Ron Rash: Burning Bright

“Why in the hell aren’t you in the house?” Parson asked finally.

It was Martha who replied.

“Danny, he’s in there, sometimes his friends too.” She paused. “It’s just better, easier, if we’re out here.”

Parson looked at his brother. Ray was sixty-five years old but he looked eighty, his mouth sunk in, skinny and feeble. His sister-in-law appeared a little better off, perhaps because she was a large, big-boned woman. But they both looked bad-hungry, weary, sickly. And scared. Parson couldn’t remember his brother ever being scared, but he clearly was. Ray’s right hand clutched a quilt end, and the hand was trembling. Parson and his wife, DeAnne, had divorced before they’d had children. A blessing, he now saw, because it prevented any possibility of ending up like this.

Martha had not been above lording her family over Parson in the past, enough to where he’d made his visits rare and short. You missed out not having any kids, she’d said to him more than once, words he’d recalled times when Danny pawned a chain saw or posthole digger or some other piece of the farm. It said much of how beaten down Martha appeared that Parson mustered no pleasure in recalling her words now.

He settled his eyes on the kerosene heater emitting its feeble warmth.

“Yeah, it looks to be easier out here all right,” he said.

Ray licked his cracked lips and then spoke, his voice raspy.

“That stuff, whatever you call it, has done made my boy crazy. He don’t know nothing but a craving.”

“It ain’t his fault, it’s the craving,” Martha added, sitting up enough to reveal that she too wore layers of clothing. “Maybe I done something wrong raising him, petted him too much since he was my only boy. The girls always claimed I favored him.”

“The girls been up here?” Parson asked. “Seen you like this?”

Martha shook her head.

“They got their own families to look after,” she said.

Ray’s lower lip trembled.

“That ain’t it. They’re scared to come up here.”

Parson looked at his brother. He had thought this was going to be so much easier, a matter of twenty dollars, that and relaying the sheriff’s threat.

“How long you been out here, Ray?”

“I ain’t sure,” Ray replied.

Martha spoke.

“Not more than a week.”

“How long has the electricity been off?”

“Since October,” Ray said.

“Is all you’ve had to eat on that table?”

Ray and Martha didn’t meet his eyes.

A family photograph hung on the wall. Parson wondered when it had been put up, before or after Danny moved out. Danny was sixteen, maybe seventeen in the photo. Cocksure but also petulant, the expression of a young man who’d been indulged all his life. His family’s golden child. Parson suddenly realized something.

“He’s cashing your Social Security checks, isn’t he?”

“It ain’t his fault,” Martha said.

Parson still stood at the foot of the bed, Ray and Martha showing no indication of getting out. They looked like children waiting for him to turn out the light and leave so they could go to sleep. Pawnbrokers, like emergency room doctors and other small gods, had to abjure sympathy. That had never been a problem for Parson. As DeAnne had told him several times, he was a man incapable of understanding another person’s heart. You can’t feel love, Parson, she’d said. It’s like you were given a shot years ago and inoculated.

“I’ll get your electricity turned back on,” Parson told his brother. “Can you still drive?”

“I can drive,” Ray said. “Only thing is, Danny uses that truck for his doings.”

“That’s going to change,” Parson said.

“It ain’t Danny’s fault,” Martha said again.

“Enough of it is,” Parson replied.

He went to the corner and lifted the kerosene can. Half full.

“What you taking our kerosene for?” Martha asked.

Parson didn’t reply. He left the trailer and trudged back through the snow, the can heavy and awkward, his breath quick white heaves. Not so different from those mornings he’d carried a gallon pail of warm milk from barn to house. Even as a child he’d wanted to leave this place. Never loved it the way Ray had. Inoculated .

Parson set the can on the lowered tailgate and perched himself on it as well. He took the lighter and cigarettes from his coat pocket and stared at the house while he smoked. Kindling and logs brought from the woodshed littered the porch. No attempt had been made to stack it.

It would be easy to do, Parson told himself. No one had stirred when he’d driven up and parked five yards from the front door. No one had even peeked out a window. He could step up on the porch and soak the logs and kindling with kerosene, then go around back and pour the rest on the back door. Then Hawkins would put it down as just another meth explosion caused by some punk who couldn’t pass high school chemistry. And if others were in there, they were people quite willing to scare two old folks out of their home. No worse than setting fire to a woodpile infested with copperheads. Parson finished his cigarette and flicked it toward the house, a quick hiss as snow quenched the smoldering butt.

He eased off the tailgate and stepped onto the porch, tried the doorknob, and when it turned, stepped into the front room. A dying fire glowed in the hearth. The room had been stripped of anything that could be sold, the only furnishing left a couch pulled up by the fireplace. Even wallpaper had been torn off a wall. The odor of meth infiltrated everything, coated the walls and floor.

Danny and a girl Parson didn’t know lay on the couch, a quilt thrown over them. Their clothes were worn and dirty and smelled as if lifted from a Dumpster. As Parson moved toward the couch he stepped over rotting sandwich scraps in paper sacks, candy wrappers, spills from soft drinks. If human shit had been on the floor he would not have been surprised.

“Who is he?” the girl asked Danny.

“A man who’s owed twenty dollars,” Parson said.

Danny sat up slowly, the girl as well, black stringy hair, flesh whittled away by the meth. Parson looked for something that might set her apart from the dozen or so similar women he saw each week. It took a few moments but he found one thing, a blue four-leaf clover tattooed on her forearm. Parson looked into her dead eyes and saw no indication luck had found her.

“Got tired of stealing from your parents, did you?” Parson asked his nephew.

“What are you talking about?” Danny said.

His eyes were light blue, similar to the girl’s eyes, bright but at the same time dead. A memory of elementary school came to Parson of colorful insects pinned and enclosed beneath glass.

“That shotgun you stole.”

Danny smiled but kept his mouth closed. Some vanity still left in him , Parson mused, remembering how the boy had preened even as a child, a comb at the ready in his shirt pocket, nice clothes.

“I didn’t figure him to miss it much,” Danny said. “That gas station he owns does good enough business for him to buy another.”

“You’re damn lucky it’s me telling you and not the sheriff, though he’ll be up here soon as the roads are clear.”

Danny looked at the dying fire as if he spoke to it, not Parson.

“So why did you show up? I know it’s not to warn me Hawkins is coming.”

“Because I want my twenty dollars,” Parson said.

“I don’t have your twenty dollars,” Danny said.

“Then you’re going to pay me another way.”

“And what’s that?”

“By getting in the truck,” Parson said. “I’m taking your sorry ass to the bus station. One-way ticket to Atlanta.”

“What if I don’t want to do that?” Danny said.