David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

By the time I returned, traffic was clogged and men and women with headset radios were guiding crowds. This time I saw the klieg lights set up on the side of the street opposite Olsen’s establishment, and the snaking electrical cables draped over the curbing, and the bored and lonely extras with their unreal eyes, chewing catered bagels from fold-up tables near the library. Down one dusty side street trailers were parked head to head. It was an impingement on my town’s soul, a final affront. The town had given itself over to the unreal. The unreal was stopping traffic, attracting gawkers. Gawkers were more concerned with the unreal than with their own lives. The work of my later life was coming to a head. Was I to be betrayed or to be a betrayer? Were there not obligations to the dead that had to be taken into consideration, punishments to be doled out? Was it not a crime to grieve, falsely grieve, and in that false bereavement to create what is essentially a perfect human gesture? What else was I to do? What choice did I have? I aimed. The wheel jittered under fingertips.

The curb offered up firm resistance, but my speed surmounted it. I struck the camera head-on. It lifted skyward, blocky and heavy. With a death, I made hallow the setting in which the perfect gesture took place.

And so you see my acts were not, as some have said, those of a madman. The police found no skid marks and drew their conclusions. The trial, as dictated by our fair Constitution, was quick and thorough. That third perfect gesture is there forever, where all gesture hunters keep these things, engraved on the rock of my eyelids like some ancient petroglyph. I can’t get rid of it no matter how false it was. For at least a few blocks it gave me back the sorrow that was rightfully mine.

I hadn’t planned in any manner to kill the director, despite the fact that death has come into my life in many ways and forms to take from me the one who provided me with the perfect gestures that, held still on the back of my eyelids, remain my salvation: my son’s gesture in the stream, the heavy wash of water against our waders, and that other one in which he was in the tub, gleaming sheens of water over his smooth baby belly, the pink whiteness of his pure skin and baby fat, the lifting of his tiny hands to splash water, not knowing perhaps that it was water at all but just a warm semblance of material wrapped around his body, because at that time his eyes were still new and hard-pressed to focus on anything and had that brown-black fuzziness of the unknowing. That was all it was, a simple splashing of another element while I sat with him on the rim of the blue tub. It seized me and sent me reeling, knowing full well that what I was seeing would never repeat itself and was certainly the most beautiful sight in the world. The water boiled up around his fist. The slick oily light slid off his skin. His smiling face looked up at me, and his tiny fleck of hair lay pasted to his scalp while my wife, behind me in the hall, softly folded a towel over her arm and outside the summer air moved, tainted with lavender.

THE FIRST house he torched that day went up in beautiful colors, fantastic, bright, lasting for an hour before the fire department got there. It didn’t matter. The three feet of snow on the ground rendered their tire chains useless. Best thing was vinyl siding: burning hot as it gooped and melted, flames sweeping the sides with fantastic swiftness. A house is built from the outside in, but fire makes its way from the inside out, eagerly, until there is no more inside and just outside. That’s what he liked about it. He stood for a long time watching as the conifers near the house turned brown and wilted, a ring of melted, steaming snow delineating the zone of most intense heat. The footprints he left went up into the woods, looped around back to the grounds of the summer association, large Victorian cottages along the shore of Lake Michigan, maintained by Chicago folk (as his old man said), held frozen in time by codes and bylaws; then in his old snowmobile boots he waded through the drifts to the road and made a run for it. 2

There is nothing particularly funny about fire. Nothing to tickle the funnybone. I had to articulate it to myself in this way because I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m a talker, when it’s to myself, but when it’s to someone else I shut up tight. The thing that would get me laughing is the sound of the fire — the amplification of it, the crackle; because it’s that loud. I mean it’s fantastically loud when the whole cottage is going rip-roaring up. No other sound like it on earth, lively and spunky, the popcorn in hot oil, right before the kernels explode — that tension in the sizzle, you know. The good thing is up here with the snow and the seclusion and all the summer folk down in Chicago, you can burn three or four in a row without much worry. Best is the way such a small little lick of flame can enlarge itself, branching out until it’s just one big motherfucking rip-roaring beast, you know.

In the backyard the kids are playing, maybe seven or eight — the number not mattering because some inner-ear part of him picks up specifically his kids as he sits in the study writing, but the voices are high — the one named Gomer making rebel hoots from the sound of it; that kid Gomer who comes over sometimes (his real name is something else, like Ronald, or Rupert) to share a Popsicle with Stan, bleeding streaks of food coloring along the corners of his mouth, purposely letting it drip like that. Against the sound of Gomer’s hoots, it comes; not exactly like a giant weed whacker (that’s the metaphor he uses later, groping for a similar sound), more like a huge hunk of brittle cellophane crumpled by the hand of God (he’d never use that one). First the kids see the big wall of flames through the trees and between the houses, and then when the wind comes around, the smoke tart with burning plastics, polymers being reduced to carbon compounds, and that gets them running, hooting and hollering with joy, to the scene, first ones there, dancing and shouting because the flames are stabbing all the way up into the sky above the trees, and the smoke is drilling in the direction of the Hudson; down in town there is the guttural, archaic sound of the fire horn grunting out its pathetic call to arms. Shortly, the volunteer crew arrives, happy to be engaged with the real thing for a change. (They burned the old hospital wing, which was being torn down, for practice, two suffering from smoke inhalation.) Right off, seeing the varnish cans on the front porch and learning of the brushes that sat wet with the rags in the sun, the chief knew the cause. This was spontaneous combustion. 3

Alone in the quiet of a late afternoon, the brushes nudge each other, soothingly lean into the pile of rags, whispering comments in a soft little sizzle and a thin swirl of smoke, which combines with the dry silence of a neighborhood where most are at work, closing deals, down in the city, doing what has to be done. The brushes talk, the can of varnish bakes, its lid rusted with speckles of rainfall oxidation. The porch was coated on Saturday. Now it’s Wednesday and the snuggling brushes, drunk with the elixir of the varnish, are ready to burst forth in the song of fire.

Shank had to tie the dog down, mouth taped shut, stake it to the ground like a tent and then get the gas can and swirl it around knowing damn well that to touch the match would put himself in as much danger as the dog but going at it with systematic care anyhow with the others hanging back watching and laughing and making light of the darkness of Shank’s desire to burn things alive; the point is getting them alive, like taking a lobster and plunging it in the pot (Shank’s old man is a lobsterman), as if you could count the number of nerve cells, as if you could make an exact record of each fused dendrite. A blue hazy flame rolls around his ankles and the air and then bursts into the dog who, even through the tape, makes a sort of high,