City on Fire Read Online Free PDF

volume all you could hear was a voice moaning hornily. Probably Led Zeppelin, whose Tolkienish noodlings had been the soundtrack of the carwash where Charlie had worked freshman year, but which he’d renounced last summer after Sam dismissed Robert Plant as a crypto-misogynist show pony. She could be like that, sharp and full of fire, and her silence now wrongfooted him. When a kid a few rows away pump-faked tossing a beercan their way, Charlie reached for it, like a jerk. The kid’s friends laughed. “Preps,” Charlie muttered in what he felt was a withering tone, only not loud enough to be heard, and sank back into the noisy pleather of his forward-facing seat. Sam had turned away again to gaze at the settlements of Queens glimmering beyond the window, or at her fogged breath turning them to ghosts. “Hey, is everything okay?” he said.
    “Why?”
    “It’s a holiday, you know. You seem like you’re not, like, real festive. Plus shouldn’t you be documenting this stuff for your magazine thingy?” For the last year, she’d been publishing a mimeographed fanzine about the downtown punk scene. It was a big part of who she was, or had been. “Where’s your camera?”
    She sighed. “I don’t know, Charlie. I guess I left it somewhere. But I did bring you this.” From the army-surplus bag on her lap came a gummy brown labelless bottle. “It was all I could find in the liquor cabinet. Everything else is water at this point.”
    He sniffed at the cap. Peach schnapps. He brought it to his lips, hoping there were no germs. “You sure you’re okay?”
    “Did you know you’re the only person who ever asks me that?” Her head came to rest on his shoulder. He still couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but the medicinal heat of the booze had reached his innards, and kissing her—making her, R. Plant would have put it—again seemed within the realm of possibility. For the rest of the ride, he had to picture the wobble of President Ford’s jowls in order not to pop a full-blown bone.
    But at Penn Station, Sam’s restlessness returned. She hustled through the hot-dog-smelling crowds, faces moving too fast for the eye to distinguish. Charlie, by now well-lubricated, had the impression of a great light beaming from somewhere behind him, setting fire to every dyed-black hair on the back of her head, her several earrings, the funny flattened elfin bits at the top of her ears—as if a film crew was following, lighting her up. Of light not reflecting off things but coming from inside them. Inside her.
    They hopped a lucky uncrowded Flatbush Avenue–bound number 2 express train, and as they racketed through a local station the train seemed to echo the conductor’s garbled syllables: Flatbush, Flatbush. Sam turned in her seat. Girders on the elongating platform strobed the light into pieces. Charlie noticed for the first time a small tattoo on the back of her neck. It was like a king’s crown rendered by a clumsy child, but he didn’t want to ask her about it and thus remind her of all the things about her he apparently no longer knew. He let go of the bar he’d been holding and shoved his hands in his pockets and stood trying to absorb the jolts—Flatbush, Flatbush. It was a game she’d taught him called “subway surfing.” First one to lose his footing lost. “Look,” he said. When she didn’t, he tried again. “Play you.”
    “Not now.” Her voice had none of the maternal indulgence he was used to, and once again he felt the night faltering, like the light of the bypassed station.
    “Best three out of five.”
    “You are such a child sometimes, Charles.”
    “You know how I feel about that.”
    “Well, stop acting like a Charles, then.”
    It shamed him, how loud she said it. Anyone who didn’t know better might have thought she didn’t even like him. So he threw himself down onto the opposite bench, as if he’d decided on his own that this was where he belonged. At Fourteenth Street, one of the