Greg Hrbek - Not on Fire, but Burning

Whereas, I, across the street, knew exactly what was burning over there. Two pieces of wood nailed together, a cross, which must have been splashed with a fossil fuel before someone put a match to it. I could smell the fumes through my open window, just barely. Gasoline or kerosene. That deadly sweet odor handed down from the past, like a heritage. As I watched the thing, I was thinking of a dream from the night before. I was back at the party, but it was pouring rain. A muezzin was chanting somewhere. I knew that the song was my sister’s name in Arabic. Karim was there, but he looked like Omar. Suddenly, Keenan appeared. To help me hold him. The same way the Arab boys had held me. I could feel the rain soaking through my clothes, warm like blood; and I understood that Karim was the muezzin and if we just kept him here in this storm, he would begin to experience a sensation of drowning. Keenan was saying: Speak English, nigger. Tell us the name . Those words. Some part of my mind couldn’t stop repeating them while I watched the thing burn, brightly enough to give a pulse to everything nearby. The face of the house. The trunk and lower boughs of a maple tree. And at the foot of the driveway, The Negro. The way its shadow kept shifting in the light of the fire, it seemed to be coming to life.

The next morning, a Saturday, at eight-forty, scared murderously shitless, Dorian Wakefield and Zebedee Hightower march across the cul-de-sac to kill Keenan Cartwright. The if-onlies in the situation are starting to pile up: if only you didn’t call him towelhead, if only we didn’t go to the stupid party, if only they never closed the camps in the first place. But the revisionary wish that seems most crucial at this point is: If only we didn’t give him the names. Which follows directly from: If only Keenan had kept the fuck out of it. They find the sliding glass door of the in-law apartment locked, the vertical blinds drawn across. Also the shade down on the bedroom window. After rapping on it to no effect, they go up the steps to the deck and see, in the kitchen, Mr. Cartwright, one hand holding a cup of coffee, the other down the front of his boxers, scratching.

Knock knock.

He turns, looking at them in sleepy confusion, blinking as if to blink away the hallucination of a couple of leprechauns, then finally comes to the door.

“What do you want.”

“Keenan.”

“Don’t be a smartass, Wakefield.”

Zebedee says: “We’re sorry to bother you, but his door is locked.”

“That’s cause he hasn’t unlocked it.”

“Oh.”

“Oh, what. You late for a pancake breakfast?” Then, looking at Dorian more closely, his face in particular: “Bastard got you pretty good.”

“I guess.”

(Drinking some coffee.) “I don’t suppose that could’ve been your idea last night.”

“What.”

“That little light show.”

While thinking of the burnt ground down the street, Dorian’s heart expands like a balloon, full to bursting, until this man in underwear, with enough hair on his chest and back to qualify as a member of an earlier hominoid species, finally grants them entrance to the house. Through the kitchen they go, down the stairs, into the apartment with its swamp-gas smell of prunes, and into the bedroom.

“Wake up, you idiot.”

“What …”

Zebedee says: “You have to call that friend of yours.”

“What friend.”

“The Nazi,” Dorian specifies.

Keenan, fumbling for his phone: “What the hell are you guys talking about?”

“Don’t you know,” Zeb says.

“Know what.”

Incredibly, he slept through the whole episode, including a 120-decibel fire engine siren. As they fill him in now, Keenan Cartwright’s eyes get clear and his nostrils sort of flare — and when a smile dawns on his face, a feeling moves through Dorian, a kind of emotional address to the self, that goes: You never liked him. You were in third grade together and last year in fifth. But you were never friends until the thing at the mosque. After that, while half the world was harshing on you, he was on your side. But even as the bond formed, you knew it wasn’t strong and it wouldn’t last …

“You have to call the guy,” Zeb says.

“Sure.”

“Now,” Dorian says.

Keenan raises a hand in an appeal for patience. Then, walking into the bathroom, drops his briefs and pushes down his boner. As the piss streams: “What about the other three? I wonder if they all got torched. Prob’ly not. It’d be too obvious. But that woulda been epic. You took some pictures, right?”

Dorian doesn’t answer. He watches him shake off some pale yellow drops and pull up his underwear. Watches him reenter the bedroom. Mostly naked. Still talking about pictures, when Dorian, using both hands, shoves him so hard and unexpectedly on the chest that all the boy can manage is one awkward backward skip before head and ass hit wall and floor — after which he lies there, clenching his teeth, fighting back tears, and finally looking up with the abashment of a dog that can’t understand what it did to warrant such cruelty. And Dorian does not feel a tinge of remorse as he says: “Now call the guy, you shithead, and tell him to stay away before we all wind up in fucking juvenile court.” When Zeb offers his hand to the injured, Keenan just slaps it away. Then Zebedee follows Dorian out the back door, hearing a voice telling him: You should’ve done that. But all you ever do is turn away or run away while other people fight and hate rises up from its own ashes. By what right do you take my name? I who died for you in a past of burning crosses …

On his front lawn, a circle of scorched earth like an impression left by a science-fictional laser beam. Could’ve been anyone. (Well, not anyone. What he means is: anyone with enough malice in him to set fire to a cross.) Happens all the time. (Well, not all the time, but pretty often, and a lot more frequently since the closing of the camps.) He just read a story the other day about a nationwide spike. Most of them supposedly the work of organized reactionary groups. Not lone wolves, not neighbors. I feel like a shit for even letting the thought occur to me. I’ve known Dorian since he was four; the kid isn’t capable of something like that . Well, not on his own, anyway. Meaning what . The Cartwright kid, or the older brother. The brother . Makes sense, doesn’t it. Maybe, but not Dorian . So Dorian is immune to anger, is he? I didn’t say that . A real dove of a kid. They worked it out, and now they’re Lifebook friends . Lifebook. The gesture means something . It means nothing. A click you can take back with a click. It wasn’t him . Sure, whatever you say. Everyone is exactly who they appear to be. Except you, right? You’re the only one with secrets … All of this to himself, within himself, while sitting on the porch, looking out at that scar on the lawn, while the sun goes down, while the sound from the trees gradually dies away, that sound which every day elicits in his mind another comparison: the din of a madhouse, he thought today, the incomprehensible ranting of the insane. Nine o’clock. Ten. The boy is upstairs. Reading calmly at his desk as if nothing of concern has occurred. Unfazed is the word. Well, why be surprised? Why would something like this frighten him? After years inside that fence. He who has sensed many a time in darkness a presence, something stalking him, almost silently, and has turned to behold it, behind and above, inhuman and unmanned, hovering and watching, seeing him with the perfect clarity of the blind, beaming at his body coded pulses of invisible light from an electro-optical infrared system, acquiring him as a target, then thinking and deciding, in the way a robot thinks and decides, if he shall live or die. A boy with such experience is supposed to be intimidated by a couple of burning two-by-fours.