Assorted Fire Events: Stories

ASSORTED FIRE EVENTS

THE FIRST house he torched that day went up in beautiful colors, fantastic, bright, lasting for an hour before the fire department got there. It didn’t matter. The three feet of snow on the ground rendered their tire chains useless. Best thing was vinyl siding: burning hot as it gooped and melted, flames sweeping the sides with fantastic swiftness. A house is built from the outside in, but fire makes its way from the inside out, eagerly, until there is no more inside and just outside. That’s what he liked about it. He stood for a long time watching as the conifers near the house turned brown and wilted, a ring of melted, steaming snow delineating the zone of most intense heat. The footprints he left went up into the woods, looped around back to the grounds of the summer association, large Victorian cottages along the shore of Lake Michigan, maintained by Chicago folk (as his old man said), held frozen in time by codes and bylaws; then in his old snowmobile boots he waded through the drifts to the road and made a run for it. ²

There is nothing particularly funny about fire. Nothing to tickle the funnybone. I had to articulate it to myself in this way because I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m a talker, when it’s to myself, but when it’s to someone else I shut up tight. The thing that would get me laughing is the sound of the fire — the amplification of it, the crackle; because it’s that loud. I mean it’s fantastically loud when the whole cottage is going rip-roaring up. No other sound like it on earth, lively and spunky, the popcorn in hot oil, right before the kernels explode — that tension in the sizzle, you know. The good thing is up here with the snow and the seclusion and all the summer folk down in Chicago, you can burn three or four in a row without much worry. Best is the way such a small little lick of flame can enlarge itself, branching out until it’s just one big motherfucking rip-roaring beast, you know.

In the backyard the kids are playing, maybe seven or eight — the number not mattering because some inner-ear part of him picks up specifically his kids as he sits in the study writing, but the voices are high — the one named Gomer making rebel hoots from the sound of it; that kid Gomer who comes over sometimes (his real name is something else, like Ronald, or Rupert) to share a Popsicle with Stan, bleeding streaks of food coloring along the corners of his mouth, purposely letting it drip like that. Against the sound of Gomer’s hoots, it comes; not exactly like a giant weed whacker (that’s the metaphor he uses later, groping for a similar sound), more like a huge hunk of brittle cellophane crumpled by the hand of God (he’d never use that one). First the kids see the big wall of flames through the trees and between the houses, and then when the wind comes around, the smoke tart with burning plastics, polymers being reduced to carbon compounds, and that gets them running, hooting and hollering with joy, to the scene, first ones there, dancing and shouting because the flames are stabbing all the way up into the sky above the trees, and the smoke is drilling in the direction of the Hudson; down in town there is the guttural, archaic sound of the fire horn grunting out its pathetic call to arms. Shortly, the volunteer crew arrives, happy to be engaged with the real thing for a change. (They burned the old hospital wing, which was being torn down, for practice, two suffering from smoke inhalation.) Right off, seeing the varnish cans on the front porch and learning of the brushes that sat wet with the rags in the sun, the chief knew the cause. This was spontaneous combustion.³

Alone in the quiet of a late afternoon, the brushes nudge each other, soothingly lean into the pile of rags, whispering comments in a soft little sizzle and a thin swirl of smoke, which combines with the dry silence of a neighborhood where most are at work, closing deals, down in the city, doing what has to be done. The brushes talk, the can of varnish bakes, its lid rusted with speckles of rainfall oxidation. The porch was coated on Saturday. Now it’s Wednesday and the snuggling brushes, drunk with the elixir of the varnish, are ready to burst forth in the song of fire.

Shank had to tie the dog down, mouth taped shut, stake it to the ground like a tent and then get the gas can and swirl it around knowing damn well that to touch the match would put himself in as much danger as the dog but going at it with systematic care anyhow with the others hanging back watching and laughing and making light of the darkness of Shank’s desire to burn things alive; the point is getting them alive, like taking a lobster and plunging it in the pot (Shank’s old man is a lobsterman), as if you could count the number of nerve cells, as if you could make an exact record of each fused dendrite. A blue hazy flame rolls around his ankles and the air and then bursts into the dog who, even through the tape, makes a sort of high,

yearning squeak while the flames devour his coat and then his skin and then his body, writhing in heat-wave distortion. No one is sure which was the distortion of the heat and which was the dog’s movement, so much like the monks doing their sit-down self-immolating dances during Nam.

One morning in Rochester, my aunt — mother of five, member of a fine upstanding family with no deep-felt hardships (apparent from outside), on the way to her job at the high school — took a can of gasoline, placed it in car, drove to a quiet cul-de-sac and poured the gas over head and body and lit herself on fire. She died a few hours later, flesh consumed.⁴

The note she left was written in the first person, from the point of view of the gas can, speaking of the sloshing ride, lodged behind the driver’s seat, the floor strewn with candy bar wrappers, then being gripped tightly in her long fingers and embraced against her blue dress, carried out to the end of the street where the air was cool and fresh and smelled of the juniper bush behind them; then the relief of having its soul poured from the long corrugated spout, the air hissing through her small yellow intake valve as it rushed in to replace the fluids — that great draining piss of gas out of her belly — and the clunking kettle-drum thud as she was dropped to the side carefully, with a delicateness very much appreciated. The note she wrote mulled the trials and tribulations of life as a gas can, servicing mainly small engines of the lawn mower variety, being left out on the lawn in the hard heat of summer afternoons, on occasion being taken into the back of the boat to service the small motor, oil mixed in for that; it was a can’s life, a life of being filled, emptied, tapped and shaken, refilled and checked. The gold curl of the liquid inside, upon which floated bits of grass chaff. Always the vapors pushing up against the roof of your mouth, singing, making little arias to the instability of their bonds.⁵

Those old movie newsreels of World War II flamethrowers spewing their lovely tongues into Jap-filled foxholes: long flexing membranes of combustion tearing into the bland dullness of the black and white. Lovely. Lovely.

The plot of fire is nebulous and serene, wildly fanatic and calm at the same time, trailing up curtains and along the undersides of carpet padding, taking its own sweet time and then conversely becoming diametric, logarithmic, taking big gulping gorging sweeps of the floorboards and runners — until it sings sweetly the fantastic house-burning lament, blasting out of windows and licking the roof eaves. You drive up to it stunned and bent over with anguish at the very central fact that what was once around your life — objects of so-called sentimental attachment — is now ash.

Burning things came naturally to Fenton, and he did so whenever and wherever he could. His father assured his mother that it was the natural proclivity of a boy to touch a flame to things. As a kid I did so myself, he assured her. It was a phase the boy would outgrow, he added. The rocket ship was makeshift, a couple of tubes of cardboard taped together and stuffed with wax paper (Fenton was sure that nothing burned better than wax paper), capped by a crude twisted cone of construction paper — dark blue, all jury-rigged to a small slab of plywood. It was the gas. He doused the tubing with gas and then the board and laid it near the side of the garage — in that narrow space between his garage and the neighbor’s — then doused a bit more for good measure, counting, five, four, three, two, one, touching the Bic lighter to the edge of the wood, not feeling the lick, the vibration, the uplift of flame — the small barely visible violet underside of the fume-flame touching his tube socks and gathering around the cuff of his jeans, with a combustion point higher than the hair on his ankles — flame opening to flame itself taking one big heaving pop, gulp, and then roaring up to his face, flinching back, falling forward into it, catching his jeans and his socks and up his leg before he knew what was what, and the dry wood along the garage, too; it had been a long dry summer in which the whole region was baked crisp. It was near fall anyhow, that tart dry smell holding the portents of what was going to happen on the first cold frost-snap night. It was all in a half second, until he was on fire doing the STOP, DROP, ROLL thing just as he’d been trained. (In class they had gone over it, throw the blanket over the body or if you’re alone don’t panic and run but roll on the ground.) But there wasn’t room between the two garages, and he rolled back against the neighbor’s wall and then towards the fire — screaming all the while this high, dog-whistle-pitched squeal that couldn’t be heard anyhow because, across the alley that serviced the driveways of this small Midwestern town, Mr. Jones was roaring swaths of grass with his ill-tuned Lawn Boy, drowning out the screams and the first crackles of the fire. He’d be the first to notice the smoke, first to see it, but too late because by that time both garages were engulfed. (He was hard of hearing but his eyesight was a resolute twenty-twenty.) The inferno would soon leap the garage to the porch and, before the fire trucks could arrive, take the whole side of Fenton’s house and part of the neighbor’s, too, destroying both with enough smoke damage to call them total losses on the insurance rosters.

Fenton’s skin is actually giving off smoke, a swamp misting in the early morn, crawling on all fours, looking slightly ridiculous if you were to view it impartially, as if in a movie, knowing it was an actor in a fire suit, some stunt person like a Chaplin tramp, or in blackface, fireface — really, honestly, smoking skin burning still, not able to scream now for the effort he has to put into moving away from the fire that is moving rapidly (following the soft westerly breeze) — but he can sense it licking his heels, although he can’t feel his heels because the soles of his sneakers have melted into his feet, or what remains of them; it’s a ghastly sight that no one gets to see. (He’s a latchkey kid. Usually he goes in and switches on the TV and kills a good hour before getting his books out of his backpack.) No one is there to see his heroic crawl out of the fire into the fresh air, his singed lungs gasping. When the emergency rescue guys and the fire trucks scream up to the curb he’s in the very center of the front lawn, still smoldering, like a heap of campfire residue. But the men have seen stranger sights, still-living souls with flames dancing out of their necks; people dancing fire dances with their hair going like a torch, things that defy even those whose imaginations are trained by computer animation techniques to accept anything on this strange earth; these guys in the course of fighting fires — the older ones — going into roaring farmhouses full of brittle ancient wood — have seen the fire gods make strange faces, with licking tongues. So Fenton wasn’t a strange sight to them the way he’d be to you if you were to come upon his smoking form. The percentage of his skin damaged (like that of my aunt) was given as a statistic, as if the square inches of body tissue could be charted, cubed off, like square acres of farmland in Iowa. Anyone familiar with the rudiments of such news stories — fire-damaged souls who have their skin grafted in a tortuous series of operations that are (according to many accounts) more painful than the actual original burning; bodies hovering in special flotation tanks, suspended in liquid, sponged off, the wounds oozing for months and years. For anyone familiar with such tales, the story of Fenton’s struggles to survive would be pretty routine. Like Christ, he lay in the tank with his arms out. Like Christ, he suffered for all humankind. Like Christ, he sucked into his skin and nerves the pain of the entire universe. It was a holy event. Eyes dark blue open to the ceiling tiles. His lips parted, trying to speak. Like Christ, he walked into the hot fire of hell and departed with only long purple blemishes and a face that was hard to recognize as human. People walked past that face with their eyes at the sky or their feet, knowing that to look at it would be to laugh out loud. It would be a big, blasting laugh that Fenton’s face would produce in most people, the kind you make at the circus when the clown’s dripping eyes and his goofy smile are painted over the saddest-looking, most pathetic clown-school dropout you’ve ever seen, some guy whose family has been in the circus for generations and has no way out except to keep doing what the family does; he hates the job more than life itself but keeps going and going, from Madison Square Garden shows to small county fairs. In the circus there is fire, too. It’s spun in hoops and thrown from the mouth of God.