The Fire

Eddie Morales was asleep in his room off Wells Avenue when the sirens woke him at seven in the morning on the third of April, and he lay there in the gray light and listened to them build, not one engine but several, and then more, and he knew from the sound that it was downtown and that it was bad.

He was forty-eight. He had driven a cab fourteen years after leaving the casino floor, and now he drove less than he used to, three days a week instead of five, and on the off days he slept late and ate at the counter at the little place on Fourth Street and sometimes walked downtown in the afternoon to see who was around. He had been a young man in this town and now he was not, and the distance between those two things was measured in the buildings he had worked in and walked past and leaned against and known.

He dressed and drove downtown because he could not help it. The sirens were still going and now there was smoke visible, a dark column rising from the center of the city, and Eddie knew before he got there that it was the block between Center and Virginia, the old block, the hotel block, because that was where smoke like that came from, from old buildings with old timbers and old wiring and basements full of whatever had accumulated in fifty years.

He parked on Second Street and walked south toward Center and there it was: the Golden Hotel, the whole four stories of it, burning from the inside out. The flames were in the upper windows and the smoke was pouring from the roof and the fire department had lines on it from three sides and it was not enough, you could see it was not enough, the building was going. The Bank Club next door was burning too, the fire having jumped or spread through the shared wall or come up through the basement, and the firemen were pulling back from the north face of the Golden because the facade was threatening to come down.

Eddie stood on the sidewalk across Center Street with a hundred other people, watching. A woman beside him was crying. A man in a bathrobe stood staring at the building and Eddie understood that the man had been inside, had gotten out, was watching the room he had slept in burn.

The Golden Hotel. Eddie had worked there. Not there exactly, not the hotel itself, but the Bank Club in the basement, nineteen years ago, 1943, when he was twenty-nine and already driving the cab but picking up shifts at the Bank Club on weekends because the money was better and because the war had taken enough men that the clubs were hiring anyone who could count chips and make change. He had worked the cage on Friday and Saturday nights for two years, forty-three and forty-four, and he had known that basement, the low ceilings and the smoke and the sound of it, the slot machines and the craps tables and the men on leave from the air base playing like they might not come back, which some of them did not.

The Bank Club had been something in those years. It was the biggest club downtown before Harrah’s expanded, the place the locals went because the locals knew where the odds were, and Eddie had stood behind the cage and counted out the chips and taken in the cash and watched the floor operate like a machine, every night, every shift, the money moving in its circle from the customer to the table to the cage to the bank to the customer again. He had been young and the work had been easy and the town had been full of soldiers and the war had made everything feel temporary and urgent, and then the war ended and the soldiers went home and Eddie went back to the cab full-time because the club did not need him anymore, and that had been that.

Now the building was burning. The acetylene tank in the basement had gone up, someone in the crowd said. A welder’s tank. Seven in the morning, most of the hotel guests still asleep, a hundred and forty people in the building, and a tank had exploded in the basement and the fire had come up through the floors and the stairwells and the elevator shafts, and people were dead. Eddie did not yet know how many. He would learn later that it was six.

He watched the firemen work. They were good, the Reno department, he had always thought so, and they were fighting a fight they could not win but fighting it anyway, keeping the water on the exposures, keeping the fire from jumping Center Street, saving what they could save, which was everything except the two buildings already gone. A young fireman on the south line was working a hose by himself, drenched, his face black, and Eddie thought of his uncle Miguel who had worked the Sparks roundhouse for thirty years and come home black like that every day of his life, the soot of honest work.

The Golden Hotel had been built in 1906, the year before Eddie’s grandmother Rosa had been cooking at the ranch south of town. Fifty-six years. It had survived the floods and the earthquakes and the Depression and two wars and the slow decay of the fifties and the Tomerlin brothers’ renovation that had made it bright again for a few years, the show lounge and the glass entrance and the names on the marquee. And now it was going down, on a Tuesday morning in April, because a tank in the basement had given way, and because old buildings burn, and because nothing in this town lasted as long as you thought it would when you were young and standing inside it.

By noon the roof was gone and the walls were shells. The fire was out by early afternoon. Eddie did not stay that long. He walked back to his car on Second Street around ten, when it was clear there was nothing more to see, nothing more to do, and he sat in the car and looked at the smoke still rising over the roofline of the buildings between him and Center Street. The Bank Club was gone. The basement where he had counted chips on wartime Saturday nights was full of ash and water and rubble, and no one would ever stand in it again.

He started the car and drove back to Wells Avenue, past the downtown blocks he had known his whole life, past the casinos and the hotels and the stores, all of them old now, all of them one bad morning away from what he had just watched happen. He parked at his room and went inside and made coffee and sat at the table and drank it and thought about the buildings he had worked in that were still standing, and how many of them would be standing in ten years, and whether it mattered to anyone but him.

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