Brock Clarke - An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

“Hey, listen,” I said. “Do you want to come inside, have a drink or something?” I was starting to get nervous, the six of us standing on the porch the way we were. In Camelot no one would have paid any attention, but my parents’ neighborhood was different, and there were always people out in their front yards, mulching their mums and tiger lilies, and listening to National Public Radio on their transistor radios while they mulched, and looking around to make sure everyone was listening to the same station. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself; I didn’t even want them to know that the guy who’d burned down the you-know-what had moved back into the neighborhood.

“Forget the drinks,” Morgan said. “We want you to tell us how to burn down houses like the one you burned down. And after we do, we can write a book about it.”

“An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England,” G-off said. “We’ve already come up with the title.”

“Why do you even need to be an arsonist to write the book?” I asked. “You could always just pretend to have burned down the houses and write the book anyway.”

“Ouch,” Morgan said. “I deserved that.”

“Come on,” Tigue said. “Be a pal.”

“That has to be some rush,” G-off said. “The fire, the smoke, the heat.” G-off looked at his hands as if they might tell him what to say next. “The fire,” he said again.

“You always seemed so happy,” Morgan said. “Happy in a simple way, like a child, only bigger.”

“Your jolly red face,” Tigue said.

“Elemental,” Morgan said. “Primal. Just like the fire you set. Please, we just need a little instruction.”

“A little push,” G-off said. “Your expertise and know-how.”

“But I told you all about it in prison,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Morgan said. “But then there’s that fire you set yesterday.”

“Two days ago,” G-off said.

“The Belmont House,” Morgan said.

“The Bellamy House,” G-off corrected.

“Shut up,” Morgan said. And then, to me: “The Bellamy House.”

“Guys …,” I said.

“Sam, buddy, we’re in a rut, a big, scary one,” Morgan said. “We’re scared. There, I said it.”

I believed him. They were in serious need, I could tell, because the two mute Ryans actually parted their lips as if preparing to speak. I even felt sorry for them, which was a switch because in prison I always admired them. Now they seemed pathetic and desperate, and I couldn’t be mad at them, not even Morgan. No, I couldn’t stay angry with them, but I knew they’d be angry with me once I told them what I was going to tell them.

“I’m sorry, guys,” I said, “but it wasn’t me who set fire to the Bellamy House.”

“Oh, come on,” Morgan said. “Who else would do it?”

“That’s a good question,” I admitted. “But whoever it was, it wasn’t me.”

“Sam—,” Morgan began, but I cut him off.

“I can’t help you,” I said.

I didn’t even listen to what came next, the chorus of threats and pleading and further, more detailed threats — I knew it all too well from Thomas Coleman’s visit to Camelot, knew exactly what the bond analysts would say and how they would say it, and so I stood there and let the white noise of their recriminations wash over me until the bond analysts exhausted themselves, broke the flying V, walked back down the front steps, and piled into a Saab, the humpbacked kind. “You’ll be sorry you didn’t help us, Sam,” Morgan yelled, and he was right: in just a few days I would be very sorry that I hadn’t helped them. As though to emphasize the point, Morgan again yelled, “You’ll be sorry,” then jammed the car into gear and drove off.

I looked at my watch. It was only eleven in the morning. There was the big, yawning day still in front of me, plenty of time for somebody else to appear out of my past. There seemed to me to be two choices: sit around the house and wait for another unwelcome surprise visitor, or leave.

I left on foot. For the first time since I’d moved back to my parents’ house, I allowed myself to walk the streets of Amherst, to see and be seen, to be recognized and shunned, or worse. I kept thinking of that one Birkenstock, the right one, that someone had thrown through my parents’ window those many years earlier. It was in my head that the thrower had kept the left one in his arsenal all that time, waiting for my return. At every corner I flinched, thinking I would be recognized by some large-footed hippie and brained with that left sandal.

But I wasn’t. It was strange. Block after block, I wasn’t recognized, and so I began to actively court recognition. I’d stop at houses I knew — here, the house where my childhood friend Rob Burnip lived; there, the Shumachers’, where my parents would play cribbage every Thursday — and linger on the sidewalk, waiting for someone to emerge from the house and say, Hey, it’s Sam Pulsifer. I haven’t seen you since… And so on. And people did come out of the houses, but they didn’t recognize me and I didn’t recognize them. They were simply younger versions of the people who used to live there: assistant professors, or young dot-com near-millionaires with new families who’d moved out from Boston or New York to Amherst because of the good schools and clean air and overabundance of coffee shops, or enviro trust-funders who might still have lived in Berkeley, as their parents did, if the insurance on their Volvos hadn’t been so ruinously expensive out there. The town was still old — each house and each church probably knew someone who knew Cotton Mather — but the people who lived in it were not.

Even the farmers had changed. This was Sunday, the day the farmers traditionally sold their wares. I could see the banner — AMHERST FARMERS’ MARKET — stretched over the parking lot next to the town green, and memory pulled me toward it, the way only memory can. When I was a child, the Sunday farmers’ market was run by the farmers after whom it was named, dour men who wore overalls and had chapped hands and faces and who sold their goods out of the backs of their pickup trucks. They sold butter-and-sugar corn and tomatoes mostly, but also some green beans and garlic and cucumbers and summer squash in the summer, and hard, crisp McIntosh apples in the fall and even broadleaf tobacco, big, flat boxes full of the stuff, which seemed right because the farmers smoked while they sold their goods, smoked constantly while they put the produce in paper sacks and miscounted my parents’ change. Sometimes, when my parents weren’t looking, the farmers gave me cubes of sugar probably meant for their nags, and I ate them and had some unhappy dealings with my dentist later on because of it. But even so, those were good days. Those were very, very good days, and by the time I actually reached the market I was feeling nostalgic for that world and time and would have hugged the first farmer I saw. So maybe it was a good thing there weren’t any there.

The farmers, apparently, were another part of the past that was gone. There wasn’t a pickup truck or a cigarette to be seen. The produce was organic — signs told me so — and ugly from not having been grown with the fertilizers and insecticides that make fruits and vegetables look and taste so good. It made me sad to see the apples and green beans sitting there, gnarled and unhappy, sold out of the hatchback trunks of Volkswagens, and it also made me sad to see the men and women who sold them, the obviously rich but filthy men and women who could have been the bond analysts’ kissing cousins, were their union suits and beards and fleece and flowing skirts and ratty but expensive sandals not largely in the way. My breath left me for a while when I realized how often and fast the world changes, something not even a career in a technologically advanced field like packaging science can prepare you for. It didn’t take a genius to see that someday I, too, would be like the farmers, cast aside and obsolete and so completely lost without a world that needed me.