Freda waved her arms. “There are no flames,” she said.
But I think she was wrong. Myron tucked himself back in and zipped up his pants. Just before he turned to go, I was sure I saw the reflection of a fire in his eyes. I knew the boy who had taken his money was Zack Holler, and I knew what he’d done to earn Myron’s five dollars.
I ran all the way home, talking to God in my private language so I wouldn’t have to think about Myron and Zack. But I kept seeing Myron on his knees. I hoped he wouldn’t pop out of any bushes tonight. He wanted to piss on us all. I didn’t understand, exactly, but I couldn’t say I thought he was wrong. I saw Zack Holler grinning, taking the money, zipping up his pants. I wondered what pleasure there was in any of this.
I kept praying, hoping for answers but not knowing enough to ask the right questions. My house was dark. That was a relief. I hoped my parents were asleep. I slipped inside, muttering a final amen as I tiptoed toward the stairs.
“Lizzie,” Mom said, “what’s that gibberish?”
I had to grab my chest to keep my heart from jumping. It beat so hard I felt I could almost touch it.
“Lizzie? What’re you saying?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“I heard you talking crazy.”
“You scared me.”
“Tell me what you were saying.” She kept walking toward me. I edged backward, inch by inch, until I hit the wall.
“It was only a prayer,” I said.
“Where’ve you been?”
“I told you before I left.”
“Tell me again.”
“I went to a movie with Rita.”
“Don’t lie to me.” She grabbed my shirt. “Don’t you dare lie to me.” She was too weak to hold me, but she kept me cornered. I had a choice: shove her down or listen. “Never mind,” she said. “I know where you were.”
She’d tricked me. I was no longer a liar—I’d been trapped. I said, “Did you follow me?”
“I didn’t have to.”
“Then how?”
“Arlen told me.”
“I might have known.”
“I didn’t believe her. I said, ‘Lizzie wouldn’t lie to me.’ But you showed me to be the fool, didn’t you?”
“Mom, that’s not why—”
“I wish I could slap some sense into you.”
“Why don’t you?”
“You’re too old.” She waved her fingers in my face. “I’m too damn old if you want to know the truth.” She let her hands drop to her sides. “There,” she said, “I hope you’re satisfied.”
She left me that way, jammed up in the corner, too ashamed to move. I wondered where Daddy was. He’d thrash me and be done with it; he’d forbid me to pray with Freda Graves, tie me to a chair if he had to, lock me in my room on Tuesday nights.
Mother sat alone in the dark living room. I stood at the doorway, the light of the hallway at my back, my face in shadow. I said, “I’m trying to be good.”
“Well, that’s just it,” Mom said. “I hardly know you these days. It makes me wonder what you’re learning from that woman.” She was only a voice in the unlit room.
“Look at yourself,” she whispered. I imagined my silhouette, my scrawny neck, my long arms. “You’re almost a woman. How can I keep you from doing whatever it is you want to do? You’re my daughter, but you’re not mine. I know the difference. But I have to speak what’s on my mind. I blame myself for what happened to Nina. I blame myself for holding my tongue when I should have been talking. I saw her future, saw her belly swell to bursting in my dreams—this before she was even pregnant, before she even met Billy. Your sister had rocks for brains when it came to boys, like one half of her body shut the other half off. She itched. You could see it plain as a rash rising up on her back. I should have strapped her to her bed, bolted her door, barred her windows till that fever passed. Well, you’d do it for a cat to save its skin. You’d shut a cat in the cellar to keep those Toms away, but my own daughter, I did nothing for her.”
“I’m not like Nina,” I said. I was still hoping that was true.
“You can go as far one direction as the other. What’s that woman teaching you?”
I had to think. We spent our nights discussing sin and temptation. I knew the words the devil whispered; I’d heard the story of a child born with her heart unfinished, her ears unformed, but the mysteries of human kindness had not been revealed to me.
“She’s teaching us what’s in the Bible,” I finally said.
“God didn’t write the Bible, Lizzie. God has no hands. Men wrote it. Then more men translated it and even more read it. There’s a lot of room for mistakes. You have to trust your own head.”
Whoever would have thought the devil would stoop so low as to use my own mother to put doubt in me? Whoever would have thought someone as crazy as the devil would resort to logic to get his way? He was a sly one, but he couldn’t fool me. I wasn’t tempted. I didn’t want any part of Mother’s distant God, who couldn’t write in stone, her God with no hands, her God with two clean stumps where his wrists should be. He looked like Lanfear Deets, his face smooth and stupid, blank as worn wood. Instead of one hand, he had none. My God had huge hands, to strike down the wicked and raise up the blessed.
If I followed every one of His laws and didn’t falter, I surely would be saved. When I woke from death, the keys to the kingdom would already be in my hand. A girl like me needed to be told how to be good. Deciding for myself was too risky. I could blow it anytime. I could piss it all away like Myron Evans, I could start thinking God had no eyes and no hands—then who would stop me? My mother was the most decent person I knew, but I could see what happened when you didn’t pay attention to the rules. The devil had crawled right into her ear and was using her to get to me.
“Why do you think your daddy was so hard on Nina?” she said. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Because he believed in certain laws. Because he knew a lot about right and wrong, what the Bible and all those good Lutherans had to say about girls who got themselves in trouble. He forgot to think, Lizzie. He forgot to love, and he forgot to forgive—his own child, and he forgot that.”
I was afraid. I didn’t know enough to argue. Mother’s words made terrifying sense. I wanted to save her. I didn’t want to be alone in Heaven with Freda Graves and Joanna Foot. I didn’t want to spend eternity listening to the Lockwood twins talking in rhyme.
This was my first trial. The real measure of my faith began a week later.
20
THE DAYS of August loomed before me, hot and dead. People seemed to wade down the sidewalks, their bodies waffling at the dizzy height of afternoon. A white sun scorched the grass. In Willis, we gave up on sprinklers, saving our water for the farmers and letting our own lawns go stiff and yellow. The grasshoppers got so mean you couldn’t walk through a field barelegged. Their crushed bodies littered the parched streets and stuck in the grille of Daddy’s truck. But the dark of evening still pulled a chill down from the mountains, a gust straight off the glaciers.
We sat on the porch one Sunday evening, my mother and father and I, in our after-dinner silence. I hugged myself, thinking I’d have to go inside soon and find a sweatshirt. And when I rose, Mother or Father would say, “Are you cold?” The words would cut between us, and I would have to answer. There would be other words when I returned, polite and ordinary.
A bell clanged. Both my parents stood. Daddy pointed toward the center of town. “There,” he said, “looks like it’s right on Main.” I followed the line of his finger until I saw a curl of smoke in the night sky. Mother had already run inside for the keys to the truck.
Everyone else in town had the same idea we did; no one could get within three blocks of the fire. But as we ran along the street a cry passed from group to group, and we knew the Last Chance Bar was burning.
A block away, the smell in the air was sweet, like the first morning fire of autumn crackling in the fireplace. But as we moved closer, the air grew
dense with the stink of things that shouldn’t burn: hair singed by a candle flame, a tire doused in gasoline, a wet wool sweater set too close to the open door of the oven.
There wasn’t much to see yet, just the flickers in the blackened building. The few men who had been at the bar stood on the street, hacking and choking. They’d tried to stamp out the blaze while it was still small, but an ember hidden in a pile of soiled rags burst into flames and sent them scurrying outside.
Huddled together now, deep in speculation, they looked down the street, counting the minutes until the city fire truck rumbled along the potholed pavement.
The truck pulled up in front of the bar, to a hydrant that hadn’t been used since the fire of ’42. That winter wildfire charred an entire block. As the men in high black boots and long coats struggled with the crusty plug and heavy hoses, I realized something was missing. Olivia Jeanne Woodruff’s Winnebago had disappeared from the front of Elliot Foot’s bar. She wasn’t in the milling flock of the curious, and I couldn’t see her house on wheels anywhere down Main. I thought, So this is how Elliot is repaid for spurning her love. I imagined Olivia Jeanne planting a dozen coals, leaving them to smolder.
Then I saw the man, Elliot Foot himself, standing on the sidewalk, his arms crossed over his thin chest. He didn’t rant or pace or pound the walls; he didn’t rush inside to see what he could save. Elliot Foot stood and smiled like a man who had just laid a royal flush on the table.
In a flash I saw the purpose of all this, knew without a doubt that Elliot Foot had torched his own bar to scald the temptation out of his heart. He wanted the Last Chance to burn to the ground. His hands seared my thigh the night I spoke in tongues. He didn’t need a match; those fingers were on fire. Others would blame Olivia Jeanne; he counted on that, on the simplicity and logic of the deed. If she had any sense left, she was crossing the border into Canada this very minute. Only a fool would stick around long enough to leave the decision to a judge and jury and newspaper in this town.
Maybe Elliot instilled deeper fears in her that night. Perhaps she loved him well enough to smell the fever of repentance and know that her Winnebago would go next. Parked in front of the bar, she would have felt the first wave of hot air in her face.
At last the hose was hooked to the hydrant. Vern and Ralph yanked it off the truck themselves and shoved their runt of a brother out of the way. He looked delirious, too distracted to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
When we saw the arc of water, the single dirty stream, women cheered and men scrambled to help aim the hose. Elliot Foot stopped grinning, wondering if something might still be saved. A second truck arrived and skidded up to a hydrant around the corner. Hope surged through the crowd.
I lost my parents in the mob. Most everyone in Willis who could walk had gathered in the street to gawk at the fire: it was better than the traveling circus that had come through the valley six years ago, better than the woman with four arms or the pinhead fetus in a jar.
Gangs of kids ran wild. Fire released some native urge, turning children into thugs and thieves. A band of ten-year-olds circled a younger child, demanding his belt and then his shoes. They would have stolen his comb and pocketknife too, but the boy’s mother swooped down and dragged her son away by the wrist.
Someone hit me square in the back and I pitched forward. It was Coe Carson and Zachary Holler jabbing at each other’s chest behind me. They argued, but I couldn’t make out the words. They jostled me again without seeing who I was. Zack Holler, the boy who had changed my life, who had thrown me into the arms of Freda Graves and forced me into weeks of lies, Zack Holler could look right through me without a glimmer of recognition.
I heard him say, “Do what you want. I’m going in. It’s free.” The veins of his forearms bulged. He lurched through the crowd, knocking people out of the way. In the months since I’d seen him he’d lost his adolescent leanness, and his strong body had begun to reveal its brutality. Full-blown, Zack Holler would crush other men’s fingers as he shook their hands; he’d slap their backs too hard and knock them forward. I hoped for a small tragedy, a wound to weaken him. I believed in fate but knew it was wrong to yearn for misfortune, so I was careful not to pray for an accident; instead, I reminded God how I trusted His infinite wisdom.
Zack Holler darted through the doorway of the burning bar before anyone got wise to his plan. Skittery sparks shot across the floor. Through the tinted windows I saw flames lapping at the frame of the storeroom door.
Coe Carson faced me. He still didn’t remember who I was, the girl in the gully, the girl on the ground with Zachary’s sister, the girl on the tree house floor with Zachary—but Zack Holler wouldn’t be proud of that; he’d forget to tell Coe. “Dammit,” Coe said, “did you see that? He says it’s a great time to get free booze. No hassle, he says. He’s going into a burning building for a goddamn bottle of tequila. I’d buy him one, you know. I’d buy him one every day from now till Christmas if I had to. You think he cares? ‘What fun is that?’ he says. He gets off on it. He gets off on scaring the shit out of himself. What kind of crazy person lives that way?”
Before I could answer, Coe Carson shouldered and shoved his way to the bar, Coe, who would never be able to grow a beard or get a real job at the mill, according to my father. I hoped he didn’t want to be a hero. His arms were thin as a girl’s, smooth and freckled. Going into the bar after the likes of Zack Holler made less sense to me than going after a bottle of tequila. Bravery is a fool’s damn luck. But Coe Carson knew himself. He stood in the street where he could watch the doorway.
A siren ripped down Main. People jumped to clear a path. As he hit the intersection of Main and Center streets, Sheriff Caleb Wolfe slammed the brakes and spun into a quarter-circle stop. A big Indian climbed out of the passenger side, a real Indian, not a questionable quarter-blood like Caleb Wolfe himself. This man had a broad face and high round cheeks, the smooth hairless chin of a full-blooded Kootenai. His blue shirt could have fit around two ordinary men, but it wouldn’t close over his dark chest. A thin black braid hung halfway down his back.
I didn’t need to be told this was Red Elk, the father of the slim boy who stole Nina that summer night long ago, a night much cooler than this one. I saw Billy Elk take Nina in his arms and make her disappear. But he forgot the second part of his magic trick, the part when the girl reappears, when all her scattered molecules are gathered from the air, a fuzzy image, almost transparent, wavering, a body underwater, and then Nina, Nina whole and laughing.
Now I saw the man my father hated, the red-skinned dog he tried to drive out of town, the heathen he threatened to strangle with his bare hands. No wonder Mother was afraid. Red Elk could crush a man under each foot and keep on walking.
I realized there were no other Indians in the crowd. They bore a history of blame; none dared come close enough to be accused.
The crowd swarmed around the sheriff’s car, and it vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared. Caleb Wolfe strutted in front of the bar, pushing the horde back a step each time he passed. His short bowlegs seemed to snap as his feet hit cement. Someone aimed the high beam of a flashlight into his face. He squinted but didn’t raise his hand to block the light.
“There’s a boy in there,” a woman yelled. “Look, can you see him?”
Caleb Wolfe whirled toward the door. An explosion from the storeroom doubled the size of every flame with a single blast. The fountains of water from the hoses seemed futile now, children pissing on a bonfire. Sparks scattered like milkweed, and each spark became the seed of a new flame.
Red Elk opened the door. Thirty feet away, the heat hit us like a wall and we shrank back. Air had turned to smoke inside the bar. But the big Indian stood his ground, as if to see how much he could bear. Then he threw himself into the fiery pit. I gasped; my lungs burned as I watched him, a shadow in flame.
A sound like thunder rocked the building. Flares climbed, finding the driest wood, the pulpy rafters. The thunder roared ag
ain, and we saw a beam tear loose and fall, engulfed in a blaze. The fast, brilliant bodies of flames writhed across the floor.
I was sure the Indian and Zack didn’t have a chance. I imagined the rafter had fallen on their backs or pinned their legs. I heard their cries above the rush of air on fire. The church bell rang and rang. High in the steeple, its insistent, foolish voice beat out a single tone.
But I was wrong. Red Elk dodged collapsing beams. The Indian had been inside less than a minute when the front window burst, splintering onto the sidewalk in a thousand smoky shards.
He sailed through the jagged opening, a huge man, suspended in this long moment when every mouth opened but no one made a sound. He hit the sidewalk with a thud, suddenly back in the world of gravity. His face was black with soot and his chest heaved. Zachary Holler was slung over his shoulder, draped on his back like a sack of meat.
Caleb Wolfe cleared the clot of people from a circle of cement in the street and helped Red Elk lay the boy down. “Give us air,” he yelled. “Give us air!”
Red Elk tilted Zack’s head back, put his hands on the boy’s chest and leaned forward and back, forward and back—but Zack Holler was as still and stunned as Jesse was when they pulled his pale body out of Moon Lake. The big man breathed into him, put his mouth over Zack’s mouth, shared his smoky air with the white boy. But that paltry bit of oxygen was too little for either of them. After a few mouthfuls, Red Elk sat back on his broad haunches, gulping. Caleb Wolfe took over. He pounded Zachary’s chest and swore. I think it was the cuss that called Zack Holler back, that pulled his soul down to the gritty street and made his rib cage swell with the first living breath.
“Water!” Caleb cried. “Jesus, his hands.”
Coe Carson brought two pails for his friend and lifted Zack’s red hands into the water. Coe’s knuckles bled from grinding them into the gravel. His lips moved, a plea; tears rolled down his cheeks. I prayed for a miracle that would deliver me from the kind of accident I’d wished upon Zachary.
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