In Zanesville

Little, Brown and Company

New York
  •  
Boston
  •  
London

For Scott

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night
is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.

Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities

W
e can’t believe the house is on fire. It’s so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all. Also, we’re supposed
to be in charge here, so there’s a sense of somebody not doing their job.

“I told you to go up there and see what they were doing,” Felicia says.

“I told
you
to go up there,” I reply.

We’ve divided the kids up, three each, and two of hers were upstairs playing with matches while the third, and all of mine,
were secured in the backyard.

The smoke isn’t too bad at this point; basically it smells like a campfire. We still can’t find where it’s coming from, although
the third-floor bathroom is a pretty safe bet, if we listen to Renee, who is accusing Derek of setting a toilet paper fire
in a wicker wastebasket.

There is no sign of Derek anywhere; he set the fire and moved on to the next thing. Renee, loitering in the hallway, had played
Barbie until the last possible moment and then gave
up when the smoke began swirling, calling out, “Fire!” in an annoyed voice.

“He said if I told, he’d murder me,” she trilled, loping down the stairs and out, eluding us.

We’ve been babysitting for the Kozaks all summer, five days a week, eight hours a day; six kids—Derek, Renee, Stewart, Wanda,
Dale, Miles—and various other, easier-to-control creatures: a tarantula, a python, a rat snake, some white mice, and an elderly
German shepherd with bad hips who lies in the dirt next to the doghouse all day, licking his stomach. We each get seventy-five
cents per hour, which doesn’t sound like enough when we’re here but blooms into an incredible bounty on the weekends, when
we’re lying around trying to decide how to spend it. Almost a dollar an hour, accumulating slowly and inexorably, in a revolving
series of gagging diaper changes, nose wipings, placing of buzzing flies in the tarantula’s terrarium, assembly-line construction
of baloney-cheese-mayonnaise sandwiches, folding of warm laundry, chipping of egg crust off the vinyl tablecloth, benevolent
dispensing of Sno-Kone dimes, helpless shouting, appalling threats, and perusal of their porn library.

We are fourteen, only three years older than Derek, who is the oldest of the Kozak children. Derek isn’t much work because
he disappears for most of each day, showing up only when the parents are due back home, which is fine with us. He won’t mind,
he cusses, and he once threw a handful of worms at us after a rainstorm. The other five kids range in age from one and a half
to nine; some in fact claim to be the same age, although none of them look even vaguely alike. We can’t figure it out, but
then again, we don’t try to.

*     *     *

“Man, are we in for it,” Felicia says, panting.

We’re evacuating the pets. She’s struggling with the smaller snake aquarium, which houses, along with the python, the python’s
furniture—a bent log, a plastic bowl, and a rock for the mice to hide behind. The snake, a young albino, is gently probing
its ivory nose at the jumbo box of ice cream sandwiches we’ve put on top to hold the wire mesh lid in place.

I’ve got the tarantula cage under one arm and all seven white mice, which are riding in a pillowcase. Once outside, I go through
the gate, past the semicollapsed garage into the alley to where the sticker bushes are, set the pillowcase down, and give
it a poke. The mice nose their way out and disappear into the bramble.

“The mice just escaped,” I announce to the kids as I come back through the gate.

“Wanda ate gum off the fence,” Dale reports.

Wanda is hanging upside down from the rusty jungle gym. She opens her mouth and something purple lands in the dirt. “Dale
stole money,” she calls out.

“Shut up and stay there,” I tell them.

“Our mom said if you told us to shut up one more time, she’d shut
you
up for good,” Renee informs me. This has the unmistakable ring of truth to it—her mother has a thatch of black hair that
she sets on hot curlers every morning, and once when she was taking out the curlers, she said, “Look,” and when I looked she
had popped out her false tooth and was leering like a jack-o’-lantern.

So far, no smoke is visible outdoors, but when we go back inside, the hallway is swirling, and it stinks quite a bit, more
like a
toilet paper fire now than a campfire. It takes both of us to handle the rat snake aquarium; we’re staggering, trying not
to breathe, but we both hate the rat snake and are scared it will get loose, so we stop and rescue some food to pile on top—a
box of cereal and some flat packages of cheese—and then lug it toward the door.

The snake, agitated, puts his head under a corner of the lid, and about four inches of him leaks out, right near my hand.
I start screaming and then Felicia sees him undulating there and starts screaming too. For a moment, we revolve in panicked
circles, holding the aquarium between us and screaming. The sound is so loud and frightening in the narrow, smogged hallway
that we calm down and use a package of cheese to direct him back inside where he belongs.

“Now what are we supposed to do?” Felicia asks, once we’re outside.

The children, clustered by their swing set, stare over our heads. Behind us, like a dragon, their house has begun to exhale
long tendrils of smoke.

Forget fathers, forget teachers: our mothers are the ones with the answers, the only people who know something about everything,
although it’s true that the answers are never that great and that both mothers are incredibly bossy and both have at least
one disturbing trait. For Felicia’s mother, it’s a bad back that can go out on a moment’s notice, freezing her in place; for
my mother, it’s a deep manlike voice that frightens people. Felicia’s mother, Phyllis, works downtown at an optometrist’s
office, answering the phone and polishing eyeglasses; my mother works near the river at a cement company, typing and doing
accounting.

We call Phyllis about any issue involving the kids and their behavior, and call my mom about anything having to do with food
or household troubles. Both mothers are in the dark—obviously—about the snakes, the furred spider, the pink-nosed mice, and
the occasional late-afternoon visits by a rival motorcycle gang called the Cherry Pickers.

We call the Kozak parents about nothing; we don’t even know where they go during the day, each of them riding off on their
own motorcycle. Yvonne wears green hospital scrubs and black leather chaps; Chuck wears jeans that fasten somewhere underneath
his stomach, and tall clanking boots with buckles; they both wear leather jackets year-round that say
King Dong
on the back.

“Sand and Gravel,” my mom says in her at-work voice. “How may I help you?”

“Hi,” I say. I’m in the back hallway with my head out the door, the phone cord stretched as far as it will go.

“Uh-oh,” she says over the sound of typewriters, her own and that of her co-workers, Trish and Char, women my mother mentions
incessantly around the house. “Now what?”

Once I tell her, there’s no way around something hideous happening. I knew we should’ve called Phyllis, who is more erratic
but also pliant. A toxic cloud of smoke is starting to come out the doorway, swirling past us into the bright summer air of
the cluttered yard. Felicia raises her eyebrows at me and steps backward, down the porch steps.

“What, quick, I’m busy,” my mom says, lighting a cigarette into the telephone.

“Well,” I say. “Something’s on fire here.”

“What do you mean, something’s on fire?” she barks. All the background typing stops.

“There’s
some
smoke, not too much,” I say.

“Don’t say
some,
” Felicia hisses. “Say
lots,
but that it was Derek, not us.”

“I heard that,” my mother says quickly. “Where are the kids?”

“Out,” I say.

“Where are you?” she asks.

“In,” I say.

“Get out
right now,
” she tells me.

“Don’t call the fire department,” I plead.

“Out,”
she says. “And get those kids far away from the house.”

“This is embarrassing!” I cry, slamming the phone down.

We move the children to the next-door neighbor’s yard, a place so beautifully mowed and toyless that it might as well be in
another dimension. The man, Mr. Vandevoort, uses a table knife to make a narrow moat between the grass and the sidewalk; Mrs.
Vandevoort grows rosebushes along the side of the house and petunias in a painted tire. She wears white ankle socks and comes
out briskly clapping her hands whenever a crow settles on the lawn. It’s a good thing they’re at work, because they would
not like knowing that the Kozak children are standing on their grass. We set the snakes and the spider under their picnic
table and frantically call Lurch, the German shepherd, over and over, until he gets to his feet, hobbles across the yard,
and stares through the open gate.

“You’re gonna get burned up!” the children shriek at him. Stewart sprints over, tugs on the dog’s collar twice, and then gives
up and sprints back. Lurch sits down and cocks his head,
listening, then points his nose into the air and makes a high, thin howl.

A siren can be heard off in the distance.

As it turns out, the firemen, who we were afraid of, are nicer than my own mother, who we both are and aren’t afraid of. She
pulls up in the Oldsmobile, smoking a cigarette and accompanied by Trish and Char, also smoking cigarettes. At that point
the firemen have already unrolled their hose and carried it inside the house. They haven’t even bothered to latch their boots,
and in fact behave more like garbage men, swinging on and off their truck, banging things around, and carrying on conversations
that aren’t about fire.

Right as my mother and her friends pile out of the car, the firemen begin breaking all the windows in the third floor. My
mother stares upward, through dark green sunglasses.

“Goddamn it,” she says.

Felicia and I have now joined the ranks of the children; we stand side by side on the Vandevoorts’ grass, me holding Miles
in his wet diaper, Felicia with her hands over Wanda’s ears. Shattering glass and shouted orders for two minutes and then
it’s over.

“Hi, I’m responsible for these two,” my mother explains to the fireman in charge, pointing at us. “They’re only fourteen.”

You can tell he’s the chief because he looks like a fireman from a television show. He has carried forth from the house the
charred skeleton of a wicker wastebasket and a molten hunk of turquoise plastic that used to be the diaper pail.