Town Burning (35 page)

“My old buddy, Bob Paquette,” John said.

“He’s gone over, Johnny,” Billy said.

“He didn’t like the way I treated Keith Joubert. You know why?” John asked Howard.

“You
did
rather demolish the idiot.”

“It’s not that. Somehow it was in bad taste, see? I’d like to give that bastard a bad taste for every time he and his buddies ganged up on me. They’re willing to admit I’ve got a higher I.Q., but not that I can beat Keith Joubert. That’s in bad taste. What has the poor bully got left?”

“Oh, he must have
something
left,” Howard said, grinning.

“No matter what you’re saying, it ain’t true,” Billy said vehemently. “I match Johnny up against any one of ’em!”

“Well, thanks, Billy,” John said. For a moment he was very grateful to Billy, but then, in the face of Howard’s amusement he added, “Only don’t match me with Junior right now.”

“As the mouse said, ‘I’ve been sick.’” Howard said. He reached across Billy’s long legs and slapped John on the knee.

Billy poked around in his back pocket and came out with a mashed sandwich. He opened it and looked inside as a man looks in his handkerchief after blowing his nose. It was jam. He began to eat. Howard jumped up, his knees cracking.

“I’ll get us some coffee.” He pushed toward the Red Cross ladies.

John noticed that Billy was even grimier than usual. The deep cracks in his face were black lines, full of soot. His checkered hunting shirt had lost its red squares and now was a patchwork of gray and black. Above his boots large splotches of dirt stained his long shins. His overalls had turned a shiny black.

“Oh, I been out to Cascom once already,” Billy said.

“Where?”

“Up to the Corners. Old Murphy place burnt up. We didn’t have no more chance than nothing.”

“How about Sam Stevens’ place?”

Billy grinned at him. “I reckon she’s O.K., Johnny.”

“Who?”

“I says I reckon she’s O.K.” He tried to stop grinning and his face inflated. For a second he looked like a huge chipmunk. “Sam’s place is O.K., I reckon.”

“Who told you about that?”

“Everybody and his brother knows you been squiring Junior’s sister around.”

“They think it’s too soon after the funeral or something?”

“It ain’t that! Everybody knowed Mike Spinelli warn’t no match for her. Just a heller, Mike was. Him and his goddam motorcycle. You want to know something, Johnny?” Billy waited, his eyebrows raised, his eyes bugged out.

“What?”

“I don’t see what a wonderful woman like her seen in him.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Billy.”

“Goddam fine woman. Never should of married that guinea in the first place. Ayuh!”

Howard came back with three paper cups of coffee and settled down against the wall again, sighing, his knees again cracking. “I’m going to tell you, John,” he said, “I’m an old man. I’m fifty-five years old.”

“I’m forty-five, come November,” Billy said. “I ain’t no spring chicken, neither.”

“An old man in a dry month. My bones are drying up like sticks, my loins are withered and sore, I’ve given up all of youth’s frivolities, I’m careful, I’m crotchety, I’m a bag of incipient rot.” Howard nodded as he spoke, “And yet I’m enjoying this business. I feel like a kid allowed to stay up late. All the excitement! I hope to hell my house doesn’t burn down, of course, but aside from that, I’m enjoying myself.”

“Like a war,” John said, “I felt that way about the war. But I don’t feel much about this.”

“It’s your home town, not mine. How about you, Billy?” Howard asked.

“Don’t ask Billy,” John said. “He and Leah aren’t speaking.”

“Screw Leah,” Billy said.

All voices suddenly stopped. Everyone looked toward the center of the room, where a sudden tenseness at the table had gained immediate attention. Junior Stevens bent over Mr. Bemis, and the little town clerk looked up at Junior, a banty rooster facing a big dog.

“I told you three times, no,” Mr. Bemis said.

“Why not?” Junior asked. He was on the edge of rage, his big face growing red. Mr. Bemis’ high, dry voice carried clear authority.

“There’s enough confusion now with everybody running around. You and your motorcycles would just add to it. We git plenty information right now. This ain’t no fun-fair you can show off your pretty uniforms at. We got enough trouble right now without you ramming around killing yourselves.”

“We just want to help, for Christ sakes!”

“Flying squadron! Be picking your flying squadron out of the ditches. We got enough to worry about.”

“Git through traffic—go where nobody else can….”

“Why don’t you grow up? Find out them noisy putt-putts ain’t good for nothing. All them damn’ things is good for is for you never-grew-up kids to ram around on showing off, making a noise nobody can think to! Think everybody admires you, showing off like that? Think you’re goddam asses, that’s what they think! You killed a boy a while back—your own brother-in-law. Ain’t you satisfied yet? You want to help? Take off them fancy uniforms and git set to use a shovel. We got no time for flying squadrons!” It was a long speech for Mr. Bemis. He looked back to the papers on his table.

Junior’s shoulders began to shake. His face, marked by little white lines, turned dark and brutal. John had never seen Junior this angry, had never seen his pride injured so badly as Mr. Bemis’ dry, authoritarian words had injured it. A windy, croupy noise came from Junior’s mouth, half words, half breath: “Wha…wha…wah…” Then he gave the table a violent shove with his thigh. The edge caught the town clerk below his bony chest and shot him up against the back of his chair. His hands fell to his sides, his pencil bounced on the cement floor. He looked up at Junior, trying to catch a breath, his open mouth vividly red in his white face.

After a few seconds of shocked disbelief, Joe Beaupre and two firemen jumped Junior and bulled him to the floor. Hands came up out of the tangle and descended, feet scraped along the cement. Out of the grasping, grunting tangle Junior’s scream of rage was as steady as a siren:
Sonsabitch in bastards sonabitch in bastards…
Occasionally muffled, but not for long. One of the firemen scrambled away, holding his bitten hand as if it were a baby, in the crook of his arm. He ran to the door and danced up and down, blowing on his bleeding hand and crooning softly. Joe Beaupre and the other fireman couldn’t hold Junior down. He rolled out of the pile and on his way to his feet put the fireman out of action with a short, vicious elbow to the chest. It was a blow so swift and expert it brought a concerted, horrified, yet admiring sigh from all the spectators, John among them. It stopped Joe Beaupre, too. With much grasping and jerking and a great amount of embarrassment he pulled his gun from his trick police holster. For a moment he had forgotten how to unlock it.

Junior turned his back on Joe Beaupre and faced the town clerk, who was still out of breath. “You’re a no-good little son of a bitch, Bemis! You’re the one playing the hero. We offer to help as best we can—” Self-pity broke his voice for a moment. “And you turn us down. We’ll help, all right, but no thanks to you!” Rage again began to gather in his face. “So goddam high and mighty! I’ll tell you something, you’ll git yours some day! The biggest thing about you is your goddam mouth!”

He whirled around and in the same motion slapped the heavy revolver out of Joe Beaupre’s hand. It bounced across the floor, everyone jumping aside to let it pass, and stopped in front of John.

“What were you going to do with it, anyway,” Junior said to Joe Beaupre, “shoot somebody?” He laughed raucously, but was obviously afraid; he had done a little too well. He was just a little too quick to turn and walk out of the firehouse. The Riders followed him.

Then the town clerk began to scream, “Stop! Stop! Beaupre! Arrest that man! Stop!”

Many wondering eyes focused on the town clerk, including Joe Beaupre’s. The town clerk’s screaming slowed and stopped, and there was dead silence in the firehouse.

John found himself walking down the narrow lane cleared by the revolver’s slide, toward the center table. He held the gun flat in his hand. One side of the cylinder and the end of the barrel were scratched silver through the blue. He handed it to Joe Beaupre and spoke to the town clerk, with a new attitude evident in his voice—one that came to him in a quite new, communal way: he knowingly echoed the sentiments of the men of Leah:

“Now, Mr. B. We have a fire to fight.”

He had never seen in any man’s eyes such clear hatred, even as the town clerk laughed and reached for the ringing telephone. The pale hand on the receiver quivered, everyone watching it. Wide blue veins deltaed down the hand and along the fingers. The telephone rang again before the town clerk answered it, and then he looked up calmly as he listened. “Ayuh. Ayuh. Ayuh.” He hung up and sent two trucks to Cascom, and the crowd in the room was less pressing. A Red Cross lady peeped in, and then another, and they took up their stations again. No one had seen them run away.

“Fire’s out of control,” Mr. Bemis said, looking at John. “Seems the wind’s coming up again. Fire crowned over the state highway, burnt up a National Guard truck. Gitting kind of dangerous out there.”

“Better there than here,” Joe Beaupre said. He was outwardly calm again, and seemed to want to forget about the fight.

“You take your truck and pick up them full Indian pumps, all the men you can get on,” the town clerk said to John.

“O.K., Mr. B.” The town clerk didn’t smile at him now.

He went outside and moved the truck up to the pile of Indian pumps. Billy and Howard and several others began to load them on. John stood on the truck and piled, jamming shovels into the cracks in the planking to keep the dripping pumps from rolling off. The smoke was leaf-sweet and sickening, and the men wheezed and spat on the sidewalk between bursts of effort. When the pumps were loaded, Howard and Billy got into the cab with John. At the corner the Riders flagged the truck and jumped on; John wondered if they had known it was his truck. In any case they couldn’t jump off now. He turned on Bank Street and overdrove his headlights just a bit on the road to Cascom.

“Been me scratched Beaupre’s gun up like that he’d most likely shot me dead on the spot,” Billy said.

“I’ll never figure that one out,” Howard said wonderingly.

“Old Mr. B. said some pretty hard things to Junior,” John said. “Now what the hell is that?”

A little red dot whirled around and around in the road, and he slowed down and stopped. A state policeman and a flashlight.

“Where you headed?”

“Cascom,” John said.

“You ain’t going to git through, you know.”

Don’t riddle me, John thought.

“There’s a National Guard truck burning up right square in the road. Looking for a bulldozer to clear it away. You better go on up to the Stevens’ place. You know where that is?”

So his wait was going to end. He drove on, faster than before until he felt Howard’s leg involuntarily jabbing the floorboards for a brake. Would she be there, though?

They descended into the smoke along the river, then climbed out of it on the big hill above the lake. They would have to go down into it again, but from now on it would be like entering a furnace. All the far hills were fire or embering fire, and flames higher than houses whipped the edges of the lake. He stopped the truck on the summit and went around to the back.

“Anybody not want to go down?” he asked. It seemed a reasonable question. The Riders looked at him stolidly.

“It’s your truck, John,” one of the men said. In the glare, their sweaty faces made them look like painted Indians. No one decided to stay, so they descended into the murk again, into the cloying stench of burning trees.

He missed the road to Sam Stevens’ farm and had to turn around. A National Guardsman, his uniform black with sweat and soot, waved him on up the gravel road. He could see about twenty yards ahead, and followed the lighter color of the gravel as the truck ground up the hill. Then they could see and breathe freely again, and there was the high house among the dark barns and against the black mountain. But the house was not white now; it was pink, and even the spruces of the mountain reflected in a weird, blackish way the colors of the fire below.

The state police had set up headquarters in front of the house, and a Salvation Army canteen truck was parked next to the police cars. All faces kept turning toward the valley, and as they did they flashed pink and the eyes stared and stared—fixed expressions not of fear or of awe, but a steady watchfulness. It was impossible to get used to that fire.

Word was passed that a whole family had died—a wedding party in Cascom. Nobody knew the name of the family. The ladder-rung mill in Cascom had burned, too.

“There won’t
be
no more Cascom,” somebody said.

John let the others unload the Indian pumps and went straight up to the kitchen door, Junior following him. Several women, two in Salvation Army uniforms, washed dishes and made up sandwiches in the big kitchen. He and Junior stood helplessly on the edge of this efficient uproar. Then Jane came into the room, in dungarees and a faded flannel shirt, carrying a tray of white coffee mugs.

She saw him at once, put the tray down and came up to him empty-handed. In the old clothes she was unbelievably trim and neat. She was completely beautiful to him, and tired, and would be soft if he touched her. She hadn’t noticed Junior, only him, and he saw that she had begun to cry as she stood in front of him with her arms hanging down. He put his hands on her shoulders.

“I don’t know…” Jane said; “I can’t stand to look down to the valley.”

“It’s all right, Janie,” he said.

“It’s so
mean.
It won’t stop.”

“No. We’ll stop it, all right,” he said. She took his arm and pulled him across the kitchen, through the hall and into the sitting room, where the stuffed wildcat glared down from the top of the piano and the deer heads stared rigidly from the walls.

“I wanted you to be here,” she said. “I missed you.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and he took her hand away and kissed her. Her lips were soft, almost liquid, and he pulled her up against him, his hands on her shoulderblades. As they came apart he looked into her eyes and saw the iris in them; a dark, ferny green.