by Brock Clarke
I don’t know how long we sat there like that: it could have been a minute, it could have been an hour. Finally Peter grabbed the back of my (his) jacket and pulled me backward. I refused to look at him, so he had to grab my chin and turn my head and attention in his direction. Peter was angry, that was clear. I assumed he was angry at me: not only had I made a fool of myself, but by telling my story I’d probably drawn some unwanted attention to myself, and to him and his letter, and to what he wanted me to do. I hung my head again, in shame; and again he put his hand to my chin and raised it up, but gently, surprisingly gently.
“You understand now why I hate that guy?”
“I do,” I said. Because I thought I did.
“OK?” Peter asked, then shrugged. I knew he was asking me if I’d burn the house down for him, for free; I knew that. I had no intention of doing what he wanted, but—and this is just one of the many things of which I’m ashamed—I was so grateful that he wasn’t angry that I decided to play along, playing along being the thing we do when it’s too difficult to do its opposite and just tell the truth.
“OK,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Where to?”
“The bar,” Peter said.
“Good idea,” I said. We got up and left the house, but before I did, I glanced back at the Writer-in-Residence. He was still sitting in his chair, still drinking his Beam. There was still a long line of people holding books for him to sign. The Director was still hovering over him for God knows what reason. But the Writer-in-Residence wasn’t looking at the Director or his audience or their copies of his books. No, he was looking at us, longingly, as we walked out the door, and who knows: maybe he was thinking that we were real people after all.
18
The bar was a gray cinder block rancher with a black plywood entrance on the front and not to the side as on Peter’s trailer. But they were from the same lowborn family of buildings. There were neon beer lights in the windows, and around the windows were flickering Christmas lights, but the lights were fighting a losing battle; half of them were out and dead. They’d probably been left up all year. There was no sign naming the place as this bar or that tavern, as if no name were sufficiently bad. The parking lot was full, the trucks—they were almost all trucks—parked at angry, confrontational angles, as if preparing themselves for a demolition derby or having just finished one. It was the sort of bar that gave one pause, especially if the one was someone like me, who’d never been in a bar like this before. True, I’d been to plenty of “bar and grille’s”: there were dozens of them near our house in Camelot. But they were the sort of places that provided crayons for the kids, and special place mats for them to deface, and stern warnings on the menu not to let the kids draw on anything but the place mats, and they were also the kind of places that issued even sterner warnings—on the place mats, on the walls, on the waitresses’ and waiters’ uniforms, everywhere—forbidding you to smoke or else, and in these ways the “bar and grille” seemed exactly like the world outside the “bar and grille” except with more rules and fewer ways to break them.
This place was different, and after entering it I understood immediately why bars exist and why people like to drink in them: if a “bar and grille” reminded you of all the things you shouldn’t do, then a real bar gave you the idea that there was nothing you couldn’t do, and no consequences to face if you did do it. My first impression of the place was wrong; it wasn’t depressing at all. For one thing, it was better-looking inside than out. The bar floor was pine, with a bowling-alley slickness to it. Overhead there was a low drop ceiling with flaking acoustical tiles that I could touch and did, which gave me a nice sense of accomplishment. For another, there was Peter, standing next to the men’s room, selling drugs—dime bags, he called them, ten-dollar plastic bags of marijuana—to guys who looked a lot like him but happier, more talkative. For that matter, Peter in the bar seemed a happier and more talkative version of Peter, too, and that’s why I say the bar wasn’t depressing. Being in it seemed to free Peter. Or maybe it was the pot, much of which he seemed to deal to himself. Or maybe it was that I’d agreed to do what I in fact had no intention of doing. Right when we first got to the bar, Peter pointed at me, said, “That’s him,” and made introductions all around. There was Barry, Mick, Shoe, and Lyle. Of course, I didn’t get their names straight at the time, but they didn’t seem to mind and made me feel right at home. At one point, Peter even put his arm around me and said, “We need you, bud,” which nearly made me cry and made me feel as though I needed them as much as they needed me.
But then again, it might have been the booze making me feel that way. Peter bought me shot after shot of bourbon, and soon I started calling myself by the wrong name, and this got all of them laughing good and hard, which made me glad, so glad that I drank some more. I must have done at least a good baker’s dozen of shots. After a point, I have no memory of any real conversation or of time passing, although it must have, because I found myself sitting on a stool at the horseshoe bar, the guys were nowhere to be seen, and there was a band playing.
There was no stage in the bar, but in one corner there was a band playing anyway, four guys—two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer—with long, stringy hair peeking out from under their ski hats, nodding their heads violently in time to a song that seemed to have no time. The bass was so loud it wasn’t just a sound but also a feeling coming up through the floor, up into me, through my groin, my heart, my throat. The sound pulled me toward the band, although first I got another shot of bourbon from the bartender.
I took my drink and went and stood in front of the band. I didn’t recognize the song they were playing, but when it ended, someone yelled out, “Creedence!” This seemed to encourage the guys in the band, because they launched into another song, a favorite apparently, and the dance floor got crowded—women dancing with men, women with women, men without partners stomping their feet and singing into their beer bottles—and before I knew it, I was dancing, too.
Yes, I was dancing, and immediately I remembered why I hadn’t danced in a long time. Because when I dance, I dream, or at least I remember, which for me is exactly the same as dreaming. So the band launched into Creedence, if that’s what it was, and I started stomping my feet and swinging my arms a little, and just like that, I started dreaming about the last time I’d danced, at my wedding, with Anne Marie. It was our wedding song, and I don’t remember what it was—another thing of which I’m ashamed—but I had the impression it had been many other people’s wedding song as well. I noticed many of the older married guests go soft in the eyes and clasp hands. It felt good to be in the company of so many similarly and successfully betrothed, and for that matter it felt good to have my beautiful girl in my arms, my beautiful, tall girl, who’d worn low-heeled shoes so that she wouldn’t be too much taller than I was, my beautiful, tall, thoughtful girl, who smelled like the cake we’d just cut. All was well except that we were dancing, and I started remembering and dreaming that time, too, remembering and dreaming about my parents, who weren’t at the wedding, of course, because I hadn’t told them about it.
Specifically I was remembering the time when I spied on my mother and father dancing. This was a year after my father had returned from his exile, and it was certainly the first time I’d seen them dance. It might have been the first time I’d seen them even touch since he’d returned. They were dancing in the front entryway. I was watching from the staircase (I was supposed to have been in bed, but I’d heard the music—it was Benny Goodman, plus his big band, I remember that—and was spying). It was some highly conflicted dancing, at least on my mother’s part. One moment, her eyes were closed, her head on my father’s shoulder as if asleep and at peace; the next, her eyes were sprung open and angry, her palms against my father’s chest and pushing him away, and the only thing holding her to my father was my father. He wouldn’t let go, and she kept saying, “I don’t know, I just don’t know,” and he kept
saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh God, I’m so sorry.” Then she’d relax for a while, only to tense up again eventually, and so on. I felt so sad for these confused parents of mine and had the distinct impression that love and marriage and dancing were like being at war with your better judgment. Watching my parents dance made loneliness look happy and relaxing by comparison, and so I went up to my room and went to bed. When I was dancing with Anne Marie at our wedding, I was remembering all this, and at the moment when I remembered going to bed and being alone, happily so, I let go of Anne Marie and took a step to the side as if making a break for it. The guests gasped, Anne Marie grabbed me, I came to my senses, saw my beautiful girl and bride, and finished the dance, and we never spoke about it afterward. She’d grabbed me hard, too. Later on I noticed two large pincher bruises on my upper biceps, as if a lobster and not the human Anne Marie had prevented me from leaving the dance floor and ruining our marriage right off the bat and not waiting eight years to do it.
And I was remembering and dreaming all this in the bar, too. I was so deep in my dream that the song ended with a crash of drums and a shudder of bass and a screech of guitar, and still I danced in the middle of the crowd. People were staring at me. I didn’t blame them one bit and would have stared, too. I drank down my shot of bourbon, as though that would make them stop staring. It didn’t. I looked around for help, to see if there was someone around who could come to my rescue.
There was: a woman to my right, holding a lit joint. I hadn’t noticed her before that moment, and I’ve never seen her since. She was exactly my height. Her eyes were dark brown and they were squinting at me in bemusement, or maybe from the joint’s smoke. She wasn’t wearing earrings and for that matter had no holes in her lobes in which to put them. Her hair was straight and black and about ready to come out of her ponytail, although you could tell she would be as beautiful with her hair down as up, and that hair didn’t matter much to her and was just something that happened to be on top of her head. Other than these details, I know nothing about her, not even her name, although I think about her all the time, the way you do about people and things that change your life forever—although I doubt she thinks about me, which is the way life works, which is why I’m sure Noah couldn’t ever stop thinking about his Flood, but once the water receded, I’m sure it didn’t once think about him.
“You look like you could use this,” she said, and then put the joint up to my mouth. I took a drag: it was my first drag ever, tasted like dirt, and made me cough but otherwise had no effect on me that the bourbon hadn’t already had. Then the band started another song, one I recognized from high school: it was Skynyrd, the band doing its best to replicate the famous three-guitar attack with only two guitars. I didn’t dance this time, though, so I didn’t dream or remember—not about my parents or Anne Marie or the kids, everyone whom I loved and for whom I was put on this planet. How does this happen? Why don’t we always have someone on hand to say, Don’t! Cut it out! Run out into the snow and throw yourself into a drift until your capacity to hurt and be bad is frozen out of you! Why don’t we have that kind of voice, a voice that tells us not, What else? What else? but Stop! Desist! You are about to do harm! But even if we had this voice, would we listen to it? What is it that makes us deaf to all the warnings? Is it need? Is it need that makes us so deaf, that fills us up to our ears so that we can’t listen to our better impulses? Is it that we are so full of need, or so full of ourselves?
I wasn’t thinking of any of this at the time. I wasn’t even thinking about Anne Marie and Thomas, wasn’t even lying to myself about being a victim with rights rather than a victimizer with no rights at all. All I was thinking was that there was a beautiful woman standing next to me, smiling at me even, her smile making the bad band sound not so awfully bad, and she had two cheeks and I wanted to kiss the one nearest to me. I leaned over and kissed her cheek, and then she turned her lips toward mine, and so I kissed them, too, with feeling, and when the kissing didn’t seem to be enough anymore, we groped, enthusiastically and without regard to anyone else in the bar, as though our hands were made invisible on contact. All of this went on for a long time. I know this because eventually my lips began to get tired and there was considerable hooting and clapping that didn’t seem intended for the band. I glanced up to see who was making all this noise and saw my father-in-law, Mr. Mirabelli, standing directly behind the woman. And a few feet behind him, I saw my mother. Neither of them was hooting or clapping. Both of them were looking directly at me in huge disappointment, as though the bar were a museum and I were a famous painting that they’d paid too much to see.
“Mom!” I yelled, breaking the lip-lock. “Mr. Mirabelli!” This surprised the woman almost as much as my mother and father-in-law had surprised me.
“What did you just call me?” the woman asked. She backed up a little and also turned my body, so that my back was to my mother and father-in-law, although the woman still held on to my biceps. She had quite a grip, too, a grip that reminded me of Anne Marie’s at our wedding those many years ago, which makes me wonder if all women have this grip, this grip being the thing that keeps a woman steady while she’s deciding whether to hold on to or let go of the man she’s hitched to.
“Wait,” I said. I tried to break her grip and simultaneously twirl us around so that I could face my mother and father-in-law again, and the resulting motion no doubt came off as something violent, because the woman said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She asked this question loudly, several times—the band had finished the song and were watching us, as we’d become the real attraction—and then she disappeared and several guys took her place, guys who I think were either related to the woman or wanted to be, all of them wanting to know if I had a problem. Peter and his friends had noticed what was going on, and they came over and asked these guys if they had a problem. All this took a while to straighten out, since each of us had so many problems, and by the time it was, my mother and Mr. Mirabelli were nowhere to be seen. I ran out into the parking lot; they weren’t there, either, and there was no sign of her Lumina or his Continental. But as I walked through the parking lot, I passed by my van, and there, on the windshield underneath one of the wipers, was a bar napkin. On it were the words “I think I know you.” I took this to be my mother’s note (the handwriting was familiar in its loops and slants), although what the words meant exactly, I didn’t know. There was so much I didn’t know. How had my mother and father-in-law known where I was? Who had told them I was driving to New Hampshire? Was it my father? Had one or both of them been involved with the phone call? Did they know each other? How did they know each other? Had they driven there separately, or together? Did my mother know I’d told my wife, my in-laws, too, that she and my father were dead? Did Mr. Mirabelli know now that they weren’t? Were she and Mr. Mirabelli talking right now about the woman I’d kissed and the wife I’d betrayed? Why would they follow me to the bar and then leave before saying anything to me? And what was that note supposed to mean? Why did my mother think she knew me? I was her son, was I not? Why would she need to think about that?
These were all questions I couldn’t answer or at least didn’t want to, and as a detective you learn, sooner or later, to stop asking yourself these sorts of questions and start asking questions that you actually can answer. So I asked myself: What time is it? Then I looked at my watch: it was twenty minutes after midnight, and that meant I was already late.
19
I was late but not entirely stupid. I didn’t drive all the way to the Robert Frost Place, didn’t park in the parking lot as I’d done earlier. Like a real detective might do, I pulled off the road about a quarter of a mile from the house, into a slot in the snowbank that the snowplows must have used as a turnaround, parked my van there, and sneaked up to the house. This cost me some more time, of course, and by the time I got there, the bond analysts had already set fire to the Robert Frost Place and were standing in the parking lot watching the house burn. Thei
r Saab was next to them with its engine on. The parking lot was ringed by white pines, and I hid behind one of them, close enough to hear what the bond analysts were saying.
“He’s not going to show up, is he?” one of the Ryans said, referring, I was pretty sure, to me. It was the first time I’d heard him speak. “What good is this if he doesn’t show up?”
“He’s missing one hell of a fire,” Morgan said, and then I knew why they’d called me: to show me that they could set fire to a writer’s home in New England without my help. They wanted me to be a witness. The bond analysts had always been like this: during their memoir-writing sessions in prison, they were always so eager to show one another how beautifully they’d written about the bad things they’d done. “One hell of a fire,” Morgan repeated.
“Who cares how good the fire is if he’s not here to see it?” the other Ryan said. Tigue and G-off were leaning against the Saab, staring silently at the fire, as though it had taken their voices and given those voices to the Ryans.
“Shut up,” Morgan said. “Trust me. He’ll be sorry.” He held up an envelope and then placed it in the middle of the parking lot, which had been plowed and was mostly clear of snow. With that, they piled into their Saab and drove away from the fire. As they pulled out of the parking lot, the Robert Frost Place’s second story collapsed onto the first. I wondered momentarily if the Writer-in-Residence was still inside the house, drinking bourbon, but there were no cars in the parking lot, and I heard no screams. I found out later on that the Writer-in-Residence was not in residence at all but was staying at a nearby bed-and-breakfast. The Writer-in-Residence had gotten lucky, the way Thomas Coleman’s poor parents had not.
