Jonathan Maberry
Pegleg and Paddy Save the World
I know what you’ve heard but Pat O’Leary’s cow didn’t have nothing to do with it. Not like they said in the papers. The way them reporters put it you’d thought the damn cow was playing with matches. I mean, sure, it started in the cowshed, but that cow was long dead by that point, and really it was Pat himself who lit it. I helped him do it. And that meteor shower some folks talked about — you see, that happened beforehand. It didn’t start the fire either, but it sure as hell caused it.
You have to understand what the West Side of Chicago was like back then. Pat had a nice little place on DeKoven Street — just enough land to grow some spuds and raise a few chickens. The cow was a skinny old milker, and she was of that age where her milk was too sour and her beef would probably be too tough. Pat O’Leary wanted to sell her to some drovers who were looking to lay down some jerky for a drive down to Abilene, but the missus would have none of it.
“Elsie’s like one of the family!” Catherine protested. “Aunt Sophie gave her to me when she was just a heifer.”
I knew Pat had to bite his tongue not to ask if Catherine meant when the cow was a heifer or when Sophie was. By that point in their marriage Paddy’s tongue was crisscrossed with healed-over bite marks.
Catherine finished up by saying, “Selling that cow’d be like selling Aunt Sophie herself off by the pound.”
Over whiskey that night Paddy confided in me that if he could find a buyer for Sophie he’d love to sell the old bitch. “She eats twice as much as the damn cow and don’t smell half as good.”
I agreed and we drank on it.
Shame the way she went. The cow, I mean. I wouldn’t wish that on a three-legged dog. As for Sophie…well, I guess in a way I feel sorry for her, too. And for the rest of them that died that night, the ones in the fire…and the ones who died before.
The fire started Sunday night, but the problem started way sooner, just past midnight on a hot Tuesday morning. That was a strange autumn. Dryer than it should have been, and with a steady wind that you’d have thought blew straight in off a desert. I never saw anything like it except the Santa Ana’s, but this was Illinois, not California. Father Callahan had a grand ol’ time with it, saying that it was the hot breath of Hell blowing hard on all us sinners, but we wasn’t sinning any worse that year than we had the year before and the year before that. Conner O’Malley was still sneaking into the Widow Daley’s back door every Saturday night, the Kennedy twins were still stealing hogs, and Paddyand I were still making cheap whiskey and selling it in premium bottles to the pubs who sold it to travelers heading west. No reason Hell should have breathed any harder that year than any other.
What was different that year was not what we sinners were doing but what those saints were up to, ’cause we had shooting stars every night for a week. The good father had something to say about that, too. It was the flaming sword of St. Michael and his lot, reminding us of why we were tossed out of Eden. That man could make a hellfire and brimstone sermon out of a field full of fuzzy bunnies, I swear to God.
On the first night there was just a handful of little ones, like Chinese fireworks way out over Lake Michigan. But the second night there was a big ball of light — Biela’s Comet the reporter from the Tribune called it — and it just burst apart up there and balls of fire came a’raining down everywhere.
Pat and I were up at the still and we were trying to sort out how to make Mean-Dog Mulligan pay the six months’ worth of whiskey fees he owed us. Mean-Dog was a man who earned his nickname and he was bigger than both of us put together, so when we came asking for our cash and he told us to piss off, we did. We only said anything out loud about it when we were a good six blocks from his place.
“We’ve got to sort him out,” I told Paddy, “or everyone’ll take a cue from him and then where will we be?”
Pat was feeling low. Mean-Dog had smacked him around a bit, just for show, and my poor lad was in the doldrums. His wife was pretty but she was a nag; her aunt Sophie was more terrifying than the red Indians who still haunted some of these woods, and Mean-Dog Mulligan was turning us into laughingstocks. Pat wanted to brood, and brooding over a still of fresh whiskey at least takes some of the sting out. It was after our fourth cup that we saw the comet.
Now, I’ve seen comets before. I seen them out at sea before I lost my leg, and I seen ’em out over the plains when I was running with the Scobie gang. I know what they look like, but this one was just a bit different. It was green, for one thing. Comets don’t burn green, not any I’ve seen or heard about. This one was a sickly green, too, the color of bad liver, and it scorched a path through the air. Most of it burned up in the sky, and that’s a good thing, but one piece of it came down hard by the edge of the lake, right smack down next to Aunt Sophie’s cottage.
Pat and I were sitting out in our lean-to in a stand of pines, drinking toasts in honor of Mean-Dog developing a wasting sickness when the green thing came burning down out of the sky and smacked into the ground not fifty feet from Sophie’s place. There was a sound like fifty cannons firing all at once and the shock rolled up the hill to where we sat. Knocked both of us off our stools and tipped over the still.
“Pegleg!” Pat yelled as he landed on his ass. “The brew!”
I lunged for the barrel and caught it before it tilted too far, but a gallon of it splashed me in the face and half-drowned me. That’s just a comment, not a complaint. I steadied the pot as I stood up. My clothes were soaked with whiskey but I was too shocked to even suck my shirttails. I stood staring down the slope. Sophie’s cottage still stood, but it was surrounded by towering flames. Green flames, and that wasn’t the whiskey talking. There were real green flames licking at the night, catching the grass, burning the trees that edged her property line.
“That’s Sophie’s place,” I said.
He wiped his face and squinted through the smoke. “Yeah, sure is.”
“She’s about to catch fire.”
He belched. “If I’m lucky.”
I grinned at him. It was easy to see his point. Except for Catherine there was nobody alive who could stand Aunt Sophie. She was fat and foul, and you couldn’t please her if you handed her a deed to a gold mine. Not even Father Callahan liked her and he was sort of required to by license.
We stood there and watched as the green fire crept along the garden path toward her door. “Suppose we should go down there and kind of rescue her, like,” I suggested.
He bent and picked up a tin cup, dipped it in the barrel, drank a slug and handed it to me. “I suppose.”
“Catherine will be mighty upset if we let her burn.”
“I expect.”
We could hear her screaming now as she finally realized that Father Callahan’s hellfire had come a’knocking. Considering her evil ways, she probably thought that’s just what it was, and had it been, not even she could have found fault with the reasoning.
“Come on,” Pat finally said, tugging on my sleeve, “I guess we’d better haul her fat ass outta there or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Be the Christian thing to do,” I agreed, though truth to tell we didn’t so much as hustle down the slope to her place as saunter.
That’s what saved our lives in the end, ’cause we were still only halfway down when the second piece of the comet hit. This time it hit her cottage fair and square.