"There's that little bitch." I could only guess that I was the little bitch Joe Andres pointed to because as I made my way toward Mama who was still fighting with the policemen and the rising water, Mr. Simoneaux and Andres cornered me. "What you got to say for yourself, gal? You gonna tell those policemen how you attacked me? How you tried stealing my wallet when I'd had too much drink?"
He wasn't worth the argument, a fact I thought was plain when I darted around him to follow my Mama and Uncle Aron, just as they broke away from the policemen.
"Run, baby. Run fast."
I didn't know where Uncle Aron was or how I'd gotten ahead of him. I didn't know if Sylv followed or where it was Mama was leading us. I only knew that the rain came so hard and fast now I could only make her out by the black hem of her slip as she dashed ahead of me and those long, red nails as Mama reached out her hand.
We came to some building I didn't recognize, and slipped right in. There were tarps that covered the broken windows and wooden crates stacked up ten feet along the inside. It smelled like mildew and dirt and of the sweat and rain that came off me and my mama's skin and hair.
"Keep still," she said to me, pulling me next to her as we hid underneath a wooden stairwell with more tattered tarps and half broken crates. She moved her head, nodding at the burned smudge in a circle around the foot of the staircase and I wondered, trying to distract myself from the race of my heart and the shake that took over my hands and fingers, if this was where drifters came to rest when nights in the city were cold and rainy.
Outside, the rain drown out most of the noise, but Mr. Simoneaux's voice carried and I heard my brother crying out, begging for something I could not hear.
"If we're still and quiet," Mama promised, her voice in a whisper, "maybe they'll go away and give on up … " She said it like she meant it. At least for a few seconds. Her rare smile was big and broad, like she thought it might give me a little comfort. Maybe make me feel less hopeless than I did just then.
But my mother knew same as me that they would not give up. Not when they felt they were justified and men like Mr. Simoneaux and Joe Andres always thought they were justified, especially when they were doing the devil's work. And it must have been the devil's work, else how would it have been possible to start a fire when Noah's own storm was raging outside.
The smoke started to billow before we realized what was happening. Sylv's voice was panicked and loud and I swore I heard someone else, a different voice not my brother's pleading for things I couldn't hear.
"They'll come out," Mr. Simoneaux said in a voice meant to carry and there was a whole lot of laughter in that promise. "Don't you fret, they'll come on out."
The smoke got thicker, billowed wilder and Mama grabbed me, led me to the opposite side of the room where it was a bit clearer, her eyes wide as she hurried around to the windows, yelping when she tugged down a tarp and saw Joe Andres on the other side with a gun pointed right at her.
"Come on out, gal. Come on now." There was tobacco between his teeth and the same greedy spark in his eye that had been there the night he ripped my shirt open. "Don't you make me say it again."
When I started to cough, because the smoke had gone black and one side of the building had gone up in a hot, bright flame, Mama pulled me along with her towards a set of rickety stairs that led to a platform in the direction of a catwalk on the second story. A large opening way high up the wall of the building, probably meant for offloading, was broken and open to the elements, with a large chain bolted to the crossbeam above it. Climbing those sagging stairs two at a time, Mama held tight to my hand, thinking, I guess, that if we got to the roof we could jump to the next building. But from the platform we saw that the catwalk up ahead dropped off in the center with only that long chain stretching high enough to reach the broken window.
"You little enough, Sookie, I want you to climb up there." Mama's voice was wild, broken as she screamed over the sound of the flames, fighting off the coughs that wracked her lungs. She pulled off the kerchief that had bound up her hair and wrapped it around my nose and mouth, trying to smile at me through the smoke, trying to give me some courage. "You can make it, baby. I know you can."
"Mama, no. I can't." I glanced at the broken window, some two stories above the ground. "It's too high. It's just too high."
She shook me then like a rag doll, her fingers clawing into my arms. "You listen here to me, girl. You get up there and climb that chain." I hated the way her voice cracked. My mama was strong, tough as nails. In my whole life I never seen her cry or fret over nothing. Now she went at me like she was desperate, like she was near to begging me and my mama never begged for a thing in her life. "You might fall, you might make it to the building across the way, but you will not burn up in this building."