by Rene Steinke
I dropped the book on the floor, rushed to the bureau, opened the drawer, and took out the Zippo lighter. Sitting on the floor, I had to shake it and flip the wheel a few times before I could even get a flame the size of an eyelash.
I pressed the corner of a page to its flicker. A knock, then the door opened. Jo ran over, tripping on my knee. “No, don’t,” she said, blowing on the flame. I stared at the ragged blackening pages as they shrank back. She ran to the bathroom and came back with a wet towel and slapped at the fire. “My God,” she said. “Smells like a bar in here.”
The flame went out in a second, and I was disappointed that the book was only half ruined, just a few pages gone and an ashy cover.
She sat down cross-legged beside me. “Ella,” she said, “you’ve THE FIRES / 221
got to get a hold of yourself.” She opened the book jacket and quickly read Paul’s note. “Oh,” she said, sighing. “I thought you were just drunk.”
She was blinking a lot. “He’ll be sorry, you know,” she said.
“When he realizes what a good thing he let go of.” I knew she didn’t mean it, but I nodded and tried to smile. “You can’t go starting fires. There’ll be others. It’s just that—” She stammered, patting my back as if to make sure to keep something inside me.
She picked up a shirt from the floor and wrapped it around my shoulders. “He was starting to get on my nerves a little anyway, if you want to know the truth.”
There was nothing to say, and she knew it, but she went on talking in the kindest voice. “Got any more bourbon?” she said, pulling me up. “I’m going to spend the night here, okay? There’s a good movie on.”
My scars pulled and twisted away from me, but I didn’t want to let them go.
I understood my aunt Emily and why she’d had to break all those windows. I only wished now they’d never caught her, and she’d moved on to breaking windows in another state, having boosted her energy with a penchant for cocaine, living the high life on her husband’s retirement money.
I thought about Hanna at Emily’s house and wondered what they did all day. I imagined Emily’s friends from the Queens of the Golden Mask, coming by with rum cake and cherry pie, a Parcheesi board and cards, spongy pink curlers and rosy lotions, and, for anyone tempted to philosophy, the longest knitting needles and balls of mohair yarn. The one who still had her dark hair would bring a bottle of sherry on Saturday night, and they’d all
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giggle as they drank their glasses down. Emily would make a lot of jokes about broken windows, and the women would gaze at her admiringly, fiddling with their girdles. Hanna would try to be one of them, try to forget, but then she’d glance down at her breasts, at the swell of her calf, and she’d see, no matter how much she wished for it, that she wasn’t yet an old woman.
XV
W hen the Holy Spirit visited the apostles, and their tongues were flames, did the voice leave ash in their mouths? Did it scar their lips?
W hen I closed my eyes, white sheets twirled through the dark of my eyelids. Arsonist. I didn’t know if I could ever stop. If I did, it seemed I’d only spend the rest of my life walking through a deep, lightless sleep. At the women’s prison in Gary, the inmates spent long tedious days making license plates or Christmas ornaments, took showers in an open cement room, and lived in cells no bigger than pantries. Once, I’d ridden on a bus past the state home for mental illness in Indianapolis: tall, frilled gates, a wide green lawn still and quiet as a faked heaven.
I prayed that night, not knowing what to ask. Don’t let me get caught. Don’t let me want to do it.
I hadn’t slept more than an hour at a time for days, even with all the bourbon before bed. There was a bottle on the nightstand and another smaller one in my purse. It warmed me, calmed me down until the real drunkenness flickered, and then I got angry, nodding my head and stamping my feet, kicking the walls. I clung 223
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to the little control I had; there were matches in a drawer I didn’t touch, more downstairs in the desk, a lighter in one of the key boxes, turpentine and gasoline in the cluttered trunk of my car.
All the things worrying me were written down in ink on a list I kept between the pages of a book I was reading— Paul, Mother, Marietta—and put away in the top drawer of the bureau behind the pert knob.
I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. My face was very red, my cheeks so dry they stung, and the blue veins in my hand rooted brightly under my skin. I felt someone watching me from behind the shower curtain. I could see just the outline of her, a pale silk gown, long, curly red hair. She’d come to reassure me.
She’d come to warn me that I had to leave. She had Hanna’s ironic smile, my mother’s pensive gaze, Jo’s white skin. The muscles in my face relaxed. When I drew back the curtain, there was just the cracked, mildewed tile, pink soap worn to a blunt charm in the dish, but I felt sleep gathering in me, and I knew what I’d seen.
Later that night I woke up calm, almost rested, and saw her standing next to the bed, smoking. Her white gown was like the one Marietta had worn in the picture, but slit up the sides, and cut low in the front in the style of a cocktail dress. Her hair and mouth glistened in the light of the cigarette tip, but she kept her head inclined back, so I couldn’t see her eyes. “You’ll get out of here,” she said. “But I don’t know how yet.” I fell asleep again and dreamed of women in white gowns running through the halls of the hotel, breaking windows and locks. It was very beautiful, how they turned into a flock of birds in that first coughing ascent into flight, and then their wings blazed orange and yellow in the clouds.
T he next afternoon I finally got out of bed. Shaky, I ate a sandwich, showered, and went down to work with a flask of
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bourbon in my purse. By the time Paul came, I was almost drunk again, and while he walked his rounds, we tried not to look at one another. Each time he rushed through the lobby, my heart fisted and beat against my chest. There was a party across the street near the courthouse. Streamers of little plastic arrows and bunches of balloons resembling huge fake fruit hung from the trees. The light was dusty and intense, like old silver that needed polishing, and the crowd milled around speakers blaring polkas and hokeypokeys. I remembered now what it was—Jo had mentioned it—the Spring Fling for the Shriners. They were drinking beer from dirty-looking plastic cups, and somewhere in the back near the jail a roasting pig was turning on a spit.
I went away from the window and sat at the desk, staring down at the leather blotter and my hands. They were chapped, the cuticles torn into gauzy strands. The burn on my wrist had healed into a purplish and dotted scar, like the design on certain duck eggs.
I went into my purse, unscrewed the little brown bottle, bent so my chest touched my legs and no one would see. I took another long swallow, the bourbon snickering in my teeth as I screwed the cap back on. Tomorrow I’d pack the two blue suitcases, leave a day before the memorial service, before the lies strung out in the martial, dutiful prayers.
I didn’t have much money, but I could go up through Michigan to Canada, Montreal, or Vancouver, and write for what my grandfather had left me. I would eat in cheap restaurants and live in a rooming house, blend into my surroundings like a happy green leaf. Then I thought of my mother, and my plans withered.
The new seams in the dress she’d sewn for me were stiff and precise, and the gray fabric didn’t wrinkle, even in my lap. When she’d come to the hotel to give it to me, the people in the lobby 226 / RENÉ STEINKE
turned and stared at her tiny shins and spindled arms. “I hope it fits,” she said. “I guessed at the hem.”
A man called down to ask for more soaps. “I like the smell of them,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?” I didn’t, because there weren’t any other tasks left to distract me. I took a small stack up to his room, knocked on the door, and left them dominoed there on the floor. A woman came out of a room in a towel, said “
Oh,”
and went back inside, closing the door. On my way down the hall, I heard a little girl screeching in one of the rooms, “More ice!”
I held on to the banister to keep my balance walking down the stairs. When I glanced down into the lobby, the chandelier’s glass drops seemed to scatter like unstrung beads, and I knew that fuzzy brown line of drunkenness was behind me.
With his new haircut that made his chin look long, Paul passed me in the lobby without turning his head, without a word, but his lower lip quivered. We didn’t know what to say to one another anymore, each of us trapped in our own furious skins.
When I got behind the gate and sat down, the phone rang. I stared at the black receiver in its notched cradle, the numbered, smiling face. I watched it and counted, two, three, four. What felt like marbles sputtered and clacked in my stomach. Wait, I said to myself. Just wait and it will pass. I rifled through the drawers in the desk—pencils, pens, a box of crayons, ancient yellow pepper-mints, sticky in their wrappers, a tampon, a glove, a box of tissues, two quarters and a penny, some browned old stationery that said The Linden Hotel in script and under these two sheets, a book of matches that said The Linden Hotel in matching gold script. The matches sang into my palm.
Standing up, I walked over to where the gas line made a seam in the old paint. It took five tries before the match would light. I held it in my fingertips, a tiny bit of hope.
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I didn’t intend to hurt or frighten anyone. I wasn’t even thinking of watching the building burn—I was just clinging to this nameless hope, watching it, thinking it was all I had, when I let the match half fall from my fingers onto the base of the gasline.
The force pushed me back, and I fell into arms, stepped on a foot.
Paul’s. “What are you doing?” He ran for the fire extinguisher behind the desk. The flame shot up toward the ceiling: a perfect yellow column, almost like part of the wall. I suddenly wanted it to be that and wished it wouldn’t take up any more space than just a beautiful gold pillar. But it came billowing at me.
Paul sprayed the extinguisher up and down the flame, and a puny hissing sound sputtered from the tube as the white clouds moved against the flames. The fire shrank back, injured, the wall browned there in a shape like a tree. Paul took a step behind him, looked urgently up and down the wall for sparks, spotted one near the ceiling, and sprayed a gray funnel toward it until it went out.
He dropped the extinguisher and turned to me. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I said, steeling myself.
He put the back of his hand to my forehead as if checking for a fever. “What—were you trying to light a cigarette?” He knew I didn’t smoke.
“No,” I said, biting my lip.
“Had the lights gone out?”
I shook my head.
“Then how did it—?”
I squeezed my arms just above the elbows. I was very hot, but not sweating. He shook his head and tripped as he stepped back.
“What’s wrong with you?” I was shivering. My knees locked in and out like cardboard knees.
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“I dropped it,” I said, though I knew it didn’t explain anything.
“No you didn’t.” He took another step away, his eyes saying, I thought I knew you. His mouth opened. He knew now.
“Shit, what are you doing?”
He grabbed both of my shoulders and looked into my face. I didn’t have an answer for him, but I couldn’t let him hold me either. I had to move. In my head, I was already someplace farther away than India, flying in an airplane, jumping out into the at-mosphere.
A man in a brown suit scurried crookedly down the stairs, shouted, “What in God’s name…?”
I pulled back from Paul’s grasp and started for the door. “It was an accident,” he said to the guest. “Don’t worry, it’s out.” I heard him call my name when I was already outside, hidden in the thorn-leaved bushes. He followed me through the door, but couldn’t find me.
The Spring Fling was over; people gathered around their cars, laughing, holding bright balloons and ribbons, pies, and stuffed animals. As I slid along the square-cut hedges, the sharp leaves pricked my dress. At the corner of the building I touched the parchment-colored brick. A hotel the color of old paper, old skin.
I saw how quickly it would burn. Voices and footsteps tapped down the sidewalk behind me. My hands and face felt very hot from all the bourbon.
As I ran out from the hedges, the sidewalk pinched up, split, and flattened again. I was running toward the darker part of the sky. I was running for the wall in the air I would shatter. In the corner of my eye, things blurred into flame as I ran past them—the Big Wheel Restaurant, Bell’s Hardware, the white house, Herstein’s department store, all lit up and blazing, these fires taller than the trees, galloping in my vision as I ran.
At the end of Pine Street I was out of breath, and my feet and THE FIRES / 229
shins had begun to sting. By the time I got to my mother’s house, the stinging had risen up to my thighs. I looked down at my leg and almost fell. At first I thought it was the dress’s lining, but then I knew better. A tiny blue flame had split the skin just above my knee. It was shaking and transparent, but spreading up toward my hip.
With my heels on the curb, I rubbed at my leg and studied the house. A shutter had fallen from one of its hinges, the first floor squat because it had been sinking. In the window of her room upstairs, a light shone, the lamp by the bed. I ran up the walk, pushed open the door, and slammed it so hard the walls rattled and pressed farther into the foundation. The floor beneath me shifted. “Mother?” I shouted up through the ceiling.
On the coffee table, a half-knitted scarf circled a coffee mug.
Her worn yellow slippers sat catty-corner under the couch. I went into the kitchen, turned on the light, and the heavy black squares of the windows crushed into the walls. There was a spoon on the floor, a napkin with crumbs on the counter. I opened the oven, turned the gas all the way up and threw a match into the crusted black hole. At the door again, I heard it bloom.
There were two fewer stairs because of the sinking. The hallway tilted toward the slab of light at her bedroom door. When I pushed it open, I saw her lying back on the pillows, a book in her lap, a glass of water in her hand. She stirred slightly, fumbled with the pink wool blanket, then bolted up. “What’s happened?” She sighed, staring at the torn collar of my dress.
“Get up, okay? The house is burning.” Flames nibbled the seam between the wall and floor. An orange vine wound its way up a crack, blossomed into roses. The sharp hot petals opened, red, blue, yellow.
I pulled at her arm. The petals of the roses were peeling back to black pistiled centers. I could hardly take my eyes off them.
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They multiplied and bunched together in bursts. I slid her legs off the bed, put her arm around my shoulder, and dragged her up. She felt about as heavy as two winter coats.
Outside her bedroom door, the hallway was in a haze. She coughed as I took the steps and pulled her weight onto my shoulder. She unhinged the photographs on the wall and pressed them against her, and the frames’ corners poked against my ribs.
I couldn’t see through the smoke at the bottom of the stairs, but found my way by habit into the living room. Squinting and coughing, I guided her past the couch, around the easy chair, and scraped my shin on the coffee table. Small flames pranced toward the doorway. My mother was weeping in my arms, her legs limp, and I dragged her along beside me. When we got to the entryway, fire swept up the living room rug behind us.
The handle of the front door was too hot to touch; wrapping my hand with the material of my skirt, I rattled the knob, but the wind from the fire had locked it shut. I sidled with my mother over to the front picture window, hiding her face with my elbow, and kicked at the glass until it shattered, and then I kicked at the sharp rays to make the space bigger. Forming a harness with my hands t
o lift her foot, I helped her through onto the porch. Stepping through the jagged space after her, I cut my arm just above the elbow on a spike of glass. We ran and stumbled down through the yard and fell into the weeds near the mailbox. When my mother saw the blood staining my dress, she took off her sweater and tamped it against my arm. “Hold it there,” she said, coughing from the smoke.
From the outside, it looked as if the house had been lit by a mass of lamps. There was watery movement in the windows, a faint shiver in the white wood walls. That furious orange light on everything: the practice organ, my girlhood bed, the sewing ma-THE FIRES / 231
chine, all the mended furniture. Flames shot out of the first-floor windows, and coming out of my drunkenness, I panicked. I hadn’t remembered to grab my father’s music books, my mother’s wedding dress, the brass bookends of rearing horses.
My mother held my arm just above the elbow, her fingertips pinching the tendons. Flames trickled through striped seams in the wood. She squeezed shut her eyes. “How did you know?”
My heart beat fast. “I had to get you out of there,” I mumbled.
She opened her eyes, pushed her lips out as if about to speak, swept a strand of hair away from her face.
Shifting my legs in the dry weeds, I tore at the frayed hem of my dress, checked the cut just over my elbow, where blood had dried into the weave of my mother’s sweater. “It started in the oven.” We’d lost everything, and I so wanted her to see how the fire wept and breathed. I wanted her to look at it. “I dropped a match.”
