Town Burning (34 page)

“I am thinking about it,” he said out loud, “and I’m not sick. I could even eat meat right now.”

But then a terrible upwelling came in his throat.
All right, hello,
there you are, old buddy. Now we know where we are again.
But now it was not the old Filipino hanging gored in his mind. Now his mind flirted dangerously with images he tried to keep under control. Bits of food danced by, a piece of red meat, a bowl of brains. He gagged and staggered to the door: Bruce had come, his head open like a bowl, his eyes leaking gray, and he had the body of a hawk. When he turned, Bruce was there, still moving like a mote across his eye that couldn’t be blinked away. Bruce leaned forward and the gray gushed out like puke, leaving the cavity of his head bony and reddish, the dura torn ragged around the edges. The eyes were empty. The hawk’s body stood on yellow legs and claws and leaned slightly forward as if against an expected bullet.

He swung his head violently, so that his lips and cheeks pulled away from his face. This helped. He did it some more and developed a headache. That was better. He began to repair the drawer of Bruce’s desk, then said to hell with it—the plywood would not stay in place. He took the plywood to the door and scaled it out along the railroad tracks. He would take the book and the metal box home with him. No one would ask him what they were. He took the pistol out of the box and started feeding cartridges into the magazine. When the magazine would take no more he put it into the gun and worked the slide, chambering a round, then removed the magazine and added one more round. The safety seemed snug and unlikely to work loose. As the phone rang he slid the pistol into his back pocket.

“Johnny?” his father said, “Charlie Bemis just called. Jesus Christ it looks as if we’re going to lose Leah! It looks bad, Johnny! Take the ton-and-a-half—the Dodge. Keys are on top of my desk. Poor Charlie’s about had it. Pick up a load of men at the firehouse and take ’em out to Cascom. You can see the red from here. God! Never mind the yard any more. I don’t know what they’re going to do nowl”

“O.K.,” John said. “Now take it easy. The wind’s stopped.”

“Fire makes its own wind, Johnny.”

“Take it easy…” He didn’t have a name to call his father, and now he needed one. “We’ll do what we can. We’ll stop it…” He almost said
Dad,
but it was as if the muscles of his tongue and jaws had never formed the word before.

“Well, all right, Johnny. I’ve just got to stay here with your mother and the kids. I’ve just
got
to. You know how your mother gets.” And then, in an urgent, low voice, as if someone had just come into the room, “Johnny, for God’s sake be careful!”

“All right, Dad.”

His father was struck silent. The word had been as startling as a shot. “I’ll be careful,” John said.

“All right,” his father managed to say, and was silent. John hung up first.

He found the keys to the ton-and-a-half, locked the office and started across the murky yard toward the garage. He could hardly see, and rubbed his eyes until they ached. At the garage doors he stopped, surprised by a peculiar lightness in him, as if gravity had lessened. It had to do with his father, strangely enough, and it was as if the big, amorphous man had gained, as he had gained from the few words they had spoken, stature and strength. He had answered his father, had recognized him, on his own, and only his own, responsibility. But why should he feel some small disloyalty to Bruce?

The ton-and-a-half sighed, popped, and ground into life, jumped backward as he let out the clutch. Naturally it had been left in reverse. He fooled with the gearshift until he found out where all the positions were, then eased out into the smoke, headlights boring redly across sawdust to a red shed wall. The truck waited alive, rocking a little in a pothole, while he locked the garage. As he drove up River Street toward the square, the smoke grew thicker in the headlights, but it no longer seemed a deficiency of his own eyes.

As Jane and Sam came away from the Spinellis’ kitchen Adolf jumped out of the truck, in his jerky, eager way, banged his head on the doorframe and stood smiling and rubbing the bump.

“Thank you! Thank you!” Cesare Spinelli called from the doorway.

“Nothing. Nothing atall!” Sam called back.

Jane climbed into the truck and sat in the middle with her feet up on the gearbox, and Adolf slammed the door on his side as if he didn’t care whether or not all his hands, feet, arms and fingers were tucked in safely or not. The springs creaked and the seat lowered under Sam Stevens. Slowly, carefully, he turned the truck out of the driveway toward Cascom.

“I don’t envy that little feller,” he said. “One son, he’s dead, and his wife addled. Don’t envy him one bit.”

“Wow,” Adolf said.

“Lucky you ain’t got no responsibilities. Eh, Adolf?”

“Sure! “Adolf said.

And here I am, Jane thought, with no responsibilities either. She felt that if she had loved Michael Spinelli enough, maybe she could have saved him from the mailbox—although that would have saved her a portion of those ten blank years, too. He would simply have taken off, and that would have been that. Cesare Spinelli might still have had a son.

“Wow!” Adolf said. He stared over the hills toward the east, where a great, angry glow, a perfect half-circle of bright red, marked the advancing fire. The smoke of Leah’s fire had thinned as they left town, and this glow, this upwelling of reflecting smoke, was a hundred times as big. Whole hills were burning.

“That tore it,” Sam said. He didn’t increase his speed.

A state policeman stepped out into the road and waved them to a stop, came over to Sam’s side and leaned in, his face close to Sam’s, his wide-brimmed hat bending against the windowframe.

“Where you going?” he asked.

“I’m going home,” Sam said.

“O.K.” The policeman stepped back to wave down another truck.

“Ain’t going to be no goddam sighteers when all the country’s burning up,” Sam said disgustedly.

The road turned and climbed, leaving the Cascom River. Sam shifted to second on the hill, and the fire came up into their eyes.

“Has it got to the farm?”

“Not yet, Janie.” Sam shifted carefully into high at the top of the hill. “I make it close to Cascom Corners, though. They hadn’t let all them fine pastures go back, they wouldn’t be in trouble. Woods come clear up to the two-holers in Cascom Corners.”

The lake reflected the red clouds, here and there even the sharp yellow of burning trees. A hill-farm house and barn across the lake flamed untended and shot a spike of fire straight up into the clouds of smoke.

“Murphy place,” Sam said. Nobody lived there. Jane remembered when someone had. Several school-shy boys and one girl, a long time ago, came on the school bus with her into Leah. They had moved away, and the farm had been vacant ever since. Each year less pasture showed on the side of the long hill.

They were going down again into the valley of the river, down into the smoke which flowed slowly between the hills; another river. A convoy of National Guard trucks passed them on the way back to Leah for reinforcements, their headlights appearing as dim orange buttons at first so that it was difficult to tell whether they were headlights or taillights until they were only a few yards away. At the gravel road to the farm a guardsman in full uniform, carrying a rifle, stepped out beside them.

“Can’t go up this road,” he said, his young voice matter-of-fact and final, as if he expected Sam to turn around immediately.

“Now listen here, son,” Sam said.

“Orders,” said the guardsman, tapping his front sight against his helmet-liner.

“I live here, sonny. Like as not your orders didn’t cover that.” Sam seemed to find the situation amusing.

“I got my orders. Nobody, but
nobody,
goes up this here road.”

“Well, now. I wouldn’t put her quite so strong, I was you,” Sam said as he let out his clutch.

“STOP STOP STOP!” The soldier shouted. He jumped back and pointed his rifle at Sam’s head. Sam stopped the truck, set the emergency brake, stepped out and faced the soldier squarely as a house, his huge body solid, his legs slightly spread.

“You going to shoot me?” he asked, smiling sternly. Finally the soldier lowered his rifle. “That’s better,” Sam said. “Now look here, son. This here’s my own road, goes to my own farm, nowheres else. I appreciate you boys’ help and all—I want to say that. But, son, you got to use your own head. Things is going to happen tonight ain’t halfways in your orders. Anybody wants to come up this road tonight, you let ’em, hear? They’ll be coming to fight fire, not to see no sights nor to steal. Next your officer comes by you tell him what I said. Sam Stevens is my name.”

After a moment of thought, the soldier shifted his rifle, in a deliberately unmilitary way, to the crook of his arm, like a hunter. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “This ain’t no war, Mr. Stevens. You go ahead home.”

They climbed the hill in second, coming out of the smoke as if from under water.

“My God!” Jane said. The house looked full of fire, and her hands grew damp all at once; she could feel the beat of her heart. The front windows of the house were furnace doors, a dull, boiling red. As the truck turned, the fires went out—reflections of the valley below. The kitchen lights were on. Mrs. Pettibone came running, her white apron to one side, her face sickly in the shed lights.

“Oh, Janie!” she whimpered, her deep-set eyes wide and wet, “Janie, i’
_m
so glad you’re back!”

Adolf wrenched the door handle until it worked, and Jane climbed out after him.

“Janie, the fire!” Mrs. Pettibone cried.

“I know, dear, I know. Everything will be all right.” She put her arm around the old woman and straightened her apron, saying gently as they walked up to the house, “All right, all right, don’t worry, now; it’s going to be all right, you’ll see.”

At the door she turned to see all at once the cause of Mrs. Pettibone’s crying. The farm was all alone above an evil plain of smoke, alone except for the spruce-dark summits of the near hills, tindery and threatening. Deep down in the smoke, by the lake and the river, bright flashes shone upward, surrounding the lake like a huge pincers, visibly advancing. Above the layer of smoke a clear layer of air was broken here and there by pillars of dark red and orange where fierce crowning fires forced up through it, flames threading upward, whirling showers of sparks fountaining up and settling back down again. The fire was too angry, too determined. It seemed that no man could live down there, that their trip from Leah had been impossible, miraculous. The whole world below was red and burning. Far above, in a limbo of clear air filled with cold light from a small, high moon, escaping columns of smoke all turned together at right angles toward the west as a stream of air at that altitude caught them.

Sam came up behind and turned his old face toward the fire, which now gleamed in the shiny skin over his cheekbones as it had in the windows of the house. He pointed upward, his big arm moving slowly.

“See that wind up there, Janie? Now, that wind’s near two miles up, I reckon. Well, Janie, if that wind comes down here to us, I figure the Old Feller’s pretty goddam mad. If it don’t, we got a chance to do some good. The Old Bastard
could
take himself a fine, long leak and solve the problem straight off. That ain’t likely. He never done me no goddam favors. I never asked for none. See you can git us men something to eat. Aubrey ain’t much good; same as Adolf, his gut’s empty.”

John parked the truck in line with several others in front of the firehouse. Guardsmen and civilians were unloading shovels and Indian pumps and stacking them against the building. Inside, sooty men just back from the front lines and clean men just arrived leaned on their shovels and added to the babble of noise in the high room. In one corner Red Cross ladies stood behind a trestle table piled with sandwiches. A large chromed coffee-maker, borrowed from the Welkum Diner, steamed and dripped behind them. Squashed paper cups littered the floor. In the center of the room quieter, listening men surrounded tables and a radio. Once in a while the telephone in the center rang, and the noise would stop as they all turned to watch Mr. Bemis, whose withered, pale face and bald head were snow-white against the black receiver. The noise would grow again until Mr. Bemis had to wave his hand up and down, trying to stop it so that he could hear.

John went up to him, ducking under the rope which made the center area more official, and waited for Mr. Bemis to finish his telephone conversation.

“Hi, John,” the town clerk said wearily.

“I’ve got a ton-and-a-half, flat bed, Mr. B. My father called up and said you needed transportation.”

“Correct. You wait, will you, John? We’re sending men out as soon as we git news and all. It won’t be long.”

“You look tired,” John said.

“So don’t you!” The town clerk grinned and cackled, his white fingers kneading his temples.

“What’s Atmon doing?”

“He’s out to the fire, John.”

“He’s a man of action, Atmon is,” John said. Several of the men at the table laughed, especially the firemen, but Mr. Bemis looked up and shook his head.

“Chief Atmon’s keeping busy, John.” The phone rang again, and Mr. Bemis sighed as he reached for it.

John ducked under the rope and looked for a place to sit down, then saw Billy Muldrow and Howard Randolf sitting against the wall in the back of the room. As he pushed his way up to them Howard raised his hand, Indian-fashion. “Howl” he said. “Why there’s the very fellow now!”

“I thought you went home to bed,” John said.

“It’s few men and small who’ll be sleeping this night.”

“Hi, John,” Billy said. “Sit down! Waiting, waiting. Just like the Army, ain’t it, John?”

He sat down on the floor next to Billy and leaned back against the brick wall.

Junior Stevens squatted nearby among the black-uniformed Riders. Bob Paquette was there, too. They all seemed to be excited about something as they listened to Junior, who bobbed up and down on his haunches as he spoke. Bob Paquette looked right at John, then turned away without any sign of recognition.