The burned the Sick Man every Labor Day in Little Aleppo. Twenty feet tall with wooden limbs held together with shoplifted neckties, the Sick Man would lead the parade up the Main Drag, up from the workers’ apartments on the Downside to the bosses’ houses on the Upside. Around Midden Avenue, which separated the two sections of the neighborhood, the crowd would get rowdy and violent(er) and marchers would skirmish with onlookers. A few blocks before Town Hall, the Paul Bunyan High (Go Blue Oxen!) marching band would play the Deguello.
The Town Fathers’ presence on the porch of the building was required, all five, and there were no exceptions. On several occasions, the parade had stopped at St. Agatha’s to wheel a bedridden Town Father along with them. Without them, Little Aleppo reasoned, there was no point to any of the proceedings. The Sick Man wasn’t a religious display, some pagan offering for a bountiful harvest, and it wasn’t some trust fund psychonaut’s art installation in the desert, no: the Sick Man was a threat. We can hand Madame DeFarge her knitting needles any time we want, the Sick Man reminded the management.
This was preferable to the old days.
The first labor strike in Little Aleppo was when the miners walked out of the Turnaway Lode; it took place May 3rd, 186-; the first murder of a labor leader in Little Aleppo came a day later when the Pinkertons shot Bart Coombs. This was immediately followed by the first labor riot in Little Aleppo. A pattern was set: direct action, abject overreaction, riot. The Turnaway Lode dried up, but the bosses and the workers remained. Commerce abounded and leapt, and labor responded with unions, none of which were united at all: Stevedores Local 611 refused to even meet with the Brotherhood of Longshoremen, not even to formally decide what the difference between the two jobs was; the International Alliance of Novelty Shop Cashiers, Stamp Collectors, and Impotents was made up of one guy named Dave Hanratty; the streetwalkers, hookers, call girls, and escorts all had separate guilds, and the rent boys weren’t allowed to join so they had one, too. Pickets signs bloomed, waved, gave fruit or not, died. The rich would sic the Pinkertons on the poor, until the police department was established and the rich sicced the cops on the poor.
And then there was the Zweitel Footwear Fire. This was 1913, and Little Aleppo had just professionalized their fire department. Ten local boys who could be trusted not to loot the burning buildings, not before at least attempting to quench the flames. They all had nicknames. Stumps and Hutch and Pidgey and Knock Knock. Before them, there were a dozen competing private crews–gangs with hoses, more accurately–that would haul their gear to fires and have fistfights over who had jurisdiction. Locals put up with that for as long as they could, then lured the crews into dead ends and blind alleys, beat them righteously, and stole all their equipment to give to the ten local boys who could be trusted. They had been training, learning to control the writhing hoses when the steam pumper shot the water through, how to enter an engaged structure, how to claw a window from its framing. They had been training almost four months when the call came in from the Zweitel factory.
116 women, girls most of them, and Cheeky Zweitel who owned the business along with his brother Lou. Had Lou been there, he would have been able to retrieve the key to the doors–two sets of them, that were kept locked during working hours–when Cheeky dropped dead of a heart attack in the first moments of the fire, but Lou was at a card game and so the doors remained locked while the walls flashed over and the desks caught. Nine women, girls all of them, suffocated in the crush that formed around the impenetrable exits. 46 scorched their lungs and collapsed and their tears evaporated from their eyes. One, a short brunette named Helen and called Lenny, tripped on a body and fell and broke her neck on a sewing machine. Three were found in the rubble with their throats slit, and the Cenotaph never reported that. 57 jumped.
Factory was on the sixth floor. A redhead in a hat–it still remained on her head as she plummeted–crashed into Pidgey on the way into the building, one down. The other nine entered the building with axes and bravery and no plan whatsoever, and they were on the fourth-floor landing when the entire structure gave way. 126 dead, almost all under 25 years old, poor girls that still listened to their mothers in apartments on the Downside and boys with thin beards who had been given a firetruck. It took days to clean them all off the street, all except a 19-year-old named Kitty Renterio who broke both her legs, back, right arm, jaw, six ribs, and punctured a lung and bruised the other organs, and was thoroughly concussed, but didn’t die until a week later. Long enough to tell her mother about how the doors were locked. Her mother did not feel an urge to keep that information to herself. Kitty was still alive when the riot started.
The Zweitels’ houses first. (Lou was mourning the dead at the same card game he had been at when the dead were created, and he fled the neighborhood when word got to him.) The crowd let their families go, but empty-handed, and all the bodies joined in, the living and not, and the fires flared all over the Upside. All the bosses, all the owners, it was too much for the cops so they ran, hid, joined in with the living and the not, a roiling flare of calloused hands and waitress uniforms and careful budgets. It all burned. There was nothing that the firemen could have done even if they weren’t dead.
“And every year since then, Little Aleppo burns the Sick Man. It represents the 126 that died in the fire. And it’s a threat.”
“I swear that threats are a load-bearing component to this neighborhood’s infrastructure.”
“Hashem has Commandments. Little Aleppo has threats. Same difference. Everyone knows where they stand,” Rabbi Levy said.
He and the Reverend Arcade Jones were standing on the corner of Rose Street, where Little Aleppo had penned up The Lord in all of His iterations: bearded, and incorporate, and many, and vegetarian, all The Lords in a row and also a mailbox and stop signs on either end. Tidy brick buildings with spires and steeples and minarets–all the ways that God had told man to put pointy things on the roof–with signs facing the sidewalk. White plastic letters on black almost-velvet behind clearish plastic. In the center of the street was the First Church of the Infinite Christ with its 80-foot high Christmas tree that was still up on Labor Day, and also not a Christmas tree to anyone but the painfully forgiving; it was a Peregrine Maria with tumorous bark and double-helix branches and 13-pointed leaves that were the size of your palm and waxy on one side. The star was still on top, but local youths armed with local slingshots had removed most of the ornaments.
The neighborhood surged by them, punching each other and grabbing ass, whooping and cussing and two-for-flinching, and there were shouts of solidarity and class consciousness:
“YOU CAN’T KILL ALL OF US!”
“EVEN YOUR BEDS ARE NOT SAFE, CAPITALISTS!”
“LEMME SEE YOUR DING-DONG!”
(That last one was Creepy Ernie, who was not concerned with solidarity and not conscious of class; the man wanted to see some ding-dongs.)
“Keep walking, Ernie,” the Rabbi said. He was short and slight and his hair was receding and his suit was gray; the Reverend Arcade Jones was enormous and his head was shaved and his suit was the color of a brand-new basketball. There was a rusty-gold dog in between them on a lead that the Reverend held, and his name was Emergency; it was his first Labor Day in Little Aleppo, and he was excited: he yelped and burfed and tappety-tapped his nails on the sidewalk and hid behind the Reverend’s ankles.
Ernie walked on.
“I pray for that man.”
“I don’t. He’s God’s problem,” Rabbi Levy said.
“Aren’t we all?”
“Not like Ernie. He’s special.”
The Main Drag was lined with Datsuns and Chevys and decade-old Hondas and precisely one BMW, which had been overturned and had its windows busted out and its tires punctured; all the other rich people knew better than to leave their luxury cars parked outside during Labor Day. All the shops were shuttered, including the movie theater. The Tahitian’s box office was semi-circular, and the marquee was triangular so that pedestrians could read it whether they were going north or south.
Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, and Julio Montez watched the effigy go by. The Sick Man was carried by 20 men and women, and it was a great honor to carry the Sick Man. (It had to be an honor, as there was no pay.) The wooden staves, lashed together with neckties, rubbed against one another.
“I always thought it sounded like a tree masturbating,” Gussy said.
“What?”
“Wood on wood.”
“When did you hear a tree doing that?”
“I didn’t, Julio. Use your imagination.”
“I don’t wanna imagine that.”
A scuffle broke out below them. Beautician’s Local 122 and Mortician’s Local 211. This was a longstanding feud; occasionally they fought in the geriatric wing of St. Agatha’s. (“I do his hair; he’s not dead yet.” “He’s 99% dead; we have jurisdiction.”) They sprayed formaldehyde at each other, karate chopped, tried to get high ground on one another via lampposts. The lampposts had all been greased, and when the festivities died down, stray dogs and cats would emerge from alleys and shadows to lick them cleanish.
Tee-shirts were hawked. All the food carts from the Verdance had been wheeled south and opened along side streets ten or twenty feet back from the Main Drag’s sidewalk: close enough to see and smell, but not tackle. Beer-Cooler Ethel was selling pints of Braddock’s whiskey instead of Arrow tallboys. The crowd worked over pickpockets found working the crowd. Communal frothing and improvisational body slams. And chanting, too.
A man with a bullhorn cried out:
“What do we want!?”
“AN HONEST DAY’S PAY!”
“In exchange for!?”
The mob did not answer, just pushed the man over and stole his bullhorn.
Gussy liked the marquee. It was the best place to watch the Main Drag from, especially when the Main Drag was partially on fire and everyone was kicking each other in the face. It was like the Royal Box at Wimbledon, but without the strawberries-and-cream. She and Julio had popcorn, though, in a brown paper grocery sack; it sat between them on the marquee’s tar roof. They sat in beach chairs Gussy kept in her office. One wobbled, and the other was crooked.
“Gussy, is this Communism?”
“No, it’s a mobile riot.”
“I meant the idea behind it.”
“There’s no idea behind this. It’s an economic primal scream. What do you know about Communism, anyway?”
“I dunno. Everything belongs to the People.”
“Uh-huh.”
Below them, a woman named Erisa had won the scrum for the bullhorn.
“LET’S RIP THE DOGS IN HALF!”
And everyone cheered.
“Those are the People, Julio. You want them in charge?”
“Are they really gonna rip dogs in half?”
Gussy ignored his question, popped the top on a warm Arrow, glug glug, ahhh. She thought about lighting a cigarette, but didn’t, and to her right the Sick Man went up KAHSHWOOM and crackled like static on Christ’s radio; the crowd had their fists in the air and their hands down their pants, and the Town Fathers put up a brave front while the flames ate up the Sick Man but nothing else, this time, in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.
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