Town Burning (19 page)

“Come on,” John said, getting up. Billy followed quickly.

“Where you going?” Bob asked.

“Nowhere. I’ll be right back,” John said. Bob waved his hand and nodded, and Junior developed a sly smile, his eyes staring brightly, this time looking right at John.

“Goodbye, boys,” Junior said in a simpering voice.

John froze. Billy fiddled with the doorknob, anxious to go. Junior still stared deliberately.

“What do you mean?” John asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

“It give me a start to see little Johnny Cotter in here. I didn’t know he drank.”

“Big Junior Stevens seems to have grown up to be pretty brave,” John said. “It seems to me he never got impolite before to anyone who wasn’t outnumbered.”

“He did or didn’t which to what to who?” Junior said, laughing loudly. Bob smiled.

“Maybe I better say something you can understand,” John said.

“Oh, he knows a lot of fancy words! He’s a goddam walking dictionary,” Junior said, smiling but suddenly steady, his smile turning ferocious in a deliberately controlled way as if his patience with something small and crawly were really about to run out. “Now wait a minute. Look who’s saying what to who.” A momentary grin toward Bob, then he finished his glass of beer and raised two fingers in the air, signaling to Futzie. He looked ominously at John.

“Come on, Johnny,” Billy said, “don’t pay him no mind.”

“Why don’t Silly-Billy mind his own business?” Junior said.

“Come on, Johnny, that big blow-mouth won’t work up to nothing. Only reason he ain’t scared is he knows if there’s trouble Atmon’ll blame me for it.” Billy pulled his arm and John let himself be led out the door. Junior was grinning and nodding his head as the door closed.

“Ain’t no use letting yourself git mad over him,” Billy said.

“Me?” John said. He walked down the narrow sidewalk, Billy in the gutter but still towering over him.

“He didn’t want to tangle with you, Johnny, you know that?”

“He started it,” John said.

“Yeah, but he figured you wouldn’t sass him back. If he was going to do something he had his chance.”

John found himself trembling as he walked. Billy was flattering him. If he hadn’t let Billy pull him out the door Junior might really have started something. He could see Junior’s huge red hands tense upon the table—the way Junior grabbed his beer glass all the way around until the thumb and fingers met. The raw brutality in Junior’s face, and that hardness all about Junior, as if he were a caged beast straining at the bars, looking for a way to get loose—the thought of it made him weak and unable, as he was unable in Futzie’s, to say the straight words that would have forced Junior to get up. Instead he made the silly speech he had, half-knowing that Junior would make fun of it instead of getting angry about it. But what in hell was he scared of? It wasn’t death, or anywhere near death to fight Junior, and he had never in his life been afraid of getting physically hurt. If the only way to deal with Junior was to stand up to him and get hurt, he ought to do it. He ought to turn right around now and go back and get done with it. But he was scared. He was
afraid
to turn around and do it.

“God damn it!” he said, and kicked a piece of cardboard, twirling it ahead to ride on an eddy of the wind.

“What’s the matter?” Billy asked.

“That bastard’s been picking on me all my life. You know when I was a little kid—even now, for God’s sake—I always had to look around corners and watch ahead and behind me wherever I went so I wouldn’t meet up with him and his friends? I remember having to stay home from swimming at the scrape because I knew he’d be out there. It was like there were Indians around ready to scalp me. I sure know how those poor bastards felt when they settled this country.”

“Junior ain’t no Indian.”

“He’s no Indian in the woods. I remember I met him out hunting—you never saw such a polite Indian. We even hunted together that day! Real buddy-buddy. And then the next day I had to fight one of his hammerhead friends outside the boys’ entrance to the high school, and Junior and a couple of others tripping me up from behind.”

“I ever catch Junior Stevens in the woods he’ll wish to God he never was born!” Billy said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

At the end of River Street they turned and faced the west wind, a thick, dry torrent flowing up and over the town. John opened his mouth and the wind dried his lips. He could smell in it the faint, ominous, dry-leaf odor of a distant fire. It blew his clothes against his body, and the soiled heat of it was unnatural for a wind flowing out of a clear, starry sky.

They climbed into Billy’s lopsided old truck and drove around to Water Street. Billy parked around the corner from Anna’s and gave John the money. When John came back Billy hid the beer under some burlap bags in the back of the truck, but brought two bottles back to the cab, where they furtively drank them, Billy ready to hide them under the seat on the gas tank if Joe Beaupre or Atmon came along.

“I tell you what, Johnny. There ain’t another man in Leah would do that for me. Not one son of a bitch in this whole lousy town would do that for me but you.”

“That’s a hell of a note,” John said noncommitally.

“Not one no-good stinking friend I got in this whole town, excepting you, Johnny.”

“You used to have friends, Billy,” John said. “What happened to them?” He thought: Have you got any friends, John? You think so, but you don’t owe them anything.

“I don’t know, Johnny. Seems like they just kind of faded away since the war and they ain’t my friends any more.”

Billy let him off in front of Futzie’s, made him promise to come and visit, then drove on up the lumpy street, the old truck clanking.

Bob was alone at the booth.

“Junior took off,” Bob said. “He had to see a dame about a log.”

“That’s too bad,” John said.

“Hell, Junior ain’t such a bad guy, John, you git to know him. He ain’t such a bad guy at heart.”

“Forget it. What’s the story on Billy?”

“Oh, Billy pulled a beaut. You never heard about it? I wish to hell I was there, only not down below! It reminds me of a dirty joke.”

“Never mind the joke. What did he do?”

“Oh, you got to hear it!” Bob drank his beer and signaled for more. “Well, like Junior said, Billy was to the movies and he was nursing on a bottle. Had a bag of beer, too, I heard. He just come out of the woods and had some money. Well, you know how he always sits up in the balcony? That old bag Susie Tercotte was up there helping him on the bottle, and I guess old Billy was trying to help himself to Susie, only she wasn’t having none of it. Pretty quick, the way I hear, they kind of forgot where they was. Talking it over, you might say. Anyway, by then nobody was watching the movie. Did I tell you what the movie was? Wow! All the mothers holding their hands over the kiddies’ ears and screaming backl Billy couldn’t of picked a better show. That Walt Disney picture about dogs! The
matinee,
by God! I sure wished I was there. Old Garwood runs down and gets Atmon, but while Garwood’s on his way the fair majority of our fair matrons are hearing some words maybe they never heard before. They’re all screaming for Billy and Susie to shut up. Billy goes stark raving
ape,
and hollers, ‘Shut up, you Leah bitches!’ He’s hanging over the brass rail up there and hollering down, but of course they don’t quiet down none, so Billy rares back and yells, ‘By the Jesus if I can’t shut you up I’ll drown the whole bloody pack!’ Good as his word, he damn’ near proceeds to do it! Some say he only poured beer, but I heard different. Panic? Well, I guess! A fair considerable portion of the upper crust got soaked! Oh,
Jesus!
All them permanent waves! Oo-hoo! They say Atmon was a rang-dang demon that day. It took him and Joe Beaupre and half the Fire Department to git Billy downstreet to the police station. And even then Billy had this big piece of balcony rail in his hand and raised hell all night till he passed out whanging it up and down the cell bars. Nobody dasn’t go in and take it off him, that’s for certain! I’ll say one thing, Billy Muldrow is a heller when he gits started.”

“No wonder Atmon shut him off.”

“Shut him
off!
Man, he spent six months in the rock factory, hard labor. They rammed it to old Billy. First offense and all that, too. But, Johnny, you ought to know you just can’t have nobody acting so free with the Women’s Club, Eastern Star—all the cream of our fair fat womanhood! Not to mention their dear little brats with their innocent minds! I’d given my…Well, I’d of given the little finger off my left hand just to of been there. I would!”

“I never knew Billy to act like that before.”

“There was a lot of people mad at poor Billy. They even sent him down to Concord to the loony bin for a while. I guess Billy didn’t take to being caged up like that.”

“He told me he’d like to roll an atom bomb down Pike Hill and blow the whole town to hell,” John said.

“When he gits ahold of one I hope I ain’t in town,” Bob said. He scraped his change off the table. “I guess we better be gitting home.”

Out on River Street, John looked straight up past the pointed gables of the old houses, where the wind rushed by. In the hot pressure of the wind even the stars seemed to sway. He and Bob stood below in an eddying pool of warmth.

“To hell with Leah,” John said. “I hope to hell you blow away!”

“Take some blowing,” Bob said. He wheeled the motorcycle down off the sidewalk and jumped on the kickstarter. “You ready, boy?”

They came out of River Street into the square, around the tilting elms and roared out past the houses toward the road to the farm.

“To hell with Leah!” John yelled at a solid old lady. Her big face flashed by, unsurprised. The houses thinned out and he didn’t mind the speed this time, nor the deadly mailboxes. The tree branches dipped overhead in graceful sweeping arcs, the stars tilted on curves and snapped back into place. Only the machine was solid—the world and Leah were left behind in fragments, blown apart by the roar of their passing.

Bruce had taken a turn for the worse, they said, and his mother had to be at the hospital constantly. So the Fresh Air lady would be at the station and John would have to meet them. It was better than having to go there with his mother, and he would have had to, since she had taken the position that she couldn’t drive because of nerves. She was distraught, she said. Well, who wasn’t? So she took a taxi to Northlee in the morning and took the bus home at night.

In the yard washroom John washed nervously, the soap not sudsing at all in his impatience with the thin stream of warm water, so small and trickly each finger had to be rinsed separately and then the soap film was still sticky all over his face and between his fingers. The paper towels were all gone, as usual. Out in the yard he would have to walk, dressed up, past Junior Stevens, who had been demoted from rough carpenter to taking off the circular one-lunger saw. He had adopted an air of moral superiority because he thought John had been the cause of it.

“What do you call him?” Junior had said that morning, speaking of John’s father. “What do you call him—‘Daddy’?” They had seen William Cotter aimlessly fiddling with the truck scale next to the office, and everybody knew he couldn’t fix it, didn’t even know how it worked underneath the splintered platform. So what could he answer to that? He could, by way of answer, fire Junior. His father would back him up, all right—not just back him up, but do something even worse: the minute he started making decisions like that he would have to make all the decisions.

He put on the white shirt, so fragile and delicate in the yard washroom, so likely to get smudged, so somehow shameful to wear out past the lumber-stickers and the three men at the one-lunger. But this time they just smirked, turning their heads away as if they couldn’t bear to smile at him, out of politeness’ sake—even feebleminded Freddie, who could do nothing but take away from a saw, whose dwarfed old body they had to turn so he would throw the wood in a new direction when one bin was filled. The whining
zing
of the saw stopped for a second as they politely turned away, and then continued as he passed them and turned the corner. He walked carefully so as not to get sawdust in his street shoes and tried to duck the waves of sawdust carried on the wind.

In Wentworth Junction the little station radiated heat, and the wind along the rails had little flecks of soot shot through it, blown from the long curving banks of cinders. The rails led to Concord and then to Manchester and then to Boston, where it was probably hotter than it was up here. The river below was sluggish, and showed high ugly mudbanks full of sticks and protruding metal among sickly weeds. There was Mrs. Rutherford in her straw hat and old stationwagon, seeing him and waving, full of life, as if she drew that awful red health out of the heat.

“The train’s late, the stationmaster tells me. They had a hot rod or something. And how are you, John Cotter?” Smiling cleverly. “I thought it was terribly noble of your family in your trouble to take the children anyway. You know I offered to find another place, even take them myself, but your mother would have none of it. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

“Yes, thank you,” John said.

“But I understand they are very nice children—little colored children, seven and ten. Brother and sister, and so bright, they say.”

“Oh, yes. That’s nice.” One more thing his mother had neglected to mention. He was sure his father didn’t know they were colored, either.

Mrs. Rutherford handed him a piece of paper, and he looked at it vaguely. First he saw large curlicues in pencil, then some names: Jenny Lou and Franklin Persons, 7 and 10. 338 W. 125th St., New York City. More curlicues underneath.

“Where
is
that train?” She swiveled her head around and her floppy hat nearly caught him across the nose. His feet made sharp, gritty sounds on the cinders. The wind forced soot into his skin, and little particles of it collected on Mrs. Rutherford’s thick red arm as it rested on the car door.

“I’ll bet they’re little darlings, and such a long trip!” she said.