No way out

Chapter Sixty-one

He said it as if my fate were as certain as tomorrow’s sunrise. I didn’t want to tell him he was right, that I often woke up in the middle of the night, sweating and trembling, certain that one day his prediction and my nightmare will come true. I was used to shaking in front of other people, letting it pass as if it were nothing more than a sneeze or cough, but this time was different. When the next flurry struck, whipping my head up and back, Terry’s quick, satisfied smile and measured eyes made me feel exposed and weak.

One of the curious things about my disorder was that talking about it, especially with someone I didn’t know well, could trigger the symptoms. I changed subjects, hoping to regain control.

“Why are you so interested in the details?”

“I’m no different than anybody else. An airplane falls out of the sky or a pitcher throws a no-hitter, good or bad, we all want to know how in the world something like that happened.”

“That’s what newspapers and cable TV are for.”

“Man, you are a tough nut. I’m just an old man looking for a little excitement in my old neighborhood, and you’re acting like I need a top-secret clearance to find out how a man died.”

“You need a better reason than that.”

He pursed his lips, nodding, looking past me, down the street and back, taking a breath and letting it out with his slow confession.

“My family lived down the street in that house,” he said, pointing to another down-at-the-heel mansion two doors away. “It was a boardinghouse. The Staley family lived there too.”

“When did you leave?”

“Fifty years ago, the night of the Electric Park fire.”

“What’s Electric Park?”

“It was an amusement park at Forty-sixth and Troost, all kinds of rides, games, and pretty girls. I was there when it caught fire.”

He got a faraway look in his eyes, the memory coming back to him, nodding as the images came into focus.

“Man oh man, you should have seen it! That fire was a beast, chewing up the park. Hell, the whole place wasn’t more than a bunch of kindling glued together. You ever been in a blaze like that?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Well, trust me brother, you don’t want to be. Even the air was on fire, and the noise it made, I swear it was the devil’s own voice hollering Look out ’cause I’m coming for you. And the people running wild trying to get away wasn’t nothing but a mob the cops couldn’t control any more than the firemen could the fire.”

“What did you do?”

He smiled again, this time softly, shaking his head. “That devil voice, it was calling me, telling me it was time to chase the darkness, and I couldn’t do nothing except answer. But, I’ll tell you what, it taught me one of life’s most important lessons. One man’s trouble is another man’s chance if you’ve got the steel to take it.”

“I’ve got a feeling you’re not talking about picking up quarters someone left lying on the ground.”

“No sir. I was just a dumb kid couldn’t see farther than the end of my dick. Hated my parents because my old man beat my brother and me, and my mother didn’t give a shit so long as he didn’t hit us with any of her whiskey bottles. They was so beat down all they could do was beat someone weaker and smaller. I swore to Christ I wouldn’t end up like them. I was seventeen, and there were only two things I ever thought about: getting laid and getting out.”

“And the fire gave you a chance to get out.”

“You’re damn right it did. The smoke was so thick, I couldn’t see where I was going, and it didn’t help that no one else could either. I stumbled into the park office. The clerks had taken off, and the day’s receipts were just sitting there waiting to be burnt to ash, three thousand six hundred seventy eight dollars, a lot of money in those days and more than I’d ever seen or thought I ever would see. There was a satchel on the floor, and I stuffed it full of cash and took off. Had my stake and never looked back.”

“Where’d you go?”

He laughed. “Not as far as I thought I’d go but as far as the money took me. Got to Matamoros, a little border town in Mexico, before I blew it on a gal with big brown eyes and bigger tits who swore she loved me long enough to get me drunk and in bed. Next morning, she and the money were gone, and I was hungover and broke. So I walked back across the border into Brownsville, Texas, lied about my age, and enlisted in the army. Got sent to Korea and bought a ticket home with a bullet in my leg.”

“You came back to Kansas City fifty years later to see Lilly Chase. You ever go back to Matamoros to see that pretty girl?”

He laughed. “A time or two. Never did catch up to her though.”

“That’s some story.”

“Best part is that it’s true, enough of it anyway.”

He slapped me on the back, went inside, leaving me alone on the porch, realizing I still didn’t know where to find Brett Staley.