by Peter Gadol
Robbie couldn’t take his eyes off of the gun in Carlo’s hand, which he wanted to connect somehow to the tree on fire. And Carlo had a blankness about him, a hollow gaze like he’d seen something, or done something awful, and this gun—it looked like a natural extension of his arm, his finger comfortably wrapped around the trigger, like Carlo wasn’t even aware he was holding a weapon. If it was possible in a glance no longer to know someone, then Robbie no longer knew who Carlo Stein was.
Robbie heard the cry again, both men did, and it looked like a lower limb was crashing down in flames. But it wasn’t a branch, it was a person emerging from behind the tree, throwing something square and flaming away from him. It was a person standing, and falling, and standing again, flailing his arms. It was a man on fire who was screaming, who was in agony, lit up as bright as the tree. A tree on fire, a man on fire.
The man shouted, “Help!”
He shouted, “Help, help!” and the man on fire was not a man at all: it was Gabriel.
• • •
CONFUSION THAT LAST NIGHT OF THE YEAR, who should do what. Robbie yelled, “The hose, the hose,”—because this was what he thought should happen, first shower the boy with water, and then the pepper tree because the pepper tree was close enough to the eave that the fire could set the house ablaze, too.
Carlo called out to Gabriel, “Don’t mov,e”—by which he actually meant stop trying to stand up—”don’t move, roll. Roll on the ground, roll on the ground.” He smelled gasoline, noxious burning gasoline.
The wind whipped up beneath the tree and blew the flames up over the house.
And then Carlo seemed to wake up to the fact he was holding a gun and flung it behind him onto the front seat of the car and ran toward the front door, and Robbie thought that Carlo was heading to other corner of the yard to turn on the faucet and dash back with the garden hose—Robbie therefore ran toward the house, as well, the two men both heading inside.
“No, no, get him to roll on the ground,” Carlo shouted at Robbie.
Robbie turned back toward Gabriel, who was motionless.
“Roll!” Robbie screamed.
The boy was engulfed and Robbie wanted to jump on the kid to smother the flames, but he didn’t know if he could because it seemed that Gabriel was now surrounded by a bed of fire, the lawn on fire, too. There was fuel spilled everywhere and about the only thing that wasn’t on fire was the chucked gas can itself lying on the sidewalk.
Carlo appeared with a blanket pulled from the bed. He threw the blanket over the boy and jumped on the kid, and the kid was beneath him and he felt, he heard the squelched flames, in contrast to the tree, which flared up with new wind.
Robbie ran over to the hose and turned the faucet and began to aim the spray gun at the tree, but the gun was rusty and loose, and the water was coming out in a trickle.
Carlo yelled at him again, “Call 911! Call 911!”
Robbie ran inside to the kitchen phone and was dialing it as he dashed back out, as if bringing the phone closer to the injured boy would somehow make the ambulance come faster. Of course, it was New Year’s Eve and while not late in the evening, late enough that it was a busy time at emergency services and the pick-up seemed slow.
Carlo peeled back only enough of the blanket to reveal Gabriel’s blackened face and Gabriel was unconscious but Carlo said, “It’s okay, sweetie. Everything will be fine, sweetie.” And for some reason, again, “Don’t move, sweetie, don’t move.”
He thought nothing would be fine, and neither did Robbie, speaking with the dispatch: “Fifteen, he’s fifteen. There’s a fire—yes, send the fire truck—and I think it was started with gasoline. I think he set a tree on fire, and he set himself on fire, too.”
Carlo was cradling the boy in the blanket and everything smelled noxious and the tree was losing limbs and the house was in danger and no ambulance could yet be heard—and the boy was shivering, unconscious but shivering.
“Get him wet,” Carlo barked at Robbie.
Robbie dragged the hose as close as he could, and of course there had to be a kink in the hose, of all the worst possible moments.
And Carlo shouted, “Get us both as wet as you can.”
Which Robbie tried to do.
“Call 911 again,” Carlo said.
Which Robbie also did. “I called before,” he said. “You need to come faster. We’re losing him.”
“You’re fine, you’re fine, sweetie,” Carlo said—his voice sounded like it was coming from outside him, it wasn’t him speaking.
“He set himself on fire,” Robbie said. “By accident.”
Or was it an accident? Each man separately had the same thought: Was this an act of self-immolation? Was this another suicide at their house?
“Robbie,” Carlo yelled because he couldn’t think what else to cry out.
“Hurry,” Robbie said even as he’d been advised an ambulance was on its way.
“Robbie,” Carlo said again.
Robbie held the phone between his chin and collarbone, the hose still running in the other hand, and he knelt down next to Carlo with the boy—Gabriel no longer moving. It was pitch black but by the light of the burning tree, Robbie could see Carlo, who was frightened, the two men both frightened.
“I hear them coming,” Robbie said, a lie.
Carlo was shaking his head, as pale as the morning they’d found Tom.
Gabriel’s body looked like it was weighted beneath invisible bricks—who possibly could breathe against such weight?—and he was going to die in Carlo’s arms, at fifteen, burned all over, his lungs scorched, too.
Robbie ran out into the street, and he could hear a siren but it was still so distant and not getting any louder.
Carlo could feel the boy with each breath settling toward the earth, weighted, sinking, too late. A siren in the distance, louder, approaching. But it was too late.
• • •
ONCE AGAIN a death at their house. The ambulance was there, and also a ladder truck had come and put out the pepper tree on fire.
After the ambulance drove off, and then the fire truck, the two men remained far apart, at opposite ends of the house. They did not console each other. They were not going to see each other through a new ordeal. Each was in his way already certain he never wanted to be touched again by the other.
The police once more. Another investigation. All the neighbors in the street that night.
Gabriel’s aunt was hopelessly distraught, considering herself in part to blame for not keeping track of the boy. But she couldn’t comprehend what sort of perverse pageant had led up to this disaster—something untoward, she suspected. She considered the two men corrupt in some way she couldn’t specify and said so. They didn’t argue with her. All this death. Atonement was pointless, regret pointless—it brought back whom exactly?
Carlo moved in with a friend and closed down the office. He was afraid to go out even in the neighborhood because of what happened by the bridge, which he told no one about, but for which there could be retribution, and it was only a matter of time, wasn’t it, before it caught up with him. He took a job at the friend’s gallery and looked for a place to live. He drank too much and knew it. At night he didn’t get very far reading the novels into which he’d try to escape. He could not escape.
Robbie slept on Jay’s couch for a week. He found a studio in Hollywood and also a place at a large architectural firm. It was supposed to be temporary, but he didn’t want to borrow money from Carlo, so he stayed on at the job. He dated around, nothing came of it.
They sold the house.
Each man had his separate youth before college, and each now had his life apart: The twenty years they spent together were twenty cold stones, indistinguishable among all the other flat rocks in the drought-dry bed of a bitter arroyo. It was easiest for one and then the other to pretend all the years in Silver Lake never existed, and so that was what they did. The End.
7
NO, NOT THE END, NOT THAT.
Although such an ending, or some variation thereof, would always haunt the two men, the possibility the night could have turned tragic, the grief then that would have cloaked them. Loss in one’s life the way loss had entered their lives made one forever aware that for every plot, there was always a ghost plot, the same story told another way.
What happened was this: As Carlo sat in his car and gripped the gun in his lap, and as the tallest man rounded the sedan and began moving toward Carlo’s car, Carlo looked up at the Shakespeare Bridge spanning the gully. Whenever he drove on Franklin across the eighty-year-old bridge, he never cared so much for the quaint gothic spires, but beneath the bridge, its concrete engineering revealed, he was filled with simple awe. On the one hand, the many pillars and trusses seemed excessive compared to contemporary structural standards, yet the twin high-curving, barely ornamented arches were oddly delicate and inspiring. It would be going too far to say that given the heat of the moment, he was recalling what it was so long ago that made him want to become a builder, and yet in that instant, something was reawakened in him, a fondness for futurism, an erstwhile excitement about his own future. Process had always fascinated him as much as what process yielded, and all he ever wanted was to be in on, to participate in the secret history of how things were made. It was clear to him he had quite a bit to lose by brandishing a lethal weapon in the name of revenge. A blink, no more, and he understood what a foolish man he’d allowed himself to become.
Also, looking back now at the black sedan, he could see, too, that it was not the ambush car (this car was newer and rounder in the hood), and that the man coming toward Carlo was not his assailant. None of the men here beneath the bridge had anything to do with that night.
The tallest guy was holding his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger like a dart, holding it in the air as if he were going to flick it at Carlo’s windshield. He was almost standing next to Carlo’s car, when Carlo shifted into reverse and pushed back from the dead end a good ten yards before backing into the nearest driveway, screeching into a turn, and zooming up Monon toward Tracy. He turned back on Tracy and crossed St. George at the light, and it wasn’t until he was halfway down the block that he realized he still had the gun out—it had slipped down the seat to the floor of the car. He skidded into the parking lot outside the closed art store, looked around, got out with the gun in hand, walked over to the dumpster, threw back the lid, pushed around the trash until he noticed a bag only partly cinched, shoved the gun inside it, reburied the trash bag, ran back to his car, and sped off down Hyperion. He was quite sure what he’d just done was illegal, but he also thought it unlikely anyone would find the gun before it was crushed by a sanitation truck.
And so when he pulled into his driveway, Carlo was not holding the gun. He arrived home several minutes before Robbie, but already the pepper tree was on fire: a few white flames ran up the trunk and along a lower branch. Gabriel must have noticed that he’d spilled the gasoline because a length of lawn was on fire, too. And then Gabriel flung the can away from him to avoid catching on fire himself, but not fast enough and the flames ran up his jacket sleeve and down along his side, down his pants, so that he fell, and stood, and fell again. This was when Robbie showed up, when Gabriel was already dancing about, on fire.
What happened was this: The two men reacted fast. One man ran for the hose while yelling at Gabriel, telling him he needed to drop to the ground, stay on the ground, and roll over and roll over and put out the fire that way. The other man thought to grab the rug from the entry, and he headed straight for Gabriel with it. He enveloped the boy with the rug and used his own body to smother the flames. At that point the man with the hose had reached the boy, and the man with the rug pulled it back and off the boy, and the man with the hose was able to hold his thumb over the end of the hose to create a good spray and douse the boy thoroughly so there was nothing burning. Then he aimed the hose at the tree trunk and the source of the fire. He washed the lower branches with water, as well as whatever bit of the lawn was in flames. Everything and everyone was soaked and the fire was out.
The boy lay on the ground and was crying, groaning, in shock, shivering—he had been burned—and one man returned to his side and told the boy everything would be fine, not to worry, there, there, sweetie, it was okay. In the darkness it was hard to see how badly he’d been hurt. They wanted to get him medical attention as quickly as possible, and because it was New Year’s Eve, because they lived in the hills and the narrow streets were packed with parked cars, they thought it would be best to drive the boy to the hospital themselves, if he could stand, which he could, and if he was breathing well, which he was, despite the fact he was sobbing.
One man retrieved a heavy coat from the house to drape over the boy’s shoulders. They walked him out to the car in the driveway and one man got in the backseat with the boy and held him and continued to tell him he’d be fine, certain he would be, even as the boy himself was trembling, and the other man drove. He drove to the hospital not along the route he preferred but the one the other man always said was faster, which maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. He drove fast and ran a red, and they got lucky with the traffic and made it to the emergency ward and walked the boy in.
It was only then, with the car parked, in the waiting room, sitting together in the corner, that one of the men started shaking, considering only now how things could have gone down. Also he was still wet and had to laugh about that—thanks for soaking me, too.
Carlo was the one shivering, and Robbie took his hands.
Robbie said, “He’ll be fine. The nurse said the burns don’t look too bad.”
To which Carlo responded, “I know.”
“We’ll all be fine,” Robbie said.
They sat in silence, Carlo staring at the floor, Robbie looking at Carlo.
“What?” Robbie asked.
“I’d met Tom before,” Carlo said.
Robbie blinked. He said, “I figured.”
Then Carlo revealed the circumstances, all the details, and hearing the whole sad story, Robbie slouched a bit in the plastic waiting room chair. Carlo told him about what happened when he returned the windbreaker, and ever so slightly, Robbie flinched.
“I need to tell you the rest,” Carlo said.
“What if I don’t want to hear the rest?” Robbie asked.
• • •
TWO HOURS AFTER THEY PUT TOM TO BED in the guest room and went to sleep that night, Carlo was awakened by a noise he hadn’t heard in years, car tires spinning against packed ice and snow on a winter hill. Obviously not that, but he couldn’t identify the grinding sound. Robbie didn’t stir. Carlo waited, the noise did not recur, but he was going to need help if he wanted to fall back asleep, and he opened his night table drawer and removed a bottle of sleeping pills. A water bottle on the floor had one sip left. As he was about to set the pill on his tongue, he heard the gnashing of gears again, greater in distress but less prolonged. He dropped the pill back in the bottle, pulled on the pants he’d been wearing earlier, and quietly shut the bedroom door behind him.
Tom was in the kitchen, at the sink, doing the dishes, and when he saw Carlo he turned and said, “Sorry, sorry.”
Carlo held his forefinger to his lips: Not so loud.
“Sorry,” Tom whispered.
Then he held up an aggrieved piece of flatware, which explained the noise: a fork had been mangled in the disposal.
“I hope it wasn’t a family heirloom,” Tom said.
“Not really,” Carlo said. “What are you doing up? You don’t have to do the dishes.”
“I was raised a certain way,” Tom said.
Like Carlo, Tom was only wearing his jeans. He didn’t appear remotely intoxicated, or tired, whereas Carlo had a headache, the early onset of a hangover.
He took the dish towel from Tom and proceeded to dry the already clean plates in the drainer. To make less noise, he didn’t put the dishes away but instead stacked them on the counter with minimal clatter.
“I owe you a fork,” Tom said.
“You don’t,” Carlo said.
“Oh, but I insist.”
“Just don’t run the disposal again. We don’t want to wake Robbie, too.”
Tom scrubbed the burned skillet in which he’d braised the chicken. The baking pan he’d used for the rolls, the fry pan for the spinach. And meanwhile, a yawning Carlo dried whatever he was handed. They were standing close to each other, which was at first awkward in their mutual shirtlessness, and they talked for the sake of talking, not about anything significant, the seasons here versus the seasons back East, and so on.
But then there was a let-up in the chatter, and Tom said, “Well, here we both are. Finally.”
“Here we are,” Carlo said.
“You do know how lucky you are,” Tom said. “The house, the career, the boyfriend—you do know.”
His voice had become louder, and as if he could lower the volume with his own softer tone, Carlo whispered when he said, “I’ve been very fortunate.”
“What?”
“I’ve been very fortunate.”
“And yet you believe all there is is the ground beneath your feet,” Tom said. “Nothing more than that? That’s it?”
“I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” Carlo said.
“You’re afraid to answer the question.”
So Carlo answered the question. He said, “Fine. Yes. The ground beneath my feet. That’s it.”
“And when we die?”
“When we die, we die,” Carlo said.
“That’s not a very pretty thought,” Tom said.
He was flicking free the espresso grounds from the coffee filter, shaking his head, less in disgust it appeared than defeat.
“Tom, you can believe in what you want to believe in,” Carlo said. “We don’t have to agree.”
“I wish we did,” Tom said.
“But why? You have Robbie, more or less. Why do you need me, too?”
Tom stared at Carlo and Carlo couldn’t read him. He dried the wine glasses and then the dishes were all done. He suggested they return to bed.
