I called down. “What happened?”
My father turned. “Donna had an accident. We’ll handle it.”
I didn’t know what it was about but I’d heard the conversation between her and Roy and it seemed to me that he was entitled to know she was hurt, so I crept upstairs and called him.
He was there in five minutes. My father talked with him on the porch for a long time before they came back in.
Roy walked up to Donna and gently placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
She shrank from him as though she was afraid and I thought that strange. My mother jerked her head toward the door.
He took two quick steps before my father caught his arm.
“That’s my job,” he said.
They stared at each other. Roy shrugged. “This is no time to argue about it. We’ll both go.”
My father turned toward the stairs. “I’ll be right down.”
I didn’t know where they were going, but I sure as hell was going along. I frantically pulled a pair of pants over my pajamas and thrust my feet into my sneakers as I heard a closet door in my parents’ room open, the rattle as a box was shifted, and I peered from the door until my father passed, a gleam of metal in his belt. I followed.
He turned once on the porch, his voice harsh. “You stay home, George.”
That was one time I had no intention of obeying and when the headlights of the car turned up the street, I leaped from the steps and began running.
The taillights were already fifty yards ahead of me but there were only two places for them to end up, at the mill or at Brady’s house, neither of which was very far away and a car couldn’t get there very much more quickly than a kid running hard.
I was running as fast as I ever had in my life when there was a low rumble and the sky ahead flashed as if from lightning and then there was another roar, louder, and the sky started to turn red, the glow blossoming slowly until it lighted the street before me.
Gasping for breath, my legs trembling, I arrived with the town’s one fire engine, along with the first of the crowd that piled up behind me.
The mill was more than a hundred years old, built beside the river, the offices facing the street at the front of the long building. Alongside was a paved area, both sides used for parking, a center aisle leading to the loading docks at the rear.
When automobiles first replaced horses and wagons, service stations were few and far between and the owner of the mill had installed a single gasoline pump at the front of the paved area as a company perquisite for his executives. It was a custom that disappeared very quickly elsewhere, but at the mill it had become a tradition that my father unsuccessfully tried to end every time the pump was updated.
I didn’t have to be there to know someone had done what my father had always been afraid of — swung too wide through the entrance gate and sheared that pump completely off. The car had ricocheted off the brick wall, spun, and wedged itself into the side employees’ entrance before exploding and spraying flaming gasoline and setting the entire building afire. Even though the interior had been remodeled many times, those century-old floors and beams burned too quickly for the sprinkler system and the one piece of fire equipment to handle.
The burning car told me who it had been. Brady.
With Brady’s car jamming the employees’ entrance, the people of the second shift were trapped inside. The only way out was through the windows on this side, those facing the river, or through the shipping doors at the rear. They were already open, people streaming out, smoke billowing above their heads.
I saw my father emerge from the confusion and, without thinking, ran into the yard after him. It was a hellish scene, lighted by the fire, two feeble spotlights on the engine, and the monotonous sweeping of the rotating red lights on the two police cars. The heat from the burning building was intense, almost unbearable, the noise deafening. I tugged at his sleeve the way kids do when they’re scared and want reassurance that everything will be all right.
Fear for me in his eyes, I could see him yell words I took to be get the hell out of here, George. Hurt, I stepped back. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders tightly, his face softening.
He glanced up at the burning building, the softness wiped out suddenly by a sad resignation and pain, hugged me fiercely, and said something I couldn’t hear. He pulled the .45 from his waist, slapped it into my palm as though passing on a baton or standard, and literally threw me toward the safety of the street.
I dodged through the firemen and turned to watch.
Through the smoke, I saw him at the wheel of his car, bumping over the fire hoses. He spun in a tight turn and smashed into the rear of Brady’s burning car, backed away and hit it again. And again. And cleared the doorway as the paint on his car began to blister.
The firemen immediately played a spray of water on the entrance and my father and Roy dashed in. They were out in seconds, each half-carrying a man the firemen hurried the rest of the way to safety. Neither hesitated as they went back into the flaming hell of the building twice more to carry men out, but no one defies the odds forever and what stays in my mind is that they had to know that and went anyway.
The third time the old mortar holding the brick wall together yielded to the heat and the wall collapsed without warning, sealing them inside.
My throat went too tight for tears and I knelt there numb; moaning around me, screaming around me, people sobbing, people choking, the heat on my face fierce even at that distance and then I saw Brady, slumped against a police cruiser, so drunk his head lolled, so drunk he was smiling and the only pleasure that night ever gave me was seeing the deep scratches running down the side of his face. Donna had fought well.
Six months later, my mother died, as much a victim of the fire as the people who had died in it, so the three of them were buried here together, Roy in one of the spaces my father had planned for either Donna or me when he bought the plot. Donna and I never discussed doing anything else. Roy had not only earned it, he had almost become one of the family, and we both knew we could never live our lives out in Monroe.
Donna and I went together to go through Roy’s things at Mrs. Thurlow’s. The backpack hadn’t held much. The most important thing was a folder Donna took. She never did tell me what was inside except that Roy had no next of kin, but a military chest ribbon slipped out and fell to the floor. The colors burned themselves into my mind, and years later I learned it was a Silver Star.
Nothing much was said about what Brady had done to her, the rape lost in the larger tragedy. No one outside the family was told except Sam. Sam was my friend. I told him everything.
Brady was tried and convicted on a half-dozen counts but never spent a day in prison because of his father’s money and influence. The mill was never rebuilt. Monroe, like many other one-industry towns, faded, and was only now beginning to recover because it was a nice place to live and newer, high-speed highways made commuting to work easier and faster.
That fall Donna left for the state university she had never intended to attend, while I moved in with Sam’s family until I finished high school. Donna came back once, for my graduation and because that was the year she turned twenty-one and there were papers to be signed at the family attorney’s office. We both left the next day, she in her car and well ahead of me as though she couldn’t wait to get out of town, me in mine following reluctantly because it was difficult to leave Sam, more like a brother now than a friend. We had the summer to settle in before I started my freshman year and she finished up as a senior.
She hadn’t been back since. I tried to visit the graves each year on the anniversary of the fire.
Headlights on, a police car crunched gravel as it slowly rolled toward me.