On Fire

by Larry Brown

  The boy shifted his gear higher and stepped off after him.

  “What’s beer taste like?” he said, as the old man wiped his mouth.

  “Beer.”

  “I know that. But what’s it taste like?”

  “I don’t know. Shit. It just tastes like beer. Don’t ask so many fuckin questions. I need to hire somebody full time just to answer your questions.”

  The woman and the girls had gone ahead by two hundred feet. The old man and the boy had not gone more than a hundred feet before he opened the second beer. He drank it more slowly, walking, making four or five drinks of it. By the time they got to the foot of the first hill he had drunk all three.

  It was that part of evening when the sun has gone but daylight still remains. The whippoorwills called to each other and moved about, and the choirs of frogs had assembled in the ditches to sing their melancholy songs. Bats scurried overhead, swift and gone in the gathering dusk. The boy didn’t know where he and his family were, other than one name: Mississippi.

  In the cooling evening light they turned off onto a gravel road, their reasons unspoken or merely obscure. Wilder country here, also unpeopled, with snagged wire and rotten posts encompassing regions of Johnsongrass and bitterweed, the grim woods holding secrets on each side. They walked up the road, the dust falling over their footprints. A coyote lifted one thin broken scream down in the bottom; somewhere beyond the stands of cane they could see a faint green at the end of the plowed ground. They turned in on a field road at the base of a soapstone hill and followed it, stepping around washed-out places in the ground, past pine trees standing like lonely sentinels, where doves flew out singing on gray-feathered wings, and by patches of bracken where unseen things scurried off noisily through the brush.

  “You know where you at?” said the woman.

  The old man didn’t even look at her. “Do you?”

  “I’m just followin you.”

  “Well, shut up then.”

  She did. They went over the last hill and here the whole bottom was open before them, the weak light that remained stretching far down across an immense expanse of land that had been plowed but not yet planted. They could see all the way to the river, where the trees stood black and solid.

  “It’s a river bottom,” said the boy.

  “Well shit,” said the old man.

  “Can’t cross no river,” the woman said.

  “I know it.”

  “Not in the dark.”

  The old man glanced at her in the falling light and she looked away. He looked around.

  “Well hell,” he said. “It’s bout dark. Y’all see if you can find us some wood and we’ll build us a fire.”

  The boy and the two girls put everything they had on the ground. The girls found some dead pine tops next to an old fence and they pulled them whole into the road and began breaking them into pieces small enough to burn.

  “See if you can find us a pine knot,” he told the boy. The boy left and they could hear him breaking through the brush up the hill. When he came back he was dragging a gray hunk of wood with one hand and carrying in the other arm some dead branches. He threw all this down and started off for more. The old man squatted in the dust of the road and began to roll a cigarette, his attention focused finely, aware of nothing but the little task at hand. The woman was still standing with her arms clutched about her, hearing something out there in the dark that maybe spoke to no ear but her own.

  The boy came back with another load and said, “Let me see your knife.”

  The old man fished out a broken-bladed Case and the boy fell to shaving thin orange peelings of wood away from the pine knot. He drew the blade down, breaking the chips off close to the base. When he had a good handful whittled, he arranged them in some unseen formation of his own devising in the powdered gray dust.

  “Let me see some of them little sticks,” he told his little sister. She passed across a bundle of brittle tinder and he set this around and above the pine chips. He drew a box of matches from his pocket and struck one. In the little fire that flared, his face loomed out of the dark, curiously intense and dirty, his hands needlessly cupping the small flame. He touched it to one of the chips and a tiny yellow blade curled up, a tendril of black smoke above it like a thick waving hair.

  “That stuff’s rich as six foot up a bull’s ass,” the old man said. The little scrap of wood began sizzling and the resin boiled out in black bubbles, the flames eating their way up. The boy picked up another one from the pile and held it over the fire, got it caught, and added it to the fire. One of the sticks popped and burst into flame.

  “Give me some of them a little bigger,” he said. She handed them. They smiled at each other, he and little sister. Now they began to be drawn out of the coming dark, the five of them hunched around the fire with their arms on their knees. He fed the sticks one by one into the fire, and soon it was crackling and growing and red embers were breaking off and falling into the little bed of coals already forming.

  He kept feeding it, jostling and poking it. He got down on his knees and lowered his face sideways to the fire and began to blow on it. Like a bellows he gave it air and it responded. The fire rushed over the sticks, burned higher in the night.

  “Y’all go on and put some of them big ones on it,” he said, getting up. “I’ll go up here and get some more.”

  The girls hauled limbs and piled them on the fire. Soon there were red sparks launching up into the smoke. The stars came out and enveloped them in their makeshift camp. They sat under a black skyscape beside woods alive with noise. The bullfrogs on the creeks that fed the river were hoarse and they spoke from the clay banks up into the darkness with a sound the ear loves.

  The woman was digging among her sparse duffel, pawing aside unusable items at the top of the sack. She pulled out a blackened iron skillet and a pint can of green beans. She set these down and looked some more.

  “Where’s them sardines?” she said.

  “They in here, Mama,” the oldest girl said. The youngest one said nothing.

  “Well, give em here, honey.”

  The boy came crashing down through the bushes and laid another armload of wood by the fire and went away again. They could hear him casting about like an enormous hound. The woman had the knife up and she was stabbing at the can of beans with it. She managed to open it and with careful fingers she pried the jagged edge up and turned the can over, shaking the beans into the skillet. She set it close to the coals and started in on the sardines. After she got the can open she rummaged around in her sack and pulled out a package of paper plates partially wrapped in cellophane and set them down, took out five. There were five of the little fish in the can. She put one in each plate.

  The old man immediately reached over with grimed fingers and picked up a sardine daintily and bit it once and bit it twice and it was gone.

  “That was his,” she said.

  “He ort to been down here,” he said, chewing, wiping.

  The boy had moved far back in the brush. They listened to him while the beans warmed.

  “How much longer?”

  The woman stared into the fire with a face sullen and orange.

  “It’ll be ready when it gets ready.”

  She looked off suddenly into the dark as if she’d heard something out there, her face grained like leather, trying to smile.

  “Calvin?” she called. “Calvin. Is that you?”

  “Hush,” he said, looking with her. “Shut that shit up.”

  She fixed him with a look of grim desperation, a face she wore at night.

  “I think it’s Calvin,” she said. “Done found us.”

  She lurched up onto her knees and looked wildly about, as if searching for a weapon to fend off the night, and she called out to the screaming dark: “Honey, come on in here it’s almost ready Mama’s got biscuits fixed.”

  She gathered her breath to say more, but he got up and went to her and shook her by the shoulders, bending over h
er with the ragged legs of his overalls flopping before the fire and the girls silent and not watching this at all. The little one got up on one knee and put another stick on the fire.

  “Now, just hush,” the old man said. “Hush.”

  She turned to the oldest girl.

  “You water’s not broke, is it?”

  “I ain’t pregnant, Mama.” Her head was bowed, dark hair falling down around her face. “I done told you.”

  “Lord God, child, if you water’s broke it ain’t nothin nobody can do about it. I knowed this nigger woman one time her water broke and they wasn’t nobody around for a mile to help her. I tried helpin her and she wouldn’t have me.”

  “I’m fixin to slap you,” he said.

  “She wasn’t about to have me. I’s standing out yonder by the pumphouse and they come in there three or four and tied her down and she had the biggest blackest thing stickin out butt first . . .”

  He hit her. Laid her out with one lick. She didn’t even groan. She fell over on her back in the dirt and lay with her arms outspread like a witness for Christ stricken with the power of the Blood.

  The girls looked at her and then they looked at the beans. They were almost ready. The old man was crouched beside their mother, his hands moving and working.

  The boy was running back down through the brush and the woods, the wire singing one high shrieking note when he hit it. He stumbled panting and on all fours to the fire and noted his mother lying stretched out on her back and his father bent over her in an attitude of supplication and saw his two sisters watching the fire with hungry looks and yelled out, over the noise of the bullfrogs and the maddening crickets screaming and the murmur of the water running low in the creek: “They’s a house up here!”

  JOE ROSE EARLY from a sleep filled with nightmares of shooting guns and swinging pool cues launched up in his face and stealthy blacks with knives who lurked around corners with their eyes walled white in the darkness or slipped up behind him on cat feet to take his life for money. At four-thirty he made some instant coffee and drank about half a cup. He put a load of clothes in to wash, moving through the brightly lit rooms while all around him outside the community slept. He turned on the television to see if there was anything on, but there wasn’t anything but snow.

  The dog was standing in the yard with his head up when he pushed open the door.

  “Here, dog,” he said. “Hey, dog.”

  He bent with the two opened cans of dog food in his hands and spooned the meat onto a concrete block at the foot of the steps. He moved out of the way when the dog moved in and stepped back up into the open door to watch him eat. Just a few grunting noises, the jerking of his scarred head up and down.

  The coffee was cold in the cup when he sat back down at the table. He pitched it into the sink and made another, then sat sipping it slowly with his arm laid out to rest on the cheap metal table, a Winston smoking between his fingers. It was five o’clock by then. He had some numbers written down on a piece of notebook paper that had been folded and rained on, and he spread it out before him on the table, smoothing it, silently rehearsing the numbers with his lips. The phone was on the table in front of him. He lifted the receiver and dialed.

  “You goin to work this mornin?” he said. He listened. “What about Junior? He get drunk last night?” He listened, grinned, then coughed into the phone. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be up there in thirty minutes. Y’all be ready, hear?”

  He hung up on a babbling voice. He listened to the clothes chugging in the machine and he listened to the silence he lived in now, which was broken most times only by the dog whining at the back step. He got up and went to the icebox and brought the fifth of whiskey that was in there back to the table. He held it in his hand for a minute, studying it, reading the label, where it was made, how long it was aged. Then he opened it and took a good drink. There was a canned Coke on the table, half empty, flat and hot. He made sure nobody had thumped any cigarette ashes in it before he took a drink. Coke, then whiskey, Coke and then whiskey. He wiped his mouth and capped the bottle and lit another cigarette.

  He turned off the lights at five-fifteen and went down the steps and across the wet grass of the tiny yard and no one saw him leave. The stars had gone in but dawn had not yet paled the sky. The dog whined and nuzzled around his legs as if he’d go, too, but Joe pushed him away gently with his foot and told him to move, then got in the truck.

  “Stay here,” he said. The dog went back under the house. The whiskey went under the seat. He cranked the truck with the door still open, found the wiper switch and watched the blades slap against the dew on the windshield. The truck was old and rusty and it had a wrecked camper hull bolted over the bed, where the poison guns and jugs lay in wreaths of dust and where the scraps of baby pines left from the past winter had dried into kindling. Spare tires and flat ones, empty beer cans and whiskey bottles. He sat revving it until it would idle and then he shut the door and turned on the lights and backed out of the driveway. It coughed up the road, missing and lurching, the one red eye in the back slowly fading toward the dawn.

  There were five of them standing beside the road with their hands in their pockets and the orange tips of their cigarettes winking in their lips. He pulled up beside them and stopped and they climbed into the back, the truck shaking and jarring as they sat. He stopped twice more before he got to town, taking on one rider at each halt. It was getting daylight when he drove into the city limits. He eased under the red light at the top of the hill and turned onto the project road with the back end sagging. The blue lights of the police cars that were gathered in the parking lot washed the gray brick walls in sporadic sapphire, while the strobes flashed and illuminated the junked autos and spilled trash and overflowing Dumpsters. He pulled up short and stopped and sat watching. There were three patrol cars and he could see at least five cops. He stuck his head out the window and said: “Hey, Shorty.”

  One of them climbed down from the back and walked up beside the cab to stand next to him. A thin youth in a red T-shirt.

  “What’s goin on, Shorty? Where’s Junior at?”

  The boy shook his head. “Somebody fucked up.”

  “Well, go see if you can find him right quick. I don’t need to be around these damn cops. They’ll think I did it.”

  “I’ll go get him,” the boy said, and he moved off toward the nearest building.

  “Hurry up, now,” he said after him, and the boy broke into a jog. Fifteen or twenty black people were standing in a group on the sidewalk, watching. Most of them were wearing undershorts or nightgowns. One cop was keeping the crowd herded back.

  As he sat looking at them, the police led a man in a pair of white jeans to one of the cars. His hands were cuffed behind his naked back. They opened a rear door and one of them put his hand on top of the man’s head in an oddly gentle act and kept him from bumping his head as he got in. Some of the workhands in the back end of the truck started out but Joe called for them to stay put, that they didn’t have time. He lit a cigarette and saw a red glow moving through the pines behind them. He swiveled his head to see an ambulance coming slowly with the siren off. Somebody dead, no urgency, had to be. Then he saw the foot. Just one, turned with the toes up, sticking out past the left side of a patrol car. A black foot with a pale bottom unmoving on the asphalt. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry he would have gotten out to take a better look. But the ambulance had pulled up now and the attendants were unloading a stretcher from the back. They wheeled it around, two men in white jackets. They bent over the body and then the foot was gone.

  “We ready now,” the boy said beside him. There was another boy with him.

  “That you, Junior?”

  White teeth gleamed in the dying night. “It’s me. You let me have a cigarette, Joe?”

  He pulled a pack off the dash and shook one out for him.

  “Hell. I thought that might be you laid out yonder, Junior. What’s done happened?”

  He li
t the cigarette for him and Junior stood there a moment. He smoked and yawned and scratched the side of his jaw with the fingers that held his smoke.

  “Aw, Noony been drunk and talkin his old shit again. Bobby’s boy shot him, Mama said.”

  “Just get up front with me, Junior. Let’s go, Shorty. We got to haul ass.”

  He put it up in reverse and waited for Junior to come around. Junior got in and then he couldn’t get the door to stay shut.

  “Slam it hard,” Joe said. “They all in back there?”

  “I reckon. Shoot. I was still in the bed.”

  He backed the truck around quickly and pulled it down into low. He took off, but the gears crashed when he tried to shove it up into second. He pushed in the clutch hard and tried again. It finally caught, but the valves rattled as it struggled up the hill.

  “I got to buy me a new truck,” he said. The black boy beside him giggled like a girl. “Where’s your hat, Junior?”

  “Run off and left it. Shorty say you’s fixin to leave me if I didn’t come on.”

  “Hell, we late. Be daylight before we ever get out there. I guess ever one of y’all needs to stop at the store.”

  “I got to get somethin to eat,” he said. “What you take for this old truck if you buy you a new one?”

  “This truck ain’t old. It’s just got some minor stuff wrong with it.”

  They stopped under the red light and waited for it to turn green. Another cruiser came up the hill and turned in with its blue lights flashing. He pulled the shift down into low and took off again, clashed the gears and dropped it into third. The truck sputtered, lurched violently and died. He cranked on it and the lights dimmed until he pushed them off.

  “Ragged son of a bitch,” he said. It cranked finally and he wound the hell out of it in low, up to almost twenty-five before he dropped it into high gear. It rattled a loud complaint but it went on.