Those Who Favor Fire (13 page)

The Short Stop Inn was a big white house covered in asbestos shingles that looked like fish scales. The innkeeper was, predictably, watching a ball game in the tiny bar off the front entrance. Autographed baseball bats were mounted on the walls above the liquor shelves, decals hemmed the mirror behind the bar, from the ceiling a long string of pennants pointed at the floor like a clown’s collar, and ball caps hung everywhere from nails, as if this might be the flip side of a hunter’s trophy room.

“What can I do ya for?” the innkeeper asked when he spotted Kit in the mirror. He was old enough to be retired, with enough time and energy on his hands to take a lifelong passion and make it his life. Kit suspected that once Christmas had come and gone the man would pack his bags and head south to be ready and waiting when spring training began.

“I’d like a room,” Kit replied. “Just me. For one night.”

“Well,” said the innkeeper, turned on his stool for a better look. “I like a man who answers all my questions before I’ve gotten around to asking ’em.”

Kit waited patiently. He wasn’t here to make friends. He wanted a place to sleep, that was all.

“Okay, then,” the man finally said, sliding off his stool. “One room, one man, one night. Sounds easy enough.”

He led Kit to a tiny office opposite the bar. “I am James Fiester,” he said firmly, as if starting in on a campaign speech. “That’s with an
ie
, although I get a lot of ribbing at Thanksgiving on account of it sounds like
Feaster
.”

Kit stood quietly, waiting for his key.

“I see you’ve no luggage,” Mr. Fiester said, peering at the floor around Kit’s feet.

“I have a bag in the car.”

Mr Fiester poked a finger through the Venetian blinds at the window and took a peek. “Nice car,” he said, as if Kit might not have noticed. “I was going to ask you to pay for the room up front, but it don’t look like you’re short of cash. I’ll settle with you in the
A.M.”

“Now’s fine,” Kit said, taking out his wallet. “I might want to get an early start.”

“Oh. Okay, then. With tax, that’ll be twenty dollars for the night.”

Kit had expected more.

“I don’t ask much,” Mr. Fiester said, as if he’d read Kit’s mind, “but the rooms are pretty basic, you know. All I get around here are fishermen, and all they want’s a place to drink a few beers, watch some ball, and get some sack time. Out at sunup, that gang. Crazy bunch, if you ask me.”

But Kit hadn’t asked him, and by now Mr. Fiester was beginning to get the idea that all Kit wanted was to be pointed in the right direction.

“Up the stairs, second door on your left,” he said, handing Kit a key. “Local calls only. Bathroom’s at the end of the hall. One towel per customer.”

First, Kit took a long, hot shower. Lacking soap (for he had never known a hotel that did not supply it), Kit washed all over with shampoo, which took so long to rinse off that the water began to run cold. Then, wrapped in a skimpy towel, he crept back to his room and climbed straight into bed. Although it was still light out, he had no trouble falling asleep, but when he woke in the middle of the night, in the strange room, he had no idea where he was.

“What?” he shouted out, sitting straight up in bed, clutching the
blankets. There wasn’t a sound but his own breathing. Then it came back to him, where he was and why.

He’d had enough sleep, but he was terribly hungry again. It seemed as if he’d embarked on a painful cycle. Half the time he was tired, the other half hungry. In either state, he seemed prone to a great sensitivity. Everything was accentuated. His problems, when he allowed himself to ponder them, seemed acute. And because their edges were so sharp, he could not bear to consider any of them for very long but instead took them in turns, one after the other, through the rest of the long night.

At times Kit felt afraid, for he did not know himself as he thought he should, as he had once thought he had. Too much had happened too quickly, and he found himself wondering if leaving home had been the right thing to do. At other times he felt a vast relief and did not care why he had left, only that he had.

Toward morning, Kit began to consider destinations. None seemed right. He did not want to stay with friends. He did not want to go back to Yale to exchange work for a stifling dorm room and a hundred days of canned food. He did not want to drive endlessly, aimlessly. Already, he was tired of being forever on his way to somewhere else.

I’ll make up my mind today
, he promised himself as he gathered up his few belongings. To do what, he didn’t know. But he had a feeling that before the day was done he’d have chosen a course, if not a destination.

After eating a huge breakfast at the first coffee shop he encountered, Kit made his way southwest, occasionally crossing a highway but never leaving the country roads he’d come to prefer. The sight of cows and horses in their meadows soothed him. Old barns made him wish for a grandfather, one who knew something about the land. At one point, an inviting meadow so enticed him that he stopped by the side of the road and spent an hour walking its borders, listening to bird-song, and wishing that he knew the names of wildflowers. He’d never paid any attention to birds or flowers before. Not wild ones.

At noon he stopped again to eat a hot beef sandwich and a dish of coleslaw in a German restaurant where the waitresses all wore white bonnets and the menu boasted four kinds of sausage.

Kit had been back on the road for only a few miles when he reached another of those little towns that slowed him to a crawl and clotted the traffic. It was here that he spotted something that appealed to him in surprising ways, and he smiled for the first time since saying good-bye to his sister.

“I want to make a trade,” Kit said, waving impatiently at his Jaguar. Big Al, of Big Al’s Used Cars and Trucks (
WE ON-ER FAIR OFF-ERS
), walked over to the Jaguar, ran his hand along its unmarked hide, glanced through the driver’s window, and shook his head.

“For what?” he snorted. “The whole lot?” Behind him, a row of aging cars and pickups slowly surrendered to rust and gravity.

“That one,” Kit said. He pointed at a huge, elderly motor home with a flat face and dusty windowpanes. Above its twin windshields, large, slanted letters spelled out the name
ROAD SCHOONER
. A long, red-and-white striped awning was furled above the side door, which stood halfway between bow and stern, and the undented white hull was trimmed with narrow bars of silver. The tires were plump. A long bumper sticker read,
GONE FISHIN’
.

“For a Jag?” As hard as he tried, Big Al just couldn’t manage to hide his excitement.

“For a Jag.” Kit nodded. He knew it was a ridiculous trade, but the Jag was tainted now—it had come from his father and had not quite lost its strings—and the thought of driving the old caravan instead, lounging under its candy-cane awning, perhaps even taking it back to Yale with him in the fall, was tempting.

Seeing the shock on Big Al’s face, Kit decided to check out the Schooner more thoroughly. If anything, the interior only made him more determined to make the trade. Here was a whole new home: two beds, a kitchenette, cupboards, carpets, and a bathroom with shower. He would need propane, gasoline, some linens, groceries, books, not much else. He drove the Schooner around a roomy K mart parking lot across the street and realized, then, that it was more road-worthy than he had hoped for. And if, somewhere down the road, the old Schooner stopped, so would he. There were other ways to get home.

While Kit looked the other way, Big Al took the Jaguar through a few figure eights and then gleefully pronounced the sleek car fit. “I think I’ll drive it for a while myself,” he chortled, his big lips bouncing. But when he saw Kit blanch and move, unblinking, toward the
car that was still his, he hollered, “I’ll throw in a tank of gas and a month’s propane,” and pocketed the keys. Then he did Kit a bigger favor than either of them realized at the time: he insisted that Kit clean out the Jag, bumper to bumper, before leaving it behind. “You never know what you might turn up,” he said wisely.

So Kit emptied the glove compartment, checked the trunk, tipped the visors, glanced in the ashtray, and at the last minute peered under the seats. The string-bound box he found under the driver’s seat puzzled him. It was about the size of a Bible and inordinately heavy. He thought that it must belong to Holly, must have slipped out of her luggage, out of sight, been forgotten. But with Big Al waiting impatiently to close the deal, Kit simply added the box to the maps and flashlight he’d retrieved from the Jaguar and stashed the lot in a handsome wooden trunk bolted to the floor next to the Schooner’s driver’s seat. Then he went into Al’s cluttered office and made everything legal.

Halfway into his cringing chair, Big Al suddenly froze. “Got the title with you? Can’t do the deal otherwise,” he said, looking as if he might well cry.

“Oddly enough, I do,” Kit said, and he too looked close to tears. He’d been delighted when, upon turning eighteen, he’d been able to transfer the car into his own name. His father had encouraged the exchange, convinced that it would teach his son to be responsible about his possessions, but Kit knew that it would enrage his father to realize how easy he had made it for his son to take flight.

“Shouldn’t keep the title in the car, you know,” Al said, lowering himself all the way into his chair, which whined a bit before surrendering. “Makes it easy for thieves—present company excepted, of course,” he added, braying.

With his pen poised, Kit looked up. “I don’t suppose you’d rent it to me for a couple of weeks?”

“Don’t rent,” said Big Al. “Never have. Never will, Buy, sell, or get out of the way. That’s the business I’m in.”

“Well, I guess I’ve come this far. Might as well go all the way.” But his hand shook a little as he penned his name.

“The owner’s manual is in the glove compartment, but I’d better warn you right up front,” said Al, now that the deal was done. “You’ll have to learn a few tricks to keep this baby on an even keel. Watch your corners, even more important, watch your overhead clearance,
watch your gas gauge—this thing is a truck, you know. Burns gas like nothin’. But ’cause it’s a truck it’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Fields, dirt roads, snow. No problem. Trust me. Oh,” and here he stopped, pursed his lips and made a face. “You’ll have to figure out your own method of waste disposal. Depends where you are, of course. Lots of campgrounds have dumping facilities. Some gas stations even. Laws vary, state to state. The Schooner’s equipped with a tank you can drain with a hose into any toilet. Or you can get a portable thing and just flush the stuff, or dig a deep hole, or burn it, I suppose. I don’t mean to go on about it, but nothin’ll put you off motoring faster than a stench. But you’ll figure out what suits you, soon enough.”

As he had before, Kit suddenly felt as if he had lost all control and were in someone else’s hands entirely.
What in God’s name am I doing?
he wondered, more frantically than before and with a measure of anguish brought on by the sight of his Jag basking outside Al’s office window. The thought of attending to toilets and the like horrified him. He had begun to feel excited, however, about this adventure. So he said good-bye to Big Al, shook his pudgy hand, boarded the Schooner, and set sail.

Rarely in his life had Kit felt foolish. He’d never been a foolish boy and had not evolved into a foolish young man. At least he’d never thought so. But for the first fifty miles after leaving Big Al’s Used Cars and Trucks, Kit made up for lost time, to the disgust of his fellow travelers. For mile after agonizing mile, he struggled to master the combined arts of steering the thirty-eight-foot Schooner along the winding country roads, urging it up the rolling hills, bringing its unwieldy tonnage to a stop in a dozen small towns, negotiating their corners, and changing lanes. After nearly wrecking his new home when he misjudged a left-hand turn in the middle of a congested town—and forcing eight cars behind him to back up into oncoming traffic so that he could extricate himself—Kit pulled into a church parking lot, switched off the engine, and laid his head gently on the Schooner’s big steering wheel. He stayed that way for a while, tired, terrified, and ashamed of his incompetence, while the traffic hustled by him. He wondered if his father had ever had moments like this. He tried to picture him afraid, undone, but could not. He tried to picture him as a boy, dirty with play, laughing, curious about the world. But he could not do this either.

He realized then how little he knew about his father. He had seen photographs of his grandparents, long dead, and heard some stories about their lives. More about them than about his own father. He was sorry about this, and it was suddenly important that he dig deeper when he returned.

With time to spare and sudden resolve, Kit began to search for some paper, but there was none to be found. Ahead, on the shoulder of the road, there was litter. It would have to do.

He climbed from the Schooner and fetched a paper bag that had become caught in a fence rail. It was dry, not too dirty, but would nonetheless shock his father more, perhaps, than anything Kit chose to write on it.

He took it back to the Schooner, smoothed it out on the top of the wooden trunk that was bolted next to the driver’s seat, and, kneeling down, took his pen from his pocket and began to write.
Dear Father
, he began, for
Dad
was somehow not quite right.