The Firebug of Balrog County (8 page)

Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I am the firebug recently mentioned in this very paper. Yes, it is true. The firebug speaks!

I am writing to you (and to your readers) because this is America and I believe everyone should be allowed to express themselves freely, even if it is only within the pages of a banal small town rag. Many aspersions have been laid upon my metaphoric doorstep recently, some warranted, some not, and I am well aware that the court of public opinion is not well-disposed toward me at the present time.

And, while I feel no special need to defend myself or explain my actions, I do feel compelled to respond to Mayor Hedley's recent “The Mayor's Corner” piece. In said piece he shamed me (for I am the firebug) and urged me “to look deep inside (my) soul, which may need to be washed out with soap.”

My reply, in turn, would be to ask our beloved mayor if he tr
uly believes it's possible to know the soul of any man. Because I have my doubts, people. A man's entire being is an impenetrable mask (and don't even get me started on women), with as many layers as an enormous onion. You can peel away one, two, even twenty layers, but always another layer is waiting below the surface, hungry for its turn in the sun. Some of those layers are wicked, some noble, but most of them just want to watch TV and drink beer.

So don't pretend to know me, Mr. Mayor. You do not. You would not know me if I walked up to you and threw a banana cream pie in your wrinkly face. I am a ghost and I will haunt this town for as long as it suits me. I am neither young nor old—I am the wind that stokes the great cosmic fire and fans the flames of freedom.

I am eternal.

I am the firebug!

The Firebug's
Legend Grows

W
e wer
e eating dinner
on Tuesday evening wh
en Grandpa and Grandma Hedley pulled into our driveway. Their white Chevy pickup had an extended cab and was comically massive, about as necessary for the two old retirees as his-and-hers matching rocket launchers. Dad hated the truck, sa
ying it was a showy thing to drive, but I'd always appreciated old people flair and encouraged it whenever I could.

The Chevy stopped in front of our garage. Haylee turned to look out the window.

“Hey. It's the g-rents.”

Dad pushed his chair back, already frowning. He went into the central hallway and Chompy bolted after him, barking his head off. I continued shoveling spaghetti into my mouth, trying to finish dinner before whatever was going to happen happened. The side door slammed as Dad and the beast went
outside.

Haylee turned back to the table. “What do you think they want?”

I shrugged and kept chewing. I had a bad feeling about where the night was headed. My firebug senses were tingling.

“I mean, they never come over here, right? Not since the funeral.”

I nodded. Grandma Hedley had come over a few times to help sort through with Mom's possessions, but as far as I knew Grandpa Hedley hadn't been to our house since her death. I pushed back from the table and went to the window. Dad and Grandpa Hedley were conversing while Grandma Hedley fussed with Chompy. Grandma was smiling, so I decided their visit couldn't be that serious.

Dad noticed us watching and waved us outside.

“I hope he's not going to make us help rake their yard again,” Haylee said. “I had blisters for a frickin' week.”

We went out to the driveway. Grandma Hedley hugged us both, smelling like lavender water and juniper bushes. It was warm for early October and nobody had a coat on.

“We're going to a town meeting,” Grandpa said. “We'd like both of you to come with and see what it's like.”

“If you're not busy,” Grandma said.

Haylee and I looked at each other. This was a new one.

“Town meeting?”

“A special assembly,” Grandpa said. “About the deviants.”

“The arson, George means.”

“They know what I mean, May. The whole town has been blabbing about it.”

Everybody fell quiet. I sensed Haylee trying to come up with a way out. Chompy chased his tail and we all watched him go for it.

“Sounds fun,” I said. “Let's check this assemblage out, sis.”

Haylee scowled and gave me a look. A minute later we were rolling with our grandparents in the monster Chevy, looking down on the leafy streets of Hickson while Gran
dpa complained about the lawns that needed raking and Grandma told him it was all right, it was a free country.

The town hall was a big room attached to the town library. The hall had a vaulted ceiling, a bunch of chairs lined up in neat rows, and a podium placed between two oak tables where the city council sat. As we entered the room, Grandpa Hedley peeled away from us to join the council members up front while Grandma Hedley led Haylee and me across the room, making sure everybody saw her two grandchildren by her side. We sat at the end of the front row and I made sure to get the aisle seat in case somebody broke out the pitchforks and I needed to book it. About thirty people had shown up and some actually appeared to be under the age of sixty. Who were these people? How bored did you need to get to attend a Hickson town meeting?

The city council members took their seats. Grandpa Hedley stepped behind the podium.

“Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming.”

The room rustled and somebody coughed. Haylee fiddled with her cell phone beside me, texting some numb-nuts.

“I called this meeting because I wanted to brief everyone about the arsonists that've been terrorizing our county.”

The firebug went pitty-pat inside my chest.

Terrorizing?

Really?

“There have been three known incidents to date. First, as many of you already know, Teddy Giles' boathouse house burned down two weeks ago.”

The crowd murmured. Poor Teddy.

“Second, last Wednesday night there was an elaborately staged fire behind the grocery store in what appeared to be a Satanic-type ritual.”

More murmuring from the crowd while I snorted and bowed my head.

“Thirdly, late this past Saturday evening, someone torched the big woodpile behind Ox Haggerton's place.”

No murmuring this time—Old Man Haggerton could go fuck himself.

“In all three incidents, the investigator determined the fires were started with automotive gasoline using the same sloppy, amateurish method at each scene.”

I leaned forward. Sloppy? Amateurish? What the hell was he talking about? Each one of those fires had been set up with love and precision! Sure, perhaps I'd used more burn juice than was strictly necessary—

Ahhhh. The sly old soldier was trying to poke the hornet's nest. He thought the firebug might be right here, at the meeting, and he reckoned that anybody who'd stage something like Hickhenge would likely be a perfectionist.

Very tricky, old man.

Very tricky.

Grandpa Hedley set his hands on the podium and leaned toward the audience.

“You know, I knew some firebugs in Vietnam. They were real gung-ho fellas, always ready to jump out from the sandbags and let'er rip. They loved big fires and big explosions and seeing the sky light up in the middle of the night. They lived for that kind of thing, I suppose you could say.”

The Mayor covered his mouth with his fist and cleared his throat.

“As far as I recall, most of those firebugs ended up coming home in a body bag. That is, if there was a body left to ship home at all. Sooner or later, no matter how fast they were, or how much firepower they carried, they ended up making one little mistake and getting blown to hell.”

The Mayor paused. Nobody rustled. Haylee had stopped texting and was watching our grandfather like she'd never seen him before.

Maybe she hadn't.

“All right then. I just wanted you all to know that we're taking the arsonist seriously. We've approved temporary overtime for additional police patrols and are asking for volunteers for a neighborhood watch. Hickson has never need a neighborhood watch before, but I suppose times are changing. If you're interested in joining the watch, please let Patty Saunders know. She's got a sign-up sheet with her tonight and would love to get as many names down as she can. You can choose to volunteer twenty hours a week or one hour, it's up to you. Otherwise, please let me or Sheriff Tillman's office know if you see anything suspicious. Thank you and have a good night.”

The Mayor picked up his notepad and stepped away from the podium. Somebody started clapping in the back of the hall and soon everyone joined in, even Haylee, even me. I clapped and clapped and clapped, a goofy grin spreading across my face. If my grandfather wanted one more battle, who was I to deny the old soldier?

I noticed Haylee had turned to give me another look. The crowd had dispersed, but I was still clapping.

A Country Drive

T
he drought continued
into the second week of October. The skie
s remained clear and blue and the county turned various shades of rust. Burn permits were denied, fallen leaves piled up in desiccated mounds, and honking Canadian geese passed through town on their way south for the winter. The temperature fluctuated daily, warming to as high as eighty degrees and dipping to thirty-five. The lack of rain appeared to have thrown Mother Nature for a loop. She knew winter was on the horizon, one way or another, but she could only stagger toward it while the birds and squirrels hunkered down, trying their damndest to remember their training.

On a warm Monday I decided to take a new path home from the hardware store, circling back through the east side of town. Though it'd always been cool to rag on the “nice” part of Hickson, all us west-side kids had secretly envied the east-side kids and their well-kept two-story Victorians, with their tastefully used Volvos and BMWs parked in the drive and their handsome fathers out puttering in the yard on weekends, wearing faded college T-shirts or cardigan sweaters, their attractive mothers carrying out trays of lemonade and brownies to anybody who happened to be around—even you, a west-side kid so bored out of your skull you're willing to hang out with an east-side kid.

Today, the east side sparkled under a high blue sky. The air smelled dry and good. I walked from street to street, aimlessly wandering as my heart squeezed in my chest, filled with wistful October sentimentality. I picked up a twig and gnawed on it. It tasted like wood and earth and soil. I stepped into the gutter and kicked a heavy blanket of fallen leaves, enjoying the satisfying crunch.

“Nice. You're kicking the shit out of those leaves.”

I looked up. It was the pale girl. Katrina. She was lying out in the front yard of an enormous brown house and I hadn't even noticed her. Her dark hair was tied back in a ponytail and in the full, glowing light of day she was so pretty that I had trouble looking directly at her. I looked down and gave an extravagant, NFL placekicker–style kick that really sent the leafy motherfuckers flying.

“Whoa, buddy. What did they ever do to you?”

“I take my pleasures where I can.”

“Oh yeah?”

Katrina sat forward, lowering an open textbook across her lap as she studied me. Taking this as an invitation, I stepped out of the gutter and walked onto her lawn, trying to seem as confidant and non-idiotic as possible. I knew I was a tall, gawky high school dude with untamable hair, but maybe she was into that type of guy.

I looked past her at the big brown house. It was ugly as hell.

“You live in Hickson?”

“Yeah,” Katrina said. “This year, anyhow. I thought it'd be cool to get off-campus and live like, you know, a regular human being.”

“So basically you're here for the cheap rent.”

“Pretty much.”

I hooked my thumbs into my pockets and squinted up at the sky. Somebody in the neighborhood was going at it with a leaf blower.

“What do you think so far?”

“Of Hickson?”

I nodded.

“Well, I'd say it's astonishingly dull so far. Astonishingly.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “We've got that down pat.”

Katrina closed her textbook. Environmental Philosophy. It had a desperate-looking polar bear on the cover, swimming in the ocean with no chunks of ice in sight.

“You feel like going for a drive?”

“Okay,” I said. “As long as you don't take advantage of me.”

Katrina laughed. She swung her pale legs out of the Adirondack chair and leapt to her feet, slipping on a pair of flip-flops laid out in the grass.

“I can't make that sort of promise, Mack-Attack.”

We took Katrina's car. She drove recklessly and it gave me an enormous erection with every screeching turn in the road. She had a black VW Bug with skull-and-crossbones decals slapped on the doors. Her brothers were both gearheads, she shouted above the windy roar pouring in through the car's open windows, and they'd given the Bug “serious fucking balls,” which meant we were able to get up to a hundred miles an hour on the straight stretches of highway, the car rattling around us like a space capsule reentering the earth's atmosphere.

“What about deer?” I hollered, shifting in my seat as I tried to hide, or at least alleviate, my hard-on.

“Deer can't go this fast,” Katrina hollered back.

I sat back and enjoyed the wind as it pummeled my body and forced tears into my eyes. Hickson kids liked to tool around the local highways but I'd never seen anybody haul ass like this, much less while wearing flip-flops and black toenail polish and smoking Camel Blues.

A lumber truck appeared up ahead in our lane. Katrina screamed and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. Somehow the Bug gained even more steam, rattling cataclysmically, and we passed the lumber truck as if it were a woolly mammoth or some other dumpy prehistoric creature.

Goddamn, I liked this girl.

We drove for an hour, winding our way around until I no longer recognized where we were. Trees blurred pas
t the Bug's windows like the background scenery you'd see in an old-timey movie, their autumn leaves a mash-up of canary yellows and russet browns. When we passed the occasional field it was like coming up for air, and the blue sky seemed impossibly enormous.

At dusk, Katrina turned off whatever godforsaken highway we were driving on and into a pasture's access driveway. She didn't slow down to do this. She just flicked the steering wheel, jammed the brake pedal to the floor, and laughed manically as the car fishtailed ninety degrees before plowing to a stop, spraying dirt into the air.

A thoughtful silence followed. I registered that we were still alive and had stopped moving altogether. My shoulder ached from the dozens of collisions it had enjoyed with the passenger door, not to mention the cutting press of the seat belt. Across from us a bunch of Holsteins were grazing in the pasture, hunting half-heatedly through the drought-blighted grass for something enjoyable to chew on. Compared to the objects we'd been roaring past, they appeared almost stationary, like spotted hay bales.

Katrina unbuckled her seat belt. “Shit, that was fun.”

“Yes,” I said, staring ahead at the nearest cow. “Vroom.”

Katrina sat forward and reached across my lap. Luckily, my hard-on had disappeared a few miles back and we avoided having an awkward discussion, at least for the moment. She popped open the glove box and fumbled around in what appeared to be a mass of paper trash. She smelled like ladies' deodorant mixed with cigarette smoke.

“Ahhh. There you are, baby.”

The glove box trash dumped out on my feet as Katrina drew out a fifth of golden liquor and held it up between us, her smile as curved as a farmer's scythe. I unbuckled my seat belt and focused on the bottle, trying to ignore how close our bodies were.

She gave the bottle a happy shake. “This here is brandy.”

“You keep brandy in your glove box? Are you an eighty-year-old British dude?”

“I wish. Those guys fucking rock.”

Katrina took a pull from the fifth and handed the bottle to me. I took a healthy swig and my toes unclenched from their death curl inside my shoes. Katrina's seat creaked as she reclined. The Bug's interior was so small it felt like we'd shoved ourselves into an escape pod and crash-landed on a dusty, backwater planet.

I took another drink and handed the bottle back to Katrina. You could hear the car's engine clicking as it cooled, as well as the hordes of crickets and grasshoppers buzzing in abandon. Past the field and above a distant tree line the sun had started to set, turning the entire horizon golden.

“So. Katrina. What are you majoring in?”

“Art and business.”

“You're a double threat.”

“I'd like to own my own art gallery someday. Tour the world, buy beautiful shit. Then sell it for twice what I paid for it.”

Katrina took another swig of brandy. I waited for her to pass the bottle but she kept it flat against her stomach. A cow lowed at us from the pasture, sounding confused. The Holsteins had given up grazing and had hunkered down in ones and twos.

“Don't cows go in at night? They sleep in a barn, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

“That'd be nice. Being a cow, sleeping with all your cow pals around you, warm and safe while the wind howls outside. I'd like that.”

“Huh,” I said, imagining. It did sound nice.

Katrina took a nip from the bottle. “You like working at the hardware store, Mack?”

“It's okay. Kind of boring.”

“I bet. I worked at Target in high school. I was a cashier.”

“Really?”

“Every day was the same fucking thing. A bunch of saps buying the same old crap. Beep, beep, beep. Everybody staring at my mascara, my nose piercing. The old ladies acting like I'd gobble them up.”

“Ha. I'd like to see you in those khakis.”

Katrina turned and looked at me. “It was better than hanging around my house, trust me. My stepdad can get pretty grabby when M
om's not around.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, he's a real snake in the grass. That dude's got my mom wrapped around his little finger, though. I think he's a sociopath.”

“Really?”

“Not the murder-spree kind, though. More like the manipulative man-slut kind.” Katrina leaned in and I could smell the brandy on her breath. “What about you, Mack? Are you a snake in the grass?”

I didn't answer. The brandy was warming my cheeks and the sun was almost halfway beneath the horizon. Everything was so beautiful.

“Shit, I don't know,” Katrina said, sitting back and taking another long swig. “I guess I'm becoming … untethered. I sit in class and can't focus on anything. I feel like a helium balloon after it's been released by some chubby kid at the state fair. My brain rising and rising and rising.”

“Life will make you crazy,” I agreed. “No way around that.”

“There isn't?”

“Not if you're paying attention.”

“Well … shit.”

“Yep.”

Katrina handed me the brandy. I took another nip and returned the bottle. A gust of wind rustled the loose paper on the car's floor and carried the smell of wood smoke.

“I blame my mother. She's a vegetarian and made us all vegetarians, too. I probably didn't get enough iron during crucial developmental phases.”

“Is she as pretty as you?”

“Prettier.” A tiny smile hooked the corner of Katrina's mouth. “Why, Mack? You sweet on me?”

I closed my eyes and let the sunset burn itself into my brain. Everything turned red then gold.

“Sweet,” I said, “as honey pie.”

Katrina slapped my arm, sloshing brandy onto the sleeve of my T-shirt. “See? Fucking snake.”

“I am not a snake, madam,” I said. “I'm totally warm-blooded.”

“Yeah right. You're a youngin' snake, Mack. A snake in training. I bet you're thinking about sexing me up right now. You'd probably love to turn me into your little fuck doll, wouldn't you?”

The golden light behind my eyelids turned a spotty purple. I rubbed my eyes and turned to look at Katrina. I wondered if she had some kind of mental disorder or if this fuck-doll talk was just her friendly way of passing the time. It occurred to me that she probably had her own dark shit going on. She was voluntarily hanging out with me, after all. That couldn't be a healthy sign.

A cow lowed in the field.

A second cow lowed back from a point farther away.

“Well, I don't think he's coming,” Katrina said, taking a final pull from the bottle and emptying it. “Old MacDonald isn't taking his cows back home tonight. He's probably sitting with Ma and Junior at the kitchen table right now, enjoying an overcooked pork chop doused in cream of mushroom soup.”

She capped the bottle and tossed it over her shoulder. I leaned forward, studying the cows in their darkening field.

“It's a nice evening,” I said. “He probably leaves them out on nights like this.”

“Like camping, but for cows.”

“Why not? The cows like to see the stars, too.”

A grasshopper flew up and landed on the windshield. The insect and I studied each other through the glass while Katrina shifted in her seat and groaned.

“Oh man. I think you're going to have to drive us back to town, Mack-Attack. I'm done tuckered.”

She burped and I laughed.

The grasshopper flew away.

As soon as I pulled us out onto the road, Katrina slumped against the passenger window and fell asleep. She made little snoring noises, cartoonish high whistlings that sounded like a child pretending to be asleep. It took me a half-hour to find a road I recognized and another twenty minutes before I was certain I'd pointed us in the right direction. Along the way we passed through a small Amish area that was pitch black except for the Bug's headlights and the eerily beautiful kerosene lantern light that shone from the sprawling homes of the Amish themselves. I shook Katrina's shoulder so she could see the houses and she asked me if she was dreaming. I told her yes, she was, and let her fall back asleep.