“Mom!” Joe screamed with everything he had, but the din of the intersection—the screams, the rumble of engines, and the laughing and shouting—seemed to swallow the sound. He could hear Robbie yelling for him to stop, but he was bolting across the street before he was even aware of it.
Light seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. There was a flash of yellow in front of him and a screech of tires. It was a taxicab with a triangular sign on top. Joe’s thighs collided with the front fender on the passenger’s side, and he tumbled up onto the hood of the car. Now his elbows were on the hot surface of the hood, and his sneakers were up by the windshield. Joe saw two things at once. One was the triangular sign, announcing that BankAmericard was now Visa. The other was the image of the driver’s face: bearded, dark, and shining with sweat. The driver’s eyes were wide with terror and rage. He was shaking his fist.
Joe rolled off the cab and onto Broadway. Robbie was calling from behind him somewhere, and more cars were screeching to a halt, but he couldn’t stop now. He dodged another car, this one a small, egg-shaped Datsun, and then reached the corner. There was a subway staircase, a hole in the ground going down to blackness. In between the subway railing and the building entrance was the mass of people breaking into the Woolworth’s. A man with an armful of clothes on hangers rushed past him, breathing hard. Joe peered east down Seventy-Ninth Street. There were pinpricks of headlights way up the block but almost nothing around the bar entrance. He could make out figures and saw a few cigarette cherries here and there. He whipped his head around, desperate for a car to turn left or come straight along Seventy-Ninth, but none did.
“Mom!” he called again. He ran east up the street, past the group of smokers and drinkers. The door to the bar was open. Weak, flickering candlelight spilled out. He whipped his head back and forth, looking for the smoking woman on the street. On the south side of Seventy-Ninth were more storefronts. One was a liquor store, also with the door open, and two men standing on either side. “Mom!” One of the men seemed to stare at him, but he could barely see anything at this point. He plodded forward, reaching the sidewalk a couple of doors east of the liquor store. “Mom! Please!” He felt his way along a wall, still moving a few feet at a time. Then he thought he saw a flash in front of him and a figure behind it. A flame, maybe. It disappeared to the right.
Where the wall ended there was an opening to a narrow alley. A damp, garbage-y smell wafted from it. He turned and screamed into the space. “Mom!” He staggered forward, kicking at some rubbish and then slamming his foot into a trash can. “Mom, where are you?!” A few feet farther he was suddenly seized with terror. There was a metal clanging sound a few feet away. Joe stared in that direction but saw nothing.
Literally, nothing.
He was as blind as Bertie. He looked up, where the sky should have been. Nothing. Nothing in front of him. Nothing behind. He was in total inky blackness. He remembered a nightmare in which he was in hell. It was endless black space like this, a concrete floor beneath his aching feet. He felt sweat running down his back. The air was still and thick. It was difficult to breathe.
Wait. Could he breathe at all?
He couldn’t. He was gasping and felt like he was trying to draw hot, fetid air through a tiny straw. Maybe it wasn’t air he was in anymore. Maybe he had turned a corner and was now trapped forever. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. The dark pressed in on him, strangling him. He fell to his knees and then collapsed on the hot pavement.
“Kid! Hey, kid! Look over here!”
Joe was in a ball on the ground, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. A cone of dirty light washed over him. The voice was low and growly. “Kid, what the hell? Get up. Come back here!”
“Joe!” It was Robbie, next to the first voice. “Joe, walk toward the light! Come on, get up!”
“Walk toward us, kid,” the first voice said. “Come on. Get out of there.”
Joe made it to his feet, which he could see now in the flashlight beam. When he reached the mouth of the alley, he saw that he’d only been about ten feet inside. It felt like miles, though. The first-voice man had a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a shiny aluminum flashlight in one thick, hairy hand.
“Joe, for God’s sake,” Robbie said. His voice sounded exhausted and frightened.
“I saw her!”
“You didn’t, Joey. Come on.”
“Get outta here!” the first-voice man said. He waved the flashlight like an usher at a performance. “Get off this block; you can’t see shit. You’re gonna get killed out here!”