Timothy Hallinan - Incinerator

After I drained my glass, I guided him unsteadily to the street, my arm around his Mount Rushmore shoulders, and steered him into Alice, my car. He snored all the way to his empty house and then refused help getting inside. I watched Al the Red go, and waited until the door was slammed shut and locked. A hot wind blew, and the air smelled of smoke. I had to make a detour on the way back to Topanga to avoid a fire area, a long-familiar profile of mountains now enveloped in flame.

Between the beer and the whiskey, it took me only a few minutes to fall asleep. When I woke up the next morning, I was famous.

The phone started in at eight o’clock. It rang several times, penetrating a rather large region of murky pain that turned out to be the inside of my head. When it became apparent that the phone had more stamina than I did, I rolled over and picked the damn thing up.

“Hang up and call me tomorrow,” were my first words of the bright new day. I’d sweated into the sheets, and they were damp and wadded. They stank of whiskey and smoke and the Red Dog and something even ranker, something I couldn’t place.

“This is Channel Five,” said the female voice on the other end, as though that explained everything.

“I don’t care if it’s the Channel Islands,” I said. “Get the hell out of my ear.” I hung up, hard enough to crack the handset. Then I rolled over, clutched the dank pillow to me, and pretended that the pillow was my ex-girlfriend, Eleanor Chan. Eleanor smelled better, but she wasn’t there. My eyelids scratched and closed over shards of broken glass, and I dozed instantly.

I hadn’t even had time to work up an erotic dream when the phone screamed again. “What time is it?” I demanded.

“Eight-twelve by my unreliable, mass-produced watch,” said a supernaturally cheerful voice, “Seventeen jewels, and all of them fakes. How you doing, Simeon?”

“What a goddamn stupid question,” I said.

“This is Pat.”

In the whole world, I couldn’t think of a soul named Pat. Pat Nixon came belatedly to mind. She was dead, though, and this was a male.

“Patrick Henry, at the Times.”

I rubbed my eyes with a hand that smelled like a rubber glove full of wet cigars. It had to be important for Pat to call himself Patrick. He’d been my student once, when I was still teaching English at UCLA.

“You’re up early,” I said. Good. I congratulated myself. A civil sentence.

“And you’re on the front page,” Pat said.

“Slowly, Patrick,” I said. “Of what?”

“The Times.”

It took both hands to make my head feel smaller. “Pat,” I said, pressing the phone between ear and shoulder and working on my temples with fingers that felt like Smithfield hams, “it’s Sunday.”

“That means you’re reaching our biggest circulation,” he said proudly. He’d always been a smart-ass.

“Sunday,” I said, “is a day of rest. Go rest somewhere.” He sputtered at me, but I hung up. Then, at long last, I yanked the cord out of the back of the phone, rolled over onto my left side, and grabbed my other pillow. It smelled terrible in a familiar fashion. It growled at me.

“God damn it, Bravo,” I said, shoving at the foul-smelling pillow, “where did you come from?”

Bravo Corrigan, Topanga’s itinerant generic dog, exhaled a bagful of dead fish at me, got to all four feet, and shambled to the foot of the bed, pausing just long enough to shake himself. With a fine snowfall of long dog hairs settling over me, I shut my scratchy eyes and aimed myself toward the Land of Nod.

Bravo’s stomach rumbled. I forced my eyes to remain closed. I thought about getting a drink of water. I thought about it for so long that I finally fell back asleep and dreamed of helicopters dumping tons of cool water over acres of fire. It didn’t do any good. The water exploded like gasoline.

When a hand touched my shoulder, I jumped all the way to the foot of the bed, clawing at the air for a weapon. Instead, my foot found Bravo, and then my other foot found nothing at all, and I collapsed on the floor, shoulder first.

“For heaven’s sake, Simeon,” Eleanor Chan said.

I got my eyes open and focused with an effort that seemed to involve even my stomach muscles. Eleanor stood there, looking cool and unruffled and amused, wearing a loose, wrinkled white shirt-one of mine, from the years when we’d lived together-and tight, ragged bleached jeans with a rip exposing one creamy knee. She’d had her black, perfectly straight hair cut short and spiky on top. On her it looked good.

“You’re green,” Eleanor said. She’d always been observant.

“Hammond,” I said by way of explanation. I tried to unknot my legs. “Dawn patrol.”

“Poor baby,” she said. She liked Hammond. I liked him, too, but I’d never have called him baby. “And speaking of Baby,” she said, holding out a newspaper.

“I can’t read,” I said desperately. “I can barely talk.” I became aware of the fact that I was naked and plucked up a corner of the dank sheet. Eleanor laughed.

“The media should see you now,” she said. “Hello, Bravo.” Bravo’s tail thumped.

“Eleanor,” I said, getting experimentally to my feet. The room swam. “Can I go dynamite my teeth or something before you start telling me about the media?”

“You’re a star,” she said, waving the paper at me in an aggressive fashion.

I shrugged it off for the moment and slipped laboriously into a pair of drawstring pants. Standing on my left leg took most of my day’s meager allotment of equilibrium. “Make coffee,” I said, barely avoiding dropping to my knees in supplication. “Please?” I went into the bathroom and tried to scrub off the residue of the night. Hot, cold, hot, cold. Then some more cold. Wash the hair twice. Slap both sides of the face sharply under the stream of icy water. It was a routine I’d practiced frequently in the weeks since Hammond’s wife had left. Hammond was doing fine, I reflected, pulling on a T-shirt. I was the one who was turning into an alcoholic.

I heard Eleanor puttering familiarly around in the kitchen of the house she’d rented for us all those years ago as I combed my hair with trembling fingers and checked the mirror for signs of permanent damage. My parents’ durable genes had survived another fusillade of abuse. I still looked like someone to whom you might conceivably lend a quarter.

Two cups of Eleanor’s bitter, highly stimulating coffee later, I was wired enough to look at the Times. “How do you do it?” I asked. “Have you got a corner on the caffeine they take out of decaf?”

“You’ll need it,” she said, handing me the paper. Bravo, sitting directly on Eleanor’s feet, watched it suspiciously. Whoever his original owner had been before Bravo gave him a final high-five and went out to play the field, he’d apparently been a member of the rolled-up newspaper school of training. “This is going to make you really popular with the cops.”

I glanced down and read. My eyes closed of their own accord. “Mother of God,” I said. And that was just the headline.

MILLIONAIRE IMMOLATED ON SKID ROW, it said. Under that, in type the size of John Hancock’s signature: HEIRESS ACCUSES POLICE OF INCOMPETENCE.

“It gets better,” Eleanor said over the rim of her cup.

Taking another sip of coffee, I accidentally cracked the heavy mug against my front teeth. It helped me to focus.

Police spokespersons last night positively identified a transient who was doused with gasoline and set on fire Thursday night on Skid Row as Chicago multimillionaire and philanthropist Abraham Winston. Winston, 68, is in critical condition at the Blumberg Burn Treatment Center in Sherman Oaks. Police have tentatively linked the assault to five others committed over the past three months, all in the same area. In each case, the victim was a transient, and all incidents have occurred between three and five A.M., when the victims were asleep on city sidewalks. All five of the previous victims died of their injuries. Winston, who reportedly suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, disappeared from his Chicago home more than a month ago. It is not known how he got to Los Angeles. “We can’t say for sure it’s the Crisper,” said LAPD spokesperson Lieutenant Alfred Brown, using the name police have given to the assailant. “All we can state at this time is that the method and the choice of victim are consistent with the Crisper’s past attacks. We’re pursuing our leads with all due alacrity.”