Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

  “What?” Lenny asked. He had tried to sit on the pavement but it was too hot. He couldn’t believe that Albie was lying on it.

  “Fire communicates with fire,” Albie said, thinking that sounded profound. Then he turned his head to the right, towards the field, and saw two brown moths dipping over the dry grass, and just like that he brought his arm straight down to the right, the Bic flame turned to high, and touched the fire to the grass.

  This was a field made to be burned. The flame licked at Albie’s wrist as he snatched his hand away and rolled twice across the pavement before jumping up and grabbing his bike. The fire made a whooshing sound and then an ecstatic crackling like stiff sheets of cellophane balled up by human hands.

  “Fuck, man,” Raul said, stumbling back. “What did you do?” They were pulling their bikes farther and farther away, swinging a leg over to get out of there but none of them turned to go. All four of the boys were frozen, mesmerized, the weirdest chill washing over their skin while they watched this miraculous growing animal devouring the earth in every direction, every direction where there was grass and not bothering them at all on the pavement. The fire came as high as their waists, their chests, gorgeous beyond anything they’d seen, the rippling orange sheets hanging in the air like a desert mirage, like something that was there and not there. Black smoke curled above the flames, announcing to the neighborhood this very private thing that Albie had made. Fire! Fire! they’d be calling in the industrial park, even though it was already starting to die out around the edges. The fire needed so much. The boys could see it looking for more grass, anything to keep itself alive. It would have happily burned them up if it meant going for another minute.

  “We should get out of here,” Edison said, though for all the world it sounded like, Would you look at that?

  Forget the whip-its, the huffing, the pot. Forget the bikes even. From that first minute all they wanted was primordial fire. In the distance they heard sirens. Yesterday they would have ridden towards the noise, followed the bright-red trucks to the action like a bunch of little groupies after a band. Today they were the action, and they knew enough to get the hell out of there.

  It was his grandfather Cousins who had first taught Albie and Cal how to make match guns one summer in Virginia. All the device required was an old-fashioned spring clothespin, a couple of rubber bands, a box of kitchen matches, and a scrap of sandpaper. The boys had been instructed to pay attention to the unspeakably boring old man, who had been instructed to impart some piece of family wisdom to the boys. A match gun was what he’d come up with. It meant something different in Virginia, of course, where at least for that one freakish summer of incessant rain the world had been rendered deep and lush and essentially fireproof. In Virginia people stored wood in the garage in the hopes that one day it would be dry enough to burn. Having made their guns, their grandfather adjusted a match into position and, zing, sent the missile sailing off the front porch in a pretty arc of flame.

  “Never in the barn,” their grandfather had said to them when he handed over his invention. “In fact, never by yourselves. Are you listening to me? If you’re going to shoot matches, I have to be with you.”

  Cal was underwhelmed. Whenever he got the chance he took his father’s handgun out of the glove compartment and stuck it in his tube sock under his jeans, tying the butt to his ankle with a tight bandanna. He was wearing it that day on the front porch while his grandfather fussed over the clothespin.

  But Albie didn’t have a gun and so the little flame thrower held his interest, enough that when he tried to reconstruct one from memory five years later in Torrance, he found he could. Spreading out his materials on the dining room table, he made a match gun for each member of his posse. After a single practice session in Edison’s backyard, in which they burned up paper towels and Kleenex laid out on the grass at varying distances, they set fire to a mountain of empty cardboard boxes banked behind the liquor store and two dead shrubs in front of an Exxon station. On the days they got up early enough, they shot matches into the newspapers that waited on the sidewalks and front steps of their neighbors’ homes. When they were much better at it they shot those papers while on bikes. They took a city bus all the way to the Sunset Strip and shot matches into the palm trees, standing back to wait for the rats to tumble down the slender trunks as the dried out fronds burst into flames overhead. They tried to shoot the rats but that never worked. Rats were fast and not particularly flammable.

  All through the summer they set things on fire despite the drought and the winds, despite the roadside admonishments of Smokey Bear. Fuck Smokey. They weren’t interested in anything as sloppy as a forest fire. They liked precision, the art of flame, the single burning newspaper, one abandoned lot. They lit matches through the first two months of their freshman year at Shery High. As shoplifters they had had a spotty record, but as arsonists they were remarkably adept at not getting caught, or they were until they set their school on fire.

  Raul had art last period on Fridays, a peaceful moment at the end of his week in which he was free to draw meticulous dragons breathing fire into trees. Just before he left the classroom, in the second after the bell rang and everyone began to shove their notebooks frantically into their backpacks, he leaned over and flipped the catch on the window sideways, to the unlocked position. The art room was in the basement of the school and the windows were big and at ground level. No one was looking in his direction and so no one saw him do it. He did it only because he could. Miss Del Torre the art teacher would turn it back before she went home, or if she didn’t think to do it, and Miss Del Torre was an idiot so who knew, the janitor would do it when he mopped up after school.

  “I want to go see something,” Raul said to the other boys on Saturday morning. Nothing else was going on and so they didn’t even bother to ask him what it was he wanted to see, they just got on their bikes and followed him over to school. He led them behind a low hedge that blocked the window’s view to the street and, looking into the art room, Raul pushed on the glass, barely tapped on it, and the window swung open. Albie, elated by the possibility of an interesting Saturday, dragged the four bikes behind the hedge, while Lenny, who was smallest, squeezed through first. Once he was inside and straightened up he smiled at them through the glass, and waved. He found another window at the other end of the room that opened wider, a portal to another world, and one by one the Goddamn Boys on Bikes slipped inside.

  There was no explanation for how the school, which was the major source of misery in their lives, could have been transformed into the most compelling place on earth simply by virtue of its being Saturday. What a difference a day makes, Albie’s mother used to sing back when she still did things like that. Twenty-four little hours. The halls were silent and wide without the hordes of furious children and bitter, defeated adults. Without the buzzing overhead lights the sunlight fell down the walls and across the linoleum tiles, collecting in watery pools around their feet. Edison wondered what it would be like to be old, as old as his father, and come back here then. He figured it would be like this, the building entirely his, because he didn’t take into account that other children might be coming in the future. Raul stopped and looked at the winners of the art contest lined up on a cork board. Only two of the pictures were any good: a charcoal drawing of a girl in a sundress, and a small painting of two pears in a bowl. Both had only been awarded honorable mentions while a ridiculous collage of a skyscraper made out of tiny magazine pictures of skyscrapers had won. He wondered if Miss Del Torre, who, it couldn’t be said too often, was an idiot, hadn’t been able to see which of the students had actual talent because there were always too many people around.

  They had lost Lenny at some point. None of them had noticed he was gone and then he came back again, walking towards them down the hall. “Guys,” he said, waving his arm as if they might miss him. “Come here. You’ve got to see this.”

  The squeak of their tennis shoes echoed in the halls and the sou
nd made Albie laugh, and then they all laughed as they passed the endless row of lockers, all of them closed, all of them exactly the same. “Look at this,” Lenny said, and he turned into the boys’ bathroom.

  For a freshman in public high school in Torrance, and especially for Lenny, who was not as tall as the other boys and skinnier despite his efforts, no place was more terrifying than the bathroom. He used every means he could think of to stay out of there, though sometimes he suspected it was thinking about it so much that made him need to go. But this room, which as recently as yesterday had been as foul and dangerous as a junkie’s den, a haze of boy sweat and shit and piss, the acrid stink of boy fear, this room was now perfectly clean. It smelled vaguely, even pleasantly, of Clorox, like a public swimming pool. In fact, the way it was all arranged—the mirrors and sinks on one side, the line of toilet stalls with their green metal doors on the other—had a sort of peaceful symmetry. There was a huge amount of space between the toilets and the sinks so that you wouldn’t have to bump up against any other kid unless that kid was very specifically trying to bump you. For the first time the boys noticed three bands of tiles that went around the entire room, three bands of blue that served no purpose whatsoever except to be decorative. Raul went to a urinal and, tilting back his head with the flow, noticed sunlight. “When did they put windows in here?”

  Because no one was around to stop them, they went in the girls’ bathroom as well and found it to be exactly the same, except that the three stripes of tile that ringed the walls were in shades of pink, and instead of urinals there was a Tampax dispenser bolted by the sinks on which someone had scratched the words EAT ME into the white enamel. Someone else had tried, unsuccessfully, to sand it out. The room was disappointing somehow. Even Albie and Raul, who both had sisters, thought there would be more to it than that.

  All the supply closets in the school were locked, as was the principal’s office, which was too bad because they would have liked to rifle through the desk drawers. They talked about taking everything out of one classroom and switching it with another, or maybe just moving a few things around to make people wonder if they were losing their minds, but in the end they decided not to touch anything. It felt too good to be in school on Saturday, and if they wanted to come again they were better off leaving everything the way it was.

  So it was senseless that Albie dropped his matches in the art room trash can just when they were getting ready to leave. He kept books of matches in his pocket all the time now, to practice opening them up and striking a match with one hand. Then he would give the matchbook a hard shake and put the fire out. Except this time when he lit the match he dropped the whole book in the trash can in the far corner of the room near the window where they had come in, much the same way Raul had flipped the lock open on the window. There wasn’t any reason, no reason for lighting the match or dropping it. It wasn’t to impress the other boys, who were themselves always dropping lit matches everywhere these days. There was no reason that it was in the art room, except that the art room was the room where they happened to be, and really no reason they were in the school on a Saturday in the first place. It was a big metal trash can that took the match, waist high, ten times the size of anything they had in the regular classrooms where all a kid would throw away was a pop quiz he got a lousy grade on. The trash can in the art room should have been empty, everything in the school was empty and clean, but down in the bottom of the green plastic trash liner there were still some crumpled-up pieces of newsprint and a couple of oily rags that had been used to wipe down the paintbrushes after they had soaked in the turpentine, and so the trash can lit up like the very mouth of hell, shooting a flame that made Albie jump back as if on springs and made the other boys turn. The flame caught the nubby green polyester draperies that were double-lined to make the room dark for that point in the semester when Miss Del Torre made a slide-show presentation on the highlights of art history. The draperies were the age of their parents and burned faster than the dry grass in the field, the flames tearing straight up to the acoustical tiles in the ceiling and spreading over the boys’ heads to the other side of the room where the paints and brushes and pastels and papers and jars of solvents waited like Molotov cocktails to explode. The smoke was nothing like the smoke they loved outside. This smoke was somewhere between ink and tar, oily and viscous and black. It came for them, sucking up the air while the clear orange flame sucked up the drapes. The whole room was coming for them now with the fire in every corner. They had entered the room through the window but when they checked the window they found it was no longer an available exit.

  They had never set a fire inside before, had never seen one, and so they wrongly used the skills they had developed by setting fires outside: they stood perfectly still and watched, the theory being that they had made the fire and so the fire was bound to respect them. Then the school’s fire alarm went off. They knew that bell, so loud it seemed to be going off inside their brains. They loved fire drills, everything dropped, the girls always so upset because they weren’t allowed to take their purses with them, everyone lined up and rushed outside in an orderly manner. The bell brought them back to their senses. The bell saved them. They had practiced and practiced so that in this moment the boys did what they had been drilled to do: duck low, stay together, run for the door. A flame reached out and caught hold of Albie’s Red Baron T-shirt, burning his back. In the hallway Edison pulled it off him and burned his hand. As they ran for the door, the sprinklers they had never noticed doused the long, empty hallway, dissolving the entries for the art contest. They pushed out the side door, ran into the sunlight, and fell on the grass by the parking lot, gasping and coughing, panting and singed, the smell of smoke ground into their skin. Albie thought for an instant of his brother. He wondered if dying had been anything like this for Cal. The four boys lay there in the grass, tears streaming over their blackened cheeks, so exhilarated by the force of their own lives they were unable to move. That was where they were when, a scant minute later, the firemen found them.

  It had been a nearly impossible decision for Teresa to send Albie to Virginia to live with Beverly and Bert. Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable. Beverly and Bert had not killed Cal. Teresa knew this very quietly inside herself. They had been negligent in the details of supervision but as Albie’s most recent catastrophe confirmed, so had she. Still, it felt better to blame them. It felt almost good, although good probably wasn’t the word. She could call Bert up on the phone and ask him, “Does it feel good to blame me for Albie? Is ‘good’ the word?”

  What Teresa knew for certain was that she couldn’t keep her second son, and since there was no one else volunteering to take him, she didn’t see what else she could do. In the end, Albie went to Arlington, and when he failed in the private school there he was sent to a boarding school in North Carolina, and then military school in Delaware. He was eighteen the summer he came back to Torrance, a junior in high school given the fact that the boarding school had held him back. Holly and Jeanette were both home from college and tried to take him to the beach, to parties with their friends he might remember, but Albie was lodged like an anvil on the couch, watching game shows and eating bowls of cornflakes covered over with a thick sludge of sugar. He kept his collective communication to twenty words a day. He counted them. He worked his way through the liquor cabinet from left to right, though the cabinet itself had no organizing principle. He never started in on any bottle until he’d finished the one preceding it.

  Then one day he claimed to have gotten a call from Edison. His old friend had a job setting up bands in a club in San Francisco, and he said that all Albie had to do was carry the amplifiers off the buses and plug them in. Edison had an apartment with some other guys and Albie could throw a mattress on the floor. Albie seemed to be almost excited about this, as excited as Jeanette and Holly and their mother could remember him being about anything. Lifting things, plugging things i
n, sounded like a job he was qualified to do, so Teresa bought him a bus ticket to San Francisco and made him a stack of peanut butter sandwiches. Holly and Jeanette each gave him a hundred dollars out of their savings. He loaded his bike underneath the bus with his duffel bag, and Jeanette and her sister and their mother waited until he took his seat by the window so that he could see them wave goodbye. He was going away again. He would be someone else’s impossible problem to solve. They were each privately giddy in their relief.

  Fodé came into the bathroom that night while Albie was brushing his teeth, one tap and he let himself in, shutting the door behind him. The bathroom was a good place to talk, even if there really wasn’t the space for two adult men to stand comfortably together. Albie was pressed up against the sink, and Fodé, wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt, moved around the stacked plastic milk crates full of folded towels and bath toys and Pampers. “My brother,” he said, “listen to me, I want to tell you, you will stay here with us. A week, a year, the rest of your life, as long as you need to be here, we welcome you.”

  Albie had the toothbrush in his mouth, minty foam trailing from his lower lip, when his sister’s husband put a hand around the back of his neck and touched their foreheads together. A tribal custom? A sign of earnestness? A pass? All he knew about his sister was what he dimly remembered from when they were teenagers, and about her crazy African husband he knew nothing at all. Forehead to forehead, Albie nodded. He still needed a place to sleep tonight.