The Fires Read online

  158 / RENÉ STEINKE

  Though it was the middle of the afternoon, the room went dim.

  The suits in the closet still smelled of his limy soap and hair oil.

  I took them off their hangers and folded all three over my arm, gray, black, blue. They would sell them at the church rummage sale this spring. The dress shoes on the floor were worn down at the heels, the leather smelling of sulfur, wrinkled at the toes. I laid these over the suits in a cardboard box and set it by the door.

  I opened the middle drawer of the bureau, filled with mothballs and dark wool socks rolled and tucked into knots. I tossed them into a paper bag and went on to the next drawer, where bleached T-shirts and boxer shorts lay tightly folded in rows. These would become rags, or we’d just throw them out, but they seemed too personal to touch. He was such a private person, someone who held himself in, it felt wrong to be going through his underwear, even if he was gone.

  I heard the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, my cobbled footsteps as I dragged bags and boxes near the door. The house felt hugely empty, yawning, and the metallic smell of rain blew in from the window.

  In the top drawer of the bureau, I found four ties, a tin of loose change, and a useless thing I was surprised he’d kept, a glass paperweight with a moth inside of it, wings frozen in an icy light.

  I tried to see the insect face, but it was smashed.

  As I swept the floor, I thought again of Hanna and how he’d hidden his love for her, every single time she tried to come back.

  He must have had some rationale for it. She was like the blackspot he had to regularly spray off his roses. He wouldn’t forgive her until she asked for forgiveness (and for what?). Or he’d forgiven her, but only as one has to forgive another human being, all of us sinners. I could see him holding that frame of an argument in his heart, propping it up like the trellis that held up his one Lys-THE FIRES / 159

  istrata rosebush, and then when he heard Hanna had died, it must have collapsed.

  I didn’t know if my mother had always been her father’s favorite, or if that had only come later, after Hanna left, but all my mother’s attention couldn’t have made up for Hanna’s absence.

  How had he come to the point where he loved her absence more than her?

  She’d said to me once, when we were in Marietta’s kitchen, rinsing the dishes, “When I was your age I was so bored, I felt like a weed, just stuck here growing, and growing ugly. You’ll do better than that.”

  I took my time rubbing the rag over the spindly legs of the nightstand and the knobs of the bureau, the plain handles of modest furniture, grotesque only when you looked at a piece and forgot the rest of the structure, this squat mushroom knob, this oddly bulbous leg, objects you didn’t notice unless you stared too long at them, things that had dumbly surrounded him as he poured the arsenic into his cup.

  Standing up, I dropped the rag on the bureau and glanced at myself in the mirror above it. My father’s old flannel shirt gaped open near the tail of a pink scar, a line like a piece of barbed wire.

  I moved closer. If I looked hard enough, there was a way to dismiss the longing, like studying a picture or a rock that had nothing to do with me. This mark was as definite as paint or ink, fake-looking. It stung as I stepped back, then throbbed as if all the blood I had were rushing into it.

  I went down the hall to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water from the tap. The water, cool in my throat, traced a blue mark down to my stomach. I turned on the faucet, filled the glass again, and drank, as lightning sheeted over the kitchen. It was so pleasant to be leaning against the sink, drinking water in that flash of light, I thought I should feel more and try to see less. The rain

  160 / RENÉ STEINKE

  suddenly quickened to a sound like gravel nervously pouring onto the roof, and I went away from the sink. I struck a match on my jeans and felt the ecstatic heat brush my fingertips before I threw it out the screen door into the rain.

  I went back to my grandfather’s bedroom. The last thing to do was to change the sheets on the bed, and I’d be finished. I pulled the pillows from their cases and peeled off the blanket and sheets, uncovering an old ticking mattress. A pink scrap of paper hung out from the corner of it. I ripped it off, and in my fingers held a pearly arm. It must have been the work of the children Marietta sometimes baby-sat for, I thought. Lifting the edge of the mattress, I found the rest of the body, a fleshy girl eating grapes, a paper doll without her clothes.

  The rain began to stop, and the musty smell from the closet mixed with the scent of clean linens. I heaved the mattress back, then pushed it off the box spring.

  A crushed pile of paper bodies lay tangled there. I knelt down to look closer. They were all naked women, their limbs bent back, arms, legs, and heads crinkled together. One with her inner organs diagrammed, a mermaid with teacup breasts, a Venus cut from her shell. I got dizzy when I saw how many there were and picked up a picture of a woman in red high heels and an apron, her breasts like frog eyes. A creased one of a brunette wearing stockings and a garter belt, a gun held at her thigh.

  I saw the shapely holes in the library’s medical and art books, the National Geographics and photography magazines, my grandfather lurking nervously in the stacks, one hand stuffing the paper figure into his pocket. He’d spent a lot of time alone in his room, and he’d washed his hands sometimes until they bled.

  He must not have known what to do about the lust in himself any more than he’d known what to do about Hanna. Something like a thick oil formed on my skin. No one should have seen this.

  No one.

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  One round paper breast had withered from moisture. I thought of those silences he tunneled into, and Marietta’s careful lipstick.

  My eyes teared up, and all the skin blurred and gleamed on the paper like sweat. He’d cut each one out so carefully, the tips of long fingers, the complicated hairdos, never a trace of the original background—part of me wanted to save them. They were flat, paper women, just flimsy, shiny pictures and low voices spun out in his head. I got up, swept the whole pile into a box, and pressed the lid down over legs, arms, stomachs, all those breasts, all those pretty faces.

  Why hadn’t he thrown them out? Maybe he wanted Marietta to find them, to punish her for her vanity, her withholding of sex.

  It seemed more likely, though, that he’d forgotten about the paper women, the way something you’ve never told anyone eventually loses its realness, and you’re grateful.

  I carried the box out the back door and dropped it on the wet ground near the garbage. It would have been too easy to blame the church for this. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It was deeper than any kind of righteousness or shame, whatever it was that had made paper less troubling than flesh. Something bit him, my father once said, about his silences. I don’t know what it was, but a long time ago, he got bit. A kind of poison, maybe, had made it unbearable for him to touch another’s skin.

  The sky was gray and the air still damp. His rosebushes were brown and scraggly. A single gray bird tapped its beak at the water in the feeder.

  He must have been lonely. When you had a secret life, you wanted it discovered just as much as you feared its being found out. It made me sick to my stomach to think about his collection, and I knew I’d try to forget this just as he must have each time he pushed one of the paper women under the mattress, just as I tried to forget that I had been one of those paper women, lying 162 / RENÉ STEINKE

  in the dark with a man, my skin slick and flawless, not feeling anything, not even knowing who touched me.

  My hands were cold. I took the matches from my pocket and lit one. I held it there a moment before dropping it. The smoke was chalky black, like a rinse of coal, and smelled of cinnamon.

  I thought of us all burning in that box, breasts, hands, feet, thighs, burning up for him, all our bodies ghosted up in the smoke.

  W hat lies inside a cage of flames? The truth, the
heart, but burned up before you can see it. Only traces remain in the ashes, a pattern you guess at or invent, an intangible thing that might leave a mark, but could just as easily blow away.

  I couldn’t lie still, even when I tried to think of the mild smell of daisies or the rub of fleece. I threw off the sheets and blankets and sat up, holding my chest. I felt a combination of infinite tiredness and the desire to get up and run. My legs felt disjointed and loose, my stomach hot. Hanna’s face and my grandfather’s clenched hands kept appearing in my head, and I was obsessed with trying to remember everything I could about them, things they’d done, the exact tone of their complexions, the gestures they made when they asked questions, but this only magnified the fact that my grandfather and Hanna, inside their skins, inside their heads, were enigmas. One day I’d be at home in a place like Mar-rakesh or Singapore, a place people here wouldn’t be able to find on the map, because foreigners like them felt so familiar. And their pull on me had only strengthened since their deaths. Was it love, or was that just the word I reached for because there wasn’t another word for it?

  I got out of bed and changed into pants and a shirt. I grabbed THE FIRES / 163

  a wool jacket. I thought a walk might be the thing to take my mind off them, no matter how long it took. I could sleep late the next morning, well into the afternoon if I wanted to. Down the hall I heard a guest turn on a light and cough, a toilet flushing. I took the stairs lightly and walked through the dark of the lobby, unlocked the front door, and then locked it again behind me.

  The snow looked like sea-foam or soap, too airy to have a temperature. But the air was freezing, I’d forgotten a hat and gloves, and my jacket was too thin. I didn’t feel like creeping up and down the stairs again for my coat, so I gave up the idea of a walk and decided to take a drive. I walked over plowed snow piles to my car, in a cleared space near the curb. I got in, and after a few tries the engine started and the heater blew at my fingertips as the tires crunched over the salt scattering the pavement.

  I drove down Lincoln toward the train tracks. It was dark, but a film of light lay over the snow. I passed the train platform and the gas station, the long white fields fenced with telephone poles.

  That uneasy, testing feeling came toward me. I recognized it, dissolute and just beyond my grasp in that dark, edging down the road in front of me, glinting and dancing over the snow, and I had been afraid of it so long I didn’t chase it. I slowed down near Taft Way, a dirt road that wound past the Barr house to the edge of Lake Eliza. Someone had plowed the road, so I turned through the narrow gorge between snowdrifts, into the pine trees, and traced the shallow path swept by the headlights, pushing into the needly green dark. There was a static of false energy in my blood, but my eyes were dry and exhausted. My foot cramped on the gas pedal, frozen at a level to push the car at a reluctant speed.

  The house popped out of the darkness, a wet gray of old wood and cinder blocks. The Barrs had moved out decades before, and no one had lived there since I could remember. I parked, turned off the engine, and blew on my hands. In the headlights, the front 164 / RENÉ STEINKE

  porch sloped over the mouth of the door. Old boards crossed the windows, and the foundation teetered catty-corner like the after-math of an accident. Teenagers broke into the house on dares, and the police sometimes chased out vagrants, but most of the time it stood empty. I didn’t understand why someone in City Hall hadn’t torn it down or rebuilt it yet, why all these years it had just sat there, secret in the woods, as if no one could bear to consider it long enough to decide what to do with it.

  I got out, went around to the trunk, and lifted the gasoline and flashlight out of the clutter. I sat on the fender with the tin between my knees, pointing the flashlight at a blue-flecked snow-bank hunched like a shoulder. Then I shone the light at the crooked front porch, pushed the beam down to the place where it slumped and then up to the roof, blinking it past a small round window. I traced the house’s outline, then swirled the light around, scribbling out the lines I’d traced.

  These were thin and porous walls you could break through easily. My father had punched through the wall of our dining room like that. Two cracks rivered down and shakily met where the paint bulged, and when he’d come home, furious, screaming, I sidled into the doorway of the kitchen. His head rolled back, his hand fisted, and it went right through the wall. I remembered the astonished look on his face when he pulled his hand out from the plaster, scraped and bleeding, and he was quiet again as if he’d let go of his fury on the other side of that wall.

  I pointed the flashlight at the warped grain of the house’s wood.

  It had accumulated a history, punched walls and handprints, broken shutters, lost doorknobs, a foundation that rose on one side, sank on the other: all this time that a fire would collapse.

  Jumping off the fender, I followed the path up to the front porch and warily went up the rickety steps. I turned the knob on THE FIRES / 165

  the door and opened it a crack before it caught on the huge pad-lock. I walked around a hole where the porch was worn away and scooted along a lone plank until I got to the window. Through the X of two rotten boards, I pointed the flashlight inside the house to what once must have been the living room or dining room. All I could see was a lumpy floor. My cheek grazed a splintery edge of wood as I called inside, “Come out. It’s an emergency!” Beside me wind flicked through the bare trees.

  I leaped off the other side of the porch into knee-deep snow.

  The side of the house leaned in slightly, and there was a scrappy frilled curtain behind one of the boarded windows. Trudging through the snow, my feet and ankles numb, I squirted gasoline up against the white paint curling off gray walls, the tin burping in my fingers. I held the flashlight under my arm and saw the gasoline tearing down in rivulets as I went around to the back, grown over with vines and black with some kind of mold or moss.

  I squirted the gasoline so high up on the wall it fell back down and stung my cheek, and I had to wipe it off on the rough sleeve of my jacket.

  I went on squirting gasoline. This felt proprietary somehow, like my grandfather’s checking his roses each night for blackspot or red spider mites. My feet tangled in icy overgrown bushes near the last corner, where a stone jutted out that said BARR.

  People would wonder what had happened here. In the morning the ground would be burned black, soot smoking in the snow—a startling blankness like the hungry nothing after a storm.

  Only for a second did regret shake in my hand as I fished up the matches from my pocket. I tore one out, pulled it between the matchbook cover, and when it lit, I wanted to sing. I heard a cat meow inside. “Get out of there, kitty,” I screamed. “Here, kitty, come out!” I banged on the window with my fist, not hear-166 / RENÉ STEINKE

  ing it anymore, but not seeing it creep out either. The wind sheared over the trees. I tossed the match at a string of gasoline and it zigzagged the wall.

  Lifting my knees high up out of the snow, I ran to the edge of the woods and swiveled around to watch. It was the pale yellow of a winter sun, wobbling like a reflection.

  I tried to ignore the thing that itched, tingled at my wrist, a twig or a leaf caught there. I hoped the cat had got out somehow; it wasn’t the point to burn anything that was alive, only what wouldn’t move. On the roof a wave of fire arched back and whipped into another; the flames twisted and preened, then coyly shrank back. I looked down, and in a blurry second, I thought I’d bled it, the flame ruffling up my sleeve. I fell on my arm into the snow and tried to put it out. Yellow flicked at my elbow, and then the heat turned to ice. I lay there, my hair wet, my cheek numb in the snow, the pain in my wrist exquisitely strummed with fine nerves, an intricate musical torment that felt familiar.

  Beside me, the fire applauded, and I watched it from the snow, one cheek frozen, the other hot with firelight.

  My father’s rage was so separate from him: that voice as if it had been piped into his throat, the one time he hit me so
hard I fell back onto the prongs of the steaming radiator, the backs of my thighs burned over the scars. When he played the organ, I heard the rage, pushed low in the sharp harmonies, then radiant as the melody rose to its familiar refrain. Those hymns. Something in him was trying to break through them.

  My heart beat faster as the fire billowed at the trees. I finally pulled my hand out of the snow and clambered up to my knees.

  My pants and jacket were wet, and between my shoulder and hand an emptiness spread. Hot and cold scarves of air whirled against my face as the numbness in my wrist cut to pain. I packed THE FIRES / 167

  snow against it and looked up again. The house’s frame wobbled uncertainly, then collapsed, and the flames fell into the snow.

  Slamming the door of my car, I heard sirens. I started the ignition with the hand of my unburned wrist and the car rocked through the white, sliding over icy spots, snowflakes salting the windows. I swerved onto the highway in the opposite direction of the sirens and drove without hearing anything for a long time, my head cold and unoccupied.

  T he next day each time I touched water I thought I smelled smoke. I was coughing in the shower. My complexion paled.

  I wore perfume and didn’t stand close to anyone so they wouldn’t smell it. The weepy blisters on my wrist turned crusty and brown.