Dry summer morning, 1978. Smell of squirrel piss. Swallows chirping from a newspaper nest above a doorway. A long day ahead, on streets made into lapping rivers from the flow of unscrewed fire hydrants, below a blue sky with clouds like soapsuds. A day of chin-ups on theDON’T WALKsigns.
Two boys walk home from the corner store. Cutoff jean shorts, white tees, secondhand Adidas. The older one bounces his Spalding off the brick walls; the younger one digs his fingers into a box of cornflakes for the plastic prize.
A voice calls to them from a parallel-parked car on Rockaway Avenue.
“Hey boys.”
Eyes twitch over. Hands close around the Spalding, crinkle-fold the cereal bag. The two boys look at each other and then take three snailish steps toward the open window of the Lincoln, the older with his arm flung horizontal like hazard tape across his brother’s chest.
“You want to make a hundred bucks?”
In the gloom of the car, a pale hand. Between two fingers, a flicker of green.
Gummed like insects on a reptile tongue, the boys are pulled toward the unknown face: a pair of thin lips etched on a marble-smooth chin, the eyes blacked out by shades.
Lina Rodriguez Armstrong saw them: two boys, no more than seven and ten, wispier than dandelion seeds, flying under the moon. From the second-floor window of her tenement, she watched as they darted from roof to roof and then crawled down the side of an abandoned house, the older one shushing the younger one’s nervous cries.
It was three a.m., but Lina had been awake, cleaning up the spills and crumbs from the poster painting party. On the record player, Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” hummed loud enough to keep her eyelids open and a beat in her bones, soft enough to let the neighbors sleep. She’d fed almost twenty folks that night, and the odors of acrylics and fish fry lingered in the room. Her place had to be the most delicious-smelling apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn: almost every day her Freedom School churned out the crispiest fish fry and the tastiest asopao in the neighborhood, and long before the Freedom School there’d been a Chinese restaurant, the essence of sesame chicken forever baked into the walls.
Now alone, she should have been washing dishes and brushes, but instead she was leaning on her elbows and peering out the window, wondering to herself if these were Sharon’s boys—Sharon had been her classmate at Thomas Jefferson High—and then wondering what trouble they were up to, and if she should go after them, maybe entice them with leftovers from the Freedom Fridge.
That’s when she smelled the smoke.
It was faint at first, and she sniffed the muggy night air, wondering if it was coming from a barbecue. In the light of the streetlamps, she spotted the Livonia Avenue cat—the kids called her Miss Freedom and sometimes left her bowls of tuna. Miss Freedom was now fleeing down the avenue, her mottled body almost airborne. As the smell intensified, Lina crossed to the front door of her apartment, undid the lock, and yanked the sticky door open.
Hot black smoke socked her in the face; the staircase had become a glowing, spastic frenzy.
Lina cried out, stumbling backward. Then, sucking in her breath, she hurried across the hall to her neighbor’s door.
“Miss Brown!” she hollered. “There’s a fire! Miss Brown!”
Annetta Brown unlatched the door, the baby on her shoulder. After one look into the hallway, she pulled Lina inside.
“Get Debbie and Kim!”
The two girls were asleep by the open window, their bodies curled like oven-hot pretzels, the sheets tossed aside. “What happened?” they moaned as Lina jostled them, dragging them onto their feet. Together, they all made for the fire escape. It shivered under their weight like it might give out and send them crashing in a shower of metal down to the sidewalk below. The baby bawled, the women and girls tiptoed, and at last Lina and the Brown family reached the ground and ran across the street. Only then did they look behind them and gasp: flames had engulfed both 78 and 80 Livonia Avenue. Smoke gushed out the windows of the two tenements like streams of ghosts, gray bodies dissipating as they ascended, losing shape in the sky above the tenement roofs. Other neighbors ran out the doors with their arms over their heads.
“This is what you did, Lina,” Annetta cried, her face smeared with tears, her hair still in its bonnet. She took her children’s hands from Lina’s and pulled their quaking frames to her breast. “You done pushed that Mr. Wong!”
Lina looked at Annetta, looked at the girls, robbed of speech. Allat once, her body became so heavy she had to sit on the curb.Annetta blamed her.
She realized then what it all meant—the two boys flying through the dark.
They’d lit the match.
Someone threw a towel over her shoulders. Another neighbor called the fire department. Flames ripped through the Freedom School banner, blasted the rusted Chinese restaurant sign, and licked the metal beams of the elevated rail. They lived on Livonia under the rumble of the 2 train, which came through every half hour at night, each car bombed front to back in bulbous lettering courtesy of local tagger NEVERFORGET68. Livonia itself was a street where every storefront was boarded up, or the glass shattered, the buildings stripped, and the plumbing exposed, and all around them, for blocks on end, the neighborhood of Brownsville was disintegrating: the parks littered with needles; the abandoned tenements yielding to nature, with dogs breeding in living rooms and rats crawling in the walls. The massive pool at Betsy Head Park had been closed since the Saturday a teenager had drowned in the deep end. Even Pitkin Avenue—Brooklyn’s “Fifth Avenue,” it was once called—was splayed like a cadaver on an autopsy table: its sidewalks littered with blood-spattered toys, muddy coats, and headless manikins. And at that moment, two boys were running east past the scarred landscape, back to Tilden Houses, looking carefully as they crossed the street—not for cars, but for stray dogs and lurching addicts.
Lina stared at the billowing flames and whispered to herself.
“They want it all. All of it. They took the junior high. Now they’re taking the Freedom School.”
Above the shouts and the crackling, collapsing wood, Lina heard a woman’s scream from the third floor, a scratchy treble just familiar enough to twist Lina’s gut.
Grandma, she thought. The old woman whom people in the neighborhood called Grandma.
“Grandma!” people cried from the sidewalk.
“Grandma’s up there!”
