Fire Point

by John Smolens

  “Down by Petit Marais—yeah, that would work,” Pearly said agreeably. “You know, you could get it good and stuck in the sand and they’d have to call Superior Gas and Lube to send out the tow truck.”

  “Harmless prank. And can’t you just see the photo in the Fish Wrap?”

  “You have to admit it’s a good idea.”

  “True,” Owen said. “But this time Colby’s is better.”

  “Owen, I was put in the car.”

  Owen shook his head. “Driving over here, I talked on the phone with the prosecutor, Alice Hooper.”

  “Oh Christ. Why do I always have to get her?”

  “She wants your body,” Owen said. “Look, you have witnesses? No? Well, Colby does. He’s going to claim that two guys came out of the Hiawatha with him and saw you lying across the front seat.”

  Now Pearly sighed for effect. “You’re saying this is going to cost me more than usual.”

  Owen nodded. “I was thinking about remodeling that bathroom on the first floor.”

  “You know, if I were a truly honest man, I would defend myself.”

  “Bad idea, Pearly.”

  “If I don’t have faith in democracy and our judicial system, then where am I?”

  “Doing time.”

  “Dostoyevsky would be appalled.”

  “This is America, pal. Even Dostoyevsky would get a lawyer.”

  BECAUSE HE HADN’T gotten home until four, Martin slept late. He didn’t climb out of bed until it was after eleven. Hannah was up and he could smell fresh paint. He dressed and went out to the kitchen, where she was rolling a nice muted yellow eggshell finish on the walls.

  He said hi, she said hi, but she didn’t look at him.

  He knew right then something was wrong.

  After getting the carton of orange juice from the refrigerator, he leaned against the doorjamb—everything was pushed to the middle of the room and there was no place to sit. He drank from the spout and watched her. She wore her bib overalls, and her hair was tied up under an old paint-spattered Tigers ball cap. Martin was trying to think about the night, if he had said or done something. When he finally returned from Marquette, Hannah had been asleep. Though it was warm in the bedroom, she had been wearing a pair of his sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

  “Pearly’s going to be arraigned this afternoon,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me talk to him, but I hung around for a while, then came back.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How you feeling?” he said.

  “Fine.”

  Gracie brushed against his leg. “I just thought you might be—I don’t know . . .”

  “Might be what?” Her voice was even, somehow protective.

  “When I came home, you were sleeping in sweatpants. You coming down with something?”

  “No.” There was a moment when Hannah’s arm paused and she held the roller high up on the wall. Then she continued to draw the wide swath of yellow down to within inches of the baseboard. “No, I’m fine,” she said.

  Martin took a last swallow of orange juice and closed the spout. He just didn’t know where to go with this. Then he said, “What’s the name of that paint? It’s a good color.”

  Her arm paused again, and for a moment he thought she was going to tell him something he should have already figured out—something he should know instinctively. But then she said, “Ancient City.”

  “Great . . .” He took his weight off the doorjamb. The cat leaped up onto the kitchen table, which was covered with a drop cloth. She sat and stared through him. They were like a team this morning.

  “Pearly called while you were asleep,” Hannah said.

  “He did?”

  “He needs his truck so he can drive back after the arraignment this afternoon. So you’ll have to take it back to Marquette.” Her voice now was very flat, almost dismissive. He’d never heard it before. Never.

  “Right.” He put the carton back in the refrigerator. “Guess I better get going.”

  THE SCREEN DOOR clapped shut behind him.

  Hannah usually loved that sound, but now it seemed like a rebuke.

  She listened to Martin walk around to the side of the house and up the driveway, where he stopped suddenly. She put her roller down in the paint tray, picked up Gracie, and went to the open window. Through the screen she watched him, not twenty feet away, bend over next to his car. He seemed to be looking for something on the cracked asphalt. Then he knelt down and peered under the car. After a moment, he got back to his feet, turned, and leaned toward the house. He touched the clapboard wall with one hand, then raised his fingers to his nose. He continued along the wall, touching the wall, sniffing his fingers, until he was out of her sight.

  Gasoline.

  He came back into view as he stepped away from the house. He recognized the smell, too—she was sure of it.

  Hannah shifted the cat to her right shoulder. She moved closer to the window, until the bill of her cap touched the screen. She wanted to tell him that yes, it was gasoline he smelled, and yes, it must have soaked into the bottom clapboards maybe all the way around the house, and yes, it meant that Sean had been there last night. But somehow the rusty screen was a barrier she couldn’t overcome; it caused optical illusions, creating zigzags of light as she watched Martin climb into the Datsun pickup at the end of the driveway. The smell of fresh paint on the kitchen walls had caused her to forget about the gasoline from last night, but now she remembered it, and she knew that if she spoke, if she acknowledged it, she’d end up telling Martin everything.

  Hannah listened to the truck back out of the driveway and head north toward the village. The engine was small and old and made a racket that took a long time to be absorbed into the distance. By the time the sound was gone, Hannah realized she could not hold it down. Gracie leaped from her shoulder as she crossed the kitchen and pushed open the screen door. She went down the steps and vomited in the uncut grass.

  When she was finished she took the paint rag from her hip pocket, blew her nose, and wiped her mouth. Her legs were weak and she sat on the steps. There was a foul taste in her mouth and her sinuses burned so much her eyes wouldn’t stop tearing. For a long time she just tried to breathe, to draw in each breath so that it didn’t cause an aching shudder down in her lungs.

  At one point finally, she seemed almost to laugh. Gazing up at the trees, she whispered, “Ancient City.” The idea of fresh paint, of making this house, this life clean and honest now seemed absurd. There would always be fear. There would always be doubt. There would always be regret. Hannah wondered if she hadn’t gone through with it, if she had decided to have the baby last year, would she be able to avoid this pain now? Perhaps this was all retribution. Maybe this was due to a guilt she could not cover over, no matter what you called the color, no matter how many coats you applied. Then she understood that she was afraid, that the nervous tension running through her—her hands trembled slightly—was caused by a fear that she’d never known before, and then immediately she knew this, too: It was a fear that had to be concealed.

  Hannah sat on the step for a long time. Flies buzzed around the vomit matting the grass.

  She got up and walked across the yard to the pile of rusted garden tools that they had found in the house. She picked up the shovel, its long handle cracked and weathered, returned to the vomit, and tried to scoop it up. But it could not be done—the grass was slick with it—so she began digging, using her foot to punch down through the grass and take up a tight, moist clump of earth. She did this twice, creating a small, shallow hole, with a slight mound of dirt next to it.

  Hannah dropped the shovel, walked across the yard again, and brought the wheelbarrow back to the hole. For several minutes she worked steadily, digging up enough grass and dirt to fill the wheelbarrow. When she had a full load, she took it around to the back of the garage, where leaves had been piled for years. She emptied the wheelbarrow and returned to the hole.

  All evidence of her vomit
was gone. But it was not enough. She picked up the shovel again and, with her foot, drove the blade down through the grass. As she pulled back on the handle, a crackling of snapped roots was accompanied by the smell of fresh earth.

  SEAN WAS HAVING TROUBLE SWALLOWING. He wondered if something had been damaged. When he was in boot camp there was a kid from Georgia who tried to hang himself. He was homesick, he missed his girlfriend, the DI scared the shit out of him, and the other recruits could tell he wasn’t likely to make it. One day they came back from mess and found him hanging by a piece of oily rope in the showers. He was still twitching and they cut him down. He was taken away and they never saw him again. The only word that came back was that the kid had damaged his windpipe and required an operation. He might never be able to talk again.

  Sean lay on Arnie’s couch, staring at the slanted ceiling overhead. Downstairs he could hear the radio in the garage, someone talking about last night’s Cubs game.

  Sean said, “Who gives a fuck.”

  Hardly anything came out. It sounded like it felt: a pair of hands clamped around his throat and squeezing tightly.

  He thought of the word windpipe. He’d never considered this part of the body before, and now he envisioned something brittle, breakable, like PVC that was used in plumbing. He imagined his windpipe was cracked into several pieces, and every time he swallowed, it was so painful that he expected a sharp, jagged edge of PVC to break through the skin in his neck.

  “Who gives a fuck,” he said again, a mere croak, “about baseball.”

  He picked up the hand mirror from the coffee table. Some girl had left it in the bathroom. He looked at his neck in the mirror; the belt had left the skin blue. Another few seconds and he would have died. The last thing he remembered was his whole body convulsing, his feet kicking out, then he passed out. It was this swift, falling sensation, followed by nothing. He didn’t know how long he’d been out. At first he was confused, didn’t even know where he was, but once he got to his feet he realized he was alone in their bedroom. Hannah was gone, and he only knew he had to get away. Once outside the house, he staggered back through the woods and drove to Arnie’s apartment.

  She had tried to kill him and now he could barely talk. Burning the house to the ground wouldn’t be enough. Not anymore. Somehow knowing this was comforting.

  15

  PEARLY’S PRELIMINARY EXAM in Marquette County Courthouse was on Monday, June 24. He met Owen at the top of the stairs outside the courtroom. One of Owen’s hands nervously toyed with his ponytail, and he had the boyish enthusiasm of someone who gets to break bad news.

  “What is it?” Pearly said.

  “We got Emmett Anderson.” He opened the door and led Pearly into the courtroom.

  Where they waited and waited and waited, because otherwise it couldn’t be justice. They sat in the back while another hearing, something to do with a property dispute in Big Bay, dragged on. Judge Emmett Anderson sat motionless up behind the bench as though he was aware of their disappointment and scorn. The man was well into his sixties and he had pork chops for earlobes. He was bald, and with one hand propping his chin, he sometimes appeared to be dozing. He was known for presiding over entire cases in this manner, then surprising the courtroom by suddenly asking a spate of pertinent questions.

  When Bettina Laakso came into the courtroom she sat to the right of Pearly and Owen. She was a thin woman with silk-white hair, who owned the Whitefish Harbor Herald. She looked like she was anticipating a splendid night of opera. Worse, she did not acknowledge them. Pearly and Owen glanced at each other warily, then looked forward, remaining quiet like two kids who have been scolded before about misbehaving in church.

  Laakso was there because Pearly was there, because Frank Colby would be there. And because Emmett Anderson was presiding. He was the kind of judge who occasionally got mentioned in the press for meting out “creative sentences.” He had once required that a woman eat chicken for dinner every night for a month, and had ordered a father to sleep in the family doghouse for a week—the kind of thing that made for good short copy on the national news wires.

  Pearly witnessed everything through the lingering effects of another raging hangover, which meant he was having difficulty keeping his eyes open. Though he could barely follow what was being said, he was convinced that he wasn’t the only one with too much alcohol in his blood. Even Frank Colby, who arrived at the last minute, appeared to suspect something. Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Alice Hooper’s speech was rapid, slurred, and periodically hysterical; her mountain of black hair was wild. At one point Owen leaned over and whispered in Pearly’s ear, “She’s been known to engage in a noontime quickie in an attempt to calm down.”

  Occasionally the judge interrupted the proceedings, asking Frank Colby questions about the “squad car in question”—the year, the model, the mileage, how often it was serviced. At one point he lectured the courtroom on the virtues of switching to heavier motor oil during the summer months and chastised the officer for using 10W-30 year-round.

  Finally Pearly drifted off, and no one bothered to wake him, until Owen nudged his shoulder hard. It took Pearly a moment to remember where he was, and Owen made a desperate gesture with his hands. Apparently the judge had asked Pearly a question.

  He got to his feet. “Excuse me, Judge, would you repeat the question?”

  Owen leaned back in his chair and exhaled.

  Emmett Anderson smiled. “You didn’t get sufficient rest last night, Mr. Blankenship?”

  Pearly wasn’t sure if that was the first question, which he had missed, or the second. “No, Your Honor, I didn’t.”

  “Tell me, before you were invited to avail yourself of our humble accommodations here in Marquette early in the morning last Tuesday, where did you sleep?”

  Pearly suspected that this might be a trick question. He glanced down at Owen, but he was looking straight ahead, meaning Pearly was on his own. “Last Tuesday? I slept on the beach.”

  “The beach?” the judge said. He flipped through his notes. “There’s been no previous mention of the beach.” Looking up, he asked, “How was it, the beach?” This brought several snickers and a cough. The judge’s eyes roamed his courtroom until there was silence.

  “It was fine.”

  “How were the bugs?”

  “Not bad, not bad at all, Your Honor.”

  “The beach more comfortable than the cot here in Marquette?”

  “I believe so, Your Honor.”

  “Indeed,” the judge said. “Indeed, I imagine it would be. It has been some time since I’ve slept on one of our beautiful Lake Superior beaches, but my recollection is that the sand has a rather uncanny way of shaping itself to the body.” There was, to Pearly’s right, some movement, and the judge looked sharply at Alice Hooper. “Counselor, were you going to say something?”

  She ran a frantic hand up into her big hair, as though she had just realized that a small animal was nesting there, and said, “No, Your Honor.”

  The judge wasn’t satisfied. “Perhaps you’ve never slept on one of our beaches?”

  After a moment, she said, “Your Honor, I really don’t see how my sleeping on a—”

  He looked away from her, shutting her up. “Now, Mr. Blankenship,” he said, “Officer Colby has stated that you were found in the front seat of his squad car, and that he suspects that you were in the act of hot-wiring the ignition. Were you stealing his car?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, Mr. Blankenship, please tell the court how you managed to get from the beach to the front seat of the car. Perhaps you somnambulated?” He quickly scanned the room, waiting for someone to laugh or snicker, but there wasn’t a sound.

  “No, not to my knowledge,” Pearly said. “I don’t know how I got to the car.” The judge seemed unsatisfied. Everything in Pearly’s being said to leave it at that, but then he added, “I think I might have been carried, sir.”

  “Carried?”

  “Yes, You
r Honor.”

  “By whom?” When Pearly hesitated, the judge said, “You know that Officer Colby claims to have two witnesses who saw you in his squad car.” Here he looked hard at Colby, who lowered his head. “I know both of these individuals, and neither seems present in this courtroom to testify.” Leaning forward, he said, “How do you think you got from the beach to the car, Mr. Blankenship?”

  Pearly stared back at the judge and said, “I don’t know for certain, sir.”

  “I suspect you’re telling the truth,” the judge said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Because you’re under oath.”

  “Yes, sir, I am under oath.”

  “Well, then, let me ask you another question, one of a historical nature.” The judge paused to pour himself a glass of water, which he drank down without stopping. Looking at Pearly, he said, “Mr. Blankenship, have you ever put a fish on anyone’s porch?”

  “Your Honor,” Owen said as he began to stand up.

  With a wave of his hand, the judge said, “Sit down, Mr. Nault. I’m only curious here. You and I both know there’s no law against placing a walleye on someone’s front porch. Your client can’t be fined or sent to jail for such an action. Besides, the statute of limitations on that walleye ran out years ago.” He waited until Owen was seated again, then said, “Well, Mr. Blankenship?”

  “Your Honor, I put that fish on your porch.”

  “Very good,” the judge said. “Would you say, for the record, that that was the stupidest thing you’ve ever done?”

  Pearly thought for a moment. “No, sir. For the record I would say it was this bet I won at the Portage years ago.”