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

Still nothing. I could hear the dog howling outside, and again I wished I were with the dog in the doghouse and not in the trailer with Peter, because at least the dog wasn’t mute and had something to say.

“What’s your dog’s name?” I asked him. “How old is he? Or she? I’ve never had a dog. Or a cat. No pets at all. Is your dog neutered? Spayed?” And so on, until I began to get sick of myself and my babbling. Then I changed my mind and got sick of him, Peter, and it, his silence, and then I got sick of stoic men in general. Did they not have anything to say, these stoic men? Did they have plenty to say but not the right things, or not even the ability to say those wrong things the right way? Well, so what. Had that ever stopped me? Did people not know that talking was good for you, like medicine or juice? Had someone told Peter that you had to be silent and gloomy to be a man? Was that what reading about mopey, inarticulate Ethan Frome had taught him? (I’d already kicked the book out of my kicking range, but I kicked it again, in my mind, for good measure.) I was so sick of these silent men, it seemed as if I’d been around them my entire life: not enjoying the silence, and not wanting it, either. Their silence was like an ugly hat someone had told them they had to wear, and so they did, but bitterly. I almost missed Thomas Coleman, who could at least talk and wasn’t shy about doing so, even if the stuff he said was hurtful and sinister and some of it out-and-out deceitful. And of course he was saying this stuff to my wife, and — now that I thought about it — maybe he was with her right now. Suddenly I was sick of Thomas, too, and maybe it wasn’t just that I was sick of silent men but of all men, which was troubling, since I counted myself one of them.

“Listen,” I said. “Like I told you earlier, I’m Sam Pulsifer. I need to know now. Are you Peter Le Clair? Are you the Peter Le Clair who wrote me years ago, asking me to burn down the Robert Frost Place?”

Peter didn’t put down his plunger at this news, and he didn’t smile or say anything. But he did shrug. It was, as I learned over the next several hours, Peter’s favorite gesture, one probably used to communicate knowingness, confusion, sleepiness, hunger, loyalty, drunkenness, impatience, empathy, sexual longing. It was an economical gesture, and I admired it so much that I thought about doing it myself right back at him. But then I remembered that time in prison when I said, “I’m a grown-ass man,” after playing basketball, and Terrell beat me; there were no prison guards to protect me this time. So I didn’t shrug. But I wanted to, and I bet, if given a chance, the mimicry would have done our relationship a lot of good. Because it seems to me that the world would be a nicer, more empathetic place in which to live if we were only allowed to mimic each other without the one being mimicked taking offense and threatening violence.

“You shrugged,” I said. “Does that mean yes?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice rough but a little higher than I expected, like a rugged Tweety Bird. “I am Peter Le Clair.”

Well, now we were having a regular conversation — we both sat down, as if settling into something — and I certainly didn’t want to lose its thread. So I kept the questions simple so that we could both follow them.

“Do you know why I’m here?”

“Yes,” Peter replied, and then, before I could respond, he said, “I want you to burn down that house. But I can’t pay you anything.” When he said this, his eyes dropped to his boots and then rose up to my eyes, as if his shame were having an internal struggle with his pride. I felt for Peter and wanted to tell him that the struggle wasn’t just part of his personal condition; it was the human condition, and it was my condition, too. Maybe that’s why my face was so red. I wanted to tell him all this, but I also didn’t want to get off the topic, which is my weakness, the way not speaking was his.

“Can’t pay me anything,” I said, just to buy myself some time to think and catch up. “Did you get a phone call saying something about burning down the Robert Frost Place?” I was also thinking about the phone call I’d gotten back in Amherst. It wasn’t Peter’s voice, I knew that now, but maybe Peter had received a phone call, too.

Except he hadn’t. “No phone call,” he said. “No phone.” Then he shrugged again. It was a definitive shrug, one that told me there wasn’t anything else to say about the phone call. So I didn’t say anything and instead silently took stock of what I now knew or thought I knew. Peter hadn’t gotten a phone call; I had, but the caller hadn’t asked anyone for money to burn down the Robert Frost Place, assuming that’s what he planned on doing. The person who’d tried to burn down the Mark Twain House had asked for money but had done so in a letter, not over the phone, and most likely wasn’t a man and so most likely had nothing to do with whomever I was supposed to meet at midnight at the Robert Frost Place. And none of these people seemed to have anything, necessarily, to do with whoever had tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House. I felt panicked, taking account of all the things I didn’t know, the same kind of panic a schoolchild feels when picking up a pencil to take a test for which he is unprepared. And as every schoolchild knows, panic is to the bladder what love or hate or exercise is to the heart.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Peter, and then wandered to the left, down the trailer’s only visible hall. The bathroom was the first door to the left and was interesting. There were appliances and fixtures everywhere — pipes and tubes of joint compound and fractured tile and shower rods and curtains and a medicine cabinet with no door. And as on Noah’s boat, there were two of each of the most necessary items: two sinks (one fixed into the wall and one on the floor) and two ashtrays and two towels and two towel racks and two toilets, a blue one and a yellow one. Now Peter’s plunger made a little more sense. But in my hurry I couldn’t stop to tell which toilet I was supposed to use, so I used the blue one in honor of the boy I’d once been and still was, essentially. When I was done, I left the bathroom in a hurry and without checking to see whether it was the right, working toilet. Because if it was, great, and if it wasn’t, well, I didn’t really want to know.

“Can’t pay you,” Peter repeated as soon as I returned to the living room. I empathized: his lack of money weighed heavily on him and he needed relief from it, his poverty being to his vessel what my pee had just been to mine.

“Don’t worry about the money,” I said. “What do you say we drive over to the Robert Frost Place and see what we’re dealing with.”

“The truck’s busted,” he said.

“Which one?”

“All of them,” he said. “We’ll take your van. Let’s go.”

With that, he started shoving clothes at me — a once-white thermal shirt, now dirty to the point of being yellow; a lined flannel shirt; a big, bulging, blue parka that might have looked good on the Michelin Man; a black Ski-Doo ski hat with an optimistic yellow tassel that smelled as though a month earlier the dog had put on the hat before taking a dip in kerosene. Peter had a point. If we were going outside, then I’d better dress for it. It was dark by now and probably even colder than it had been, and all I had on was what I always wore: khaki pants with too many pleats, which bunched up unattractively when I sat, a pair of running sneakers, and a gray fleece pullover, and they weren’t warm enough, even, for tropical Massachusetts. So I put on the clothes Peter gave me, right over my own. It was like adding another layer of skin, and then another. Even Peter was putting on a few extra layers of flannel and then a big hooded parka over the extra layers, and at one point, after all the piling on of clothes was finished, we turned to each other as if to say, Ta-da! There we were, in our beards and flannel, like a couple of girls dressing side by side for our big night out. It was unlikely and sweet, the way only unlikely things can be.