Town Burning (37 page)

“Get upl Get up!” he yelled into Howard’s face. Howard’s lips bubbled as he breathed, and a little spray of spit hissed up each time he exhaled. “Wake up! You son of a bitch, wake up!” Howard breathed on, and now he was taking long breaths—slow, irregular breaths, but long ones. It convinced John that he was legitimately unconscious. By squatting down and partly burrowing underneath Howard, he managed to get a fireman’s carry on him, but just barely staggered to his feet with the limp body over his shoulders, took three steps and tripped over a ground juniper branch. He fell heavily into the junipers with Howard on top of him. His mouth pressed against the needles and the stink of the juniper berries rose sharp as gin in his nose. He felt as if he were drowning in the dark bush, and scrambled out from under, only to fall again. Above, the fire’s approach seemed vicious and personal, and a long salient of the red flame reached down toward him. He stood up, and his knees were weak and shaky. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait one minute, John. Damn it, Howard, why do you weigh so much? O.K. now. O.K.” He rolled Howard over and pulled off Howard’s belt, then looped it around the limp wrists and drew it tight, forced the tongue of the buckle through the leather, then rolled Howard over onto his belly again. “It better work, John,” he said out loud. He squatted down and got the arms over his head, held the belt down on his chest and got up, Howard draped over his back. “Damn it all, now, Howard,” he said, “why did you have to grow so long?” Howard’s knees rested on the ground, but this way John could move shakily forward, providing he picked his way carefully. He knew that if he had to duck very low to go beneath blowdown, he would fall again.

He managed to drag Howard a hundred yards this way, until he came to a long, rotten white birch fallen across the way. He didn’t think he had enough strength to push Howard through the branches, or even to lift him over the trunk, so he stood gasping, then sank unwillingly to his knees. His knees would not hold, no matter how he commanded them. Sweat nearly blinded him; his hands on the belt were numb and cramped into claws. For the first time, as he sat staring at his boots, Howard’s long-breathing body relaxed beside him, he wondered if he would make it. In his exhaustion—and he knew it was because of exhaustion—the matter didn’t seem very important. But the fire kept coming. A spark settled beside him, another landed on Howard’s cheek and must have burned the flesh before John made himself brush it off. Howard was still unconscious. Another spark burned John’s head like a bee sting, and he smelled burning hair. “God damn you, Howard;” he said weakly. He didn’t want to turn around to look at the fire, and he knew that this, too, was partly due to exhaustion. It hardly seemed worth the effort. He could hear it singing up through the trees, could feel its heat against the back of his head.

“Got to!” he said, and as he got to his feet he was surprised that the short rest had done so much for him. He draped Howard over his shoulder again and moved on. The birch was rotten, and he walked right through it, only having to kick the bark away. The little black branches were as unsubstantial as spider webs.

His breath came out of his mouth in little groans, and he listened to the absurd sounds with, he thought, a great deal of disinterested speculation. Had his vocal cords sprung or something? At one point he was quite sure that Howard had bitten him on the shoulder-blade. He clearly felt the long teeth, and stopped to look at Howard’s lolling head, his slack jaw and protruding tongue. To his right, through sweat, surrounded by little rainbows, the advance feelers of the fire passed him, and real fear gave him sudden energy. He ran, a heavy, stabbing run that quickly nauseated him. He retched and kept on, bounded from a slim sapling and would have fallen except that another sapling supported him and pushed him on again. He fell several times, once kicked a pretty shower of sparks from a burning bush, tried while running to spit on a spark that seared his hand. He had no spit. He seemed to have been running for days, and Howard’s weight became a part of the fire, or the dream of escaping through molasses.

When he saw the first man across the firebreak he thought it was a bear, a fellow victim, and didn’t shout for help until he started to fall, and kept on falling, turning and turning over in the air. Below him was a pretty little lake, blue and cool, and as he fell he wondered why he didn’t enter the water—he fell toward the lake and yet never hit. And then his own shouting came into his ears, “HELP HELP HELP!” and they were dragging him, Howard still attached, through the branches and across the rooty ground.

When he reached the house he was staggering, and his feet seemed prepared to meet the ground before the ground was there. He stood swaying, watching while Howard was inserted into the police car. Then, when the car sirened off down the road, he turned toward the kitchen. Two men took his arms and helped him up the steps. “Boy, am I pooped,” he remembered saying over and over, and when he sat at the kitchen table, with a cup of hot chocolate in his black hands, he couldn’t remember who the men were who had helped him up the hill. The crew he had come with had all gone back to Leah.

“Why, Jane!” he said, “are you still up?” A silly question—she sat across the table from him, her tired eyes looking intently into his.

“You’re the one who shouldn’t still be up,” she said softly. “I called your father and told him you were all right. I told him you’d stay here.”

“Good.” He looked around the big room. “Now there’s a spot would be perfect,” he said, pointing to a far corner. “Just let me sack out over there.” He could feel his bones crumpling wonderfully into the corner. It seemed the nicest and most comfortable corner he had ever seen.

“No corner,” Jane said. “You need some sleep. You need a bath.”

“Too pooped,” he said. His eyes closed and he let his head float off—a lovely, weightless feeling—and then Jane had a firm hold on his arm and he was walking.

“Up the stairs,” she ordered.

“O.K., O.K.,” he kept saying. All the way up the stairs he couldn’t feel his legs at all, but they did keep working. Finally he leaned against the bathroom doorframe thinking how wonderful the running water sounded.

“I guess we can spare a few gallons of water,” Jane said. She bent over the big tub and swirled the water around, then got him a towel from the cupboard. “Here.” She pushed the towel into his hands. “Get some of that soot off and then you can sleep. I’ve got a bed made up for you.” She went out and shut the door.

The next horrible interruption of his lovely weightlessness was a knocking on the door. “Come in,” he said, and Jane came in, strangely angry.

“Look at you, sitting there!” she said, “Why don’t you take a bath and get it over with? You don’t want to sit there all day!” He thought he
had
taken a bath—remembered very well taking his clothes off and sliding into the nice water. But there he was, still in the torn, cruddy clothes, sitting on the toilet seat.

“I’ll be damned, Janie,” he said. “I’ll be damned!” Suddenly he thought the whole situation was terribly funny, and he began to laugh. Jane began to unlace his boots, and suddenly it was very sad. “Janie, Janie,” he said sadly, “don’t do that. Let me do that.”

“You don’t seem to be able to do it,” she said. After the boots came the streaked, wet socks, then his shirt. “You’re the dirtiest man I ever saw,” she said, and it was still sad to him.

“Yes, you know,” he said, “I’m the filthiest man there is. Oh, that’s so true. I’m a dirty son of a bitch, Janie.”

“Don’t get maudlin,” she said, put her arm around him, lifted him up and slipped off his pants. She helped him into the bathtub and he lay in the warm water, one leg twitching, the spasm traveling up and down his thigh like a wave.

“I’ve still got my shorts on,” he said. “Crazy damn’ thing take a bath with shorts on. Feels like a little kid wet his pants or something, you know? Doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

“It’s my Puritan modesty,” she said.

“My shorts.
My
Puritan modesty,” and the blue waves of nothing closed in again, happily, happily….

He was asleep in the shallow water, his knees up in the air, and she scrubbed him clean. There were raw places on his head where hair and all had been burned away, and he didn’t wake up even when she scrubbed the raw spots, just slept quietly, breathing deeply, an expression of calm happiness on his face she had never seen there before. His dark face had smoothed, looked terribly young and pure. When he was reasonably clean and the water black, she took off his shorts and washed him there, and then let the water out and rinsed him off with clean water. He slept on, but somehow even in his sleep cooperated when she raised him up and walked him into the small bedroom under the eaves. He sighed at the touch of the cool sheets, and lay relaxed on the old, sloping hammock of a bed. Before she covered him she stood and admired the smooth body, the graceful curve of muscle on his thighs—now no longer in spasm—the silky black hair curling from his armpits and over his chest, the muscular ridges of his belly. Then she pulled the sheet over him and lay down beside him. Just for a moment, she told herself, and then back to clean up the bathroom.

She ran her hand down the sheet over him, the image of the hard body erotic in her mind, and she thought of children—of babies—of babies and the primal reason for sex, of all women and all men, of the couplings and the need and the continuity of things. She herself was meant to open and need, to receive this man. She wanted to shake him, to hit him awake. Her thighs rubbed easily together. He slept on, relaxed, oblivious. She leaned over and kissed him on the lips, and he slept on. I could wake him, she thought, but I know that if he woke and wanted me, I would refuse him. Refuse him because I want him so badly, so permanently. That’s not honest, but I’m too old to be honest. His arm came over her and still he slept, his square hand on her waist, and she meant to go clean up the bathroom, had to get right up and go clean up the bathroom….

A late afternoon sun, nearly horizontal, shone through the small window and made the sheets and pillowcases gold. The first thing she saw was the face of Mrs. Pettibone, the sallow face smiling with a kind of fierce joy, and then John’s arm across her breast, each little hair on his arm reddish in the sunlight. He still slept.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” she said to Mrs. Pettibone, who stood over the bed.

“Janie, I looked in earlier, but you was sleeping so nice, so peaceful.”

“I never meant to go to sleep,” she said. “I just lay down for a second.”

“Oh, you was so cozy, so nice. I just didn’t have the heart to wake you up,” Mrs. Pettibone said, tilting her head as if she were looking at a child in bed. Jane got up and smoothed her clothes.

“He fell asleep and I had to help him to bed.”

“Don’t you go feeling embarrassed, Janie. I didn’t mean no harm looking in on you like this.” Mrs. Pettibone was close to crying, and Janie put an arm around her.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right, dear. I know you didn’t mean anything.”

Mrs. Pettibone wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then whispered, “You was so nice, so nice there.” They both looked down upon the sleeping man, upon his strong arms and the presence of him picked out in the warm light of the late sun. He sighed in his sleep and his arm moved slowly across the sheet, then moved slowly back again. Suddenly Mrs. Pettibone kissed Jane on the cheek, lowered her head and left the room.

Jane was about to follow her when John’s sleeping face screwed up into an expression of intense sorrow, and tears rolled from his closed eyes.

“Bruce,” he said clearly—as clearly as if he had been awake and had spoken to his brother. His chest jerked with an occasional explosive hiccup; the voiceless sob of a child.

A shy tapping at the door. Mrs. Pettibone called softly: “Janie, I meant to tell you. Mr. Randolf has two broken ribs and heat something—prestation? And they’re holding the fire at the firebreak, they think. He’ll be all right, the policeman said.” And she padded back down the stairs.

“Bruce,” John said again. He lay on his back as if he were paralyzed, his arms spread out, his palms up and fingers slack.

Do I dare touch him? She wondered. The green window shade scraped the frame; the round pull twirled slowly in the sunlight. Motes of dust turned and glinted. It seemed too calm and ordinary an afternoon, here in the old-fashioned room, for such sorrow.

“Bruce.” His mouth opened, his teeth were exposed, and he made an agonizing sound with an intake of air: “Huh-huh-huh-huh…”

“John!” she said sharply. She couldn’t stand to hear it, yet couldn’t leave. Her own eyes had begun to burn, her throat to hurt in an effort not to share his sobs. “John!” She didn’t dare touch him, knowing as she did his odd, inimical relationship with his brother. What swift, frightening reaction might come from the touch of her hand?

His face softened, he stretched his arms, then his trunk and legs arched beneath the sheet, and he came awake looking straight into her eyes. For a moment his expression was totally blank—watchful—then he smiled and reached for her arm. He pulled her down on top of him and kissed her. His face was like fine sandpaper, the whiskers dry and hard.

“What a pleasant surprise!” he said. “For a minute I thought I was home in bed, but the window wasn’t in the right place.” He hiccuped again, and felt his chest, surprised. Then he noticed that his face was wet, and he looked at her, the question in his eyes.

“You were crying in your sleep,” she said.

“Me?”

“You were crying hard.”

“Probably trying to get Howard off that goddam hill. What’s happened? How long have I been sleeping? How’s Howard?”

“He’s all right. The state police said he had some broken ribs, and heat ‘prostation’ according to Mrs. Pettibone. They think they’ve stopped the fire for a while at your firebreak.”

“Nothing but good news. I can stop crying?”

“You weren’t crying about the fire.”

“You mean I talked in my sleep?” He smiled worriedly. “What did I say? Jesus! You’ll learn all my secrets.”