American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  For Tonya, the work did seem to come from a place of genuine interest rather than just a practical fallback. Her mother, Susan, had studied to be a nurse before marriage. She’d never officially entered the profession, but she’d kept her old textbooks. Susan was a gentle person, the kind of friend who would see a good deal on cantaloupes in the grocery store and pick up an extra for a neighbor, or who would hand out homemade preserves as gifts. Tonya’s father had been a farmer, mostly working other people’s land. People thought that Carroll was an odd man. He had an unpredictable temper, as one man whose family employed him remembered. Certain strains of Bundick men were ornery. It came with the blood.

  The blood also ran through Tonya, who herself gained a reputation for orneriness, though of a different kind. The people who remembered how she’d been teased also remembered how she’d taken it: When people teased her on the bus, she never cried and she never accepted it. She fought back, schoolmates remembered, even when the perpetrators were twice her size.

  She graduated from high school and she did become a nursing assistant. She moved to the nearby island of Chincoteague and ended up pregnant by a local landscaper who specialized in bringing southern palm trees to Eastern Shore front lawns. He was black, resulting in the kind of union that, even in the late 1990s, made a good portion of Accomack County take notice. Accomack was about 61 percent white and 29 percent black. The chair of the Board of County Supervisors was black, and so was the clerk of the court, and the population was too small for the two public high schools to be anything but integrated—all of the neighborhoods went to them—but like a lot of the South and like a lot of America, there was a difference between who people worked with and who they socialized with. Tonya and the landscaper weren’t ever officially together, though, and after the birth of their second son, she took the children and moved back to the mainland without him.

  She got another nursing job, at a residential house for mentally disabled adults where she arrived by 6 a.m. to make beds and help residents through their wake-up call and breakfast. Her colleagues liked her, thought she was a fast learner and unflinching in the face of messy, intimate work. It was hard, and it didn’t pay particularly well. In that job, she almost never made more than $15,000 a year. When she talked about her private life with her colleagues, it was about her boys, whom she doted on. She complained, sometimes, that the boys’ father didn’t send regular child support, but she made do. She baked cupcakes for school fund-raisers, she bought the boys clothes from Peebles, a local department store with precisely hung jeans and collared shirts, instead of from Walmart or Rose’s, the discount chain where clothing was always sliding off hangers and sometimes had holes.

  In 2006, Tonya’s mother, Susan, collapsed in her own backyard. She died instantly. Tonya was the one who found her, out near the clothing line like she’d been getting ready to hang some laundry. A short while after that, Tonya moved with her two boys back into the house in which she had been raised, a white ranch-style home on a two-lane road in an unincorporated locale called Hopeton. The house had been left to both Tonya and her sister, Anjee, but the two had decided upon an arrangement. Anjee would sign over the rights to their parents’ house for the sum of one dollar, plus, as they decided to word it in the transfer of deeds, “natural love and affection and other good and valuable consideration.” In exchange, when their still-healthy grandmother eventually passed away, Tonya would similarly sign her rights to that house over to Anjee.

  At nights to unwind, she’d started going to Shuckers. Old acquaintances saw her, people who had never left the mainland, and they were stunned because somehow, in between the two kids and the hard job, and the move to Chincoteague and back, she’d become beautiful. The glasses were gone. Her hair—whether she was wearing it blonde and spiky or brunette and curly—was meticulously styled. Her makeup, frosty lips and dark eyeliner, was expertly applied.

  Some folks didn’t even recognize her. One man, who had gone to high school with her and whose wife had counted herself as one of Tonya’s only friends, spent several minutes chatting with Tonya before she laughed and said, “You have no idea who I am, do you?”

  Gradually, this new Tonya replaced the old Tonya in people’s minds. At Shuckers, she found the popularity she never had in high school. One night she invited a coworker from the residential facility to come out to Shuckers with her. The colleague hadn’t ever been there before—she was black and thought of it as a place where mostly white people hung out. But she went and was surprised by how much fun she had, and even more surprised at how popular her coworker was. “The queen of her own little world.”

  So that was Tonya, or a version of her. The version that anyone who had lived in Accomack for more than a decade would have gleaned just through idle grocery store chatter. Sometimes there would be grace notes added to the story—people gossiping over the parentage of her kids, or saying that women who had children shouldn’t leave the house dressed as she dressed, or marveling at the orange color of her skin.

  But set all of that gossip aside and there was still a clean narrative: There was a girl. She was plain and unpopular. She moved away. When she came back, she was beautiful. Both when she was plain and when she was beautiful, she had a spark to her, the kind of spark that led her to stand up to bullies or, as one person who knew her socially remembered, arm herself with a preemptive beer bottle when another female patron was getting up in her face.

  By day she was a hardworking nurse and terrific mother, by night she got dressed up and went to Shuckers, and that was the other part of Tonya’s story people could agree on: it was here that she met a funny guy, a firefighter with a drug problem who everyone said had a big heart, and they got to talking.

  CHAPTER 7

  “LIKE A GHOST”

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT on December 15, 2012, Lois Gomez sat up in bed. She thought she heard something. She listened. Nothing. Maybe she was wrong, maybe she hadn’t heard anything. She went to the kitchen for a drink of water. It was two or three in the morning, only a few hours before her shift at Perdue and her husband’s shift at Tyson. Now she definitely heard something. A banging on her front door—which in itself was odd; friends and family knew they always used the side entrance—and someone yelling: “Your garage is on fire! I’ve already called 911!”

  She stood frozen in the kitchen trying to process the information. Christmas lights, she thought. Her outdoor Christmas lights were halfway up, but she and her husband had recently decided to visit his family in Texas for the holiday and she’d been trying to figure out whether to bother with the rest of the decorations, which were meanwhile stored in the family’s detached garage, which was now on fire. Christmas lights, along with the expensive music equipment for her son’s rock band.

  It had been a rough couple of months. For one thing, she wasn’t getting along with her next-door neighbors. She’d been close with the woman who’d owned that house before, Susan Bundick. They brought each other dinner sometimes, or stood and chatted in their backyards. But one Sunday afternoon, Lois was outside emptying the aboveground backyard pool to close out the summer season, and she saw the police were at Susan’s house. They told Lois her neighbor had died. Now, Susan’s daughter lived in her mother’s old house and things weren’t as pleasant. Tonya was fine, kept to herself, but Lois had a few run-ins with Tonya’s new boyfriend, a squirrelly redheaded guy whose name she didn’t know. He’d done a few little things, like dumping a bunch of branches on their lawn instead of disposing of them like he was supposed to. Once he’d accused her of making racial slurs against Tonya’s kids. The accusation was ridiculous. Lois’s husband was from Mexico, and her four grandchildren were partly black.

  She’d also been having nightmares about the arsonist. In one dream, she went into her kitchen late at night and saw someone racing through the yard, an intruder wearing dark-colored sweatpants and hoodie. “What are you doing?” she called. The figure turned and looked at her but she still couldn’t see
his face, and he eventually disappeared behind her detached garage. She woke up and realized it wasn’t real.

  This night wasn’t a dream, though.

  She went outside, where flames were leaping from the garage. She watched the dissolution of her Christmas ornaments, and her son’s band equipment, and all the other things people stick in garages and toolsheds when they don’t want to get rid of something but aren’t ready to say good-bye. Numbly, she realized that whoever had lit the garage on fire had also taken the time to let out the chickens. They had been kept in a pen attached to the building and they were now running all over the lawn at three in the morning.

  It was the thirtieth fire.

  By now, it was a strange time to live in the neighborhood.

  Reports of arsons were appearing almost daily on the local TV news as reporters strained their thesauruses looking for new words to describe fire, and ended up just saying “blazed” a lot. The newspapers, the Eastern Shore News and the Eastern Shore Post, operated with shoestring staffs, a handful of reporters apiece who covered everything from local politics to local basketball games in print editions that had been reduced to twice a week. Now they were covering the biggest news of the decade.

  By the time Lois and Miguel’s garage lit up, they already had friends whose properties had burned, in what was becoming a real fear for anyone who owned a structure that looked even slightly decrepit. People were filled with—well, “paranoia” wasn’t the right word for it, not exactly, because paranoia meant that the thing you feared wasn’t likely to actually happen. These fires could happen, did happen, every night, all the time.

  It was hard to pinpoint one moment when people realized what a big deal the serial arsonist was. Was it fire number seventeen, a big rental house worth $95,000, a lot of money for the Eastern Shore? Was it fire number thirty-four, the house on Front Street? That one was abandoned, but it wasn’t isolated like the others. It was right in downtown Accomac, just a few blocks from the courthouse. If the wind had gone the wrong way, that fire could have taken out the whole town.

  Maybe it was fire number fifteen, a little house directly across the street from state police investigators Rob Barnes’s and Glenn Neal’s offices. That fire wasn’t even called into 911—Neal saw it himself as he was driving back from an interdepartmental meeting about the arsons. He was on his cell phone, talking to the director of the 911 Center about how the meeting had gone, and said, “Well, shit, man, the house is on fire. I gotta go.” It was so blatant. fire fifteen had a message, and the message seemed like it was Screw you.

  After a little while, watching the fires was akin to seeing a set of china stacked precariously on the edge of a table and knowing it would fall but not knowing when. Or watching someone squeeze and squeeze a balloon and trying to prepare for the inevitable pop. Every single place people shopped or worked or went for coffee or got the car repaired, they would wonder if the arsonist was standing next to them in line. Facebook pages developed: “Who is trying to burn down Accomack County?” and “Arson in Accomack” and “Who is setting these fires? And how will they be stopped?”

  On one of those pages, somebody reported that there was a scanner app that could be downloaded onto smartphones, so that listeners could hear about 911 calls at the same time the cops did. Everybody took that advice, and shortly after, somebody else noticed a different thing: one of the features of the app was that it showed users which cities it was most popular in, a top ten list. There was a period of time in late 2012 and early 2013 when number three was New York City and number two was Los Angeles, and the number one place where people were listening for crime data on their phones was Accomack County, Virginia.

  The national news media had arrived, eventually. The story beckoned because of the sheer vastness of it—the almost comically large number of incidents taking place in a locale that brought with it a ready-made atmosphere. To journalists and professional storytellers, crimes are always more interesting when they happen in folksy, safe communities than when they happen in big cities; there’s a reason that Twin Peaks was set in a small Washington State logging community and not in New York.

  But there were other reasons why the Accomack fires were so appealing to the American public at large. Big-name crimes have a way of becoming big name not only because of the crimes themselves but because of the story they tell about the country at the moment. The infamous bank robbers of the 1930s—Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Frank “Jelly” Nash—were stealing money at a time when hardly anyone had any, when Dust Bowl poverty made such thefts seem, if not justified, then at least understandable. The 1920s jazz killers—women who murdered their husbands and blamed it on the music—did so in an era where the country was grappling with rapidly loosening morals and a newly liberated female populace, which had just gotten the vote.

  And now here were arsons, happening in the type of rural environment that had been figuratively burning down for several decades, whether in the midwestern Rust Belt or the southern Bible Belt, or the hills of Appalachia. Underrepresented in television shows and media. Left behind when industries changed or factories moved. Residents in places like these represented the “real America” that national politicians always seemed to talk about when they wanted votes. The America that had just recently caused President Obama to found the White House Rural Council, to “promote economic prosperity and quality of life in rural communities.” Obama had recently been elected into office for a second term, but the vast majority of people in rural places—61 percent—hadn’t voted for him. The United States was still recovering from a crippling recession that had bitterly divided the nation in terms of where its money should go. Should the country continue farm subsidies, which sent billions of dollars every year to less-populated counties? (Between 1995 and 2014, Accomack received nearly $68 million.) How much money should go to supporting affordable housing in rural areas? In 2010, the government-backed 502 Direct Loan program, which provided funds to buy or rehabilitate rural dwellings, was funded at $2.1 billion; three years later the number was $828 million.

  This was not the story of Accomack. This was the story of America. In 1910, back in the peak of the Eastern Shore’s wealth, more than 70 percent of Americans lived in rural counties. It was the norm, it was the standard. Now, rural counties contained only 15 percent of the nation’s population.

  The people who did stay in rural places got older. The median age of a United States citizen was thirty-seven in the 2010 census; in Accomack it was forty-four. There were counties out in the western part of the country—big, cowboy counties—where the median age now approached sixty, populated by residents who didn’t want to leave but who knew they didn’t have the amenities to make younger folks stay. “It’s time for us to have an adult conversation with the folks in rural America,” U.S. secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack had just recently said in a December 2012 speech. “Rural America, with a shrinking population, is becoming less and less relevant to the politics of this country, and we better recognize it and we better begin to reverse it.”

  Rural America was a theoretical place that took up a large, romantic space in the American imagination. The people who lived there had cultivated the nation. They had fed the nation and nurtured its soul. Thoreau had to go find the countryside to write Walden. The poet Elinor Wylie had to go find the countryside to write “Wild Peaches” in 1925. In fact, she had to go find the Eastern Shore: “When the world turns completely upside down,” she wrote, “you say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore.”

  You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown

  Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color

  Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor

  We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

  The imagery was beautiful, it was wistful, it was evocative, it was eerie. But what did it mean in real life? What did it mean in the modern world? What things were worth holding on to and what things had to be relinquished? America fretted about its rural parts,
and the arsons were an ideal criminal metaphor for 2012.

  CHARLIE ROSE was about as national as you could get, a newscaster with CBS This Morning. He’d sent down a reporter from his show to get the story on the ground. “Someone is waging war on rural Virginia,” Rose said to his viewing audience, from behind his desk in New York. “Their weapon of choice is fire. Chip Reid is in the town of Tasley on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Chip, good morning.”

  Chip Reid, a reporter with CBS This Morning, had come to Accomack with a camera crew. He interviewed the pizza maker at the Club Car Cafe and asked lunching locals how the fires had changed their lives. He visited the Parksley fire station with Phil Kelley, who had been dispatched as a local fireman representative. Before the cameras were even rolling, Reid and Kelley drove around together, Kelley in a carefully selected sweatshirt with the fire company’s logo, and Reid in an expensive-looking, tundra-ready parka. Kelley pointed out the locations of some fires and explained the equipment and terminology of firefighting, and Reid made Kelley feel comfortable by conducting a pre-interview, a casual conversation to ready Kelley with the kinds of questions he could expect to be asked when the camera was on.

  “The arsonist is almost like a ghost,” Kelley offered, thinking of the way nobody had seen him slip into or out of any buildings yet. Reid’s eyes lit up, as Kelley remembered, and he told Kelley that the ghost metaphor was a really good one. Then the camera man started to film.

  “What’s your biggest worry?” Reid asked Kelley on air.