The Arsonist (10 page)

The man at the register, Adrian Snell, said he owned the place. He seemed happy to answer Bud’s questions between ringing up customers, most of whom he obviously knew. He was a stocky, strong-looking guy,
big around the middle but not fat—just solid-looking. Even his head was solid and fleshy, the back of his neck permanently a reddish tan, his jaw square, his eyes oddly pale and pretty. He had a fair amount of white hair that he clearly took pride in—it was carefully combed into a pompadour. He wore a flannel shirt, his long-sleeved undershirt visible at the neck and at the rolled-up cuffs of his shirtsleeves. He was clearly a guy who liked to talk, a solid, satisfied man.

It was a friendly town, he said. “Course, you got your different groups. Farmers, a few left. Dairy mostly, and now some vegetable farms. Hunters. Fishermen. I’m both of those myself. Summer folks. Bunch of kids come up in the seventies or so and stayed, doing organic stuff and the like.” He said Bud ought to read the bulletin boards around town. One here outside the store. One next door, at the post office. One at the town hall. “Give you a flavor of things.” He pointed out a pamphlet for sale in the magazine rack that would tell him the history of the place.

On Saturday afternoon, Bud sat in on a book club meeting at the library. There was one man at the meeting besides himself, and maybe ten women. The book was by Updike, one Bud hadn’t read. The man liked it. Most of the women didn’t. The general consensus among them was that Updike didn’t like women.

“How can you say that, ‘He doesn’t like women’? He
loves
women.” This was Dan Stark, as Bud would later come to know.

“I didn’t say he didn’t
love
women,” Mildred Early said. “I said he didn’t
like
them.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Oh, if you don’t know the difference …” She swatted at the air in front of her dismissively.

On Sunday, he went to the service at the Unitarian church. Safe enough for a Jew, he figured, and he was right—nary a mention of Christ. No sign of him either—no cross, and the church windows were clear, crazed glass, letting in the gently gray light of the overcast day outside. The minister was a woman, though Bud wasn’t certain of that until she opened her mouth, and her voice—lovely and light—said, “Let us pray.”

Afterward, he went to the coffee hour in the church basement. You entered through a door around the side of the church, descending three
or four steps. Perhaps fifteen people were there in all, standing around on the shiny linoleum floor under the unkind fluorescent lights. Bud moved around, speaking to several of them.

The woman pouring coffee or tea introduced herself as Emily Gilroy.
Coffee
, Bud said, and picked up a doughnut. “Homemade,” Emily said. And then, “So nice to see a new young face.”

Bud said, “Young?” and turned to look behind him.

Emily laughed. Later he’d come to know her well. She was the clerk in the town hall, someone who heard a lot of gossip about everyone in town and was willing to share almost all of it. A resource, as Bud thought of her—seemingly incapable of keeping a secret. He liked the odd woman who couldn’t keep a secret.

Sunday afternoon, he went to a Little League game in the field behind the white frame grammar school and stood leaning on a chain-link fence, shivering, with a half-dozen others as the Pomeroy team lost, 14–1, mostly on walks. By the end of the game, they had run through seven pitchers, the coach was so desperate to find anyone who might, perhaps, be able just to get the ball over the plate. Some of the boys were actually called in from the bases and the outfield to give it a try. Minutes before the mercy rule was invoked and the game declared over, a light wet snow began, disappearing as it fell onto the brownish grass. The woman next to him put her head in her hands and said to no one in particular, “Just take me out and shoot me now, why don’t you?”

By the end of the weekend, he’d made up his mind. He’d read through the town’s history, he’d talked to people he ran into. It all seemed yeasty to him, interesting, and he had an almost immediate sense that he could
get
it. He felt he could make a life here, professionally, personally.

On Monday, before he left to go back to Washington, he went to see the owner of the paper. They sat in his office, housed on the second floor of a brick building on the town green. The first floor was a real-estate office, its space mostly unoccupied in the winter, the paper’s owner said. He was tall, skinny, hawk-nosed, in his early seventies. He wore a bow tie and a pilled, stained cardigan. Bud asked about the health of the paper.

It was doing okay, Pete said. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he’d run it for almost fifty years with his wife. After she died,
a year and a half earlier, it was too much work. But also, he said, and shrugged, “Not so much fun.”

Bud remembered then the picture of them together in the article in the
Post
, standing outside this building in warm weather. Laughing, he thought. When he looked it up later, he saw he was right. She was stout and shapeless, a monolith, wearing a kind of dress he didn’t think they even made anymore, sprigged with flowers. Pete was saying something to her, an eager, wicked grin on his face as he leaned in toward her, and she was laughing in response—her shoulders were lifted up toward her ears, her head was thrown back, her eyes were shut. Maybe that’s what had made him notice the article, Bud thought. Fun indeed, embodied.

He wasn’t sure if his offer would be accepted. Pete had been asking forty grand, and Bud only had twenty, his entire savings.

But two days later, back in Washington, he had a message on his telephone answering machine. “It’s Pete. Two words. You’re on.” He called back, and they made the arrangements. Pete would stay on for six months to help him get going. Bud would get there as soon as he could.

He gave his notice at the paper, started packing in the evenings, throwing and giving things away. He contacted a real-estate broker in New Hampshire about rentals in the area and began to say good-bye to people.

Some of whom were incredulous that he could be sacrificing what seemed a great career to go to Palookaville, as one friend called it. Greg Maloney. They were sitting in a dark, noisy bar in Georgetown drinking tequila shots among all the handsome young people in charge of the nation.

“But didn’t they used to keep the Jews out up there? Remember that Rehnquist thing?” Greg pointed at him. “A different kind of covenant
there
.” He had a swallow and set his glass down, hard. “How can you be going to a place like that?”

“That was Vermont,” Bud said. “Rehnquist was in Vermont.”

“Vermont, New Hampshire: what’s the difference?”

“Look, if you didn’t go to places where they used to keep the Jews out, you wouldn’t go anywhere.”

Greg laughed. Then he said, “Seriously. What’s this about?”

“It’s who I am, man.” Bud lifted his hands, then cradled the shot glass
again. “Where I’m from, which is easy for someone like you to forget. I like it. Small-town stuff. I liked it way back then, anyway, except I felt obliged, in some way, to want more.” Bud said this casually, but as he spoke, he realized how true it was. He remembered that he had wanted to stay, to go to the community college and marry his high school girlfriend, a basketball star with ash-blond hair who regularly beat him at arm wrestling. He remembered that it was the adults around him—his parents, his teachers, his coaches—who encouraged him to “get out,” as they called it. And so he had, first to Colorado State, then to Denver, then to Washington.

He tried to explain this to Greg, who’d grown up in Manhattan and didn’t need to get out of anywhere.

Greg conceded this. “It’s weird to think of, actually, for me. Having that kind of divide in your life.”

“Oh, it’s not like it’s something I’ve thought about much, up to now. But now that it’s come up, I feel a kind of … I don’t know.
Hunger
, I guess, for it. I’m
up
for it now,” he said. “The weekly pace, and making what you can of what’s right around you. Plus I’m forty-four. I’d like to slow down. Just live in one place. Look hard at what’s around me. Try having a home. I’ve been floating along on top of that notion for a long time.”

Greg made a face. “Home is overrated.”

“You say that because you’ve got one.” Greg did: a tiny former coach house in Georgetown, two kids, and a long-legged, funny wife with a busy career as a personal caterer.

Bud said, “I’d like the opportunity to decide that for myself.”

“But what kind of stories will you be writing?” Greg asked. “Births, deaths, graduations? Town meetings? High school sports? That stuff gets old fast.”

“Not as old as riding on a bus with a bunch of stale reporters and an aspiring candidate spouting every political cliché in the book: ‘We need to move this country’ ”—he raised his hand and brought it down hard on the bar—“ ‘Forward!’ I’ll take the local level.”

“Okay, so take the local level for a while. Just don’t burn your bridges, is all.”

But that, Bud felt, driving north towing a U-Haul trailer behind
his elderly car, was what he wanted. To burn bridges. To say
no
so he could say
yes
. Isn’t this the American way? The fresh start? The new beginning?

Though it was also a lot like going home, he thought, as he crossed the state line into New Hampshire.

6

“O
H
! W
ELL
,
IT HAS
to be arson, don’t you think?”

This was Liz, always so emphatic, so sure of her opinions. She was sitting with the rest of the adults, all but her husband, Clark, on the screened porch. Clark had gone down the hill to open the house in the meadow below, to drop off the duffel bags they’d arrived with, to turn the water on. The two older children, Daphne and Chas, were upstairs, exploring—you could hear their feet thudding on the floor overhead. The littlest, Gordie, was sitting on Liz’s lap in the rocking chair. His head was leaned back against her breasts, and his bare feet dangled over his mother’s knees, their soles a dusty gray. They danced a little with the chair’s steady, slow motion back and forth.

“I mean, two in a
row
,” Liz said. “Can there be any doubt?”

“Well, and they were empty houses, too,” Sylvia offered. She and Alfie had their predinner martinis, Frankie had beer in a bottle, and Liz was drinking lemonade, since she was still nursing.

Liz waved her hand. “Say no more.”

“Though it doesn’t make any difference to label it, does it?” Frankie asked.

“But then they can start looking for clues,” Liz said. And she went on to talk about a fire at the little prep school near Northampton where she worked as an admissions officer, a fire set, they discovered, by a student who was late with a paper and wanted an excuse not to have to turn it in. “It could be something as idiotic as that.”

Sylvia’s chair was turned to the view of the meadow, and now in her peripheral vision she saw a moving shape and focused on it. Clark, or a glimpse of Clark through the trees on the dirt road. As the conversation
went on around her, she could see him making his slow progress back on foot, parts of his figure appearing and disappearing behind the maples and the clusters of birches that drooped over the road. She was fond of this son-in-law, the genetic donor of the children’s coloring: they were all silver blonds, like him.

And here came the older two, back downstairs. They stood in the porch doorway looking around. Like Gordie, they were wearing shorts and no shirt. To someone else they might have been nearly indistinguishable, these three, a mass of beautiful pale flesh and curly white hair, but Sylvia had a keen, loving sense of the differences among them.

She had been surprised by her love for her grandchildren but, more than that, surprised by their love for her. She felt an almost absurd gratitude for it—for its sweet lack of complication, and for some sense of forgiveness she found in it, which she welcomed without really seeking to understand it. Now Daphne, the oldest at five, came to stand by Sylvia’s chair. Sylvia touched her bare white shoulder, so warm and smooth. “Are you liking your school so much this year?” she asked, and listened as the little girl began to talk about her day care.

When she looked up a minute or two later, she met Frankie’s concentrated gaze on her and Daphne. Frankie looked away quickly.

What was she thinking? Sylvia wondered. Perhaps the wish for children herself? The sense she’d missed that opportunity? They had spoken of it a few times. Once Sylvia had asked her outright if she’d ever considered it.

“Absent the man,” Frankie had said, “I’m not interested.”

“So?” Sylvia asked. “What about the man?”

“Long story short: what man?” Frankie had said, and laughed.

The screen door in the kitchen slapped shut: Clark arriving. In a minute or two he appeared on the porch, carrying a bottle of beer. Like Liz, he was wearing what Sylvia thought of as their uniform—jeans and a well-worn T-shirt. Both had on thick-soled sandals. His blond hair was caught back in a ponytail, something Sylvia found unattractive on any man, even Clark, who was otherwise quite beautiful. He and Liz made an odd couple—he so large and blond, she so small and quick and dark—though her hair, cut in a short cap around her head now, was touched with white everywhere.