The Arsonist: A novel

by Sue Miller

  “No,” Bud said.

  She leaned back in her chair. “Well, Adrian and Lucy took him in, but Lucy said it was hard. Like having a wild animal in the house. You know, he’d never sat down for a meal except maybe the lunch room at school, he’d never been taught even basic manners.” She shook her head. “And he’s such a beautiful boy. It’s just a shame, that’s what it is.”

  He’d dropped out of school, finally, she said. That was when Adrian hired him. At first at the store, but that didn’t work out. Then to do some of the odd jobs Adrian used to do himself. People said he was a good worker, Emily said. A hard worker. Just not sociable. “Not socialized, I suppose is what they meant. Though Lucy said she tried. Then when he turned eighteen, he moved back to the trailer.

  “He’s pretty much a loner. You know how it is with kids. If you’re not very bright, it’s hard, even if you’re as handsome a boy as he is. The girls say he never even had a girlfriend. They kind of made fun of him, he was so shy. I heard that from Carin Knox. That they weren’t mean, exactly, but still, teasing. She felt bad about it later, but you know how girls do at that age.”

  Bud said he did, remembering certain misfits from his high school, the way they suffered.

  “So that’s pretty much what I know. I guess he’s been up there awhile with no electricity and no telephone. That might explain the kerosene purchases that got everyone so worked up.”

  “I missed that.”

  “Oh, yeah. Loren and some of the state guys. Adrian had to set them straight. That Tink had let the electric lapse, so he and Lucy gave him a couple of old kerosene lamps. They were all excited when they saw him buying the kerosene. ‘Nope,’ Adrian told them. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree there.’ ” She shook her head. “I imagine he’s devastated,” she said. “He really loves that boy, I think. It’s hard.”

  They sat for a minute. “Do you think he set the fires?” Bud asked.

  “Well, he confessed, didn’t he?”

  “Does it make a difference that they held him for almost twenty-four hours?”

  “But why would you say you did something if you didn’t?”

  Bud had read of various complicated reasons you might, but he didn’t feel like talking them through with Emily. Instead he said, “Let’s say he hadn’t confessed. What would you think then?”

  She sat silent for a long moment, her lips pressed together. It made her look mean. “You know, I just don’t know, Bud. It seems like such a crazy, kinda pointless thing to do, setting a bunch of fires like that. But just think how mad he has a right to be. And how few ways he’s got to let that out.” She shook her head. Not a hair moved independently. “It’s just hard to imagine, how you’d respond to such a raw deal in life, isn’t it?”

  “It’s unimaginable for me.”

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “This is what I come here for, Emily,” Bud said, getting up.

  “Oh. Gossip.” She lifted her shoulders and looked embarrassed. “Well, I’m sorry. I can’t help it, I’m afraid.”

  “No. Not gossip. Your take on the gossip. That’s what makes it worth listening to.”

  She sat a moment, and then she smiled and stood up, too. “You’re a nice man, Bud.”

  “Finally. Someone noticed.”

  And as she swatted her hand in the air to dismiss him, he left.

  He sat in the car outside the town hall for a few minutes. It was still raining, but he decided he’d drive over by Silsby Pond and have a look at Tink’s trailer, now that he wasn’t there.

  As he was driving across the valley, the rain slowed. By the time he got to Silsby Pond Road, it had stopped. He drove to the point where he’d stopped before, where the road opened onto the meadow, but this time he continued up the worn double path made by Tink’s tires. Grass grew tall between the dirt lines. He saw that the meadow was really an old orchard that was slowly being swallowed by brush and saplings, though you could still see the dark, twisted apple branches through the younger growth. Bud drove up to the high point, where the trailer sat, and got out of his car.

  The grass immediately around the trailer was trampled and flattened. He knew there’d been a search warrant after the fire at Frankie’s parents’ house, but clearly someone had been here again recently, looking for evidence. He turned slowly around. There were sweeping views in all directions, gorgeous even on a day as dark as this.

  He turned to face the trailer. It was old, a humped, old-fashioned shape. There was cardboard taped over one of its windows. It sat up on cinder blocks. Scattered around it were tin cans and trash. Tink’s firefighting boots were leaned against what constituted the steps up to the door, steps that were also made of cinder blocks. Bud mounted them. The door was metal, with a metal lever rather than a knob.

  He stood there, trying to figure out what to do.

  If the door wasn’t locked, he’d look, he decided, but only from the doorway—he wouldn’t go in. Mr. Morally Fastidious. He pulled down on the lever, and the door swung open.

  He leaned slightly forward, to see what there was to see.

  It was a mess, but there was no way of knowing how much of that was Tink’s doing and how much was the police’s. Dark rucked-up carpeting covered the floor. Clothing was strewn around on it, and a couple of girlie magazines. Along the wall facing him, a smudgy picture window looked south to the Presidential Range. Under that was a banquette and a built-in table with a Formica surface. There was a small television set on the shelf opposite this.

  Dishes were stacked in a kitchenette sink to Bud’s left. A little hallway went past that area, and Bud assumed it led to a bedroom—or a bed in a room, anyway—as well as a bathroom. There must be a bathroom. An unfinished picture puzzle was on the Formica table in front of him, and pieces of it were scattered on the floor. An old kerosene lamp with a net filament sat on the table, too, along with a couple of glasses still half full of something, and some more dishes.

  The banquette was pulling apart at the top seam. Worn, almost granular foam was spilling out, was pilled over the no-color fabric of the cushioning.

  Bud tried to imagine driving from here, from this squalor, down to town, past the well-kept summer homes—empty, unused for most of the year. He couldn’t. He tried to imagine coming home to this in the dark every night, and couldn’t. It seemed wrong to him, cruel. Maybe it was illegal, actually—there must be zoning laws to prevent someone’s living like this in a town like Pomeroy. In the United States of America.

  And yet Tink had chosen it. The solitude.

  No, the privacy, Bud thought. Over what must have been comfortable and warm, what according to Emily was loving and caring at Adrian and Lucy Snell’s.

  But you wanted your privacy. You wanted your own home. You wanted to live by your own rules, in your own place. You wanted to fix your own dinner, even if it meant just opening a can. You wanted to sit down and look at the beaver shots in your Penthouse and jerk off. Or lean under the light of your kerosene lamp and add six or seven pieces to the puzzle you were working on.

  Bud shut the door, pulling it to with the awkwardly small metal lever. He turned around.

  The sun was glinting through under the clouds to his left, lighting them a brilliant golden color from below, casting a dramatic, threaded horizontal light across the landscape. Ahead of him, the hill fell away greenly. The ancient apple trees still held the wizened brown fruit the deer hadn’t reached, so many homely ornaments. The mountains to the north beyond all this were a distant gray-blue. He looked to the east. Yes, against the brooding dark sky in that direction, a rainbow.

  So this was part of what held Tink here. Beauty. After all.

  19

  SYLVIA HAD WAKED with the idea clear in her head, she told Frankie. It would be better—for her, and for Alfie, too—to be back in Bowman. This was three days before Alfie was to come home from the hospital. She and Frankie were sitting in Liz’s house at the table, talking about her plans. He had been in the hospital for
four days.

  Sylvia said she had started calling as soon as the relevant offices in Bowman had opened this morning. First, the community college where she’d taught. Where, yes—“Oh, fantastic!” the department chair had said—she could come back next semester, certainly to teach one course, and maybe two.

  Then she called the housing office at Alfie’s college, Wadsworth, which she knew had a small number of shabbily furnished short-term-rental apartments for visiting or retired faculty.

  Yes, there were two available now. One on the third floor with one bedroom, one on the ground floor with three. Sylvia said she would take the ground floor three-bedroom.

  It was an hour or so later, she said, when it occurred to her to call Barbara Simms about dividing the land on the property here, to ask whether she thought Sylvia could sell perhaps two ten-acre lots up the hill behind the main house.

  “With the Lord, all things are possible,” Barb had said, and gave her a price range. And just before she hung up, she had also said, according to Sylvia, “This is going to be fun!”

  The trees outside were at their peak for color, an array that was almost overwhelming in its intensity. The sun was bright on them, and the reflected light gave the room a strange, almost-pinkish glow. Frankie had just come back from a walk—on the road, because the leaves in the woods were so deep you couldn’t find the paths, much less the rocks or roots that might trip you on the paths.

  Sylvia had been waiting for her on the porch, nervous and excited and eager to talk about her idea.

  Frankie had tried not to appear as shocked as she was. Or as hurt, which she only slowly realized was part of what she was feeling. Hurt that Sylvia could so readily dispense with her support, she supposed. Although really, she’d hardly done anything except sit with Sylvia occasionally and listen to her.

  But didn’t that count? Wasn’t that important?

  Apparently not, for here her mother was, her face animated into its powerful attractiveness, talking about how much easier it would all be in Bowman. To find part-time care for Alfie (students for now, she thought—always out for what they could make in a couple of hours). To be able to walk to a store—divine! To walk to the library, to walk to see friends. To have colleagues again. To have neighbors close by. “I realized that more than half the reason we came up here was so that Alfie could live the kind of life he imagined for his retirement. Which makes no sense now, since that life is just beyond him.”

  “Is it really?” Frankie asked.

  Though she knew it was. She wasn’t even sure why she was asking the question, unless she somehow just needed time to take this in, Sylvia’s plan. Certainly she was aware that since the search-and-rescue operation, her father had taken three or four steps more deeply into his illness. He wasn’t sure where he was in the hospital—whether it was home or a school he was teaching in. He didn’t want to read anymore or, perhaps, suddenly, he couldn’t. And his face—his eyes—had that blank look all the time now.

  “Oh, I think so,” Sylvia said.

  “And you think this will work,” Frankie said. She was foundering, looking for anything to say.

  “Work? What do you mean, work?”

  “Okay, I don’t know. Be manageable, I guess. Not just Alfie, but financially.” It was the first time she’d asked her mother anything like this.

  “Well, I’ll have to look around for a smaller apartment off campus, eventually. And we’ll need the money from the land certainly. We may actually have to do some more selling off here and there as we go along. But it’s more than one hundred fifty acres in all, even if most of it is in woods at this point. So we’ll make it. I hadn’t thought of it before we gave Liz her section, but there it is. And no one’s ever going to farm it again, that’s certain. It’s hardly a sad thing, for other people to make use of some of it.”

  “No. No, it’s not sad.” Though a part of her wanted to say, Yes, it is sad. But she understood even as she had the thought that it was connected to something else. Something complicated having to do with herself, not her mother. Her sense of this farm and its land as in some deep way her place. She thought abruptly of the way her colleague, Sam, along with most of the other Africans she knew, considered the villages they had grown up in as their real homes, no matter where they lived at the moment, or how many years they’d lived there.

  “When will you go?” she asked after a moment.

  “Therein lies the rub. I guess as soon as I can manage it, packing up and getting Alfie ready. I wish I could get down there ahead of time to see the place, to fix it up, but I can’t, and that’s that.”

  After a few seconds, Frankie heard herself say, “I could do that.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t ask you.”

  “You didn’t ask,” Frankie said. “I offered.”

  Sylvia looked sharply over at her. “But what would you do?”

  “Whatever you’d like me to do. Go down, clean it up, if it needs it. See what you’ll need. Bedding, I suppose. And kitchen things. Whatever. Do you know what it comes with?”

  “No,” Sylvia said. “I think those places are all a bit of a hodgepodge, at least according to visiting faculty I’ve known. Basic furniture, and then some of what any number of people have left behind over the years.”

  “Well, if it’s too dreary, I could try to cheer it up. I’m good at that. Good at making strange digs livable. I could take down a small load of stuff and then let you know what else you’d need. For the short term, anyway.”

  Frankie could see that her mother wanted to say yes. “So it’s settled,” she said to Sylvia. “I’ll go in a day or two. That way maybe you could actually just bring Alfie directly there from the hospital. Wouldn’t that be better?”

  “Oh, I think much better. Much less confusing for him.” Frankie could hear it, the relief in her mother’s voice. “And then you’ll come back up here,” Sylvia said. This wasn’t inflected as a question, but Frankie understood that Sylvia was asking.

  “That’s something I’ll have to figure out,” Frankie said. “Maybe once I’ve finished in Bowman, I’ll head down to New York and see if there’s something there that compels me. I’ve been putting off dealing with all that, I have to say. Work. Earning a living. Et cetera. Maybe now’s the time.”

  Her mother frowned and said, “But what about … your life? Here?”

  “Well, you know. I needed to make some decisions about that anyway.” She was thinking of Bud.

  And now Sylvia said, “But Bud?”

  This had always been the question. “I don’t know. I mean, obviously, I care for him.” She lifted her shoulders.

  “I think you should come back here.” And then, maybe because Sylvia heard how assertive she’d been, she said, “If you want to, that is. Maybe you could find something to do here.”

  “I’ve tried, Mother.” Though of course this wasn’t true. Sometimes, in her efforts to imagine a life here, she’d asked about one job or another—an opening at the high school, in the admissions office of the health center she’d gone to visit. But she hadn’t followed up on anything. She said, “I can’t stay here indefinitely anyway. Clark and Liz will reclaim their house eventually, for one thing.”

  “But then the big house will be unused. And perhaps someone should be staying there, after all.”

  Frankie laughed suddenly. “This can’t be my life, Mother, staying in empty houses to be sure they don’t get burned down. And besides, Tink Snell’s been arrested.”

  “If he is indeed the arsonist. There’s plenty of dispute about that.”

  “I know. He has his defenders. Bud among them, actually.”

  “Is he? I didn’t realize that.”

  “Mostly I think he feels Tink wasn’t treated fairly.”

  “Ah,” Sylvia said.

  They sat for a while longer, talking about the details. When Frankie would go, when Alfie would be released. What Frankie should take down.

  “Well, it sounds as though this is settled,” Sy
lvia said at last, standing. “I’m going to go up and look around and see what needs packing, then.”

  “Good.” Frankie got up, too.

  At the door, Sylvia stopped. “I don’t know that I think it’s helpful to you, that way of thinking about your work.”

  “What way?”

  “Seeing what compels you.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know.” Sylvia was frowning. Serious. “I guess there’s a lot that can compel you that perhaps can’t … sustain you. Sometimes those things, the things that sustain you, are more or less accidents. Off to the side of whatever you thought compelled you in the first place.”

  “I’ll put that in my pipe and smoke it, Mother. Thank you very much.”

  “I didn’t mean to try to sound wise, God knows.” Sylvia made a face.

  “And yet …” Frankie was grinning, holding her hands up.

  After Sylvia had gone, Frankie sat for a while, alone, at the scarred round table. So this was it, then. The kick in the ass. The push. She looked out the windows at the flaming colors. How odd that this was where it should have come from. Alfie and Sylvia. Or Sylvia, anyway, with her sudden drive to seize control of something in her own life again, and in Alfie’s life, too. Which perhaps Frankie should have foreseen, her mother had been so at a loss for a while. So not in control of anything.

  And beyond that, it did make sense, in many ways. She could agree with the logic of many of Sylvia’s arguments for it. It was a surprise, but it wasn’t, finally, surprising.

  Though it was interesting that it was Alfie who’d set things in motion, with his strange compulsion, whatever it was—to head out. To leave, to go. Perhaps to die, which is what Frankie still thought.

  No one had been able to get it from him, what he’d intended. When they asked where he was going or what he thought he was doing—Sylvia or Frankie or Liz, who had come up briefly—he couldn’t really respond. Once or twice he’d managed to say, “Home.” But it wasn’t clear to any of them what he meant by that. Did he just mean he was trying to get back to the house here in Pomeroy? Or maybe he had in mind the one they’d lived in for so long in Bowman. Or even, dreaming further back, the one he’d grown up in, in Binghamton.