The Arsonist: A novel

by Sue Miller

  It was the end of the day, and the store was moderately busy. Adrian was ringing up customers, so Bud just waved to him as he walked in, and to Loren, who was last in line at the register, behind a couple of other people. He greeted Harlan, who was stocking shelves, and they talked for a while about his recovery—he was off the crutches now. “But I’ll be longer living it down than my foot will be healing,” he said.

  Bud went to the back to get some milk for coffee, to look around in case he saw something else he needed, and while he was there, he heard voices rising from the front of the store—Adrian’s voice, and Loren’s. Adrian was saying something to him about Tink.

  They spoke more quietly, back and forth, as Bud moved down the dog-food and bread aisle to get a little closer. He could hear Loren say, in his self-satisfied tone, “I don’t know why you’d object to my talking to him. We’re just driving around, having a normal conversation.”

  “I’ll tell you why. Because you’re taking him away from his work,” Adrian said. “And I need him at his work.”

  “Well, I need to talk to him.”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, this and that.”

  “You’ve talked enough by now. He’s told you everything he’s got to say. I want you to leave him alone.”

  Loren said something back, smoothly, quietly.

  “And I’m telling you, you can’t talk to him anymore unless you’re going to charge him with something,” Adrian said angrily. “And you’ve got nothing to charge him with.”

  “If he’s worried, he can always ask for a lawyer,” Loren said.

  “The boy doesn’t have a lawyer. And he would never ask for one.”

  “Well, we told him he could if he wanted to.”

  “How many times did you tell him that?”

  “I only have to tell him the one time, Adrian.”

  “There’s some people you need to tell more times than that.”

  Loren chuckled. “You’re gonna have to get someone to rewrite the fucking Constitution then,” he said. “What I’m saying is he could get one, anytime he wants.”

  “Charge him, and he will. You’re not charging him because you don’t have any reason to.”

  “I can’t discuss that with you, Adrian.” Loren sounded amused.

  Sarah Chick turned into Bud’s aisle, pushing a cart with a few groceries in it. Bud moved away, back around by the refrigerators, then forward again in the next aisle over. Loren said, “All I’m saying is he’s an adult, and I’ll treat him like one.”

  “And what I’m saying is you’re not. You’re treating him like a kid you’re trying to take advantage of.”

  Bud moved away again, but he could hear them as he went back for the milk. Back and forth they went, Loren silky, Adrian furious. It ended only when Sarah came up to the register behind Loren with her cart, which meant Loren had to pay for his two Ding Dongs and move on.

  When Bud saw Frankie that night, he reported all this to her, too. “I would have stood there by the soups for as long as they were talking, pretending to decide between low-sodium and regular chicken broth, but it was over at that point.”

  “Poor Bud.”

  “I am a nosy bastard. All to have something to talk about with you.”

  “God knows we’ve got nothing else to do,” she said, moving on top of him.

  He decided he’d talk to Gavin and Tink about being under suspicion—maybe there’d be a story in it. At worst, he could offer it to Frankie.

  He found Gavin at his work helping to build a big glass house up on Pleasant Hill, a house whose visibility and obvious expensiveness was an issue for a lot of people in town. He asked the contractor, Kevin O’Hara, if he could borrow his guy for a while. Ten minutes, O’Hara said, so he and Gavin walked a little distance away on the packed dirt of the construction site and stood looking back at the house.

  Gavin was basically amused by the whole thing. Yeah, he’d gone with Loren and Tink to Black Mountain, and then Loren had come by again, to Gavin’s house this time, on a weekend, and they’d driven around and had some coffee together at the café. But when he came a third time, at work again, Gavin just said no, that he didn’t have time. “I mean, it’s not like there’s a law that says you’ve got to do everything Loren tells you to do. And he’s just trolling, just trying for anything he can get, it seems to me. Hoping you’ll make a mistake and let something slip.” He laughed. “I mean, here’s a guy who had nothing better to do when I was in high school but try to catch kids making out. Coming up outside your car parked somewhere and shining his flashlight on you hoping to catch you with your ass in the air and your pants around your knees. Fuck him.” He laughed again. “I told Tink that, too. That he just has to tell him he’s too fuckin’ busy to talk all the time. But that’s not something Tink can do, I guess.” He shrugged. “Maybe he likes the attention.”

  Later that day, Bud spotted Tink on a tractor in the Louds’ field. He pulled his car to the side of the road and walked out over the stubble to where he was. Tink turned the motor off as he approached, but he didn’t get down, so Bud found himself looking up at the kid, the sun in his eyes, Tink’s face in shadow.

  He hadn’t had anything longer than a quick exchange with Tink in the past, so now he introduced himself, he explained he was writing a piece for the paper on the way the investigation of the fires was proceeding, and he understood Tink and Gavin had been asked some questions.

  “Yea-up,” he said. He was looking off at the tree line.

  “Do you think Spader suspects you?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “Does he tell you why?”

  “Not really.”

  “But you’ve spent a lot of time together.”

  “Well, that’s just, you know, spendin’ time.” He shrugged again. “Don’t mean much.”

  After a few seconds, Bud said, “So you’re not guilty.”

  “Nope.”

  “Have you told Spader that?”

  “He didn’t ask that.”

  “He didn’t ask if you’d set the fires?”

  “He asked that, and I said no. He didn’t ask if I was guilty.”

  “I see,” Bud said. “Well, do you expect he’ll have more questions for you?”

  “He don’t ask so many questions.”

  “So you, what? Just drive around together?”

  “That. We get coffee. Went fishing once. Went once to the Castle.” This was a small amusement park between Whitehall and Winslow.

  “So you enjoy these … drives?”

  “They’re okay.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that they interrupt your work?”

  He smiled, for the first time. “It bothers my uncle, that’s for sure.”

  “But not you.”

  “Nope. Just, I don’t like to fail Adrian.”

  “He was about as opaque as anyone could be,” Bud told Frankie.

  “Do you think it’s just that he’s stupid?” she asked.

  “I have no way of knowing. It could be a brilliant strategy, for all I can tell.” They were lying on the mattress, huddled close to each other under the quilt. The night was suddenly chilly, perhaps even down in the forties. “Our friend Loren is going to royally fuck this thing up with all his coziness,” Bud said.

  “How so?”

  “It’s coercive. It’s like beating someone up until he confesses, only different. Loving him until he confesses. It’s illegal pressure.”

  “Do you know that’s what he’s doing?”

  “I don’t. But it’s seems pretty clear. They make a very odd couple otherwise. And their great friendship didn’t begin until after Tink fell under suspicion.”

  “Until I picked his car out.”

  “This is true.”

  Frankie moaned. “I should have kept my big mouth shut.”

  “Let’s talk about that,” he said. “Your mouth. Open. Shut.”

  16

  IT WAS LIKE COMING AWAKE, Fran
kie thought later about the weeks after she began to sleep with Bud. Sometimes a bit painfully, the way your limbs felt when they’d been numbed for a while and were tingling back to life. But mostly it was like opening her eyes on new day after new day. Very different from her affair with Philip—or with other lovers in Africa.

  Even physically it seemed so. Everything was slower and more private, somehow. It occurred to her at one point over those early days with Bud that at least some of the excitement of her love affairs in Africa had been that they were public. That they were observed in the close quarters everyone inhabited. She remembered Rosemary, the South African nurse, who’d been involved with Philip in the months before Frankie arrived on the scene, saying to her one night in the room they shared, “You’ll find, I think, that he gives excellent head.” A way of signaling many things to Frankie, among them, that everyone knew that Frankie and Philip were sleeping together, and that Rosemary had had him first.

  Frankie had said, “That’s just so good to know, Rosemary,” and continued dressing.

  “A bit like high school,” Bud said when she told him this story.

  “I suppose. For me, more like Pomeroy used to be in the summers of my youth—the pool of boyfriend candidates was so small, and the moves anyone made were so visible.”

  Bud made a noise. “Like Pomeroy now.”

  “No. That’s my point. This is different. It’s … private.”

  “You imagine it’s private. I can guarantee you that at this moment, there’s someone, somewhere in this town, talking about how often my car has been parked outside your house.”

  “But that’s not part of anything between us. It doesn’t feed us, it doesn’t matter to what’s going on right here that they’re doing that.”

  “And somehow, in Africa, it did.”

  “Oh, yes. I think so.” She was thinking of the parties they had sometimes after work, the way your eyes met someone’s and the sexy thrill of that. But it was that, yes, in connection with the sense of others watching your eyes meet, of others being part of that connection. Once, she and a doctor whose name she could no longer remember had moved to the screen door from opposite sides of the room and gone into a darkened kitchen off the porch, where everyone else was still dancing, and fucked, pushed up against a table there. Frankie hadn’t climaxed. It was all too hurried, too awkward. But she had been turned on, wet. And when they came back and began to dance once more—moving quickly away from each other, becoming once again part of the gyrating mass—everything sexual in the room had seemed amped up. Everyone there seemed to be part of it. To have been part of it.

  She and Bud were, as usual, on the mattress on the floor when they had this conversation. It was early afternoon, a warm sunny day. Bud had stopped by just before he went off to Whitehall to drop the paper off to be printed. Frankie had been painting the walls, wearing just some cutoff shorts and an old bathing-suit top as she wielded the roller, when he arrived. Dots of the white paint speckled her arms and legs, even her belly.

  Bud had said, “Hey,” at the screen door and opened it. She went to turn down the radio, the roller still in her hand. When she turned to him, he was grinning at her. “Aren’t you something?” he said, in his whispery voice.

  Her mouth opened. She went quickly to get some aluminum foil to wrap the roller and brush in. She shoved them into the freezer, and then, with Bud almost carrying her, they had danced their way into the bedroom and knelt together on the bed, pulling at each other’s clothes. He’d turned her to get her shorts off and then turned her again, and she was thrilled at that, at his strength, lifting her body, pulling her hips up to him as he knelt behind her. His whispering was urgent. “This way. This way.”

  Now they were side by side, talking. Frankie could feel the sweat on her chest, the warm wetness on her thighs, between her legs. The sweet, soapy odor of sperm was in the air.

  “Yeah, the sex was fun there,” she said. “But somehow … I don’t know. It also wasn’t real. It was like being on a playground in grammar school. Everything had to do with the group.” Her hand moved over her wet chest, stroking it. “It wasn’t real,” she repeated. She couldn’t quite explain it to him.

  “And this is.”

  “Well, it’s realer.”

  He laughed, lightly. “Nice to hear.”

  She was thinking, too, about how sex in Africa was connected with alcohol. She didn’t talk about this with Bud—she wouldn’t have liked him to know how much alcohol had fueled her nonwork life there. But this part of things was different with Bud, too. In fact, they often met utterly sober in the evening after he’d been to some meeting or social function he was covering for the paper, or in the day, during a break in Bud’s work. And this, too, made it different, the acute alertness Frankie brought to it, the physical intensity this made possible. Several times she’d wept after she came, and Bud had held her and stroked her arms, her face.

  There were other, more practical ways in which Frankie seemed suddenly to have come alive. She got a telephone, after first consulting Liz, who agreed with her that it made sense. What she said was “I suppose if someone did start a fire, or you saw something or heard something, you’d have to hike all the way up to Mother and Dad’s to call it in.”

  “Which is useless,” Frankie said. She was standing in Sylvia’s kitchen, where she’d come to use the telephone. “Though I have to admit that up to now I’ve sort of enjoyed being unreachable by the world.”

  “That’s wearing off, I bet.”

  Frankie was thinking of Bud, of how it might change things between them to have him able to call her, to have her able to call him. “I think so, yeah. At any rate, I’m ready to give it a try, the old twentieth century.”

  Liz seemed to have consulted Sylvia about it. At least Frankie was pretty sure it must have been Sylvia who made the money available to have the line brought in from the road. In any case, Sylvia came down a day or two later and said Liz had asked her to give Frankie the go-ahead.

  So Frankie called the phone company, and a few days after that the phone guy came. He was in his fifties, she would have said, stout and bearded. He was outside for most of the time, bringing the wire in from the road.

  But then he was in the house, breathing noisily and heavily as he went about his work. He’d heard about the arsons, but in his opinion the phone was useless as a means of defense. “If you’re here, he’s not gonna do it. If you’re not here, what’s the difference?” He thought the answer was to move into town. “You’re just asking for it, living way the hell out here with no reason to be living out here.”

  “Are you speaking of me personally?” Frankie asked. She had been trying to read while he went about his work, but he kept interrupting her.

  “All of you. All of you. You think you’re having some sorta back-to-the-land experience and whatnot, but these things just wouldn’t be happening if you lived in town.”

  Frankie said she was sure he was right, she thanked him for his concern. While he was there, she stayed carefully polite, but she was almost weepily glad to be alone when he’d left.

  Her first call, of course, was to Bud.

  On a sunny August afternoon, Frankie and Sylvia were sitting in the living room together, having a drink. Frankie had dropped in as she returned her parents’ car—she’d been to the town library and the grocery store. Alfie was resting, as he so frequently seemed to be. The door to the screened porch and all the windows were open, the smell of the new-mown grass worth commenting on, Frankie thought. So she did.

  “Ah, yes,” Sylvia said. “Tink Snell was up today, mowing.” Sylvia, she noticed, had refilled her martini glass once already, topping off the ice cubes, the twist of lemon, with straight gin.

  “Well, it’s pretty fabulous.” She sipped her drink. “So, you’re still having him come?” She thought of him, that gorgeous boy. She thought of the night he’d called in the fire up here, before she’d slept with Bud. It seemed a world ago.

  “Why
not?” Sylvia said.

  “I guess the idea that he might have started the fire here. Or others, too.”

  “He can’t start a fire while he’s mowing. And I’m a wreck no matter what.”

  “So you’re wakeful?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Really? Alfie, too?”

  She laughed. “God, no. Alfie seems incapable of sustaining anxiety at this point in his life.”

  They were silent for a moment or two. Then Frankie went ahead and asked: “Any results from the tests?”

  “She says it’s clear there’s loss. And they can see what look like dead areas in his brain.”

  “God! What a horrible thing to think of.”

  Sylvia nodded, and drank. After a moment, she said, “But she says it might be something else, though. She said it might be something called Lewy body disease.”

  “Which is? Not as bad, I hope.”

  “Well, it is as bad, really. Just different. So it hardly matters.”

  “Different how?”

  “Oh, it has a slightly Parkinsonian element to it—you’ve noticed he moves a bit stiffly, I’m sure. And then there’s the business of going in and out of it—you know, sometimes he seems pretty good. And then, even minutes later, he’ll seem really bad.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That’s more typical of Lewy body. As are the hallucinations.”

  This was news. “What hallucinations?”

  “Oh, sometimes mistaking one thing for another. Or imagining things. Visits from people. That he’s in his room at his parents’ house. Or he thought you had been kidnapped once.”

  Frankie was thinking of the Larkin poem her father had mentioned to her. She’d gotten the book out of the library, High Windows, and thought she’d rarely read a darker vision of life than the collection proposed. But “The Old Fools,” the poem Alfie had mentioned, seemed remarkable to her in its description of how the old people thought. And it seemed recognizable to her in what her mother was saying now.

  They were silent again. Frankie wondered what Sylvia was thinking, and then her mother said, “Well, maybe we’ll end up hiring someone eventually.”