by Brock Clarke
“Why not?” I asked.
“They’re protected,” Morgan said. “Lions, rhinos, okapi—you can’t touch them anymore.”
“The veldt is closed, man,” G-off said.
“We’ve even tried bungee jumping,” Tigue said. “We thought it might be risky enough.”
“You tie a big rubber band around your legs,” Morgan said. “You jump. You hang there and wait until someone cuts you down. That’s it.”
“That’s it,” Tigue repeated.
“It’s humiliating,” G-off said, “hanging there like that.”
“Hey, listen,” I said. “Do you want to come inside, have a drink or something?” I was starting to get nervous, the six of us standing on the porch the way we were. In Camelot no one would have paid any attention, but my parents’ neighborhood was different, and there were always people out in their front yards, mulching their mums and tiger lilies, and listening to National Public Radio on their transistor radios while they mulched, and looking around to make sure everyone was listening to the same station. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself; I didn’t even want them to know that the guy who’d burned down the you-know-what had moved back into the neighborhood.
“Forget the drinks,” Morgan said. “We want you to tell us how to burn down houses like the one you burned down. And after we do, we can write a book about it.”
“An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England,” G-off said. “We’ve already come up with the title.”
“Why do you even need to be an arsonist to write the book?” I asked. “You could always just pretend to have burned down the houses and write the book anyway.”
“Ouch,” Morgan said. “I deserved that.”
“Come on,” Tigue said. “Be a pal.”
“That has to be some rush,” G-off said. “The fire, the smoke, the heat.” G-off looked at his hands as if they might tell him what to say next. “The fire,” he said again.
“You always seemed so happy,” Morgan said. “Happy in a simple way, like a child, only bigger.”
“Your jolly red face,” Tigue said.
“Elemental,” Morgan said. “Primal. Just like the fire you set. Please, we just need a little instruction.”
“A little push,” G-off said. “Your expertise and know-how.”
“But I told you all about it in prison,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Morgan said. “But then there’s that fire you set yesterday.”
“Two days ago,” G-off said.
“The Belmont House,” Morgan said.
“The Bellamy House,” G-off corrected.
“Shut up,” Morgan said. And then, to me: “The Bellamy House.”
“Guys …,” I said.
“Sam, buddy, we’re in a rut, a big, scary one,” Morgan said. “We’re scared. There, I said it.”
I believed him. They were in serious need, I could tell, because the two mute Ryans actually parted their lips as if preparing to speak. I even felt sorry for them, which was a switch because in prison I always admired them. Now they seemed pathetic and desperate, and I couldn’t be mad at them, not even Morgan. No, I couldn’t stay angry with them, but I knew they’d be angry with me once I told them what I was going to tell them.
“I’m sorry, guys,” I said, “but it wasn’t me who set fire to the Bellamy House.”
“Oh, come on,” Morgan said. “Who else would do it?”
“That’s a good question,” I admitted. “But whoever it was, it wasn’t me.”
“Sam—,” Morgan began, but I cut him off.
“I can’t help you,” I said.
I didn’t even listen to what came next, the chorus of threats and pleading and further, more detailed threats—I knew it all too well from Thomas Coleman’s visit to Camelot, knew exactly what the bond analysts would say and how they would say it, and so I stood there and let the white noise of their recriminations wash over me until the bond analysts exhausted themselves, broke the flying V, walked back down the front steps, and piled into a Saab, the humpbacked kind. “You’ll be sorry you didn’t help us, Sam,” Morgan yelled, and he was right: in just a few days I would be very sorry that I hadn’t helped them. As though to emphasize the point, Morgan again yelled, “You’ll be sorry,” then jammed the car into gear and drove off.
I looked at my watch. It was only eleven in the morning. There was the big, yawning day still in front of me, plenty of time for somebody else to appear out of my past. There seemed to me to be two choices: sit around the house and wait for another unwelcome surprise visitor, or leave.
10
I left on foot. For the first time since I’d moved back to my parents’ house, I allowed myself to walk the streets of Amherst, to see and be seen, to be recognized and shunned, or worse. I kept thinking of that one Birkenstock, the right one, that someone had thrown through my parents’ window those many years earlier. It was in my head that the thrower had kept the left one in his arsenal all that time, waiting for my return. At every corner I flinched, thinking I would be recognized by some large-footed hippie and brained with that left sandal.
But I wasn’t. It was strange. Block after block, I wasn’t recognized, and so I began to actively court recognition. I’d stop at houses I knew—here, the house where my childhood friend Rob Burnip lived; there, the Shumachers’, where my parents would play cribbage every Thursday—and linger on the sidewalk, waiting for someone to emerge from the house and say, Hey, it’s Sam Pulsifer. I haven’t seen you since... And so on. And people did come out of the houses, but they didn’t recognize me and I didn’t recognize them. They were simply younger versions of the people who used to live there: assistant professors, or young dot-com near-millionaires with new families who’d moved out from Boston or New York to Amherst because of the good schools and clean air and overabundance of coffee shops, or enviro trust-funders who might still have lived in Berkeley, as their parents did, if the insurance on their Volvos hadn’t been so ruinously expensive out there. The town was still old—each house and each church probably knew someone who knew Cotton Mather—but the people who lived in it were not.
Even the farmers had changed. This was Sunday, the day the farmers traditionally sold their wares. I could see the banner—AMHERST FARMERS’ MARKET—stretched over the parking lot next to the town green, and memory pulled me toward it, the way only memory can. When I was a child, the Sunday farmers’ market was run by the farmers after whom it was named, dour men who wore overalls and had chapped hands and faces and who sold their goods out of the backs of their pickup trucks. They sold butter-and-sugar corn and tomatoes mostly, but also some green beans and garlic and cucumbers and summer squash in the summer, and hard, crisp McIntosh apples in the fall and even broadleaf tobacco, big, flat boxes full of the stuff, which seemed right because the farmers smoked while they sold their goods, smoked constantly while they put the produce in paper sacks and miscounted my parents’ change. Sometimes, when my parents weren’t looking, the farmers gave me cubes of sugar probably meant for their nags, and I ate them and had some unhappy dealings with my dentist later on because of it. But even so, those were good days. Those were very, very good days, and by the time I actually reached the market I was feeling nostalgic for that world and time and would have hugged the first farmer I saw. So maybe it was a good thing there weren’t any there.
The farmers, apparently, were another part of the past that was gone. There wasn’t a pickup truck or a cigarette to be seen. The produce was organic—signs told me so—and ugly from not having been grown with the fertilizers and insecticides that make fruits and vegetables look and taste so good. It made me sad to see the apples and green beans sitting there, gnarled and unhappy, sold out of the hatchback trunks of Volkswagens, and it also made me sad to see the men and women who sold them, the obviously rich but filthy men and women who could have been the bond analysts’ kissing cousins, were their union suits and beards and fleece and flowing skirts and ratty but expensive san
dals not largely in the way. My breath left me for a while when I realized how often and fast the world changes, something not even a career in a technologically advanced field like packaging science can prepare you for. It didn’t take a genius to see that someday I, too, would be like the farmers, cast aside and obsolete and so completely lost without a world that needed me.
But here, too, no one recognized me; no one seemed to know who I was. As I left the farmers’ market, I even walked up to one woman I thought I recognized from high school, a fit woman in expensive running shoes, walking her three children in their complicated, rickshaw-style stroller with its many mesh pockets and cup holders, and I said, “Hello, I’m Sam Pulsifer.”
“That’s fantastic,” she said, and then veered around me on her fast-walking way through the farmers’ market and around the town green.
“That is fantastic,” I shouted after her. She didn’t recognize me; no one recognized me! It was like Nero coming back to Rome years later and the few singed citizens who remained not knowing who he was.
There was one more thing to do to test my anonymity, one more bit of final accounting. I walked a couple of blocks to the east, to where the Emily Dickinson House used to be. They’d cleared away the charred wreckage, of course, the yellow emergency tape, too, but they hadn’t built a new house to take the place of the old one. Instead they had planted trees, which were now decent-size eighteen-year-old birches and white pines and maples, and in the midst of this arbor there was a bronze plaque on a four-foot-high metal pole, probably explaining what had once been there and why it wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t read what was on the plaque, and if you didn’t, you probably would have thought that there was nothing there before those trees except for other, older trees. You wouldn’t have known about Emily Dickinson or her house, or about my accidentally burning it down and killing those poor Colemans.
And if you saw me standing there, chances are you wouldn’t have recognized me as the boy who, some twenty years earlier, et cetera, even though, as mentioned, I’d once achieved a good deal of local celebrity. Was this so strange? After all, I no longer looked like the boy who had done what he had done: my face was redder even than it had been then, with more wrinkles and some flab and the beginning of jowls; my hair was both higher and curlier on my head and retreating backward; plus, I’d just started growing a beard, which promised one day soon to truly cover large parts of my face. I looked nothing like a boy anymore: I looked like someone else—a grown-ass man, maybe, who had a family he loved and had hurt, and who’d been exiled because of it and quit his job and moved back in with his parents and was now ready—no, determined—to make amends. Finally I really was a grown-ass man, and it was about time. I had waited so long to become one.
And what does one do when one finally becomes a grown-ass man? Why, one goes back to the people he’s loved and lost and tells them, as the poet says, the whole truth and nothing but and then refuses to go anywhere until he is forgiven for lying in the first place. It was time. Hopefully it wasn’t past time. I turned away from the Emily Dickinson House and began to walk back to my van, parked outside my parents’ place. I was going back to Camelot, and in doing so, I had the idea that I was walking away from the past and heading toward the future and that I’d better hurry up and get there before I—like those poor farmers and their pesticided produce—was no longer needed and, if remembered at all, was remembered only as something that was bad for you.
Except then, finally, I was remembered; I was recognized and I learned some useful information when I was. I’d almost made it back through the farmers’ market when I ran into Sandy Richards, a tenth-grade biology teacher at Pioneer Regional High School, which was where my mother taught eleventh-grade English. She walked right toward me, and I couldn’t avoid her. I also couldn’t avoid noticing Sandy had aged the way my mother had not: her face was a map of wrinkles and blotches; she had begun the once-a-week home-permanent routine in order to obscure her thinning hair; and most damning, she was wearing the sort of sweat clothes people wear, not when they exercise, but when they can’t feel comfortable in anything else.
“Sam?” she said. “Sam Pulsifer?”
“That’s me, Mrs. Richards,” I admitted.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said.
“Almost,” I said.
“How have you been?”
“I’ve been OK,” I told her. After that, there was a huge, oppressive silence surrounding us, a silence made up of all the past we couldn’t speak of and all the present and future made unspeakable by the past. It was awkward. And in order to break that awkward silence, Sandy Richards said something that ended up being an important fact I learned that day.
“We’ve missed your mother,” she said.
“You have?”
“I wish she was still at school,” Sandy said. “We miss her”—and here her background in biology betrayed her and she searched long and hard for just the right word to describe what about my mother she missed—“spirit,” she finally said.
“I bet,” I said. “Now, I can’t remember. How long have you missed it?”
“It must be about six years now,” Sandy said.
“That’s right,” I said. “It must be.” And then, “You know, my mother has always been a little foggy on the details of her retirement.”
“Retirement …,” Sandy said, clearly unnerved by the conversation’s turn. Her blotches and liver spots seemed to grow and throb with her unease. “Well, I suppose she was asked to retire, sort of.”
“Oh.”
“Because of her drinking,” she said.
“Right,” I said. “Her drinking.”
“It’s a disease,” Sandy said. “Treatment, not punishment, that’s my motto.”
“That’s a very good motto to have,” I told her.
After that, we were surrounded by another silence—a more rewarding one for me, although I can’t speak for Sandy. My mother had been forcibly retired from her job six years ago but hadn’t told me, had lied to me about going to work, and not just on a Saturday, either. Why? Had she told my father? Where did my mother go every day? And how could I find out?
“Sam?” Sandy said. “Hello?” She had clearly been talking to me while I’d been having these thoughts, and I heard her voice from far away, then followed it until I left my world and returned to hers.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m back.”
“Yes, well, I have to go,” Sandy said, and then she shook her canvas tote bag full of organic vegetables, as though the vegetables were late for an appointment. “Please give my best to your mother.”
“I will,” I said. “I most definitely will.”
11
It was a triumphant walk from the farmers’ market to my parents’ house that afternoon. I had learned something, something large, but it wasn’t the learning something, in itself, that was so satisfying: it was that I would get to go home, tell my mother that I knew the truth about her “work,” and then say, Aha! It was the Aha! I was so looking forward to, so much so that I momentarily forgot my plan to go back to Camelot, to force myself and my apologies and confessions and further apologies upon Anne Marie and the kids until they took me back. The prospect of saying, Aha! to my mother had that effect on me, like amnesia. I bet I wasn’t the only one for whom this was the case. I bet it was also the triumphant Aha! and not the truth itself that had fueled all those famous literary detectives I knew not much about except their names—Philip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, Joe and Frank Hardy. I felt like yelling something celebratory on my way home, something like, Yeah! or Fuck, yeah! just like Marlowe would have yelled, just like the Hardys would have yelled, and maybe Holmes, too, although maybe that’s why he kept Watson around: to tell Holmes to simmer down and not get too far ahead of himself.
Because maybe there is no true Aha! moment for a detective, or for anybody else, either. There sure wasn’t one for me that night. I walked into my parents’ house and found them sitting
next to each other on the couch, talking to—I discovered in a few seconds—a cop. He was sitting in a chair with his back to me: he was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, the hood bunched and folded and looking like the rolls of an elephant’s skin. My parents were drinking coffee, not beer, and so I knew that something was up and they were in a bad way.
“There … he … is,” my father said. His hand shook a little as he spoke, coffee dribbling over the cup’s lip. The cop stood up and turned around. He looked exactly like the guards I remembered from prison, who were overweight and overwhelmed and, if not for their guns, exactly like the junior varsity high school football coaches they might have been. Except this one was even younger looking than the guards. He was in his midtwenties, tops. His cheeks were bright red, as if he were cold or ashamed, and he was exactly my height, too, and all in all he looked as though he might have been my much younger brother if my parents had decided to have one and then dress him in entirely neutral colors: in addition to his gray sweatshirt, he wore khaki pants and tan work boots and a tan barn jacket. “Here I am,” I said, echoing my father, my face flaring up almost automatically to match the cop’s, as though his shame were a challenge to mine.
“I’m Detective Wilson,” he said in a surprisingly high voice for such a big guy. He took my hand and shook it vigorously, making up for not ever having shaken it before. His hands were large and soft, as if made of something once hard that had melted. “I was just asking your folks a few questions.”
“About what?”
“There was a fire last night, Sam,” my mother said. Her voice was calm, perfectly calm, and her coffee-cup-holding hand was steady, but I could see that her other hand, her right one, was gripping the couch arm tight, as though the couch were a seat on an amusement ride. “Someone tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House.”
