T. Boyle - The Women

The gasoline. He had the big canister of it right there, ready to hand—“Mr. Weston,” he’d said to the dishwater man not thirty minutes ago, “may I have some of that automobile fuel to work the spots out of the rug in the living room, that one with all the swirls and patterns on it?” and the dishwater man had said yes, go ahead, he didn’t care — and he sloshed that gasoline over the two of them at the table and the one that had made it out the door and was still alive and working, her legs against the stone floor, and dropped a lit match on it and heard the sudden harsh sucking sound it made.

Quick now, quick — make a job of it. He ran as fast as his lungs and legs would take him to where the men were boasting and laughing and sucking the soup his wife had cooked between their teeth and he bolted into the kitchen through the courtyard door and jammed a wedge of wood under it so no man, even Achilles himself, could have pushed it open. Gertrude might have called out his name, but he gave her one look — one look and two words through his clenched teeth: “Save yourself”—and then he let the gasoline flow out under the door, the whole canister of it and the rugs in the hall already soaked through with it and here was the match, cousin to the last one, and he dashing out his door to the courtyard and the single exit he’d already shut and barred against any man or boy with his clothes aflame and trying to escape. Quick. Quick. The second canister propped there beside the door and gone up in an instant. He could hear them inside, cursing, screaming, shouting like the damned in their hellfire, hear them pounding at the immovable door — shrieks, raw shrieks as alive as the skin that was blistering off their flaming white faces — and then there was the sharp celebratory explosion of the glass of the window and the first of them to come hurtling through it to meet the hatchet, which rose high and higher and fell on them each in turn with all the force of his killing arm and the gravity behind it and it was no more troublesome than splitting shingles.

They were dead as they came through the window and now the flaming rectangle of the door, dead or stunned, the stunned ones rolling on the ground with their clothes aflame, as if that would do them the least lick of good, and he struck them again and again as they rolled and dodged and put up their hands to try to protect themselves where they were most vulnerable. There was a method to this. An order. An efficiency. And he wanted, above all, to be efficient. Three blows for the dishwater man, the hatchet spinning so that it was the flat that brought him down and not the blade, and the boy too, but Brodelle— black nigger son of a bitch —he split him open like a wiener on the grill, the same as Mamah, and the fat man too and he went after the other boy, Fritz, but Fritz was rolling, rolling, and every board and fiber of the house in an uproaring lit-bright pandemonium of flame.

Later, he was sick. Later, it burst out of both ends of him and he knew they’d be coming for him with their dogs and the noose braided for lynching and if he ran out into the fields he’d have no say in the matter because he would just be their bait. How he got down into the cellar beneath the inferno of the house he couldn’t have said. And he couldn’t have said either why he didn’t just stand there and let the burning joists fall to crush him and the flames to devour him, because he was done now, all the rage purged out of him as if it had never been there at all. He gave a thought for Gertrude — they’d make her pay and she didn’t deserve any part in it — but it was a thought that flitted by and vanished in the instant her sorrowful face materialized in his brain. A flame was as light as air, and yet the frame of that architect’s house couldn’t withstand the weight. Brands fell round him. Everything shrieked and groaned, unholy noise, the structure rattling and striking out against the death that had come to embrace it. He opened the door of the furnace that had boiled the water for the dead of the house. It was cool inside. Or cooler, anyway. He got in there with the thick glass bottle he’d saved for last, the caustic to kill him before they did, muriatic acid and the triple X and the skull and crossbones to warn them off. He pulled the steel door closed against the roar and the chaos. It was black, purely black, not the thinnest tracery of light to be seen in any direction. They would never find him here.

Lunch. A sandwich from the restaurant, a moment to relax with the newspaper — umbrage in the Balkans and the guns thundering across the Continent, and what next, the Archduke rising up out of his coffin on angel’s wings? — before he went back to wrangling with Waller over money and Iannelli over the sprites, because the Italian, understandably but maddeningly, was balking at delivering the rest of the statuary without payment in hand or at least guaranteed. The sandwich was good, first-rate — Volgelsang really knew his business, give him credit there — and the newspaper was sufficiently lurid and bloody for even the most jaded reader, but Frank couldn’t help keeping one eye on John, 176who was at the far end of the room, up on the scaffolding, applying a wet brush to the polychromatic mural behind the bar. A pretty picture that, and John as precise and unerring a worker as his father himself. Details, details. This room, the tavern, was Waller’s number one priority and never mind the glories of opening night with Max Bendix and his hundred-piece orchestra sawing gloriously away and Pavlova pirouetting across the stage and all the rest, he was bleeding money through his pores till the beer started flowing right here, out of these dry and thirsty taps. (“I don’t give a damn about murals or sprites or anything else,” Waller kept telling him. “I just want the place finished and the tables full. Beer. I just want beer.”)

Of course, it was an insult, and he was determined to see the design realized in its every last particular if he was going to draw another breath on this earth, but he could hardly be blamed for the delays at this point. He took another bite of the sandwich. Lifted the glass of ice water to his lips. It was hot. Damnably hot. He thought of Taliesin then, of the lake, and how he’d give anything to throw off his shirt, trousers and shoes and plunge into the cool opaque depths of it and maybe give the fish a run for the money. He was thinking of that, of the fish and how Billy Weston’s son had pulled a catfish as long as his arm out of there just a week ago — an amazing thing, really, with its big yellow mouth gaping wide as if to suck in all the air in the valley and the barbels twitching and the tiny dots of its blue-black eyes that hardly seemed sufficient to take in the incandescent world that had loomed up on it so precipitately — when the stenographer from the main office suddenly burst through the door, looking as if she’d had all the blood drained out of her in a scientific experiment. He was going to comment on that, make a joke of it, a quip about the heat and how it was a leading cause of anemia in women under thirty, but her face warned him off. “Mr. Wright,” she said, out of breath, running sweat, paler than the stack of paper she kept to hand beside her typewriter, “you’re wanted on the telephone. Long distance. From Spring Green.”

Once, when he was young, younger than John was now, he’d seen a building collapse. It was a massive brick structure still under construction, men aloft, hod carriers rushing to and fro, the workmen all separately focused on their tasks but communicating as if by some extrasensory intelligence, the whole thing — men, materials and machines alike — a kind of living organism. He’d stopped to watch as he often had over the course of the weeks past, fascinated by the frenzy of activity and the way the building rose in discernable increments — different each day and yet the same too — and he was there watching when all that changed in an instant. More than anything he remembered the sound of it, the explosive snap of the beams buckling and the cannonade of one floor tearing through another, a roar of the inanimate animated, withering, unforgiving. And the screams. The screams that rose up out of a clenched fist of silence and the harsh soughing of the dust. He’d stood there for hours, the dread rising in him with a bitter metallic taste that constricted his throat — one man had been crushed till he was little more than extruded pulp; another had to be sawed, living, from the wreckage, two raw stumps palpitating there in place of his legs — and he’d wanted only to put it all right again, to build it back up so it would never fall. But Taliesin had fallen, was falling now, and it was worse, far worse, because this was fire and fire not only crushed you, it consumed you too.