The Explosion

Jack Fitzgerald was standing at the corner of First and Virginia with his hands behind his back, waiting out the last twenty minutes before his relief, when the street under the next block lifted itself up and came apart.

He felt it before he heard it. He felt it come up through the soles of his shoes from somewhere below the pavement, a deep wrong shove, and then the sound arrived, not a crack but a long flat slam that he felt in his chest and his teeth, and a half second behind it the windows of half the block went, all at once, a bright hard rain of glass falling straight down out of the storefronts onto the sidewalk along Sierra Street, and then a second slam, smaller, from across that street, and then the screaming started.

It was three minutes before one o’clock in the afternoon on the fifth of February, a Tuesday, and it had been a mild day for the season, the snow only on the high Sierra and not in the town, the river running open and gray under the bridges, and the lunch crowd had been thick on the downtown blocks the way it always was, and now there was a column of dust and pale smoke going up over Sierra Street one block west, and people were coming out of it, and people were not.

Jack was twenty-seven. He had been on the force four years. His grandfather Patrick had worn the same badge, had stood on the perimeter of the crowd of twenty thousand the day of the big fight out east of town in nineteen ten and kept the peace in a city that the whole country was watching, and his father Michael had not been police, had riveted the high steel of the Riverside across the river and poured the WPA walls along the Truckee in the bad years, and Jack had grown up on both kinds of story, the keeping of order and the building of things, and he had chosen the badge, and in four years the worst he had seen was a knifing in an alley off Commercial Row and the bodies the river gave back in the spring.

He had never seen a city block come apart.

He ran. He ran west on First toward the smoke, and his whistle was in his hand though he did not remember reaching for it, and the closer he got the worse it was. The Elks building on the corner by the river, the big three-story one that had stood there since before he was born, was not standing the way a building stands. The front of it was gone into the street. There were partial walls and bent black steel and a haze of dust hanging in the mild air, and the shops along the block, the shoe store and the men’s store and the fabric place and the others, had their fronts blown into the gutter, and there was glass everywhere, glass for a block in every direction, a whole department store down at the next corner with its upper windows gone, and under all of it the smell of gas, thick and sweet and wrong, the smell that meant it was not over.

A man came toward him out of the dust holding his own arm against his body and Jack caught him and turned him and pointed him east, away, toward First, told him to keep walking, keep walking, sit down when he got to the bridge, and the man went. A woman was sitting on the curb with her hat still on and blood on the side of her face looking at her hands. Jack got her up. There were others coming out now, out of the lodge, men in their shirtsleeves coming out over the rubble of their own building, some of them carrying others, and a man among them was shouting numbers, counting heads, sending them along, a lodge man getting his people out of the wreck of the place they had been eating lunch, and Jack left him to it because the man knew his own and Jack did not.

The fire took hold while he worked. It came up in the broken front of the lodge and in the shops, fed on the gas and the splintered wood and the goods, and the heat of it began to push at the dust, and somewhere behind Jack the first sirens started, his own department and then the deeper note of the fire engines, and they would be calling everyone, Sparks and the air base and Carson and the county, every truck within thirty miles, because one company was not going to hold this.

He got three more people moving east. He found a fourth, an older man, down and not moving by the blown front of the shoe store, and he could not tell at a glance the thing you needed to tell, and he knelt in the glass and felt for it at the man’s neck the way they had taught him, and could not be sure, and a fireman was suddenly beside him with a coat and they moved the man together back from the heat, and the fireman looked at Jack and shook his head once, and Jack stood up with the glass cutting through the knees of his uniform and did not let himself stop on it, because there were people still in the noise and the smoke and that was the whole of his job now, to go toward it and bring them out, and there would be time after to be a man who had knelt in the glass over someone’s grandfather, but the time was not now.

A sergeant he knew was at the corner of First and Sierra now, planting himself, starting to make a line, waving the gawkers back and the cars back and the wandering hurt toward the spot where the ambulances were coming in, building order out of the middle of it the way you had to, and he saw Jack and pointed past himself into the smoke, into the worst of it where the lodge had been, and shouted that there were people in the back of it, in the card rooms, that they were not all out.

Jack looked where the sergeant pointed. The smoke was coming off it black now and the heat reached him across twenty feet and the gas smell was still under everything and the whole front of the building hung over the spot in pieces that had not yet decided to fall.

His grandfather had held a line at the edge of twenty thousand men. His father had walked the high steel over the river with nothing under his boots. Jack Fitzgerald pulled his collar up over his mouth and his nose, and put his head down, and went in.

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