He nodded and patted my hand, then dropped out of sight, hopefully not on top of Irma.
I crawled and crouched my way to the front of the room, looking for anyone who wasn’t dead yet so I could show them the way out. This was no easy task, as the smoke was getting heavier and there was a good chance the ceiling would be collapsing at any moment.
I managed to find about twenty people and point the way—including Looie’s nephew, who was miraculously still breathing when I unburied him—before things got dicey. I was dragging a somewhat portly and thoroughly inconsolable woman across the floor when a fire-engulfed support beam landed between me and the trap door. I had no doubt that in another second the rest of the ceiling was going to join it, but the woman wouldn’t budge. I tried to scream at her to get her fat ass up and start moving them legs, but I’d been breathing smoke for about five minutes. My lungs felt like they were on fire and there was a good possibility I’d permanently damaged my vocal cords. (My future existence as an immortal mime flashed before my eyes. I didn’t like the idea at all.)
Not knowing any other way to get the fat lady to pick herself up—and not entirely willing to leave her behind (although she was sure pushing her luck)—I leaned over and pulled her skirt up past her hips.
If you ever need to get someone’s undivided attention, the very best way to do it is to expose their undergarments. People are weird.
“Hey!” she screamed. It worked. She rolled to her feet. Still unable to speak, I grabbed her by the back of the neck and pushed her around the fiery beam and to the trap door. She barely fit through, but she did fit, thank goodness.
I took one last look back, but there was no way I’d make it for another trip, not without a good long dose of fresh air first. I dropped through the trap. Seconds later, the ceiling gave with a tremendous crash, and the building started to come down.
The water was wonderfully cool and only about four feet deep, so I didn’t even have to concern myself with drowning. Even more pleasant was the air. I promised myself not to ever take air for granted again.
“Rocky,” someone called out to my right. I followed the voice, emerging from underneath the lip of the old fish market to find myself eye level with a short dock.
I accepted Looie’s hand gratefully and mutely, as I still could not speak. It would be days before I could utter anything. I never got a chance to ask Looie if he’d seen a woman with bright red hair emerge from the club. Because I sure never did.
Chapter 4
Shortly after the fire at Looie’s, Irma found God, pretty much signaling the end of our relationship. Especially when she insisted God had saved her from the fire, which I took a bit personally, as I was there saving her and a bunch of other people at the time, and I never once saw God. Too bad. I could have used the help.
It turned out Looie’s mistake was in selling out to the wrong mafia family—although the question of whether there is such a thing as a “right” mafia family is debatable—and ending up an important piece in a turf war he knew nothing about. Not willing to risk making the same mistake again, he got out of the speakeasy business altogether. He ended up using his savings to open a small shoe store.
I decided to leave Chicago not long after that, fairly well convinced my red-haired foil was dead. It just didn’t seem possible for her to have gotten out of that fire intact, not if she was anything like me—although maybe she wasn’t.
I ran through the possibilities again. Vampire was one that was most likely, as they are hypothetically just as immortal as me. Except I’d seen her in the daytime on more than one occasion. And, every vampire I ever met had black eyes. Possibly she was a vampire that didn’t need to hide from sunlight and had blue eyes, but that’s a bit like saying something is a cat except it walks on hind legs and has no fur or whiskers.
I don’t know any other sentient humanoids that have a get-out-of-death clause. Well, other than me. And I don’t have porcelain skin and haunting eyes. So, she might be like me, but was she the same thing as me?
What was she?
Mind you, I’d run through all this before, thousands of times. I’ve taken suggestions, too. A succubus I used to hang out with insisted my red-haired mystery girl was death incarnate, meaning my endless search for her was actually a complex working-out of my immortality issues. (A note: succubi are notorious amateur psychologists and have been since well before Freud. In fact I have it on good authority that Freud stole his whole gig from a particularly talkative succubus he used to know. And if you don’t believe Freud knew a succubus, you haven’t read Freud.) I didn’t find the argument convincing. If I am to believe in some sort of anthropomorphic representation of mortality, I should first develop a belief in some higher power, or at least in life-after-death.
I’m a pretty sad example of what one should do with eternal life. I’ve never reached any higher level of consciousness, I don’t have access to any great truths, and I’ve never borne witness to the divine or transcendent. Some of this is just bad luck. Like working in the fishing industry in Galilee and never once running into Jesus. But in my defense, there were an awful lot of people back then claiming to be the son of God. I probably wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of the crowd. And since I don’t believe there is a God, I doubt we would have gotten along all that well anyway.
I probably wasn’t always quite so atheistic. I don’t recall much of my early hunter-gatherer days, but I’m sure that back then I believed in lots of gods. And that the stars were pinholes in an enclosed firmament. There might even have been a giant turtle involved. And I distinctly recall a crude religious ceremony involving a mammoth skin and lots of face paint. But after centuries on the mortal coil I’ve come to realize that religion is for people who expect to die someday and want to go to a better place when that happens. It doesn’t apply to me.
Anyway, I sat around for days and mused over these and other subjects, mainly pertaining to my mysterious red-haired bugaboo. Gary and Nate were decidedly nonplussed about it, especially since I almost never moved from the futon except to get more beer—which I was still paying for, by the way.
“Man, can you at least shower or something?” Gary asked one evening.
“Later,” I muttered.
“How ’bout now? I wanna watch the game.” It did me no good to ask which game. There was always a game, sometime, somewhere, that absolutely had to be watched. ESPN may eventually be the end of Western civilization as we know it. And I should know, having witnessed the end of Western civilization at least four times.
We stared at each other for a while, and then I reluctantly ceded the futon.
“You should get out or something,” he recommended as I got to my feet and stretched out the muscle kinks.
Nate, from the kitchen, agreed. “Clear the cobwebs, dude. Get some night air.”
Obviously they had decided among themselves that having an immortal as a house guest wasn’t nearly as fun as it sounded. I should have seen this coming when they kicked Jerry out. (Literally. Nate drop-kicked him). But Jerry had left about two dozen stains on the walls, copped a feel on three girls who will probably never speak to Nate or Gary again, and clogged the toilet twice. He had been asking for it. Me, I just bought more alcohol and
