Break the Skin (26 page)

A few days later, when Delilah and I were at the clinic so I could see the doctor about my migraines, Rose and Tweet came in.

“Hey, Laney,” Rose said.

Delilah and I were sitting along the wall by the receptionist’s window. Thank goodness there were no empty seats near us. The waiting room was fairly full of patients, some of them coughing and sniffling, some of them reading magazines, and a few chatting with one another.

I looked right at Rose and didn’t say a word. Just looked at her hard, stared a hole right through her, until she said, “Well, someone’s got her panties in a twist this morning.” She slipped her arm around Tweet’s waist. “C’mon, sweetie. Let’s find a couple of seats on the warmer side of the room.”

Tweet hesitated. I remembered the time on Christmas Day when he came to my house to see why I’d stopped coming around.
I thought we were all friends
, he said to me. Then he laid his hand on my shoulder, and I felt something give way. I thought maybe he’d do it now, say something to make the hateful moment wither, something to thaw my frozen heart,
to make everything seem square, but all he did was lift his shoulders the slightest bit as if he were saying there wasn’t a thing in the world he could do about what she was feeling, not a thing at all. Suddenly I hated him for not saying something to me. I grabbed a
People
magazine, shook it open, and pretended to be fascinated by it, all so I wouldn’t have to look at him and Rose any longer.

Delilah said, “What’s new, Tweet? Has Rose found you a real job now that you’re going to be a daddy?”

I heard the rustle of Rose’s jacket, and when I let my eyes lift just a bit from the magazine, I saw her drop her arm from Tweet’s waist. She was breathing through her mouth—I could hear that, too—breathing hard as if what Delilah had said had punched her in the stomach and left her gasping for air.

“Damn you, Laney.” Rose knew I’d betrayed her confidence. “Why would you tell her about our money worries?”

Her voice was sharp, and a woman sitting next to me took notice. She was an older woman with a blue tint to her hair. She had a walking cast on her foot, and she swung it over and tapped it against my leg. She gave me a stern look, but I didn’t pay her much mind.

Tweet said, “You talked to Laney about all that?” He cocked his head toward Rose, trying to make sense of what he’d heard. “That’s all private. That’s just between you and me.”

“Now, Tweet.” Rose was trying to smooth things out, and I regretted what I’d done. I couldn’t stand to think that I was causing trouble. “Tweet, baby,” she said. “You know I didn’t mean anything.”

“Hurts when someone goes behind your back.” Delilah’s voice was all sweety-sweet, and I knew she was enjoying this. “Doesn’t it, Tweet?”

That’s when Rose knocked the magazine out of my hands. “You hateful thing,” she said, and still I didn’t say a word. Cool as could be—though my heart was pounding and I was trembling inside—I bent over and picked up the magazine. The woman with the walking cast on her
foot got called back to an exam room, and she gave us all the once-over, shaking her head with disgust before she got up from her chair.

I kept staring at Rose, until finally she and Tweet walked over to the other side of the waiting room, where they sat, not saying a word. Two men in bib overalls had been talking about the weather, but they stopped when Rose and Tweet sat down beside them. I felt the eyes on me, the folks in the waiting room wondering what sort of girl I was. I couldn’t have told them. I’m certain of that now. I had no idea who I was as we made the turn toward the end of our story.

Finally, a nurse came out and called my name, and I was glad to get out of there and into an exam room. The doctor wrote me a prescription for Inderal to keep me from getting my headaches as often. When I came out to settle my bill, Rose and Tweet were gone.

When we were outside, Delilah took my arm and turned me so we were face-to-face. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

I waited, startled by the heat in Delilah’s eyes, afraid to ask what she was talking about. Finally, I couldn’t tolerate the quiet any longer. Even though I didn’t know what she had to report, I felt myself drawn into the rage smoldering inside her, not knowing that in just a few minutes it would be mine. That’s how close I was to her at that moment, so close I took her anger as my own even before she said what had caused it. I knew it as well as I knew my own name, and though the power of it terrified me, I couldn’t stop thinking that as soon as she said what she had to say, my life—Laney Volk’s life—would be on fire. It would be—and this thought struck me with a sharp, aching sweetness—it would be like it was for Lester in Iraq. Alive with possibility and risk and consequence. Not mine any longer. A life on the other side of right thinking. I told myself I would understand better then everything that had led Lester up to and away from that moment when he walked among the Iraqi wedding guests, putting his rifle to their heads and pulling the trigger.

“Tell me,” I said to Delilah, knowing that in just a few moments I would be someone different than I ever was. “Tell me what happened.”

The story was this: As I went through the door to see the doctor, Rose said in a voice loud enough for everyone in the waiting room to hear, “There goes Laney Volk. You know she’s sleeping with that boy, that Poke Hambrick. Fifteen years old he is, and her nineteen. Story too sad to tell.”

The thought of that being said in front of all those people made my face burn, not so much over what it made me out to be, but more because of how it treated what was true between Poke and me—that two people could be kind to each other and not expect anything in return. Rose, out of spite, had tried to turn that ugly. She needed someone to draw her up short, scare the stuffing out of her, so she’d learn how to treat people. I didn’t once stop to question whether what Delilah had told me was true. From where I sit now, I doubt that it was, but that day I believed it with all my heart.

“This fire?” I said to Delilah. “When do we do it?”

A FEW NIGHTS LATER
, just after dark, we got in Lester’s truck and drove to New Hope. He toted the gas cans, said, sure, all right, he didn’t mind giving Rose and Tweet a little scare.

I told myself there was no harm in it. A fire in the grass on an early spring night when there’d been plenty of rain and the ground was soft and there wasn’t a stir of a breeze. Not a chance in the world for that fire to skip to the house. Just a little fire in the night to give Rose the whim-whams.

“Rose MacAdow,” Delilah said under her breath. “You watch out now.”

We moved through the dark, having left Lester’s truck along the street in front of my mother’s house. No one would think a thing about
seeing that truck there. Everyone knew that Lester and I were a match. I thought about Rose saying what she did about Poke and me so all those people in the clinic waiting room could hear, and, again, I burned with how mean that was, how unfair.

“She better watch out,” I said. “She doesn’t know who she’s messing with.”

It was so quiet, I could hear the gas sloshing around in the cans. From time to time, they banged against Lester’s legs. The three of us slipped around behind Mr. Hambrick’s house. The house was dark except for a faint light coming from the living room, and I knew it was the glow of the television screen, that Mr. Hambrick was snugged down in his reclining chair, dozing after supper while the TV played. He wouldn’t hear a thing as we cut through his backyard and made ready to cross over into Rose and Tweet’s.

“Where you going?”

The voice came out of the dark and Delilah gave a little yelp. Lester said, “Jesus,” and I felt my heart in my chest.

It was Poke. He came out of the dark and stood with us. I could smell his supper on his clothes, the smell of hot grease from whatever Mr. Hambrick had fried up. It was a night of no moon, so I could barely make him out, but I could hear him breathing, and I felt the air stir a bit as he stepped up close to us. He bumped a gas can with his foot.

“That’s gas, isn’t it?” he said.

“Go inside, Poke,” I told him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t tell.”

“Nothing to tell,” said Delilah.

Poke bumped the gas can again. “Soon will be.”

That’s when Lester said, “You heard Laney. Go inside and forget you saw us.”

He said it in a mean tone of voice I’d never heard from him. “Lester,” I said, “don’t do him like that.”

“I said, go.” Lester’s voice was softer now, but it was too late. I knew he’d hurt Poke’s feelings.

“You don’t want to be any part of this,” I said. “Really, Poke.”

He didn’t say a word to me. He took off running across the yard, and then off into the dark, where he could be alone with his hurt.

I slapped Lester across the arm. “Why’d you have to do that?”

“Jeez, Laney, I just wanted him to go.”

“Well, he’s gone,” said Delilah. “Now, let’s get moving.”

At Rose and Tweet’s, the house was full of light. Light in every window, a light burning on the front porch.

“Lit up like a Christmas tree,” Lester said.

“Like they’re expecting company,” said Delilah.

“Like they knew we were coming.” My voice was a whisper. “It gives me the creeps.”

For a good while, none of us said a word. Then the music started. Tweet on his saxophone. The windows were open—it was that kind of night, still and warm enough to make folks think of summer on its way—and I could hear the music, something smoky and hot. I knew Rose was in the house listening. Rose and her man, just whiling away the night. Rose, who said the vile thing she did in the clinic waiting room; Rose, who went dancing by a window, and then another, and I could see she wasn’t thinking a thing about how much she’d hurt people. She was dancing to Tweet’s music, holding the bottom of her bulging stomach, thinking everything in her life was okey-doke.

“I hate her,” Delilah said, and neither Lester nor I said a word to disagree.

So with that music playing, and the dancing going on, Lester finally got to work. Crouched low in the dark, he circled the house, walking backwards, trailing gasoline as he went. He had to stop once and come back to get the other gas can. When it was all done, his breath was coming fast. He bent over, his hands on his knees, and waited for his breathing to steady itself.

The smell of gasoline was all around us.

“Okay?” Delilah asked.

“Right,” said Lester. He took a box of matches out of his pocket. “I’ll just be a tick.”

He went off into the darkness, and soon I heard the scratch of the match head, saw the small flame, and heard the puff of ignition as it touched the trail of gasoline. The flames stretched out in each direction, racing along the circle.

Then I heard Lester cry out, and I knew he was on fire.

I ran to him. I pushed him to the damp ground and slapped at his boot and his pants’ leg with my bare hands, not thinking at all of burning myself, only thinking that I had to put out those flames.

Finally, I did. Gas had gotten onto Lester’s boots while he’d been making his circle around the house, and when he put the lit match to the trail, the flame caught his boots and pants’ legs, burning off the gas. Luckily, I got to him before the fire could lick through leather and denim to the skin beneath.

I helped him away from the fire, to where Delilah was waiting, and then the three of us ran, escaping before Rose and Tweet caught sight of the fire.

At Lester’s truck, we panted for breath. I realized that my hands were throbbing. Lester opened the door, and in the dome light’s glow, he inspected my palms, which were already starting to blister.

“You’re burned,” he said.

Then I realized Poke was on the sidewalk. I didn’t know where he’d come from or where he’d been when we’d been setting the fire at Rose and Tweet’s, only that he came to me now, and he said, “Are you hurt, Laney?”

Just like that, he put away the hurt he’d felt when Lester talked mean to him. If only we’d all been able to forgive one another the way that Poke did.

“My fingers,” I said. “Did you see?”

He nodded. The fire whistle started to blow, and I knew Rose and Tweet had finally seen that fire and made the call. Soon there would be a pumper truck, and maybe even the county sheriff, and, of course, it would be all over the news, and there I was marked with those burned hands.

“Get out of here,” Poke said. “Just go. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”

BY MORNING
—once I’d been to the emergency room at the hospital, where they gave me Silvadine cream for my burns and Vicodin for the pain, and then wrapped my fingers in gauze—the word was out that Poke Hambrick had tried to set fire to that house where Rose MacAdow lived with that man known as Tweet.

Poke had come clean and told the fire chief and then the police how he’d poured gasoline onto the grass and set it ablaze with a match. Why? Just fooling around, he said.

Fooling around? People shook their heads when that story got around town. Wasn’t no fooling to it when it came to fire that close to a house and a woman inside it carrying a baby. Lordy. What was that boy thinking?

He wasn’t, he told the police. He didn’t have a thought in his head that anyone might get hurt. It was just something to do.

Something like that? the police said. Arson? You don’t do something like that unless you’re out to do some harm.

I heard the story from Mother the next day. What in the world had happened to my hands, anyway? she wanted to know. I’d been at Lester’s, I said. He had one of those smooth-topped stoves, the kind where the burners were underneath a ceramic surface, and after supper I’d gone to brush some crumbs off with my hands, not noticing, until it was too late, the red light on the control panel telling me the surface was still hot. “I’m an idiot,” I told her, and Mother said, “Well, my gosh, Laney. You
need to be more careful. Play with something hot, and you end up getting burned.” I suspect she knew right then and there that I’d had something to do with that fire at Rose and Tweet’s. “You hear what I’m saying, Missy? You take care.”