by James Ellroy
"No," I said. "It'll explode." I pointed at the sprayer and the tank of gas on the tractor.
"Gas doesn't burn," Robert said. "It's wet—nothing that's wet can burn. It's the fumes that burn" He took a wood match out of his pocket and struck it on the tractor, then tossed the small flame into the gas spray.
The air groaned and came alive with fire. The wasps were flying full-bore out of the broken window now, right into the wall of flame and through it. Their wings were on fire, still beating, the air currents lifting them up in the heat even as they burned to nothing. A flaming wasp landed on my work shirt and I smacked it into the corn. Now they were all over, burning and flying. Stinging anything they touched. One lost a wing and kept flying, a coin-sized flaming circle into the corn. I watched one come out of the window whole, coated shiny with gas. It flew over the corn, its wings caught fire and kept beating as the body burned to a cinder, the wings still going until they vanished in tiny ash. Robert smacked some wasps off his arm and backed the tractor up, driving over to the river.
We soaked the corn next to the river and then sprayed it a little thinner up on the bank. "The fire will seek the gas," Robert said. "That patch we left in the middle will burn slower than the rest. We'll be all set."
We decided that the best way to do it would be to have Stobik drive the truck around to the New Hampshire side of the oxbow. Then I'd light the fire from the riverbank too, so that the onrushing flames wouldn't somehow jump the river. Robert drove the tractor back through the field, leaving me standing right on the bend in the river with a box of matches. I could barely see the white shack over the corn. The river ran behind me, softly laughing its way over the rocks. Everything was still, and my heart almost stopped panting for the first time in a long time. Bill Allen stood on the riverbank and knew he needed to die. He knew he had to go back to the place he was born and answer for the crime that fathered him. I heard the airhorn blow from the big rig, Robert's signal to me that he was clear of the fields. As I lit the corn on fire, Bill Allen decided to throw himself into the blaze.
The flames grew fast, and I jumped out into the Connecticut River. It must have been cool, but I didn't feel it. The heat from the fire seemed to reach across the oxbow and right through the water. I climbed up on the bank on the other side just in time to see Robert's white wedding shack take the flames full force. The walls and roof caught like they were made of rice paper, and in the next instant the shack was gone. The fire was so hot, so intense, I couldn't look at it. I walked farther up on the bank and Stobik was there with the small truck. I got in and we started to drive back toward Vermont. A black cloud grew in the air of the beautiful blue horizon and we watched it for miles. It seemed as if we'd permanently smudged the sky.
When we got back to Lord's farm, Robert was busy fending off several local volunteer fire companies, who had arrived with sirens and lights going. He just kept showing them the permit Judge Harris had given to Frank. Stobik and I stayed in the small truck. At one point, I swear the flames in the field were higher than the farmhouse. Stobik backed the truck up so the windshield wouldn't crack. I finally got out and sat alone in the passenger's side of the big rig. I fell asleep. It was late that night when Robert climbed in to drive and slammed his door, bringing me straight up in my seat. The fields were still burning and all I could smell was smoke. We drove slowly back to the woodlot and I slept there in my Bronco. The next day — Sunday —I was going to drive all day and turn myself in. Bill Allen was dead.
The screaming echo of the phone over the woodlot woke me. I saw Robert go into the headquarters shack to answer it. He came back out shortly, still in his coveralls, and walked over to the Bronco. I got out. He handed me a styrofoam cup of coffee and pointed his chin at the Bronco.
"Comfy in there last night?" he asked. I nodded and he went on. "That was John on the phone. He's going to plead out tomorrow and take two years." Robert shook his head. "Anyway, you've got tomorrow off. I'm going up to Concord to be at the sentencing" He reached in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. He handed it to me.
"What's this for?" I said.
Robert narrowed his eyes and looked at me. "Do you need it or not?" His voice was the hardest love I'd ever felt. I nodded. He turned around and started walking back to the shed. I watched him close the door. I climbed back in the Bronco and headed out onto the highway. I drove north, and crossed over into Ver mont. There was still a huge black cloud in the sky over the oxbow. I drove up Route 5 and looked out over the burnt fields, still smoldering, scorched dead. Lord's farm looked gray from the smoke. I drove up into the Northeast Kingdom. I never did find the courage to turn myself in, and things got worse. I spent the winter at a logging camp in Quebec.
I called once, when I hit a jam out in North Dakota. I called from a phone booth outside a diner. I recognized John's voice the second he spoke. I hung up. Later, much later, in another life, with another name, we were driving and someone handed me a road atlas. I flipped through it and found Vermont and New Hampshire were together on the same page. I started tracing their shared border, the Connecticut River, north toward Canada. I dropped the atlas when my finger reached the oxbow. For just that split second, right on the tip of my finger, the surface of the map was scorching hot. I heard the roar of the fire, the little white house burning. The air rushing to be eaten by the flames. I smelled the gasoline. Riding across the top of the fire on a black horse was Bill Allen. Three dark shapes followed swiftly after him, the burning wasps in their long black hair, chasing him. Catching him and dragging him down into the fire, screaming.
Years later, on the security ward at Western State Hospital near Tacoma, I saw a man in a straitjacket, strapped to a gurney. I walked over to him and spoke.
"I didn't know they used straitjackets anymore."
He could barely move his head. "Well, they do." The smell of ether was everywhere. He was quiet as a white-jacketed doctor walked by. "Say, Mac, scratch my shoulder, will you?"
I slowly reached down and began scratching the outside of the thick canvas that bound him. Solid steel mesh covered the ward windows.
"Harder," he said. "I can barely feel it." He looked up at me. "I think they're trying to save on the heat. Aren't you cold?" I shook my head. "I'm cold all the time," he said.
I dug my nails into the canvas on his right shoulder. "My name is John Wilson," I said.
He looked at me, his eyes wide. "That's my name," he said softly.
I stopped scratching the straitjacket. "What's your middle name?" I asked.
He shook his head slightly and closed his eyes. "Same as yours," he said. He shivered. It was cold. But my paper gown was soaked with dry sweat and my face was hot. I could smell smoke.
ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE
2003: Christopher Coake
CHRISTOPHER COAKE (1971–) is a native of Indiana who always wanted to be a writer. He received his BA in creative writing from Miami University of Ohio and his MFA from Ohio State University. His stories have appeared in such literary periodicals as the Journal, Gettysburg Review, Epoch, and Southern Review. His early stories, all written while a student at Ohio State, were collected in Were in Trouble (2005), which earned him the Robert Bingham Fellowship from the PEN American Center, awarded to a fiction writer whose debut work shows great promise. In 2007 the British magazine Granta named him one of twenty "Best Young American Novelists," an unusually flattering accolade considering Coake is still working on his first novel. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.
"All Through the House" successfully tells a story backward in time, a process the author compared to an archaeological excavation: "If I kept digging in the same place," he wondered, "what would I find?" This is an exceptionally difficult literary form which has become something of a cliché following the success of the 2000 film Memento, mostly with predictably poor results. It is unlikely that any story in this collection will offer a greater surprise in its narration than this one.
"All Through the House" was first published in the summer 2003 issue of Gettysburg Review. It was first published in book form in The Best American Mystery Stories 2004 and was collected in Were in Trouble.
***
Now
HERE IS AN EMPTY meadow, circled by bare autumn woods.
The trees of the wood —oak, maple, locust— grow through a mat of tangled scrub, rusty leaves, piles of brittle deadfall. Overhead is a rich blue sky, a few high, translucent clouds, moving quickly, but the trees are dense enough to shelter everything below, and the meadow too. And here, leading into the trees from the meadow's edge, is a gravel track, twin ruts now grown over, switching back and forth through the woods and away.
The meadow floor is overrun by tall yellow grass, thorny vines, the occasional sapling —save for at the meadow's center. Here is a wide rectangular depression. The broken remains of a concrete foundation shore up its sides. The bottom is crumbled concrete and cinder, barely visible beneath the thin netting of weeds. A blackened wooden beam angles down from the rim, its underside soft and fibrous. Two oaks lean over the foundation, charred on the sides that face it.
Sometimes deer browse in the meadow. Raccoons and rabbits are always present; they have made their own curving trails across the meadow floor. A fox, rusty and quick, lives in the nearby trees. His den, twisting among tree roots, is pressed flat and smooth by his belly.
Sometimes automobiles crawl slowly along the gravel track and park at the edge of the meadow. The people inside sometimes get out and walk into the grass. They take photographs or draw pictures or read from books. Sometimes they climb down into the old foundation. A few camp overnight, huddling close to fires.
Whenever these people come, a policeman arrives soon after, fat and gray-haired. Sometimes the people speak with him —and sometimes they shout—but always they depart, loading their cars while the policeman watches. When they depart he follows them down the track in his slow, rumbling cruiser. When he comes at night, the spinning of his red and blue lights causes the trees to jump and dance.
Sometimes the policeman arrives alone:
He stops the cruiser and climbs out. He walks slowly into the meadow. He sits on the broken concrete at the rim of the crater, looking into it, looking at the sky, closing his eyes.
When he makes noise the woods grow quiet. All the animals crouch low, flicking their ears at the man's barks and howls.
He does not stay long.
After his cruiser has rolled away down the track, the woods and the meadow remain, for a time, silent. But before long what lives there sniffs the air and, in fits and starts, emerges. Noses press to the ground and into the burrows of mice. Things eat and are eaten.
Here memories are held in muscles and bellies, not in minds. The policeman and the house and all the people who have come and gone here are not forgotten.
They are, simply, never remembered.
1987
Sheriff Larry Thompkins tucked his chin against the cold and, his back to his idling cruiser, unlocked the cattle gate that blocked access to the Sullivan woods. The gate swung inward, squealing, and the cruiser's headlights shone a little ways down the gravel track before it curled off into the trees. Larry straightened, then glanced right and left, down the paved county road behind him. He saw no other cars—not even on the distant interstate. The sky was clouded over—snow was a possibility — and the fields behind him were almost invisible in the dark.
Larry sank back behind the wheel, grateful for the warmth and the spits of static from his radio. He nosed the cruiser through the gate and onto the track, then switched to his parking lights. The trunks of trees ahead faintly glowed, turning orange as he passed. Even though the nearest living soul, old Ned Baker, lived a half mile off, he was an insomniac and often sat in front of his bedroom window watching the Sullivan woods. If Larry used his headlights, Ned would see. Ever since Patricia Pike's book had come out—three months ago now—Ned had watched the gated entrance to the woods like it was a military duty.
Larry had been chasing off trespassers from the Sullivan place ever since the murders, twelve years ago in December. He hated coming out here, but he couldn't very well refuse to do his job—no one else would do it. Almost always the trespassers were kids from the high school, out at the murder house getting drunk or high, and though Larry was always firm with them and made trouble for the bad ones, he knew most kids did stupid things and couldn't blame them that much. Larry had fallen off the roof of a barn, drunk, when he was sixteen. He'd broken his arm in two places, all because he was trying to impress a girl who, in the end, never went out with him.
But activity in the woods had picked up since the Pike woman's book came out. Larry had been out here three times in the last week alone. There were kids, still, more of them than ever—but also people from out of town, some of whom he suspected were mentally ill. Just last weekend Larry had chased off a couple in their twenties, lying on a blanket with horrible screaming music playing on their boom box. They'd told him —calmly, as though he might understand —that they practiced magic and wanted to conceive a child out there. The house, they said, was a place of energy. When they were gone Larry looked up at its empty windows, its stupid, dead house-face, and couldn't imagine anything further from the truth.
The cruiser bounced and shimmied as Larry negotiated the turns through the woods. All his extra visits had deepened the ruts in the track—he'd been cutting through mud and ice all autumn. Now and then the tires spun, and he tried not to think about having to call for a tow, the stories he'd have to make up to explain it. But each time, the cruiser roared and lurched free.
He remembered coming out here with Patricia Pike. He hadn't wanted to, but the mayor told him Pike did a good job with this kind of book, and that — while the mayor was concerned, just like Larry was, about exploiting what had happened —he didn't want the town to get any more of a bad name on account of being uncooperative. So Larry had gone to the library to read one of Pike's other books. The Beauties and the Beast was what the book was called, with the close-up of a cat's eye on the front cover. It was about a serial killer in Idaho in the sixties who murdered five women and fed them to his pet cougar. In one chapter Pike wrote that the police had hidden details of the crime from her. Larry could understand why: The killings were brutal, and he was sure the police had a hard time explaining the details to the families of the victims, let alone to ghouls all across the country looking for a thrill.
We're going to get exploited, Larry had told the mayor, waving that book at him.
Look, the mayor said. I know this is difficult for you. But would you rather she wrote it without your help? You knew Wayne better than anybody. Who knows? Maybe we'll finally get to the bottom of things.
What if there's no bottom to get to? Larry asked, but the mayor had looked at him strangely and never answered, just told him to put up with it, that it would be over before he knew it.
Larry wrestled the cruiser around the last bend and then stopped. His parking lights shone dully across what was left of the old driveway turnaround and onto the Sullivan house.
The house squatted, dim and orange. It had never been much to look at, even when new; it was small, unremarkable, square — barely more than a prefab. The garage, jutting off the back, was far too big and made the whole structure look deformed, unbalanced. Wayne had designed the house himself, not long after he and Jenny got married. Most of the paint had chipped off the siding, and the undersized windows were boarded over—the high school kids had broken out all the glass years ago.
Jenny had hated the house even when it was new. She'd told Larry so at her and Wayne's housewarming dinner.
It's bad enough I have to live out here in the middle of nowhere, she'd said under her breath while Wayne chattered to Larry's wife, Emily, in the living room. But at least he could have built us a house you can look at.
He did it because he loves you, Larry whispered. He tried.
Don't remind m
e, Jenny said, swallowing wine. Why did I ever agree to this?
The house?
The house, the marriage. God, Larry, you name it.
When she'd said it she hadn't sounded bitter. She looked at Larry as though he might have an answer, but he didn't—he'd never been able to see Jenny and Wayne together, from the moment they started dating in college. He remembered telling her, It'll get better, and feeling right away as though he'd lied, and Jenny making a face that showed she knew he had, before both of them turned to watch Wayne demonstrate the dimmer switch in the living room for Emily.
The front door, Larry saw now, was swinging open. Some folks he'd chased out two weeks ago had jimmied it, and the lock hadn't worked right afterward. The open door and the black gap behind it made the house look even meaner than it was—like a baby crying. Patricia Pike had said that, at one point. Larry wondered if she'd put it into her book.
She had sent him a copy back in July just before its release. The book was called All Through the House; the cover showed a Christmas tree with little skulls as ornaments. Pike had signed it for him: To Larry, even though I know you prefer fiction. Cheers, Patricia. He flipped to the index and saw his name with a lot of numbers by it, and then he looked at the glossy plates at the book's center. One was a map of Prescott County, showing the county road and an X in the Sullivan woods where the house stood. The next page showed a floor plan of the house, with bodies drawn in outline and dotted lines following Wayne's path from room to room. One plate showed a Sears portrait of the entire family smiling together, plus graduation photos of Wayne and Jenny. Pike had included a picture of Larry, too—taken on the day of the murders—that showed him pointing off to the edge of the picture while EMTs brought one of the boys out the front door, wrapped in a blanket. Larry looked like he was running —his arms were blurry—which was odd. They'd brought no one out of the house alive. He'd have had no need to rush.
