On Fire

by Larry Brown

  “I’m not going out with you if that’s what you want.”

  “I ain’t said that. Why you want to do me like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Won’t talk to me. Won’t even see me.”

  “This is not the place to talk about it. You’re not gonna come in here like you did that other time. Mr. Harper’11 call the police if you ever do that again.” She leaned toward him and whispered: “How do you think that made me feel? Everybody in here saw you. I’ve got a good job here.”

  “I know you do. I’m proud you do.”

  “Then let me do it.”

  He raised his hands a little. “Hell, calm down. I just wanted to see you a minute.”

  “Well, this is not the place to see me. I’ve got to work.”

  “Where is?”

  “I don’t know. You want to buy something?”

  “Yeah. Gimme a book of stamps.”

  She shook her head and reached under the counter.

  “You use more stamps than anybody I know.”

  “I got me some pen pals now,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes and smiled a little. “Sure.”

  He pulled out his billfold. “How much is that?”

  “Two-fifty for ten or five dollars for twenty.”

  “Give me twenty. You need any money?”

  “Nope.”

  “I can let you have some if you need it.”

  “I’m doing fine. I got a promotion and a raise last week.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You been out with anybody?”

  “None of your business. I wouldn’t tell you if I had. There you are.” She put the little booklet on the counter. He gave her a five dollar bill.

  “Let me give you some money,” he said. He had three fifties folded between his fingers and he put them on the counter.

  She looked around to see who was watching.

  “I’m not taking that. You’d think I owed you something then.”

  “You don’t owe me nothin, Charlotte. I’d rather you have it as me. I won’t do nothin but blow it. You don’t want to go eat lunch?”

  He had drawn his hands back and the money lay between them. He went ahead and lit a cigarette, turned his head and coughed.

  “I can’t right now,” she said. Somebody had moved up behind him. An old woman, he saw, smiling and digging in her purse, shaking her head.

  “I been doin real good,” he said. “I ain’t been out in about two weeks.”

  “That’s good, Joe. But you can do whatever you want to now.”

  “Only thing I want is to see you.”

  “I’ve got to get to work now. Take this money,” she said, and she held it out to him.

  “I’ll see you,” he said, and he turned and walked out.

  On the couch he turned his face to one side and saw the things happening on the television screen without seeing them and heard the words the actors were saying without hearing them. They were like dreams, real but not real. He closed his eyes and it all passed away.

  THEY ENTERED OVER a rotting threshold, their steps soft on the dry dusty boards, their voices loud in the hushed ruins. The floor was carpeted beautifully with vines, thick creepers with red stalks matted and green leaves flourishing up through the cracks. An ancient tricycle sat before the dead ashes of a fireplace whose old rough bricks, ill spaced and losing their homemade mortar, chip by sandy chip, seemed bonded only by the dirt dauber nests that lined the inside. “Looky yonder,” the old woman said, pointing to the tricycle. “Reckon how old that is.”

  In the vault of rafters overhead a screech owl swiveled its head downward like something on greased bearings to better see his invaders, then spread his small brown wings to glide soundlessly through the gable and out into the spring brightness.

  They moved through the house with red wasps droning above them, to a back room where a nest anchored to the top log spanned sixteen inches, a mass of dull bodies with black wings crawling there like maggots, poised and vibrating. They backed away into the front room, quietly, carefully.

  “Ain’t nobody lived here in a long time,” the boy said. He reached down and pushed the tricycle, which rolled woodenly across the floor, the pedals turning perhaps with weak remembrance from the feet of a long-dead child. He stood at a glassless window and touched two logs notched to within the thickness of a sheet of paper and wondered at what it had taken to raise hewed timbers a foot square and set them in place with such precision.

  “We’ll have to get somethin over them windows,” the old man said. “And these vines got to be cleaned out.”

  “We better get that wasp nest down first,” the woman said. The two girls had settled in a far corner with their sacks. They studied their father with a sullen recalcitrance.

  “This old house is awful,” the oldest one said. Her name was Fay and the little one was Dorothy.

  “It’s bettern a culvert,” Wade said.

  The old man stopped before a wooden safe weathered of varnish and blistered from a fire survived in some other household. He opened one of the doors and it protested with a thin yawning. On the dusty shelves inside were mice pills, the dry hollow husks of insects, tiny colored bottles with rusted caps.

  The boy was fascinated by the logs. He touched their axed surfaces, felt the dried mud chinked in the cracks. He thought he would have liked living in times when men built houses like this one.

  “Mules,” he said. “I bet them people used mules.”

  The old man was picking up bottles from inside the safe, small blue ones and tall green ones of strange and flawed glass with bubbles of air trapped within the wavey walls.

  “These old bottles liable to be worth some money,” he said.

  There was a little room attached to the side of the house. The ceiling joists were only six feet above a floor littered with leaves, scraps of newspaper yellowed and brittle, rotted bits of discolored fabric. The boy toed among the refuse, searching. He glanced at his father and mother. They were examining the bottles and arguing quietly over them. With his shoe he scraped twigs and dust away from the floor. The mold of untold years. He bent and picked up a shotgun shell soft with ruin, green with tarnish. He touched the crimped and swollen end and the faded paper flaked away in his hand. Small gray shot was packed loosely within, almost white now. He turned it up and poured over his shoes an almost soundless rain of lead. They were murmuring in the other room, talking. There was no furniture other than the safe, not even a chair. He looked out a window and saw a small shed tumbled down, windrowed with leaves, composed of green boards and cancerous wooden shingles. He saw a caved-in outhouse. And just beyond, a wall of pine woods was already gathering the day’s coming heat. He looked around in the room. Whoever had lived here had been gone for a long time. He went back up front and joined his parents.

  “Y’all can start pullin these weeds up,” his daddy said.

  Gary bent immediately and began tearing handfuls of them up through the floor, carrying them to the window and throwing them out.

  “I wish I had a broom,” his mother said.

  “What we gonna do for water?” Fay said. “We ain’t got no water.”

  “I imagine they’s a creek around here if you’d look,” Wade said. “Why don’t you get up off your ass and see if you can find it?”

  “Why don’t you go find it your own self?”

  The boy stopped what he was doing and looked at his sister. The old man was standing over her, the woman turning now and watching them. The girl got up slowly.

  “They ain’t even no bathroom in this place. Look at it. It’s full of wasp nests, and weeds is growin right up through the floor. You don’t even know who it belongs to.”

  The old man slapped her. A sound like a pistol shot, his hand suddenly exploding on her cheek, the dark hair flying around her head as her face was slapped sideways. The old woman moved and froze at once, sank down to the floor with her legs crossed and
her hands in her hair. The girl doubled up her fist.

  “Don’t double that fist up at me,” Wade said. “I’ll slap the hell out of you.”

  She swung at his nose but missed by a good six inches. He caught her arm and twisted it up behind her back. He was trying to whip her with his open hand and she was trying to kick him. They danced in a demented little circle in the dust. The youngest girl watched with her hands caught at her mouth.

  He tried to push her against the wall, but she whirled and kicked him hard in the balls. He went down with his teeth bared. She picked up a stick from the floor and commenced pounding him over the head with it, whipped him to the floor where he lay curled and groaning and trying to fend off the blows she was laying on him like someone beating a rug, him screaming for her to Quit it, that Goddamn, that hurts.

  “How you like it?” she asked him. But Gary took the stick away from her and threw it out the window.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  “You taking up for him now? What you taking up for him for?”

  “Cause,” he said. “All you gonna do’s make him mad.”

  “I wish he’d die,” she said. She bent over her father. “You hear me? I hate your guts and I wish you’d die. So we wouldn’t have to put up with you.”

  The old man moaned on the floor with his eyes tightly closed. Through gritted teeth he said: “I’m goin to beat your ass till you can’t sit down.”

  “You ain’t nothing,” she said. “I wish you’s dead and in hell right now.”

  “You gonna wish you was somewhere when I get through with you,” he told her.

  “Y’all stop it,” Gary said. “Here. Help him up.”

  He took hold of Wade’s arm and pulled him to a sitting position. The hat had come off his head and his sparse gray hair was in disarray, coated with dust. He sat rocking back and forth, holding his belly. The girl was still circling him, looking for another opening.

  “Get away from him, Fay,” Gary said.

  “You better get outa here,” Wade said.

  “If I had any other place to go I would.”

  “Get up off the floor, Mama.” The boy bent to his mother and helped her up, one knee at a time. She was dazed and trembling, was pawing at her hair with her fingers as if she meant to comb it. The old man had one knee up and was forcing one of his hands against it in an attempt to rise. He showed his rotten teeth and struggled, finally made it up, and stood panting in the center of the room. He bent over and picked up his hat and dusted it off.

  “I want this place cleaned up fore dark,” he told Fay.

  “You kiss my ass,” she said. He lunged and got her by the throat. She didn’t scream. She just closed her eyes and tried to force his hands away from her throat, the two of them stumbling against the logs. The boy tried to get between them, and the little girl and the woman joined in, all of them tugging at the hands clenched so tightly on her. She gagged and coughed and her face started turning purple until she said: “All right. Damn,” and he turned her loose. She rubbed her throat and coughed some more. He weaved in front of her, raised one finger and put it in her face.

  “You gonna do what I tell you,” he said.

  She didn’t answer. The marks of his fingers were red spots on her neck.

  “You hear me?”

  Gary watched them and didn’t move away. He could hear them heaving like runners after a race.

  “One day,” she said.

  “One day?” The old man stepped closer. “One day what?”

  “Nothin.”

  “All right, then. I don’t want to hear no more of your smart shit. I’m tired of it. You hear?”

  “I hear.”

  “Well, go on and do like I told you.”

  “What?” she said.

  He gestured wildly with his hands. “Go on and start pickin this shit up. Get some of these sticks and leaves outa here.”

  They began picking up the leaves and trash that had blown in through the broken windows and carrying it all to the door and throwing it out. The old woman found a scrap of broom some-where and they were soon obscured in the dust she raised attacking the floor. Wade started to say something, but then coughed and sagged against a wall. He leaned there coughing and then bent over gagging. His tongue came out. He was fanning at the dust with his hands. She swept harder, whipping the dust into a rolling cloud of brown smoke. The old man had both hands around his throat as if he might strangle himself. The dust plumed out the windows and rose to the rafters. Wade retched like a victim of tear gas, going to his knees on the wide boards. Gary helped him to his feet and led him outside, the old man hacking ferociously now, all but being carried by the boy. He allowed himself to be led to a fallen tree in the yard and he sat down on it, putting his head between his legs with his tongue hanging out.

  “You gonna be all right?” Gary said. His father didn’t answer, couldn’t. He sat there choking, his shoulders moving in great spastic jerks.

  “Maybe you need to get up and walk around,” he said. He turned and looked at the dust billowing out into the yard. The dim figure of his mother inside was moving methodically through the room, the shaft in her hands sweeping back and forth. Fay stepped down from the house, coughing, and held onto the doorjamb with one hand.

  “Hell fire,” she said.

  “Where’s Dorothy?”

  “I don’t know. I guess she went out the other side if she ain’t done choked to death. I don’t see how Mama can stand it her ownself.”

  They went around to the other side of the house and the younger girl was there, beating the dust from her clothes.

  “You okay?” he said. She nodded her head that she was. They stood together and watched the dust swirl and settle in the grass.

  “She’s crazy as hell,” said Fay.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Well, she is.”

  “You don’t have to say it,” he said. “If you don’t quit smartin off to him . . .”

  “I ain’t scared of him.”

  “Ain’t nobody said you were. It just don’t do no good to aggravate him. All it does is just make it worse.”

  “He ain’t worth killin,” she said.

  “Hush.” He nodded with his chin toward the little girl. “She’s listenin to you.”

  “I don’t care if she is. How you think we gonna live out here? They ain’t no water. Ain’t even no windows in that old house.”

  “I’ll fix em,” he said.

  “Horseshit. You can’t fix up that old house. We don’t even know who it belongs to. What we gonna do if whoever owns it comes up here and catches us?”

  He thought about it for a minute. “Well, maybe we can find us someplace else.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. He’s sposed to know some people around here. Maybe they know of a place. A place a little closer to a store or somethin. We got to have some way to get somethin to eat. Have we got anything left?”

  “I doubt it. I don’t think she’s got nothin left. I don’t know what we had to leave Texas for. At least we had a garden out there. There ain’t nothin here.” She looked around in disgust. “Back off in the woods. Poison ivy all over the place. I bet you couldn’t find nobody in his right mind would live up in here.”

  “I wonder if he’s got any money,” Gary said.

  “What do you think?”

  “Naw.”

  “You know he ain’t. If he did he’d of done found him a liquor store somewhere and spent it.”

  “Well, what we gonna do?”

  She just looked at him.

  “I don’t know.”

  By noon they had most of the trash cleaned out but they were having to stay out of the room where the wasp nest hung. They were sitting under the shade of some trees in a yard that honey-suckle vines had taken over. Like foraging cows they had trampled them down and flattened them.

  “Now how much money have we got?” the old man said to them. He looked hopeful.

&n
bsp; “I ain’t got none,” Gary said.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Fay.

  “Where’s your purse?” Wade asked her.

  “I said I ain’t got none,” she told him. “What, you think I’m lyin?”

  “I just want to check.”

  “I done told you I’m broke.”

  “Well, I just want to see.”

  “Well, you can just jump up my ass.” She got up and started to pick up her purse, but he caught her by the arm. They fought briefly over it until he broke the strap and snatched it away from her. He upended it and dumped the contents on the ground while she cursed at him. A comb, a mirror, two sticks of gum, hair clips, lipstick. He shook it but nothing else came out.

  “Now. You satisfied?” She knelt and started putting her things back in it, muttering under her breath.

  “We got to have somethin to eat,” he said.

  “You oughta thought of that before you got us out here.”

  “You want me to slap you?” he said. She didn’t answer.

  “We gonna have to do somethin,” Gary said. “Find us a job.”

  “Where you gonna find one at?” the old man said.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to go look for one. How far is it to town?”

  The old man looked around at the woods as if the trees bore road signs that marked the route to civilization.

  “It’s about ten mile, I guess.”

  “Ain’t there a store no closer than that?”

  “They’s one over here at London Hill. Or used to be.”

  “Reckon they’d give us some credit?”

  “They might. You could ask. They might give us credit.”

  “Well, why don’t we walk over there and see? We got to do somethin. We can’t set around here all day.”

  “You go. My legs is hurtin s’bad I can’t hardly get up.”

  The old woman had not spoken but she was unfolding limp green paper in her hands. Each of them realized it gradually, turning one by one to look at her as she sat with her head down, her fingers trembling slightly as she fumbled with the wrinkled bills. She smoothed each one on her knee as she drew it from the wad.

  “Where’d you find that, Mama?” Gary said.

  “I had it,” she said. Her hair was coated with dust and it hung limply around the sides of her head so that her ears stuck through.