Alligator (29 page)

FRANK

D
ID FRANK THINK?
Yes, he did. He was exceptionally lucid. He was in the centre of a ball of fire. The air was jellied. He couldn’t get air into his lungs. He had been locked in a house and the house had exploded into flame and his clothes were on fire and his hair and his face. He had woken up in a blazing room with no memory of passing out.

His windpipe was scorched and his lungs were scorched and the blood that rushed through his veins and capillaries toward his lungs, desperate for oxygen, was hot. His arms were bubbling; he saw rather than felt the blisters coming up. But all he knew was he could not breathe.

He thought of the door and where it was in relation to the centre of the room. Glass crashed; the mirror over the fireplace splintered and then fell from the wall in jagged pieces. The flames were swaying around his knees like a field of long grass and the heat climbed each piece of furniture and gave the piano a liquid glaze. The piano top was a rippling lake and the heat twisted around Frank like bedsheets, and he kicked out of the sheets of flame and got to the door and when he touched the doorknob it was already too hot to touch. He lifted his shirt over his mouth and nose. Time was not behaving, he knew. He was in the room for no more than a minute. Five minutes? But the minutes had melted and warped. Time, without oxygen, collapsed. It couldn’t have been more than a minute.

He threw his shoulder against the door but the door didn’t budge. There was one way out and it was this door and the door was not opening. A massive blast of tumbling heat tore through the living room to funnel up the staircase and on the way it smacked against Frank nearly knocking him down and it transformed upon touch into more flame and it licked him all over his back and ran up his spine and shoulders, and it had grabbed his scalp, tugging viciously at his hair. He could feel a blister form on one eyelid. His eye was closing over. He couldn’t keep it open. He wiped at the blister with his finger-nails and it broke and the water ran into his eye. He was gasping, there was nothing in his lungs.

He stumbled back into the centre of the room and he saw the goldfish in the bowl flicking madly back and forth. He understood perfectly that Valentin had jammed something against the door.

He’d had a shot of vodka in Valentin’s apartment but what followed was out of all proportion to a shot of vodka. What followed was a weak-limbed euphoria, an easing up of gravity and everything grave. Frank hadn’t had a good rest since his mother died. Whatever had been in the vodka, it was odourless and colourless and extremely potent. It made him feel rested.

He knew Valentin had dropped a match; that much he knew. Everything that had come before, his mother’s death, the evenings at the hot-dog stand, the way Colleen had clamped her body against his, all the rain that had fallen over the summer, the money, the hunger for it, the need, the compelling need to accumulate money, the stark ugliness of his bed-sit, and the infestation of worms, all of this had been forgotten, briefly, gently, thoroughly forgotten when he drank from the shot glass Valentin had given him.

Valentin had put the glass down in front of Frank and he had a shot glass for himself and the glasses were small and printed with Christmas trees. The glasses matched, Frank had noticed. Valentin had pulled out the chair opposite Frank’s and he sat with his elbows on the table, hunched over, and watched Frank drink. He was intent and patient. Valentin’s brown eyes had a beer-bottle colour, amber flecks.

How are you, my friend? Valentin said.

They had gone down the stairs and got into Valentin’s truck and then they wandered into the house on Morris Avenue where the furniture needed to be moved.

He was supposed to be helping Valentin move furniture.

But here he was, standing in the centre of the fire and he reflected on the nature and texture of his exhaustion, which he knew to be physical and having as much to do with the vacuum created by the fire, the loss of oxygen, as with his spiritual fatigue. Spiritual fatigue was a term his dance teacher, Dr. Callahan, used to use and it was a term Frank had forgotten completely but it came back to him in the fire on Morris Avenue and the phrase was so apt he nearly wept while the flames ran up the arms of his nylon jacket and made the material shrivel and burned runnels into his arms. He felt his forehead tighten because his eyebrows had sizzled off his face. He felt all his facial hair, even the bristles under his skin, burn away. Here’s what happened: he woke, he threw himself out a window. But later the goldfish came back to him.

Being in the very centre of a fire is a religious experience, Frank thought. He had been told the house was empty, someone had moved, and there were household items for sale.

There was a stereo he could have, Valentin had said, for next to nothing.

The Russian had passed him on the stairs and said, Just come and have a look, my friend. I need help moving some furniture.

Frank had given him Kevin’s money, right there on the stairs, without a word, and Valentin clapped him on the arm and told him it was very good. He held the money in his fist and shook his fist for emphasis and he said the money would be doubled in a few short days. But he still insisted Frank go with him to move furniture.

You could use some furniture, the Russian said. It was a reference, Frank knew, to his mother’s ashes and the ruined waterbed.

They’d gone up the stairs to Valentin’s bed-sit for a drink.

First we will drink together, Valentin had said. The Russian’s bed-sit was tidy. There was a stuffed flamingo on the floor in the corner with long lime green legs; it must have been a prize from the regatta.

I have a young son, Valentin said, nodding toward the toy.

I’m sure he’ll appreciate it, Frank said.

It was that or a teddy bear.

You went with the flamingo, Frank said. He downed the shot and it hit him like a pillow fight. He felt gently bashed and full of wonder.

An Inuit guy hanged himself in this room, Frank said.

There’s a strong smell, Frank had said, when he walked into the house on Morris Avenue. He knew it was gasoline. He was putting it together as he spoke. If his body was found after the fire, the police would think he had started it. Just as he put it together he had passed out.

VALENTIN

H
E HAD THE
accelerator jammed to the floor and Frank had slumped against him. The boy’s head had fallen onto Valentin’s thigh and it was as heavy as a bowling ball. Valentin had dragged him over the grass to the cab of the truck with the boy’s arm flung over his shoulder. When he gripped the boy’s wrist he felt a blister burst under his hand. The water made his grip slippery. The boy was heavier than Valentin had expected and when he became semi-conscious his feet tripped all over themselves on the driveway.

Valentin had given the boy a larger dose of the drug than he thought was strictly necessary because he didn’t want him to suffer. He had seen this drug work on women, had seen them sleep for almost a full day after they’d been given it. He couldn’t understand what had roused the boy once his head had dropped onto his chest.

In the cab of the truck the boy’s eyes were rolled back in his head and his eyeballs were bluish. The eyelids quivered but didn’t close. The whites of the eyes stared up at the roof of the cab and Valentin was taking the corner on two wheels. Froth bubbled up from the corners of the boy’s mouth; his breathing was ragged; his lips were moving as in prayer. The boy was reciting something to himself, something ancient and ordinary, full of rote spirituality. The wordless praying was interrupted by rough, weak coughs full of phlegm and it sounded like the boy’s lungs were irrevocably damaged. Blisters had come up all over his face and neck. The truck stank of melted plastic and smoke and the boy’s burns. His windbreaker had shrivelled in rough glittery scales, like the skin a snake leaves behind.

They had entered the house in the dark. The boy was stumbling and incoherent but he had noticed the piano as soon as they entered the living room. He had bent over to read the sheet music that lay open on the wooden ridge above the keys. It was too dark to read the sheet music but the boy continued to lean, his face close to the paper.

Valentin had said, We don’t need the lights.

Frank stood that way, apparently reading in the dark, until he began to weave slightly, forward and back, and had to put his hand out to steady himself. He avoided falling face first into the piano by pressing three fingers against the lid, which was closed over the keys. A passing car sent headlights zooming over the walls and they hit the fishbowl on the lid of the piano and the goldfish flared a fierce, pulsing orange and quivered all over and the aqua-coloured stones on the bottom and the plastic palm tree were all full of surging brightness and then, just as quickly, fell into shadows. The fish lost its colour and sank slowly to the bottom of the bowl. The boy turned his back on the piano abruptly and swayed sideways like a punching clown and righted himself.

I need to sit down, he had said. He had spoken in a formal tone, and he had closed his eyes in the effort to enunciate the thought. Valentin took him by the shoulders and helped him to the chair in the centre of the room.

I need a rest, Frank said.

You are a good boy, Valentin had said.

I’m pretty tired.

Sit down in this nice chair.

He waited until the boy’s head dropped. Frank was very still and then his head rolled back and his mouth hung open and he snorted deeply.

He would feel absolutely nothing. He would suffocate before he burned. He would never wake. Valentin waited before dropping the matches. He waited for an eternity, but the boy didn’t move. The boy was out cold. He struck a match and lowered it carefully toward the carpet but the flame leapt up from the floor to greet the match.

The fire ran in ribbons from the match he dropped. It traced the invisible ropes of gasoline, it ran down the hallway and into the living room and kitchen and the flames looked like something that had always been there, but had been lying in wait. Valentin had splashed the walls as well and the flames traced the splashes that had sunk into the paint. Through the living-room window Valentin saw flames leap from one curtain to another curtain. They leapt up the stairs like weasels. He saw one of the upstairs windows go bright, then the next window, and finally the third window on the second floor.

Valentin was outside in the fresh air and shoved the stick he had chosen beneath the handle and he tried the door but it wouldn’t open. He pulled hard on the doorknob and the stick dug itself deeper into the ground and the door didn’t open.

Then he ran down the path and got in the truck. He was pulling out of the driveway when he saw the chair come through the window and the boy hurl himself onto the lawn. He saw this in the rear-view mirror and he leapt out of the truck and grabbed his shovel from the back.

The boy rose up from the lawn on his hands and knees and the flames stood up on his back like the fur of a hissing cat. The boy stood up with his arms held out from his body as though he were a conductor about to address a choir. The house held its breath. Then Frank flapped his arms wildly. He whipped his arms through the air and the house bellowed behind him with one long, sustained, sonorous boom.

The windows in the front of the house blew shards of glass all over the lawn and knocked the boy down. The fire reached as far as it could out the windows and then it flowed upward. It poured into the sky like a river falling in the wrong direction. Flames tumbled up and raced over the backs of other flames and flicked at the leaves of the trees that grew near the house.

And then the trees went up. The flames moved from tree to tree and the trees shrivelled up and crackled and spat sparks. All the worms hanging in the trees were lit up for the second it took them to turn to carbon.

The boy stood up again and turned around to see what had knocked him down. Valentin ran from the driveway into the wall of heat. The hairs on the backs of his hands curled and disappeared and it made the backs of his hands itch. He saw, through the front window, a yellow film of heat engulf the piano. He saw the sheet music curl and disappear. He thought of the possessed look Isobel wore while she played and the way she nodded at him to turn the page, how imperious and frantic her face had looked, how important it was to turn the page at exactly the right moment, how concentrated he had been in order to do her bidding, but the sheet music had disappeared the instant the flame touched it just like any other kind of paper. The armchair was a sunflower.

The boy was slapping the flames on his back, he was turning in fast circles and arching his spine and ducking and slapping at himself. There were tattered flames on both of his swinging arms and flames at his ankles and he was trying to twist out of them. He appeared to be wrestling himself to the lawn, finally knocking himself down and rolling. The fire covered him in a flimsy straitjacket the boy couldn’t get out of.

Then he was out cold again. Valentin was dragging the boy to the truck before he knew what he was doing. Everything took time and was mired in the time it took.

He had taken the shovel out of the back of the truck. He would bring it down on the boy’s head and throw him back in the fire where he belonged and put an end to this at once. He knew the shovel would never work but it would have to work.

Then he saw the woman across the street, under the street light. She stood with a dog on a leash. Valentin dropped the shovel and dragged the boy across the lawn by the back of his jacket but the jacket came apart in Valentin’s hand. He knew the woman was watching and now it was necessary to think before he killed the boy. He managed to drag the boy’s body over the lawn and he got him into the cab of the truck. He slammed the passenger door but the door bounced back and he slammed it again and it bounced back, and he slammed it with all the force he had, spit flying out of his mouth and the door bounced back. The woman across the street watched him and it occurred to Valentin that it was over. He would not implicate Isobel. He decided that in an instant. He did not love her, he hated her, but he would not implicate her. He would say he had acted without her knowledge. He would say he was a jealous lover. He would go to jail forever but he would leave her alone. She could have the insurance money; that’s what he decided. He would stand by her. It might be the honourable thing.