On Fire (20 page)
J
UST AFTER FOUR
O'CLOCK
, D
AN AND
I were in Frank's office. He was on the phone when we came in but he got off when he saw us. “Dan,” he said. “Matti.” He cocked his head at me. “Nice to see you in the daylight. Any particular reason for the getup?”
I didn't let him distract me. “When you first told me down in Kingman that you knew who Dan was, even though you didn't, you said his whole family was killed in a car accident. Right?”
“I think so,” Frank said.
“How did you find out about that?”
“The . . . connection I have in Kingman sent me a copy of an old newspaper clipping about it.”
“Do you have it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“May we see it?” I was trying to keep things businesslike.
“I don't know where I put it,” Frank mumbled. He hardly ever mumbled so it was a dead give-away that he was hiding something.
“What about that red folder over on the TV tray by your desk?” Dan asked. “That's where you had it when I was here before.”
Frank made a show of noticing the folder and then picking it up and looking through it. “What do you plan to do with this information, Matti?” he said. “I really should burn it.”
“I intend to read it to Dan.” I held out my hand. It was trembling a little, but it had been a long day. I was still keeping it together. “I'm positive that Willis . . . ”
“Asche,” Frank said. He was reading it off something in the red file.
“I'm positive he's someone we knew when Dan was in the hospital. I just need to find out one more thing about him and then I'll back off.”
I held out my hand again and snapped my fingers. Only once, but I did snap them.
“You're not making sense,” Frank said. “If he's someone you know, why didn't you realize it right away when you heard his name?”
That's when I had the melt down. A very brief one. “Because it's complicated,” I yelled. “It's . . . just . . . I'm sorry.”
Frank lets me get by with a lot, but he does not appreciate being yelled at.
“Please,” I said in a soft Bambi's mother's voice. “May I see the newspaper article? I'll give it back.”
Frank handed me the folder, but he did not look happy.
“Thank you,” I said. I opened it. The clipping was right on top. I decided I was too stressed out to handle reading it myself. I handed it to Dan. “Could you read this out loud?”
Dan looked at the clipping for a minute and then began to read very quietly. “A lightning strike during yesterday's freak electrical storm brought trees down on Highway 6A Sunday afternoon, causing a fatal accident. Killed was passing motorist Willis Asche, 37, and his wife, Selena, also 37.”
Dan stopped reading then. “It goes on about the accident. How the car jumped the road and crashed into an embankment.”
“But there's more, isn't there?”
Dan studied the clipping, and then looked up at me. His face was suddenly different, pulled down in some way. “Also killed in the accident,” he read, “was the couple's six-year-old son, Howard . . . ”
He cleared his throat and not for the reason I do it. “Howard Asche. Willis Asche, Jr., nine years old, was the only survivor.”
Dan put the clipping in the folder, closed it and laid it back on the desk.
“This sound like your friend?” Frank asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I saw him at the main bus terminal in Kingman one time when he said he was going to visit his family. He had flowers and a small teddy bear with him. The bus he got on went out to a cemetery.”
“All the same . . . ” Frank said.
“I couldn't find him when I left the hospital,” Dan said. “I never told him goodbye.”
“I know where he lives,” I said.
The next words out of my mouth were for Frank's benefit, because even though he sometimes went too far, I knew he could make things happen.
I was sorry for the meltdown and I used the clearest, calmest voice I could come up with. “Frank,” I said, “we have to get back to Metal Springs right away. We have to find Howard.”
“Right away,” Frank said, “as in tomorrow?”
“Yes,” I said. “If we can't go today.”
“I've got insurance people coming in the morning, Matti. I can't leave here. And Marsh is expecting a big shipment. You won't be able to pry him away, either.”
“You'll find a way though, Dad,” I said.
I think it surprised him, me calling him that instead of Frank. But it probably sealed the deal.
F
RANK CAME UP WITH A BRILLIANT
solution to our travel problem. Early the next morning Dan and I were on a helicopter to Kingman. One of the X-Treme Ski pilots had to pick up the owner there anyway and we went along.
A friend of Frank's picked us up at the heli-pad south of town and drove us to the main bus terminal. I knew the trip from there to the hospital like the right side of my face.
Except we weren't going to the hospital. We were going to get off at the Metal Springs gas station. I hadn't cleared that with Frank, but I thought it was the best place to look.
We had to be back at the palace by 7:00 PM or he would never allow me to go out alone again until I was eighteen. We'd stay overnight and Frank would drive down to get us sometime the next day. He said he and Dan had some business to take care of before we went back home again, anyway.
It was noisy in the helicopter so Dan and I didn't talk much. I put on my ear muffs and spent my time looking at the way the lake below us cut a long exclamation mark down through the dead trees, and farther south, the living ones. And at the iron hard mountains all around it.
We didn't say much in the car we were picked up in either. Once we got on the bus though and we had a little more privacy, I asked Dan what he thought we should say to Howard.
“If we find him,” Dan said. “There's no guarantee we will.”
“We'll find him,” I said. “What are we going to say to him when we do?”
Dan turned to look at something out the window.
“That appaloosa, again,” I thought. “He won't quit.” When I looked though, there was just a guy on a tractor driving down the edge of the road.
“Dan?” I said. “About Howard?”
Dan turned back toward me. “He told me when you lose your memory of something it can be very traumatic to get it back. I thought at the time he was saying it for my benefit. Now I think he was talking about himself.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“What makes you think he'll want to know what his real name is? Or that his family's dead?”
“What makes you think he doesn't know already? Maybe he's just using his brother's name to give him a second chance at being alive.”
Dan was quiet for a minute. “All the time I was in the hospital, Howard looked after me. Now . . . ”
“I think we'll invite him to come home with us,” I said.
Dan laughed. “Frank would have a bird.”
“Probably. At first.”
“Howard wouldn't come, anyway.”
“He told me family was the most important thing in the world. I think he needs one that's above ground.” The bus stopped at the Metal Springs gas station.
“What are you doing?” Dan said, when I stood up to get off the bus. “I thought we were going to the hospital.”
I shook my head. “This is where Howard lives,” I said. “Frank and Marsh and I let him off here once.”
Dan grumbled, but he got off after me. Then he stood looking around and shaking his head. “I can't believe he lives here,” he said. “Is there even running water in these places? Or heat?”
Metal Springs did look a lot worse than I remembered. Most of the houses had doors or windows missing now. A few had apparently been yanked off their foundations and moved away. There were just holes in the ground where they'd once been.
Gulls picked through the garbage that was everywhere. If you looked hard enough you could probably find a rat.
“Which one of these shacks is he in?” Dan asked finally.
That was the one flaw in my plan. “I don't know exactly,” I said. “We're going into the gas station to find out.”
T
HE CASHIER IN THE GAS STATION
looked like he was about Dan's age. He was wearing a red bow tie and a vest with a badge pinned on it that said,
Norm.
And under that
, Employee of the
Month.
I pointed to the badge and said, “Congratulations.” Frank usually started out that way when he was trying to be friendly and get the other person on his side.
Every now and then, I tried out one of his strategies.
“It's no biggy,” Norm said. He had so many freckles on his face and they were so close together in places that he made me think of the Appaloosa I used to see on the way to the hospital.
“I'm the only one who works here now. We're about to close. All these houses are coming down and they're putting in a shopping centre.”
“I wonder if you can help us?” I said. Frank's influence coming out in me again. “We're looking for a friend of ours.”
“His name is Howard,” Dan told him. He gave the usual description. While he was talking it occurred to me that if Howard ever changed his suspenders, we'd have no way of finding him again.
Norm shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I don't know anyone by that name.”
“He lives around here somewhere,” I said. “My dad and I dropped him off in front of the gas station a month or so ago.”
“Lots of people live in these rundown old houses,” Norm said. “They did, anyway.”
“So, you're saying you don't know our friend?” Dan asked.
“Not exactly.” Norm scratched his neck. “I see him now and then. But,” he hesitated, “his name's not Howard.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. Or Dan did.
“Why did you want to find this guy again?”
I was beginning to feel impatient so how I answered his question was more my way of handling things than Frank's. “We think he's very ill,” I said. “And if we can't find him soon we're going to have to call the doctors at the Metal Springs Hospital and have them send out a search party.”
As if that would ever happen.
“You mean he's mental?” Art said.
“We all are. I have T.S. and he has . . . ” I pointed at Dan. I didn't know if he actually had something you could name or not. The doctor never told us.
“B.I.N.G.O.,” he said. “So does Howard.”
“You'd better hope there isn't a full moon tonight,” I added.
Norm looked from Dan to me and back again. I could tell we'd worried him. His face was red, where his freckles hadn't blotched together to make it brown. But he wasn't dumb.
“Okay,” he said. “Why do you really need to find this guy?”
“Because,” Dan told him, and I guess honesty might have been the best way to go in the first place, “he's my friend. I want to make sure he's all right.”
“Our friend,” I said.
Norm whispered like he thought the gas station might be bugged. “I don't want to get into trouble, but this guy you're talking about? He comes in here once a month to pick up his government check.The owner charges him twenty bucks a month to use this station as his home address.”
“You're not the owner?” Dan said.
“You think I'd be wearing this monkey suit if I owned the place?” Norm took off his bow tie and laid it on the counter. “Your guy comes in to get his check like I said. Sometimes I let him use the shower in the back. But I'm telling you, his name's not Howard.”
He opened a cupboard behind him and took out a brown envelope with a clear plastic window on the front. He held it out for us to see. A name showed plainly through the window.
Willis Asche, Jr.
“If you can just tell us which of these shacks he lives in,” Dan began . . .
“ . . . we'll get him and take him home with us.” I finished his sentence for him.
Norm shook his head. “I don't know. I really don't. But if you have time to wait, I'm sure he'll be in to pick up this check any minute. It came yesterday. I'm surprised he hasn't been in already.”
N
ORM GAVE US TWO PLASTIC CHAIRS
to set out on the gravel in front of the gas station. He even offered each of us a free coke and a bag of chips. “On the house,” he said. “I feel bad about your friend having to pay to pick up his mail here. He isn't the only one, either. It's just . . . I needed the job.”
I appreciated him saying that. After all, he was just another kid trying to make the best of a bad situation.
The wind had come up a bit since we arrived and the sky had that funny look it gets in the fall when it might let down a lot of rain on your head, or it might decide not to. Dan drank his coke fast and then wandered around to the other side of the garage where I couldn't see him.
I thought Howard might be coming on the bus, so I turned my chair toward the highway. While I sat there watching the road I began thinking about what we'd do if Howard actually said yes.
Plan A would be to fix up a place in Cato City, if he insisted on being some place rundown. At least he'd have a great view living there. And we'd be close by.
Plan B involved Frank bringing in another trailer like Dan's for him. Or Howard could even have the egg and Dan could move into the house.
I was so involved with all the possibilities that when I heard Dan calling from the other side of the garage, I had to check out where I was for a minute. Then I got up and ran around to where he was.