Jesse Ball: How to Set a Fire and Why

I laughed.

She said, see, I’ve been doing some reading of my own.

I said, that’s not a syllogism. A syllogism would be like, All girls who eat donuts become fat girls. All fat girls stop eating donuts. Therefore all girls who eat donuts stop eating donuts.

That’s what I’m saying, she said. The problem solves itself.

On one part of the paper I drew up the resources that we have:

A large house .

A garden (parts not visible from the street) .

Lighters, matches .

Gasoline .

Pipe bombs .

Gunpowder .

Three workers .

Two cars .

Two phones (could get more) .

Candles .

50m of fuse .

Electric detonator .

On another part I wrote in big letters:

IT WILL BE OBVIOUS WHO DID THIS SO YOU NEED TO LEAVE TOWN IMMEDIATELY, LUCIA, DON’T THINK YOU CAN GO ON LIVING AROUND HERE.

When I wrote that, Lana said quietly, maybe I’ll go with you.

Would you?

Maybe I would. Is there something better going on?

Her quiet was contagious. We were both quiet for a minute.

If we were going to get out of town, she said, we should make arrangements ahead of time, that’s for sure.

She looked over the piece of paper.

Lucia, you told me about all the junk he has piled in every room of the goddamned place. It sounds like a firetrap to me. You don’t have that down as a resource. Don’t you think …

And with that—she had solved it.

I had forgotten a basic rule: if you want it to be simple, then make it simple. I could just light the room with the wedding dress and the whole place would go up.

I looked down at my nice plan with its diagrams and lists. I crossed them out.

Lana, a person could easily get to disliking you.

I know it, she said. Don’t I know it.

Jan didn’t come back that night, or the next. Lana and Ree and I were sitting around and I said I was worried. Lana said maybe he got run over by a tractor trailer. We went down to his place, and it was wrecked. It looked like someone had gone over it looking for something.

I said, if he got picked up by the police I don’t want to go to the station to check up on him. Probably not a good idea. Lana said she wasn’t the one to go either. We just both looked at Ree for a while, because she can get anything she wants out of a chump guy, and finally she buckled. She said she’d be back in half an hour and she borrowed Lana’s keys.

Half an hour passed and lights came in the driveway. Ree said he was up in county. Evidently someone had been telling stories about him, and when they tossed the house they found all kinds of materials. He might be there a while. I felt a little sick about it.

He’s a sweetheart, for sure, said Ree.

Why?

He didn’t put them on to you.

Lana chimed in to tell me how lucky I was that my things were at her place by chance when the police raided Jan’s. And not just your things, but you. You’re lucky you weren’t there.

But I didn’t do anything yet.

Well, he didn’t do anything either.

I don’t know about that. Maybe he did.

Lucia, you’re lucky you weren’t there.

Yeah, I guess so. Here’s to staying lucky.

We toasted with what was left of the plastic vodka bottle.

Ree did a little pirouette as we went back to the car. She stopped and dropped into a crouch looking up at us.

But who would have told on him? Do you have any guesses?

Lana and I lay on her bed and talked late into that night. She was excited as hell. She said it would be such a surprise for her mom and for her boyfriend when she just disappeared.

Won’t you leave a note for your mom?

Yeah, oh fuck, I don’t know. What do you think?

Even if it makes it a little worse for us, I think.

She deserves it, yeah. I guess so. But I’m not telling Hal. It’s not like he’s going to have it rough finding a new girlfriend.

I agreed. Plenty of them sniffing around him day and night.

She got all businesslike suddenly.

So, tomorrow, we pack. You go to the Home. We buy the bus tickets for the day after. Then we sleep for the last time here.

That’s right.

And what about Jan—do you think he will …

A guy like him—he has to take care of himself.

We lay there for a while. I don’t know what she was thinking about, but I was thinking about Lucia Stanton—this person who would basically disappear. What would I call myself next? What clothes would I wear? There is that part in the Bardo Thodol where the dead person goes into a womb to be born again into a new place, where the dead person actually chooses where she will be born—whether into an animal or a human, and into which land. Now, I know that’s just some Tibetan nonsense, but it is a good metaphor. So, I lay there thinking:

Who will you be, Lucia, when you are not Lucia anymore?

I wrote down that last section after Lana went to sleep. From here on in, there isn’t time to write things, so I will just put down my final prediction about how things will go, and then it’ll be things as they come, however they come.

Two days from now, Lana and I will go down to the bus station. We will put our bags into a locker there. We will return to her mom’s house. We will get a container of gasoline from the backyard where we hid it. Together, we will go in her brother’s car to a spot some blocks from the house. Then, we will separate. I will walk over to the house. She will stay at the car.

I will sneak into the house through the basement—the downstairs window can be opened from the outside. I’ll sneak in through that window. Once I am inside, Lana will call the landlord on the telephone from a public pay phone. He will answer if he is in the house. She will pretend to be a police circuit board operator informing him that his car has been stolen. Although this does not make sense, we both believe it will make him leave the house to look at his car. At that point, I will pour gasoline over the contents of the room in which my aunt’s possessions lie. I will set fire to them and to the house, and I will escape back out the basement window. I will travel on foot to the rendezvous point where Lana will be waiting with the car. She will drive us back to her house where we will leave the car. She will leave the keys in the car and a note to her mom on the dash. We will walk down to the bus station and catch a bus out of town. I think we are both frightened about what will happen, but it feels good. The ticket will take us clear across the country. Stay in one place too long and you become a mark.

Anyway—what else is there to do. Everyone’s always shouting, hurry up, hurry up. For once, we will.

Lana is drunk. I am driving her car and I am not a good driver. We are going down Smith Street past the Wentworth building and I am hoping desperately that the police do not stop us because the only license I have is someone else’s and I don’t think it will pass muster.

We turn on to Gedding, and then on to Seventeenth. We pass up Wilson and I see a good spot. I do some shitty semblance of a parking job. The gas can is in the back. I grab it and start to head out.

Hey, Lana shouts. Come here.

What.

Listen, before a fight, the cornermen slap the boxer in the face, I think, to get them motivated.

How do you know that?

My brother used to watch boxing a lot.

Okay.

Lana slaps me in the face.

That’s awful. Why would they do that?

I don’t know. I’m starting the stopwatch.