Fire from the Rock (19 page)

Tears burned in Sylvia's eyes as she reached Mr. Zucker's store. Johnny had parked his car in front of his father's barbershop by that time. The radio was silent, the motor was off, and Johnny was nowhere to be seen. Sylvia felt a little safer, knowing she was surrounded by friends like the Zuckers and Miss Lillie—people who would protect her—but she still planned to call home and ask her mother to come pick her up.

She waved quickly at Miss Lillie, who was working on a new display in her window, and hurried inside the Zuckers' store. Rachel met her at the newly painted front door, grabbed Sylvia's hand, and squeezed it warmly. Sitting by the cash register was a fresh bouquet of roses—pink this time.

“You're shaking, Sylvia. What's wrong?” Rachel asked with concern.

“Nothing, really. I just had a run-in with Johnny Crandall. He scares me.”

“I know how you feel. Papa is sure that he and his juvenile delinquent friends have something to do with the Nazi signs on our door, but there's no way to prove it. I just try to stay out of his way.”

“He makes me feel dirty—like I need to take a bath after I talk to him. And I want to use your phone if I could before I leave. I don't want to walk home by myself.”

“Good idea. Now, let's not spoil our conversation with talk of disgusting boys like Johnny. How's your family?”

Sylvia relaxed a little. “Gary's as hardheaded as ever, Donna Jean has discovered Archie comics, and parents don't change, do they?”

“Mine sure don't. How's Reggie?” Rachel asked.

Sylvia sighed. “He's hard to figure out. Sometimes he's like a cuddly little teddy bear, and I just want to squeeze him. But other times he's like an ugly old spiny toad, acting more like Gary and ready to fight all the time. That worries me.”

“Maybe he's not good enough for you, Sylvie,” Rachel said. “Maybe he's just practice for the right one.”

“Hmm. I never thought about it that way. A practice boyfriend—like training wheels on your bike!” Sylvia made a funny face. “But I really have no complaints—he's never been sweeter to me. He's even kissed me a couple of times,” she announced triumphantly.

“Did you see fireworks, like the actresses do in the movies?” Rachel asked with a giggle.

“It happened so fast I never even noticed!” Both girls laughed heartily and chattered as they walked slowly down the store aisles looking for the items Sylvia's mother had requested. It felt good to be there with
Rachel,
Sylvia thought,
relaxing a bit.

“Did you see
American Bandstand yesterday?”
Rachel asked.

“I never miss it! Even Donna Jean watches it like a teeny teenager. She knows the names of all the regular dancers and is learning the words to every single song on the hit parade!”

Rachel laughed. “My favorite song, at least this week, is 'Whispering Bells' by the Del Vikings. I'm waiting to be kissed like you so I can hear those bells, too!”

“Did you know that group has both colored and white singers?” Sylvia asked. “Nobody seems to have a problem with it, and they're really popular.”

“Yeah, I have their album. They make it look, and sound, so easy to mix it up like that.” She started to say something else, but her mother headed toward them. “Here comes Mother with a plate of cookies and one of those suffocating hugs!”

Sylvia endured the hug, thanked Mrs. Zucker for the cookies, then turned to her friend. “You excited about high school?” she asked as she nibbled on a butter cookie.

“Oh, yeah. I am so ready! You're way ahead of me in the boyfriend department.” Both girls avoided the obvious subject at hand for the moment.

Sylvia and Rachel walked leisurely around the store, picking up a couple of lemons, and searching in vain for the vanilla extract.

“Between my alphabetical filing system and Daddy's mad-man method of stocking the shelves,” Rachel said with a smile, “nothing is ever in the right place.”

They found the eggs and flour, a friendly silence sitting comfortably between the two girls. They walked back leisurely toward the front of the store with Sylvia's purchases in their arms.

I have to ask her this! What are we friends for if I can't ask her the hard questions?
Sylvia stopped, put her hand on Rachel's arm, and asked finally, “Rachel, what do most of the your friends—the white kids—say about all this integration stuff? I mean, I know how Johnny and his bunch think. And I ran into a white boy a couple of months ago who didn't seem to care if I was purple or green. He went out of his way to be nice to me. So what's the real deal?”

Rachel looked directly at Sylvia. “Believe it or not, most of the kids I know don't care one way or the other whether the school is integrated or not”

“For real?” This wasn't the answer Sylvia expected.

“What I mean is, it's like that singing group. Nobody really makes a big deal of the fact they're a mixed-race group.”

“I see your point. But this is Little Rock, not some big city like Philadelphia or New York.”

“True, but most of the kids from my school that are going to Central really don't want to get involved with political problems. They're teenagers—they care about dates to the school dance and whether they have pimples—at least that's what I get from the kids I talk to. I think most of the opposition is coming from a small number of loud, hateful folks who can't stand blacks or Jews, either, like the Crandall family.”

Sylvia was about to tell her exactly what she thought of the Crandalls when the world went crazy. She heard a crash, followed immediately by the crackling and breaking of glass, and then a thud, like the sound of a bowling ball being dropped. It all happened faster than she could process.

The explosions that surrounded her the next moment caused her to drop the eggs in her hand as she was tossed to the floor. Her head connected with the floorboards before the rest of her body. A shelf full of groceries fell over onto Sylvia. As if she were outside of herself watching the horrible scene, she knew she was screaming, knew she was falling.

The noise of the toppling shelves and dry goods frightened her more than the feeling of crumpled wood on her legs. Most of it fell around her rather than upon her. Even so, sheer terror overwhelmed her. Her screams became clogged as debris filled her mouth, and she was finding it hard to breathe.

Stunned for a moment, Sylvia at first could see nothing. Gradually she dimly became aware of eggshells and gooey egg yolk in her hair and on her clothes. Something wet and drippy snaked down her back. Her mouth was full of a thick and powdery substance. She couldn't move her legs. Her head throbbed. Rachel seemed to have disappeared.

Sylvia's thoughts were as jumbled as the broken bits of the store that lay around her. Could an earthquake have hit Little Rock? Maybe it was a bomb?
Are we at war?
All she knew for sure was that she was afraid it was blood that was dripping from her body, and she yearned for her mother, who would know what to do.

Sylvia heard footsteps. She twisted her body toward the sound, tried to open her mouth to speak, but all she could do was cough a little. She saw a broken bag of white powder next to her face and figured it must be flour, not dirt in her mouth. But that didn't make it any easier. No words, no sounds, escaped her lips.

A second thud make the floor tremble, and the explosion that followed was louder than the first. Sylvia put her hands over her head and ears and trembled in the pepper and paprika. She had always wondered how she would feel at the moment of her death. Now she knew. She could hear more shelves collapsing, more pieces of the world falling in on itself. The floor smelled of fresh floor wax.

When the noise and movement stopped, Sylvia found her legs were covered with broken bottles and boards. She kicked at them angrily. She knew that Rachel's parents had to be searching frantically for them. As Sylvia managed to twist herself to the side, she had a clear view of the rubble-covered floor from the front of the store to the back. She saw two sets of feet fleeing from the store. Neither pair belonged to Rachel's parents.

Near the front door was a pair of highly polished, chestnut-brown, double-laced oxford shoes. Sylvia inhaled sharply. The shoes crunched over broken glass and spilled powders, then rushed outside. Sylvia could still hear the sound of the taps on those shoes, however, as they clicked on the wooden floor. Running to the back door was a pair of dirty blue tennis shoes.

A spilled box of pepper by her nose made Sylvia sneeze. The small room was filling with smoke. She knew she had to get out of there immediately. Sylvia twisted her body once more and found she could wriggle out from under the shelf. She pulled her legs free of the wood, relieved to see that her knees still bent and her ankles still flexed normally. As she slid her body out, she was glad she hadn't been standing next to a shelf full of large cans of candied yams or green beans.

Sylvia sat up carefully and tried to catch her breath, but she coughed once more as a sharp, acrid odor filled the small room. The smell reminded her of the barbecues her father prepared on holidays—how her mother always fussed at him because he used too much kerosene to start the fire. Fire. It was then the odor of burning wood and oil assaulted her. Oh,
my
God! The store's
on fire!

Scrambling to her feet, Sylvia looked around frantically. Dark smoke, like a greedy ghost, gobbled the air. Eyes stinging, Sylvia could see flames two aisles over, eagerly destroying the dry goods on the shelves. Sylvia looked behind her and there lay Rachel, a jagged cut on her forehead. Her eyes were open, but she didn't move.

“Rachel! We have to get out of here! Can you get up?” Sylvia shouted desperately as she shook her friend.

Groggy, Rachel stirred. “What happened?” she asked, her voice thick with confusion.

Sylvia pulled Rachel out from under the spice shelf and helped her to her feet. “The store is on fire,” Sylvia told her, terror in her voice. “Let's go!”

“My parents!” Rachel screamed, looking around in confusion. “Where are my parents? Mother! Papa!”

Sylvia, becoming stifled now and feeling the heat from the flames that were getting closer, grabbed Rachel's arm and pulled her, with great difficulty, toward the door. The entire store was ablaze. “We'll find them, Rachel! They're probably looking for us as well. Hurry! We gotta get out of here!”

Just as the terrified girls reached the door of the store, they heard Mr. Zucker's thick German accent outside, screaming for his daughter. “Rachel! Where is my Rachel!” he cried frantically.

Sylvia, still holding Rachel's arm, ran through the front door and outside into fresh, breathable air, and safety. Amazingly, the bell on the door still tinkled pleasantly.

Gasping and breathing hard, Sylvia looked at the gaping opening where the front glass window used to be, and watched Zucker's store burn. The new yellow paint on the front door bubbled and sizzled, melting any memories of the signs of hatred—those swastikas. Also ablaze was Miss Lillie's beloved little flower shop. The two businesses, once separated only by wooden walls, independent ownership, and mutual respect, now burned together in one incredible ball of flame and smoke, which snaked into the darkening sky. The outer walls of Mr. Crandall's barbershop, two doors down and separated from the others by an empty lot, stood smoke-blurred, but unharmed.

Rachel, safe in the arms of her parents, cried like a baby. Her mother, it turned out, had left the store to take out the trash and had found her husband wandering outside, screaming for his family.

By that time, the sirens of fire trucks and police cars began to pierce the sound of muffled explosions coming from the store as bags of goods were consumed. The air smelled of burned hair, smoldering leaves, and charred sugar. Dreams disappeared with the smoke.

Sylvia, standing off to one side by herself and shaking uncontrollably, was having trouble comprehending the enormity of what was happening.
This can't be real,
she thought,
not here in stupid old Little Rock.
Her pretty yellow dress, stained and torn in spots, hung on her like a wilted bloom. She wrapped her arms around herself and ached for her mother.

Bright orange and yellow flames tinged with blue drifted up to the sky. The small stores, made mostly of thin plaster and wooden beams, were easy morsels for the fire to devour. It made no distinctions between bouquets of gardenias and shelves of oatmeal, between colorful carnations and bottles of syrup.

The two structures began to crumble in the heat. At one point two thin skeletons of wooden beams were perfectly outlined by the bright orange flames, an oddly beautiful painting of destruction. The fire hoses did little more than add decoration to the gloomy afternoon.

Mr. Crandall, his son Johnny, and the two Smith brothers stood quietly on the opposite corner, looking aghast at the destruction. Sylvia shivered. She did not see Miss Lillie at all. Finally, Crandall scratched his thinning hair, then walked across the street to where the Zucker family huddled together.

“Hey, Zucker. You all right?”

“Ya,” Mr. Zucker replied shakily. “My family is safe. That is all that matters to me. What about you?”

“Fire didn't touch my shop.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Hey, I know you and me got our differences, but I want you to know I never did nothing to hurt you.”

“Ya. So you say.” Mr. Zucker turned to hug his wife, then looked at Mr. Crandall with eyes filled with grief. “Thank you. Now go—we must deal with this tragedy ourselves, sir.”