How Fire Runs

by Charles Dodd White

  Carson weakly laughed.

  “I wanted to get a picture of you both. Something to rub in your faces.”

  “I think you’re confused.”

  “Don’t patronize me. I’ve followed you, seen it. More than once. Your little getaway in Abingdon. That was me that followed you up here a while back. Should have known you were crazy then. Shooting at my car. Jesus. What kind of person does that?”

  Kyle tightened his grip on the wheel as he turned for town. He set the hazard lights and stepped down on the accelerator. A few streetlights streaked the dash, their bulbs glancing down like canted eyes.

  They turned in at the hospital by Sycamore Shoals. Kyle went inside and brought a man out with a wheelchair, walked in with Carson in and told the woman at the desk what had happened.

  “A gunshot? You mean you’re telling me you shot him?”

  “Yes ma’am. It was an accident.”

  Carson laughed, shook his head. The duty nurse looked back and forth at them.

  “Sir, is this man a threat to your safety?”

  Carson said, “What does this look like to you, a paper cut? Can you get me a fucking doctor?”

  “I’m going to have to call the sheriff’s deputy that’s on duty,” she told Kyle. “We have to report all firearms injuries. You need to take a seat in the waiting area.”

  He sat next to the coffee machine, poured some out in one of the little paper cups but left it untouched. He wrung his hands a minute before he went ahead and called Laura.

  “Hey, is everything okay?”

  “Not really. Can you talk?”

  “Yeah, wait a minute. Let me get up and turn the light on. It’s been a hell of a night.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  She told him of a petty fight that erupted between her and her husband, how he’d called her a goddamn whore and told her to get out. She had, went and rented a room at the Holiday Inn by the interstate until she had a chance to get her feet under her. Kyle realized that it had likely only been part of the plan to provoke her to flee and then catch her in the consoling arms of her adulterous lover.

  “Kyle, what is it? What’s going on?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said when he saw the deputy’s cruiser pull up in the emergency lane. “I just wanted to check in, see how you were doing. I’ve got to run, okay? I’ve got to see to some things. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  He ended the call without waiting for her answer and then went out to meet the law.

  20

  DELILAH RODE THE MAN UNDER HER, FELT NOTHING BUT THE DULL ache of her flexing muscles until he gave up what he’d been holding back. His eyes went blind and his mouth tightened into something that looked like it had been stabbed. She patted his chest and rose, went to the bathroom and washed out his leavings from between her legs. She tied her hair back and leaned over the sink, pulled some cold water up to her face.

  “Come on back to bed,” Jonathan said.

  She could see his pale legs in the mirror. The rest of him was hidden behind the wall. Like he was nothing more than disembodied bones inviting her back for another joyless fuck. Loathing flooded her, something that seemed as though it was borne along her blood currents. Still, she knew to play her role, to make him believe she wanted to rub up against him like a scratch that had just found its favorite itch.

  “I’m coming, baby.”

  He had propped himself on a small bank of pillows and watched her when she crawled into bed next to him, put her face against his damp chest so she wouldn’t have to endure his face. She placed the tip of her finger over where his heart was supposed to lie, mapped a circle there, as if diagramming a scene of later excavation. At her touch he made a small sound of pleasure.

  “Sweet boy, you haven’t forgot what I asked you for, have you?”

  “No, baby. I sure haven’t.”

  “Well, you gonna let me have it?”

  “I’m not sure you’re going to like it very damn much. It’s not pretty, you know.”

  Damn fool. As if she would be lowering herself to this if she was worried about things remaining pretty. She knew Harrison had something on the side, some slut he saw when he was out of town for days at a time. But knowing it wasn’t the same as having the proof in front of her, seeing the face of what she’d been passed over for. She needed to have the picture in her head, the image that would bind her hate fast.

  “You can show me whatever it is, sweet boy. You aren’t jealous, are you?”

  He laughed, pushed himself farther up on his pillow buttress.

  “Hell, no. I got nothing to be jealous of. You’re in my bed, ain’t you?”

  “That’s right. I am.”

  He slid out from beneath her and fished the phone from the backpack he’d slung on the arm of the desk chair. He tapped the screen and started to scroll through. Its blue light limned his profile.

  “Hand it here, baby,” she urged, tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. “I’m a big girl. I can take whatever it is.”

  He glanced up at her, then back to the screen.

  “I knew there was something wrong with that motherfucker. You sure you want to see this?”

  She kept her hand extended until he finally gave it over. She placed her finger on the edge of the first picture. Harrison entering a brightly colored house. Then he was let in. Some black man. She kept going. The pictures hazy and blurred. The fool couldn’t even figure how to get a goddamn picture taken properly.

  “This ain’t nothing, Jonathan.”

  “Keep looking through.”

  She passed through another few shots. Now she was looking through the window at Harrison and the man sitting next to one another on a piece of shit little green couch. Smoking something. Their legs were touching. Something big and dark and hollow swung out from underneath the base of her stomach. She scrolled once more and they were holding each other by the waist, their mouths on each other like they were trying to take air out. One picture more and she felt that sickness overtake her. She ran to the bathroom, slammed the door.

  She had Jonathan take her back to the compound that night. Harrison was out. She went through his things in the closet, looked for signs of what she already knew. There was nothing more that incriminated him. Everything cleaned and organized. She had the address where Jonathan had followed him to Knoxville and knew how long it would take to drive there. She didn’t yet know what to do with this information, though she could feel it taking shape in her like a sickness running through the many doors of her body.

  Around midnight she’d heard Jonathan come scratching at the wall outside her room, speak her name in a hoarse whisper. She ignored him, pretended to sleep.

  21

  SHEPARD DIXON CAME UP WITH GERALD TO SEE KYLE AT THE HOUSE. They sat out on the porch and drank a beer before they got down to the business that each knew had to be settled. Dixon wore a tight polo shirt. Above it his patrician face looked as though it could have been lifted directly from a coin. Gerald was wearing overalls that appeared like they’d been pulled out of the bottom of a laundry hamper. A razor hadn’t touched his face inside a week.

  “There’s no way around this, I’m afraid, Kyle,” Dixon said, tugged at the peeling edge of the bottle label. “Not with what’s already happened.”

  “It’s a bunch of bullshit is what it is,” Gerald angrily broke in. “That man breaking into your house, for godssake. You had every right to kill him on the spot as far as I’m concerned.”

  “It’s more than simple legalities, Gerald . . .” Dixon began to explain before he was cut short by Kyle.

  “We all know this extends beyond the law,” he said. “It won’t take long before it gets around why he was out here. There’s no way I can’t resign. It would put the board in a hell of a position if I refused to. I shot the husband of the woman I’m sleeping with. That’s the fact and there’s no way in hell that won’t tear the town in half. We’ve got enough of a circus on our hands already with w
hat Gavin Noon is trying to pull.”

  “Kyle’s right,” Dixon said. “We need to find a way to get ahead of this, and quick, too. There’s going to be a special election announced as soon as we bring this to the public. We have to have someone to back.”

  They passed the old names back and forth for several minutes, but the familiar reasons for dismissing them seemed to rise up of their own accord. Too clannish. Too dull. Too old.

  “What about Frank Farmer?” Kyle suggested.

  Gerald passed his hand across the bridge of his nose, held it there as if given to sudden pain.

  “Farmer, the black fellow that runs the arbor business?”

  “Yeah, he’s been here in the county for years now. Family man. Well-spoken and with business ties in the community. Hell, he can’t be more than thirty-five years old.”

  Dixon leaned in, his jaw propped on his joined fists.

  “It could work. It would sure piss off Noon and his people. You know he will make a run for your seat. Hell, he’d do it on principle alone at this point. What better than to have a solid black man as his opponent. It will get people out to vote, for sure. He played ball for Tennessee, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he was a hell of a cornerback for a couple of years,” Kyle said. “If there’s one thing that can get a man some traction it’s that he spent some time as a Vol.”

  “But what people will it bring out?” Gerald asked. “It’s just as likely to help Noon as it is to hurt him. You two are playing with fire. I’m not saying that Farmer can’t pull it off, but we’re not even sure he’d agree to run in the first place. You know, not every single man in the world thinks that sitting down with a bunch of boring old farts hashing out zoning laws is the second-best thing to getting an early ticket to Kingdom Come. Farmer might be a touch smarter than to suffer all of that.”

  “Well,” Kyle said, “let’s hope he isn’t.”

  Dixon said, “Listen, this is all going to take some doing. We’re going to have to run some kind of Republican. Officially speaking, I can’t be a part of this or we’re walking into a minefield of collusion. That being said, a three-way race gives you all a much better chance of pulling this thing off. I’ll get together with my people right away. You’ll know soon enough who we will run. Getting Farmer is going to be up to you all. But I have to say, I really do wish you all the luck in the world.”

  FRANK FARMER was unloading a pair of chainsaws and a safety belt from the back of his pickup when Kyle and Gerald pulled into his driveway. He nodded hello, set everything down at his feet and stood wiping his oily hands while they got out and came to speak with him.

  “Howdy, Frank,” Kyle said, offered his hand.

  “I don’t want to dirty you up, Mister Pettus. I just got in from a job near the college. A big old elm that couldn’t be saved.”

  “Why hell, Frank. I’m a politician. There’s no way to keep my hands from getting dirty.”

  He smiled and they shook hands. Farmer was a thin but sinewy man, the muscles in his forearms defined from years of hard outdoor work. He wore a ball cap propped up on his balding skull. It read THE TREE DOCTOR.

  “You mind if we step inside, Frank? There’s something we’d like to talk to you about for a minute, if you can spare it.”

  He told them to come on, and they followed him through the open garage door and entered a tidy kitchen. He offered coffee, which they accepted. While Frank puttered around the kitchen for mugs and a filter, it gave Kyle a chance to take in the Farmer household. A framed portrait of his family in what looked like Easter clothes. A credenza with Frank’s plaques and trophies from years of high school and college football. Above it a big action shot of Frank in Volunteer orange crashing into a Vanderbilt receiver, shoulder matched against shoulder. He remembered there had been talk of Frank having a shot at the NFL before he’d gone down with a knee injury in a bowl game his senior year. What had looked like nothing on television added three-tenths of a second to his forty-yard dash at that year’s combine, which made all the difference in the world at a position that depended on speed. It must have been terrible to be that close to living a life among gods and then have such promise ripped unceremoniously away. But if Frank dwelled on the life he’d never had, Kyle could see no evidence of resentment.

  Kyle asked after Farmer’s wife, Gloria, and the kids, and he said they were doing well, and should be home from a visit to their grandmama’s soon. Nice to have family close by that could relieve them of the kicking and screaming that twin girls brought into a house. They softly laughed and agreed.

  “We do want to talk to you about something specific, Frank.” Gerald finally brought the subject around.

  “I imagined you did,” Farmer said, his smile undimmed.

  It was Kyle who continued.

  “Frank, there’s something that’s about to come to light. Something that’s going to force one of us to bow out of the commission. Normally, that wouldn’t worry us all that much, but with this business with Gavin Noon and his group . . .”

  “You mean the white supremacist? I thought you all had decided you weren’t going to give them the time of day. Last I heard old Gerald here was going to hold out to the Second Coming before giving up his seat.”

  “It ain’t me that’s leaving,” Gerald said. “Though if I had a plain lick of sense left it would be.”

  “It’s me, Frank,” Kyle said. “And we need to run somebody that we trust, somebody that will serve the community’s interests.”

  “What kind of hornet’s nest have you kicked over, Pettus?”

  “That’s not important right now, Frank. What’s important is that regardless of which party you run for, the sitting members of the commission are willing to throw their weight behind you. Unofficially, at least. They’ll field a Republican candidate, but it’s all just following what’s expected of them at this point. I don’t think anyone doubts that as soon as Noon has a chance to disrupt the board he will seize the opportunity. We can’t afford for a man like that to gain political power. So, after a little bit of talking, we’ve decided our best shot is a three-way race.”

  “And you figured a little local black boy would be just the ticket, didn’t you?”

  No one said anything for a while.

  “Frank,” Kyle broke the silence. “There’s no way we can hope to run someone successfully unless they polarize the race. If we sit some faceless nobody that no one knows one way or the other then it gives Noon a chance to energize the people that support him, not just the ones that live out there praying to the ghost of Hitler, but to all the others in the county that are happy to go along with it. With you, we’d be making a stand. A real stand that shows everyone we won’t allow men like this to take over our country. That damn thing in Charlottesville last summer, that was just the beginning. They marched and chanted and got everyone on Facebook stirred up, but look at what happened a few weeks later. It was on to the next outrage. Everyone had moved on to hating something else. But those bastards with their torches and their fascism don’t forget.”

  Frank laughed, tugged at the brim of his ball cap.

  “You think black folks don’t know that, Pettus? My God, you all are in my house sitting here delivering a lecture to me about what it means when you let scared white men get a hold of something they don’t understand. You think we ever stop thinking about it? Look, I don’t doubt you’re doing what you think is right, but you’re asking me to get involved in something that would put me and my family at risk. Do you think there’s a chance in hell that those men and those who support them are going to just stand off to the side while some nigger tree cutter stands between them and what they want? I know what year the calendar says, but I also know I live in Carter County, Tennessee. I know that means certain things. I’ve built my life around knowing that.”

  Before anything else could be said, they saw through the kitchen window Farmer’s wife and girls pull into the garage, heard the car doors slam shut. His daughters burst
through the door, exact duplicates of one another, charged forward to embrace their father.

  “Well,” Kyle said. “I guess we better be off.”

  “Yeah,” Frank told him. “I guess you better be.”

  KYLE MET Laura at the Mexican restaurant on the main strip in town, sat in a booth near the back where they ordered the margaritas on special and shared an order of nachos though neither had much of an appetite. She had visited Peter in the hospital that afternoon. He had told her to do him a favor and put a bullet through her skull. She had remained in the room for a while after that, tidying flowers and just sitting there under his gaze, but nothing else had been said. Finally, she had told him she would check back in when she could and left.

  “I can’t believe I was such a fool,” she said.

  “We both made mistakes.”

  “I’ve told you it’s not the same, Kyle. Look, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I went to see Orlynne a couple of days after we went out to her place.”

  Kyle puts his hands flat on the table, leaned back. “I wish you wouldn’t have done that,” he told her.

  “That’s what you don’t understand. I need to be a part of your life if you want this to work. And it doesn’t matter if you and Orlynne are having a fight right now. She’s as much a part of you as if she were your mama. It’s not hard to see that. It’s especially important for me to do what I can when it’s the fact of us being together that’s the problem you’re having with her. I’ve got to make some kind of peace with her. A woman in a small town leaving her husband for another man can end up isolated in a hurry. I need all the friends I can find. Anyhow, I knew there was something upsetting her when we were there, even if she was trying to keep it to herself.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She told me what she tried to warn you about and how you’d back-talked her.”

  “Back-talked? Jesus Christ. That’s a hell of a way to put it.”

  “Well, she wasn’t wrong, was she? Look where this has gotten us.”