On the Nickel

by John Shannon

  He moved the sloshing gas cans to the side to clear his path, then took a deep breath and readied the knife, his most reliable friend, though he kept Mr Pistol ready, too. He knelt slowly and gripped the head of the doorkey with his teeth, feeling like a pirate. OK, whoever you are, he thought. I make you this promise. I’m reliably on the side of human evolution. I’m a fool in many ways but not in this one. I’m ready. Can you deal with it?

  Go for it, the voice insinuated. Mr Nietzsche is in favor of first-strike. Always. He has nothing but contempt for the reasonable and the dutiful man.

  He kept a shoulder against the door and bit down on the key. He twisted his head to rotate the key until he felt the beginning of give, and the pressure was just starting to overwhelm the furious push of his shoulder. One-two-three, he counted off for whatever sentient presence was watching over him and speaking back. Then he hurled himself to the side and let the door fly open. The opening brought bedlam, but a little light. He used the knife in his right hand to stab and fling a toppling chair down the staircase, as other chairs followed.

  ‘Freeze, police!’ he heard. A woman’s voice.

  He’d braved the unpredictable clout and slap of falling chairs and then he was out the open door and flat against the wall. In the faint hall light he saw a silhouette, almost certainly going for a gun. I’m prepared, O Future! He flung the knife hard and then fired once at the silhouette.

  ‘Paula!’ Gloria cried out. ‘I’m coming!’ She was on her feet at the first cry of her voice and then the shot, and something that had been in her hand, a can of hot water, went flying aside, causing voices to yelp. Gloria rounded the staircase and then yanked herself backward on instinct as a small shadowy figure appeared below and fired twice at her with the biggest pistol she’d ever seen.

  ‘I am bringer of death!’

  She darted around the corner low with her own pistol out but she didn’t shoot, holding her fire-discipline because she lacked a definite target, as she’d been taught. The short figure was gone. She heard a deep whoomp and immediately a lick of near-transparent flame gestured around the corner in a tease, then yanked back.

  She patted the radio-pack mike on instinct but it was still on the fritz for some reason. She pulled out her cell and hit the 911 button that she’d programmed.

  ‘Officer down! Officer needs assistance! Shots fired! Building on fire! Ten-99!’ She glanced around. Jack Liffey was right behind her. ‘What the fuck’s the address? I can’t think!’

  ‘Fortnum Hotel,’ he leaned forward to yell into her phone. He gave the cross streets. ‘We’re taking gunfire. We’re on fire. Send a bus, send a ladder truck, send backup for LAPD Officers Ramirez and Green. Officer Paula Green is down!’

  Gloria made a face. She wasn’t even supposed to be working in this division, but it was done now and there was no avoiding the consequences. She left the phone on and shoved it into his hand.

  ‘Paula!’ she hollered down the staircase. All she could see was a throbbing orange glow on the walls that was definitely not good news. ‘Talk to me, Paula!’

  The only answer was a high-pitched male giggle.

  She grabbed hard to stop Jack Liffey descending with his stupid pistol – it looked like her old .38 – but at the turning they both surrendered to a flare of intense heat which drove them back up. ‘Up, everyone!’ he shouted. ‘Fire!’

  She grabbed his arm. ‘Jack, don’t be a jerk and get people hurt. This is under control, dammit.’

  She could see him take a deep breath to calm himself and cede her the authority with a nod. ‘No it’s not,’ he said softly. ‘Take control.’

  ‘Up one floor, now!’ Gloria ordered. ‘Everybody! Come out in the hall now! Don’t stop to grab a thing! The lobby’s on fire.’

  She heard one more shot below and prayed the small shape she’d seen wasn’t finishing Paula off. ‘If he shot Paula, that fucker is on his way to hell.’

  ‘I get you,’ Jack Liffey agreed.

  The motley company began straggling out of Morty’s room and then allowed themselves to be herded ahead of Gloria toward the staircase.

  ‘Hurry along, folks. No sightseeing.’

  One doorway on the next floor up still had a lit EXIT sign above it, and they headed that way. Incongruously, it led into a filthy wrecked bathroom with pipe torn from the plaster walls, and the basins and toilets smashed for no rational reason other than to make them unusable.

  Maeve found herself shoved out in front of the whole crew, and she hurried to a window under a second EXIT sign and pushed hard. She couldn’t budge it and started thinking about breaking the glass when Conor and Morty joined her and managed to tear loose a generation of paint and force the sash up. The window opened to a slatted iron fire-escape platform. They all sucked down a cool draught of city air. Conor stepped over the waist-high sill first and hurried across the iron grid to grasp the metal stairrails.

  ‘Yaaaaa!’ His torso disappeared abruptly.

  Maeve’s heart skipped a beat as she saw the boy plummet out of sight. She hurried to the edge and gasped to see him just below her, clinging furiously to the handrails and one stub of metal step. Several rusty steps in a row had crumbled away to nothing under his weight.

  ‘Rust never sleeps,’ he announced a little shakily, looking up at her. She was probably the only other one there who knew that was the title of a Neil Young song and album. She grasped the upper hand rails for extra support as her dad lay down on his chest across the iron platform that seemed to be holding, in order to reach down to grab, first, her ankle, and then Conor’s wrist.

  ‘I’ve got arm strength, kid.’

  He hoisted the boy slowly toward the landing, Conor’s feet scrabbling for purchase. The platform itself looked none too secure to Maeve, with big scabs of rust coming away wherever she wriggled.

  ‘Stay inside, people,’ Jack Liffey called. ‘It won’t hold.’

  ‘We need a ladder truck,’ Gloria said at the window. Maeve backed very slowly toward the brickwork of the building, feeling the iron straps flexing a little under her weight. She looked down and could see a flickery glow emanating from the windows two floors down. Glancing up on a whim, she counted three more floors to the roof. Iron fire escapes were probably fine if you painted them with Rustoleum once a decade or so, she thought angrily – damning all slumlords.

  Gloria was on her cell, explaining their predicament angrily to someone.

  Maeve stayed outside with her father, helping boost a shaken Conor in though the window. When they got inside, Gloria shooing them all out ahead of her into the hall. Taking up the rear, Maeve was struck suddenly by the amazing surplus of vulnerability in their little group – a skinny girl from half a country away, a lost woman hunting for her husband, two very old unhappy men, one probably with first-stage Alzheimer’s, a boy who seemed permanently a little bemused, then herself – she wouldn’t judge herself – and a recent paraplegic who was none too steady on his feet if you watched close. The whole straggling crew emerged from the bathroom just as a burst of flame found its way up some flue in the hallway and belched out behind them, lighting everything in sight with a flare.

  ‘Oy!’

  ‘Now!’ Gloria shouted, pushing one of the old men toward the stairway. ‘Folks, let’s go! Up is the way! We’re gonna be fine! I promise.’

  They hurried up the steps, feeling the heat rising ominously up the stairwell. Jack Liffey stayed back to guard the rear. Maeve took the crook of Sam Greengelb’s arm, helping him climb. Ahead of her, Conor and Millie had their hands through Morty’s elbows like bookends, boosting his stiff legs up the steps in a rather drunken gait, like a three-legged race at a picnic.

  Taking up the rear with Jack, Gloria was on her cell again, shouting repeatedly at someone. ‘You get everything here fast, Miss Oh! Absolutely everything. You heard me, officer down! Officer needs assistance! Code three! Fuck the codes. I don’t care about any basketball riots you got at Dorsey High or any drive-bys in the Shoes
tring Strip. Get your choppers. Get your SWAT. Get medevac for Sergeant Paula Green, LAPD, and get the fire boys to bring one of their firesuits. They may have to send somebody straight into a real fire inside the Fortnum to get our Paula out. I’m badge 21-437, Harbor Division, honey. If I don’t see that ladder truck the minute we get to the roof, I’ll come over there tomorrow and kick your ass all the way across town.’

  Maeve realized with a chill that Gloria’s friend, Paula Green, whom she had met and liked a whole lot, must be caught down there somewhere in the inferno. But hopefully below it or protected from it.

  Rice Thibodeaux slipped out of the Fortnum, after pouring the cans of gasoline everywhere, with flames brewing up nicely one floor up and licking down into the lobby. He crossed toward McCall’s big truck and glanced back at a crashing sound to see a ball of fire punch out a second-floor window and flames begin to caress up the brick walls above the window. The other windows on the second floor were already aglow with fire. Bless the fury of gasoline, he thought. It couldn’t have been burning more than a few minutes since he’d run along the linoleum hallway emptying the cans. He heard sirens in the distance and climbed the Dodge’s footstep to pull confidently at the door. Shock! The shitty thing didn’t give! That asshole McCall had locked up by habit and taken the keys, instead of leaving them in the ashtray as they’d always arranged. Fuck him. Where was McCall? Oh, yeah. He was in the basement, a crispy critter before long. And then his heart sank after he realized the front tire was dead flat.

  A number of old black men along the sidewalk were watching him curiously. He was really pissed off suddenly to be watched, but held it in. What business was this of theirs? Spades always thought the world owed them something. Why was that? What was it about niggers? They had some peculiar idea of justice wedged up their ass, and none of them – none – knew a thing about Nietzsche and making your own future.

  ‘You got a fucking problem!’ he yelled at all of them.

  He jumped down from the Dodge and walked to the curb to confront the old men. Thibodeaux had left the useless empty pistol back in the cleansing fire, but he yanked his big new killer knife out of his waist. He’d yanked it out of McCall and now he felt the incredible momentum as its big blade waved around in his hand. He’d found the outlandish eighteen-inch copy of the Marine knife in a Tijuana tourist shop. It was his sop on a trip down there so McCall could see a stupid donkey show he’d heard about, which never even happened. The tourist shop had been full of onyx birds, onyx Mexicans in sombreros sleeping against cacti and strings of firecrackers and cherry-bombs. The knife was probably only meant to be window décor, he realized. The shopkeeper had snickered, setting an inflated price, but he’d ignored the old fool’s game and paid what he wanted, $50.

  ‘Calm down, mister,’ one of the spades against the fence called out to him. ‘We all cool here.’

  ‘All you coons stay back on the sidewalk!’

  ‘There’s no need for that kind of talk, mister.’ That had come from the biggest colored man of them all, a brawny man twice his height and width, and Thibodeaux had half a mind to knife him down immediately, set an example to the others.

  But he heard a noise and whirled to guard his back, brandishing the big knife from a crouch. No one was there. He could see the Fortnum clearly in the dusk, and it was extremely satisfying, cooking up just like the two-story farmhouse his Blackwood team had barbecued near Falluja with the kids screaming upstairs. If you don’t want to die, fuckers, somebody on his fire team had shouted, don’t let the hajis shoot at us from your house!

  ‘Some bad shit’s going down,’ a man still sitting on the sidewalk said.

  Thibodeaux whirled again. ‘I’m not gonna negotiate with you sambos! I mean it. Just shut the fuck up. I got to think.’

  ‘This is a free country, man. We shall overcome.’

  Sirens were howling nearby, a block or two away. And a chopper was scooting overhead, sweeping its bright sunbeam across the buildings of The Nickel, tapping at them like the probing cane of a blind man.

  ‘You want to fuck with me? I know a place all you Zulus can go to die! Learn about Fred Nietzsche, Niggers.’ Thibodeaux started edging away from them, into the middle of the street, but the biggest Negro stepped off the curb with his eyes narrowing.

  ‘Hold on, man. Why you got to go racist on us?’

  ‘Back off, nig.’

  ‘Why you got to be doin’ this? Did some black man hurt you? We don’t mean you no harm at all, son.’

  Thibodeaux ended his retreat. He planted his feet and poked his knife toward the big menacing Negro. ‘Stay back, heavy-duty! You think I’m deaf and dumb?’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. I think you’re a sad man who’s worried about something that’s coming down on him. Look, we all know how mean the world can be. Just look at us. We got nothing. Why would I want to hurt you?’

  ‘Well, here’s some nothing!’

  Just as the first fire engine came around the corner, Thibodeaux ran toward the big black man with the long knife thrust out in front, like a knight with a lance.

  Moses Vartabedian hadn’t felt like going to an empty home, with a stack of pizza boxes on his fancy granite counter, so he’d returned to his local downtown office from the unpleasant party at Wolverton’s where even the gold-diggers were too young for him. Coming in the door, he knew he needed a new ream of paper for the buzzing fax, and he was fussing through the racks of office supplies he kept in a small back room, with spiffy orange metal racks from some pricey Italian company. There was a wired window at the back of the supply room, an original sash from the sweatshop it had once been. No point in fixing it up because it looked out over Skid Row, then the L.A. River, and then the heart of Mexican L.A.

  It was only chance that led him to glance out. He saw the column of black smoke first, then a flicker of flame.

  ‘Grandmother of God!’ He backed away and saw his own reflection in the glass. Who was this – the bland pasty look of a prey animal? No more than a mile away a helicopter was weaving its bright light in figure-eights over what was unmistakably his Fortnum building, and unmistakably on fire.

  I was happy once, Vartabedian thought. I was on top of things, confident, rebuilding wrecks, honored for it. Is it all gone?

  For every emergency shelter-bed or transitional shelter-bed in Los Angeles, there are approximately twenty-five homeless souls every single night. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the amount of beds for the homeless was so ridiculously inadequate that they suspended the city’s anti-street-camping ordinance within the official boundaries of The Nickel.

  NINETEEN

  You Can’t Save the World By Yourself

  The up staircase ended abruptly in a dark vestibule with a pitched roof and a locked door that led to the roof, and Jack Liffey’s whole retinue started piling up behind him. The heat and now the growling animal noises of fire were gathering below them. Almost by instinct he yanked out the clumsy .38 Police Special and put his last three slugs straight into the doorframe where the latch-tongue would be, alarming everyone behind him to a frazzle and causing one of them to scream, but then he kicked the door open on fresh cool air. The doorframe was so rotten the shots had probably been unnecessary. But he was on the edge of panic himself, feeling responsible for so many lives.

  The approach of fire pressed a sadistic thumb on one of his rawer nerves – not three years ago he’d been chased in a long scramble down through brush and gully by the wind-driven Malibu wildfire that they had taken to calling the Cold Canyon Fire. Cold Canyon, set by an arsonist at the height of the Santa Ana Winds, plus the arsonist himself had killed a Jamaican he’d come to like a lot, right beside him, along with several other hapless people, and it had burned out seventy-three ‘structures,’ as the fire department put it, many of them multi-million dollar homes.

  The last of the Fortnum residents pushed out on to a tarpaper roof so dry that it crunched a bit underfoot, but it seemed to hold their weigh
t well. Gloria hung back at the vestibule a moment, yelling into her cell phone. Jack Liffey walked cautiously to the knee-high parapet above Fifth Street, hearing a fire siren dying away below, and sure enough, six or seven stories down, a big ladder truck was deploying, with its men in yellow slickers hurrying this way and that. But they weren’t raising the ladder yet, and that was absolutely all he had a mind to see.

  ‘Dad!’ Maeve was pointing.

  A police helicopter approached like a killer Apache run from Nam, coming in just above the roofs and blinding him for a moment with its big Nite-Sun beam that swept over him.

  ‘Yeah, I see it.’

  Gloria was done with her rant on the cell phone and started toward them.

  ‘Close the door!’ Jack Liffey shouted. All they needed was a heat flue to suck the fire upward.

  Gloria went back and shouldered it shut. Several of their group began waving frantically to the approaching helicopter, as if it might miss them and fly straight past. He glanced down again and the firemen still hadn’t begun to raise their ladder.

  Conor squatted against the parapet, writing fast in his notebook, amazed that he’d found so much focus and intensity. He knew it was a way of trying to control his gathering dread, but it was better than letting fear take hold.

  Day 7 later still

  How does memory work? Last semester we read a book about it in Social Studies. It said memory was like cubby holes where images you’ve seen are stored away. You can get it all back, if you have to, with hypnosis or just superior recall – like one of those autistic savants, human telephone books. I don’t think so. I argued with Mr LaRue that memory isn’t like that at all. I’d seen too much self-deception. And Dad had just written a weird article on the chemistry of memory that was pretty hard to follow, but it convinced me that memory was really an active thing.