PROLOGUE

APRIL, 1981

 

That venomous spring a massive high pressure system stalled over Georges Bank and Canada’s Maritime Provinces lifting the jet stream north of the Saint Lawrence River, trapping a five-hundred-year heat wave over the northeast United States, a heat wave that lingered like a fever incubating a last illness. In Boston, a radio station ran a contest–first prize central air conditioning–to the listener who found the sidewalk that fried an egg the fastest.

The contest was a sham. No sidewalk ever got hot enough to fry an egg. Experiments in Death Valley where such heat was as common as a carpet of flowers after an early spring rain had proven that. There would be no winners. But, there were losers. Victims of heat stroke backlogged hospital emergency rooms, overflowed mortuary embalming tables, or braved the pollution of Boston’s beaches.

Many blamed the heat for the events of that miasmal April recounted here. Others blamed God or Satan. Boston’s Jews blamed the city’s mayor, Charles F. Sullivan, Jr. The city’s Irish blamed the Jews; its African-Americans blamed the whites. Everyone blamed somebody; nobody blamed themselves.