“Maybe not, Ox, but you’d still be an asshole nobody can stand.”
Haggerton’s mouth tightened into a knot. I still didn’t hear any sirens, distant or otherwise.
“You’re wondering where the cavalry is,” Haggerton said. “Well, the whole damn neighborhood took off to go watch that ugly straw heap burn in the park. You should have seen them all peeling out of here, like flies to shit. I guess we ain’t the only ones who appreciate a good fire.”
“You started that one, too.”
“You got it, kid. Thought I’d finish what you couldn’t.”
“And that was you hiding in the outfield.”
Haggerton chuckled and spat more chew. “Last night was as much fun as I’ve had in years. When you climbed over that outfield fence I recognized you straight off as Hedley’s grandkid and hunted you for the hell of it. Almost had you, too, but I hadn’t figured on a getaway driver. Usually shitbags like you work alone.”
I turned to watch the fire, deciding I didn’t care whether the old coot shot me in the back or not. The fire had eaten through the roof in patches, exposing the building’s innards to the blackened sky. My parents had purchased the house before I was born, right when they’d gotten married. That made for twenty years of Druneswald occupancy, more or less.
I noticed smoke coming from the garage. The garage door was rolled up and a healthy fire was roaring, right where my car was usually parked—
“Motherfuck.”
I sprinted up the driveway, seized with a fresh wave of crazed wildness. I heard a crack and a patch of gravel in front of me kicked up dust. I pulled up.
“No, no,” Haggerton shouted from across the ravine. “You come back here, asshole. I’m not done talking to you.”
I turned around, my eyes and throat aching. The heat had sucked all the moisture from the world.
“You lit my car on fire.”
“That’s right,” Haggerton said, nodding. “Right after I found the bullet dent on your trunk. It was a little bitch, all right, but I know a bullet dent when I see one. Particularly one made by my own rifle.”
A whistle blew south of town. Not an ambulance or a fire truck. Just a train, passing through Hickson like this was any other day. I wondered if the conductor could see our house smoking in the distance and what he made of it from his perch in the engine. More likely, he was watching the heavy plume of smoke on the east side of town along with everyone else.
Haggerton scratched his chin with the stock of his rifle.
“So what, kid, you think because your mama kicked the bucket, that makes you special? That you can just do whatever the fuck you want, valuable personal property be damned? You think you’re the only one who ever lost somebody?”
“How about you go fuck yourself, Ox.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Ox Haggerton clicked off his rifle’s safety and aimed it at my chest, nestling the gun into his shoulder. The sound of the roaring fire behind me, as well as every other sound in the world, dropped away. I peered down the barrel of Haggerton’s rifle and saw nothing but a long, dark descent I probably had coming.
The ground shook as the train approached. Something inside our house exploded.
Ox Haggerton lowered his rifle.
“All right. I’m not going to kill you, boy. We’re settled, far as I’m concerned.”
The train blew its whistle again, a deep and primal noise the rumbled in my gut. Haggerton set his rifle back on his shoulder, turned around, and crossed the railroad tracks in two fluid strides as he headed for the woods beyond. The train roared out from behind the tree line, all thunder and sparks, and by the time it’d blown through, Old Man Haggerton had vanished into legend.
The Face of God
Across town, nearly everyone in Hickson watched the straw castle burn. Later they would speak of its white, incandescent flame in deeply reverent tones, as if they’d seen the face of God and somehow lived to talk about it.
Sam said you had to be there.
The Great Conflagration
The Great Conflagration lasted for three days, blotting out the sky and sending the citizens of Balrog County scrambling for safety. Not only had Ox Haggerton set fires on both sides of Hickson, but he’d begun his busy afternoon by igniting a blaze in the woods five miles north of town. This carefully executed trio of burns was a masterwork of arson that put my entire firebug career to shame. Yes, the grumpy old fucker had put one more snot-nosed kid in his place before skipping town.
A warrant had been put out for Ox Haggerton’s arrest and all eyes were turned toward him now, believing Haggerton responsible for all the recent fires, but I still could not shake a feeling of vague uneasiness. I told the authorities about my encounter with Haggerton in my driveway but omitted my own role in cultivating his rage. Unable to stand the soft, periodic weeping of my sister, who mourned her puppy’s kennel-trapped death above all, I spent long periods outside, alone in my grandparents’ backyard, wrapped in heavy blankets as I watched helicopters fitted with buckets work endlessly, dumping load after load of water they’d collected from a nearby lake. I felt like a character in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, listlessly taking the cure for consumption in a smoky version of the Swiss Alps. I belonged in the cluttered Grotto now and I wouldn’t leave it for the rest of my life. Grandma Hedley would bring me food, I’d endure the harsh winter cold, and never would I light a fire or harm a single creature, great or small, ever again.
I kept picturing Old Man Haggerton, standing stiff and ready and trying to decide if I was worth shooting.
That look in his eyes.
On Wednesday, the Conflagration’s third afternoon, Grandpa Hedley came out to the Grotto with a cup of coffee and sat down beside me in one of the patio chairs. He and my grandmother had been working nonstop since the fires, helping out with various town emergency-type things, and so I hadn’t seen him much. His clothes were blackened by soot and ash and he smelled like he’d stepped directly out of a campfire. When he sat down beside me I turned my head away and stared at the Grotto’s statue of Michelangelo, examining it like I’d never seen a big dangling stone penis before.
Grandpa Hedley made soft slurping sounds as he drank his coffee. He leaned back and considered the smoke-hazed sky.
“She got out of hand, didn’t she?”
I glanced at my grandfather. Clearly sleep-deprived, he looked so tired and old I could hardly stand it.
“Yeah,” I said, unsure of exactly what he was getting at. “She sure did.”
Nobody said anything for a minute and my grandfather sipped his coffee like he had all the time in the world. It was cold as hell out, but he was just wearing a long-sleeved denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The shirt had a POW logo stitched onto the breast pocket.
Grandpa Hedley sat forward and cupped his hands around his coffee mug.
“I should have nipped it all in the bud, I suppose.”
I licked my lips, which were painfully cracked and dry from the past three days of sitting outside.
“Nipped what in the bud?”
Grandpa Hedley sighed and waved a hand at the gray sky.
“Your firebug hobby. Our little cat-and-mouse game.”
I leaned forward in my chair and stared at the space between my knees. I noticed that the Grotto’s concrete patio was rife with cracks, some big enough for weeds to poke through. Even the most cared-for place in town was sliding toward ruin.
“You mean Haggerton’s firebug hobby, don’t you?”
“No, Mack. I know it was you, setting those earlier fires. Hell, you really expect me to believe Ox burned down his own wood pile? The man loved that wood pile beyond all reason. You set those early fires, Mack, and then you set off Haggerton like a firecracker. Why else would he pick your house for his grand finale?”
Grandp
a Hedley sipped his coffee. The world had grown even colder and I could feel it pressing down on me like the lid of a coffin. The jig was up. The screw had turned.
“Actually, I figured it was you ever since that second letter you wrote to the Herald ’s editor. Nobody else around here writes like that.” Grandpa Hedley patted my knee. “Shit. Nobody else around here is like you, Mack.”
I felt my throat swell and threaten to choke me. I grabbed it and tried to massage the lump.
“Then why didn’t you call the cops on me? Or tell me to stop?”
Grandpa Hedley shrugged. “I figured you were working through something you needed to get out of your system. Some type of poison. I looked at the burns first-hand and decided you weren’t out to hurt anybody. If I’d gone to the police, you’d already turned eighteen and it might have meant jail time and a rough future. If I’d warned you off directly, you might not have listened or you might have quit and eventually drowned in that poison. I’ve known a lot of troubled young men over the years, Mack. They don’t all make it.”
I quit massaging my throat. The lump wasn’t going away anytime soon.
“Of course, I didn’t predict Haggerton going wild over one old woodpile,” my grandfather continued, “but I suppose old Ox is as clear a case of a poisoned man as you’ll ever see. You’re too young to remember this, Mack, but Ox’s wife left him back in the ’80s, after they had a third miscarriage and zero kids. He turned mean after that and fell into the bottle.”
I turned to my grandfather. “Do you want me to give myself up? I will. You can bring me in yourself.”
Grandpa Hedley shook his head. “No. I considered it, but I don’t see how that’ll serve anyone now. You’ve learned your lesson about starting your little fires, haven’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, shuddering under my cocoon of blankets. “I have and I am truly sorry.”
“I thought you might be, sitting out here like this.” Grandpa Hedley turned and looked back at the house. “It’s not a pleasant thing to hear your sister crying like that, is it?”
“No,” I said, feeling the knot in my throat swell even more. “It’s not.”
We listened for a moment but I couldn’t hear anything but the wind blowing through the Grotto. Sometimes Haylee would run out of crying and need to drink some water for a couple of minutes. She’d begun to remind me of the professional mourners you could hire in the Far East, the ones really good at keening.
“Well,” Grandpa Hedley said, turning back around in his chair. “I’m not saying I’m as innocent as Mary here either, kid. You know, I was enjoying our little covert war. The letters in the newspaper and the sneaking around. It was fun. It got me amped up for the first time in a long while and I liked it. I may be an old man playing at mayor, but I’m no angel myself. I used to kick around some.”
I stared at my grandfather and imagined him as a young man. A young man running around Vietnam with grenades and a knife and an assault rifle. A young man who’d done that and saw all that and then come back home again to sit quietly behind a desk and raise a family.
“But you’re going to do one thing for me, Mack.”
I raised my head. Anything, I thought. Anything the fuck you want.
“You’re going to tell your father exactly what you’ve been up to. You owe the man that much.”
The Pit
By Thursday afternoon the Great Conflagration was considered under control, if not totally out. Dad and I convinced Haylee to come with us to see if we could salvage anything from the house. The police had cordoned off the last two blocks of our street and we had to park the van on a side street. When we stepped outside it felt as if we were astronauts landing on a strange and possibly hostile planet. The burnt smell was stronger here, like bacon charred in a cast-iron skillet.
We went up half a block and turned onto our street, stepping around the traffic sawhorses.
“Holy shit,” Haylee said.
We stopped and took in the scene. As reported, the homes on the street’s north side were in various states of ruin while all the south side homes appeared untouched except for a heavy coating of soot, as if a protective force field in the middle of the street had deflected all flame. It was like something out of the Old Testament, a Passover of fire. I noticed lights on in the south houses, a curtain pulled back.
We walked on. Two of our neighbors were already poking through their own wreckage, heads down as they scowled at what they found. Dad waved, but they didn’t notice us.
“This is why you pay those premiums,” Dad said, cramming his hands into the pockets of his new jacket. “Just look at this mess. One lunatic decides to go off and you get all this.”
The last three houses on the street, including ours, had burned to their foundations. Our basement, now exposed to the sky, was a murky pit of charred trash and dirty water. An unlucky red squirrel had fallen into the mess and now lay floating among the debris, his little belly a spot of white amid the dark.
Haylee walked away from us and began to circle our house’s foundation, slowly picking her way through the rubble. Our garage was gone and the blackened metal shell of my Oldsmobile was clearly visible. The scene reminded me of old footage from bombed-out war zones like Beirut or Dresden. The forest that had once surrounded our neighborhood was now a field of skeletal wreckage with a scorched train track running along its edge. A dead forest that went on for miles.
Dad blew into his hands. It was a cold day and you could smell snow mixed with the burnt.
“Your mother loved this house so much,” Dad said. “This would have killed her all over again.”
I stared at the floating squirrel. My heart felt hollowed out. The firebug was either dead or had gone far, far underground. The game was over and in it I would find solace no more. I would apply to college. I would force myself into the wide world and get along as best I could.
That would be my penance.
“Dad,” I said, raising my head. “I was the one who set fire to Ox Haggerton’s woodpile. I burned down Teddy Giles’ boathouse, too.”
My father turned to look at me. I watched as trusting, stir-fry-cooking Pete Druneswald realized what had been under his nose all this time. The devil he’d harbored on the second floor.
“Haggerton chose our house because of me. He figured out what I did and wanted revenge.”
I pictured a prisoner standing before a firing squad and smoking one last cigarette, bravely awaiting his fate with open eyes.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t think this would get so out of hand. I was just trying to have some fun.”
My father pursed his lips, his face flushing red. A sharp north wind gusted through the dead forest and bits of ash fluttered around us like snowflakes.
“You selfish … jerk.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You selfish … little … snot.”
“I know—”
Dad stepped forward, his chest puffing out. “You know? What do you know, Mack? Do you know how frightened she was before they put her under sedation? Before they shoved those tubes down her throat?”
Dad shoved me in the chest. I staggered back, surprised.
“No, you don’t know, do you? Because you weren’t there, Mack. You missed her leaving us because you wanted to do what you wanted to do. You had to take that stupid history test. You always have to have your way. You’re willful. You’re a willful little jerk.”
Dad shoved me again, but I was ready for it this time and stood my ground. I could feel my sister watching us from across the basement pit, her eyes like twin black holes absorbing it all for later, for the rest of her life.
“She asked for you, Mack. Did Haylee ever tell you? Your mother was scared and she asked and you weren’t there.”
I shuddered and bowed my head as a cold wind blew through me. I took a step back, and then anothe
r. I could feel the watery pit looming at my heels, dirty and disgusting and shallow—the kind of place I belonged. I let my body go loose and pitched backward.
As I fell, I could hear my sister scream and a train rumble through my mind. I hit the water first and the basement’s concrete floor second, knocking my tailbone and the back of my head before I bobbed up again.
Colorful sparks dotted my vision.
The water was cold enough to stop your heart.
Haylee called my name. She ran around the edge of the pit and stood beside my father, who was bent over at the waist with his hands upon his knees, like he’d been sucker punched. She was crying. He was crying. They called my name. And then, lo, a bony creature appeared beside them, himself filthy with soot and ash. A creature freshly returned from the shadowlands, from Mordor. He barked and wagged his scraggly tail, irrepressible as a son-of-a-bitch, and I knew he, too, was calling my name.
One Last Burn
The next day, sore as hell but still in one piece, I drove to Katrina’s house to escape my brooding family for a few hours. Although Chompy had returned to us (a little hungry but otherwise fine), relations between my family and I were understandably tense. I felt exhausted and hollowed out and didn’t know if I could handle feeling any more goddamn emotions. I just wanted to sleep for a thousand days and magically wake up back in my old house and for everyone to be happy and not totally pissed off at me for being such a degenerate.
Katrina was waiting for me out on her lawn. She had her hair tied back in a workmanlike ponytail and wasn’t wearing any makeup, not even her trusty mascara. When she smiled and waved at me I felt like dropping to my knees and falling on a sword, I was so grateful.
Then she did something even crazier—she hugged me in broad daylight.
“That’s so crazy about your dog. I’m glad he’s okay.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I am too.”
“Haylee must have been so happy.”
The Firebug of Balrog County Page 19
