The Fires Read online

  “It’s the aura of the basketball,” I said. “Some kind of orange halo for you, isn’t it? How many of them did you date? Seven?”

  “Eight,” she said, fondling a trophy. “But they were losing.

  David said they needed me to boost their spirits,” she said, laughing.

  She went over to the window and flipped the switch for the THE FIRES / 41

  neon VACANCY sign. Usually she stayed for a chat, but she was going to meet David later at the Big Wheel Restaurant. “You’re in for a slow night, I can tell.”

  “I’m looking forward to the peace and quiet,” I said.

  She tilted her head and clicked her tongue sarcastically. “Right.”

  A fter my father died when I was fifteen, my mother’s eyes would tear up whenever I said I was going to Jo’s, or leaving for school, and when I came back home, she’d be sitting in a hard-backed chair near the door, mending the same plaid skirt it looked as if she’d just picked up, her eyelids puffy over her small, tense irises.

  One Friday night I’d asked permission to go to a party on the lake, and I was looking forward to it because there were going to be boys from out of town there, and one in particular with rangy arms and sandy hair, whom I’d met at the bowling alley the week before. I came into the kitchen, where she stood near the stove. “There’s a party at Lake Eliza tonight,” I said.

  She had her back to me and was stirring something. She turned around, holding the dripping spoon like a scepter. “Whose party?”

  “Beth Hanson’s.”

  “Will her parents be there?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I didn’t know, because there was supposed to be a keg.

  “Is Jo going?” Her voice wavered.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, and her eyes faded into the dimness. “I wish you wouldn’t,” she said, and turned around again, her shoulders hunched over the stove.

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  I was furious, watching her back, the spoon sadly scraping the bottom of the pot. She’d been like this ever since he’d died, wanting to keep us together in the house, the rooms arranged exactly the same way, the same seven meals on each day of the week, the time when we went to sleep and the time when we woke up the same, as if by keeping the borders of our lives exactly as they had always been, we could also contain my father’s death, even tame it.

  I left the room and went upstairs to get the cigarettes Jo and I had stolen from her father and went back downstairs and out the back door to sit in the yard. It wasn’t dark yet, but the air had an autumnal, heavy stillness.

  I hadn’t even liked smoking particularly when we’d tried it under the canopy in Jo’s room, the smoke trapped beneath the gauzy fabric. And the thought of doing it alone wasn’t as appeal-ing as it had first seemed. It wasn’t the taste of cigarettes, but seeing how we looked to one another smoking that had been interesting.

  The cigarette was in my hand, though, so I lit it and watched my fingers holding it until the white paper shrank back to the brown filter. Somehow I got interested in the way the tobacco disappeared, the wither of the tiny crumpled brown strands, and I lit another match to the end of the cigarette stub. When the flame moved close to my fingertips, I dropped it in the dry grass, and the spark caught. An accident.

  When the flame grew to the size of my hand, I stood up to stomp it out, but the fire looked so graspy and unsteady, I wondered what would happen if I let it go. It was only a thin, pallid fire, apologetic and trembling, and after a minute or two the wind blew it mostly out. I ran the sole of my shoe over the black and brittle patch it had made in the grass. It was the first fire I’d set. A hole in the bright green. Even though I wouldn’t be going to the party, I felt strangely satisfied, my disappointment burned

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  away and replaced by a small internal radiance. I didn’t think much about it, just that it was pleasant.

  After the cancer was diagnosed, my father had died so quickly we hadn’t had time to fathom it. At first he wouldn’t stay in bed, and he insisted on helping with the dishes, played tunes from silent movies on the practice organ, and stayed up watching the late-late show on television, propped up on the Lazy Boy chair with a beer, so it seemed as if he weren’t really sick. Finally, he did stay in the guest room, though, his face bony and pallid, the blankets piled so we couldn’t see how thin he’d become.

  My mother had gone up to bring him breakfast. She came straight to my room afterward, looked at me incredulously and said, “There’s blood on his mouth.” I think she knew he was dead, but she let me call the ambulance anyway. Maybe she couldn’t think of what else to do. Only when the paramedics came and she fell, going up the stairs again, did she cry.

  For days the whole house seemed filmed with a foggy light, and once in a while my mother’s voice or the smell of shaving lotion would clear the air, and I’d see the lilt of a bowl, the tines of a fork, and they were unbearably sharp and precise.

  “What are we supposed to do?” my mother would say whenever she ventured out of her room. Weeks later she began to clean and cook again, but her voice had turned low and scratchy, as if it were coming from a radio not properly tuned, and she began finding ways to keep me with her in the house.

  I set more small fires in my room, or in the field behind our backyard. I felt so unlike myself without my father that the fires, held in a bucket or a hole, with water nearby to put them out, didn’t seem nearly as drastic as the changes I felt in myself.

  It was a few years later, after I’d quit college and it had became harder for me to sleep through the night, that I moved the fires out of their safe containers. These were some of the things I’d 44 / RENÉ STEINKE

  burned: the X of the street sign at Oak and Jefferson, an old rag rug someone had hung out on a line, two wigs in the garbage behind Dora’s Beauty Salon, a thrown-out tinseled Christmas tree, a rusted washing machine and dryer, a swing set on a playground, a wooden dwarf. I’d come close to getting caught that time. A little girl on a tricycle wheeled up beside me just as I’d lit a match to the sneering lawn dwarf in one of the neighbors’

  yards. I didn’t want her to get burned, so I pushed the tricycle back toward the curb.

  “What are you doing?” she asked me.

  The dwarf’s pointed hat and head were on fire. I told her that he had been so jealous of all the people who could move, all the people who walked by him every day, that his head had exploded.

  “Poor dwarf,” she said.

  Trembling, I took off my jacket and ran over to slap at the flame.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and someone should have seen me. The dwarf ended up headless, at least, not sneering, his walking stick still plugged into the too-green grass. I walked the little girl back to her house and let her tell me the story of Cinderella, which she’d memorized and made up a song about.

  I hoped I hadn’t scared her. When I was a girl, one of the neighbor bullies, Roy, set fire to a pile of twigs in a hole he’d dug up in an empty lot. His older sister screamed that he was a pyromaniac. “It’s my lantern,” he whined, probably knowing he was going to get into trouble. “When you’re camping, you need a lantern.” I was watching them from my bicycle on the street and practiced the word. Pyromaniac. Pyro sounded like a toy, a plastic thing that shook or spun, but maniac scared me—someone’s crazy hair pulling their wits out of them like the picture of Medusa I’d seen in The Golden Book of Greek Mythology. There was a slow torture in her head that made her mean.

  I wasn’t unafraid when I set these first fires. I knew they were THE FIRES / 45

  dangerous. I would tell myself “no more” and quit for six months, but there was something inside me that I had to stop, and it would only get worse and worse the longer I went without touching matches: There were these happily chattering mouths, but their sharp teeth caught at my stomach and heart, and their voices were grating and childlike, and I’d go along with it for a while, but then the futility of the nothingnes
s they said got to me—because what it came down to was a cheerful, nonsensical nothingness that taunted me. When I set fire to something, the mouths and voices trickled away out of the flames, and it was such a relief.

  O n a sunny day, just beginning to get cool again, the leaves yellow and red, I wore a secondhand sheer black dress with long velvet sleeves, much too formal, but with cigarette burns and a brown stain in the bodice, a dress someone must have worn to a party that got out of hand.

  It was still too early at the Paradise for the after-work drinkers.

  “Not many gals care for this place,” said the bartender, mixing my whiskey sour in a bullet-shaped metal shaker. I noticed he had a slight lisp, which softened his heavy, stubbled face. Before it seemed he’d watched me sarcastically, and I’d been wary, but now his cracked, razor lips seemed friendlier.

  “I like that it’s dark in here, even in broad daylight,” I said.

  Against the mirror, the faces on the liquor labels reminded me of cameo brooches, the wine and creme de menthe the exact red and green of stones on Marietta’s rings.

  “Yeah.” He chuckled, a gold tooth glinting as he slid the glass in front of me, floated an orange slice and cherry in the ice. “Don’t get many orders for whiskey sours.”

  “But you make good ones,” I said, sipping from the short glass.

  “Not too sweet.”

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  I’d come to like bar talk, that benevolent, inquiring chatter that didn’t ask or answer much, but if you said more than you wanted to, if you got careless, it wouldn’t hurt anything either.

  He tucked his rag into his pants pocket, folded his arms on the bar, and asked where I worked. “The Linden,” I told him.

  “Oh.” He arched his brows and nodded. “Good job?”

  I nodded. “I get tired of seeing all the same faces I went to school with. At work, at least I get to meet new people.”

  He pulled out his gray rag and swiped it across the circle-stained, shellacked bar. “People are friendly here,” he said, and I thought he must have misunderstood me. Of course they are, I thought. They have no choice. The circles cut into one another, formed tangled chains. I pictured the place Hanna lived, a city, I was certain, a place where it was safe to be rude once in a while.

  The door opened, and in the last afternoon light, all I could see was a narrow silhouette walking forward until the door shut behind him and his face cleared out of the shadows. He sat down on the stool next to me and flattened his palms on the bar.

  “Bourbon, please.”

  He had a long, handsome face, pale eyes, and curly hair. Right away, I could tell he was from out of town. He put a cigarette between his lips and struck a match. “You smoke?” he said through the corner of his mouth. I stared into the wiggling seed in his fingertips, thinking of the field of yellow it could grow.

  “No,” I said.

  His name was Strom, which reminded me of an old cowboy’s guitar. He was a high-school teacher, in town to comfort a brother whose wife had left him, but he drank like one trying to drown his own misery, and I liked him.

  We started talking about local legends and characters. I could make Porter sound exotic when I wanted to. I told him about the octogenarian twins who owned a restaurant and a bike shop and THE FIRES / 47

  spoke a private language somewhere between Spanish and glos-solalia, about the wooly mammoth someone had found in the moraine, which the judge ruled had to be split in half between the finder and the landowner, making it practically worthless.

  The front half was in the natural-history museum in Gary, hung up like stuffed game; the rear end was in somebody’s attic.

  “Really,” he said to everything, not smiling, but nodding. I told him about the cursed white house said to be haunted by the mad wife of the mayor who used to live there. “There’s a statue of Venus in what used to be the garden. Supposedly she puts rocks in the statue’s hand whenever a Porter girl loses her virginity.”

  He seemed impressed by this, judiciously extending his lower lip. “If you go there,” I said, “her hand is always overflowing.”

  Encouraged by his interest, I told him about Mr. Bell, who owned the hardware store, how he changed the stock so inad-equately there were still packages of wire with pictures of men wearing stiff hats and paint cans with labels showing women wearing aprons and sausage curls. He talked constantly and once told me about a Klan speech he’d heard as a boy. A grand wizard stood up in front of a large crowd over by the courthouse and preached about the dangers of Catholicism, saying the nuns and priests held orgies and that they wanted the Pope to gain control of the country, take away our religious liberties and economic freedom for the sinister uses of the Vatican. The grand wizard was jumping up and down as he talked and said, “The Pope’s going to start right here with Indiana because he knows we’ve got good people. In fact, the Pope himself is on that five-o’clock train,” and he pointed toward the station. A crowd ran from the courthouse to meet the train. The cars were all empty except the last one, which held just one passenger, a man. The men rushed in and pulled him off by his coat collar, threatening to lynch him.

  I paused a moment, “He was a carpet salesman from Detroit.”

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  Strom laughed, shaking his leg, letting the side of it graze mine.

  Jiggling the ice in his glass, he looked into it and finished off the last sip. “I get the feeling people can be happy here, but a lot of them must ferment. My brother will probably never leave now, but he just gets more and more bitter every time I come.”

  He didn’t seem to feel my hand brush his knee, and this made me nervous. I didn’t know what to make of it.

  “You’re not, I can tell,” he said. “You’ve got a sense of humor about all this.” He circled his glass around in the air. There was a song I liked on the jukebox, about black-haired girls and their blue eyes, and I felt myself humming.

  The bar was filling up, and we had to lean in close to hear one another. I told him about my great-aunt Emily, who’d become famous as the window-smasher of Calumet, years before I was born. One day she left her husband with their three small children and walked into town with a shovel. She smashed the windows of a storefront, a lawyer’s office, and a barbershop. Then she got on a train to Bloomington and smashed the windows of a beauty parlor, a hat shop, a feed store, and a bakery. She’d bought a cross-country ticket. She made it through Crawfordsville before they put her in jail and called her husband. As soon as they brought her home, she was at it again. She went on like this for three years, smashing windows in a pattern the police couldn’t follow, sometimes three towns in a week, sometimes none for six months. Since her husband paid generously for the damages, no one pressed charges. It got to the point where people began to recognize her face from the newspapers, and when they saw her coming, they’d press themselves against the back walls of the room and protect their faces with chairbacks and catalogues.

  Amazingly, no one was ever hurt, and after a while she seemed to get bored with it. She sighed and shuffled along with the shovel slung across her shoulder as if it were her job.

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  In Marietta’s house there were newspaper clippings of her sister in frames in the hallway. “Oh, there was nothing wrong with Emily,” my grandmother would say. “She just got angry one day and couldn’t stop herself.”

  “You inherit any of that?” Strom jiggled his leg, so his knee caught on my skirt a couple of times.

  The whiskey sours twisted through my rib cage. “She’s old now,” I said. “I only see her at family reunions.” (She’d been ill the day of my grandfather’s funeral and hadn’t been able to come.) I pulled at a strand of hair near my eyes. “But I can get reckless.”

  He told me about the basketball team he coached, the Wolves, and about Winter Garden, where he liked to go camping in Minnesota and the deer would come right to the flap of your tent.

  He was looking at my breasts as if he
could see right through my dress, but of course he couldn’t, or he wouldn’t have begun to stroke the velvet against my arm. He turned my hand over and traced spirals in my palm. In the candlelight I could see my veins.

  Only skin set boundaries between me and him, just that thin, porous covering. It didn’t seem like enough protection. He was too sober. Before I left with him, I wanted to see him trip and stumble, or tell me something he’d later regret.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around. It took a second for me to recognize my father’s old friend, Mr.

  Schultz, he looked so out of place in that smoky air. His face wadded up awkwardly so his eyes turned to specks. “Ella? I wasn’t sure if that was you.”

  I pulled my hand away from Strom’s and sat up straight. “It’s me.” I felt my face redden.

  He tried to smile. “Having a cocktail?” Placing his index finger just under his ear, he quickly glanced back at Strom. The linoleum floor tilted uncertainly, like a checkerboard someone had grabbed.

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  I tried to smile. “I was just about to leave, actually,” I said, getting down from my stool.

  “I’ve never been here before,” Mr. Schultz went on. “I was just waiting for the train to come in and thought I’d pop over for a beer. Popular spot, huh?”

  I blindly gathered up my purse and sweater. Strom threw a bill down on the bar and stood up, too. I wished he’d have stayed put. I didn’t want to have to introduce them. “Well, nice running into you,” I said, waving.

  Mr. Schultz waved limply and turned back to the bar.

  Strom followed me out. “Who is he? ”

  I thought I might vomit again, the whiskey sours suddenly swirling in my stomach like crazy music. I wanted to get away from Strom and be alone somewhere. “An old friend of my father’s. I’m sorry. I don’t feel well,” I said, weakly. “I’m just a few blocks away.”