'Presently I was able to get to my knees, then to my feet. And I seen these shapes running off toward the greenbelt. At first I thought they were ghosts, and then I seen shoes. By then it was so bright around the Black Spot it was like daylight. I seen shoes and understood it was men wearin sheets. One of them had fallen a little bit behind the others and I saw . . . "
He trailed off, licking his lips.
'What did you see, Daddy?' I asked.
'Never you mind,' he said. 'Give me my water, Mikey.'
I did. He drank most of it and then got coughing. A passing nurse looked in and said: 'Do you need anything, Mr Hanlon?'
'New set of 'testines,' my dad said. 'You got any handy, Rhoda?'
She smiled a nervous, doubtful smile and passed on. My dad handed the glass to me and I put it back on his table. 'It's longer tellin than it is rememberin,' he said. 'You goan fill that glass up for me before you leave?'
'Sure, Daddy.'
'This story goan give you nightmares, Mikey?'
I opened my mouth to lie, and then thought better of it. And I think now that if I had lied, he would have stopped right there. He was far gone by then, but maybe not that far gone.
'I guess so,' I said.
That's not such a bad thing,' he said to me. 'In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.'
He reached out his hand and I took it and we held hands while he finished.
'I looked around just in time to see Trev and Dick goin around the front of the building, and I chased after them, still trying to catch m'wind. There was maybe forty or fifty people out there, some of them cryin, some of them pukin, some of them screamin, some of them doing all three things at once, it seemed like. Others were layin on the grass, fainted dead away with the smoke. The door was shut, and we heard people screamin on the other side, screamin to let them out, out for the love of Jesus, they were burning up.
'It was the only door, except for the one that went out through the kitchen to where the garbage cans and things were, you see. To go in you pushed the door open. To go out you had to pull it.
'Some people had gotten out, and then they started to jam up at that door and push. The door got slammed shut. The ones in the back kept pushin forward to get away from the fire, and everybody got jammed up. The ones right up front were squashed. Wasn't no way they could get that door open against the weight of all those behind. So there they were, trapped, and the fire raged.
'It was Trev Dawson that made it so it was only eighty or so that died instead of a hundred or maybe two hundred, and what he got for his pains wasn't a medal but two years in the Rye stockade. See, right about then this big old cargo truck pulled up, and who should be behind the wheel but my old friend Sergeant Wilson, the fella who owned all the holes there on the base.
'He gets out and starts shoutin orders that didn't make much sense and which people couldn't hear anyway. Trev grabbed my arm and we run over to him. I'd lost all track of Dick Hallorann by then and didn't even see him until the next day.
'Sergeant, I have to use your truck!' Trev yells in his face.
'"Get out of my way, nigger," Wilson says, and pushes him down. Then he starts yelling all that confused shit again. Wasn't nobody paying any attention to him, and he didn't go on for long anyway, because Trevor Dawson popped up like a jack-in –the –box and decked him.
'Trev could hit damned hard, and almost any other man would have stayed down, but that cracker had a hard head. He got up, blood pouring out of his mouth and nose, and he said, "I'm goan kill you for that." Well, Trev hit him in the belly just as hard as he could, and when he doubled over I put my hands together and pounded the back of his neck just as hard as 7 could. It was a cowardly thing to do, hitting a man from behind like that, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And I would be lyin, Mikey, if I didn't tell you that hitting that poormouth sonofabitch didn't give me a bit of pleasure.
'Down he went, just like a steer hit with a poleaxe. Trev run to the truck, fired it up, and drove it around so it was facin the front of the Black Spot, but to the left of the door. He th'owed it into first, popped the clutch on that cocksucker, and here he come!
'"Look out there!" I shouted at that crowd of people standing around. 'Ware that truck!"
'They scattered like quail, and for a wonder Trev didn't hit none of em. He hit the side of the building going maybe thirty, and cracked his face a good one on the steerin wheel of the truck. I seen the blood fly from his nose when he shook his head to clear it. He punched out reverse, backed up fifty yards, and come down on her again. WHAM! The Black Spot wasn't nothing but corrugated tin, and that second hit did her. The whole side of that oven fell in and the flames come roarin out. How anything could have still been alive in there I don't know, but there was. People are a lot tougher than you'd believe, Mikey, and if you don't believe it, just take a look at me, slidin off the skin of the world by my fingernails. That place was like a smelting furnace, it was a hell of flames and smoke, but people came running out in a regular torrent. There were so many that Trev didn't even dare back the truck up again for fear he would run over some of them. So he got out and ran back to me, leaving it where it was.
'We stood there, watching it end. It hadn't been five minutes all told, but xxxit felt like forever. The last dozen or so that made it out were on fire. People grabbed em and started to roll em around on the ground, trying to put em out. Looking in, we could see other people trying to come, and we knew they wasn't never going to make it.
Trev grabbed my hand and I grabbed him back twice as hard. We stood there holding hands just like you and me are doing now, Mikey, him with his nose broke and blood running down his face and his eyes puffing shut, and we watched them people. They were the real ghosts we saw that night, nothing but shimmers shaped like men and women in that fire, walking toward the opening Trev had bashed with Sergeant Wilson's truck. Some of em had their arms held out, like they expected someone to save them. The others just walked, but they didn't seem to get nowhere. Their clo'es were blazin. Their faces were runnin. And one after another they just toppled over and you didn't see them no more.
'The last one was a woman. Her dress had burned off her and there she was in her slip. Sh e was burnin like a candle. She seemed to look right at me at the end, and I seen her eyelids was on fire.
'When she fell down it was over. The whole place went up in a pillar of fire. By the time the base firetrucks and two more from the Main Street fire station got there, it was already burning itself out. That was the fire at the Black Spot, Mikey.'
He drank the last of his water and handed me the glass to fill at the drinking fountain in the hall. 'Goan piss the bed tonight I guess, Mikey.'
I kissed his cheek and then went out into the hall to fill his glass. When I returned, he was drifting away again, his eyes glassy and contemplative. When I put the glass on the nighttable, he mumbled a thank-you I could barely understand. I looked at the Westclox on his table and saw it was almost eight. Time for me to go home.
I leaned over to kiss him goodbye . . . and instead heard myself whisper, 'What did you see?'
His eyes, which were now slipping shut, barely turned toward the sound of my voice. He might have known it was me, or he might have believed he was hearing the voice of his own thoughts. 'Hunk?'
'The thing you saw,' I whispered. I didn't want to hear, but I had to hear. I was both hot and cold, my eyes burning, my hands freezing. But I had to hear. As I suppose Lot's wife had to turn back and look at the destruction of Sodom.