“Get out.”
“I’m not leaving until you give it to me.”
“I said get out!”
Miriam charged out of the room, pushed the intruder out of her path. As she started up the stairs, she felt hands try to grab her around the ankles.
“I want what’s mine!”
“Get the fuck out of here!” Miriam screamed.
Her pursuer tried to overtake her on the stairs, came up alongside her, grabbed at Miriam’s hair to slow her down.
Miriam’s head jerked up briefly, and she lost her balance. She made a grab for the railing, but missed it.
Her body pitched backward, seemed almost suspended in midair for a second before she hit the stairs.
A sound of something snapping.
Miriam’s head rested on the bottom step, the rest of her body splayed awkwardly on the stairs.
“No! God, no! You’re not dead! You’re not dead!”
Miriam, in not replying, seemed to be suggesting otherwise.
Forty-five
A fireman named Darrell let me go up to my apartment to grab a few things. I didn’t notice any actual damage, but an acrid smell overwhelmed the place. The gas had been turned off, so I wouldn’t have been able to cook anything — not that I ever did, anyway — and the power had been turned off to the building as well. I tossed a change of clothes into a small travel bag. From the kitchen, I got a small freezer bag, which I stuffed with my toothbrush and toothpaste and half a dozen other things from the bathroom. I found an extra pair of socks and underwear and tossed it all into a backpack.
Took about three minutes.
Before heading up, I had told the police everything I could about what I’d seen, which was not a lot. I’m usually good with cars, but telling a Ford pickup from a Chevy pickup, from the side, when it’s moving fast, was not among my skills. All I knew with any certainty was that the truck was black and there was some rust around the rear wheel wells. An older model, judging by how loud and rough the engine sounded. The person who threw the Molotov cocktail was male, white, blondish hair, probably early twenties.
And I remembered what he’d said: “Fucking terrorist!”
I felt sick for Naman. The flames had spread from one stack of books to another, and were licking at the ceiling by the time the trucks arrived. But they had water on the fire before it had done any significant structural damage. The place, as bad as it looked, was not going to fall down. Naman, disbelieving, surveyed his burned and water-damaged stock.
“I’m finished,” he said to me when I reappeared with my stuffed backpack.
“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’ll get this all cleaned up. You’ll be open again in no time.”
“The water seeped through the floor. Hundreds of books in the basement, ruined. I should never have called it Naman’s Books. I should have had a sign that said ‘Used Books,’ that’s all.”
I didn’t know what to say. All I could come up with was “It was a couple of assholes, Naman. The whole town isn’t like that.”
He turned his head slowly to look at me. “Is that what you think? That the man who did this, that he’s an anomaly? That that kind of racism is rare? You have no idea.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t sense it, that I don’t feel it. Maybe I’ve never been firebombed before, but you think I don’t hear whispers behind my back? You know how long I have lived here, in America? More than forty years. I am an American.” He waved his hand toward the street. “I have taught these people’s children. I have worked with these kids, encouraged them, shaped them, cried with them, helped make them good, decent citizens. I have always paid my taxes. I have sent boxes and boxes of free books to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is my thanks. I am a terrorist. How would you feel about this town if you knew you’d given your whole life to it, and this is how it pays you back?”
He was looking me hard in the eye, and I held his gaze. I said, “You have my cell. If there’s anything you need, call me. Okay?”
Naman said nothing. He turned around, bent over, picked up the now singed and waterlogged copy of The Blue Hammer that he’d been reading earlier.
I decided it made the most sense to stay with my sister, Celeste, at least for tonight. I didn’t know how many days it would be before I’d be able to get back into my apartment, and I might need to rent a motel room. But Celeste had already offered to let me stay with her, even if her husband, Dwayne, was not crazy about the idea. I’d insist she take some money from me. What with the town cutting back on the work it contracted Dwayne’s paving company to do, there wasn’t much money coming in.
I parked out front, grabbed my backpack, and trudged up the two steps to the front door. I was about to knock when I caught sight of Celeste and Dwayne sitting on the couch together. She had her arm around him, and at first I thought they were making out. Kind of sweet, I thought, for a couple married as long as they had been.
Then I realized I was seeing something very different.
Dwayne’s shoulders were hunched over, his head down and propped up on his palms.
The man was crying.
Celeste must have noticed my shadow at the window. She looked my way and caught my eye. She whispered something to her husband, got up, and came to the door. She opened it and slipped outside.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was about to knock and saw—”
“It’s okay,” my sister said. “What’s with the bag?”
“Never mind, don’t worry about it.”
“You want to stay here tonight?”
“There was a fire. At the bookstore. Some yahoos tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window.”
“What?”
I explained the likely motivations of the idiots in the pickup truck.
“Of course you can stay here,” she said.
“No, I don’t think so. Looks like you’re dealing with something.”
She moved me toward the far end of the porch, away from the door. “He’s falling apart.”
“I figured.”
“I mean, I’m worried, too, you know. About how much longer we’re going to be able to pay the bills. But we’ll manage somehow, right? Maybe it’s just as well we never had kids. Think how much worse this would be if we had mouths to feed. But it’s just us — we’ll get through. But no matter how much I tell Dwayne that, he’s just not hearing me. The stress of it’s killing him. It goes right to the heart of who he is, being able to look after me. Hey, I can get more hours if I have to, but it’s been wearing him down for a long time.”
“I have money,” I said.
She put a hand on my arm. “Cal.”
“No, really. I have some. Enough to get you through a couple of weeks, anyway.”
She went up on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good brother. You really are.”
“If there’s anything I can—”
The front door opened. Dwayne said, “What’s going on here?”
“Cal just dropped by.”
Dwayne looked at the backpack I’d left on the porch. “What the hell is this? You’re bunking in with us?”
“No,” I said. He’d wiped his eyes, but I could see where tears had been running down his cheeks.
“I don’t have enough problems? I gotta take people in?”
“Dwayne, Jesus,” Celeste said. “It’s okay.”
“You know, Cal,” Dwayne said, “you had some awful shit happen to you. I get that. Your wife and your kid, what happened to them, that’s a tough break. But we got problems, too, you know? You can’t be coming around here all the time bringing us down.”
“Shut your mouth,” Celeste said. “God, just stop it.”