The Fireman (58 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

5

Harper found fishing line and a hook in a tackle box under the worktable, and used them to put two stitches in Allie’s upper lip. Allie sat rigidly while she sewed, gaze pointed toward the ceiling, eyes welling with angry tears. She made not a sound the whole time. Harper wasn’t sure if that was the silent treatment or stoicism.

When she was done, Harper worked on Nick. He was deeply asleep and only frowned while Harper put four stitches into his torn forehead. She used the same needle, but she sterilized by holding it between thumb and forefinger until the steel glowed hot and white.

After, Harper went outside to sit on the stoop and watch the clear night sky. Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.

At last, in the gray light of dawn, a small sparrow of fire zigged out of the trees behind the graveyard and exhausted itself in a whiff of smoke. A moment later the Fireman followed it, staggering from the forest and into Harper’s arms.

The sight of him appalled her. The long gash on his left cheekbone was a ragged line of black gum. The side of his neck was baked red with what looked like an agonizing sunburn. He stank as if he had rolled in the ruin of a campfire.

In his left hand swung a steel bucket full of coals.

“I saved her,” he gasped. “We need to put her someplace safe and get her some fresh wood.” He gave Harper a frantic look. “She’s starving.”

He only reluctantly allowed Harper to pull the bucket out of his hand. The tin handle was hot—maybe searing—but Harper’s palm lit softly and she felt no pain.

Harper set the pail on the stoop and guided him inside.

He passed out almost as soon as she was done sewing up his slashed cheek. She left him on the couch, where he slept with his own turnout coat as a blanket.

She went back outside, feeling very tired and very pregnant. The small of her back was a continuous shriek and she was experiencing sharp pains of a gynecological nature.

The bucket of glowing coals sat on the back step, next to the tape deck. Mick Jagger promised he was going home, over a strutting bass line. Those coals swelled with brightness, faded and swelled again, matching the rhythms of the song.

Harper had an urge to kick the bucket over into the grass.

Instead she carried the pail to a big steel drum, standing in the grass behind the garage, one in a cluster of garbage cans. She poured the coals in on top of old rubbish: splintered boards, rusting beer cans, oily rags. Flames guttered and jumped, the garbage igniting with a soft, hungry
whump
. Harper found some sticks and a rotten log crawling with bugs, fed them to the blaze.

“What’s that?” Renée asked. “Cook fire?”

“More like one of these fires you light to remember someone by.”

“An eternal flame?”

Harper said, “I hope not.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

6

They slept on the couch in shifts, ate the Spam, drank the cans of milk. It was hot and close in the garage, stale with the odors of potted meat, concrete, and diesel. They would have to do something about Gil soon. In another day he would begin to spoil.

When the sun was down, Harper slipped out the back door for fresh air. It was better under the stars. The night had a nearly liquid quality, was like sliding into a warm swimming pool, a pool filled with buoyant darkness instead of water. When Harper wasn’t paying attention, it had turned full lush spring.

A knot popped in the trash can. Harper turned to look and saw Allie standing over the flames, looking down into the coals with wide, dazed, frightened eyes. She hugged herself tightly, hands squeezing her elbows.

“You okay?” Harper asked.

Allie turned and looked at her blankly.

“No,” she said, and went back inside.

Harper peeked into the flames herself, but saw only coals.

She sat on the back stoop. She counted how many days till she was due, then counted again to be sure. She made it eighteen if she delivered on time. Sometimes women were late with the first baby.

She listened to
Aftermath
and rested her hands on the hilarious globe of her pregnant belly. But she had to turn the Stones off when it got to “Under My Thumb.” She had all her life longed for a world that operated like an early-sixties Disney musical, with spontaneous song-and-dance routines to celebrate important events like sharing a first kiss or getting the kitchen spick-and-span. If she couldn’t have
Mary Poppins,
she would settle for
A Hard Day’s Night
. But it turned out life was more like the kind of song the Stones wrote: you didn’t get any satisfaction, you took one hit to the body after another, if you were a woman you were a bitch who belonged under someone’s thumb, and if you wanted mother’s little helper from your dear doctor you better have the silver, take it or leave it, and don’t come crying for sympathy, that was just for the devil.

She twiddled through the channels. A gospel group clapped their hands for Jesus. The Spring Training boy was back: the Red Sox were having an exhibition game against the Shakespeare All-Stars. Romeo was up to bat. He struck out, broke his bat over his knee, swallowed poison, and died on home plate. Juliet ran over from the on-deck circle, wept for a few moments, then stabbed herself through the heart with the shaft of his Louisville Slugger. The pitcher, Tom Gordon, waited with his hand on his hip while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dragged the bodies off the field.

Farther down the FM dial, a woman reported that Senior Field Marshal Ian Judaskiller had signed an execution order for the Fireman, who had murdered two New Hampshire Soldiers for Christ in the firefight at Camp Wyndham three days before. In other news, twelve thousand godless Japs had killed themselves in the largest mass suicide ever recorded, in Okinawa. In Iowa, a herd of cows had been photographed from the sky in the formation of a cross. The last days had come and soon the last seal would be opened and the final trumpet would sound.

Something feather light brushed her knuckles. Harper looked down and found a bushy cat, dark with golden stripes, lifting its chin to sniff at the smell of Spam under her fingernails. Harper studied him for an instant—feeling, somehow, that she had seen this cat before—then reached out to stroke his head. He shrank from her touch, launched himself into a damp green tunnel in the high grass, and was gone.

Harper was still staring after him when John Rookwood stepped out onto the stoop, dressed for duty in his helmet and coat.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.

He looked down at himself, as if to remind himself of what he was wearing. “
Well
. I can’t go to a funeral dressed like this. And you can’t go to one dressed like
that
.” Nodding at her begrimed Boston Red Sox hoodie and sweatpants. The sweatpants had once been blue, but were now mostly black with soot, and smeared with bloody fingerprints. “So I suppose I’m going shopping.”

“Are we burying Gil?”

“I think we’re burying the whole camp,” he said. “In a manner of speaking. Renée needs that.”

“We all need it.”

He dipped his head in a single nod and began to amble away.

“They’re looking for you,” she told him. “I heard it on the radio.”

“They better be careful,” he said, without looking back at her. “They might find me.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

7

He was back two hours after sunup, pushing a rusted shopping cart through the strangling grass. He bumped it over the back step and into the garage.

The cart was overflowing with suit jackets and ties, dresses and blouses, boots and high-heeled shoes, scarves and hats. Beneath the heap of laundry was enough food to get them by for another week: some canned fruit, a box of instant oatmeal, and a six-pack of soda, an off-brand called Nozz-A-La that Harper hadn’t seen since she was a kid. Dropped in among the groceries was an audiocassette. Harper didn’t have a chance to look it over. The Fireman plucked the tape up and put it in his coat pocket.

“Memorial this evening. Dress appropriately,” he said.

“I get the top hat,” Allie said and delicately set a black stovepipe on her head. “Top hats are metal.”

Nick found a pair of opera gloves and pulled them on. They were so long they came to his shoulders.

It was the first time Harper had seen him smile in weeks.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

8

The mourners crossed the wild grass of the cemetery beneath a star-flooded sky. The Fireman led them, one hand burning blue. Nick walked in the middle, trailing green fire from his fingers. Harper brought up the rear, her own hand a candelabra of gold flame.

The Fireman had converted the shopping cart to a makeshift bier. He had placed two planks across the length of it and secured them with bungee cords. The dead man had been set on top in the tarp that served as his shroud. Renée pushed it along and Allie followed, carrying the tape deck, the music already playing, turned low.

Allie looked good, in her top hat and a black duster that swooshed about her ankles. Nick had ultimately passed on the opera gloves, but he wore a canary yellow tuxedo jacket with tails and his mother’s locket. Somewhere the Fireman had come up with an enormous black Patriots hoodie for Harper, an XXXXL. For an enormously pregnant woman, it was the best that could be managed for proper mourning weeds. Renée crossed the graveyard in a midnight blue velvet dress, slit high enough to show the dimples in her knees. She had very sleek, very nice legs. Harper hoped Gilbert had properly appreciated them.

Who knew where the Fireman had got what
he
was wearing: a kilt that showed his bony, hairy legs, a black beret, and a short black suit jacket. Harper didn’t believe he was making fun of the occasion. She had an idea this represented his most heartfelt effort to look respectable.

The Fireman pushed open the door of O’Brian’s tomb with his burning hand. The flame lit a tidy marble cube, the shadows hovering, seeming to sway to the melody. He had found a copy of Dire Straits’
Making Movies,
and they were listening to “Romeo and Juliet.” It sounded good, mixed with cricket-song.

He extinguished his right hand before he walked the shopping cart in. Renée followed, and on the count of three they moved the shroud off the cart and onto one of the stone caskets. Nick lit candles with his fingertip. Allie joined with the tape recorder, but Harper remained just outside, her own hand burning without any sensation of heat at all. It comforted her. That bright blaze seemed to her, that evening, to be her own soul made visible.

The song echoed in the little stone cabinet and in a soft voice, Harper began to sing along. The Fireman joined her, and as he began to sing, he reached back to take one of Renée’s hands. Nick took another. The little boy reached for his sister and his sister held her hand for Harper, in a swaying human chain. Renée lowered her head and shut her eyes, perhaps to cry, perhaps to pray. Only when she looked up at last her irises were threaded with light. The coils of Dragonscale around her bare arms lit a deep shade of plum, traveling down to her wrists. The glow leapt from her hand to the Fireman’s and to Nick’s. Harper felt her own ’scale respond, a rush of light and warmth.

They glowed in the darkness, all of them: pale shining wisps with rings of light where their eyes belonged, as if
they
were the dead—ghosts risen from their graves—not Gilbert Cline. Harper felt their grief as a slow current of cold water, and herself as a leaf revolving upon it.

As she moved to the music she felt her own self slip away, her own particular Harper-ness. Her identity wouldn’t float and was swallowed by the stream flowing through all of them. She was no longer Harper. She was Renée, recollecting Gil’s sandpapery cheek against her neck and the sawdust smell of his hair. She recalled the first time Gil had kissed her in a corner of the basement, one hand firmly against the small of her back, as if she had experienced it firsthand. Cobwebs on the bare dead lightbulb overhead. Smell of dust and old brick, the pressure of his dry lips on hers. She was adrift on Renée’s memories, rushing along over the surface of them, carried over a drop and into—

—a memory of Carol holding her and rocking her the night her mother died. Carol had held her and rocked her back and forth and been wise enough to say nothing, to offer not a single false word of comfort. Carol was crying, too, and their tears fell together and Harper could taste them right now, standing in the tomb, could taste what Allie had tasted the night Sarah Storey burned. Her perceptions were a leaf, turning rapidly now, spilling again over another fall into—

—a remembrance of being thrown. Gail Neighbors had grabbed her by the ankles and Gillian had held her wrists, and they swung her back and forth like a hammock and chucked her into a giddy silence and she fell soundlessly onto a cot, her lungs convulsing with a laughter she couldn’t hear. In the awesome quiet of Nick’s deafworld, colors seemed to shout. How he had loved the way they tossed him again and again, how he had loved their happiness, and how he missed them and wished he could have them back. But Harper’s consciousness was rushing on, plunging over the highest fall yet, into a grief so deep it was almost impossible to see to the bottom of it, cascading into—

—John’s head and what thoughts he kept there of Sarah. Harper felt Sarah sitting in her lap, and her nose was in Sarah’s hair, savoring the delicate sugar-cookie smell of her. She was working on a crossword, nibbling on her ballpoint pen in thought, and what grace, what confidence it required to do the puzzle in pen! A perfect square of sun was on the curve of her slender brown shoulder. Harper had never been so acutely aware of light and stillness without being high on mushrooms. She thought, with a kind of savage joy, of her father, that brilliant, literary, distant, resentful drunk.
I get to be happy,
Harper thought, in an English accent,
and that means I beat you. That means I won
. Sarah pressed herself back against Harper’s bony chest.
Five-letter word for abiding happiness,
she asked, and Harper touched her hair, pushing a strand of it behind her pink, delicate ear, and whispered
today
. To have had such contentment and lost it was like a burn that never healed. To think of her was like picking up a hot brand, was being seared afresh.

And on at last into her own smooth pool of hurt, of homesickness for all the good things that had once been hers and were gone now: coffee in Starbucks while the cold drizzle hit the windows, vacuuming in her underwear and singing along to Bruce Springsteen, letting her gaze wander along the spines of books in a little bookstore with high shelves, eating a cold apple in the front yard and raking, hallways full of babbling laughing scuffling children at school, Coca-Cola in a glass bottle. So much of what was best in life went unnoticed in the moments you had it.

The fading current turned her little leaf around and around and slid her away from all memory, away from pain, and on finally to a firm, sandy shore. The cassette player clicked off. The song was over.