Melanie Thon - Meteors in August

My cousins worked in vain. The blaze had grown beyond any human desire to control it. It would have to consume itself.

Flames glowed brilliant and orange inside the blackened skeleton, but I could see the fire had eaten a hole in itself and was dying. Flares no longer danced; they only burned, steady and fierce. I walked up and down the street, looking for my mother and father, but I couldn’t find them in the crowd.

People were slow to admit it was time to abandon the cause. Caleb Wolfe and Red Elk could barely hold folks back when they realized every hose had been turned on the building next door. Red Elk wore a shiny badge. Sometime in the past half hour he’d been deputized.

Despite the heat, some of the men shoved their way closer to the bar; their voices rose, as if they meant to rip the hoses from the hands of the firemen and aim them back on the bar. Folks took this personally. The Last Chance was the only bar in Willis, the only bar for a good fifteen miles, and everyone dreaded the inconvenience, the long drunken drives along narrow Montana roads, the impossible winter miles.

Myron Evans breathed right in my ear. He was trying to tell me something. Finally I heard the words: “I wish I’d done it.” He grinned. “Did you see what happened to that boy?” He grinned. I wasn’t the only one with a grudge against Zack Holler. I felt ashamed for both of us, ashamed of the company I kept.

Minnie Hathaway tottered down the alley, cussing. She hadn’t been on a bender in months, but she’d pickled herself tonight. Her black hair was damp and tangled. She staggered toward us, falling into Myron. She pinched his arms. “Wanna dance with me, you handsome sonuvabitch?” She puckered her red lips and closed her eyes. Myron stooped, pushing his face up nose to nose with Minnie. I thought he really meant to kiss that wrinkled mouth, but instead he spat words in her face: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” She cussed. She was no temptress and no devil, only a woman who made a man realize how terrible the flowers are at the end of summer. Myron tossed his head and limped away.

“You’re not such a fine piece,” Minnie shouted at his back. “You’re not breaking my heart, mister.”

The insides of the bar crumbled. The roof collapsed, a slow fall of flame. It was over. If Olivia Jeanne Woodruff ever dared return, all she’d find would be a burned-out shell. I saw Bo Effinger’s head half a foot above everyone else’s in the crowd. Lyla Leona clung to his shirt sleeve. In the final heat of it all, Bo crushed her to his chest and stole a kiss. Sorry for his deed before it was half done, he tried to pull away, but Lyla grabbed the back of his neck and held him fast, smashing his nose and his lips into her face for a minute or more. I watched that kiss, forgetting the fire for those long seconds, forgetting my father and myself.

Luella Lockwood shook me from my stupor. “Have you seen my sister?” she said. For an old lady she had quite a grip. She’d painted her mouth on crooked and had two pairs of overlapping lips, moving together.

“Don’t smirk at me, missy.”

“Calm down,” I said, “everyone’s lost tonight, but she can’t be far.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“Ten minutes,” Luella said, “maybe more.”

“Ten minutes? That’s all? I haven’t seen my parents for an hour or more.”

She squeezed my wrists so hard my hands tingled. She might have held me there all night if Eula hadn’t tugged at the back of her sweater just then. They fell into each other’s arms as if they’d been separated since birth and searching for their twin all these years. “Isn’t it something?” they wheezed with one voice. “I was so worried.” They fell apart with giggles, and I walked away, back out to the street.

Two more fire trucks rattled down Main, relief from Alpena and Rovato Falls. They hooked up around the corner and down the block. Dewey’s News would be smoking soon if they didn’t get the roof of Saddles & Studs cooled down.

I felt my mother next to me. She said, “See what comes of all that praying?” She scared me when she knew things like that. She didn’t have to go to Freda Graves’s prayer meetings to know the torment of Elliot Foot and guess that he had taken a torch to his own bar. She didn’t have to see me thrashing on the floor to know my beliefs were strange and my fear dangerous. I wondered how long it would take other folks to figure it out. The man looked sorry now, his head buried between Joanna’s comforting breasts, his body shaking with muffled sobs. Joanna Foot patted her husband’s back, satisfied at last that he had paid dearly enough for his sins of the hands and of the heart. The beams of this charred building would crumble and the body of love would lie in a black heap.

I thought Elliot would be relieved if people found him out. A jury of his peers would surely send him to jail for destroying their only drinking hole — even if it was his place. Maybe he wanted that, maybe he longed to be confined and safe, free of Olivia Jeanne and free of his wife’s forgiveness. A jail can be a monastery to a simple man, a cave he doesn’t have to dig himself, a place to be good.

On that day in 1964 when the Foot brothers raised the sign for the Last Chance Bar, Freda Graves shouted from the steps of the Lutheran church and Elliot Foot, brave and indestructible, shouted back. That was a lifetime ago, for all of us. Elliot was his own man then, not the victim of Olivia Jeanne’s temptations or Freda Graves’s holy wars. Myron Evans was still skittish as his own cats. That was a time when Gwen Holler and I held hands and tried to get a good look inside this house of sin. Now, alone, I was trying to peer into the gutted bar again, hoping to understand, but there was nothing left. Another memory burst into my thoughts. Nina swatted my butt. Daddy would skin you like a rabbit if he saw you here . Then I heard my own words: I wish I didn’t have a sister .

Why did God always hear the wishes I made in haste and anger?

I stared through the shattered window of the Last Chance Bar. There, beyond the ragged opening, dancing on red embers, her golden hair aflame, I saw Nina. She twirled in the light, her hands raised above her head, spinning to a blur. I squinted hard. Smoke stung my eyes. I rubbed them but that made it worse. When I opened them again, my sister had disappeared. How long has she been lost? a voice like Luella Lockwood’s said inside my skull. I had to count on my fingers. Luella smirked. “Five years,” I said out loud. But there was no one to hear my answer, and no one to comfort me. There was only the feverish babble of the mob.

It was in this moment, when the bar was lost and my sister was gone, again, that Freda Graves appeared on the steps of the Lutheran church, just as she had six years before.

She bellowed, “The wrath of the Lord is upon all ye sinners!” Those of us who knew her well couldn’t help hearing her voice above all other sounds. The word sinners called to our blood and burned our cheeks. I saw Myron and the Lockwood twins, Bo Effinger and Lyla Leona. Even in her daze, Minnie Hathaway managed to teeter toward the church. Only Elliot Foot hung back, the wound of his conscience cleaned and cauterized.

Slowly the word passed through the horde that she was here. The swarm turned and inched toward the church. Vern and Ralph Foot headed the pack, bent on revenge. An insidious whisper hissed from person to person. By the time it reached me the words had twisted but the meaning was clear: the throng had found the one it wanted to blame — someone had to pay. If anyone had asked, I would have said, “I don’t know her.”