Beau was lost.
How he got so far downtown he never knew.
He remembered the railroad tracks, beyond Cold Spring. He remembered, because he almost got killed there. A train—mixed and covered with people like flies on flypaper—came around a bend, headlight shining, folks scattering ahead. Some got hit. The train gave a whistle blast and thundered by, out of the city, Beau guessed. Even so, he must have taken the wrong direction on the tracks afterward. It was hard to remember which way you’d faced, after you’d rolled down an embankment.
For a long time he didn’t identify the great pyre with direction. He had not tried to reason where the bomb had hit. He’d been in his cellar at the time—and the Light had merely been omnipresent, not directional, down there.
He was somewhere around the Simmons Park area, though, in Wickley Heights, he thought.
He stopped to take bearings.
“Quite a night,” he said aloud.
Netta’s dead, he thought.
There was a big apartment building, a swanky place, on this street, he noticed. Nobody around. Nobody at all. The wind was blowing and the street was warm, nonetheless. The building had broken windows, big ones, because the ground floor was for shops. He thought there might be a liquor store. He had lost his whisky bottle when he’d jumped out of the path of that goddamned wildcatting railroad locomotive.
He didn’t think it would get very far, going like that, with the rails probably spread here and there and debris on the tracks.
He walked along in front of the fire-illumined building, waded, rather, in deep glass that was slippery. All the street trees had been knocked over in neat rows pointing the same way.
He stopped.
It wasn’t a liquor store.
It was a jewelry store.
The big window was just a glass jaw, like a shark’s, that a man could step through. The glass counters were conveniently shattered. Inside, things glittered in the firelight, brighter than glass, and different colors.
Beau said dazedly, rather happily, “Well!”
He went in and picked up a bracelet and then a necklace.
“Well, well!” he murmured. He commenced to stuff his pockets, humming. He hummed,
“Happy days are here again….”