Westside, page 18
“It’s insanity. You’ve already lost three. Don’t throw these others away.”
“I have to, Gilda,” he said, low enough that only I could hear how sick he felt. “These boys are going no matter what I do. Only Barbie can turn them back.”
“Where is she?”
“Like a true leader, she’s bringing up the rear.”
He tipped his head, and raised his sword, and spun on his heel without saying goodbye. I shoved my way through the army, exposing my arms to sweat, war paint, spilled liquor, and the awful bristle of pubescent moustaches, and found Barbarossa, flush with liquor, surrounded by her honor guard, all the way at the back.
“Gilda, Gilda, Gilda!” she cried. “The daughter I never had. Come to watch the festivities?”
“Call it off.”
“You’re too late. Can’t you hear them singing? You’d have an easier time calling off a typhoon.”
“It’s not Van Alen who stole your guns. It’s Thorne.”
“That can’t be.”
“Where is he?”
“He got too drunk at the war council. We left him slumped in his chair.”
“Find him. String him up if you have to. The man killed Galen Copeland. He lied to your face. He pushed you into this war. Stop it now, or you’re giving him just what he wants.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Is it true you loved my father?”
“Like no one could ever know.”
“Thorne was the one who betrayed him. Now he’s done the same to you.”
“Eddie Thorne barely has the ingenuity to button his own pants.”
“I can find him for you. You can stop this fight.”
“I gave you till midnight, didn’t I? It’s fifteen minutes gone. This army does not turn back.”
“Then at least choose somewhere else to cross. Van Alen’s expecting you. He’s put every guardsman he has right at Eighth Avenue.”
“You sold us out, did you?”
“I was trying to save a few lives.”
“And why? For what purpose?”
“They are children!”
“What death could you offer these boys better than a fight on the Borderline? You’re as stupid as your . . . never mind.” A tremor went through her, and her skin went pale. From her belt she pulled a dented flask. A long pull put the color back into her cheeks. She tossed the flask to me. From her left boot she drew a long, curved knife. “Drink, dear, and enjoy the show. This will be the best brawl the Westside’s seen in ages. If I see your daddy tonight, I’ll give him both our love.”
I stopped, and she kept walking. I tore off the top of the flask and dumped her liquor down my throat. It was good whiskey, as smooth as fire can get, and I drank it like water.
As they reached the Borderline, Barbarossa’s boys stopped singing and let out a ragged cheer. They were children playing dress-up, but they would bleed like men. At Barbarossa’s word, they charged across the broken glass, throwing rocks and swinging chains, and the guardsmen laid them flat with their clubs. Some of the guardsmen held back, unable to strike a child, and they were rewarded with knives in the gut. Van Alen’s guards were well drilled and well equipped, but the Lower West had the numbers, and the suicidal enthusiasm of youth. It would be a close fight.
I closed my eyes and heard metal on metal, metal on skin, and bodies falling on glass. The fire-watchers beneath Van Alen’s brazier tossed flaming coals at the charging boys, perfuming the air with singed flesh. A guardsman made the mistake of chasing two Swamp Angels into the darkness. They turned on him and buried knives in his neck. He mumbled a half-coherent snatch of the Lord’s Prayer and died in the street.
When her first attack was repulsed, Barbarossa roared for another charge, and from the top of his coach, Van Alen roared right back. The boys held their weapons above their heads and plunged back into the fray. As he’d promised, Cherub Stevens led the pack. I tried to tell myself that this wasn’t my fault, that they were dying for something better than a missing leather glove. I couldn’t make myself believe.
First from the east, then from the south, the cry of sirens echoed off the buildings. The battle became more frantic, as the armies of the Upper and Lower West fought to finish their business before the police arrived to spoil the fun. But I soon saw it wasn’t paddy wagons that were screaming toward the intersection. It was fire trucks—vintage models, drawn by horses far less majestic than Van Alen’s and dragged out of storage for a purpose I could not understand.
One stopped behind me, nearly close enough to touch. The men leapt off the sides, unspooled the hoses, and struggled to work the pumps. The way they fumbled with their equipment showed that these were not the brave men of Engine Company Eighteen. They wore the tattered blue of the Fourth Precinct. Every one had a pistol in his belt, and a few had rifles too. Thorne rode on top of the contraption, rifle slung over his shoulder like he was leading a hunt. I’d never seen him standing so tall.
They got the hoses working and trained them on Van Alen’s fire. Steam hissed over the battleground, a sickening gray cloud that swallowed the armies of both sides even as black descended. The guards on the platform struggled against the water, throwing what fuel they had left on the dying blaze, but in less than a minute, the fight was lost. The fire died, and night surged up the avenue.
As the water swallowed the last embers, I saw Barbarossa in silhouette, one of Van Alen’s guardsmen kneeling at her feet. She clutched his hair in her fist, pressed that curved knife to his throat, and pulled until she hit spine. She wrenched his head back like it was on a hinge and sawed against the bone, and the darkness was total.
I ran. I had no choice. I pushed past the cops and ran north to find Cherub Stevens, because I did not have the strength to let another friend die. I called his name, but my voice was lost amid the sizzling of the dead fire and the whimpering of a thousand frightened children.
Thorne’s men opened fire. What happened next, I saw in the light of their muzzle flashes—jets of flame that beat the night back just long enough to show a little scene of hell. A bullet burst through the throat of a blue-eyed boy and sailed on into the crowd. Flash. Another clipped a guardsman on the arm and caught a second in the eye. Flash. Two boys dropped their weapons and were cut down as they raised their hands in surrender. Flash. I did not know what gangs they fought for. Their standards were gone; their uniforms were stained with blood. They were just children now.
It was like a flipbook. With each flash, I saw a little more. A guard’s left leg raised, then his right, then his left, then he was dead. With each burst of light, the crowd grew closer to panic, until Lower and Upper forgot their division and united in a desire to get away from the men with the guns. But there was nowhere for them to go. No matter how bright the rifle fire, the light could not penetrate the shadows of the Borderline. There was a wall of darkness about to crash down.
A little hand grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me into the crowd. It was Roach, still clutching the standard of the One-Eyed Cats. At the edge of the massacre, we found Cherub Stevens, waving his saber, trying to rally his men.
“One-Eyed Cats!” he shouted, his voice broken, his ankle twisted, a horrible bloody gash running down his chest. “To me!”
“I found her,” said Roach, and Cherub smiled that marvelous smile, and the shadows swallowed us whole. The icy black knocked the wind from my chest and forced my eyes shut, and for a long moment there was nothing I could do but try to catch my breath. When I opened my eyes, light was dark, dark was light, and the battle had gone silent.
Cherub’s mouth hung open. He might have been screaming, or he might simply have been in shock at the impossible scene. Behind him, stretching down the white pavement of Fourteenth Street, an army marched beneath the bone-gray sky. Clothes tattered, skin liquid smoke, eyes flickering white fire. There were hundreds of them, those ghouls, those creatures of the shadows: newsies and cops, priests and streetwalkers, gangsters and debutantes and every other specimen of humanity the city had to offer. They held their arms open to embrace the routed soldiers. They swallowed them in white smoke and turned the boys to their side. Inch by inch, they grew closer. I would not let them have us.
I seized Cherub by the wrist, held tight to Roach’s hand, and dragged them away from the dark. Shoving through the retreating mob was like swimming against the Hudson current. It took all the strength I had to keep from being picked up and carried along by the wave. I fought to take one step, then another, and another, but no matter how hard I worked, it seemed we had not gotten anywhere, and death was closing in.
If there had only been some noise, I thought. If I could have heard them at my back, instead of just knowing they were there. If I just could have screamed, to release the pressure that had been building on my chest for the last minute, day, week, then I might have been light enough to flee.
Somehow, at last, we reached the base of Van Alen’s great brazier. We pressed our backs against it, and for a moment we could breathe. I looked back the way we’d come, at the soldiers disappearing into the impenetrable white night, at the thousands of dead and vanished who had come to take their revenge on the fighting boys of the Westside. How many of those white-eyed people had I met, or spoken to, or even just seen? How many of my neighbors marched in that regiment of ghouls? A question that large could never be answered, but the fact that I was asking it meant that I was still alive, that even in this hellish underworld, a girl could find a few seconds to think, that she could take control.
Thorne and his men stood at the edge of the intersection in their ragged line, picking off the stragglers and the boys too frozen to run, their weapons belching white fire. I pointed that way. Cherub shook his head, that old look that said, “Gilda, this is madness, but I know we’ll be doing it anyway,” and my god—I may have smiled.
Roach bolted, and we followed, the syrupy paralysis we had felt before forgotten. There were not more than a few dozen men left standing between us and the ghouls, men who had fallen to their knees in supplication or despair, waiting to be taken and destroyed. We did not have time to wait.
Rifle fire cut down a man kneeling in front of us. He tried to stand, to run, but he was too weak to move. I leapt over his body, but the boys were as useless as ever. The dying man grabbed Roach by the ankle, and Cherub stumbled trying to get him free.
“Get up!” I screamed, but no one heard. The ghouls were nearly on us. Cherub kicked the dying man in the face and took Roach by the hand, but the smoke was on him first. Three of them—two old men and a boy no older than Roach himself—their eyes flickering, their twisted tendrils snaking up Roach’s legs, pulled hard, but Cherub would not let go. It was a desperate tug-of-war, and I ended it. I grabbed Cherub tight around the waist, and I yanked hard, and I forced him to let Roach go.
Their hands—or what should have been their hands—snaked up Roach’s body, flooding his gaping mouth and scraping out his eyes. As he died, or came as close to death as this world would let him, he looked more frightened and more sad than any boy should ever be.
Cherub, broken, let me lead him. I dragged him across the blood-wet asphalt and lined us up in front of the policemen and their guns. They could not see us. They were back in the real world and had the luxury of blindness to the horrors that lay in the dark.
They pressed their rifles against their shoulders and leveled the barrels at our chests. They peered down the sights. They pulled the triggers.
We died, and we came home.
The police were, understandably, surprised. From what they had seen, we had appeared out of the night. If they had fired again, they could have killed us, but they had other things on their mind. Behind us, where the battle had been, where a thousand had vanished, there was a wall of darkness. Inside that darkness lay living death. I knew it, and Thorne, curiously, knew it too.
“The light!” he cried, and two of his men put torches to a pile of gasoline-soaked firewood on the back of one of their wagons. Flames exploded, and the shadows were beaten back. We shoved through the line of cops. If they’d cared, they could have stopped us, but there was liquor on their breath and blood in the air. They had done enough for the night.
We walked home through simple, ordinary darkness, far more inviting than the horror that lay behind. The smell of death faded, to be covered up by the hot, sweet, Westside night.
“Why don’t these shadows jump?” he said. “Why don’t they swallow us? Why don’t they take us . . . there?”
“I think . . . I think the hungry shadows are drawn by blood.”
“Like sharks.”
“Kill one man, and you attract a few of those ghouls. Kill a hundred . . .”
“And you get an army. How did you get us out?”
“It’s like a dream—die in it, and you wake up.”
“Is there any way to get . . . if someone was left behind there . . .”
“How should I know? This was my father’s sort of mystery. Not mine.”
It was a nasty thing to say, and I tried to mean it, but as the words hung in the air, all I could see was the look on Roach’s face when I left him to die. He hadn’t looked angry. He’d looked surprised—unable to understand how badly Miss Carr and the chief had let him down.
After that, Cherub was silent. From Eighth Avenue to Bleecker to Charles Street. Across Seventh, right at Waverly, past Sixth Avenue, and then just a block back to Washington Square. By the time we got back to the park, the night was melting into gray. His jaw was clenched, and tears had worn tracks in the matted soot and blood that stained his face.
“What will you do?” I said.
“I’m going to kill Edward Thorne.”
“It won’t fix anything.”
“I don’t care.”
“They’ll shoot you down before you get within fifty feet of him.”
“That would suit me fine.”
“Do nothing. For a day or two. Go back to the pet shop. Eat. Sleep. Rest. I’ll fix it.”
“Gilda, damn you—I thought I was supposed to be the childish one. The world is ruined. The Westside is broken, and nothing will fix that. Nothing will ever be good again.”
I wanted something clever to say, something to make him smile in spite of himself. Nothing came to mind. We stepped off the sidewalk into the mossy street, and the quiet was broken by screams, faint and piercing. They came from the far side of the park, and they came in Swedish.
I ran, and Cherub stumbled after me. The night’s horrors were not through with us yet.
The top floor of the house had blown away like smoke. Below, where the vines were thickest, my home was putting up a fight it could not win. Hairline cracks shot from the foundation up through the brick. The stone shattered, but the windows could not be broken. I knew that immediately, because Hellida was on the first floor, banging on the glass with my father’s favorite reading chair, and no one in New York was stronger than Hellida when she was angry.
The gate was latched and would not open for me. I hopped over it, and Cherub called after me, but the breeze had turned into a tornado, and I couldn’t make out the words.
I tried to jerk open my front door. The knob, white hot, burned my hands.
“Where’s your goddamned sword?” I screamed at Cherub, my words lost in the wind.
Something thudded against the window—Hellida’s crepe pan. She retrieved it, ran deep into the parlor, spun, and let it go, hard enough that it should have shattered the glass and sailed all the way across the park. But the window would not yield.
The second floor followed the third into the shadows. All that remained was the dust-covered wood. The vines flopped across the second story—my father’s office, and the room where my mother left this world—and squeezed. The cracks in the brownstone opened wider, and from them poured inky black light.
The thudding stopped, and above the wind I heard Hellida scream my name.
She ran her finger across the window. The house began to split. As the room melted around her, she did not wince and did not cry. She simply disappeared.
A final gust blew me down the steps, which were gone by the time I opened my eyes. Cherub and I stood in an empty lot, overgrown with a decade’s moss and vines, just glowing pink in the light of dawn.
I clawed at the dirt, looking for some sign of my home, screaming through my blackened fingers until my voice choked down to nothing, and Cherub pulled me away. Even the foundation was gone.
Twelve
It was a putrid Sunday at Ebbets Field, and the Giants were down by three. I hated the Dodgers, I hated their fans, and I hated Ebbets Field—a cramped, meaningless little ballpark that struck me as Brooklyn personified: stunted, scrawny, ugly, and rude. I shifted in the hard wooden seat and tried to understand why I was there.
I wasn’t entirely sure how I got to Brooklyn. As the sun rose on my vanished home, I lay on my back in the dirt until the cold seeped through my clothes and I had to stand or go numb. I forced Cherub to go back to his pet shop and wandered west until I reached Bedford Street, where Bex Red lived in the narrowest home in New York, a three-story scarlet town house that was barely wide enough to hold its own front door. I knocked only once before the door opened, and she swept me into her arms, in a dressing gown sticky with plaster and lime.
“I heard the shots,” she said. “I saw the fires. Come inside. I’ll feed you some whiskey.”
Past the door was a stack of accordions. Eight feet wide and forty long, Bex’s first floor stored watering cans, cracked mirrors, wilted plants, typewriters, rosaries, vases, taxidermy, cellos, inaccurate globes, and poorly made pots. They were artifacts rescued from the homes of the vanished, kept by Bex in tribute until the constraints of the space forced her to make room for more.
“You don’t want an accordion, do you?”
I couldn’t say a word. I followed her through the stacks of neatly organized refuse to the second floor, where she thrust a glass of rye into my hand.
“It’s not Boulton’s,” she said. “Apologies.”
