had no power in the white city.

  “When is this supposed to happen?”

  “Half hour.”

  That brought him awake. “Half hour from now?”

  “Restaurant near here.”

  Longbaugh looked away, shaking his head. “Cutting it a little close.”

  He pictured how it had happened. The Chinese boy had followed the man to the lecture hall the night before and had been surprised to see Abigail there. He had watched the man make his move, and was determined to do something about it. So that morning he had followed Longbaugh to the Brevoort, but couldn’t get past the doorman. Had Longbaugh dawdled in the café, Abigail would have been at the man’s mercy. Longbaugh didn’t want any part of this. Then he remembered her reaction to the Triangle fire and the way she had slipped the newspaper under his door. She had a good heart, despite being confused about her marriage, despite being a jangle of raw nerves on the verge of making a bad decision she was sure to regret for a long time.

  Longbaugh looked the boy up and down. “The conscience of the neighborhood.”

  “Wouldn’t know, cowboy.”

  Longbaugh wondered what the man had done or said to the Chinese boy to bring out such an intense desire for punishment. “You eat breakfast?”

  “No.”

  He handed him the red apple. The boy considered it, nodded, wiped it on his shirt, and took a bite as he started walking. Longbaugh closed his eyes a moment, then followed. A few blocks later they were outside the restaurant. They lounged across the street, and after a few minutes, the Chinese boy pointed out two men coming from the other direction.

  “There.”

  “The short one or the tall one?”

  “Tall.”

  Longbaugh scrutinized the tall man. Not much to look at, but he knew downright ugly men who could charm the leather off a saddle.

  “She’s lonely,” said the Chinese boy.

  Longbaugh was impressed by the Chinese boy’s empathy. “Why didn’t she go into the lecture?”

  “Too shy. It was called The Ideal of Free Love.”

  Longbaugh smiled sadly. Now he better understood the tall man as well. In the West, he’d seen predators just like him make their play. Apparently predators were no different here. The city just offered more and better opportunities. Like lectures for women about love and ideals. From what he knew about Abigail, she would have been curious, vulnerable, waiting across the street from the lecture hall, summoning her courage, wanting to know more
about herself and her body. Her whole life she would have been told what not to do, and therefore she didn’t know what she could do. She would have gone there to learn. The tall man knew women would come, and then be too shy to go inside. Longbaugh saw the moment in his head: When it was time to go in to hear the speaker, Abigail had faltered, ticket in hand. The vulture then swooped in with his sympathetic smile and sensitive eyes, and she was comforted, relieved to be understood. The tall man would have known what to say to make her feel desired and safe.

  Longbaugh watched the tall man stop in front of the restaurant, showing off for his friend, conniving and smug, and he felt his stomach lurch.

  He said nothing more to the Chinese boy, left him behind as he crossed the street, walking near the front door, then kneeling to tie a shoelace that wasn’t loose. He eavesdropped on their conversation.

  “—what happens after is I go home and maybe feel a little sorry, so, hey, I’m nice to the wife. Thing is, she’s so happy for the attention that I get it twice in one day. It’s like I did her a favor by screwing this girl.”

  His short friend laughed. “You’re something else.”

  “Next time, come with. You check their left hands and pick the married ones, so, hey, what are they gonna do? Make a scene?”

  “I’ll stick with my wife. But I wanna hear all the details.”

  Their laughter propelled Longbaugh into the restaurant. Once inside, he looked around. Abigail had yet to arrive. If he knew anything about her, she would be unsure, she would hesitate, she would be late, and then in a frantic hurry because she was late. It was a long way from the boardinghouse, but he also knew she would come.

  A moment later the tall man came in alone. The manager knew him and led him to a corner table in back. It had a curtain he could pull for privacy once she arrived. A dark corner for a dark rendezvous. Longbaugh waited for him to settle in his seat, then crossed the restaurant, passing the manager coming back. He grabbed the curtain and pulled it around the table so no one could see what he was about to do.