How Fire Runs

by Charles Dodd White

  He shut down the computer and pushed away from the desk, sat in the darkness of the room until his eyes could adjust. He stepped into a pair of slippers he kept at the door and walked silently down the hall and stairs. He paused at several doors to see if he could hear the others sleeping before he moved on. It was a strange habit, this walking the floors while everyone else was asleep, but he’d been subject to it since he was a child. He would stand for many hours of the night and be aware of the enclosing emptiness of his surroundings and absorb the fact that he was solely aware of it, the others all trapped behind the high walls of their own dreams.

  Sometimes it crushed him to realize how alone he was at this point in his life. It happened to everyone eventually, being slowly stripped of the people who made you who you were. But he could never escape the sense that his bereavement was premature, unfair. Both his parents gone by the time he was thirty. Close to two decades now that he’d been without blood ties. Perhaps that’s what drove him toward building Little Europe. There had been other factors at play, of course, but maybe it was this keen awareness of being utterly alone that allowed him to recognize the power such a vision could mold. Great deeds could be subverted by a fear of hurting those you loved. But greatness was surely a worthy answer to grief.

  He went outside and sat on the front steps, the huge front door left open at his back like a mouth. That’s what it was, too, what it was meant to be. A mouth to speak of a truth that couldn’t be acknowledged or understood by the rest of America. This place in the woods to bring the possibility of a new country together. A small country within the country. When he had first heard the idea of Little Europe he knew he was the man to make it happen. Not simply the idea of a pure and isolated community as had been tried elsewhere, a commune that would be subject to its own vulnerable politics and struggles for power. No, the necessary difference would come when it was made part of an established government. They would have to entrench politically in a place that would be receptive to the idea of white nationhood. That was true revolution, when the revolution became invisible, when it became part of the routine. That was what would make the ultimate difference.

  He had heard of efforts made out in Montana and Wyoming, places where the communities had taken root in the midst of great isolation. Preserves or reservations of people who stockpiled arms and foolishly became noticed by the FBI. But these broke down fairly quickly. They dissolved because of a lack of cogency. It was unclear who they were fighting in the middle of all that wind and tall grass. Their seclusion was easy to ignore or oppress. It failed to become a message. It failed to understand the idiom it needed to speak.

  Then he had realized the mistake had been that Little Europe was a place that had to be created rather than one that simply needed to be wakened. Why settle empty territory? Why not simply enter the minds of the sleepers and reveal to them their own self-interest? Wake them and show them the world could be shaped by the imagination of those with the strength and fortitude to do so.

  He stood and moved out past the yard and crossed into the tree line until he felt himself muted by the entanglement of trees, the undergrowth. There was a comfort in this invisibility. How to explain that? And yet it took a kind of heroism to accept the role one was destined for, didn’t it? To be the mind controlling the hand, the abstract behind the accomplishment. There was nothing wrong in agreeing with the nighttime in his soul. It was where action mounted. It was where the loss of sleep surrendered something more.

  6

  KYLE CHECKED IN ON GERALD EVERY COUPLE OF DAYS ONCE HE’D LET him cool off for a week and then taken him back to his place across from Gavin Noon and his followers. He took no particular pleasure in the roles of spy and nursemaid, but didn’t care to entertain the possibility of another of the old man’s ideas about ammunition and its application to ideological difference. Kyle had made him promise to get him on the phone if he felt any risky impulses coming on. He had him hand over all of his rifles for the next couple of months too, though there was no depriving him of his pistols. That would have been like pulling a man’s healthy teeth, Gerald had said, and Kyle knew he was lucky to have gotten the concession he had.

  After he was satisfied the old man was well disposed, he drove the truckload of seedlings to Buckhorn Ridge where the rest of the veterans group was meeting him. Trey Buckner helped him unload while a few of the others started digging where they were told. This was the tail end of the project on the ridge, and Kyle was proud to see it working as well as it did, as much for the men as the countryside. Orlynne had been the one to come up with the plan—having the veterans work through their trauma by putting their hands in the ground.

  “One thing I’ve learned about menfolk,” she had said, “is that the only way they ever give a damn for another’s hurting is if they work together a little while. Realize they have that little bit of suffering in common before they get into anything more. Stubborn sonsabitches to a one.”

  It hadn’t taken much convincing the next time the group met. The bad counterfeit of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting had begun to wear on nearly every one of them. So Kyle had advanced the project to the county commissioner board in order to get access to the reforestation initiative that was coordinated with the state. Surveying the marked rows of small trees going all the way back to the newest seedlings that were being planted, he could see the time up here had been put to good use. The other men agreed.

  A little before noon they put the last of the seedlings in and dug into Kyle’s Yeti cooler for a cold can of either beer or Coke.

  “Looking pretty damn snazzy, you ask me,” Trey said, surveying the bristling ranks.

  “It’ll be an awful nice place to picnic up here in a few years,” Kyle agreed. “Deer are going to love it too. Good way to run down to the valley and still keep cover.”

  Trey bottomed his can of soda, crushed it under his foot and tossed the disc in the truck bed.

  “You noticed who was missing out here today, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “I did. I’ll run out that way to check on him. Due diligence and all.”

  “I don’t mind going out there with you. Turner can be a special kind of pain in the ass at times.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Kyle said. “Special kinds of pain in the ass seem to have become my specialty lately.”

  TURNER WHIST lived at the back end of a family hollow that could have been split up and sold to a real estate developer for a couple of million dollars, but unlike so many the Whists had kept the property together even if family relations had run as thin as the drought-starved creek you had to cross when you went over the bridge.

  Kyle drove up past Turner’s oldest brother’s place and then past some of the cabins tenanted by his cousins and other distantly connected kin. At each bend, the walls of the mountains nudged in a bit closer, closed much of what was left of the sun, so that by the time he could see Turner’s doublewide set back in the deepest pocket, everything in sight lay in a muted blue shadow.

  He got out and talked to the geriatric Plott hound that came and licked his hand before it settled back under the house that lacked an underpinning. The dog’s ribs were as plain as an anatomical diagram. No one came to the porch to see who had come even though he waited a good couple of minutes before he knocked hard enough to rattle the door in its frame.

  Turner’s wife Melanie finally answered. She had her boy on her hip. Too big to be carried around like that, Kyle knew.

  “Hey, Kyle.”

  “Hey yourself.”

  She was a good decade younger than Turner, which meant she couldn’t have been much past legal drinking age. Short yellow hair and skin that looked like it had been pulled too tight for too long. The kind of face that might have been called handsome a generation ago but now would most likely be considered hard. A face that held no happy future.

  “I think you’ve got something I’ve been missing,” he said.

  “Missing, huh?”

 
“Yeah, that husband of yours. Is he around?”

  “Guess that depends on what you mean by around. He’s here, though.”

  “You mind if I step inside and talk to him a minute?”

  She watched him for a while, said nothing. Her boy stared on with empty eyes.

  “Shit,” she said. “What could it hurt?”

  She went back to the couch with the boy and let Kyle close the door himself. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light he could see the domestic congestion—the dirty laundry, the chldren’s toys, the erratic scrum of everything else.

  “He’s back in the bedroom if you’re sure you want to talk to him.”

  Kyle said that he did and went back, stood at the end of the hall listening for anything on the other side of the thin door. He tapped lightly, spoke Turner’s name. When he heard an answer he stepped in.

  The room, like the rest of the house, had no electric light. Turner was a vague shape sitting atop the unmade bed, limned by the soft strokes of lingering daylight through the blinds. Kyle’s hand instinctively went to the light switch but the bulb didn’t burn though he flipped it up and down a couple of times.

  “Shut off a couple of weeks ago,” Turner told him.

  Kyle found a place on a recliner that faced him, wedged in between low piles of sour-smelling clothes.

  “She tell you about the job?”

  “No,” Kyle said. “She hadn’t told me anything. I just came up here to check on you. The rest of the group, they’ve been missing you.”

  “Missing me? I kind of find that hard to believe. Most of them can’t stand the sight of me.”

  “That’s not true. You don’t know what other people think of you. No one ever really does.”

  If he accepted that point of wisdom, he did so without comment.

  “How long you been closed up in here in the dark like this, Turner?”

  “Been a while.”

  “Couple of days?”

  “More than that.”

  “A week?”

  Turner’s shoulders made some kind of movement that Kyle took to be a shrug.

  “You got a weapon in the house?”

  “Yeah. I got a couple of deer rifles in the closet.”

  “That all?”

  He hesitated before he reached a handgun out from beneath the pillow he was sitting against, placed it on a wadded sheet.

  “I’m going to come take that from you now, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kyle took the handgun and slipped it into his waistband at the small of his back, then knocked around in the closet until he’d collected both of the rifles.

  “Be careful,” Turner said. “They’re loaded.”

  “Nothing else in here I need to be concerned about, is there?”

  “No, not now.”

  “I’ll be back here in a minute, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kyle left the bedroom door ajar before he went back to the front of the house. His voice was shaking despite his trying to keep it quiet when he talked to Melanie.

  “Don’t you think you could have called somebody?” he said hoarsely.

  “With what?” she spat back. “Telephone bills don’t pay themselves. Nothing around here does. There’s not enough gas in the tank to get as far as the highway.”

  “You all live right out here with another half a dozen families in walking distance.”

  “Yeah, well, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I go to any of them uppity motherfuckers playing white trash.”

  “They’re his family, for Christ’s sake.”

  Her laugh was even and mean.

  “You don’t understand shit, do you?”

  “No,” he said, “I guess maybe I don’t.”

  HE CALLED and got the deputies out to execute the welfare check and have Turner transported to the hospital psychiatric unit for twenty-four hours observation. After that, they’d just have to play it by ear, but maybe changing up his meds would help. He hoped to God so. He asked Turner if he could come by and check in with him once he got settled. Turner said that that would be fine before the deputies took him out of the hollow in the back of their car.

  Melanie cussed at him for a while after her husband had been taken, but when Kyle told her he would give her a ride to somewhere she might be able to stay until things were all right she told him to wait while she packed a few things. She had a sister over in Kingsport she wouldn’t mind seeing.

  It was dark by the time he got home. Dark but the house was not empty. As he topped the final rise of the drive he saw Laura’s car parked down by the greenhouse. When he pulled in beside he saw her walk down from the front porch.

  “I’d about given up on you,” she told him, encircled his neck with her arms.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You want me to leave?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  They kissed. The night paused.

  “I can’t stay, you know. He expects me back.”

  “You got time for a drink?”

  “A glass of wine if you’ve got any.”

  He told her she was in luck and led her to the house. She sat in the living room thumbing through a couple of Oxford American magazines while he uncorked a Côte du Rhône and poured it out in a pair of water tumblers. As they drank they sat there listening to the ticking of the old tall clock. She got up to study it.

  “Did you grow up with this?” she asked.

  “I did. It was a wedding gift to my parents. My father’s mother gave it to them. Hell of a gift to give somebody considering they didn’t have a house to put it in at the time. But there it was. Had to haul it around from three different places that weren’t much more than shacks before he finally got the money to build this place.”

  “I like the sound it lends to a house,” she said. “Makes things seem more permanent. When I was growing up everything was just drywall and shag carpet. Seemed like we were being moved around like luggage through our own lives. I could see how it wore my mama down. I did. My dad didn’t, but I did. He never cared about a house. To him it was just a place you went when you were done working selling tires. I think that’s why I was in such a hurry to get out on my own. I love my parents, but by god I think I’d lose my mind if I ever became them.”

  He came up behind her and held her shoulders. She eased beneath the weight of his hands. Together they listened to the steadfast sound of what had once been unwanted.

  7

  ORLYNNE WAS UNEASY ON THE MOONLIT PATH. TWICE SHE’D LOST the trail and had to guide herself back by the awkward angle of the cabin’s lights on the side of the mountain. It reared like a vessel on a black ocean and she aligned herself to it, made her path depend on direct opposition. By the time she reached the front steps her breath whistled high in her throat and her body felt like a heavy suit that did not properly fit. She waited until she had collected herself and tapped at the front door.

  He fumbled from the back of the cabin, knocked over an object that thudded and clattered and he then came on and unbolted the door.

  “Oh, Orlynne. I’d thought it was too late for you to come. Please,” Gerald said, stepping aside to usher her in.

  She went back to the den where he had a television on. It made a sound like a stream of water in the room. He asked her if she would like something to drink.

  “Tea if you have it,” she said.

  “I do. Sit down.”

  This was the first time out here among his things. A strange solace. How long had she known the old eccentric, even if by reputation alone? But she had never imagined what his home would be like, how he would arrange the finer details of his daily life. It was only when he had come to stay with Kyle that she’d seen him as a man, a lonely old man, who was no longer anything but another human within reach. How that made a difference in their talks. And quietly something had begun, something she felt giving way in the frozen passages of her own body. Still, this was theirs alone. This didn’t belong
in the mouths of others. She knew how the talk would get around, how it would be reduced to an idle bit of humor, even among those she cared for and who cared for her in turn. There was an unintentional cruelty people committed against the old, laughing at what was a silent torment of the heart. So she had kept it from Kyle. Would keep this contentment to herself as long as she could. That was what you did with something you stole. And she knew that anything you had this late in life was a kind of theft.

  He came back in and silenced the television, placed a cup and saucer with a Twinings tab hung over the rim. She lifted it and sipped.

  “It’s very good,” she said.

  “Good. I usually drink coffee. Are you hungry? I could find a snack.”

  “No, I’m fine. I just came to see you. Like I said I would.”

  He smiled, sat there with his hands heavily in his lap, without an idea of what else to say. It amused her to see him at such an awkward end with himself.

  “I’ll have to admit, this is all pretty exciting,” she said.

  “Exciting? How?”

  “Coming out here in secret. Kyle doesn’t have any idea, I’m pretty sure.”

  He laughed, the lines in his face beginning to relax.

  “I’m sure Kyle would be scandalized. Some kind of rift in the Democratic Party would ensue, no doubt.”

  She weighed this a moment before speaking.

  “He cares about me. Wants me to be safe, but sometimes being safe can just be so goddamn boring, don’t you think?”

  He said that he did and asked if she’d mind listening to some music. When she said that she’d love it he dropped the needle on a Leonard Cohen record and the mellow tones of “Suzanne” leaked from the speakers stuck at each end of the bookcase. She leaned her head against the back of the chair and shut her eyes. Cohen’s young voice was tranquilizing and she knew if she allowed it she could let it do something to memory, but she didn’t want that. She wanted to remember exactly when and where she was.