Town Burning (5 page)

“Are you O.K., Janie?”

“Yes, I’m all right,” she said, knowing that she would have to go to Northlee anyway. She didn’t want to go; this journey to see Mike wounded by his own stupidity had been taken in her imagination too many times. Now it hardly retained the pull of emergency, and as far as love was concerned, he had divorced her in favor of the machine too long ago. Who had done the deserting? She thought, perhaps, she had loved Michael Spinelli once; really she had loved the man she thought he might become.

Cesare Spinelli turned her toward the stairs, gently, and started her forward. “You get ready, now. It won’t take me no time at all. I’ll get the car out and wait in the driveway.” He followed her upstairs and opened the door of her room for her. He whispered, “If you want we won’t make Mama come, huh?” then patted her shoulder and trotted down the hall.

She faced the empty bed.

As she dressed, she thought of the coming scene, and it, too, had happened before in her mind. The Riders would be there, with her brother, Junior, and they would have to face her in whatever guilt they could assume for themselves. Junior would feel especially responsible, and the sight of her would give him pain. Junior would then lash out, in his poor brutal fashion, at himself, at anyone, at the world in general. It would be a scene more damaging to Cesare Spinelli than to anyone else, because he would blame no one but his own beloved son.

She dressed, combed her hair, put on lipstick and looked again in the mirror to see nothing but the way her hair lay against her head and the way the lipstick turned out. Between and around these two things a white face flashed and was gone.

Mr. Spinelli’s old Plymouth idled in the driveway, the white exhaust curling up around the back in the morning air. The door opened for her.

“All set?” Mr. Spinelli asked. He reached across and shut the door carefully, then eased the old car down the driveway into the street, turning north, shifting as silently as possible. “I told Mama not to worry,” he said.

The town was still asleep under the black sky. They went around the empty square and took the river road to Northlee, Mr. Spinelli driving the five miles slowly on the winding road. They met no other cars until they came into the larger town and passed the all-night taxi stand, the silent campus and square. Summer session was nearly over, a few lights were on in the college dormitories, solitary and lonesome in the large banks of darkened windows.

The old red-brick hospital seemed to be alive, crouched among its elm trees. The hall lights were all on, showing at the ends of the wings, and steam puffed regularly from a vent near the ambulance entrance. The parking lot was an island floodlighted, surrounded by large whitewashed stones. The bright machines of the Riders waited precisely in formation, leaning on identical kickstands, boondoggle and coontails hanging down from their handlebars.

Jane and Mr. Spinelli got out of the car, shut the doors quietly, and walked nervously and carefully to the front entrance, up to the round porch and through the large, thick-windowed doors. The Riders, in black leather, sat awkwardly in the old wicker chairs of the lobby, looking at magazines. They all watched Jane and Mr. Spinelli as they came toward the reception desk. Junior Stevens got up and followed, but would not look directly at his sister. Charlotte Paquette came around the desk and reached for Jane’s hand.

“We’ll have to wait for a while, Janie,” Charlotte said. She looked down, dark and sympathetic, her white uniform binding and stiff.

“Is he all right now?” Jane asked.

“As soon as the doctor is finished I’ll have him talk to you. I just called.” Charlotte looked from Jane to Mr. Spinelli, including him. He had worn a necktie to the hospital, a formal place.

“They’re doing everything they can,” Charlotte said.

Jane had heard those words before, on the night her father died in this same hospital. Her mother had died here, too.

“Why don’t we sit down?” Charlotte asked, motioning toward the tired wicker chairs.

Junior picked up a copy of
Look
magazine and hid behind it. His face was the face of the biggest boy—red, somewhat brutal in its shape, uncontrollable; and like the biggest and most awkward boy in school he kept his face set in a knowing, immature expression which excluded both interest and sympathy from the feelings of anyone who looked at him. He was thirty-two years old, unmarried, and worked as a laborer for Cotter & Son.

“It was an accident,” Junior said from behind his magazine.

“I know it was an accident,” Jane said.

Mr. Spinelli looked disgustedly at the
Journal of American Nursing.

“It was windy as hell above Grafton, and he slued into a mailbox,” Junior said. “It kind of stuck out on a pole, almost right into the road. They shouldn’t stick mailboxes out like that.”

“It was his own fault!” Mr. Spinelli said fiercely.

“His bike went on almost a hundred yards, but that mailbox scraped him right off of it. He was way ahead of us, going like hell on wheels,” Junior said. He let the magazine come down for a moment and looked quickly at his sister. He started to put the magazine back to his face, but then threw it on top of the others on the table.

It isn’t your fault, Junior, she wanted to say, but don’t you and all your Riders look so heroic, as if this were war and this casualty were sad but inevitable. Don’t brag about how fast Mike was going to show how brave and reckless you are or how drunk you were! But then she looked at the Riders across the room—four girls and six men—boys. They were not enjoying themselves. They looked, aside from the trim bodies, pale and unhealthy. She knew all of them: the girls with the narrow hips and big breasts and pretty but now pallid faces, the boys with narrow hips and broad-shouldered uniforms. They were not bragging now. They did not want to die, or to be brushed as closely by death as they were now.

An orange light went on and off behind the desk, and a low buzzer gently kept time with it.

“I have to go, Janie,” Charlotte said. “I’ll come back as soon as the doctor is ready.”

“Thanks, Charlotte,” Jane said.

Mr. Spinelli’s hand shook as he turned the pages of the
Journal of
American Nursing.
On Jane’s other side her big brother sat on his spine, his long legs in riding pants, his feet, in expensive Western boots, extending too far out into the room. She smelled the gasoline that had sloshed on the Riders, and she smelled Junior’s fear as bitter sweat. The Riders looked into the distance or at magazines, occasionally glancing at their leader and his sister, the mourner.

“Why don’t you go on home, Junior?” Jane asked.

“…Wait and see how Mike’s coming,” Junior mumbled.

“You can’t help now. They’re doing all they can in there. Look how
they’re
suffering.” Jane pointed toward the Riders, who stared back at her, shocked by this gesture from the mourner.

“Can’t do that,” Junior said, slowly beginning to be indignant, then becoming terribly indignant. “Our friend!” he shouted, then went on in an angry whisper: “Mike was one of us. Don’t get so damn’ superior like all the rest! One of us, too, not all yours, God damn it, you! So damned superior I We’ll wait all night and tomorrow, so shut up!” His hands crushed the brittle wicker arms of his chair, and he smiled. The Riders heard all this, and went fiercely back to their magazines, embarrassed, but with a principle to uphold.

Jane knew them well; the lobby was too quiet and too bright. Within half an hour of whispers and creakings they had left with Junior, truculent and ashamed, giving as their last word the deep roar of their machines in the silent town.

When Charlotte came back with the doctor they followed him down the long hall and into a little room. The doctor smiled at them and put his stethoscope firmly into his side pocket. He wore a clean white jacket he had obviously just put on, and his forehead was still red-lined from his surgical cap. He looked extremely tired.

“Janie, this is Dr. Karmis. This is Mrs. Spinelli, Doctor, and Mr. Spinelli, his father,” Charlotte said.

“I think I should tell you first,” the doctor said, rubbing the red line on his forehead, “that his condition is very serious. I understand that he hit a telephone pole….”

“A mailbox,” Jane heard herself say. The doctor looked at her closely, as if he were trying to look through a fog.

“A mailbox,” he said. “His chest is very badly crushed. Fortunately he didn’t hit his head. His lungs are punctured badly. The only thing we can do now is wait and see if he improves within the next few hours. If he improves, he may recover rapidly. I don’t want to get your hopes up, though. I want you to know we’ve done everything possible. Everything we can for him. A nurse is with him now and will stay with him.” The doctor paused, looking from one to the other.

Finally Charlotte spoke. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Jane said, turning toward the door.

Mr. Spinelli put his hand out and the doctor took it, surprised, and smiled warmly.

“We’re doing everything we can for your son,” he said. “Everything.”

Mr. Spinelli nodded, without expression, and followed Jane out the door and up the long hall.

In the car, going very slowly toward Leah in the morning light, Jane watched the new sun light up the tops of Vermont hills across the river. A bright, beautiful day. In Cascom, to the east, her grandfather, Sam Stevens, would have finished the chores and would now be having his second breakfast, telling his hired men what had to be done today. In Leah, people would be getting up to go to work. Mrs. Spinelli would be waiting in her kitchen. Waiting…

John Cotter lay in bed in his bright room, the morning sun flashing on the new wallpaper, the air still cool although the dry wind that came rolling down from the open window to his bed would soon blow hot. His watch, that had told the time in dingy stations, in bars, in his mildewed room in Paris, here told the hour of a fresh morning at home. Seven o’clock, and the house was about to wake up. He sat up in bed and looked at the back yard. The lawn had been cut recently, and this was one of the years the Cotters did not have a garden. The garden grew weeds on its uneven surface, and near the garage tough rhubarb had gone to seed. A dusty pile of kindling leaned against his father’s outdoor grill.

Trying to remember other times he had looked out this window-other specific times: in Leah, memory tended to become one hazy scene stretching, without system, back to nothing—he thought the rock maple had grown perceptibly. Nothing else had changed very much. The birdhouse in the first fork of the tree was about to fall down, as it was always about to fall down. He had put it up himself fifteen years ago, tying it with half-inch rope which even then showed signs of rot.

That was the day he shot the red-shouldered hawk, and the bird-house was a kind of payment to all birds, necessary to help absolve him of the sin of the hawk’s murder. It
was
murder; murder pure and simple, with all of murder’s thick feeling of pleasure and power. He knew that boys must do this. Boys step on caterpillars and shoot English sparrows with their BB guns because the little birds are unprotected by law and because boys like to kill. Was there ever a boy who
never
pulled the wings from a fly? He had known this at the age of fifteen, known then that among his friends he, at least, found this weird joy mixed with pity and guilt.

He found the hawk sitting on the branch of a white birch, on Pike Hill, sitting erect and motionless, bemused for some bird-reason by the bright day. It would not fly even when he shook the tree. He ran home and got his .22, ran back and shot the hawk through the breast. He heard the
thunk
when the little bullet pushed through feathers and bone, and the hawk slowly raised its wings and flew down, losing altitude quickly, half gliding. One leg dangled. It hit the road and twirled around on the one good leg, wide wings raising a cloud of dust as they supported the bird in place of the useless leg. He ran up to the hawk, but the expression in the bright eyes kept him back. The hawk hissed and snapped his beak, ready to fight. Fearfully, John watched the brave animal arrange what weapons he had left—one talon, beak, and most of all his pure and fearless hate. John fired the rest of his ammunition directly into the breast, the feathers shredding, bullets digging up the dirt behind. Finally the hawk fell to its side and died.

At least he did not hate forever afterward the objects of his cruelty. Bruce did that. Whatever Bruce hurt he hated. John remembered very well the time Bruce had sealed his hatred for toads. He had been there on the beach at Lake Cascom with Bruce. John was five and Bruce was twelve, and that year there were toads of all sizes around the beach; little toads as big as a fingernail and toads bigger than a fist. Under every piece of driftwood, in every clump of grass, beneath every root of the shore trees there were toads, and Bruce killed them. He had an anchor, a tin coffee can filled with cement, and he dropped it on the toads. John followed him excitedly as he found more and more toads to squash. Finally Bruce found the granddaddy toad of them all and kicked him, rolling and ugly, covered with sand, out into the middle of the narrow beach. Like a fat old man, very dignified, the toad righted himself and looked around. He saw no way of escape—just the two boys above him. Then he put his hands over his head. Squatting there alone and in the open he didn’t try to get away; he just covered his head with his stubby hands and waited. Bruce held the anchor high.

“Look,” John said. “He’s got his hands—”

And the anchor fell on the toad, blotting him out. Bruce went back to the cabin and didn’t come out all afternoon. John was allowed to go fishing with his father, who even let him hold the tiller of the outboard motor for a while, and in all that excitement he forgot about the toads. Two years later, when he was seven, he remembered them because of the thing Bruce did when he found the toad on the lawn. Bruce got into a lot of trouble over that, because he took his father’s deer rifle out of the upstairs closet and the ammunition out of the bureau drawer and shot the toad, point-blank, on the lawn, right in town. Nothing was left of the toad but some odd gore in a smoking hole six inches wide. Miss Colchester, the high-school teacher, was going by, and she called the police. What a time that was! That was the summer, too, when Bruce took the car and went for a drive—two years before he could get a license and hardly knowing how to shift gears. He got his behind warmed for that, too, although he didn’t run into anything and probably wouldn’t have been caught at all if he hadn’t driven downstreet right through the middle of town. Seven or eight people saw him and called up to tell his mother. That had been a bad summer for Bruce.