Chapter 14: The Harbor

Sandro was off the couch before I could say his name.

He hit the alarm panel by the door with his fist, and the whole loft started screaming.

"Call it in," he shouted. "Nine-one-one, then the marshal."

He went down the stairs barefoot, in jeans and nothing else.

I dialed with shaking fingers.

Then I pulled on his boots, three sizes too big, and ran after him.

The paint shed sat ten feet behind the main shop.

Flames were coming out of its one window. The roof was smoking along the ridge.

Inside that shed were forty gallons of paint, varnish and thinner.

Ten feet away, behind a wall of old dry cedar, was the sloop.

Two years of his life, on blocks.

Sandro had the yard hose going already. It looked like a garden sprinkler against that fire.

"Get the boat out," I yelled.

"She's on blocks, Annie. She doesn't move without a crane."

The paint shed window blew out.

Glass hit the gravel at our feet.

Sandro pulled me back by the arm and put himself between me and the heat.

Then I heard trucks.

Not one. A dozen.

Headlights came down the lane, bouncing on the gravel.

Pickups. A van with a ladder on top. The old man's rusty Ford.

The volunteer fire truck was behind them, its siren going, and a pair of lobster boats were roaring across the harbor toward our float.

The town had heard the alarm.

The co-op president jumped off the first boat with a gas pump on his shoulder.

"Where's your sea water?"

"End of the float," Sandro said.

In two minutes they had a hose running from the harbor to the paint shed.

Another lobsterman ran a second pump from his own boat.

The firemen took the roof.

The rest of them made a line.

I ended up in it, in Sandro's boots and his flannel shirt, passing buckets between a fisherman's wife and a boy who couldn't have been sixteen.

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