Town Burning

by Thomas Williams

  Then, with the rifle in one hand, he took his beer and went out into the hall. Bruce’s door was shut. He stood in front of it, convincing himself that Bruce was not there, could not be there, put his empty can on the banister post and turned the knob.

  The room was as bare as it had always been when it was forbidden to him on pain of—On pain of what? he asked himself as the details of the room sorted themselves out: single bed, highboy, two windows, closet door, bedside lamp. He thought of death. On pain of death. On pain of something like that—something awful and frightening, compounded of more than physical hurt alone. The pain of his brother’s screaming rage; the pain of his brother’s hate.

  The room had the cold, clean look of a guest room. Of course his mother had been through it, straightening and cleaning, but his mother could never have created such frigid order. In the closet a similar order governed the neatly hung clothes, the shoes lined up toes to the baseboard. Bruce’s automatic shotgun leaned against the wall, a heavy, bruising, unlovely gun John didn’t bother to examine. By the smell, it was well oiled and clean. As he closed the closet door a nearly unbearable twinge of guilt, of being caught, came over him. The feeling went away quickly, but not until a twisting, nervous shake traveled from his legs to his head. He brought his rifle up to his hip and stepped out into the empty hall, collected the empty beer can and went back to his room. Ten o’clock. In three hours he must be back in Bruce’s room in the hospital.

  His mother had given him the keys to Bruce’s black Ford, and it was not necessary for them to make an agreement not to mention this to Bruce. A general rule in the family for many years—a symptom of their fear—was that what Bruce did not know and act upon hurt no one.

  John parked in front of the Town Hall, the half colonial, half Victorian building on the square. The rear half was older, built of pale small brick, with severely geometrical high windows. The front half, the aesthetic addition of 1880, was built of darker brick, with heavily arched, Greco-Roman windows. He thought of the Town Hall as a pair of Siamese twins horribly fused at the navel, one cool and chaste, the other round and ripe.

  Mr. Bemis, the town clerk, a little balding Yankee, stood behind his tall counter, his tight-skinned, almost miniature skull set with blue eyes. He peered straight and humorously at John over the maple counter.

  “Well, well, if it ain’t the town prodigal come back from the far and fancy places.”

  “Hi, Mr. B.,” John said. At the moment he felt an expansive affection for the little man. “Mr. Bemis, that’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me since I got back.”

  The town clerk’s eyes wrinkled around the edges, but he held off smiling.

  “You come in, I suppose, to pay your head and poll tax? No, you don’t have to pay poll tax, seeing as you’re a Democrat and it don’t matter how you vote anyways.” He let out a high laugh that brought his secretary to the door. “It’s all right, Edna,” he said, waving her back.

  “You don’t mean to tell me you’re still a Republican?” John said.

  “John Cotter. I swear! If some people heard you say that I’d lose my job come town meetin’!”

  “It’s enough to make a man turn Communist,” John said. Mr. Bemis reared back and screeched his high laugh again. Edna put her head in the door.

  “Now, it’s all right, Edna,” Mr. Bemis said, but she came on in.

  “Hello, Johnny,” she said.

  “Hello, Mrs. Box. What do you hear from Walter?”

  Her motherly instincts aroused, she rippled a little about the breasts. Walter was her successful son. “Why, Walter asked about you, Johnny. They have a new baby.”

  “How many is that, now?”

  “Three. Two boys and a sweet little girl and he said in his letter, ‘What’s with old Johnny Cotter?’ just like that. They live in Cleveland, you know. Walter sent me an airplane ticket and I’m to come out and visit, take the airplane from Concord and change in Boston and go right to Cleveland. It scares me so, but I’ve just got to see that baby! I’ve just got to get my hands on that baby!”

  “Johnny’s going to be a bachelor like me,” Mr. Bemis said. “He ain’t interested in babies, are you, Johnny?”

  “Now, that’s just what Walter said in his letter. He said, ‘Old Johnny Cotter’s the wise one,’ just like that. I don’t think so, though.” She went out to answer the telephone.

  “Now, John, what can the Town of Leah do for you?”

  He had to pay a five-dollar head tax before he could send for a driving license. Being a veteran—”Isn’t everybody?” John asked—he didn’t have to pay a poll tax.

  “It’s that dang head tax ain’t fair, Johnny,” Mr. Bemis said. “Why, I just shudder to think what will happen some poor fella comes in with two heads and I have to charge him ten dollars!” He screeched and pounded the counter, then stopped suddenly and looked seriously at John. “Say, John, how is Bruce coming along up to Northlee?”

  “They’re going to operate, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. Gory! That’s too bad, John. Bruce and I never knew each other too well, but I hate to see a man down like that.”

  When John left, he drove around the square to the Post Office. Mr. Bemis saw him drive away and knew he didn’t have a driving license, but John didn’t worry about that. Mr. Bemis would consider it none of his business. The town police were just a little too eager to catch people out, had always been, and though this was considered to be bad taste on their part you couldn’t tell a policeman not to do his duty. You could just dislike him, which had the effect of making him more dutiful. Chief Atmon and his one officer, Joe Beaupre, according to most people, saw too many TV shows. Dragnet, in particular, was considered a bad influence, since every suspect who was impolite to the police turned out to be guilty and all the laws concerning search and seizure were somehow violated. The only public outcry came when Atmon bought the submachine gun from Army surplus. He finally had to pay for it himself.

  He knew he had beer on his breath, and, as everyone in Leah did habitually, he looked carefully around for the police. Atmon would be in his office in the Town Hall, but Joe Beauore might want to talk. He made it to the Post Office all right and bought a money order from Donald Ramsey, the assistant postmaster, whom he had known in high school. Ramsey had been one of Junior Stevens’ bully boys, but had become tame and respectable in Civil Service. Now he chose not to remember the time he and Junior and Keith Joubert had thrown John into the fountain in the square. As John watched him fussily stamp the money order, it did seem fantastic that this pale man in black arm elastics and green eyeshade could have helped at such an athletic prank.

  “Is that right! Did we do that? Well, boys will be boys, won’t they, John? I guess we had our times, didn’t we?”

  I guess we did, you yellow bastard, John thought. You and Keith Joubert and Stevens. And me in the water with the broken glass just before the DeMolay dance. He mailed his application for a driving license, and left.

  He still had more than an hour before he had to be at the hospital, and he drove out of town on the winding road toward Lake Cascom, past the new drive-in theater that had been built in the time he’d been away. Very little else had changed. A pasture where he used to ski had grown up in little birch and poplar. Soon he was climbing the long hill below Cascom Mountain. The sky was a bright, luminous blue—bluer than any sky he had seen in Europe, bluer than any tropical sky, yet capable of changing even at noon into a night of black thunderheads. Now there were no clouds in the sky, just the hard bright shell of blue, smooth as an egg from hill to hill. The fields were too yellow, parched to the edges of the advancing jungle, dangerously tindery. A cigarette thrown from a car anywhere along any road could set it all off.

  He circled the mountain, spruce-green to its granite ledges near the round top, and came down a winding hill above Lake Cascom, blue as the sky; a long knobby finger of a lake following Cascom’s valley in a half-circle. At the head of the lake a few big ho
uses and a white church stood among tall maples, and that was Cascom Center. The hills rising back of Cascom Center had once been cultivated fields, but now only small pastures kept the woods from dooryards. The people of Cascom Center were old, and lived in the high rooms of the old houses. They sat on narrow porches or puttered in kitchen gardens in the summer, and in winter they stayed indoors in hot, woodstove-heated rooms, coming out seldom and then only to push the snow from the sidewalk or to split kindling, bundled up and slow and careful of old bones.

  He remembered one of the thick-based sugar maples very well for having seen a slight bark-bruise disappear slowly over the years. Just before the war a boy he knew hit the tree at eighty miles an hour and wrapped his 1936 Ford completely around the tree so that the front and rear bumpers locked together. The police cut through the top and part of the frame to get his body out. The old people of Cascom Center had emerged from their houses like careful ghosts, and slowly crossed the road to see if they could help.

  Near the dam at the foot of the lake, where Cascom River started its winding course toward Leah, he turned the car around. Below the huge granite blocks of the dam a boy swung high over the river on a long chain. They called the swimming place there “the scrape” for all the skinned knees and elbows and banged heads that were the usual price for swinging out and dropping from the chain. The chain was fastened to a limb of a crooked rock maple that grew out of the foundation of an old mill long since washed downstream. All that was left was the granite foundation and some huge bolts, one of which protruded from the bole of the rock maple and served as a step up to the platform from which the swingers took off over the water.

  John remembered when the chain had been a rotten rope, and when Bob Paquette fell from the highest point of the outward swing, turning over and over, pale gawky arms and legs in the sunlight—and hit a bellyflopper. They were thirteen or fourteen.

  He could still feel the wonderful weightless fear of the long drop into the cold water, and the tightening of his skin. But there was something unpleasant about that memory—Jane Stevens had come along on her bicycle, in her bathing suit. He would never forget what happened, and wondered if Bob or Jane might remember. He could see her still, her bathing suit pale, faded red, made for a younger girl. The front part was too narrow, and when she moved in certain ways he could see the hard, beginning rise of her breasts. The suit was faded even more around the seat from sitting on rocks and sand, and it was made of a cottony material not used any more. At that time he had been committed to not liking Jane because of her brother, although there was between them a grave respect born of the seriousness of his feud with Junior. So it was a terrible shock to him when she swam up beside him—he saw the water running through her long pale hair and the hair flowing down over her skinny shoulders—and she said, “I love you.”

  He immediately submerged and stayed down until he couldn’t stand it any longer. When he came up for air he saw a different girl. She sat on the bank throwing water out of her hair and watching him, having become something terribly shocking and wonderful in that underwater minute. He let his head come out of the water, stood there in the current and watched her, then dived and let the cold water move over his body. He came up again and watched her, seeing her straight, light hair, her ears that stuck out with the hair hooked behind them, a dinky little pimple on her forehead, wide dark eyes and little nose. Her eyes were suddenly deep and clear as she looked at him, and her lips were slightly blue from the cold water. The beauty of her! She was three inches taller than he, but the possibility that this might become important could exist only in dreams of body contact, and that ecstatic idea followed him in the deep water that brushed coolly along his ribs and between his legs. He came up again and looked at her. It was early summer and her arms and legs were untanned, raw-pale against the faded red suit. She stood up, conscious of his watching, and went to the diving stump. Her hips, just beginning to look like a woman’s, moved sideways as she stepped up to the stump.

  He had a sense of great responsibility, and was not ready to accept it. It was the same when he got his bicycle—he remembered looking at it, at the delicate bright spokes and gears, and thinking, I must be responsible for all of this, and for a second he did not want the bicycle at all. But that had quickly passed. This was more complicated. He wanted to hide, and yet he wanted to take off his trunks and swim as hard as he could through the cold water. There was also a great disbelief in him. How could she love him? He had run away crying from her own brother. Could a girl love a coward such as John Cotter? If so, and in a way he could believe it, it was not the kind of love the hero of his daydreams accepted and was worthy of.

  Then she made a shallow dive and coasted toward him, bubbles trailing the ends of her hair. He looked quickly to see if Bob Paquette knew, but that was all right for the moment. Bob was climbing the tree to the swing platform. Jane came up right next to him, wiped the water from her face with both hands and opened her eyes. They looked directly, painfully into his, and he dived to the bottom, grabbed her ankles and dumped her over backward. She came up sputtering, water up her nose, and smiled at him. Smiled at him! He did it again, and this time held her under for a moment, his hand on her head. She put her hands lightly, coolly on his body below his arms.

  He jerked away as if he’d had a shock, flailing his arms in the water uncontrollably, and then they both looked up to see Bob come turning down, his big feet out anywhere and his mouth open, the broken rope clutched in his hands. “Ow ow ow ow!” Bob yelled. He hit the water flat on his belly, and a thin sheet of spray shot out and over them. They dragged Bob to shore and waited for him to get back his wind. In a minute he was diving from the stump.

  John took his towel and flicked it experimentally at Jane. She jumped back, smiling again immediately. She knew. “I saw you and Bob go by, so I came too,” she said.

  He snapped his towel again, this time against a flat rock, and the sharp, mean crack stopped her. The towel end flicked through the water and snapped again in the air, leaving a small burst of misty droplets floating.

  “That’s the only reason I came,” Jane said.

  “Let’s duck her!” he yelled to Bob.

  Bob came swimming over. “Huh?” he said.

  “Let’s duck her!” He ran at Jane and pushed her into the water. She was smiling. They went after her and grabbed her ankles, lifted her unresisting body out and dunked it in the water, again and again. At first she smiled, whenever she could, but it went on and on. They grabbed her legs, her waist, anything they could get hold of. One time she came over and John saw red fingermarks on her white buttocks. The old bathing suit had pulled tight, and her buttocks stuck out like little white balloons.

  “Stop it!” she cried over and over, and finally, in a surprising burst of effort, broke loose and ran up the bank. John ran behind her and, taking his towel from the rock, caught up with her as she reached her bicycle. One flick—one sure, accurate flick and crack, he saw the dark red triangle on her buttock where the towel bit and burned. She turned, bawling, and looked at him once before she rode off.

  Sitting now in Bruce’s car above the scrape, he could still hear her hoarse bawling, see her red, injured face looking at him. Even now his hands shook as he lit a cigarette. Things like that could be explained, he knew, by saying that he was a child. But did he graduate from childhood on a certain day, receive a diploma that proved he was no longer a child? He could say that he was older, now, and a man. But when had it happened? Years were short and didn’t seem to matter very much any more. He couldn’t count on them to cure him or to change him.

  He drove into the hospital parking lot at a quarter to one, before his father and mother arrived. He intended to sit in the car and wait for them, and then go in with them; their slight protection would help. At least Bruce’s violent remarks would then be shared, scattered over a larger target. But he felt exposed to the windows of the hospital. Bruce’s room was on the other side of the building, but stil
l…No, Bruce could not walk through the long halls. But Bruce might just feel something about it. John got out of the car and started toward the entrance, feeling as if Bruce’s eyes were on him. This must be conscience, he thought; a mixture of fear and duty. The word duty was a strange one, especially to him. Duty in the Army had been a particular job he had to do, like standing guard, or K.P. An officer once told him that because he would not go to Officer Candidate School he was not doing his duty. Even going to OCS seemed easier than seeing Bruce alone today. For a moment he felt quite heroic.

  “Oh, it’s too much,” he said out loud, and then in a low voice, “It’s too, too much for a delicate, sensitive flower like yourself, John Cotter, to have to see your only brother before they open up his head.”

  He could run away, as his father tried to do in the morning, but he’d never caught himself doing anything so obvious as that. When he ran away, he managed to create a fugue of wonderful and complicated motives, so that when he arrived at his safe, new destination he was fairly free of guilt. He could now go back to Leah, drop in at Futzie’s Tavern and start creating, but he was afraid his talents were not up to it. His excuses would last no longer than the effects of Futzie’s beer.

  He found himself again in the long, cream-colored hall. He was afraid to look into the open doors that invited his eyes, afraid of the stark, sick people on the high beds. He walked toward Bruce: the horror at the end of the aisle in the dream. Bruce saw him at the open door and turned toward him, aggressive in his helplessness.