Bread and Blood (pt 1).

The truck’s going seventy, the speedometer needle rocking like an earthquake; it’s got bags of sand in the bed but still slides all over the black ice with only half a ruler between it and the neighborhood cars. The Wonder Bread plant at the end of the street with its smokestacks chugging all night makes everything smell like sweet rolls and birthday cake. Dixie sniffs it until his nose burns; when he was a little kid he thought everywhere smelled like this. The weather guy is on the radio again warning everybody about the temperature. Dixie turns up the heater full blast and takes the intersection corner too fast, almost smashing right through the Wonder gates, which would have been fine with him but the truck won’t do him any favors and its tires grab onto the asphalt, jerking it out of its spin. He barks a laugh, his fists strangling the wheel, the hundreds of scars turning white as if they are about to burst. There’s no talking to a man when he’s having a fit, his mom used to say to Mrs. Moran from next door, the two of them in curlers talking over the back fence like cartoons. You just got to get out of their way. She was right, Dixie thinks, grinding his teeth and tasting blood in his gums. Linda Gamble was no saint but at least she understood him and his dad, for as long as she could anyway.

Maybe the next corner would have done the trick, but instead of turning Dixie comes to a stop because on the next block is the best thing he has ever seen: the house on the corner of Doris and Elevated Street is burning, every window full of fire, the eaves and gutters boiling over with it, people bunched together in the shadows of the fire engine whose faces turn red and blue and back again as they watch the water cannons hit the superheated walls and make fog. But the heat . . . Dixie gets out of the truck, leaving it running right where it is; he holds his hands out towards the fire, feeling the waves of it on his skin, on his face; he can’t take his wide, crying eyes off of the firelight, and the heat that for just one moment is going all the way through him to all the cold places. They are yelling at him to move his truck, cops and firemen both, but there is a crash as something inside the house gives way and the second floor folds in on itself, rafters and supports falling like any old campfire. And somebody is running out, man or woman, who can tell, everything burning from their feet upward, their face three screaming black holes covered in a mask of fire; they make it halfway down the walk and simply collapse on their face before being sprayed with foam by the firemen. Oh my god, the women in the crowd say, biting their fingers; the men are clenching their jaws and nodding at each other, passing some secret kind of information. Dixie knows most of these faces. When he was a kid his father used to come and see them if they were behind in paying up what they owed. A lot of them notice Dixie and flinch, and he should go – but there’s cold back at his dad’s house, cold hands and arms and eyes in a cold bed lying alone like that for who knows how long, and he’d rather burn to death right here than have to go back there any faster. So he rubs his hands until they hurt and pretends he can’t hear what the people are saying. Warm for just a little bit. Warm for just right now.