Clean Burn

by Karen Sandler

  Dragging his ratty old blanket, Sean returned from the toilet over on the other side of the stairs and snuggled up next to James. The baby sat up in her playpen, her thumb in her mouth, sad brown eyes staring at James. He’d changed her diaper a few minutes ago. The old one sat rolled up on the stairs where Mama had told him to leave it. He was tall for his age, so he could almost put it on the topmost step, right near the door. When Mama brought lunch, she’d take it and leave another clean one.

  Sean turned to face him. “Quiero jugar.” The little boy thought a moment. “Want to play the game.”

  James had made up a game to play with Sean using a plastic jar full of nails and some of the paper cups Mama brought their juice in. James would hold up his fingers, and tell Sean to put that many nails in the cup. At first, Sean didn’t understand what James wanted, but then he figured it out and could count out the nails up to six now.

  They only played at night, when Mama went out. James had hidden a candle and matches so he could have light when Mama was gone. He’d found the candle and matches when he’d found the nails, stuck back behind the buckets of rags and cans of kerosene under the stairs. He kept the matches and candle stuffed under his mattress. The nails and paper cups just fit underneath the playpen, in a corner where the baby wouldn’t sit on them.

  “Tonight,” James said. “I promise.”

  Sean must have been tired, using Spanish that way. At the beginning, when the little boy would mix in Spanish words with English, Mama would scream at him, sometimes slap his face. Once James figured out why Mama was so mad, that she wanted Sean to speak only English, he helped the little boy remember.

  James heard the rattle of the lock and quickly stood up as the door opened. “There’s the diaper, Mama.”

  “Thank you, Junior.” She went down the two steps to retrieve it, then set a clean one in its place. She placed a cardboard box on the step, too. Their sandwiches and juice would be inside it, along with the baby’s bottle. “Mama has to go out.”

  “But it’s daytime.” James glanced up at the window. The bright noontime sun still shone there. It was stupid, but for a second he thought maybe that beam of sunlight on his feet had been his imagination. Or maybe Mama had made the night-time come early. “You don’t go out during the day.”

  Mama just stood there, quiet. James wondered if he’d said something wrong, something that Mama didn’t like. She’d only slapped him a few times since he’d been here, but he didn’t want her to do it again. Or make him hold the candle.

  “I just want you all to go to heaven, Junior.” Her voice sounded dreamy and distracted. “Like you did before. You and your brothers and sisters.”

  James felt a tug of fear, like he always did when Mama talked that way. “I’ll be good, Mama. I promise.”

  “I know you will.” Now she sounded more normal, almost like his real mama. “Tell Mama you love her.”

  He hated this the most. She asked him to say it at least once a day. The first time that she’d slapped him, it had been because he wouldn’t say it. Because he didn’t love her. He only loved his real mama.

  But he’d learned to say the words as if he really meant them. It was much better to keep Mama happy. “I love you, Mama.” He forced himself to smile.

  “And I love you, Junior. Even more than before.”

  She swung the door shut. He heard the click of the lock, then her footsteps grew softer. He waited, listening to be sure she wasn’t coming back.

  Then he dumped the rags from two of the buckets and set first one, then another on top of it below the window. He’d figured out he could reach the window standing on both buckets, even though one fit partway into the other. He wanted to look at the window, see if he could open it. He wouldn’t be able to fit through, but maybe Sean could.

  First James peeked through to watch as Mama headed off away from the house. When he couldn’t see her anymore, he set his hands against the window frame and pushed up. It didn’t budge at all. He looked at the frame to see if maybe it was stuck with paint. Most of the paint had peeled off, so he knew it couldn’t be that.

  Hiking himself up a little, he tried to see if there was a lock he’d missed. He had to really twist his neck around to spot the problem. The window had been nailed shut from the outside. He could only see two nails that had bent before being hammered all the way in, but he figured there were more than those two.

  James dropped down to the mattress, then put the buckets back under the stairs, each with their pile of rags stuffed inside. He felt his throat get tight, and he knew if he wasn’t careful, he might start to cry. Mama wouldn’t like that.

  Instead, he got their lunch and the diaper from the stairs where Mama had left them. He gave the baby her bottle and turned the cardboard box upside down to use it as a table for his and Sean’s lunches. Once they’d finished eating, he put the box back on the stairs and pulled out the cups and the nails.

  “We can play now,” he told Sean as he set out the cups and spilled some nails onto the concrete floor. He held up four fingers. “How many is this?”

  As Sean dropped four nails into a cup, all James could think of were those others, rusted and bent in the window, locking him in this room forever.

  CHAPTER 10

  By the time we pulled into Arnie’s Automotive, the air in the Ford was as explosive as a primed shotgun. I scanned the open repair bays as Ken angled into a parking slot, looking for a likely ex-con candidate.

  I didn’t have to search very hard before I spotted the guy in the center bay. He stood under a pickup on a lift, prison tats flexing as he turned a wrench, his scruffy black hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  He confirmed the ID when he turned our way. Denning took one look at Ken climbing out of the Explorer, threw his wrench and took off running.

  The spectacle of me chasing after a suspect from a cold start isn’t a pretty sight. Without my usual stretch and warm-up, I launched into a pitiful, limping crab walk while Ken shot ahead of me after Denning. By the time my muscles had loosened up enough to look more like a human being than a crippled crustacean, Ken had caught up to the ex-con and had him spread-eagled over the hood of the truck he’d been making for.

  With speed no longer of the essence, I slowed to a more dignified amble and tried to pretend that pain wasn’t screaming along every nerve in my left leg. Having searched Denning’s person for weaponry and other contraband, Ken had him upright again, one arm in a compliance hold. With everything hurting from my left hip down my leg to my toes, it took everything in me to keep from taking a swing at Denning.

  Ken got into Denning’s face. “Why’d you run, Marty?”

  Even inches away, the ex-con wouldn’t meet Ken’s gaze. “You caught me off-guard.”

  Ken all but whispered into Denning’s ear. “Innocent people don’t run.”

  I moved into the ex-con’s line of sight. “They say confession is good for the soul, Marty. Maybe you want to get it off your chest.”

  He gave me an evil look. “Who the fuck are you?”

  I stretched my mouth into a smile. “Just trying to give you a little friendly advice.”

  Denning sneered. “I didn’t do nothing. I got nothing to confess.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Miscarriage of justice.” Holding my breath to keep from inhaling the stench of stale perspiration, I took a closer look at his dilated pupils. “You on something, Marty?”

  “I’m clean.” He said it too fast, with a quick glance to the left. Then, all bravado, he leered at me. “But I’m glad to piss in a cup if you hold it.”

  Ken torqued Marty’s arm a little tighter until the ex- con sucked in a breath. I just kept on smiling. “If I hold it, lover boy, it won’t be attached to your body much longer.”

  He smirked, but kept his trap shut. Ken eased his grip. “If you take off again, I pull out my Glock. Got that?”

  Denning nodded and Ken let go. The ex-con shot me another dark look as he rubbed the circulation back into his arm. “If
I don’t get back to work, Arnie will fire my ass.”

  Ken tipped his head back toward the repair shop and we strolled on back. Ken twitched a little when Denning retrieved his wrench, but he stepped aside to let Marty resume tinkering with the underbelly of the Ram 1500.

  “So what the hell do you want?” Denning asked, ever the charmer.

  “Wondering if you’ve been playing with matches,” Ken said.

  Marty’s grip on the wrench faltered and he nearly dropped it. Then he gave the bolt a hard twist. “That’s ancient history. I done my time, finished my parole a year ago.”

  I grabbed the other end of the wrench. He didn’t let go. “It’s tough sometimes, quitting,” I told him. “Especially when you like it so much. Burning things. Watching the destruction. I bet you still get off on it.”

  He yanked the wrench away, hefting it like he was going to take a swing at me. I hoped he would, relishing the opportunity to inflict some bodily damage on him in return.

  Ken spoiled the fun. “Put it down, Marty.” His hand rested on his Glock.

  A rattlesnake rendered in black ink coiled around Denning’s forearm, its teeth dripping black venom. The snake flexed as the ex-con considered his options. Denning dropped the wrench into his toolbox. “You got something to accuse me of, just say it.”

  Ken edged in closer. “We’ve got a string of arsons, Marty. And here you are, with all that ancient history.”

  He laughed, the twin lightning bolt tattooed on the back of his hand rippling as he worked. “You check my record, Sheriff Heinz. The charge was arson for profit. Who’s gonna hire me here in Podunk, California to burn down their shed?”

  “Markowitz might have, for the insurance money,” I ventured.

  “Sounds like a Jew name.” The letters “H-A-T-E”, tattooed in thick black, tightened on his knuckles. “I don’t work with no Jews.”

  Ken’s hand closed over his baton and I suspected he was wishing for an excuse to smack Marty upside the head himself. Instead, he pulled out his notepad. “I need a home address.”

  “I live out in the back of beyond.” Marty dropped his wrench in his tool box and swiped his hands with a greasy rag. “I got a PO box.”

  “Then directions to your place,” Ken told him.

  Marty stared at Ken, in silent hatred, for a good thirty seconds. Finally he rattled off a series of twists and turns to a southeast county locale. As familiar as I was with the back roads in Greenville County, I doubted I could have followed the complex route. I suspected the ex-con was making up the directions.

  Ken scribbled on his pad. “You live alone?”

  Another long delay before Denning answered. “I got a girlfriend.”

  “Name?”

  The response came out of Denning with all the ease of a molar extraction. “Sharon Peele.”

  “She home?” Ken asked. “In case I want to go out and talk to her?”

  Something flickered across Marty’s face. Not quite guilt, since this was a man who completely lacked a moral compass. But something that raised my antenna. Ken, his gaze on his notepad, missed it.

  “She’s visiting her mother,” Marty said finally.

  If Ken caught the prevarication in Marty’s tone, he didn’t have a chance to say so. His radio crackled, and he moved off toward where the Explorer was parked. Denning backed out from under the Dodge and activated the lift. The truck lowered to the bay’s concrete floor.

  I wanted to egg him on a little, see what he might give up, so I asked, “You and your girlfriend enjoy the same hobbies?”

  If he was evasive before, now he shut down like the gate to solitary. “What do you mean?”

  “Does she like fire, too? Like to burn things?”

  His eyes all but goggled out of his head as he stared at me. Then he turned his back. “I got work to do.” He swiped his still greasy hands on his jeans, likely the same denims issued to him in prison. I couldn’t see his hands shake, but I was damn sure his palms were sweating.

  In for a dime, in for a dollar, I figured. I pulled out James’s photo and held it in front of Denning’s nose. “Have you seen him?”

  I saw his reaction as he registered James’s ethnicity. I knew what those double lightning bolts on the back of Denning’s hand signified, could almost hear the n-word squirming around in the ex-con’s warped brain like some toxic worm.

  His lip curled in an ugly Elvis parody. “Can’t say that I have.”

  Ken called to me from the Explorer. “We’ve got a situation.”

  I stuffed James’s picture back in my pocket. As I headed over to Ken, my skin crawled. Marty Denning might hate my guts, but he was watching my butt as I retreated, despite the complete lack of sex appeal in my awkward gait. The thought of his gaze on my body made me sick, which pissed me off so much I longed to sink an elbow into his gut.

  It might have been morally righteous, but would just complicate things. I tamped down my fury and resisted the urge to look back as I climbed into the Explorer where Ken waited.

  “You get anything else from him?” he asked as he pulled out.

  “Those directions to his place have got to be bogus.”

  Ken nodded as he screamed off up the road. “I’ll check around. Ask his boss, or the UPS guy. Someone will know where he really lives.”

  “Something’s going on at his house he doesn’t want us to know about. Did you see the look on his face when he mentioned that girlfriend of his?”

  Ken shook his head, taking a turn on two wheels.

  “What’s the hurry?”

  Turning toward Highway 50, he hit the lights. “An eight-year-old boy fell into the Greenville River.”

  “What kind of winter have you had?” A drought year meant the river would be running slower, that there’d be a prayer of getting him out.

  He glanced across at me, his expression grim. “Plenty of snow and too much rain in March.”

  There went the prayers. I’d never had much use for them anyway.

  I could feel Tommy’s accusing stare boring into my shoulder blades from the caged back seat of the Explorer. As if anything that had to do with kids and disasters was my job to fix. I wanted to turn around and yell, It wasn’t me that pushed him in, damn it. Go haunt someone else’s life.

  But I kept my mouth shut and sank into my own private gloom.

  * * * *

  The river had been one of my escapes during my early teens, a haven free from my father’s attentions. I had a couple of older friends with cars who would drive me out there, just past the Strawberry Canyon turnoff. I didn’t mind that my friends used me as cover for their illicit forays into the surrounding woods with their girlfriends. Or that they’d persuaded Mom or Dad they’d be too busy keeping an eye on little Janelle to be engaging in anything nefarious. I was happy as a clam to stay by the river’s edge while they found a secluded spot among the trees.

  Later, I became one of those girlfriends, losing my unlamented virginity in a prickly bed of pine needles near Strawberry Canyon, with a rock the size of Ohio stabbing my lower back. As Ronny Johnson groaned “Oh, baby, oh baby,” in my ear, his breath hot against my neck, I watched a squirrel performing acrobatics in the Ponderosa pine above my head. I remember thinking how funny it would be if the little gray fella crapped on Ronny’s head right at the climactic moment.

  The turnout Ken pulled into wasn’t the same one Ronny had used that day, but it pretty much looked the same. Six miles past Strawberry Canyon, black oaks and incense cedars competed for shoreline space with willows and Himalayan blackberry. Below us, the river roared over boulders, fat with treacherous spring melt.

  A couple of cruisers were already there, along with a paramedic truck and a handful of civilian cars. A woman huddled in the back of the paramedic truck in the numb aftermath of hysteria, a blanket around her shoulders.

  Kid Deputy—Alex—ambled on over as we climbed from Ken’s Explorer. He gave me a once-over, curiosity ablaze in his punk kid face. “Still no sign o
f a body.”

  The screech of tires announced the arrival of what had to be the boy’s father. He took off at a run for the woman in the paramedic truck, the door to his Subaru still open, the bell dinging out its warning that he’d left his key in the ignition.

  “Run me through it again,” Ken said, pulling Alex out of earshot of the distraught parents.

  “I was on patrol two miles up the highway when the call came in, so I got here pretty quick.” Alex flipped open his notebook. “The victim’s name is Brandon Thompson. A group of second graders from Greenville Elementary were on their way up to Plover Lake for a field trip. They pulled in to look at the river. They’ve been studying beavers. I guess they were hoping to spot one.”

  I took a look down the steep, rocky bank. “How the hell did he get down to the water?”

  “His family moved here from Carson City two months ago,” Alex said. “The kid hasn’t made many friends yet. The girl he’d been buddied with stayed in the car with her friends. The teacher and the boy’s mom got to talking and didn’t notice Brandon wandering off by himself.”

  “How do they know he went into the water?” I asked.

  “Mom finally went looking for him, was watching when he slipped off a rock and went in. Mom tried to get to him. Would have probably drowned, too, if the teacher and one of the dads hadn’t grabbed her before she could jump in after her son. She banged herself up pretty good fighting them.”

  The image of the boy tumbling into the water was sharp in my mind. From the tightening of Ken’s jaw, I imagined it was playing out in his as well. “Did you do a preliminary search?”

  “I went far enough downstream to realize I didn’t have control of the surroundings. I was about to call OES when you arrived.”

  “Go ahead, then,” Ken said.

  Alex pressed the talk button on his radio. “Dispatch, this is Greenville Search and Rescue. We need OES at the turnout at mile marker 23. Tell them we need canine, foot team and swift-water.”