James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

“She’s not gonna hurt Drew again. Are you gonna help or not?” Weldon said.

I followed them into the hallway, my heart sinking at the realization of what I was willing to participate in, my body as numb as if I had been stunned with Novocaine. Mattie was sleeping in the stuffed chair, her hose rolled down over her knees, an overturned jelly glass on the rug next to the can of spot cleaner.

Weldon walked quietly across the rug, unscrewed the cap on the can, laid the can on its side in front of Mattie’s feet, then backed away from her. The cleaning fluid spread in a dark circle around her chair, the odor as bright and sharp as a slap across the face.

Weldon slid open a box of kitchen matches and we each took one, raked it across the striker, and, with the sense that our lives at that moment had changed forever, threw them at Mattie’s feet. But the burning matches fell outside the wet area. The blood veins in my head dilated with fear, my ears hummed with a sound like the roar of the ocean in a seashell, and I jerked the box from Weldon’s hand, clutched a half-dozen matches in my fist, dragged them across the striker, and flung them right on Mattie’s feet.

The chair was enveloped in a cone of flame, and she burst out of it with her arms extended, as though she were pushing blindly through a curtain, her mouth and eyes wide with terror. We could smell her hair burning as she raced past us and crashed through the screen door out onto the gallery and into the yard. She beat at her flaming clothes and raked at her hair as though it were swarming with yellow jackets.

I stood transfixed in mortal dread at what I had done.

A Negro man walking to work came out of the mist on the road and knocked her to the ground, slapping the fire out of her dress, pinning her under his spread knees as though he were assaulting her. Smoke rose from her scorched clothes and hair as in a depiction of a damned figure on one of my holy cards.

The Negro rose to his feet and walked toward the gallery, a solitary line of blood running down his cheek where Mattie had scratched him.

“Yo’ mama ain’t hurt bad. Get some butter or some bacon grease. She gonna be all right, you gonna see. You children don’t be worried, no,” he said. His gums were purple with snuff when he smiled.

The volunteer firemen bounced across the cattle guard in an old fire truck whose obsolete hand-crank starter still dangled from under the radiator. They coated Mattie’s room with foam from a fire extinguisher and packed Mattie off in an ambulance to the charity hospital in Lafayette. Two sheriff’s deputies arrived, and before he left, one of the volunteers took them aside in the yard and talked with them, looking over his shoulder at us children, then walked over to us and said, “The fire chief gonna come out here and check it out. Y’all stay out of that bedroom.”

His face was narrow and dark with shadow under the brim of his big rubber fireman’s hat. I felt a fist squeeze my heart.

But suddenly Sister Roberta was in the midst of everything. Someone had carried word to the school about the fire, and she’d had one of the brothers drive her out to the house. She talked with the deputies, helped us fix cereal at the kitchen table, and made telephone calls to find a place for us to stay besides the welfare shelter. Then she looked in Mattie’s bedroom door and studied the interior for what seemed a long time. When she came back in the kitchen, her eyes peeled the skin off our faces. I looked straight down into my cereal bowl.

She placed her small hand on my shoulder. I could feel her fingers tapping on the bone, as though she were processing her own thoughts. Then she said, “Well, what should we do here today? I think we should clean up first. Where’s the broom?”

Without waiting for an answer she pulled the broom out of the closet and went to work in Mattie’s room, sweeping the spilled and unstruck matches as well as the burned ones in a pile by a side door that gave onto the yard. The soot and blackened threads from the rug swirled up in a cloud around her veils and wings and smudged her starched wimple.

One of the deputies put his hand on the broomstick. “There ain’t been an investigation yet. You can’t do that till the fire chief come out and see, Sister,” he said.

“You always talked like a fool, Gaspard,” she said. “Now that you have a uniform, you talk like a bigger one. This house smells like an incinerator. Now get out of the way.” With one sweep of the broom she raked all the matches out into the yard.

We were placed in foster homes, and over the years I lost contact with Sister Roberta. But later I went to work in the oil fields, and I think perhaps I talked with my father in a nightclub outside of Morgan City. An enormous live oak tree grew through the floor and roof, and he was leaning against the bar that had been built in a circle around the tree. His face was puckered with white scar tissue, his ears burned into stubs, his right hand atrophied and frozen against his chest like a broken bird’s foot. But beyond the layers of mutilated skin I could see my father’s face, like the image in a photographic negative held up against a light.

“Is your name Sonnier?” I asked.

He looked at me curiously.

“Maybe. You want to buy me a drink?” he said.

“Yeah, I can do that,” I said.

He ordered a shot of Beam with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side.

“Are you Verise Sonnier from New Iberia?” I asked.

He grinned stiffly when he took the schooner of beer away from his mouth. “Why you want to know?” he said.

“I think I’m your son. I’m Billy Bob.”

His turquoise eyes wandered over my face, then they lost interest.

“I had a son. But you ain’t him. Buy me another shot?” he said.

“Why not?” I replied.

Sometimes he comes to me in my dreams, and I wonder if ironically all our stories were written on his skin back there in Texas City in 1947. Or maybe that’s just a poetic illusion purchased by time. But even in the middle of an Indian summer’s day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta’s rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people.

Harlan Ellison (1934-) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and had various jobs, mostly blue collar, in all parts of the country before settling in New York to become a full-time writer. Within the next two years, he produced and sold more than one hundred stories and articles before being drafted into the Army. Soon after his discharge, he moved to Chicago to work as an editor at Rogue magazine and Regency Books. His prolific writing career continued when he moved to California to write for motion pictures (including the 1966 blockbuster The Oscar) and, mostly, for television. Ellison supplied scripts for many series, including Burke’s Law, The Flying Nun, Route 66, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Outer Limits, and, most famously, Star Trek — his “The City on the Edge of Forever” is regarded as the best episode in the history of that series, named Best Original Teleplay by the Writers Guild of America; his “Demon with a Glass Hand,” for The Outer Limits, and two other teleplays also won the award. He is among the most honored writers in America, especially among writers of speculative fiction, winning ten Hugos (World Science Fiction Society), including Grand Master; four Nebulas (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America); five Bram Stoker Awards (Horror Writers Association), including lifetime achievement; and two Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Mystery Writers of America) for his memorable short stories “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” and “Soft Monkey”; among many other genre and nongenre honors.