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Then, in the back of his mind came a faint chant—and he remembered the firemen who visited his class at Harding Middle School a decade ago and taught the students Stop! Drop! Roll! to starve a clothing fire of oxygen.
He stuffed the burning cuff under his right armpit.
The pain to the raw skin of his burned hand was intense. But the flames finally died.
A minute later, Ruben Mora, feeling light-headed, glanced at the blackened sleeve and hand. Then he looked at the fire growing inside the car.
Mesmerized, it took him a moment before he decided that he had to get away before he burned his whole body.
He kicked the door shut and, pulling his stocking cap tight on his head with his uninjured hand, ran down Hayworth Street.
When he reached the corner, at Hayworth Street, he glanced back. The windows of the Volkswagen were filled with a roiling dark black smoke and bright red flames. He heard a small Boom! and saw a flash of bright white flame, and guessed that that had been the acetone can exploding.
He snugged at his black stocking cap, winced as he stuffed his hands in his sweatshirt pocket, and then jaywalked across Hayworth Street.
Two blocks up, at Torresdale, he saw a police cruiser speed past, then a couple minutes later another one quickly followed it.
Then, behind him, he heard and felt the concussion of an explosion, and when he looked back he saw a huge plume of black smoke soaring above the roofline of the row houses.
Then he heard the wail of police sirens.
He glanced around the neighborhood, trying to figure out the easiest way to get back down to the corner in Kensington without walking what he guessed had to be three or four miles. He remembered the money he had taken from the VW’s ashtray, and decided SEPTA was it.
He pulled out his injured hand and looked at it. It felt as if it was still on fire, even exposed to the frigid air.
And it had begun to throb.
Dammit that hurts! he thought as he went to cut across the middle school playground, headed for the El station that was six blocks away.
[ THREE ]
Monmouth and Hancock Streets
Fairhill, Philadelphia
Saturday, December 15, 3:32 P.M.
“Is your momma gonna come down here and surprise us?” seventeen-year-old Carmelita Martinez teased Tyrone Hooks, who was sitting naked on the edge of his bed while watching her pull her shirt off over her head.
The cluttered basement bedroom, a crowded space of fifteen by twenty feet, also held a brown couch that faced a flat-screen television against one wall and, against the opposite wall, a wooden desk on top of which was a MacBook computer with a pair of high-end studio headphones and a chromed-mesh Shure professional musician’s microphone plugged into it. Also next to the computer was a ruby-red crushed velvet pouch with a string closure and a small, six-inch glass pipe. A wisp of smoke twisted upward from the pipe, the pungent aroma of marijuana hanging in the air.
Carmelita, a petite, dark-eyed, coffee-skinned Dominican with large breasts and full hips that had begun to spread, playfully tossed her top at Tyrone. Smiling widely, she ran her finger along the thin silver necklace that he had minutes earlier taken from the crushed velvet pouch and presented to her.
“She knows to stay in her room upstairs,” Hooks said, reaching out to unbutton Carmelita’s blue jeans. “Here, let me help you, baby girl.”
In the years that Tyrone’s grandparents had lived in the row house—his mother’s parents, who helped raise him; he never knew his father—the blue-collar neighborhood had begun to fall o
n hard times as its middle-class jobs slowly disappeared with the closure of the nearby factories.
By the time the grandparents had died, and his mother had inherited the home, a great deal had really changed in the area.
There now was widespread blight, for example, pockets of it severe. Calling the Hooks property a row house was something of a misnomer, as there were no other houses along its row. Twenty years earlier, when Tyrone had been five, a fire had ravaged all the others on that side of the street. Their blackened masonry shells had been demolished by the city, leaving the Hookses’ two-story structure standing alone near the corner, with only raw empty lots where the other row houses had once stood.
Over time the demographics of the neighborhood had dramatically changed, too.
Now the vast majority—eighty percent—of Fairhill’s residents were Hispanic. While these were mostly Puerto Ricans, there were also many who had emigrated from Cuba and Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Family-owned businesses in what they called their El Centro de Oro—Center of Gold—catered to them, the markets painted in the same bright yellows and greens and blues as those in the islands. Remarkably, on all four corners at Lehigh and Fifth there were even palm trees—leaning ones made of metal installed to further create a tropical feel.
Carmelita—who had been born at Temple University Hospital’s Episcopal Campus, on the outer edge of Fairhill—wiggled her hips as Tyrone tugged down her skintight jeans.
