The Firebug of Balrog County

by David Oppegaard

  Somebody in the living room whooped, setting off a round of copycat whoops. Sam and I pushed forward into the crowd, using the noise as cover, and dodged our way through the living room, past the kitchen, and out the back door. Outside, it was quiet again. To our right, just off the back steps, sat a full-sized keg and two plastic coolers. In the distance was the promised bonfire, surrounded by a ring of people.

  “Look at that keg,” Sam said, pushing his way past me. “It’s like a giant silver grenade begging to be fallen on.”

  I nodded, fixated on the fire. The roaring blaze amid the cold night. The light out of the dark.

  A plastic cup appeared in my hand, filled with beer. Sam also had a beer and was smiling for the first time that night. “Here’s to liquid courage,” he said. “May it guide us faithfully on this cold fucking night.”

  “Here, here.”

  Sam chugged his beer. He belched and wiped his mouth.

  “Damn, Mack. That’s good stuff.”

  I could feel the heat of the bonfire on my face as we approached it. I closed my eyes, enjoying the dancing red light as viewed through my eyelids.

  “Fuck!”

  Cold beer splashed my face and ran down the front of my coat. I opened my eyes and saw a girl outlined by the fire—a short girl with dark hair. Her mouth gaped as she looked at me, trying to process my idiocy and turn it into words.

  It was the Pale Girl.

  “Sorry,” I said, whisking the spilt beer off my coat. “I didn’t see you.”

  “No shit,” the Pale Girl said, flicking her hair back over her shoulder. “You walked right into me. Like a freaking zombie.”

  “And your beer.”

  “Right. You zombied that, too.”

  Sam laughed from behind me. The Pale Girl looked even prettier in the firelight than she had in the hardware store, her skin extra pale and angelic, her high leather boots more kick-ass. I could feel my fight or flight instincts kicking in, threatening to take over and fuck the situation up worse.

  The Pale Girl’s forehead scrunched together. “You’re the hardware store guy, aren’t you?”

  “Yep. I’m Mack. Mackity Mack.”

  “Well, Mack, I’m Katrina—”

  “Mack-Attack, Big Mack, Mack-a-Lack, Whack-a-Mack … ”

  Oh, Jesus. I was babbling.

  “Sorry,” I said, trying to shift gears. “You’re Katrina. You bought some Vermont American plain-end scroll-saw blades, used primarily for intricate wood carving projects such as the construction of doll houses or Christmas mangers.”

  Katrina laughed. “Holy shit, Mack-Attack. You know your hardware.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, at least ten hours a week. I also work at the Legion slinging brew.”

  Somebody shouted at us from Lisa’s house. They’d propped open the back door and you could hear the music booming inside, leaking out into the night like a poisonous audio fog. I could feel Sam watching us, waiting to see what foolishness I’d come up with next.

  Katrina looked longingly at her beer cup.

  “Here,” I said, holding out my cup. “Have mine.”

  “Your beer?”

  “I only took one sip. I’m not sick.”

  Sam coughed and muttered something that sounded like “herpes.” Katrina took the cup from me, drained it in one impressive swallow, and handed it back. “Thanks, Mack-Attack. Who’s your buddy?”

  Sam stepped forward.

  “That’s Sam. He hates people.”

  “You do?”

  Sam nodded. “Most of them.”

  “I hear that,” Katrina said, turning and looking back at the bonfire. “Just look at all these preppy assholes enjoying themselves. How dare they?” She pushed her hair back and sighed. “Right now a child is starving to death somewhere, I bet. Probably getting raped, too. Getting raped while starving to death.”

  Sam and I looked at each other.

  “Okay,” Katrina said, burping into her fist. “Talk to you later, Mack-Attack.”

  “All right,” I said, looking into my empty cup. “See you, Katrina.”

  Katrina swept by me, leaving a faint smell of bonfire in her wake. Sam drank his beer as we watched her go.

  “Well, Whack-a-Mack, at least you didn’t drop your pants and wave your penis around.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Probably too cold for that.”

  We reloaded on beer, found two stumps amid the gathered crowd, and hunkered down close to the bonfire. Whoever had made the fire knew their shit—they’d started with a log cabin frame of firewood, right in the middle of the pit, and it was now the luminous core of a properly roaring fire. The heat was intense enough that everybody had taken their coats off, lending a summertime vibe to the scene, like a beach party in California.

  Sam and I drank and eyed the crowd around us. I didn’t recognize many people.

  “Just look at all these fancy college kids,” Sam said. “Slumming it with us local yokels.”

  A girl across the bonfire raised her hands in the air and whooped. It was turning out to be a big night for whooping.

  “O Sammy Boy,” I said, “the flames the flames are burning.”

  An ember popped and we stared into the fire. Party talk buzzed around us, loud and incomprehensible, like background noise in a movie. I thought about Sam living with his grandmother, what it must be like to go through your teens with a septuagenarian as your only trusted source of adult council.

  Sam picked up a handful of twigs and tossed them into the fire. I felt an urge to whoop and dance wildly around it.

  “You know, Katrina’s probably one of the college girls.”

  “I figured,” I said, sipping my beer. “She’s out here slumming it with the rest of them. Patronizing our hardware stores and bonfire parties. Making the local girls jealous.”

  Sam shifted on his tree stump and listed to the right.

  “That means she’ll leave,” he said. “End of this semester, maybe the end of next. Whenever she gets bored or graduates.”

  “Yep.”

  The wind picked up, whipping the fire around and sending sparks sailing into the dark sky. The countryside crickets were singing. They sounded the same as the crickets at Teddy Giles’ boat shack, the same as the crickets I’d grown up with chirping below my bedroom window. The whole county was filled with these crickets, the backyards and the forests and the fields and the wetlands. We had enough crickets, mosquitoes, and deer for everybody.

  Sam stood and swayed like a tree in the wind. “I’m going to get another beer. You want one?”

  The back of my hands began to itch. I wanted to extract a flaming branch from the fire and run back into Lisa Sorenson’s house, whooping madly as I torched her entire backwoods McMansion and sent my drooling classmates scrambling into the night.

  But that would be wrong. That would be evil, evil, evil.

  Ahhhhhh.

  Evil.

  “Sure,” I said, killing my beer. “Why the hell not?”

  The Siege

  The doctors didn’t fuck around after they found the cancerous mass in Mom’s lungs. We took her to the hospital for surgery two days after the diagnosis, all of us bewildered, and we brought her home two weeks later missing half a lung and thirty percent of her stomach.

  I was ten and Haylee was seven and a half. Neither of us fully grasped the enormity of the change that had befallen our family, not even after Dad finished moving their bedroom downstairs into the first floor guest room, vacating the master bedroom on the second floor. We knew Mom had gotten sick, gone to the hospital for a period that felt like a thousand years, and had returned home all sewn up. We thought she simply needed to rest and eat chicken noodle soup and eventually she’d be back to her old self again. I was old enough to know
cancer was about as bad a disease as you could get, but I also knew my mother was tough as hell when she needed to be—I’d once seen her back down an aggressive pro-lifer in the produce department of the Hickson IGA, an obese slob of a man with a bright pink face. I figured she’d gone to war in that hospital operating room and come back wounded yet victorious. I pictured cancer as a dragon, a flapping, emerald-scaled dragon, and I believed my mother had sallied forth and slain it.

  A month after her surgery Mom got some of her old strength back, even if she had trouble breathing and ate about as much as a sparrow. She started using the toilet on her own, then showering on her own. Dad had built a new bathroom/closet annex that attached to their new bedroom using the old, small bathroom right off the kitchen and a chunk of our back porch. It was actually a pretty sweet setup—the new room’s windows had a special tint to them so the sun wouldn’t fade Mom’s clothes and retained heat well. Also, Mom didn’t have to go down into our creepy basement anymore to do her laundry since the new annex had a washer and dryer just for her.

  Mom’s new handicap shower was unsettling, though. It had a big rounded ledge at the back you could sit on and two stainless-steel handrails for grabbing. It was like something you’d find in a nursing home, not a house with two kids, a father, and a mother who was only thirty-two. It had a tropical-rainstorm-type showerhead, but I never used it, not once.

  It felt strange at first, sleeping upstairs with our parents downstairs. Their old bedroom felt deserted. Empty. When Haylee had nightmares in the middle of the night, she started coming to my room because she was too frightened to go down the stairs in the dark. At first I played the part of intermediary, the reluctant and grumpy guide who would turn on all the lights and walk my sister downstairs to the new master bedroom. But, as time passed, I said screw it and let Haylee sleep in my room as long as she promised to sleep on the floor. She agreed to this eagerly and would drag in every blanket and pillow from her bedroom and lay it all out on the floor like a bird’s nest. Then she’d go back to her room, giggling, and return with as many stuffed animals as she could carry, dropping them into her nest and laughing as they rolled.

  “Dude. All right already. Lie down and go to sleep.”

  “Dude!”

  “Sleep.”

  “Dude!”

  And, of course, when I’d wake up in the morning, Haylee would be lying beside me in my twin bed, her gummy kid breath all up in my grill.

  The next ominous change was the arrival of Randy the Oxygen Guy. His first visit must have been pre-arranged by my parents, but to me it seemed like he just showed up one day, when I was trying to eat my Frosted O’s in peace, and barged into our house through the side door like he owned the place. “Hey bud,” this burly, greasy-looking stranger said to me. “I’m here to help your mom breathe.”

  Randy installed a large oxygen tank in the coat hall, right off the kitchen. The tank, or “compressed oxygen gas cylinder,” vaguely resembled a beer keg but was slimmer and taller and weighed a ton (Randy used an industrial dolly to unload the tank off the truck’s ramp and wrestle it into the house, a process that involved much grunting and swearing). The tank had a couple of gauges and spigots on it and I named it HAL after the artificial intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Randy attached a clear rubber oxygen tube to one of HAL’s spigots and gave the other end to my mother. The tube ran fifty feet, so she could move around most of the first floor while still attached to HAL. My mother’s end of the tube actually split into two tubes, like earbud headphones, and like earbuds she looped the tubes around her ears for comfort and stability before stuffing the little nostril bits into her nose. The other spigot on the tank was for refilling a portable oxygen tank, itself good for ten hours of use. My mother used a metal frame with wheels on it to roll the portable tank around when she went out of the house. That one we called R2O2.

  My mother never truly got accustomed to her oxygen tether. It caught on stuff and if she didn’t notice the catch, the line would make her head snap back, POW, like a dog that’s reached the end of its chain. She also didn’t like being seen in public with the oxygen rig trailing behind her, a rolling reminder of her frailty for all to see. She took off the oxygen halter, which I’ve since learned is called a cannula, whenever somebody took a picture of her.

  You can click through years of photos, lots and lots of photos, and find maybe half a dozen where she’s wearing that goddamn halter.

  But Mom was still Mom, kind and hyper-aware of those around her. She developed a new routine, which mostly involved sitting on the couch in the living room, propped up with pillows and covered by a quilt Grandma Hedley’s church group had made for her. Whenever you went through the living room she’d ask you how you were doing, what was up. In the morning, she’d inevitably hear my bedroom door open upstairs and shout, “Good morning, sweetie!” in a cheerful voice I found massively obnoxious as I shambled toward the bathroom, wanting nothing more than to piss and fall back asleep as swiftly as possible. I usually grumbled some reply to this inevitable morning greeting, or ignored it altogether.

  I think Mom must not only have known how obnoxious her chirpy greeting was but found it massively hilarious, a sort of running joke between the two of us that never got old to her, especially as I plunged deeper and deeper into the roil of adolescence, an early morning automaton capable only of the most guttural utterances.

  Because she was missing so much of her stomach, Mom couldn’t eat a lot. She’d order a big spread, pick at it for a half hour, and finally give it up with obvious reluctance. Dad and I always joked that going out to eat with Mom was like getting a two-for-one dinner special, your meal and hers.

  One of the strangest things about the siege years was Grandpa Hedley. A gruff, loud-talking dude, he’d always acted as blustery around my mother as he did around everybody else. He’d pop into your house when you were out, read your mail, and yell at you for not paying your electric bill when you returned home.

  But after Mom’s surgery, Grandpa Hedley was a changed fellow. While his previous visits to our house had been unannounced and sporadic, like surprise inspections, he now made it his business to show up at exactly two o’clock every Saturday afternoon and sit with his daughter in our living room. He brought Mom flowers and books and gourmet chocolates she could no longer digest. He’d sit in Dad’s leather recliner and rock steadily while watching Mom from the corner of his eye. Constantly harassed by insomnia and coughing fits, Mom would usually be bone-tired and on some kind of pain medication, which only enhanced the loopy aspect of their conversations.

  “LeRoy Higgins hit a fire hydrant last night with his truck.”

  “He did?”

  “He was drunk as a skunk, too. One of the deputies had to haul him in.”

  “Really?”

  “I always told LeRoy he should watch it with the boozing. Dumb son-of-a-bitch is going to pay for it now.”

  “I always liked fire hydrants. I like red.”

  “I mean, hell. How do they expect me to keep this town running smoothly if fools are driving around soused and slamming into valuable city property? Yes, sir, I wouldn’t mind taking the strap to Higgins for a good ten minutes. Or caning. Public caning’s not such a bad idea.”

  “Candy canes are red. Red and white.”

  “That’s right, sweetheart. They sure are.”

  Grandpa Hedley’s visits normally wound down after a half hour or so. After a steady stream of chatter he’d abruptly fall silent, as if somebody had thrown his talking switch, and pop out of the recliner. He’d throw his strong arms around his bony daughter, kiss her cheek, and stride swiftly out of our house without a word to anyone else, his eyes wet and distant. In his absence, the house would feel as if a tornado had just swept through it and Mom would sleep for a solid two hours on her couch, which was amazing for her. Even Dad had to admit the old guy could be a sweetheart, if y
ou got him in the right company.

  Bacterial infections began to creep into Mom’s lungs more and more frequently. The surgery had reduced her immunity and even a common cold was dangerous. The doctors gave her a variety of antibiotics of ever-increasing strength, turning back the hordes of bacterial invaders one by one. Haylee and I did our best to ignore these bouts of infection, had in fact learned to tune out every possible conversation regarding Mom’s medical condition as a form of emotional self-defense, but we were still constantly aware that the siege was not only continuing, but slowly growing worse with each passing day. The idea that Mom would die young still seemed impossible, yet the idea that she’d continue to live in her current condition seemed almost equally impossible.

  One night, when I was thirteen, my father woke me up in the middle of the night. He was taking Mom into Thorndale for help with her breathing, he said, his voice surprisingly calm. He wasn’t going to wake Haylee, but he wanted me to know in case I woke up in the morning and they weren’t home yet. He wanted me to know what was happening and to look after my sister.

  “Okay,” I said. He said good night and exited the room, leaving me alone in my bed to stare at the ceiling. I heard his voice downstairs, saying something to Mom, and then I heard a door slam shut. I felt small and helpless and wondered what the world would be like without my mother.

  She could die, she could die. She could die that very night.

  I fell back asleep.

  Chompy

  The morning after the party at Lisa Sorenson’s I woke with my head aching and a slobbering hound licking my face. His enormous tongue was coarse, his breath foul and meaty. I struggled to get away, but my arms were knotted beneath the blankets and apparently someone had shoved an ice sword into my brain, making it hard to think even at a deeply instinctual level. I recalled the party at Lisa Sorenson’s the night before, the chugging of many a crappy lite beer. A slow, creeping drive back into town with Sam as I sat hunched behind the wheel of the Olds, terrified of cops.