The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

  Now, as he turned into the steep driveway, he could tell that this one was a bonfire, the same story as the Kershaw place. It was essentially over, the house long gone. Even in the car, he could hear the joyous roar of the flames.

  He pulled in. There were cars everywhere, six or seven already on the lawn, in the driveway, angled oddly, some with their doors hanging open. Behind him as he killed the engine, he could see the cars whose headlights had followed him on the road and into the drive pulling up, parking, too.

  He got out of his car and hiked up the driveway to the house. It looked like the setting for a mad party, every window brilliantly lighted. The flames jumping into the dark sky were yellow and full and happy. Sparks exploded high upward, lighting the air like small-town fireworks, then drifted away, dying, blinking out like fireflies into the black night.

  There were men running all over. Some were hooking the pumper truck to a water tank. He saw that Dan Stark was the pipeman, that Kevin O’Hara was feeding the hose to him. Behind him he heard another car pull up, and Gavin Knox, one of the kids on the fire crew—there were three or four younger guys—ran past him in his turnout gear, and then, a few paces away, stopped, looking up, taking in the sheer scope of the thing, the fact that the house was the fire now. Was nothing else but fire. “Fuck!” he said in awe, making two syllables of it.

  Bud saw Davey Swann, the chief, moving around at the side of the house, and followed Gavin over to him. He heard the kid yell, “Where do you want me?”

  “What the hell difference does it make?” Davey yelled back. He sounded furious.

  Tink Snell was suddenly there now with Gavin. He was wearing his gear, too. “Just watch out, watch for a jump,” Davey yelled to both of them. “Get the bladders. What the hell else is there to do?” He started to walk away.

  Bud followed. “Everybody’s out of the house then?” he shouted, leaning toward Davey.

  He shook his head. “ ’Twasn’t nobody there. Nobody home. Same as the Olsens’.”

  They stood, stupidly, for a few moments, watching the flames rise into the sky, watching the arc of water now rising uselessly into them. “Strange, isn’t it,” Bud said. “The two of them, so close together.”

  “More than fucking strange.”

  Bud looked sharply at him, and he looked back levelly, furious. “Don’t you write that. Don’t you write I said that.”

  Bud nodded, and then they both turned at a noise, the noise the outer wall at the side of the house made as it disappeared. It didn’t quite fall—it was more that the wall had already been eaten, was just a lace of slender supports that now suddenly vanished into the frantic light. And then the roof sagged partially into the fire and began to be eaten, too.

  There was the wail of a siren. Bud turned and watched another tanker rising up the steep drive and onto the lawn, probably from Winslow, the next town over. The chief left him, jogged over to it.

  For an hour or so, as the house folded piece by piece in on itself, Bud walked the perimeter taking pictures of the fire, of the men working, the ones on the hoses and the ones with the bladders—backpacks of water—who were moving around watching for sparks that landed on the floor of pine needles here, in the dry leaves there. And all the while he was thinking about these two fires, starting in the middle of the night, in the middle of the summer. Both of them in empty houses.

  What caused fires? Heating, in winter. You didn’t have to be home, necessarily. Bad wiring anytime, sure, whether you were home or not. But mostly, most of the time, if you wanted a fire, you had to be home. Someone had to be home. Because mostly it was people who started fires. People using crappy space heaters. People cooking carelessly, or with defective stoves or equipment. People dumping not-quite-dead coals from grills in dumb places, or leaving a fireplace unattended or a cigarette smoldering at the edge of an ashtray. A cigarette that would burn slowly down on its own, tipping out when it got low enough, tipping onto paper or wood or fabric.

  People.

  This house was empty. The earlier fire had been in an empty house, too.

  He’d talk to Davey again tomorrow. He’d get a quote he could use—by then surely he’d be willing to speculate on the record. Everyone else would be doing it.

  He realized then both what he was thinking, and that he was excited by what he was thinking. It was arson. It had to be arson.

  What a story. What a break. What a fucking lucky break.

  And then, suddenly ashamed of himself, he said aloud, “Asshole.”

  Bud had read about the Pomeroy Union in an article in the Washington Post, a good long piece about the demise of small-town papers. The Union was one of three papers mentioned in the story, all barely holding on. It was run by one old guy and his wife with a small group of part-time, nonprofessional reporters. The printing was done forty miles away, the distributing by the owner and some kids he paid by the hour.

  Bud was living in Washington at the time, writing on politics for the Denver Post. He was, he would have said, happy. He liked his job, he liked Washington as a city, he still thought that Bill Clinton might be a great president. But he was restless. Was it the sense of another political season coming on, with some of the same candidates getting ready to run and some of the same old clichés already being spouted? Maybe. Was it his personal life, more or less dead since his divorce just a bit more than a year earlier?

  His second divorce, actually, which had been a killer.

  As opposed to the first one, which had been from his college girlfriend. She and he had, it seemed, grown easily and slowly apart, into near-siblinglike, asexual companionship. From time to time, one or the other of them would suggest working on it—sex—and they would try. There was expensive underwear involved, and sex toys. On the last of these occasions, Bud hadn’t been able to get hard. He had apologized. “My prick apologizes.” When they had split up, the only acrimony was about who got certain books.

  No, it was the second, disastrous marriage that had undone him. She was a political consultant working on Jerry Brown’s campaign. It was not quite a rebound relationship, but close enough to it for him to be dazzled and endlessly gratified by his own reliable hard-on for her. Ha! Take that, you unbelievers! A hard-on connected to her beauty, to her intelligence, yes, of course, and to her apparent vulnerability. Later he would wonder how it was he hadn’t noticed how unhappy she was. He didn’t, he supposed, because he imagined he was the cure for that.

  He was not the cure. In their sixth month of marriage, angry at him because he’d been out of town for two weeks covering the primaries, she had fucked several other men, one in a bathroom at a party, the other two in the apartment she shared with Bud, bringing one home from the bar where she’d met him, beckoning the other, an old married lover, from his own home.

  He was crazy with jealousy when she told him. She blamed her loneliness, her despair, her sense that he’d drifted away from her—he hadn’t called for a couple of nights in a row, he’d forgotten the anniversary of their meeting. She wept, he wept. They made up, they had great sex, he vowed his attentiveness, his love.

  And that was how it went, over and over. It took him a while to see the crises as manufactured, as born of a need for crisis. It took him a while to understand the pitch she needed to live at, and to come to terms with the fact that he couldn’t sustain that. It took him a while to see that part of that pitch was her near-constant feeling of having been wounded, betrayed, in ways that were unbearable for her. Which required apology, penance, on his side, a reshaping of habits if not personality. Ending it took months, in part, he slowly realized, because the ending itself was thrilling to her—the drama of it. There was even a gesture at suicide.

  And finally he had to walk out. He couldn’t negotiate his way out of it, he couldn’t persuade her of the necessity of ending it, or of anything. He just walked away, overwhelmed with sorrow and relief.

  So maybe all of that was part of his restlessness. He didn’t know. All he knew was that th
ere was something about the story of these small-town papers that caught his interest—perhaps because as a teenager in a small town in Colorado, he’d always been so aware of his local paper, of how important it was in his life, in his family’s life. His grandmother liked the obituaries and the social column—who was entertaining whom, serving what for lunch, with what kind of party favors, every single stunningly boring detail. His mother clipped recipes and was passionate about local politics—she’d been deputy mayor of their small town for five or six years and was always active in local affairs. Bud himself liked to read about high school sports, which were covered exhaustively. And his father, and Bud as well, actually, followed the crime reports, usually someone driving drunk or kids overturning a car or nuisance complaints—animals running free and tearing up gardens, someone partying loudly and too late.

  In any case, when he read about the Union again almost a year later in a piece that popped up on the Internet, when he saw that it was for sale, that the guy was giving up, he got in his car and drove north. He stopped in Concord. He’d concocted a story to pay his way, a story about politically active Republicans in New Hampshire and how they felt about the next crop of likely candidates who were already periodically visiting the city. He called on the three people he was going to use, did his interviews, and got back in the car.

  It had been late spring when he left Washington, the magnolias almost gone by, their blossoms brown and unattractive now, the cherries just coming into bloom, the days sometimes hot—even too hot. The farther north he went, the more he moved backward in seasons. In Concord it was early spring. By the time he got to Pomeroy, everything was sere, brown, bare—Andrew Wyeth colors, except for the intense deep green of the pines and the white patches of lingering snow here and there in the woods. Late winter.

  He didn’t contact the paper’s owner for the first few days. Instead he drove around, looking up at the looming mountains. He walked around the three little town centers, he hiked in the muddy woods, he fell into conversation with people he met. He stopped at the café for lunch, at Snell’s Country Store for gas. Then he parked and went inside.

  The store was a large, low-ceilinged room, with wide aisles of grayish, unfinished wood. The shelves were stacked with packaged food and household items. The space was dim, light falling in through the dirty windows at the front. The register was just off to the side of the door in a large, alcovelike space where there were also postcard and magazine racks, a collection of videos on display, and a few shelves of mostly cheap wine. A large fan, stilled for the winter, hung from the ceiling over the register.

  The man at the register, Adrian Snell, said he owned the place. He seemed happy to answer Bud’s questions between ringing up customers, most of whom he obviously knew. He was a stocky, strong-looking guy, big around the middle but not fat—just solid-looking. Even his head was solid and fleshy, the back of his neck permanently a reddish tan, his jaw square, his eyes oddly pale and pretty. He had a fair amount of white hair that he clearly took pride in—it was carefully combed into a pompadour. He wore a flannel shirt, his long-sleeved undershirt visible at the neck and at the rolled-up cuffs of his shirtsleeves. He was clearly a guy who liked to talk, a solid, satisfied man.

  It was a friendly town, he said. “Course, you got your different groups. Farmers, a few left. Dairy mostly, and now some vegetable farms. Hunters. Fishermen. I’m both of those myself. Summer folks. Bunch of kids come up in the seventies or so and stayed, doing organic stuff and the like.” He said Bud ought to read the bulletin boards around town. One here outside the store. One next door, at the post office. One at the town hall. “Give you a flavor of things.” He pointed out a pamphlet for sale in the magazine rack that would tell him the history of the place.

  On Saturday afternoon, Bud sat in on a book club meeting at the library. There was one man at the meeting besides himself, and maybe ten women. The book was by Updike, one Bud hadn’t read. The man liked it. Most of the women didn’t. The general consensus among them was that Updike didn’t like women.

  “How can you say that, ‘He doesn’t like women’? He loves women.” This was Dan Stark, as Bud would later come to know.

  “I didn’t say he didn’t love women,” Mildred Early said. “I said he didn’t like them.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Oh, if you don’t know the difference …” She swatted at the air in front of her dismissively.

  On Sunday, he went to the service at the Unitarian church. Safe enough for a Jew, he figured, and he was right—nary a mention of Christ. No sign of him either—no cross, and the church windows were clear, crazed glass, letting in the gently gray light of the overcast day outside. The minister was a woman, though Bud wasn’t certain of that until she opened her mouth, and her voice—lovely and light—said, “Let us pray.”

  Afterward, he went to the coffee hour in the church basement. You entered through a door around the side of the church, descending three or four steps. Perhaps fifteen people were there in all, standing around on the shiny linoleum floor under the unkind fluorescent lights. Bud moved around, speaking to several of them.

  The woman pouring coffee or tea introduced herself as Emily Gilroy. Coffee, Bud said, and picked up a doughnut. “Homemade,” Emily said. And then, “So nice to see a new young face.”

  Bud said, “Young?” and turned to look behind him.

  Emily laughed. Later he’d come to know her well. She was the clerk in the town hall, someone who heard a lot of gossip about everyone in town and was willing to share almost all of it. A resource, as Bud thought of her—seemingly incapable of keeping a secret. He liked the odd woman who couldn’t keep a secret.

  Sunday afternoon, he went to a Little League game in the field behind the white frame grammar school and stood leaning on a chain-link fence, shivering, with a half-dozen others as the Pomeroy team lost, 14–1, mostly on walks. By the end of the game, they had run through seven pitchers, the coach was so desperate to find anyone who might, perhaps, be able just to get the ball over the plate. Some of the boys were actually called in from the bases and the outfield to give it a try. Minutes before the mercy rule was invoked and the game declared over, a light wet snow began, disappearing as it fell onto the brownish grass. The woman next to him put her head in her hands and said to no one in particular, “Just take me out and shoot me now, why don’t you?”

  By the end of the weekend, he’d made up his mind. He’d read through the town’s history, he’d talked to people he ran into. It all seemed yeasty to him, interesting, and he had an almost immediate sense that he could get it. He felt he could make a life here, professionally, personally.

  On Monday, before he left to go back to Washington, he went to see the owner of the paper. They sat in his office, housed on the second floor of a brick building on the town green. The first floor was a real-estate office, its space mostly unoccupied in the winter, the paper’s owner said. He was tall, skinny, hawk-nosed, in his early seventies. He wore a bow tie and a pilled, stained cardigan. Bud asked about the health of the paper.

  It was doing okay, Pete said. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he’d run it for almost fifty years with his wife. After she died, a year and a half earlier, it was too much work. But also, he said, and shrugged, “Not so much fun.”

  Bud remembered then the picture of them together in the article in the Post, standing outside this building in warm weather. Laughing, he thought. When he looked it up later, he saw he was right. She was stout and shapeless, a monolith, wearing a kind of dress he didn’t think they even made anymore, sprigged with flowers. Pete was saying something to her, an eager, wicked grin on his face as he leaned in toward her, and she was laughing in response—her shoulders were lifted up toward her ears, her head was thrown back, her eyes were shut. Maybe that’s what had made him notice the article, Bud thought. Fun indeed, embodied.

  He wasn’t sure if his offer would be accepted. Pete had been asking forty grand, and
Bud only had twenty, his entire savings.

  But two days later, back in Washington, he had a message on his telephone answering machine. “It’s Pete. Two words. You’re on.” He called back, and they made the arrangements. Pete would stay on for six months to help him get going. Bud would get there as soon as he could.

  He gave his notice at the paper, started packing in the evenings, throwing and giving things away. He contacted a real-estate broker in New Hampshire about rentals in the area and began to say good-bye to people.

  Some of whom were incredulous that he could be sacrificing what seemed a great career to go to Palookaville, as one friend called it. Greg Maloney. They were sitting in a dark, noisy bar in Georgetown drinking tequila shots among all the handsome young people in charge of the nation.

  “But didn’t they used to keep the Jews out up there? Remember that Rehnquist thing?” Greg pointed at him. “A different kind of covenant there.” He had a swallow and set his glass down, hard. “How can you be going to a place like that?”

  “That was Vermont,” Bud said. “Rehnquist was in Vermont.”

  “Vermont, New Hampshire: what’s the difference?”

  “Look, if you didn’t go to places where they used to keep the Jews out, you wouldn’t go anywhere.”

  Greg laughed. Then he said, “Seriously. What’s this about?”

  “It’s who I am, man.” Bud lifted his hands, then cradled the shot glass again. “Where I’m from, which is easy for someone like you to forget. I like it. Small-town stuff. I liked it way back then, anyway, except I felt obliged, in some way, to want more.” Bud said this casually, but as he spoke, he realized how true it was. He remembered that he had wanted to stay, to go to the community college and marry his high school girlfriend, a basketball star with ash-blond hair who regularly beat him at arm wrestling. He remembered that it was the adults around him—his parents, his teachers, his coaches—who encouraged him to “get out,” as they called it. And so he had, first to Colorado State, then to Denver, then to Washington.