It

grabbed Dick. When I took his weight my gut went against the side of the building, and it was like having your belly against a stove that’s just starting to get real good and hot. Dick’s face came up and for a few seconds I didn’t think we was going to be able to get him. He’d taken a right smart of smoke, and he was close to passing out. His lips had cracked open. The back of his shirt was smoldering.
‘And then I damn near let go, because I could smell the people burning inside. I’ve heard people say that smell is like barbecuing pork ribs, but it ain’t like that. It’s more like what happens sometimes after they geld hosses. They build a big fire and throw all that shit into it and when the fire gets hot enough you can hear them hossballs poppin like chestnuts, and that’s what people smell like when they start to cook right inside their clo’es. I could smell that and I knew I couldn’t take it for long so I gave one more great big yank, and out came Dick. He lost one of his shoes.
‘I tumbled off Trev’s hands and went down. Dick come down on top of me, and I’m here to tell you that nigger’s head was hard. I lost most of my breath and just laid there on the dirt for a few seconds, rolling around and holding my bellyguts.
‘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,