Page 30 of A Matter of Pedigree
“Frank!” she screamed. “There’s a fire at the Factory!”
“Whuh?” Frank had been dozing; he struggled to upright the chair and untangle himself from the dog. He took a quick look out the window and headed straight for the closet to get his coat.
“You’re going over there?” Carole didn’t think it was a good idea.
“Sure, I’m goin’ over there. Some of the guys might still be there, working late.”
She looked at the clock; it wasn’t six yet. The clouds and rain had made it seem later than it was. “I’ll go with you,” she said. It had long been understood between them that if one of their employees had been injured, she would be the one to break the news to his family.
What a day, she thought, zipping up her parka. She hadn’t changed out of her velour track suit and was still wearing her dog-walking boots. She hadn’t even had a chance to do her hair or put on her rings. She grabbed her bag, slung it over her shoulder, and hurried over to the garage with Frank.
“Where’s your car parked?” he asked, as they jogged along.
“We gotta take your truck,” she said. “The Cayenne’s at Johnny D’s.”
He stopped and stared at her with narrowed eyes. “I thought you said the Porsche was okay …”
“I’m just having Aaron look it over to make sure.”
He let out a big sigh and led the way to the truck. Exiting the garage a bit too fast, he avoided Promenade Street, which was crowded with fire trucks and police cars, and wound his way through the side streets, past the rows of three-story tenements with their steeply pitched roofs and porches stacked one above the other. Spotting a police barrier on Valley Street, he turned abruptly and parked in the lot behind the Coca-Cola bottling plant, and they hurried across the street, holding hands, to join the crowd of onlookers.
“Where’s the fire?” demanded Frank. You could smell the smoke, but there were no flames shooting out of the windows of any of the buildings, at least not that they could see. Nevertheless, the fire department was responding as if it were a major fire, with lots of engines. Their lights were flashing, illuminating the entire area in an eerie, pulsating, red light.
Hoses were snaked through the area, firemen were running this way and that, cops were setting up yellow saw-horses to keep everyone back. Frank wanted to get in there; he wanted to know firsthand what was going on, but the cops wouldn’t let him. “Too dangerous,” one was saying, when suddenly there was an enormous boom and a giant fireball exploded out of one of the hollow, black buildings.
“What the hell!” exclaimed somebody.
“Propane,” said Frank. “Musta been a tank in there. Probably other explosives, too.”
“Move back, move back,” ordered the cops, lifting the sawhorses and forcing everyone to the far side of the street.
“I thought all the buildings were empty,” said Carole.
“The artists, they squat; soon as you kick ’em out of one place, they pop up somewhere else,” said Frank. “And that art stuff is flammable: paints, tanks for welding—you name it, they got it in there.”
“You know, Frank-O hasn’t been spending much time in his apartment. You don’t think he’s down here, do you?”
“Doesn’t he work over at the school? Don’t they have studios there? We pay ’em enough.”
“Of course. You’re right. That must be it,” she said, as an ambulance began making its slow way down the street and onto the fenced building site.
“They musta found somebody,” said a man in the crowd.
And indeed, two helmeted firemen were running to meet the ambulance, carrying an unconscious victim between them in a classic firemen’s hold.
“I didn’t know they really did that,” said Carole, straining to get a glimpse of the victim. But all she could see was a glimpse of purple hair. Probably an artist, she thought, like Frank-O, with his blue hair.
She sent up a little prayer for the kid, gazing at the red light that was bathing the scene, giving it a surreal glow. Everything was red, she was thinking, and what did you get when you mixed red with blue? Purple, you got purple.
“Frank-O,” she screamed, shoving her way through the crowd and breaking free from the cop who tried to stop her. The ambulance drivers were beginning to close the doors, but paused when they heard her shrieking. “That’s my son!” she was yelling frantically, crazy with terror, running as fast as she could to the ambulance. “That’s my baby!”
Chapter Eleven
The ambulance ride was horrible. Carole perched on a little jump seat thing as they bounced over the potholed streets, rushing Frank-O to the hospital. She couldn’t even hold his hand because the EMT was between them, bent over Frank-O, whose face was covered with an oxygen mask. Since she couldn’t reach his hand, she grabbed his ankle, holding on for dear life as if by hanging on to him she could keep him from slipping away.
Through the windows in the rear doors, she could see the headlights of Frank’s GMC truck; he was following close, slip-streaming behind the ambulance. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew how he looked: his jaw set, his eyes straight ahead, fixed on the ambulance containing his wife and son. Nothing was going to come between him and that ambulance. Nothing.
It seemed to take an eternity before they swooped down the ramp beneath the hospital and braked outside the emergency room. The EMTs must have alerted the ER that they were coming; people in scrubs were waiting for them, and as soon as the stretcher was unloaded, they rushed it inside. Carole ran after them, only to be blocked by a large woman with frizzy gray hair.
