The Night of the Fire (excerpt)

When I was six years old, the house across the street from ours burned down. House fires were not uncommon in our neighborhood in Queens, but previous fires had been far away, with only the cry of distant sirens and the sweet smell of the remnant smoke to disturb our equilibrium. On this occasion, policemen knocked loudly on our door and ordered us to stand outside in preparation for an evacuation. It seemed the fire was threatening to raze the dense, incongruent building patterns that formed the streetscape of Roosevelt: houses, grocery stores, restaurants, bars, movie theaters, offices, libraries and churches all in a disorderly line, huddled one against another as if jostling for position on the grimy concrete. Even the garbage strewn along the streets – candy wrappers, cigarette butts, old newspapers, rotten food, tread-worn tires, empty cans and bottles – offered fuel for the flames. Adding to the danger were fuel and electrical lines feeding the elevated train system that carried commuters high above the streets on steel beams covered in graffiti and the excrement of those daredevil pigeons that flew under the track bed and between the trestles.

That night, the temperatures dropped below freezing. My mother dressed Alexia and me as if we were going to school or church. She pulled us from our beds and put us in wool coats, hats, face masks, scarves, gloves and boots before dragging us down the stairs. My father was already standing outside. He had walked around the neighborhood several times to get information from policemen and other neighbors about the fire’s likely path. He reported that things looked bleak. “Hurry, hurry, the boiler across the street exploded, and the fire is going to take it all.” He yelled for my mother, who was dragging my sister and me down the stairs as she prayed, her words almost soundless as they leached into wisps of frozen air. My mother often prayed this way – to herself – when she felt most scared, or when we would get lost in Harlem or the Bronx during one of our rare Sunday drives in my father’s Audi as nightfall blanketed his never-reliable sense of direction.

That night we stood downstairs, on the steps of our walkup, staring in disbelief at the burning house across the street. Our neighborhood had lost its familiar look and feel: emergency vehicles crisscrossed the thickly drawn yellow lines of the four-lane highway in front of our home; men in uniforms crowded streets and sidewalks; dazed neighbors roamed around in pajamas, slippers and unbuttoned coats while tongues of sporadic orange flame licked at and consumed the house that had always seemed as unexceptional as all the others on the street, then ballooned and distended towards the sky, the elevated trains and neighboring houses.

        

    “The danger is in the fuel lines. Can’t you smell it?” Capote asked my sister and me.

I nodded my head slowly. An odor of fuel was ever-present in our neighborhood; there was no greenery on our streets to mask it. In the spring and summer, warmer temperatures gave the train fuel a harshness that hung in the air like a musty blanket; in the fall and winter, the mix of cool air and petroleum gave off a heady, full-bodied scent. No matter the season, the smell evoked a sense of perpetual motion, of the urgent comings and goings of trains as they passed overhead along Roosevelt Avenue on their way to Forest Hills in one direction and Grand Central station, in Manhattan, in the other.

“Everything will go if the flames reach the fuel lines,” my father explained breathlessly. “Then we’ll have to get in our cars and drive as fast and far as we can.” 

“Basta,” my mother said, trying to still his interruption of her prayers, but his imagination was running wild and he wanted us to feel his excitement.

“This reminds me of the great Chicago fire,” he continued, “that started in a factory, traveled with the wind and went across the river until the whole city burned down. That could happen here today.”

“Basta!” my mother said again, more shrilly this time.

Capote allowed himself the last word. “Goddamn beautiful, isn’t it?”

I shivered. My sister’s head fell to one side in sleep as we continued to wait out the fire while it made up its mind whether to let itself be contained or to force us to flee in Capote’s blue Audi. It did not seem to me the wisest course – to have everyone encapsulated in gasoline tanks on wheels, trying to outrun a fireball that reached up to the sky and was spreading fast with the help of the railway track – but no one could quite bring themselves to question the fine details of father’s escape plan. He was too wrapped up in the spectacle of the house being consumed across the way to have been receptive to any dissenting voice.

    Just as quickly as it began, the fire was doused. Emergency vehicles dispersed, and our sleepy neighbors were ordered through hand-held megaphones to return to their homes. No one spoke about the people who had lived in the wrecked house. Every morning, en route to school, I had noticed a woman, who lived in the house, walking several children to P.S. 19, the elementary school Alexia and I attended. We all walked side by side, separated by the four-line highway between our sidewalks, until we simultaneously reached the school, a few blocks from our respective homes. Later, when I asked my mother what happened to the children who lived in the ravaged house, she stifled my curiosity with an insistent “Shh!” I was too young, to her way of thinking, to become acquainted with death