Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“Get a blanket,” a woman customer said. And when I yelled “Where in hell am I going to get a blanket in a supermarket?” she said “Get a coat, then, something to wrap around him, at least.”

But this was a hot, sticky August day and not a person in the store had even a jacket on, not even the register clerks, though it was compulsory for them. Nelson ran up aisle A, flames still coming out of his back. Everyone, including a dozen or so customers and the delivery boys and all the clerks, except the two who were using the store’s only working fire extinguisher to put out the small blaze at number three, just sort of looked dumbfounded and helpless at Nelson running up and around and down the aisles, wailing his head off, till I tackled him from in front, a perfect tackle right below the knees, so his whole body would buckle and fall backward and lose an extra yard and maybe even loosen the ball from his hands, and rolled him on the floor on his back till most of the fire was out. Then I flipped open five quart bottles of cranberry juice, the nearest liquid I could reach, and poured them over him till the fire was doused, and rested from the ordeal, with my breath coming on hard, while all three delivery boys uncapped quart and half-quart bottles of tomato and pineapple and apricot-orange juice and spilled the contents over Nelson, even after his clothes had stopped smoking.

“Anyone call the police for an ambulance?” I said to the manager, and he repeated the question to the customers and staff surrounding Nelson and me, and they just looked at one another, some shaking their heads.

One man, speaking for his wife and him, said “We didn’t; nobody said to.”

“Well, someone call the police for an ambulance,” the manager said.

“Want me to do it, boss?” Richard, a food bagger, said.

“Dial 9-1-1, Richie.”

“Nine-eleven, right, that new police emergency number, right away. Which phone should I use — the one in the office or the pay one in back?”

The office, and quick, now, Nelson’s hurt.”

“What I do, what I do for this?” Nelson said, his eyelids and nostrils fluttering, and just my trying to blow away the ashes on his chest that were the remains of his short-sleeved white shirt caused him great pain. He seemed to be going crazy and his hair smelled singed like burned chicken feathers and we were both getting more soaked by the second from being in this large puddle of juice. Nobody seemed to want to get near us or even get their shoes wet.

“How do I keep him from going into shock?” I asked the manager.

“Put his legs up on that olive-oil can there and keep his head straight down.”

“No,” a woman said, “you put his head up on something soft and his legs down.”

“Which do I do?” I asked the manager.

“Let’s keep him flat, then. The police will be here in a sec.”

A combination of different sirens was heard in a few minutes and then police came and firemen with picks and fire extinguishers and what looked like gas masks and then ambulance people from the local city hospital. Nelson was given oxygen and put on an IV and treated briefly for his burns and was being wheeled out of the market on a gurney when he threw off his oxygen cup and yelled “Boom, damn bomb went boom. And I saw the man who threw it, saw the bum who went boom.”

“Hold him there for a moment,” a police officer said to the bearers, but the doctor said he’d have to insist that Nelson not be detained.

“Just one quick question, please.” And to Nelson: “Who’d you see throw the bomb, son? I’m saying,” when Nelson looked at him blankly, “the person who threw it, I mean. You know him? Could you give me a description of him?

The person was a man,” Nelson said. Threw it right through it, right at me, right through the window at the Heinz beans I was ringing up. Went boom. That man went boom. And the boom went off like a bomb and burned my back, the bum, my back.”

“Is that what happened. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine and dandy in a few days, son, and take care.”

“Good luck to you, Nelly,” one of the register clerks yelled out.

“Safe recovery.”

“Now, what happened?” the police officer said to me. “And please say it nice and straight and slow. Shorthand’s not my profession.”

My wife asked if anything had happened at work that day, as she asked almost every night when I first got home and immediately went to the bathroom to wash my face and hands and sometimes take a shower, and I said “No, nothing much.”

She said “Oh. It’s because this time you look more tired than usual, so I thought something might be wrong. Like a beer?”

“Yeah, a beer — no, an ale. I’m dying for one ice-cold.”

“You bring home any from work?”

“No, I didn’t even bring home a beer. I didn’t even bring any groceries. There was a fire at work, that’s why.”

“A fire? So, now what are we going to do for supper? I was counting on a chicken from you, Kev. Why didn’t you stop at another market? Or, better yet, phoned me so I could shop somewhere near here. I would’ve, even though we don’t get the discount like at your C & L.”

“Someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the store window and Nelson Forman nearly got burned to death.” She asked who Nelson was and when I told her, she said “Was he seriously hurt?”

“I said he was nearly burned to death. That means nearly being burned to death. The hospital I called said he has second-and third-degree burns on about fifty percent of his body and that he’s still critical and probably lucky to be alive.”

“Which is worse, second or third?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if first is worse or better than second. All I know is that fifty percent body burns is very bad, very critical.”

“You should’ve phoned me, Kev. You phoned the hospital; I admit that’s more important, but you should’ve also phoned me. Now we have nothing for supper but eggs, unless you want to go and walk the ten stupid blocks to the market.”

“Is that the closest?”

“And the only one. It’s almost seven and that’s it in about a square mile around here that stays open. I think they’re worried about robberies and such. An enterprising chain should open a store nearer the project, stick an armed guard in it and stay open till nine or ten at night and make a fortune. You ought to suggest it to C & L.”

The phone rang just around the time we normally sit down to eat. “Who is it?” I said, angry, as if everyone in this time zone should know that most families have supper at this hour, and a man said “Wimer, Kevin Wimer, you’re in charge of the C & L produce section at Bainbridge, correct?”

“Sort of assistant in charge. Finerman’s head.”

“Finerman, that’s right. There was a fire in your store today, caused by a particular labor-trouble reason I’ll disclose this very minute, if you’re not in a rush. There’s a movement going on for better wages and working conditions by the ras-, black-and loganberry pickers of this country. And your food chain has continued to sell these products, even though we’ve expressly requested it to boycott all the big growers of them till they’ve fallen in line with the few smaller growers who’ve raised pickers’ wages to the national minimum and improved the pickers’ living and working conditions while they’re on the job. Were you aware your store was firebombed today?”

“Sure. One of the clerks got fifty percent of his body burned, both second and third degree.”

“I heard. And it’s terrible. But if it’s only five percent second and forty-five percent third, it wouldn’t be that bad, am I right?”

“You are if second is worse than third, but it could be fatal the other way around.”