Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

She looks at Martin, shakes her head.

“He can’t be gone,” she says.

Martin tightens his jaw. He looks around, too. He gestures. “All my life,” he says, “he was such a big man. He was my father . Look at this place, though. Always, he was bigger than life. Always, he told me I’d never live up to him. Told me that . Look at this.” Martin has to stoop to go through the doorway, stands in the bedroom, toying with the cheap fiberboard door. He reaches up, plunges his hand into a gap between the wall and the ceiling, and peels the fiberboard panel aside, showing cheap insulation beneath. He heaves the torn board from the wall, drops his hands to his sides, looks over at Turtle. He says, “I don’t know what all he told you, but you will outgrow us both. You will be more than he ever was. And more than me. Don’t ever let anyone—not anyone, not me, not Grandpa, not yourself—tell you different. Look at this.” He lifts the five-gallon gas can in his hands, unscrewing the cap.

“Don’t,” she says.

He looks at her, shakes his head, and pours gas over the bed. He walks backward, stooping, through the door, pouring gas along the carpet. He comes into the kitchen and dumps it across the table, the chairs, the cabinets and counters.

Turtle catches Rosy by the collar and carries the excited dog out of the trailer while Martin dumps more gasoline in the walkway. Turtle kneels in the raspberries, holding Rosy by the collar, and she watches Martin douse the place in gasoline. He steps down and stands beside her. He puts his hands in his pockets, digging for his lighter, and laughs, bitterly, quietly.

“What?”

“You know, kibble, I lived half my life in terror of that man. Christ.” He gasps. The sound is strange and unexpected, like a hiccup. He finds his lighter and fetches it out, stands looking at it in his palm, and then looking around for something to light the fire with. He says, “Ah, but he was good to you, wasn’t he?”

Turtle nods. “Yeah,” she says, her guts squeezing at the inadequacy of her answer.

Martin stands shaking his head. “Christ. That’s good, I guess. That’s good. I don’t know why I let you come down here to see him like I did. A girl should have her grandfather in her life, I guess. Christ. I would’ve said his capacity to hurt me was all run out, but it was something else, I tell you, to watch him with you. I tell you what. You come up as a child with such a man as that for a father and you have to spend a lot of your life persuading yourself that it was nothing to do with you, because I tell you—he was not so gentle with me. He was the most sadistic kind of fuck, kibble. So it takes some persuading. And it’s hard, because it comes so natural to think that your father hates you for a reason. You almost want to think that. It’s somehow easier than thinking his hate is inscrutable. That makes no kind of sense to a child. It is quite a thing, I tell you. And yet I have seen him be the most patient kind of man with you, kibble. I hated him for that. Isn’t that strange? Years and years later. I would’ve said his capacity to hurt me was all done. Well.”

He turns. He picks up a handful of grass, tosses open the lighter, and touches it to the grass, but the grass will not take. It smolders and blackens away from the flame, and does not burn. He looks around. Turtle stands there beside him. He says, “I should’ve taken some paper out with me.”

Martin looks in at the carpet, sodden with gasoline. “Well,” he says. He moves toward it, and the flame of his lighter goes out. Carefully, he leans into the trailer, planting one hand on the counter and extending the lighter down to the sodden carpet. He strikes the flint and then springs back, expecting the carpet to go up in a whoosh of flame. Nothing happens. Martin touches his jaw in frustration and annoyance, relights the Zippo, and tosses the burning lighter inside, onto a standing pool of gasoline. The lighter goes out, mid-flight, and lands with a splash.

“Well, shit,” Martin says. He climbs back into the trailer, picks up the lighter, stands holding it between thumb and forefinger, shaking gasoline from it.

“I wouldn’t use that lighter, Daddy,” she says.

He shakes his head in muted, bitter comedy. “Fucking hilarious,” he says.

He climbs down from the trailer, walks around back, and Turtle follows, bringing Rosy along. They stand in high raspberries behind the trailer, and Martin crawls into the undercarriage, and takes hold of a five-gallon propane tank attached to the trailer’s gas hookup. He unscrews the propane from the gas assembly, hauls the tank around to the front, heaves it through the trailer’s door. There are two more propane tanks stashed beneath the trailer, and he goes back for each, retrieving them, and lining them up in the trailer’s hallway. He comes to stand beside her, draws the Colt .45 from his belt. He thumbs back the hammer and fires.

The propane tank pings , the bullet leaving a visible, gleaming scar in the white paint. Annoyed, Martin fires again, and then a third time, the shots throwing small, shiny dents into the steel. Martin stops firing. He looks at Turtle, who kneels in the raspberries holding Rosy.

He climbs back into the trailer, which groans under his weight. He walks to the propane, stepping around pools of gasoline, cranks the spigot open, but the propane tank makes no noise of escaping gas. He chews his lips. Then he smacks his head. “The valve,” he says, referring to the valve that keeps the tank from venting gas unless it is assembled to a line. He climbs out and down, crawls back under the trailer, captures the gas hookup, and drawing his Daniel Winkler belt knife, severs the line in a single stroke. He walks back into the trailer and screws the gas hookup onto the propane tank, which begins to fountain propane from the severed line. He scrambles out, vaulting over the fountaining gas line, waving Turtle away. She can see the clouds of propane filling the trailer, rolling out the door.

The escaping gas begins to spread pools of frost across the floor in a funnel pattern from where the severed line lies on the carpet, and then the gas line heaves itself up into the air, sweeping across counters. Frost climbs up the cabinets, the cold wrinkling the skin off the ersatz wood, which buckles and heaves up from the fiberboard. Now Martin stands wiping his Zippo clean on his shirt, shaking gasoline off of it, and Turtle backs away, hauling on Rosy’s collar. Rosy gives several excited barks and looks at Turtle, raising her eyebrows to points and smiling. Martin opens the Zippo, and the entire lighter goes up in flame. “Shit,” he says, “shit!” and pitches it into the trailer and then turns and runs into the grass, shaking his burned hand.

For a moment, nothing happens. Propane pours out through the open door in visible white steam.

Martin says, “You’re fucking kidding me.”

Then fire flushes out the door and across the grass in a low wave. Martin claps his hands over his ears. The windows rupture out and strips of siding peel off the frame. Then there is a second explosion and fire lances up into the sky and something comes right out the open door and Turtle believes for a moment that it is a raven flying from the flames, flying right at her, and then Martin runs into her, hands over his ears, and throws her down to the ground as something whistles past. The flames collapse, and leave only the hulk of the trailer, burning steadily. Turtle can see a sheet of steel lying in the doorway—the unwrapped cylinder of a propane tank. Behind her, she can see the cylinder’s head, launched off the tank like a cannonball. She can hear nothing. She looks at Martin. He is talking to her. Then, in her left ear, a hard, high ringing noise. Her right ear, nothing. She puts her hand to it. She looks to him again, holding her right ear, and he is talking. He laughs wildly. She looks down and sees Rosy barking frantically, stiff-legged, looking at the trailer and backing away from it. They stand together and watch it burn—the green raspberry canes curling and blackening away. The grass catches in fitful patches. Turtle looks to her daddy, then back to the burning trailer. The fire holds their attention for a long time. Over the ringing noise, she begins to hear him. She begins to hear the flames. She feels dizzy. She feels as if her right ear is empty, soundless, as if it has been permanently lost.