The Arsonist (9 page)

Then she was touching herself idly, thinking of Philip. In quick sequence, images of him in Africa flashed by. His narrow face, white with fatigue under the kerosene lamp over the dining table after a long, fruitless surgery to sew up a boy’s machete wound. Waking in the dark next to him at the call to prayer on Lamu and silently making love. Afterward lying still, hearing the men’s voices in the street below as they greeted one another on the way to the mosque. “Ah, the varieties of religious experience,” Philip had whispered to her.

It seemed like a dream. He seemed like a dream, her time with him a thing she’d invented.

She fell asleep.

In the night, she woke suddenly. At first she thought it was the moon, which fell nearly as bright as a cold, colorless daylight into the room. She’d forgotten to close the curtains.

But then, lying there, she heard it again—the same faint, insistent noise that had waked her the night before. This time she knew instantly what it was.

5

B
UD WAS IN THE CAR
, on the way to the fire. His pager had pulled him awake from a deep sleep, so deep that he almost fell, getting up. He was standing next to the bed, listening to the dispatcher’s voice giving the location before he felt fully conscious. It was the Ludlow house, she said, out on Pliny Road, number 7, almost to Pleasant Hill. He’d stopped only to take a piss, to splash some water on his face, to pull on his jeans and shoes and a shirt he hadn’t bothered to button. He was already out the door, entering the cool dark of the night, when the fire horn blew, summoning the volunteers from wherever they were.

It wasn’t until he was driving through the dark quiet of the village that he became aware of how hard his heart was beating, of his own audible breathlessness filling the car. He was excited. A part of him, he realized, was actually glad, even thrilled, at the prospect of a fire waiting. He shook his head and laughed quietly, quickly.
We are all boys
, he thought,
playing with matches
.

This was only the fourth fire he’d been summoned to in the three years he’d lived in Pomeroy. Most often the calls were for accidents—highway accidents, work accidents. Falls were big business. Some indoors: down the stairs, getting out of the tub. Some outside—through the ice in winter, off ladders, out of trees. Of the earlier fires before this recent twosome, neither had been truly worthy of the name. One was small, a chimney fire, and the other was a grease fire in a dirty kitchen. Both quickly put out.

Now, as he turned into the steep driveway, he could tell that this one was a bonfire, the same story as the Kershaw place. It was essentially over, the house long gone. Even in the car, he could hear the joyous roar of the flames.

He pulled in. There were cars everywhere, six or seven already on the lawn, in the driveway, angled oddly, some with their doors hanging open. Behind him as he killed the engine, he could see the cars whose headlights had followed him on the road and into the drive pulling up, parking, too.

He got out of his car and hiked up the driveway to the house. It looked like the setting for a mad party, every window brilliantly lighted. The flames jumping into the dark sky were yellow and full and happy. Sparks exploded high upward, lighting the air like small-town fireworks, then drifted away, dying, blinking out like fireflies into the black night.

There were men running all over. Some were hooking the pumper truck to a water tank. He saw that Dan Stark was the pipeman, that Kevin O’Hara was feeding the hose to him. Behind him he heard another car pull up, and Gavin Knox, one of the kids on the fire crew—there were three or four younger guys—ran past him in his turnout gear, and then, a few paces away, stopped, looking up, taking in the sheer scope of the thing, the fact that the house
was
the fire now. Was nothing else but fire. “Fuck!” he said in awe, making two syllables of it.

Bud saw Davey Swann, the chief, moving around at the side of the house, and followed Gavin over to him. He heard the kid yell, “Where do you want me?”

“What the hell difference does it make?” Davey yelled back. He sounded furious.

Tink Snell was suddenly there now with Gavin. He was wearing his gear, too. “Just watch out, watch for a jump,” Davey yelled to both of them. “Get the bladders. What the hell else is there to do?” He started to walk away.

Bud followed. “Everybody’s out of the house then?” he shouted, leaning toward Davey.

He shook his head. “ ’Twasn’t nobody there. Nobody home. Same as the Olsens’.”

They stood, stupidly, for a few moments, watching the flames rise into the sky, watching the arc of water now rising uselessly into them. “Strange, isn’t it,” Bud said. “The two of them, so close together.”

“More than fucking strange.”

Bud looked sharply at him, and he looked back levelly, furious. “Don’t you write that. Don’t you write I said that.”

Bud nodded, and then they both turned at a noise, the noise the outer wall at the side of the house made as it disappeared. It didn’t quite fall—it was more that the wall had already been eaten, was just a lace of slender supports that now suddenly vanished into the frantic light. And then the roof sagged partially into the fire and began to be eaten, too.

There was the wail of a siren. Bud turned and watched another tanker rising up the steep drive and onto the lawn, probably from Winslow, the next town over. The chief left him, jogged over to it.

For an hour or so, as the house folded piece by piece in on itself, Bud walked the perimeter taking pictures of the fire, of the men working, the ones on the hoses and the ones with the bladders—backpacks of water—who were moving around watching for sparks that landed on the floor of pine needles here, in the dry leaves there. And all the while he was thinking about these two fires, starting in the middle of the night, in the middle of the summer. Both of them in empty houses.

What caused fires? Heating, in winter. You didn’t have to be home, necessarily. Bad wiring anytime, sure, whether you were home or not. But mostly, most of the time, if you wanted a fire, you had to be home. Someone had to be home. Because mostly it was people who started fires. People using crappy space heaters. People cooking carelessly, or with defective stoves or equipment. People dumping not-quite-dead coals from grills in dumb places, or leaving a fireplace unattended or a cigarette smoldering at the edge of an ashtray. A cigarette that would burn slowly down on its own, tipping out when it got low enough, tipping onto paper or wood or fabric.

People.

This house was empty. The earlier fire had been in an empty house, too.

He’d talk to Davey again tomorrow. He’d get a quote he could use—by then surely he’d be willing to speculate on the record. Everyone else would be doing it.

He realized then both what he was thinking, and that he was excited by what he was thinking. It was arson. It had to be arson.

What a story. What a break. What a fucking lucky break.

And then, suddenly ashamed of himself, he said aloud, “Asshole.”

Bud had read about the
Pomeroy Union
in an article in the
Washington Post
, a good long piece about the demise of small-town papers. The
Union
was one of three papers mentioned in the story, all barely holding on. It was run by one old guy and his wife with a small group of part-time, nonprofessional reporters. The printing was done forty miles away, the distributing by the owner and some kids he paid by the hour.

Bud was living in Washington at the time, writing on politics for the
Denver Post
. He was, he would have said, happy. He liked his job, he liked Washington as a city, he still thought that Bill Clinton might be a great president. But he was restless. Was it the sense of another political season coming on, with some of the same candidates getting ready to run and some of the same old clichés already being spouted? Maybe. Was it his personal life, more or less dead since his divorce just a bit more than a year earlier?

His second divorce, actually, which had been a killer.

As opposed to the first one, which had been from his college girlfriend. She and he had, it seemed, grown easily and slowly apart, into near-siblinglike, asexual companionship. From time to time, one or the other of them would suggest
working on it
—sex—and they would try. There was expensive underwear involved, and sex toys. On the last of these occasions, Bud hadn’t been able to get hard. He had apologized. “My
prick
apologizes.” When they had split up, the only acrimony was about who got certain books.

No, it was the second, disastrous marriage that had undone him. She was a political consultant working on Jerry Brown’s campaign. It was not quite a rebound relationship, but close enough to it for him to be dazzled and endlessly gratified by his own reliable hard-on for her. Ha! Take
that
, you unbelievers! A hard-on connected to her beauty, to her intelligence, yes, of course, and to her apparent vulnerability. Later he would wonder how it was he hadn’t noticed how unhappy she was. He didn’t, he supposed, because he imagined he was the cure for that.

He was not the cure. In their sixth month of marriage, angry at him because he’d been out of town for two weeks covering the primaries, she had fucked several other men, one in a bathroom at a party, the other two in the apartment she shared with Bud, bringing one home from the bar where she’d met him, beckoning the other, an old married lover, from his own home.

He was crazy with jealousy when she told him. She blamed her loneliness, her despair, her sense that he’d drifted away from her—he hadn’t called for a couple of nights in a row, he’d forgotten the anniversary of their meeting. She wept, he wept. They made up, they had great sex, he vowed his attentiveness, his love.

And that was how it went, over and over. It took him a while to see the crises as manufactured, as born of a need for crisis. It took him a while to understand the pitch she needed to live at, and to come to terms with the fact that he couldn’t sustain that. It took him a while to see that part of that pitch was her near-constant feeling of having been wounded, betrayed, in ways that were unbearable for her. Which required apology, penance, on his side, a reshaping of habits if not personality. Ending it took months, in part, he slowly realized, because the ending itself was thrilling to her—the drama of it. There was even a gesture at suicide.

And finally he had to walk out. He couldn’t negotiate his way out of it, he couldn’t persuade her of the necessity of ending it, or of anything. He just walked away, overwhelmed with sorrow and relief.

So maybe all of that was part of his restlessness. He didn’t know. All he knew was that there was something about the story of these small-town papers that caught his interest—perhaps because as a teenager in a small town in Colorado, he’d always been so aware of his local paper, of how important it was in his life, in his family’s life. His grandmother liked the obituaries and the social column—who was entertaining whom, serving what for lunch, with what kind of party favors, every single stunningly boring detail. His mother clipped recipes and was passionate about local politics—she’d been deputy mayor of their small town for five or six years and was always active in local affairs. Bud himself liked to read about high school sports, which were covered exhaustively. And his father, and Bud as well, actually, followed the crime reports,
usually someone driving drunk or kids overturning a car or nuisance complaints—animals running free and tearing up gardens, someone partying loudly and too late.

In any case, when he read about the
Union
again almost a year later in a piece that popped up on the Internet, when he saw that it was for sale, that the guy was giving up, he got in his car and drove north. He stopped in Concord. He’d concocted a story to pay his way, a story about politically active Republicans in New Hampshire and how they felt about the next crop of likely candidates who were already periodically visiting the city. He called on the three people he was going to use, did his interviews, and got back in the car.

It had been late spring when he left Washington, the magnolias almost gone by, their blossoms brown and unattractive now, the cherries just coming into bloom, the days sometimes hot—even too hot. The farther north he went, the more he moved backward in seasons. In Concord it was early spring. By the time he got to Pomeroy, everything was sere, brown, bare—Andrew Wyeth colors, except for the intense deep green of the pines and the white patches of lingering snow here and there in the woods. Late winter.

He didn’t contact the paper’s owner for the first few days. Instead he drove around, looking up at the looming mountains. He walked around the three little town centers, he hiked in the muddy woods, he fell into conversation with people he met. He stopped at the café for lunch, at Snell’s Country Store for gas. Then he parked and went inside.

The store was a large, low-ceilinged room, with wide aisles of grayish, unfinished wood. The shelves were stacked with packaged food and household items. The space was dim, light falling in through the dirty windows at the front. The register was just off to the side of the door in a large, alcovelike space where there were also postcard and magazine racks, a collection of videos on display, and a few shelves of mostly cheap wine. A large fan, stilled for the winter, hung from the ceiling over the register.