Page 276 - Some Dance to Remember

246 Jack Fritscher

you die.”
Straight below was a thirty-foot drop, but it was only six feet out and
eight feet down to the garage roof. Two men stood on the edge facing
Solly. Firelight played on their faces. They were shouting. The whole block
of wooden apartments was in flames. The men on the roof, their voices
lost in the roar of the fire, made motions to jump.
“They’re ready to catch us,” Solly said. “If we make it.”
Behind and above them searing heat and flames roared through the
tar-paper rooftops and blew out the back windows. Glass rained down
into the backyards. Outside the mews of their entrapment they could
hear fire sirens. The clock in the burning kitchen behind the handcuffed
man read 10:43.
“I don’t want to die in the nude!” The handcuffed man began to cry.
“I don’t want to die period!” Solly said. He motioned to the leather-
man. “We’ll stand him up on the railing and push him.”
“No!” the naked man screamed.
They picked him up bodily and stood him on the railing. For a
moment Solly had a boom-shot flash of the absurdity of hanging onto a
naked man’s thighs and arms knowing he had every intention of pushing
the man wavering on the railing off into the darkness below. This is why
I never leave home! “On three,” he said, “when we push you, you jump.”
“Oh, God!” the man cried “Tell my mother I love her.”
“I don’t even know your mother,” Solly said. He nodded to the leather-
man. “Okay,” he shouted, “it’s getting too hot. We’re going to burn out
here. I’m gonna count to three and you jump, asshole. Jump for your
mother!”
“I can’t!”
“You can! You’re a fairy! Fairies can do anything! Fairies can fly!”
Solly made the count to three mercifully short. They pushed the man
who, in the final moment, jumped from the railing with all the grace he
could remember from one dream-week watching the high divers fly off the
cliffs at Acapulco. He landed in the arms of the two men on the garage
roof. One of his legs splayed out broken as other dark figures pulled him
through the shadows to the other edge of the roof. Solly could see them
looking down over the far edge, hoping for rescuers.
“There’s an alley there,” the leatherman said. “But I don’t see a ladder
coming up.”
Down on the roof, every face, red like flat burning pies, gaped up at
them with the flames licking out at their butts.
“Jump!” Solly said. “I don’t have much more time to be heroic.”

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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