From the Fire IV (4 page)

~

“— (M)atter now? 
No?

“No more, no more
cutting now.  I
need
to talk.  See, yeah that’s just it.  You taking
this?  No matter after Mabelie, I just thought you wanted my words for when I’m
gone.

“All right, no more
about the kids.  No more of that.  I’m sorry.

“No.  I can’t sleep
‘til I’m done telling you.

“I was in that
shattered room with the outer basement all around me.  And my little shop door,
just paneling painted white, that was all blackened shrapnel, splinters all. 
The door had burned off, hinges and almost melted.

“Looking out, I saw
Jenny’s house had collapsed in that ring down all around me.  There was much
screaming still, the others all trapped and dying up and out there, I just
could not hear myself.

“But I cried out, I
know it, ‘Jenny, you OK?’  Stupidest damn thing.  I couldn’t … I couldn’t
believe that she was gone.

“Oh, to be alone. 
To be alone in that infernal, wicked place.  Mercy, never.

“No.  Let me have
my say.

“Still the ruins
were all afire, here and there, ever-competing fires stifling one another, battling
in that greasy smoke for any scrap of air.  Seeing who would get to devour me,
evil
fires lording over me like jackals over lion’s kill.

“I call out again,
‘Oh God Jenny, where are you?’  I was up on my knees by then again, looking for
mountains, but just marveling at that saw-blade swallowed up by the wall.

“Out I go, out of the
collapsed and burning door, climbing up some timber.  From that higher vantage,
see?  I saw … dripped down over the floor-planks in some flow of cooling
plastic, the television I guess, I saw pieces of my granddaughter.

“I know, but I must
tell.  I
must
tell.

“Let her live in
you.

“Her name was
Mabelie, eyes so wide and full of soul and sunlight, just like her bittersweet
Mama Lucille.  Lovely, lovely girl and oh, that smile to break your heart.

“She loved black
kittens, she wanted to be an astronaut.  She had this book from National
Geographic, not yet eight years old and she
knew
it, that damn old star-book,
front to back. 
Our Universe
.

“She’d watch
History Channel and Hell, she’d
yell
at the TV when they got the order
of the moons of Saturn wrong.  Her idol was Doctor Mae Jemison, yes you know. 
Michelle Obama got nothing on Doctor Mae.  First black woman astronaut in
space.

“Mabelie, she
actually learned painting, watercolor no less and that’s a tricky thing ‘cause
you can’t do over.  She learn that watercolor solely to make a perfect portrait
of Mae, it was
perfect
, which she had hung up on our wall over our TV,
so it was there when she came over to watch all the cable space shows with
Grandma Jenny.

“All of that, take down
every memory.  You write this down when I am gone.  Know it well.  The others
in me, even my grandson, they all had beautiful lives, but oh.  My Mabelie.

“She never got to
be a whole person.  And when I die, she’ll be gone forever.  But I put her
inside you now, and now she will live on in you.  You many people, now. 
Goodness now will always be a part of you.

“Your Lacie, this
lovely girl you tell me we going to drive all the way to Kersey for, your
happily ever after?  For only love. 
Only
for love.

“That,
that
is a destiny.  I will proudly die beside you to get you there.  All my heart.  I
know these mountains, I guide you well.

“Yeah, I pray all
my heart that destiny be for you, Mrs. S.-G.  We get you there, sure and true. 
I
kill
to get you there to Kersey if I have to.  I’m a mean shot with a rifle
or machine or even pistol if you got one, that I promise you.

“What?  Course I
was.  Saigon, Tet Offensive, Bien Hoa and a marksman.   First Infantry all with
Sergeant Talley, me and Kilbride and Melly Gee.  Sixty-eight, eternity.  Back
then standing, covering my own like an eagle out of Hell, that was me.  That
still
me.  I shoot true, I kill for you if ever anyone dare to touch you ere to
Kersey.  And that’s all I’m ever telling you about that.

“Even today, bet
you I can take out a running quail at fifty paces, one shot.  Lying down aside. 
I’m that damn good I don’t mind telling you.  Ain’t bragging because it’s true.

“All I ask in
return is your immorality for my little girl, your memory and your voice for my
poor Mabelie, my stargazer.  She live in you if you record all I am saying. 
You keep her inside you now, let her be there with your Lacie-love.  You hug
her close.  Forever.”

* * * * *

(The session
continues over another day.)

~

“Well, after I saw
what I saw, I don’t remember all what happened for some time.  I went mad to
see my Mabelie, you see.

“I could hear so
much more screaming, but certain it wasn’t my Jenny.  Oh, no.  It was thousands
of people, in torture all around me.

“Ever hear a song? 
Lucille used to love it on the radio, NPR.  It’s by the Smiths, see?  Yeah, that
eighties group.  Morrissey and Marr.  You that age, you love that too?  Well
good.  See, you just like my daughter now.

“Good band, but not
one I ever really knew while I was young enough to fall in love with music for
myself.  Me, I was always a Roy Orbison, a Woody Guthrie boy.  Well this song,
can’t quite remember the name but it begins with like two minutes of piano and
people screaming like they was burning up in Hell, begging all to die, but
trapped forever in anguish because they already slaughtered one by one, only
the voices all remain.

“You know that
song?  No?  It’s lost now, like so much else.  But that was that sound, a thousand-fold. 
Near and far out of Littleton and Highlands Ranch and all the way down to
Denver, near and far and echoing ever after.

“A burning world of
screams.

“I almost passed
out again and it’s a wonder that the smoke didn’t kill me, I had … well, I had
pissed a rag like my daddy had taught me if I’d ever chosen to become a coal
miner.  Had that smelly thing over my face to filter all the smoke so I could
breathe my own piss and so survive.  Saved my life, I’m certain of it. 
Radiation, it’s not just waves.  It’s in the dust, the people.  The ashes.

“But all the air
was being sucked up into this huge scarlet-white glowing vortex in the sky.  Called
her the Archangel, I did, when I could bear to look at her.  To gaze up into
her, you see, or you
will
see though she black now.  To behold her, I
needed prayer.

“Could barely
breathe, but I think without that cyclone sucking all those shingles and parts
of people and smoke-gas up away, the smoke would have done me in.

“I regained some of
my senses, rocking back and forth there on my knees and my circulation gone all
to hell, legs asleep and aching an hour later, maybe longer.  Who knows?

“And I was
shivering.  Still didn’t know how badly burned I was above the belt.  Couldn’t
feel a whole lot of it yet, somehow.  But oh, I was shivering fierce and some ever-more
burning wreckage had fallen down on my legs and I was almost burning up again.

“I think I ‘woke’ again
to that, up and screaming, because with that piss-rag tied over my face and all
that stinging smoke sucked up away, I was quick running out of air.

“I had no choice.  I
tugged the new wreckage off of me and that’s when my skin began to fall off.  I
pulled off my jean overalls, and some of my own skin too, didn’t feel it.  And
I wrapped myself in a tarp we used to use for Christmas trees.

“Hell, I can feel
some old pine needles grafted into my body now.  Sure you saw that in the
shower.

“No?  Well then I
guess they’s burned deep in the scraps now, a part of me.

“Well, later that
tarp, it had to come off.  It was terrible and I won’t tell you.  But I sheared
it and replaced it one-handed, cover myself with a garbage bag instead.  Taped
it up around me best I could.  That’s me, Colson in the trash bag tuxedo.

“I tried to pull
some of my shirt off, but the skin started to come with it all the more.  Black
parts went and gone, but
pink
parts, when the meat of me pulled, that at
the last was agony.  Almost a blessing to feel the pain of my own flesh, to
know that somehow I was still alive.

“Yeah, a little agony. 
That’s all right, that’s feeling.  The
scariest
was the nothing, the
on-again, off-again hollows flicking where all the pain should be.  I worried
about that true, terrible so.  I worry now that you were able to clean me, that
I can only feel a distant hum down to where my body was.

“Oh, Mrs. S.-G.,
these last few days.  I do not think I can bear to know what you had to do to
me.

“I cried out for my
Jenny all over again.  No answer, no answer to be ever.

“I stood up high,
no bones broken, another miracle all its own.  Somehow, I wasn’t bloody, just
covered in things that were falling on and off of me, solid things curling away
and melting down into tar.  I realized only later that those burning squares
piled up to my ankles they was shingles, up from the roof.

“I tripped over a
burning gutter, it had a little line of burnt-up finches all down it with their
little legs up in the air.  Steam was still rising out of them, burning blood I
guess, up out of the leaves where all the April rain had gotten vaporized.  Was
cold, you remember?

“Don’t think it
ever will be cold again now.

“I was calling
still a fool, oh a fool, ‘Jenny?  Jenny?’  But of course she was gone, blasted
out of the building, out of the kitchen and probably into the street.  Or onto
a roof somewhere and that tumbled down on top her, I don’t know.  She’d been
all the way upstairs, folding laundry and watching Kenny and Mabelie.

“I never did find
her.”

* * * * *

“Well, I climbed
out of my basement at last.  Up I did, up burnt timbers used to be my kitchen’s
floor, slanted down like catwalks and covered with shattered pieces of plates
and Formica floor-tile and there, and I think some burnt-out streaks of Jenny’s
blood.  Or Kenny’s.

“No.  Not Kenny.  There
was hair, I knew it was hers.

“Oh, Lord.  Oh, I
cannot say any more of what I saw there.  I could tell you, could immortalize
my Jenny inside you, but I need her soon to be with me and she is mine.

“She is mine.

“I did climb.  What
did I see?

“You cannot
possibly understand.  You will behold it for yourself.  For Lacie.

“Littleton was
gone.

“How I explain what
the world is now?  One of Mabelie’s favorites from art class, Hieron-a-bus
something.  What?  Yeah, that’s it.  Hieronymus Bosch.  I was in a Bosch
painting, see?  You know those medieval horror-scapes with bodies tangled
everywhere and Apocalypse horses reigning on high, cackling skeletons, sky all
burning, endless miles of mountains set afire?

“That was Old
Littleton, that was everywhere I could see for miles all along the Rocky
Mountains, except for the way up to Black Hawk.  Lord knows the science, what
blast pattern, what fire spread, what wind current made it happen, but up this
direction?  The forest was still green right then, through smoke and black
waves all of maelstrom, blackest and burning
smoke
was washing the
untouched miracle of those narrow mountains away to a deathly fog.

“Before I lost
sight of the mountains, I knew:  If ever I were to survive, up the pass toward
Black Hawk and beyond, that would surely be the only way.

“I could barely
understand what I was seeing so I didn’t see much o’ Black Hawk’s pass.  I was
staring down at the ground to avoid the light.  Harsh shadows, blackest shadows
you’ve ever seen.  Dancing, firelight shifting them all to wave as one, like
wheat blown in a field.

“Oh, that heat.  I
got outside of the borders of what my yard used to be, and there was the
sound
of burning, but there also was this strange sound of buzzing.

“The buzzing?

“It was rising and
coming closer from all around, and then I realized — it was the murmurs of all
the shocked people coming out of their buildings, bloody wrecks babbling,
people all hunched over and holding hands with strangers, just guiding one another
to nowhere, crawling, naked people with all the hair burned off their heads, mothers
holding dead babies and men cradling their wives’ heads or their own severed
arms, all those wretched people who still had a couple of minutes or terrible
hours yet to live, to look upon the shredded corpses of their loved ones,
before they themselves would vomit and shit their insides out and die.”

* * * * *

“No, I’m done with that.  I don’t want to talk anymore about that
now.

“You understand.  You don’t need to know everything, and some
things I just need to let die inside of me.  I’ll never forget my neighbors,
friends, always love them, and that will be enough for me to go on.  Because it
has to be.