The Lightning Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the saloon, and their footing, too, was unsure. He put his hand out like a blind man, grazing the knobs and levers with chill fingers, careful to disturb nothing, trusting that the desired one would announce itself to him. It was then that he felt the touch of her hand guiding him to the lever that would advance the spark, for she had a keen memory of the sequence of MacEwan’s ritual. The car leapt forward with a full-throated roar, causing a horse-drawn dray to veer off, and its driver hurled his oath after them.
    Amos Bigelow, in the back seat, seemed so thoroughly absorbed in his reflections on the afternoon’s business that he took no notice of the Packard’s slewing and lurching, and his only advice was that the youngman should turn north on Fifth Avenue when they reached it, that being the surest route to Delmonico’s and dinner. He settled back then, the collar of his coat turned high, and counted his wheels.
    Toma was scarcely aware of the knots of pedestrians and the challenge of other vehicles. The cold stench of axle grease gave way, by degrees, to the perfume of the young woman, crouching, who fumbled with the control of the heater hanging beneath the dash on the passenger’s side, and he was reminded, suddenly, of how she had smelled in that one moment of intimacy in the echoing baths of Herculaneum.
    â€œWhat is this street, boy? Are we lost already?” Having bent forward to deliver this question to Toma, Amos Bigelow sat back again, knowing he could not hear any answer over the din of the motor.
    â€œTell him, please, that I must not leave my things. I cannot travel to…”
    â€œTo Beecher’s Bridge.”
    â€œâ€¦to Beecher’s Bridge,” he said very slowly, “with these clothes only. We are almost at the place.”
    They had now entered the tangle of streets west of Seventh Avenue, following the route that Toma took every evening from the Stephenson works on the East River across the tip of Manhattan to the place where he slept, a long narrow room heated only, in winter as in summer, by the bodies of other men sleeping in serried ranks.
    Toma brought the car to the curb and Harriet’s head was outlined by the glow of a lantern in the saloon window. Had her face changed? Or was it the light? The planes and angles were more defined, but the eyes, large and expressive, were still the dominant feature, and the unbroken line of her eyebrows reminded him, as it always had, of the look of his own people.
    â€œThis is your home?” she asked, looking at the buildings and briefly at the slack faces pressed to the glass of the saloon front. He smiled but did not answer.
    â€œPlease to wait. I have not many things, but I must speak with the landlady about the money. I would not have paid for the month if I had known.”
    â€œI’ll speak to Papa. Toma, why do those men stare at me so? I can feel their eyes, even though my back is turned to them. Have they never seen a woman before?”
    He smiled again at the naïveté of her question. “They have seen many women. It is the automobile that confounds them. What is it doing in West Eleventh Street, they are asking themselves. Perhaps they are thinking this is some man of influence from Tammany Hall. You will wait here, please.”
    He took his hands from the wheel, eased his feet from the pedals, was interested to note that the motor ran on imperturbably. He would leave it so: she would need the heat and if he did not have to restart this machine in the dark, so much the better. Already he was beginning to imagine how this thing worked, the gathering of fuel, air, electrical impulse; the sudden compression of volatile gas in the cylinder was like the clenching of muscle in his belly, and the explosion, over and over.
    The hallway seemed narrower, the staircase more forbidding, and he nearly fell across the outstretched legs of the man who had been bedded down on the first landing