Firestarter (60 page)

“Do you want something to eat, Karl?” Norma asked.

Hofferitz looked at their plates. “No—but if I was to, it looks like you wouldn't have to dish up anything new,” he said dryly.

“Will she have to stay in bed for long?” Irv asked.

“Ought to have her down to Albany,” Hofferitz said. There was a dish of olives on the table and he took a handful. “Observation. She's got a fever of a hundred and one. It's from the infection. I'll leave you some penicillin and some antibiotic ointment. Mostly what she needs to do is eat and drink and rest. Malnutrition. Dehydration.” He popped an olive into his mouth. “You were right to give her that chicken broth, Norma. Anything else, she would have sicked it up, almost as sure as shooting. Nothing but clear liquids for her tomorrow. Beef broth, chicken broth, lots of water. And plenty of gin, of course; that's the best of those clear liquids.” He cackled at this old joke, which both Irv and Norma had heard a score of times before, and popped another olive into his mouth. “I ought to notify the police about this, you know.”

“No,” Irv and Norma said together, and then they looked at each other, so obviously surprised that Dr. Hofferitz cackled again.

“She's in trouble, ain't she?”

Irv looked uncomfortable. He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“Got something to do with that trouble you had last year, maybe?”

This time Norma opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Irv said, “I thought it was only gunshot wounds you had to report, Karl.”

“By law, by law,” Hofferitz said impatiently, and stubbed out his cigarette. “But you know there's a spirit of the law as well as a letter, Irv. Here's a little girl and you say her name is Roberta McCauley and I don't believe that anymore than I believe a hog will shit dollar bills. She says she scraped her back open crawling under barbed wire, and I got to think that's a funny thing to have happen to you on the way to your relatives, even with gas as tight as it is. She says she don't remember much of the last week or so, and that I do believe. Who is she, Irv?”

Norma looked at her husband, frightened. Irv rocked back in his chair and looked at Dr. Hofferitz.

“Yeah,” he said finally, “she's part of that trouble from last year. That's why I called you, Karl. You've seen trouble, both here and back in the old country. You know what trouble is. And you know that sometimes the laws are only as good as the people in charge of them. I'm just saying that if you let out that little girl is here, it's going to mean trouble for a lot of people who haven't earned it. Norma and me, a lot of our kin … and her in there. And that's all I think I can tell you. We've known each other twenty-five years. You'll have to decide what you're going to do.”

“And if I keep my mouth shut,” Hofferitz said, lighting another cigarette, “what are you going to do?”

Irv looked at Norma, and she looked back at him. After a moment she gave her head a bewildered little shake and dropped her eyes to her plate.

“I dunno,” Irv said quietly.

“You just gonna keep her like a parrot in a cage?” Hofferitz asked. “This is a small town, Irv. I can keep my mouth shut, but I'm in the minority. Your wife and you belong to the church. To the Grange. People come and people go. Dairy inspectors gonna drop by to check your cows. Tax assessor's gonna drop by some fine day—that bald bastard—to reassess your buildings. What are you gonna do? Build her a room down cellar? Nice life for a kid, all right.”

Norma was looking more and more troubled.

“I dunno,” Irv repeated. “I guess I have got to think on it some. I see what you're sayin … but if you knew the people that was after her …”

Hofferitz's eyes sharpened at this, but he said nothing.

“I got to think on it some. But will you keep quiet about her for the time being?”

Hofferitz popped the last of his olives into his mouth, sighed, stood up, holding onto the edge of the table. “Yeah,” he said. “She's stable. That V-Cillin will knock out the bugs. I'll keep my mouth shut, Irv. But you better think on it, all right. Long and hard. Because a kid ain't a parrot.”

“No,” Norma said softly. “No, of course not.”

“Something strange about that kid,” Hofferitz said, picking up his black bag. “Something damn funny about her. I couldn't see it and I couldn't put my finger on it … but I felt it.”

“Yeah,” Irv said. “There's something strange about her, all right, Karl. That's why she's in trouble.”

He saw the doctor out into the warm and rainy November night.

After the doctor had finished probing and pressing with his old, gnarled, but wonderfully gentle hands, Charlie fell into a feverish but not unpleasant doze. She could hear their voices in the other room and understood that they were talking about her, but she felt sure that they were only talking … not hatching plans.

The sheets were cool and clean; the weight of the crazy quilt was comforting on her chest. She drifted. She remembered the woman calling her a witch. She remembered walking away. She remembered hitching a ride with a vanful of hippies, all of them smoking dope and drinking wine, and she remembered that they had called her little sister and asked her where she was going.

“North,” she had replied, and that had caused a roar of approval.

After that she remembered very little until yesterday, and the hog that had charged her, apparently meaning to eat her. How she had got to the Manders farm, and why she had come here—whether it had been a conscious decision or something else—she could not remember.

She drifted. The doze deepened. She slept. And in her dream they were back in Harrison and she was starting up in her bed, her face wet with tears, screaming with terror, and
her mother rushed in, auburn hair blinding and sweet in the morning light, and she had cried, “Mommy, I dreamed you and Daddy were dead!” And her mother stroked her hot forehead with a cool hand and said, “Shhh, Charlie, shhh. It's morning now, and wasn't that a silly dream?”

There was very little sleep for Irv and Norma Manders that night. They sat watching a succession of inane prime-time sitcoms, then the news, then the
Tonight
show. And every fifteen minutes or so Norma would get up, leave the living room quietly, and go to check on Charlie.

“How is she?” Irv asked around quarter of one.

“Fine. Sleeping.”

Irv grunted.

“Have you thought of it, Irv?”

“We've got to keep her until she's better,” Irv said. “Then we'll talk to her. Find out about her dad. I can only see that far ahead.”

“If they come back—”

“Why should they?” Irv asked. “They shut us up. They think they scared us—”

“They
did
scare me,” Norma said softly.

“But it wasn't right,” Irv replied, just as softly. “You know that. That money … that ‘insurance money' … I never felt right about that, did you?”

“No,” she said, and shifted restlessly. “But what Doc Hofferitz said is true, Irv. A little girl has got to have people … and she's got to go to school … and have friends … and … and—”

“You saw what she did that time,” Irv said flatly. “That pyrowhatsis. You called her a monster.”

“I've regretted that unkind word ever since,” Norma said. “Her father—he seemed like such a nice man. If only we knew where he was now.”

“He's dead,” a voice said from behind them, and Norma actually cried out as she turned and saw Charlie standing in the doorway, clean now and looking all the more pallid for that. Her forehead shone like a lamp. She floated in one of Norma's flannel nightgowns. “My daddy is dead. They killed him and now there's nowhere I can go. Won't you please help
me? I'm sorry. It's not my fault. I told them it wasn't my fault … I told them … but that lady said I was a witch … she said …” The tears were coming now, streaming down her cheeks, and Charlie's voice dissolved into incoherent sobs.

“Oh, honey, come here,” Norma said, and Charlie ran to her.

Dr. Hoffertiz came the next day and pronounced Charlie improved. He came two days after that and pronounced her much improved. He came over the weekend and pronounced her well.

“Irv, you decided what you're going to do?”

Irv shook his head.

Norma went to church by herself that Sunday morning, telling people that Irv had “a touch of the bug.” Irv sat home with Charlie, who was still weak but able to get around inside the house now. The day before, Norma had bought her a lot of clothes—not in Hastings Glen, where such a purchase would have caused comment, but in Albany.

Irv sat beside the stove whittling, and after a while Charlie came and sat with him. “Don't you want to know?” she said. “Don't you want to know what happened after we took your car and left here?”

He looked up from his whittling and smiled at her. “Figure you'll tell when you're ready, button.”

Her face, white, tense, and unsmiling, didn't change. “Aren't you afraid of me?”

“Should I be?”

“Aren't you afraid I'll burn you up?”

“No, button. I don't think so. Let me tell you something. You're no little girl anymore. Maybe you ain't a big girl—you're someplace in the middle—but you're big enough. A kid your age—any kid—could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do.
Why would they want to? Why should you want to? A kid your age should be able to be trusted with a jackknife or a pack of matches, if they're halfway bright. So, no. I ain't scared.”

At that Charlie's face relaxed; an expression of almost indescribable relief flowed across it.

“I'll tell you,” she said then. “I'll tell you everything.” She began to speak and was still speaking when Norma returned an hour later. Norma stopped in the doorway, listening, then slowly unbuttoned her coat and took it off. She put her purse down. And still Charlie's young but somehow old voice droned, on and on, telling it, telling it all.

And by the time she was done, both of them understood just what the stakes were, and how enormous they had become.

Winter came with no firm decision made. Irv and Norma began to go to church again, leaving Charlie alone in the house with strict instructions not to answer the telephone if it rang and to go down the cellar if someone drove in while they were gone. Hofferitz's words,
like a parrot in a cage,
haunted Irv. He bought a pile of schoolbooks—in Albany—and took up teaching Charlie himself. Although she was quick, he was not particularly good at it. Norma was a little better. But sometimes the two of them would be sitting at the kitchen table, bent over a history or geography book, and Norma would look up at him with a question in her eyes … a question for which Irv had no answer.

The New Year came; February; March. Charlie's birthday. Presents bought in Albany. Like a parrot in a cage. Charlie did not seem entirely to mind, and in some ways, Irv reasoned to himself on nights when he couldn't sleep, perhaps it had been the best thing in the world for her, this period of slow healing, of each day taken in its slow winter course. But what came next? He didn't know.

There was the day in early April after a drenching two-day rain when the damned kindling was so damp he couldn't get the kitchen stove lit.

“Stand back a second,” Charlie said, and he did, automatically, thinking she wanted to look at something in there. He
felt something pass him in midair, something tight and hot, and a moment later the kindling was blazing nicely.

Irv stared around at her, wide-eyed, and saw Charlie looking back at him with a kind of nervous, guilty hope on her face.

“I helped you, didn't I?” she said in a voice that was not quite steady. “It wasn't really bad, was it?”

“No,” he said. “Not if you can control it, Charlie.”

“I can control the little ones.”

“Just don't do it around Norma, girl. She'd drop her teddies.”

Charlie smiled a little.

Irv hesitated and then said, “For myself, anytime you want to give me a hand and save me messing around with that damned kindling, you go right ahead. I've never been any good at it.”

“I will,” she said, smiling more now. “And I'll be careful.”

“Sure. Sure you will,” he said, and for just a moment he saw those men on the porch again, beating at their flaming hair, trying to put it out.

Charlie's healing quickened, but still there were bad dreams and her appetite remained poor. She was what Norma Manders called “peckish.”

Sometimes she would wake up from these nightmares with shuddering suddenness, not so much pulled from sleep as ejected from it, like a fighter pilot from his plane. This happened to her one night during the second week of April; at one moment she was asleep, and at the next she was wide awake in her narrow bed in the back room, her body coated with sweat. For a moment the nightmare remained with her, vivid and terrible (the sap was running freely in the maples now, and Irv had taken her with him that afternoon to change the buckets; in her dream they had been sapping again, and she had heard something behind and had looked back to see John Rainbird creeping up on them, flitting from tree to tree, barely visible; his one eye glittered with a baleful lack of mercy, and his gun, the one he had shot her daddy with, was in one hand, and he was gaining). And then it slipped away. Mercifully, she could remember none of the bad dreams for long, and she rarely screamed anymore upon awakening from them, frightening Irv and Norma into her room to see what was wrong.

Charlie heard them talking in the kitchen. She fumbled for
the Big Ben on her dresser and brought it close to her face. It was ten o'clock. She had been asleep only an hour and a half.