Town Burning (25 page)

“I can stand on it now,” John said. “It’s just stiff, that’s all. It’s O.K.”

“The boy’ll give you a lift home.” He nodded to Slugger. “Sorry I can’t offer all of you some breakfast, but the kitchen’s all burnt up. Neighbors’ll take care of us, but I can’t invite you to somebody else’s table. Howsomever, I mean to make it up to all of you.”

He walked away from them, swinging back and forth, he was so tired, picked up a lace doily from the trampled grass and entered the house.

Bob told John he would take care of his old bike, and to take the ride home with Slugger in the farm pickup. One at a time the Riders left, their girls riding behind, dirty-faced but still erect on the buddy-seats. They drove slowly and carefully now they had been caught out in daylight; careful, too, because they were tired.

After breakfast John took a bath and fell asleep in the tub, woke to hear his mother knocking on the bathroom door, then went to bed and slept until Franklin woke him up at two o’clock in the afternoon. His bruised knee seemed much better.

“You’re sort of awake, aren’t you, John?” Franklin asked cautiously.

“Sort of,” John said, opening his eyes. Franklin stood in front of the gunrack, his hands behind his back.

“Go ahead and take them down, if you want,” John said. “I showed you how to look in the breeches to see if they’re loaded. They
aren’t
loaded, but look anyway.”

Franklin carefully lifted the .30-.30 down, flicked the lever and looked in the chamber. “It’s not loaded,” he said, then held it awkwardly to his shoulder and sighted out the window.

“If the woods weren’t closed we could take it out and shoot it,” John said.

“We could?”

“You wouldn’t be afraid of the kick, would you?”

“Well…Is it bad?”

“You’ve got enough muscle on you. It wouldn’t hurt you, as long as you held it tight against your shoulder.”

“I’d hold it good and tight,” Franklin said eagerly.

“If we could get a little rain the woods would open again.”

“Yeah,” Franklin said. He put the rifle back in the rack and sat down in the big leather chair. “You going to get up, John?”

“Sure, in a minute.”

Franklin said, “Do you remember Herman and Verman, in the book?”

“Yes. The two boys who moved in in back of Penrod’s alley.”

“You remember how they beat up on the big bully who was picking on Penrod?”

“They sure finished him off, didn’t they, Frank?”

Franklin looked down at his sneakers, then tightened a loose bow-knot in the laces. “I was Penrod up to then—You know what I mean? I wasn’t really Penrod—you sort of stand off and laugh at him half the time, but still wish you were
him.
And then they call Herman and Verman ‘colored’ and it’s hard not to think I’m maybe Herman or Verman. But I’m not! My aunt doesn’t have a goiter, whatever that is! I wouldn’t chop off my brother’s finger, either, just because he said to do it!”

“That book was written a long time ago, Frank.”

“I don’t care about that!” Franklin was really upset about it. His mouth trembled, and he seemed to be about to say something more, but remained silent.

“There are other books, Frank,” John said.

“I can forget it. That bothers me. Like I was laughing at Herman and Verman because they’re black and funny. But I’m not too funny and I could never have beat up that bully. Never.” Franklin looked up again and stopped, watching John with an odd, distant expression on his face. “I sure wish it would rain, John,” he said.

John reached over to his desk for his cigarettes, not wanting to look Franklin in the eyes.

“You never forget, do you, John?” Franklin asked in an intense, emergency sort of voice, as if he must get the question out all at once and get it over with.

“What’s the matter?” John asked, startled.

“I just asked.”

“It isn’t a question of forgetting, Frank. If you mean about you…you mean am I prejudiced? You ought to know I’m not. I don’t think I am. What’s bothering you, Frank? You tell me now!”

“Your mother said we should be nice to you because you got all upset when you found out we were coming!” The words came in a rush, with tears, and for a second John felt the familiar desire to retreat, even began to plan. Then he threw the cigarettes back onto the desk and sat on the edge of his bed. He took hold of Franklin’s thin shoulders and shook him until he stopped.

“Frank, can you think of any other reason why I might have been upset? Think, now.”

“I don’t know.”

“I didn’t
know
you and Jenny Lou then. You know why I’m home? You know Bruce is in the hospital, probably dying, and that this isn’t a very happy place. I didn’t think you, or anybody, would have a good time here. That’s why I got upset. Frank, I didn’t know you and Jenny Lou were colored until I met you at the station. That didn’t have anything to do with it! I thought you knew me better than that by now.”

“You’re not mad about it any more?” Franklin looked at him with a certain amount of suspicion, tears still shiny on his face.

“I’m glad you came.” And he realized that he clearly
was
glad they had come, not just because Jenny Lou had taken over his mother completely. His feelings about Franklin were far from the resigned acceptance he had believed. A strange enlightenment, he thought, for John Cotter. “I really am glad you came. I really am glad about it, Frank.”

Franklin smiled.

The door at the bottom of the kitchen stairs creaked, and Gladys Cotter called: “Johnny? Are you awake? Telephone!” She came running up the stairs and into the room. “Well, Franklin! Are you and Johnny having a nice talk?”

“Yes,” Franklin said.

“Telephone, Johnny. You know, I think it’s Billy Muldrow. I wonder what he wants with you, Johnny?”

“Tell him I’ll be right down, Mother.”

“I wonder what Billy Muldrow could want with you?”

“I’ll tell you when I talk to him.”

“I can’t see what that old tramp could want with you.”

“Look, Mother, will you please go down and tell him I’ll be right down as soon as I can? I have to go to the bathroom first.” Gladys went back downstairs.

“She sort of irks you, doesn’t she?” Franklin said.

“She sort of does, sometimes.”

“You know an old tramp?”

“Billy’s not a tramp. He’s not so old, either.”

“How old is he?”

“Not more than forty, anyway.”

“That’s not
old?”

When he picked up the phone, Billy’s worried, apologetic voice began: “Johnny, I’m sorry to of woke you up. Your ma says you was up all night and I’m real sorry to of got you up.”

“That’s all right, Billy.”

“Johnny, you recall I told you Atmon was going to git me blacklisted over in Wentworth Junction too? He done it.”

“That bastard.”

“I was just wondering if you’d git me a case of beer, Johnny. I’m downstreet now, calling from Futzie’s. Futzie won’t sell me no beer, neither. I’ll give you the money, Johnny. I can meet you at the foot of Pike Hill and we’ll go have a couple at my place. O.K., Johnny?”

“Sure, Billy. Give me time to get something to eat. I’ll meet you at the bottom of the hill.”

“I can’t thank you good enough, Johnny. You’re the only friend I got in this whole lousy goddam town. I mean that.”

“It’s no trouble, Billy. I’ll see you later.” He hung up.

“You want to come with me?” he said to Franklin.

“I don’t know,” Franklin said, “I guess so….”

“Come on. It won’t hurt you….” He stopped, wondering why he wanted Franklin to come. Usually he spent a lot of time in like situations trying tactfully to keep people from going with him. “You aren’t afraid of Billy, are you?”

“No.” Franklin was obviously examining his feelings. He scowled and bit his finger. “I want to go, I guess,” he said.

“You haven’t gone out of the house very much since you’ve been here.”

“But there’s so much
in
the house.”

Jenny Lou came in from the kitchen, her arms crossed, her face stern. “Gladys wants to know do you want some mustard on your lamb sandwich.”

“Just a little bit,” John said. Franklin grinned at him.

“He wants a little tiny bit of mustard,” Jenny Lou called as she went back into the kitchen, “Pecky, isn’t he, Gladys?”

“I’ll go with you, John,” Franklin said.

“You sure you want to? You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“I’d tell you, John, I would. I’d tell you if I didn’t want to go.”

“You ought to get out of the house more, anyway. You know, Frank, you can see the whole of Leah from the top of Pike Hill. That’s the funny thing about it. It doesn’t look very high at all to look at it from the bottom, but when you get up there it seems high as a mountain. You can see far away from up there—Vermont, Cascom River, Connecticut River—just like being on a high mountain.”

“I’d like to see that,” Franklin said, then added in a hesitant voice, “About
Penrod
and all…”

“Yes, Frank?”

“I still love that book,” Franklin said.

John was a sophomore in high school when he first met Billy Muldrow to know him at all. He went to Billy’s old shack with Bob Paquette and Junior Stevens, Keith Goss and Keith’s cousin, Merton Goss. Sometimes there would be one or two others. Of course, they were too young to buy beer then, and sometimes Billy would get it for them. Almost always he would give them beer or hard cider if they came to see him, and would talk to them as if they were men, not condescendingly. So they felt vastly superior to him, laughed at him behind his back and pulled tricks on him. They sawed out the braces of his outhouse seat fairly often, let the air out of his truck tires and wrote his name among the smut on the walls of the men’s room in the Town Hall. John had done it along with the rest of them. There was no organized attack against Billy, but when they felt like writing dirty words on the walls of men’s rooms, when they had to destroy something, this one older man with the simple-mindedness and bad taste to treat fifteen-year-old kids as equals became their target.

Stranger people than Billy lived in Leah, but Billy’s strangeness was at least approachable. Others, like the pale, baby-faced old man who cooked at the diner and who asked the boys to come around the corner with him; the woman who dressed like a man and her companion, a young, almost pretty but huge, muscled girl who could have taken on nearly any man in town bare-knuckled; the laugher—a big man with an intelligent-seeming middle-aged face who suddenly and for no known reason would begin to laugh and continue to laugh all day long—these were just a little too frightening. Billy could be hurt more. They all realized it; not only realized it but discussed it and decided on Billy. They hadn’t discussed why they wanted to hurt anyone. The fact of destruction—their unspoken need to destroy—they did not justify or even recognize. Yet the subject of their persecution they chose with lucid, frightening intelligence. There must be something to destroy—not an idiot like the laugher; not a queer like the old cook whose malady, though hysterically funny to them, opened dank, unsounded parts of the unknown; not the woman transvestite because they believed she might be something they called “morphadite,” which was physical and freakish and thus not quite all her fault, and also because she was partly, or probably, a woman. Her companion was a woman too, and even more, a young woman who excited them and whose giant, muscled frame, severe dark hair and fierce eyes promised violence they did not dare unleash. Billy Muldrow was not too old, not too frightening, not too far beyond the bounds of society to be hurt: he was chosen.

No one, as far as John knew, had ever accused Billy of writing dirty words in public places. Everyone must have known that it had been done mostly by kids, and that Billy was not stupid enough to write his name under the primitive but terribly adequate drawings above the urinals. Yet if Mr. Bemis, the town clerk, every time he went to the toilet saw Billy’s name as he smelled the disinfectant, the unclean dingy stink of the public latrine—if Chief Atmon, if any man of Leah were continually reminded in that place of Billy Muldrow—a connection with the sordid, born originally, perhaps, of the honest burgher’s disapproval of Billy’s independent life, would grow into more than a passive thing. Maybe this started Billy’s feud with the town of Leah. More likely it had started long before John knew about it, out of Billy’s character and Bemis’ and Atmon’s. No doubt the matrons of the town would never under any conditions have accepted Billy Muldrow, but that tolerance for the wild and different most men have in the face of their wives’ disapproval had been broken down over the years. Billy no longer had even the status of town character. No amused forbearance, no tolerance at all toward Billy now. Even Mr. Bemis, whom John thought to be a tolerant and easy man, had no good word to say about Billy Muldrow. The riot at the movie matinee had turned their disapproval into a kind of hatred, had given Billy a prison record. Atmon needed no other reason for the black list.

Franklin stayed in the car while John went into Anna’s to buy the beer. While Anna gruntingly hoisted the case out of the refrigerator and up to the counter, John watched through the grimy window. Franklin sat up straight, not quite looking at the people who walked by, the people not quite managing not to look at Franklin. He was so black, so glaringly black on the streets of Leah.

As they drove toward Pike Hill, Franklin said: “You’re buying beer for this man because they won’t let him buy it for himself. Is that right?”

“That’s right. They black-listed him.”

“Black-listed him,” Franklin said.

“You’re thinking of ‘black.’ ”

“I always think of it,” Franklin said.

“Black is bad and white is good—you know—like people were afraid of the dark.”

“That’s very interesting,” Franklin said.

“I guess Billy’ll be waiting at the bottom of the hill.”

“John, you don’t think this man deserves to be on the black list?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t believe in black lists, for one thing.”

“Neither do I,” Franklin said. “I believe the way you do, John.”