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

by Brock Clarke

  Peter Le Clair’s address: 10 State Route 18. I found his place because of the hand-painted number 10 on the mailbox, which was bent face downward, almost off its pole, as if ashamed of its address. His trailer was the same as the others except for one thing: Peter himself was standing at the trailer’s one front window, watching as I pulled into his driveway. His face disappeared from the window, and seconds later the tan plywood door to the black plywood addition swung open and there stood Peter, five-day beard and flannel shirt and no coat, holding a gun. Except it wasn’t a gun—my eyes and assumptions were playing tricks on me—it was a plunger (Peter had real plumbing problems, in addition to his other problems). Still, Peter looked mighty threatening. He was big, much taller than six feet, with a chest that was full barreled to my half. There was a doghouse in front of the trailer, right next to my minivan, and a dog howled from inside it but didn’t come out. I wished I were in the doghouse with the dog, who knew Peter better than I did and could probably give me a few pointers about how to please its master. Or maybe the dog was trying to do just that, through its howling, which was loud and echoing from inside the doghouse. Go away, it might have been howling. Go away, go away.

  But I couldn’t go away. For one thing, it was only six o’clock, and I had to stick around until at least midnight to find out who had made that phone call and why. And for another, I had nowhere else to go, nothing left to do. Perhaps Peter’s trailer in Franconia was as close to home as I was going to get. Perhaps, for a man like me, there was no longer any such thing as a true home and so I couldn’t be picky, couldn’t just sit in the van and refuse to come out because the homes were depressing and their inhabitants were large and menacing. Yes, I needed to get out of the van. Now that I knew that, the dog’s howling took on a different meaning, and instead of Go away, go away, it was Get out of the van, get out of the van. I got out of the van.

  Boy, it was cold. The sort of heart-clutching cold where after being out in it for a second, you can’t bear another one. Even Peter and his plunger were less frightening than the cold. Plus, it was still snowing hard and I didn’t have a hat, and if I stayed out there much longer, I’d be buried like the wrecked vehicles in the yard. There were three of them, to the left of the doghouse; I could see their antennas sticking out of the snow.

  “Mr. Le Clair, I’m Sam Pulsifer,” I said, walking up to him. And then—not reminding him of who I was or of the letter he’d sent me who knows how many years ago or even waiting for a response—I said, “Let’s go inside, what do you say? My teeth are chattering right out of my gums, they’re so cold.” And with that, I kept walking, right past him and into the trailer, not because I was brave but because the fear had frozen inside me. It was that cold.

  It was warmer in the trailer. There were boots everywhere, and coats, lined flannel shirts, and hooded sweatshirts hung on hooks and off the backs of chairs and even off the back of the TV, keeping it warm. It was an enormous, old TV. No remote control ever had or ever would control it. There were heavy tattered rugs everywhere, too—there was even one nailed to the living room wall, like an animal’s hide—rugs with not much color in them (mostly brown and dark red), and you knew someone’s grandmother had labored over them for a year and a day. Then there were the books: the living room—its furniture, its floor—was covered with a layer of books, like dust. The books were all from some library—I could see the telltale laminated tag on the spines. I looked down, lifted my left foot, and saw I’d been standing on a copy of Ethan Frome, a book every eighth grader in Massachusetts since Edith Wharton had written it had been required to read and then wonder why. I kicked the novel away from me, something I’d been wanting to do for twenty-six years, and in doing so I imagined I was striking a blow on behalf of its many unwilling, barely pubescent readers. There were so many library books that I wondered if Peter had put the local public library out of business and whether his living room hadn’t become the real library instead. I say the living room, but in addition to being the library and the living room, it was also the TV room and the dining room. There was a separate kitchen, which was only a little bigger than the TV, and between the two rooms was the most important appliance in the house: the woodstove. The stove was really going, high and hot, and it was so dry in there that your sinuses couldn’t help but go screwy. My face, which was still raging from the cold outside, was no less red now that I was inside, and the effect of the extreme heat wasn’t much different from that of the extreme cold.

  The door slammed and rattled nervously in its frame. I turned around. Peter was right behind me, standing at the mouth of the room. He was still holding the plunger—he really seemed attached to it—and still hadn’t said anything. My face felt even redder, just looking at how his wasn’t. Boy, he was white, like the snow, but much paler and not so pure. Peter had tapped into some primordial whiteness, like a prehistoric fish in a cave, except wearing flannel and well over six feet tall. I was scared of him, always had been. There were guys like him in my high school, country guys with big scarred hands, brooding hulks who didn’t say much and didn’t need to. They seemed older, more serious than me, more manlike, and they also seemed to have properties and qualities and things that I did not, even when they didn’t have much, which Peter obviously didn’t. I could see rolled-up newspapers and towels shoved into the holes at the bottom of the trailer, where the elements had rusted through the metal.

  “That’s much better,” I said, rubbing my hands together to indicate the improvement of my blood circulation. “Whew.” Peter still didn’t say anything, and now that I was warmer, I was feeling even more afraid, and so to calm my nerves and butter up my host, I said, “That’s a good fire. I mean it. Really wonderful heat.”

  Still no response. I suddenly remembered this one time in high school, when I’d finished an apple and thrown it in the trash can from a great distance, or tried to. Instead I’d hit this dairy farmer’s son named Kevin. I was thirteen and Kevin was thirteen, but it seemed as if we were from different planets, his the bigger one populated by a warrior race, and he charged in my direction when he realized who had thrown the apple. Once he got to me, he stared the way Peter was staring now, and I babbled how sorry I was and that it was an accident and what a poor shot I was in general (you could ask the gym coach), and so on and on out of nervousness and terror until Kevin punched me in the right cheek and knocked me down. I assumed he punched me because I’d hit him with the apple, but I found out later, from reliable sources, that he punched me because I just wouldn’t stop talking. I couldn’t stop talking with Peter, either, which just shows that history repeats itself whether you know it or not.

  “Le Clair,” I said. “Is that French? I mean French Canadian? From Quebec?”

  Nothing. If it were possible to slip out of silence into deeper silence, then Peter did so. His eyes, which were pale blue and already set back, receded even further into his face. His forehead and chin jutted out at me like weapons.

  “Because I went there on my honeymoon,” I said, “with my wife, Anne Marie. We’re having some troubles, but I hope we can work them out, but it’s too complicated to go into right now. I lied to her, but she thinks I lied to her about something I didn’t, but I can’t tell her that, because the actual lie is worse than the lie she thinks I told. Although she might be thinking I’m lying about something else entirely now. See, complicated. To Quebec, though, that’s where we went on our honeymoon, even though I didn’t speak French. Still don’t. I’ve kind of always regretted not learning another language, although I have all these other regrets, too, to keep it company. I bet you do, though. Speak French, that is. Although maybe not. Did you ever learn it in school? I hear it helps to live in the actual country. Did you ever live in the actual country? Although maybe your parents taught it to you.”

  Still nothing. I could hear the dog howling outside, and again I wished I were with the dog in the doghouse and not in the trailer with Peter, because at least the dog wasn’t mute and had so
mething to say.

  “What’s your dog’s name?” I asked him. “How old is he? Or she? I’ve never had a dog. Or a cat. No pets at all. Is your dog neutered? Spayed?” And so on, until I began to get sick of myself and my babbling. Then I changed my mind and got sick of him, Peter, and it, his silence, and then I got sick of stoic men in general. Did they not have anything to say, these stoic men? Did they have plenty to say but not the right things, or not even the ability to say those wrong things the right way? Well, so what. Had that ever stopped me? Did people not know that talking was good for you, like medicine or juice? Had someone told Peter that you had to be silent and gloomy to be a man? Was that what reading about mopey, inarticulate Ethan Frome had taught him? (I’d already kicked the book out of my kicking range, but I kicked it again, in my mind, for good measure.) I was so sick of these silent men, it seemed as if I’d been around them my entire life: not enjoying the silence, and not wanting it, either. Their silence was like an ugly hat someone had told them they had to wear, and so they did, but bitterly. I almost missed Thomas Coleman, who could at least talk and wasn’t shy about doing so, even if the stuff he said was hurtful and sinister and some of it out-and-out deceitful. And of course he was saying this stuff to my wife, and—now that I thought about it—maybe he was with her right now. Suddenly I was sick of Thomas, too, and maybe it wasn’t just that I was sick of silent men but of all men, which was troubling, since I counted myself one of them.

  “Listen,” I said. “Like I told you earlier, I’m Sam Pulsifer. I need to know now. Are you Peter Le Clair? Are you the Peter Le Clair who wrote me years ago, asking me to burn down the Robert Frost Place?”

  Peter didn’t put down his plunger at this news, and he didn’t smile or say anything. But he did shrug. It was, as I learned over the next several hours, Peter’s favorite gesture, one probably used to communicate knowingness, confusion, sleepiness, hunger, loyalty, drunkenness, impatience, empathy, sexual longing. It was an economical gesture, and I admired it so much that I thought about doing it myself right back at him. But then I remembered that time in prison when I said, “I’m a grown-ass man,” after playing basketball, and Terrell beat me; there were no prison guards to protect me this time. So I didn’t shrug. But I wanted to, and I bet, if given a chance, the mimicry would have done our relationship a lot of good. Because it seems to me that the world would be a nicer, more empathetic place in which to live if we were only allowed to mimic each other without the one being mimicked taking offense and threatening violence.

  “You shrugged,” I said. “Does that mean yes?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice rough but a little higher than I expected, like a rugged Tweety Bird. “I am Peter Le Clair.”

  Well, now we were having a regular conversation—we both sat down, as if settling into something—and I certainly didn’t want to lose its thread. So I kept the questions simple so that we could both follow them.

  “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “Yes,” Peter replied, and then, before I could respond, he said, “I want you to burn down that house. But I can’t pay you anything.” When he said this, his eyes dropped to his boots and then rose up to my eyes, as if his shame were having an internal struggle with his pride. I felt for Peter and wanted to tell him that the struggle wasn’t just part of his personal condition; it was the human condition, and it was my condition, too. Maybe that’s why my face was so red. I wanted to tell him all this, but I also didn’t want to get off the topic, which is my weakness, the way not speaking was his.

  “Can’t pay me anything,” I said, just to buy myself some time to think and catch up. “Did you get a phone call saying something about burning down the Robert Frost Place?” I was also thinking about the phone call I’d gotten back in Amherst. It wasn’t Peter’s voice, I knew that now, but maybe Peter had received a phone call, too.

  Except he hadn’t. “No phone call,” he said. “No phone.” Then he shrugged again. It was a definitive shrug, one that told me there wasn’t anything else to say about the phone call. So I didn’t say anything and instead silently took stock of what I now knew or thought I knew. Peter hadn’t gotten a phone call; I had, but the caller hadn’t asked anyone for money to burn down the Robert Frost Place, assuming that’s what he planned on doing. The person who’d tried to burn down the Mark Twain House had asked for money but had done so in a letter, not over the phone, and most likely wasn’t a man and so most likely had nothing to do with whomever I was supposed to meet at midnight at the Robert Frost Place. And none of these people seemed to have anything, necessarily, to do with whoever had tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House. I felt panicked, taking account of all the things I didn’t know, the same kind of panic a schoolchild feels when picking up a pencil to take a test for which he is unprepared. And as every schoolchild knows, panic is to the bladder what love or hate or exercise is to the heart.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Peter, and then wandered to the left, down the trailer’s only visible hall. The bathroom was the first door to the left and was interesting. There were appliances and fixtures everywhere—pipes and tubes of joint compound and fractured tile and shower rods and curtains and a medicine cabinet with no door. And as on Noah’s boat, there were two of each of the most necessary items: two sinks (one fixed into the wall and one on the floor) and two ashtrays and two towels and two towel racks and two toilets, a blue one and a yellow one. Now Peter’s plunger made a little more sense. But in my hurry I couldn’t stop to tell which toilet I was supposed to use, so I used the blue one in honor of the boy I’d once been and still was, essentially. When I was done, I left the bathroom in a hurry and without checking to see whether it was the right, working toilet. Because if it was, great, and if it wasn’t, well, I didn’t really want to know.

  “Can’t pay you,” Peter repeated as soon as I returned to the living room. I empathized: his lack of money weighed heavily on him and he needed relief from it, his poverty being to his vessel what my pee had just been to mine.

  “Don’t worry about the money,” I said. “What do you say we drive over to the Robert Frost Place and see what we’re dealing with.”

  “The truck’s busted,” he said.

  “Which one?”

  “All of them,” he said. “We’ll take your van. Let’s go.”

  With that, he started shoving clothes at me—a once-white thermal shirt, now dirty to the point of being yellow; a lined flannel shirt; a big, bulging, blue parka that might have looked good on the Michelin Man; a black Ski-Doo ski hat with an optimistic yellow tassel that smelled as though a month earlier the dog had put on the hat before taking a dip in kerosene. Peter had a point. If we were going outside, then I’d better dress for it. It was dark by now and probably even colder than it had been, and all I had on was what I always wore: khaki pants with too many pleats, which bunched up unattractively when I sat, a pair of running sneakers, and a gray fleece pullover, and they weren’t warm enough, even, for tropical Massachusetts. So I put on the clothes Peter gave me, right over my own. It was like adding another layer of skin, and then another. Even Peter was putting on a few extra layers of flannel and then a big hooded parka over the extra layers, and at one point, after all the piling on of clothes was finished, we turned to each other as if to say, Ta-da! There we were, in our beards and flannel, like a couple of girls dressing side by side for our big night out. It was unlikely and sweet, the way only unlikely things can be.

  “Ready?” he asked. I was and said so. Peter threw the plunger into the corner of the room and then leaned over the couch. There was a dog curled up there, among the blankets; I assumed it was the same dog that had been howling from its doghouse earlier. Peter had obviously let him inside while I was in the bathroom. You could barely see the dog—it was, like everything else in the trailer, somewhere between brown and deep red—but you could hear it sigh happily when Peter placed his hand on its head and left it there for a moment, and this sound filled me with sadness of the
worst, self-pitying kind. How was it that this mottled pooch had these most precious things—the love and affectionate touch of another, a couch to lie on, a place (two places) to call home—and I did not? Was this what it had come to? Was I lower and less fortunate than a dog? Was there a sadder person in New England, in the history of New England? Would even sad-sack Ethan Frome look at me and feel lucky to at least have his piss-poor land, his failing farm, his drafty house, his shrewish wife, his impossible true love, his barely functional vocabulary? Would even Ethan Frome be glad he wasn’t me? Yes, the self-pity was thick in the air; the room was full of it, the way I had been full of pee a few minutes earlier. Maybe that’s what the other toilet had been for. It was an interesting idea—having a place in which to deposit your self-pity—and it made me feel better, for a second, for having thought it.

  Then whoosh, we went out through the cold and the snow and into the van. I can’t remember anything about it except that at first it wasn’t any warmer inside the van than out. Oh, was it cold! I can’t emphasize that enough. It was the kind of cold that makes you insane and single minded, thinking only about how to get warmer, warmer, warmer. The heater was so slow in its heating, and to keep myself from thinking about how cold I was, I concentrated on Peter’s directions to turn this way and that, and on the snow in the headlights, swirling and bouncing like molecules, and outside the snow the deep, deep darkness. Remembering it now, I realize it was nice: the world felt small and homey, just me and Peter and the snow and the darkness and the truck and the heat—because here it finally came, really blasting at us, just in time for me to pull up in front of the Robert Frost Place. The house was your standard old white farmhouse—the sort where you wouldn’t be able to keep the hornets out during the summer, or the heat in during the winter—and the only things truly notable about it were that it hadn’t been burned down yet, it was ringed by parked cars, and it was lit up like Christmas. Every light in the house must have been on, and even Mr. Frost must have been able to see it from his new and more permanent home in the Great Beyond.