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

“Wait,” I said, walking around to his side of the car. Detective Wilson’s face looked as confused as it had appeared confident a few moments earlier; his face looked younger, too, which is to say that confidence ages you, but confusion keeps you young, the way a positive outlook and Swedish facial creams are supposed to but never do. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to your house,” he said, “to talk to your wife and this Thomas Coleman.”

“Just because I said so?” I asked. Was being a stool pigeon this easy? Who knew that all you had to do was give voice to your suspicions and blame someone else to get such quick results? “Just like that?”

“Yes, Sam,” he said. “Just like that. But you’d better not be lying. You better not be jerking me around.”

“I’m not,” I assured him, even though I was the person who really needed reassuring. Thomas Coleman had been my number one suspect, my sole suspect, really. I had known with all my heart that he was the one who’d set the fires; I had known he was the guilty one. And then I had gone ahead and said so, to Detective Wilson, and then immediately afterward I had doubts, big ones. I’d said guilty, and immediately Thomas Coleman had seemed as if he might be innocent. I wondered whether, if I said innocent, he might seem guilty again. But it was too late to say that, so instead I asked, “But aren’t you going to ask my mother where she was last night before you go? Aren’t you going to ask her where she was the night of the Bellamy House fire, too?” I said this not because I wanted him to ask her that, but because Detective Wilson — with his badge and ID and gun and coffee — was seeming more and more like a real detective, and I wanted to know what a real detective might ask, and when, and of whom.

“Not now,” he said. “Besides, I know where I can find her.” With that, Detective Wilson rolled up his window and peeled out into the foggy night, leaving behind the squeal of his tires and the smell of his exhaust and this lesson: being a real detective meant knowing where you could find people. I knew now where I could find my mother. But why was she there? Was this her apartment? Was she staying with someone else? Was this her home? Was she in the apartment and not in our house the night of the Edward Bellamy House fire, and last night, too? Was she somewhere besides the apartment? I patted my coat pocket and felt the two letters: the one from Mincher asking me to burn down the Mark Twain House, and the other, anonymous and typed, asking Mincher for three thousand dollars to do the burning. The letter had no postmark, so that meant that someone had driven there, probably from close by. But why a letter in the first place? Why not just call Mincher and pretend to be me on the phone? The only answer was that whoever had typed and delivered the letter couldn’t pretend to be me on the telephone. Any man could pretend to be me on the telephone, but a woman could not. And what woman would want to pretend to be me? I really only knew two women in this world: one of them was in Camelot, and the other was right in front of me, seeming less like the mother I thought I knew, and more and more like someone I didn’t know at all.

“Oh, Mom,” I said, softly. My mother was still sitting at her window, not reading, not looking out the window at me, either: as far as I could tell, she was simply staring into space.

At that moment, the book-group wizards and witches emerged from the building, each of them holding their copy of the book away from their body, as though it were a divining rod leading them directly to their children’s heart of hearts. They looked so happy, overjoyed, the way people are when they think they’ve found the answer to a particularly difficult question. Each of them felt compelled to say their hearty “Hello’s” and “Good evening’s” to me and then commenced to talk about the fog and how it was a very English fog, and then there was a long, sincere discussion about how very magical fog was and how they’d be sure to wake up their kids when they got home to show them the fog and then find a passage in the book featuring fog, and then they’d compare the literary fog and the meteorological fog, and in the middle of all this I saw, peripherally, a flicker of light. I turned away from the witches and wizards and toward my mother’s apartment window; it was now completely dark, and I couldn’t see my mother anywhere. I must have stared at the window for five, ten, fifteen minutes. The witches and wizards got into their vehicles and drove away into the night, and still I stood there, waiting for my mother to turn her light back on, waiting for her to emerge from the building, waiting for something. But this is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide (which, as you’ve figured out by now, is also a detective’s guide, a son’s guide, a guide that is as specific or generic as you and I need it to be): you can wait only so long for a blackened window to be illuminated. And when you start to wonder whether the window will ever be illuminated again, and whether you were seeing what and who you thought you were seeing when it was lit, then you’ve waited too long, and the best thing is just to go home. So I just went home.

It should be said at this point that I knew all along that my father was a drunk and hadn’t had a stroke at all. I must have known that; how could I not have known that? Of course I knew that. I was just pretending to believe that my father had had a stroke. Because we all know that to be a son is to lie to yourself about your father. But once you start telling yourself the truth, does that mean you are no longer a son, and he is no longer your father? And then what are you? And what is he?

The truth was that my father was a drunk, and there had been a party at my parents’ house. It must have ended not long before I got home for the second time that night. The place was an even bigger wreck than before. There were ashtrays everywhere and they were full to overflowing, and so, rather than empty the ashtrays, the smokers had used every available surface — flat and concave, highly flammable and less highly flammable — to deposit their ashes. The living room looked postvolcanic. On the coffee table was a line of juice glasses, and inside each glass were the watery remnants of something dark and evil, something you were no doubt supposed to drink all at once or not at all. On the couch, someone had left behind the sort of visor you might see a card dealer or a cub reporter wearing in an old movie. On the floor between the couch and the coffee table, there was a translucent gasoline funnel. I picked it up and saw a long piece of white hose or tubing dangling suggestively from the bottom, and I put it down again. The exercise bike had been thrown in the corner of the room, on its side; one pedal was pointed ceilingward and still spinning. The television was on, but the sound was not; it was a program devoted to heart surgery, and they kept showing close-up shots of open and then closed chest wounds. There was music playing loudly, so loudly I couldn’t tell what it was or where it was coming from, especially since my parents, to my knowledge, didn’t own a stereo. I followed the noise through the living room and into my father’s bedroom. The bed was as big a disaster as the rest of the house: sheets were draped over the chair, the end table, the headboard, everywhere but the bed itself. There was a boom box on the floor, vibrating from its own noise. Over the crash of guitar and bass, I could hear the singer ask obscurely, “Does anyone have a cannon?” I turned off the boom box and heard normal human voices coming from the kitchen. I followed them. My father was sitting at the kitchen table, and across from him was another man, someone I’d never seen before. In between them, on the table, was the shoe box, and scattered around the table were the letters. I missed my mother right then, badly, the way you miss one parent when the other one isn’t doing what he’s supposed to.