Town Burning (10 page)

“Nothing,” John said, but this was a lie, or nearly a lie. He meant nothing he could tell at this moment to Bruce that might have meaning to Bruce, although he wondered at the same time if, perhaps, Bruce’s methods of evaluating “something” were not the valid ones. He himself had never managed to define, although he seemed always to be trying, the meaning of “something.”

He went to the low chair in the corner and sat far down in it. He felt that as long as he said nothing more, Bruce would not continue to jab and twist. Bruce was not very witty and needed a straight man. Anyway, Bruce looked very tired now with his eyes shut and the cigarette burning down toward his fingers.

All of John’s bad memories (the persistent memories were always bad) concerned things he had done. Weren’t these “something”? He had killed a man—but that was in the Army and didn’t count because he had no alternative to that. It didn’t count, so why should he have to remember it? It must have counted once, because he couldn’t eat meat for several weeks afterward. Why go into that? he asked his uncontrollable memory. Don’t go into that again. We’ve had that out…

But there he was looking up at the statue of Quezon by the Chinese cemetery. It was so hot! The sky was gray-blue and hazy, a stifling blanket, and the seven men stood around waiting for him to do something—Ben Nakano the interpreter, Parsons, Iwashita, the others. He couldn’t remember all the names, and that was good. Maybe someday the whole business would fade away as the names had. The men of his squad: he could still see their faces too well.

Parsons said, “Where the hell are the street signs? They ought to have street signs.”

“We’ll find the house O.K. There’s no hurry,” John said, and the others slouched around while he looked at the ridiculous map. “I guess it’s over there,” he said, and they followed him down the dusty street, looking around indifferently. It was all his responsibility, but what was so hard about finding a house in a city?

The number was still on the door of the four-story house. It stood alone, shored up by the rubble and occasional walls of the buildings that had stood on each side. The front door was partly open, and just as they were going up the front steps the old woman burst out and went through them, bumping and bouncing off one and then another with her head down as if she were a goat. She made the sidewalk and ran like hell in her long black dress and black shawl.

“Lookit her
go!”
Parsons said. “She must of broke the NCAA muh-fun mile!”

“Now they’ll all be nervous in there,” Nakano said. As he spoke
_:
John pushed open the door. They all heard another door slam down the hall.

“Well,” John said, “Parsons, you take Cummins and Johnson and go around back and up the back stairs.”

Parsons and the other two ran around through the wreckage of the house on the side while John and the four others ran into the hall and stopped on the stairs to the second floor, where they could not be enfiladed. They had all run into doubtful buildings before. They could cover the hall from the stairs. John motioned to Nakano.

“Who the hell are they supposed to be?” Nakano asked.

“People from the Riken Company.”

“Come on out!” John yelled down the empty hall. “We won’t hurt you, but we’ve got to ask you some questions!”

Silence.

“Tell ’em in Tagalog,” John said to Nakano, and Nakano shouted the strange syllables down.

Silence.

“Tell ’em in Japanese,” John said, and Nakano shouted the Japanese. Still no answer.

“What the hell would they speak?” John asked. Parsons and the other two came up the back stairs.

“No other way out of the house,” Parsons said.

Just then they heard the muffled, flat
pop,
and a narrow strip of the hall door just to the right of the stairs peeled down and swung like a reed in the wind. Across the hall a flake of plaster fell to the floor.

“They shot, by God!” Parsons said.

“Stop that!” John yelled at the door. The answer was another
pop.
A larger piece of plaster fell from the opposite wall.

“Don’t be foolish!” John shouted down. He looked around at his men. At least four were wearing the hot, bulky pistol belts and holsters they had been issued. “Give me a gun,” he said. One of them handed him the big pistol. He hadn’t carried one because of the weight and because he didn’t like the feel of the pistol. The service automatic wasn’t a pistol; it was a cannon.

Nakano put his hand on John’s shoulder. “Maybe they speak Spanish,” he said.

“Naw. Hell, they’d know English,” Parsons said.

But none of them knew enough Spanish, so John went down the stairs, close against the wall. When he came as near as he could to the door he stopped.

“Come on out, now,” he said. “We don’t want to hurt you.” This time the gun inside the door was louder, and he looked at the door and saw three jagged holes in it. It was made of plywood and the outer layer of ply had split down in long strips. He reached around with the Colt in his left hand and put it to the door, then pulled the trigger four times. The Colt jumped around in his left hand and up, and the last hole was a foot higher than the others.

For a moment he let the sound die, and then a terrible screaming began behind the door. He kicked it open and rushed in.

The two women in black squatted screaming over the old man. Their mouths opened too wide and were red and black inside, and the screams blatted against his eardrums and whistled and blatted out again. Their black skirts were beaded with shiny blood, and the old man on the floor had taken all the slugs in his chest and neck and face. He looked a little like a wicker basket that had been full of strawberry jam, chopped by an ax; or like fresh red beef, chopped and cut. He had been peering through the bullet holes in the door, trying to see what was in the hall. An old nickel-plated revolver lay on the floor beside him, and in one corner of the room sat the reasons for his defiance of the law—four cartons of cigarettes and two one-gallon cans of Crisco. He and the women were not the people from Riken. They were awfully small-time black marketeers.

“What did you say?” Bruce asked, sitting up higher in order to see John in the low chair.

“Nothing,” John said again, and then looked more closely at Bruce. Bruce smiled at him, and the smile had no hard malice in it. It did not seem to belong to Bruce—as if he were wearing a mask.

“I guess they’re a little late,” Bruce said.

Gladys and William Cotter came into the room, the tall woman first, hurrying to her son’s bed. She stopped with both hands pressed upon his pillow.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“O.K. I don’t feel too bad,” Bruce said, “but they’re going easy on the dope today and tonight.” He winced at the sound of the last word. His mother pulled a straight chair over to the bed and sat leaning toward him, her long hands making nervous circles upon the sheet beside his pillow.

She wants to touch him, John thought. She wants to hold him and cure him with those nervous hands, but he won’t let her and never has. Neither of us ever has. I wonder why.

“How’s the Miller house coming?” Bruce said to his father.

“O.K., Bruce. The architect got mad as hell this morning when he saw that tin drip-edge, though.”

A moment of fearful expectancy.

“God damn it! I had that out with him before! Just because I’m not around, that sheeny son of a bitch! You tell him he agreed a month ago and if he don’t like the looks of it he can paint it. This isn’t Florida, for Christ’s sake!”

“O.K., Bruce, I’ll tell him.” William Cotter didn’t look up.

“Yeah, sure,” Bruce said in a low voice, staring at the top of his father’s head. “How’s the Waters’ house? How’s the roofing going on?”

“Good weather for it,” William Cotter said, “but a crazy thing happened the other day. Junior Stevens put the vent in upside down. I saw it before they had it boxed in.” There was some hesitant pride in his voice. He looked up and smiled.

“Put him back sawing slabs,” Bruce said. “He’ll never make a carpenter. How the hell did we ever get such a dumb bunch down there? Cotter’s playground for the mentally handicapped. We ought to get assistance from the state.”

Bruce reached for a cigarette, but his mother found one first, put. it in his mouth and lit it. She held the match up and he blew it out; then she smilled happily, turning around to John and William Cotter as if to say, “See? Did you see that?”

John shut his eyes. Baby tricks! When he was a child he thought that if he put his hands over his eyes his whole body was invisible. And now Bruce, blowing out the held match. See? Baby blew out the match! It was too goddam perplexing to figure Bruce; and then he had the horrible thought that if Bruce really let himself go to his mother, all the way, he would end up a plump, unshaven babe-in-arms, sucking a bottle or his thumb. And his mother would look around just as fondly and proudly as she cuddled him. Perhaps he and Bruce both knew that their mother had no limits, at least that they had never seen her stop, and that such needful love must be brutally curbed.

Gladys Cotter sat at her son’s bedside staring across the bed at the wall. Bruce smoked a cigarette and looked at the window. John smoked a cigarette that had no flavor, but a dry mechanical usefulness. His throat seemed like a flue and his teeth tasted like dry bones. His mother moved her hands, smoothing the sheet, and his father looked at a magazine with too much concentration, never looking up, never turning a page. The white window was hard to look at from the cool depths of the room.

Time moved, John knew, but he couldn’t look at his watch. Bruce might see that. He let himself fall into a dry, almost rigid position of waiting, thinking that he would not move at all until the afternoon was over and he could leave. He tried to hypnotize himself by staring at the light switch on the wall, but nothing worked for him. Time moved, he knew, and at least he had to do nothing to make it move. He was not responsible for that.

“More words,” Bruce said suddenly, “will be spoken at the funeral.”

“What? Why,
Bruce!”
his mother said.

“I mean everybody is pretty quiet,” Bruce said in an even voice. “But I can hear—well, look at
him
suffer!” He pointed at John. Gladys Cotter put a shy hand on Bruce’s arm and he quickly pulled away from her. Her hand went back with the other, to smooth the sheet by his pillow. “But I can hear,” he went on, “Reverend Bledsoe—the Reverend Mr. Bloody Bledsoe, the Reverend Mr. Bloody Bedsore—harping upon my wonderful qualities such as working my ass off and wondering how much the traffic can stand even at a funeral when he tries to say what a fine loving character I was. I can hear the old hypocrite now. I bet he’s got the speech all written already.”

“Oh, Bruce!”

“Bruce!” William Cotter said. He stood at the foot of the bed. “I’d think you’d have more…I’d think you’d not be so mean to your mother! What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re damn’ mean and nasty. You act like they were going to kill you, when all they’re trying to do is help you and cure you!”

The big man stood tall and angry at the foot of the bed, and his smaller son stared back at him, half smiling. John had seen this happen before. In a second the fire went out of William Cotter, but it remained burning in Bruce’s eyes, his face thrust forward out of his weakness, vicious and conquering. He stared his father down and broke him back into his chair and into his magazine.

The silence came on again, and John knew that they would not look to him for any help or strength. He was even weaker than his father. Hollow and weak and good only for running. His father had never run away so far: his father had to come back day after day.

The afternoon went on in small noises and the long tired moans of the old man down the hall, bedspring creaks and sharp heel clicks. The wind flicked an aerial wire against the window frame. John ran out of cigarettes and couldn’t make himself borrow one from his father or Bruce. Outside, the cars ground in the gravel. The nurse came in and gave Bruce his mineral oil, but this time he said nothing to her, and she seemed to be in a hurry to pour it down his throat and leave. John rationed his trips to the bathroom, figuring that two and no more would not make Bruce think that he couldn’t stand to sit in the room. When the intern wheeled in the napkin-covered stand he found himself moving his lips, saying over and over, “Please make us go home. Tell us we have to go home.” He had no more feeling for Bruce; now it was self-preservation alone. He had to get out of the room. He had a headache and wondered in fear if he had a tumor. He could plainly see the tumor—it looked like a black walnut right in the back of his head, and he found his hand up there feeling around as if he might feel the bulge in his skull. My God! he thought.
What if it was me?
The intern spoke to Bruce in a low voice.

“I thought you might want them to go,” the intern said.

“Yes,” Bruce said, and then turned, smiling, to the others. “This is when I lose my hair, but don’t worry, they’ll save it for me.”

The intern was embarrassed. He fiddled with his equipment, and wouldn’t raise his head. Gladys Cotter stood up, and the intern said, “I’ll be back in a little while,” and left.

“We’ll come back after supper,” Gladys Cotter said.

“No. This is it,” Bruce said.

“But they aren’t going to operate
now!”

“No. But they’re going to get me ready for morning.”

“What about your supper?”

“I don’t know about that. Goodbye.” Bruce smiled, his eyes triumphant, and John thought,
If only he can hold on until we get out!

“Then we won’t see you until…afterward?” Gladys Cotter’s voice went high and out of control and she ran around the bed toward Bruce, but his eyes held her off.

“Goodbye,” he said in a level, taut voice, and deliberately took her hand, holding her away from him.

“I’ll see about the edging,” William Cotter said, “and tell you how it comes out.”

“Sure. Goodbye.”

John and his father both shook Bruce’s limp hand, so weak compared to the hard determination in his face.