An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

by Brock Clarke

  And then I found the memoir I was looking for, without even knowing that I was looking for it or that it even existed: A Guide to Who I Am and Who I Pretended to Be, written by Morgan Taylor, one of the bond analysts.

  Except according to the book he was now an ex- bond analyst. That was the first thing I found out about his life after prison (I sat right down on the floor and started reading the book, as though catching up with a long-lost friend): Morgan didn’t go back to being a bond analyst. “That life was dead to me now,” he claimed in his memoir, without saying why it was dead or how it was ever especially alive in the first place. But in any case, instead of resuming his career as a bond analyst, he became what he called a “searcher.” The first thing he did after he got out of prison was to go to South Carolina because he’d never been in South Carolina before and his inner voice said that he had to—had to!—visit all fifty states over the course of his lifetime. He also attended a game at every major league ballpark. He traveled to Yosemite and Badlands and Sequoia and every other national park of note …

  “Wait a minute—hold on,” I said to the book, and to Morgan, too, wherever he was. Because I recognized the story: it was my father’s. He’d told me those things on his postcards, during those three years he’d left my mom and me, and I, in turn, had told the story of my father’s travels to the bond analysts in prison. They were especially interested in the story—I remembered that now, too.

  Was I angry? Of course I was. Is this what memoirists did? Steal someone else’s true story and pass it off as their own? I was tempted to put the book right back on the shelf and not buy it, except that I wanted to see whether Morgan had gotten my father’s story right and also whether I was in the memoir or not. I wasn’t on the acknowledgments page, that’s for sure: I checked, right there in the store, before I moved on to the cash register.

  AFTER I BOUGHT Morgan Taylor’s fake memoir and left the Book Warehouse, I did exactly what my father said I shouldn’t: I didn’t wait. Instead I drove out to Camelot. Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.

  It was after four by this point, but beyond daylight savings and so already dark and getting suddenly cold and weirdly cheerful and Yuletide-like. Camelot was festive in a way it had never seemed when I lived there, with its streetlights and floodlights, and in a few houses you could tell the ventless gas fireplaces by their steady, nonsmoky, nonflickering blaze. I knew our own ventless gas fireplace wouldn’t be in use—Anne Marie was a big believer in wood fire, and no other kind would do—but the lights were on downstairs, in the living room and dining room and kitchen. I parked across the street so that I could see through our living room’s enormous bay windows, turned off my headlights, and watched as each member of my family passed the window in turn, as if modeling for me. There was Katherine, carrying that gigantic ringed binder full of the homework that came so easily for her that she would already have finished it; there was Christian, holding his plaster hammer above his head as if preparing to strike a blow for the working man; there was Anne Marie, gesturing wildly about something, her free hand flapping around her head as if defending herself against bees, sometimes smiling, sometimes scowling, the whole time talking to someone else in the room, I couldn’t tell who. It wasn’t the kids, because I could see them sitting at the table now, and Anne Marie’s back was to them. She was speaking either to herself or to someone else. But who? I couldn’t tell, because there was me, Sam, sitting in my van and not in the house, looking at the three of them (plus this invisible guest), feeling so far away from them, longing for them and afraid to knock on the door and find out that they weren’t longing for me. Yes, I was outside looking in, all right, which was not unlike being a reader (this was my very thought), and maybe this was another reason why my mother gave up reading: she was sick of being outside the house. Maybe she wanted to be inside, with my addled father, drinking beer until there was no beer left to drink and nothing to forget that hadn’t already been forgotten. Suddenly I wanted that, too, so, so badly, and so I drove out of Camelot, back to my one family, my one family that I didn’t have to long for, my one family with whom I could drink myself to sleep and forget about the other one.

  8

  In many of my mother’s books, the troubled narrator has a telling dream at a crucial moment, and so I wasn’t at all surprised that night when I had one. A telling dream, that is.

  In my dream I was standing in a cupola, four stories in the air, on the very top of a sprawling, gray-shingled mansion. The mansion backed up to the ocean, and there was a storm. The white-lipped, whip-backed waves crashed against the boats, which were coming unmoored in the surf, their lines snapping off like overextended rubber bands. The water was a bruise; the sky, an even darker, more violent blue. Up in the cupola, my back was to the water, facing inland toward a compound of five slightly smaller shingled mansions, and I was holding a red plastic gasoline can by its handle, daintily, like a purse. The smaller mansions were all on fire: there was more flame than wood, more smoke than structure. But there were people still inside the buildings, and they were leaning out windows, clinging to trellises. Each one was holding books; they were all burdened by books. Some of them were throwing the books out the windows; some were lowering overflowing sacks of books down the trellises toward men waiting on the ground below. There was one woman on top of a roof. She was wearing a gauzy, nearly transparent nightgown. Her hair was on fire: the flames ringed her skull like a crown, dripped down her long, curly locks like wax. I couldn’t see her face, but it was obvious, in the logic of the dream, that she was beautiful and necessary. She was leaning against the chimney, beating her head with one of the books as if to put out the fire. The book was a hardcover, though, and the woman quickly knocked herself unconscious. Slumped against the chimney the way she was, I could see that the woman had no underwear on: her black pubic hair looked like a tattoo against her pearl white stomach and thighs. One of the men on the ground saw this, too. He became distracted, understandably, and while gazing at the unconscious woman’s exposed nether regions, he, too, was knocked unconscious by a falling sack of books. Another man knelt to attend to his fallen comrade, then looked up and pointed to the woman on the roof. Her nightgown was flickering and hissing in the fire; the book, still in her right hand, caught fire and exploded. A severe, sharp cry came from the men on the ground, from the men and women in the windows and on the trellises. It appeared to be the first book lost in the fire. A great despair washed over them all. The men and women abandoned hope, hurled themselves out the windows and off the trellises. The men on the ground below did not attempt to avoid the falling bodies and were crushed.

  It was quite a dream, all right, and not at all the kind I usually had. I usually had the kind in which familiar people showed up in unlikely places, like the one in which I found my boss sitting at my kitchen table, drinking coffee, which I found interesting—my boss had never been in my house and didn’t even drink coffee—but no one else did, and when I relayed these dreams to my family, their eyes glazed over as if they were having a dream of their own. No, this dream was different, and I wished my family were around so I could tell them about it and prove what sort of fantastic dream life old Sam Pulsifer was capable of having—although I’d have to edit out the pubic-hair part for the kids. Or maybe I wouldn’t have told them after all, because the dream didn’t make me feel so hot: my head hurt and I was breathing hard. After a dream like that, you’re grateful that it was just a dream, that no matter how bad your actual life, it couldn’t be worse than your dream life. That’s how I felt until I went downstairs (the house was empty again, my hangover more familiar and less terrible, the hangover potion on the table again less urgently needed, though I drank it anyway), opened the Springfield Republican, and discovered that someone had set fire to the Edward Bellamy House in C
hicopee, Massachusetts, not twenty minutes from where I sat, reading about it.

  At first I didn’t remember that Bellamy was a writer, and, by extension, that his house was a writer’s house. The headline read LOCAL LANDMARK RECEIVES MINOR FIRE DAMAGE, as though the minor fire damage had come in the mail. Only after reading a little bit did I discover that Bellamy had been a writer and that his most famous book was Looking Backward. Only then did the author’s name and his book sneak through the fog of my hangover and appear in my memory bank. I put down the paper, walked to my father’s room, opened the end table drawer, rifled through the box of letters, and finally found it: a letter from Mr. Harvey Frazier of Chicopee, Massachusetts, asking me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House. The letter had been mailed only fifteen years ago (so said the postmark on the envelope), but it was so crinkled and smudged and creased that it looked like an ancient artifact. I put the letter in my shirt pocket, put the shoe box back in its not-so-secret hiding place, then went back to the newspaper article: it said that the fire damage was minor and that the fire department said the cause of the fire was “suspicious.” I knew what that meant: they’d called my fire “suspicious,” too, even after they already knew I was the one who’d accidentally set it.

  A confession: my mother never let me read detective novels when I was a child, not even child detective novels. Once, when my mother caught me reading an Encyclopedia Brown book (it was, I believe, about the neighbor’s cat and who had caused it to go missing), she confiscated it and said, “If you want to read a mystery, read this.” She handed me Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, which, as far as I could tell, was not a mystery but instead a book about black people who weren’t, and white people who weren’t, either, and an outcast New York fingerprinter and some Europeans and Virginians in Missouri, and the only mystery as far as I was concerned was how these non-Missourians got to the state in the first place, and why they then stayed there for as long as they did.

  My point: if I’d ever read a real detective novel, about a real mystery, then maybe I’d have known what to do next. Instead I muddled through the best I could. I seemed to remember hearing, or maybe seeing on TV, that detectives drank impressively, even (especially) while on the case. So I had a drink, the last beer in the fridge, left over from the previous night’s family binge. While drinking, I thought about who might possibly have set fire to the Bellamy House. Thomas Coleman was the first person I thought of, obviously. I knew he was going to make more and greater trouble for me, and maybe this was it. He would burn down the Bellamy House and somehow blame it on me. But then again, how would he even know someone wanted me to burn down the Bellamy House in the first place? After all, the letter was here, in my shirt pocket; I patted it to make sure.

  But if not Thomas Coleman, then who? Could it have been Mr. Harvey Frazier himself? After all, he’d been waiting such a long time, and maybe he felt he couldn’t wait anymore. Or maybe it was someone else entirely, someone I obviously hadn’t yet thought of. I didn’t know, but I decided to visit Mr. Harvey Frazier and find out. How I would find out, I had no idea. Again, if I’d read the right books, I might have known how to be a proper detective. And if I hadn’t quit my job at Pioneer Packaging and had something else to do, then maybe I would have been too busy to try to be one. And if I hadn’t been all alone, if there had been someone else in the house, then maybe they would have warned me: maybe they would have told me not to go near the Edward Bellamy House, just to stay put and not go anywhere.

  But then again, maybe that’s who a detective is: someone with nothing else to do but act like a detective and with no one around to tell him not to.

  MR. HARVEY FRAZIER of Chicopee, Massachusetts, was awfully cagey for an old guy and pretended not to recognize me or my name at first. And he was old, at least eighty, and spooky, too, because he opened his door just as I was ready to knock on it, as if he were expecting me right at that moment. Even though I was startled, I managed to say, “Sir, it’s me, Sam Pulsifer,” then unclenched my knocking fist and extended my hand for Mr. Frazier to shake. He didn’t shake it; instead he said, “I was about to walk,” and then he did, right past me and down the street. He was difficult to read, all right, and suddenly I wanted not only to know whether he’d set the fire or not, but also to know him, to really know why he wanted what he wanted, to know him in a way I hadn’t known anyone else—not my parents or Anne Marie or the kids—and you could say I was making up for lost time and missed opportunities as I chased after Mr. Frazier.

  He was fast, too. For an old guy. Or maybe the speed was part of his anger at me for not responding to his letter for so long. I jogged until I caught up with him, and then said, “A walk, huh?” and when he didn’t take this conversational bait, I asked, “Where to?”

  “Store,” he said. He spoke with that serious, terse Yankee accent that always makes me feel I’ve done something wrong, and when he said “store,” he sounded so ancient and formal that I imagined he was walking to an old-fashioned family-owned store, where he was going to buy something obsolete, like dry goods, whatever dry goods might be, or maybe tobacco, maybe some good-smelling pipe tobacco. But no, scratch that; Mr. Frazier didn’t smoke and never had, I was guessing, not even before it was known to cause cancer, because tobacco was expensive or at least an expense and Mr. Frazier was a tight-ass. I knew this because Mr. Frazier was wearing brown wool pants and a brown cardigan sweater and a houndstooth sport coat that were worn down to the last thin layer of fabric. He probably hadn’t bought new clothes in thirty years, and he’d probably bought the clothes he had on at a department store whose name he wouldn’t be able to remember, nor its location, although no doubt it was in a downtown somewhere, and no doubt it had gone out of business by now. Mr. Frazier would think the idea of new clothes silly. Absolutely ridiculous. Especially if you bought clothes made out of good, durable wool, which his had probably been before he’d worn them all to hell, which was how I knew he was a tight-ass. I mean no disrespect when I say this. I was merely trying to get into his head, trying to get a bead on his whole psychology.

  “What are you getting at the store?”

  “Newspaper,” he said, and I noticed that he didn’t use articles, either, and I added that to his psychological profile. A few blocks ahead of us I could see a big chain supermarket, a Super Stop and Shop, and not a “store” at all. If this was where we were headed, I would add delusional to his profile while I had it out and was working on it.

  Another thing about Mr. Frazier’s getup: it was excessively heavy for the very warm Indian summer November day that it was, and it was also an excessively formal getup for a daily trip to the supermarket or store or wherever it was we were headed. Or maybe it was just our immediate surroundings that made it seem so. Because the neighborhood was really gone, and Mr. Frazier was the best-looking thing in it. There was garbage everywhere—bottles, egg cartons, diapers—and almost no cans to put it in. On the sidewalk someone had written in pink chalk, “Shamequa eat pussy.” It was too bad because the neighborhood had once been very pretty, you could tell. The big white houses had probably been Victorian at one point, but they had been added onto so often that they now defied architectural classification. Yes, I bet the houses had once been owned by families, good, respectable families, and they’d probably all dressed like Mr. Frazier, and the families had made sure that the houses had straight ridgepoles and well-pointed chimneys and elm trees and squirrels, and they, the families, could do this because they had jobs at Pratt and Whitney making airplanes or at the Indian motorcycle plant making Indian motorcycles or at Monarch making insurance premiums. But at some point between the wars, people started losing their jobs. It’s an old story. They lost their jobs and then couldn’t afford to keep their ridgepoles straight or their chimneys erect or their homes single-family, and the elm trees began dying and so did the people, or they moved and then died, and the houses were aluminum-sided and divided into apartments—the multiple mailboxes, the tangled and bunched
telephone and power lines, and the rusted cars parked curbside told me so. The neighborhood wasn’t Mr. Frazier’s anymore, it didn’t need him, and how could this not make him good and mad?

  Just then we passed our first two human beings: two boys sitting on the front steps of one of those multifamily homes. They were shirtless and wore shorts that were not properly shorts, because they came down well past the knee. The boys were emaciated and their chests were as concave as mine had once been, and both of them had their nipples pierced with silver hoops. I wondered if air had escaped from the boys’ chests with the piercing.

  “Good afternoon,” Mr. Frazier said as he passed them.

  “Fucked up,” one of the boys said. When he said the word “fucked,” he didn’t exactly enunciate the c and the k but slurred the word straight into the final d. The other boy didn’t say anything but just laughed and shook his head.