by Brock Clarke
“Here you go,” he said, and then handed me his badge, which was embedded in a slim wallet. The badge was gold and had some sort of raised seal or crest, and on the crest was some writing that was unreadable in the light and fog. Still, I pretended to examine it closely, as if I knew the difference between a real badge and a fake one. On the wallet flap opposite his badge was an ID with his picture, and his name, Robert Wilson, and his title: detective, Arson Unit, State of Massachusetts Fire Division. The ID looked real enough: I held it up to the streetlight and saw official-looking watermarks and holograms.
“You’re a fireman,” I said.
“I’m a cop,” he said with a little too much force, letting me know exactly what nerve was exposed and how much it didn’t like to be hit.
“OK,” I said, and handed him back the badge. Detective Wilson took it and tucked it inside his jacket pocket. When he did so, his jacket popped open and came away from his torso and I could see his shoulder holster and the butt of his gun sticking out of it. So even if he wasn’t a cop, he was a fireman with a gun, which I figured was pretty close to the same thing.
“Did you know that someone tried to burn down the Mark Twain House last night?” he asked.
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“I didn’t think it was,” he said, although the knowing smile on his face said that he did in fact think I’d set the fire, which made me add, “It wasn’t me who set fire to the Edward Bellamy House, either,” for unnecessary good measure.
“I didn’t think it was,” he said again, this time with even less sincerity. He put his left hand in his sport coat pockets and tapped a happy beat through the lining and on his thigh.
“Sure you didn’t,” I said. “That’s why you were following me here.”
“Maybe I wasn’t following only you,” he said. “Maybe I was following your mother, too.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Maybe I have my reasons,” he said, and then waited for me to ask the obvious question, which I did.
“What are your reasons?” I asked. “Why are you following my mother?”
“The night someone tried to set fire to the Edward Bellamy House,” he said, “you were at your parents’ house, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Were they there, too?” he asked, hooking his thumb in the direction of my mother sitting in her illuminated window. “Was your mother there that night?”
“Of course she was,” I said. But was she? Had my mother been home, after all? “Where else would she have been?” I said this to myself more than to anyone else, but of course I also said it out loud, thereby losing my sole rights to it.
“Maybe she was here,” Detective Wilson said. “Maybe she was somewhere else. Either way, I’ll find out.” He sounded confident, which scared me. There is nothing scarier to those who lack confidence than those who are full of it. And so I said something right then, something that in the end, and once again, I probably shouldn’t have and would end up regretting.
“I know who tried to set fire to the Mark Twain House,” I said.
“You do?” Detective Wilson said. His confidence didn’t disappear entirely right then, but it did seem as though I’d diluted it some.
“Yes,” I said. “His name is Thomas Coleman. He probably set fire to the Edward Bellamy House, too. I don’t know where he lives, but you can probably find him at my house in Camelot.”
“Your house in Camelot,” he repeated.
“One thirteen Hyannisport Way,” I said.
“Why would this guy be at your house?”
“He’s sleeping with my wife,” I said, admitting this to myself and to someone else for the first time. “Or trying to.”
What was Detective Wilson’s response to this news? It was unexpected. He didn’t ask me any questions, didn’t wonder who this Thomas Coleman was or why he would want to burn down these houses or how I knew he had tried to do so. Detective Wilson didn’t ask me any questions at all. He simply turned away from me, walked over to his car, opened the driver’s side door, and climbed in.
“Wait,” I said, walking around to his side of the car. Detective Wilson’s face looked as confused as it had appeared confident a few moments earlier; his face looked younger, too, which is to say that confidence ages you, but confusion keeps you young, the way a positive outlook and Swedish facial creams are supposed to but never do. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to your house,” he said, “to talk to your wife and this Thomas Coleman.”
“Just because I said so?” I asked. Was being a stool pigeon this easy? Who knew that all you had to do was give voice to your suspicions and blame someone else to get such quick results? “Just like that?”
“Yes, Sam,” he said. “Just like that. But you’d better not be lying. You better not be jerking me around.”
“I’m not,” I assured him, even though I was the person who really needed reassuring. Thomas Coleman had been my number one suspect, my sole suspect, really. I had known with all my heart that he was the one who’d set the fires; I had known he was the guilty one. And then I had gone ahead and said so, to Detective Wilson, and then immediately afterward I had doubts, big ones. I’d said guilty, and immediately Thomas Coleman had seemed as if he might be innocent. I wondered whether, if I said innocent, he might seem guilty again. But it was too late to say that, so instead I asked, “But aren’t you going to ask my mother where she was last night before you go? Aren’t you going to ask her where she was the night of the Bellamy House fire, too?” I said this not because I wanted him to ask her that, but because Detective Wilson—with his badge and ID and gun and coffee—was seeming more and more like a real detective, and I wanted to know what a real detective might ask, and when, and of whom.
“Not now,” he said. “Besides, I know where I can find her.” With that, Detective Wilson rolled up his window and peeled out into the foggy night, leaving behind the squeal of his tires and the smell of his exhaust and this lesson: being a real detective meant knowing where you could find people. I knew now where I could find my mother. But why was she there? Was this her apartment? Was she staying with someone else? Was this her home? Was she in the apartment and not in our house the night of the Edward Bellamy House fire, and last night, too? Was she somewhere besides the apartment? I patted my coat pocket and felt the two letters: the one from Mincher asking me to burn down the Mark Twain House, and the other, anonymous and typed, asking Mincher for three thousand dollars to do the burning. The letter had no postmark, so that meant that someone had driven there, probably from close by. But why a letter in the first place? Why not just call Mincher and pretend to be me on the phone? The only answer was that whoever had typed and delivered the letter couldn’t pretend to be me on the telephone. Any man could pretend to be me on the telephone, but a woman could not. And what woman would want to pretend to be me? I really only knew two women in this world: one of them was in Camelot, and the other was right in front of me, seeming less like the mother I thought I knew, and more and more like someone I didn’t know at all.
“Oh, Mom,” I said, softly. My mother was still sitting at her window, not reading, not looking out the window at me, either: as far as I could tell, she was simply staring into space.
At that moment, the book-group wizards and witches emerged from the building, each of them holding their copy of the book away from their body, as though it were a divining rod leading them directly to their children’s heart of hearts. They looked so happy, overjoyed, the way people are when they think they’ve found the answer to a particularly difficult question. Each of them felt compelled to say their hearty “Hello’s” and “Good evening’s” to me and then commenced to talk about the fog and how it was a very English fog, and then there was a long, sincere discussion about how very magical fog was and how they’d be sure to wake up their kids when they got home to show them the fog and then find a passage in the book featuring fog, and then they’d compare th
e literary fog and the meteorological fog, and in the middle of all this I saw, peripherally, a flicker of light. I turned away from the witches and wizards and toward my mother’s apartment window; it was now completely dark, and I couldn’t see my mother anywhere. I must have stared at the window for five, ten, fifteen minutes. The witches and wizards got into their vehicles and drove away into the night, and still I stood there, waiting for my mother to turn her light back on, waiting for her to emerge from the building, waiting for something. But this is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide (which, as you’ve figured out by now, is also a detective’s guide, a son’s guide, a guide that is as specific or generic as you and I need it to be): you can wait only so long for a blackened window to be illuminated. And when you start to wonder whether the window will ever be illuminated again, and whether you were seeing what and who you thought you were seeing when it was lit, then you’ve waited too long, and the best thing is just to go home. So I just went home.
15
It should be said at this point that I knew all along that my father was a drunk and hadn’t had a stroke at all. I must have known that; how could I not have known that? Of course I knew that. I was just pretending to believe that my father had had a stroke. Because we all know that to be a son is to lie to yourself about your father. But once you start telling yourself the truth, does that mean you are no longer a son, and he is no longer your father? And then what are you? And what is he?
The truth was that my father was a drunk, and there had been a party at my parents’ house. It must have ended not long before I got home for the second time that night. The place was an even bigger wreck than before. There were ashtrays everywhere and they were full to overflowing, and so, rather than empty the ashtrays, the smokers had used every available surface—flat and concave, highly flammable and less highly flammable—to deposit their ashes. The living room looked postvolcanic. On the coffee table was a line of juice glasses, and inside each glass were the watery remnants of something dark and evil, something you were no doubt supposed to drink all at once or not at all. On the couch, someone had left behind the sort of visor you might see a card dealer or a cub reporter wearing in an old movie. On the floor between the couch and the coffee table, there was a translucent gasoline funnel. I picked it up and saw a long piece of white hose or tubing dangling suggestively from the bottom, and I put it down again. The exercise bike had been thrown in the corner of the room, on its side; one pedal was pointed ceilingward and still spinning. The television was on, but the sound was not; it was a program devoted to heart surgery, and they kept showing close-up shots of open and then closed chest wounds. There was music playing loudly, so loudly I couldn’t tell what it was or where it was coming from, especially since my parents, to my knowledge, didn’t own a stereo. I followed the noise through the living room and into my father’s bedroom. The bed was as big a disaster as the rest of the house: sheets were draped over the chair, the end table, the headboard, everywhere but the bed itself. There was a boom box on the floor, vibrating from its own noise. Over the crash of guitar and bass, I could hear the singer ask obscurely, “Does anyone have a cannon?” I turned off the boom box and heard normal human voices coming from the kitchen. I followed them. My father was sitting at the kitchen table, and across from him was another man, someone I’d never seen before. In between them, on the table, was the shoe box, and scattered around the table were the letters. I missed my mother right then, badly, the way you miss one parent when the other one isn’t doing what he’s supposed to.
“I know where Mom is,” I said to my father, but he didn’t hear me, or pretended not to. The other man did hear me, though; he looked up and smiled at me in the vacant, unperturbed fashion of the truly punchy. He was approximately my father’s age, maybe a little older, was wearing a beat-up gray corduroy blazer, and had a nose that might have been Rudolph’s had Rudolph been a boxer—a bad one. There were two forty-ounce Knickerbockers on the table in front of them, and empties scattered around the kitchen.
“Now, this,” my father was saying, “this is one of my favorites. It’s from a man in Leominster who wanted my son to burn down the Ralph Waldo Emerson House because he had been named Waldo, after Emerson, and no one had ever let him forget what a stupid name he had.” I, too, remembered the letter: the letter writer had said that he probably should have wanted me to burn down his parents’ house, too, for naming him Waldo in the first place, except they were dead and he was now living in their house and the mortgage was paid, free and clear, and if I burned it down, he’d have to pay rent somewhere else. My father handed the letter to the man across the table, and the man looked at it blankly, as if it were a picture of people he didn’t know; then he put it on the table. “And this letter,” my father went on, “is from a woman who wanted my son to burn down Herman Melville’s house in Pittsfield …” And so on. What matters here was not only what my father said, but how he said it. He slurred slightly when he spoke, but there was nothing halting or stroke damaged about his speech. I heard and saw and understood this clearly now. I was seeing my father, not by himself or with my mother, but in his element, and this is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: seeing your father in his element will make you feel sad. I had been sad when I thought my father had had a stroke and was partially paralyzed, but at least then he could be considered heroic. This was a different kind of sadness, a deeper one, a sadness you feel when you discover that the person you love is not the person you thought you were loving. Would I wake up the next morning and find my father sad in a totally different way? How many different kinds of sadness were there in the world, anyway?
“But this is odd,” my father was saying, although the man across the table from him wasn’t exactly listening anymore: his hand was curled around the beer can, but his eyes were closed and his neck was fighting a losing battle to keep his head from crashing to the table. “There seem to be some letters missing.” My father gathered all the letters, stacked them, and then began flipping through them, his lips moving as he took inventory. He finished the inventory, then took another one. The man’s head fell to the table with a dull thunk, but my father didn’t notice. Perhaps not wanting to be further ignored, the man got up from the table, a lump already formed on his forehead, and left the room and then the house: I could hear the front door open and then shut. My father didn’t notice any of that, either. “I just don’t understand,” he said.
“Which letters are missing?” I asked him gently, because as far as I could tell, he wasn’t aware of me standing there, and I didn’t want to scare him. Except he didn’t seem surprised at all to hear my voice. Maybe he’d known I was there the whole time, or maybe he didn’t care.
“The Edward Bellamy House letter, of course,” he said. “But there are six other letters missing, too.”
“What are they?” I asked. I knew full well that the Mark Twain House letter was missing, since it was in my pocket. Sure enough, my father named it, and then added, “But then there are five others that are missing, too. I just can’t figure out which ones.”
“How do you know that many are missing, then?”
He looked at me with pity. “You were sent one hundred and thirty-seven letters. There are only one hundred and thirty letters here.” He knocked himself on the head, as though to dislodge the forgotten names.
“Did you know that someone tried to burn down the Mark Twain House last night?” I asked.
“Yes,” my father said. He turned to look at me for the first time, although his face was empty of anything except worry and bafflement. “That’s how I can remember the Mark Twain House letter, because I knew someone had tried to burn it down. Your mother told me. She also told me that whoever did it didn’t do a very thorough job.”
“How did she know that?” I asked him.
“I suppose she read it in the paper,” he said. “How did you know it?”
“I read it in the newspaper, too,” I said, which was the trut
h, or part of it. And then: “Dad, I saw Mom leave the house earlier.”
“Yes, she was here,” my father said, starting to count the letters again. “And then she left.”
“She didn’t look happy,” I said.
“There was a bit of a mix-up,” my father said. “I have one of these parties every Tuesday. Your mother tolerates the parties as long as she knows when they are so she won’t be around. That’s why they’re every Tuesday.”
“Today is Monday,” I said.
“That was the mix-up,” he admitted. “I thought it was Tuesday. So I called everyone and said, ‘Where are you? Get over here.’”
“Tell me about the parties, Dad,” I said, although I could picture them pretty well already. They would be populated by men like the old, red-nosed guy who’d earlier bounced his head off the kitchen table, men whose natural and sole habitat was the college town: failed or failing graduate students, drunk professors or book editors like my father, all of them wearing corduroy jackets in various stages of disrepair. These guys had once had their fields—Victorian literature, tropical botany, the cultural import of the manual typewriter—but one day they discovered that they didn’t like their fields anymore, not as much as they liked to drink, anyway. And the only thing they liked as much as drinking was oddity, which made sense, since they were both odd and drunks themselves. My father and his free booze and his son the arsonist and murderer and all those letters fit both those bills. I could picture all of them, every Tuesday, showing up at my parents’ house and drinking their booze and listening to my father read those letters until they’d exhausted most of the liquor and my father had exhausted most of their curiosity and they drifted away, until there was only one red-nosed guy left, always the drunkest one, the one with nobody to see and nowhere to go and nothing to do except sit at the kitchen table and drink the last Knickerbocker and listen to my father drone on and on and on about the letters, the letters, the letters, the way he’d talked to so many drunks before. I knew this without my father telling me, even though he did, in so many words.
