Town Burning (30 page)

“New York, I think.”

“Gone. All gone away,” Howard said dreamily. “Poor Leah! Out of the Eightballs and the Atmons and the Billy Muldrows she somehow manages to produce a few examples of Homo sapiens. And then they leave her. No loyalty, Johnny. None at all.”

As they passed an alley leading to the burning houses, the heat hit them a nearly singeing blow. Yet the fire, searingly hot as it was, had turned a darker and less threatening red, like a fireplace embering down. The bucket brigade seemed less useless, and Bemis had put the Legion boys to work on it. For the first time it looked as if the other side of Poverty Street might be saved.

They waited their turn at the pumper, and in a few minutes the tank had been sucked dry. “We’re not being too helpful here,” Howard said. John followed him over to the town clerk, who seemed to be in charge of everything.

“Howdy, Mr. B.,” Howard said.

Mr. Bemis smiled wearily. “All that back-cutting didn’t do much good, did it?” he said.

“I can turn in my ax,” Howard said, “honorably. I even have a slight wound. I
got
a Purple Heart, so just gimme a aspirn.”

Mr. Bemis smiled. “You done a good job, Howard.”

“What can we do now. Mr. B.?”

“You done enough, Howard.” He saw John. “Hi, John. You been busy?”

“He ain’t been kissed yet,” Howard said. “How about the bucket brigade?”

“I think we’ve saved the houses on this side,” Mr. Bemis said.

“If the wind stays put…”

“Northlee’s sending a tank truck and another pumper. We’ll be able to run down the street pretty soon, damp the fronts down properly. Takes a good deal of water this way. Slops out.”

Joe Beaupre, the young policeman, came to confer with him. The armory was ready, the Red Cross was finding cots and blankets, and the Salvation Army had called from Boston. They were sending canteen trucks.

“From
Boston?”
Mr. Bemis said. “What do you make of that?”

“Said they were on the way. Ought to get here in a few hours. We’re pretty famous,” Joe Beaupre said. “It ain’t often a whole town starts to burn up.”

“Newspapers are gitting a little tired of just plain old forest fires,” Mr. Bemis said. “Howard, you and John want to help, you go through them tenements and see if they’re empty of people. Didn’t have no time before. Don’t want nobody trapped if they do go. This fire ain’t out by a long shot.”

In one high-ceilinged kitchen they found a great horned owl in a carrion-stinking wire cage. A pan of fried potatoes had been upset on the floor. The owl stared at them and snapped his beak as they stepped carefully among the potatoes.

“We ought to let him go,” Howard said. He sat down on a wooden chair, his feet stretched out, watching the owl.

“They’re not protected,” John said. “They kill rabbits and stuff.”

“So who’s protected? You’re looking at a fellow carnivore, my dear young friend, a fellow hunter and eater of meat. We’ve got to stick together or the herbivores will breed us to death. A united front, I say!” He pounded his fist on the oilcloth-covered table. The owl jumped and hissed. “If I didn’t think he’d gobble my hand like a bleeding mouse, I’d give him his liberty.”

“Come to think of it, they kill skunks, too,” John said.

“I rather like skunks.” Howard frowned at the owl. “They have the courage of their convictions.”

John opened the icebox and found two quarts of warmish beer.

“Anybody who’d leave a poor owl to burn doesn’t deserve our honesty,” Howard said. “Where’s the opener?”

They found a pound of hamburger for the owl, who quickly tore off the paper and stood in the meat, kneading it while he ate.

“Whoever lived in this warren probably learned his manners from the bird. Did you notice the library? A pile of
True Confessions, Real
Romances, Confidentials
—you know the stuff: ‘I killed my baby with a hammer and now I’m sorry.’ ”

On the wall, in the light of the bare overhanging bulb, a nude calendar girl smirked through her patina of grease. A crude vagina had been penciled in just below her bellybutton. Howard pointed at it. “And yet there were children gotten here. I saw the inevitable detritus in the bedrooms. And that anatomical inaccuracy is not the work of a child. In spite of its location there is about it a certain knowledgeable accuracy of detail. A man did that, Johnny. Above the kitchen-midden, the magic symbol. Man is distinguished by his art.”

They left a dollar on the table to pay for the beer. The owl seemed too involved in the meat to desire escape. They left him and continued through the building, each with a bottle of beer in his hand.

“It’s funny to look out other windows,” John said. “You get such a different feeling about the town—like it was another town altogether.”

They stood in an apartment full of new kitchen furniture; there were chrome-plated legs on all the straight chairs, formica tops on all the tables, whether in the kitchen, dining room or living room. Tiny, shiny pictures hung high against the walls. The waxed floor shone, bare except for the art-square linoleum rug on the kitchen floor.

They went through the incredibly clean apartment to the front bedroom. Even the bed had chrome-plated legs. “The operating room,” Howard said. “Completely aseptic, as you can see.”

The fire across the street made the room like an oven. The walls were almost too hot to touch. Both pumpers were working down the near side of the street, spraying each other and the buildings. Each had canvas dropcloths strung along one side to protect the men and the tires. The wind still held from the east.

“Feel like Nero watching Rome?” Howard asked.

“No. Do you?”

“I can see how the crazy bastard felt.” Howard leaned his elbow on his knee, one foot up on the windowsill, and stared broodily into the flames, his long, gullied face as red as a devil’s. The fire was brighter than the electric lights at the head of the bed, and for a long time he stared into it. When he turned around his eyes seemed curiously blind.

They finished their beer and the tour of the tenements. With the fire at least partly under control, the town clerk had changed his headquarters from Mechanic Street to the end of Poverty Street, where he could see down the length of the row of collapsed, embering buildings. John and Howard sat down with him and had some coffee from a Thermos bottle.

“It’s a miracle,” Mr. Bemis said.

“You done a good job, Charlie,” Sam Stevens said. He waited for the pumper to come back and drain his truck-tank.

“Say, Howard,” Mr. Bemis said, “you sure done a job of work tonight.”

“Now you mention it, I came into town this afternoon to buy groceries. I was drafted. What time is it? My wife will be having the state police after me.”

“Ten o’clock,” Mr. Bemis said. “Go and call from the firehouse. I’m going back there myself pretty soon. There’s three or four forest fires going and I guess I’m the fire department.”

“That’s no lie. Where’s the manly pillar of the law?”

Mr. Bemis smiled, but shook his head disapprovingly. “Chief Atmon’s doing a good job, Howard.”

“If anybody saved them houses it was you, Charlie,” Sam Stevens said deliberately. Coming from the big man the judgment was final and binding. None of the men disputed it by so much as a change of expression.

John and Howard walked back toward the Town Square and the firehouse. Some of the refugees who had found a place to spend the night were coming back to see their houses burn. Those who lived on the east side of the street waited for the fires to die down so they could move back. Already the cars, trucks, and toy wagons were deploying around the back fire escapes. The watching people stood in odd groups and in lines, their faces turned toward the sparking, beam-falling red mounds. All the burned houses had now fallen in upon themselves, and the west side of Poverty Street looked like a range of low, incandescent mountains.

As they were walking along, Howard went out into the street and pulled a derelict mattress up onto the sidewalk. John helped him drape it over a granite post. Howard sat wearily on a horse trough. “I’m an old man. Wait a minute,” he said. He seemed suddenly to be completely exhausted. He’d seemed young and spry enough before, but now his dark, lined face was slightly yellow under the streetlight. The lines in his forehead were ropy folds. “Johnny, are you familiar with the emotion of joy? Joy,” he said, “is when you realize, for no reason and on no special occasion, that you are happy.”

“I’ve never done that, I guess,” John said. “If I was ever really happy it was because of some outside happening. V-J Day, for instance, which most likely saved my life.”

“In the First World War I was in the Navy. I can remember no joy whatsoever from that experience, armistice or no armistice. But goddam it! At least recognize its existence once in a while. Joy does exist.”

“Even if it does, it doesn’t last.”

“So what? Why ask it to last forever? You’ve got to eat your cake to enjoy it.”

“I guess you’re right,” John said.

“You guess I’m right. Oh, well.”

“Joy, shmoy, as long as you’re healthy,” John said.

“So you think I made an ass of myself the other night,” Howard said, and looked at John with that shrewd expression that is always deliberately put on. It seemed to John that Howard was really very sad.

“Howard, you have no idea how much I admire you. But you just don’t seem very joyful right now, that’s all.”

“Hell, John,” Howard said, grinning, “I ate that cake. Only difference with me is, I know I ate it. I can taste it when I burp.” He got slowly to his feet, and they went on toward the firehouse.

The wind seemed to be undecided. It still blew from the east, though occasionally whirls and puffs in the stream of smoke above the town moved in several directions at once. As quickly as it had filled with people and white sheets and the carnival-colored bedding of the town, the turf beneath the tall elms of the Town Square had emptied again. Here and there across the seared grass a piece of fluttering paper, a bottle or can or unwanted cardboard box remained. The homeless people had been absorbed by the town.

In front of the firehouse the Northlee pumper, red enamel and shining brass, dripped water and coughed hollowly as its slowly revolving old engine idled. The Leah pumper alone could now cope with the embers of Poverty Street. The bucket brigade was straggling back, the Legion Drum and Bugle Corps with them, the legionnaires swinging their helmet-liners by the straps and no longer marching.

“We just happened to be practicing,” one of them said, and John was surprised to see that it was Keith Joubert, one of Junior Stevens’ high-school friends, and a bully. The blue-and-gold uniform was wet and bedraggled, the shiny jump-boots were scuffed and damp, and the imitation
fourragère
of yellow boondoggle had become slightly unstrung. The oversized ribbons—the usual ones, but also the combat infantryman’s badge and the European Theater ribbon with three battle stars—shone damply on the wrinkled satin. The other legionnaires turned in their buckets and went home, but to John’s continued surprise Keith Joubert sat down on the firemen’s bench next to him.

“We just happened to be practicing when they called us,” he said apologetically, “so we come all dolled-up like this.”

“The First World War finished all that,” Howard said, pointing to Keith’s uniform.

“Finished what?” Keith looked at Howard with the common expression, the one used in Leah for fools. John wondered if he had ever made his face over that way. He tried it and found it familiar—the small stresses and folds around his mouth formed easily. He had used it on Howard the other night when Howard had gone overboard about the poetic novelist. He guiltily wiped it off with one hand, and held his hand over his face for a moment to make sure it stayed off.

“Finished what? Finished the crippled peacock strut, the crossed white straps which made a perfect target even for an arquebus, the upright method of dying in battle. Soldiers, or their leaders, found that olive drab in the brown-brindle muck was better for morale than the gay crimson or whatever rainbow colors uniforms were. It’s generally agreed, and I see you’ve been in a battle or two so you’ll probably agree too, that it’s better not to be seen by the enemy. All those bright colors, they used to think, frightened the enemy—filled him with panic. Filled his gunsights is more like it. Everybody’s brave enough, but the dead can’t help with the fighting.”

“We ain’t in no combat,” Keith said.

“Oh, I know. Not when you march to the drums and bugles. You do make a pretty sight when you do. I admit that. You really do. But didn’t I detect a note of apology in your voice when you explained to John, here, that you just happened to be practicing in your finery?”

“Huh?”

“Jesus! I’ve got to telephone my wife,” Howard said, ducked around the men in the door and disappeared inside the firehouse.

“What a crazy bastard!” Keith said. “If that bastard seen as much combat as me he wouldn’t shoot his mouth off so much. I ain’t seen you for a long while, Johnny. What you been doing with yourself?”

“Not much. Using up the G.I. bill.”

“What’d you do in the service, anyway?” Keith sounded more as he used to in high school—as if he were looking down at a small intellectual-type who couldn’t get out of his own way. It had always been the same and always would be, John supposed. The unfairness of it welled up in his throat. For a second he looked clearly and steadily at Keith. A great many things had happened since high school. Even in high school he had once had a fair fight with Keith and decisively beaten him—bloodied Keith’s nose and pinned him to the ground. That didn’t change anything. He could have done it every day for a week, except that Keith was rarely alone and he couldn’t beat up Keith Joubert, Donald Ramsey, and Junior Stevens all at once.

“I was in the Army,” he said.

“What part of the Army?” Keith asked. John could see visions of typewriters and neat clerks in Keith’s eyes.

“First ASTP, then the Infantry, then in Intelligence. I was in three years altogether, one year overseas.”

“What the hell’s ASTP?”