Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

Firebug by Annie Reed

Annie Reed lives in northern Nevada with her husband and daughter. Her short story “The Beginning” was published in Strange New Worlds VI (Pocket/June 2003). She is a graduate of the 2002 Oregon Coast Short Story Workshop, taught by writers Kristine Kathryn Rusch (herself an EQMM contributor) and Gardner Dozois. She is also a recipient of a Nevada literary arts fellowship.

Me and Bobby, we started a fire yesterday in that empty house on Colfax, the one with the ugly puke-green Realty Masters For Sale sign in the front yard. We got in through the patio door, real easy-like. The guys working on the inside, fixing up the place, they don’t always lock up when they leave. I guess they think no-body notices, but I do. Even I know better than to leave a house open like that. Just asking for trouble.

We were outside the AM-PM on Fourth and Garnett, hanging out in the shade, when I came up with the idea. Me and Bobby, we went to AM-PM for drinks like we always do. I had a Mountain Dew with lots of ice. I like lots of ice in the summer, crunch it between my teeth like candy. Bobby was sucking down AM-Pm’s lame-ass version of a sour-berry Slurpee. He stuck out his tongue every now and then just to gross me out, like a blue tongue is all that gross. I’ve seen grosser.

I’d slipped a lighter in my jeans pocket when the AM-PM cashier wasn’t looking. The lighter was clear orange plastic, the kind where you can see the fluid inside sloshing all around. I almost forgot about it until I did that little jump-skip thing I do over cracks in the sidewalk and I felt the lighter poking hard against my hip.

“Wanna see something cool?” I asked.

I took the lighter out of my pocket and showed it to Bobby, and all of a sudden, just like that, I had the idea.

Kinda funny when I think about it, how ideas come to me. I didn’t really want the lighter, hadn’t planned on swiping it. It was just so easy to take.

It’s part of the game, to see what I can get away with. People look at me and expect me to be nice. Bobby says it’s my face, the way I can make it look all sweet and innocent. I think he’s jealous because he can’t. People look at Bobby and just expect him to do something bad.

Like that stupid AM-PM cashier. She was this old lady with rotten teeth and frizzy bleached-out hair and a loser job. She watched Bobby the whole time he was in the store like he was going to stuff his Slurpee in his shirt instead of pay for it, or maybe she thought he’d pull a gun on her and rob her. Just because of how he looks, like he can help it. So I smiled my sweet, innocent smile and paid for my Mountain Dew, and when she went back to watching Bobby’s every move, I grabbed the lighter off the display next to the counter. Serves her right. I hope they make her pay for it.

Bobby didn’t want to do the fire at first. He’s always so scared of getting caught.

“Roberto, man, c’mon, we gotta do this,” I said, and because I know he hates his real name, I said it again, drew it out singsong. “Ro-berrrrr-to.”

He took a swing at me, but I’m faster than him and I ducked out of the way without spilling any of my drink. I could have hit him back, but he’s my friend so I didn’t.

“Don’t call me that,” Bobby said. He looked like he wanted to try to hit me again. “You know I ain’t that freaking name.”

Yeah, I know, but saying it makes Bobby mad enough to do what I want him to. I know it, and he knows I know it, but that doesn’t change things. Bobby’ll do almost anything to prove he’s not Roberto, not some worthless piece of shit like his old man.

“Listen,” I said. “I been inside already. There’s all sorts of stuff in there that’ll burn.”

“Yeah? Then why don’t you go do it? You’re the one who’s got a hard-on about it.”

Hard-on. That’s funny.

Bobby sucked down some more of his drink and pretended to ignore me. But I saw the glint in his eye, and I could tell he was coming around to the idea. That’s one of the reasons he hangs with me. I come up with all the best ideas.

We stood there for a while, finishing off our drinks and watching the traffic on Garnett. Wasting time, but it was Saturday and we had no place special to be. I didn’t want to go home, not yet. There was nothing to do there anyway. There never is.

An eighteen-wheeler roared by, belching nasty-smelling diesel over its rusted trailer. Garnett has a No Trucks sign, but nobody pays any attention. There’s a park across the street from AM-PM, lots of grass, a couple of basketball courts, and a playground with swings and a slide and a little-kid merry-go-round. I guess somebody figured trucks driving by a park where a bunch of kids hang out wasn’t a good thing. Too bad nobody cares. I flipped the truck driver off even though I knew he couldn’t see me, and Bobby laughed.

“This is lame,” I said, tired of just standing around. “Let’s go.”

I tossed the rest of my drink toward the trash. It hit the rim and bounced back on the sidewalk, spilling ice on the hot concrete. Bobby picked up the cup and threw it with his into the trash can.

“What are you, the garbage man?” I asked as I headed off down Garnett. Colfax was four blocks away, the empty house three blocks up.

“Rebound Man,” Bobby said. “He shoots, he scores!”

He did an air-ball jump shot and then started walking with me, and just like that I knew he’d decided to do it.

Never a doubt. Bobby’s my friend.

Seven blocks can take forever when you’re walking someplace you don’t want to go. Your feet drag and the hot sidewalk burns through your shoes until the bottoms of your feet feel like they’re on fire. The sun zaps all your energy, and it’s all you can do to keep on walking.

The seven blocks to the empty house on Colfax wasn’t like that at all. The sun still fried my head and the sidewalk, but my feet didn’t feel the heat. A few cars drove past, but nobody else was out on the streets but me and Bobby. No kids jumping rope or throwing ball. No dads mowing half-dried-out lawns or washing cars in the driveway, no moms pulling weeds in front-yard flowerbeds. Even the dogs that normally yapped their heads off while they chased along after me inside chain-link-fenced yards only barked a couple of times and stayed in the shade.

Lazy, hot Saturday afternoon, and I was so jazzed I could hardly keep from running. I get like that when I’m playing the game.

“Burgers,” Bobby said, his nose in the air, sniffing like a dog.

I smelled barbecue, too. Somebody was in their backyard grilling lunch or maybe an early dinner. Probably sucking down a beer or two and listening to the Giants game on the radio. My stomach rumbled. Barbecue was one of the best things about summer.

“Steak,” I said. “Gotta be steak. Or maybe ribs with lots of sauce. Or chicken. Burgers don’t smell that good.”

“Burgers rule.”

Bobby was Burger Man. He’d eat burgers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if he could get away with it. McDonald’s, Burger King, Jack in the Box, Bobby didn’t care as long as it was a burger. I always figured it was part of him wanting to be Bobby instead of Roberto. Nobody could like burgers that much.

“Burgers suck,” I said, just to piss him off. “Give you Mad Cow Disease.”

“Do not!”

He went to shove me, but I veered off the sidewalk into the street. I mooed at him and he laughed at me.

“Mad Cow,” I said, and mooed again, then we both started to laugh.

Half a block away from the empty house, Bobby started walking slow. He eyed the house like it was going to bite him. It wasn’t anything special, just like any other old house in the neighborhood except for the For Sale sign. Sure, the lawn was dried out and the yellow paint on the outside of the house was peeling, but half the houses we walked by were in worse shape.

“You sure nobody’s there?” Bobby asked, eyeing the rusty old white Toyota parked in front of the house.

“It’s Saturday. They don’t work on Saturdays. I told you, I been watching.”

Watching long enough to know that the Toyota belonged to the house next-door. That meant the neighbors were home, but I could hear the deep thump-thump-thump of a rap beat coming from their house. Whatever me and Bobby did, they’d never hear us.

“I’m hungry,” Bobby said. “We should get something to eat first.”

He was stalling. Maybe he’d decided to back out. I could start the fire myself and it would still be cool, playing the game was always cool, but it wouldn’t be as much fun without Bobby. Friends did shit together, that’s what being friends was all about.

“You backing out on me?” I asked. I stepped up close to him, getting in his face. “Huh? Roberto?”

Bobby backed away from me.

“No,” he said, defiant-like, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I don’t think this is such a good idea. I mean, this is somebody’s house.”

“No, it’s not.” I pointed at that puke-ugly sign. “Nobody lives here, nobody’s gonna care. They’ll just fix it up again.”

“Yeah?”

I smiled my sweet, innocent smile. “Yeah. It’ll make them happy, give them more work to do. They’ll get more money. Everybody’s happy when they have more money.”

“What if we get caught?”

“We’re not gonna get caught.”

I slugged him in the arm, not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to let him know I was getting tired of his shit.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said.

I walked to the backyard gate and pretty soon Bobby followed me like I knew he would. The sidewalk around the side of the house was littered with cigarette butts.

“Look at this.” I kicked at a cigarette butt with my toe. “I bet they’ll blame the whole thing on these guys, smoking on the job.”

“Smoking’ll kill you,” Bobby said.

Bobby’s old man smoked, but it hadn’t killed him yet. Drinking hadn’t done it, either. Maybe he should take up running. I heard that killed a lot of people.

I opened the gate. The hinges creaked and the gate sagged, its wooden slats scraping against the concrete sidewalk. Bobby winced and looked over his shoulder like it was an alarm or something, but I knew it didn’t matter. All the houses around here have tall wooden backyard fences. Everybody wants privacy, and everybody else gives it to them. It’s rude to peek through the cracks in the fence to see what’s going on in your neighbor’s backyard. Once we got behind the fence, we could do almost anything and no one would know.

Bobby walked through the gate and I closed it behind us like we belonged there. No sweat.

Most of the backyard was just dirt, but some of it had been lawn before the workmen trampled it down. Their big, ugly boot prints were all over the place. Scraps of lumber and little bits of chalky walling and rusty nails were ground into the dirt right along with more cigarette butts. In the back corner a couple of piles of dog shit drew flies. I wrinkled my nose against the smell. Debris from inside the house — big pieces of walling and insulation and scraps of wood and little bits of wire — was piled against the inside of the fence, and more stuff was jammed in a battered metal trash can next to the back gate.

The guys who worked here were slobs. Good thing. Hidden underneath all that debris was the little red Sold sign I pulled off the top of the Realty Masters sign the day before. If they’d cleaned up their mess they would have found it. Some people make it so easy to play the game. They deserve what they get.

The sliding-glass patio door was unlocked, just like it was yesterday.

“Easy,” I said. “Told you.”

I slid the door open and grinned at Bobby. It wasn’t my sweet, innocent grin, more like a shared-secret kind of grin. My playing-the-game grin. The best grin of all.

The door opened into a room I guessed was supposed to be the dining room. A paint-splattered plastic sheet covered dirty carpet. The room was empty except for three doors propped up against the walls. Yesterday the white paint on the doors had still been wet. Now the doors were dry, but the house still stank as bad as it had the day before, maybe even worse because it was so hot inside.

I looked at the white door closest to the patio door. The scratches I’d made the day before with a nail in the new paint at the bottom of the lowest panel were still there. Not quite my initials — I’m not stupid — but enough of a mark that if anybody looked close, they’d know somebody did it on purpose. I wondered if anybody would notice before they put the door back where it belonged.

“You do that?” Bobby asked, leaning in to look at the door.

“Yeah.” I laughed. “Cool, huh?”

“You’re a freak, you know that?”

If anybody else had said that, I would have slugged them. But Bobby knows he can call me that and I won’t get mad.

“And you’re the freak’s friend, so what does that make you?”

“Freak Man!”

Burger Man. Rebound Man. Now Freak Man. That was just too much. Bobby could always make me laugh. We stood there on that paint-splattered piece of plastic, busting up in the middle of a hot, stinky dining room over something that was only funny because I was in the game.

We were both freaks, and that was fine by me.

Things started to go bad when I showed Bobby the dead hamster.

I didn’t think it through, I guess. Animals are just animals to me, nothing special. But Bobby, he used to have a dog before his old man found a mess it made and beat the crap out of it. That’s the only time Bobby ever stood up to his old man, and that piece of shit turned his belt on Bobby. He ended up with a bruise on his arm the shape of a belt buckle, and probably more on his back that he wouldn’t show me. I wanted to wrap that belt around his old man’s neck and squeeze, pull it tight until his face turned as purple as Bobby’s arm. I didn’t do it, though. Part of the game is to pick the right time. One of these days it will be the right time for Bobby’s old man.

“C’mon,” I said after we finally quit laughing. “I gotta show you the weirdest thing.”

The dead hamster was inside what was left of a wall in an upstairs bedroom. I found it the day before, just a piece of stiff, dried-up fur with sunken holes where the eyes used to be. The guys working on the house had punched out a hole in the wall between two of the bedrooms, and the hamster was wedged in tight next to a beam in the empty space between the two sides of the wall. I figured maybe it got inside somehow and couldn’t get back out again. Stupid thing probably starved to death.

I thought the hamster was cool. Bobby wanted to give it a funeral.

“A real funeral, you know, like a Viking or something. You wanted to burn something anyway. We could make a funeral pyre.”

All that Bobby knew about funeral pyres came from reading comics. That heroic, send-your-dead-warrior-off-in-a-burning-boat crap. I could have cared less about the funeral, but the idea of a pyre was kinda cool, I had to admit. Barbecued hamster. Better than burgers.

“Well, I’m not touching it,” I told him. “You want to set it on fire—”

“Give it a funeral.”

“Whatever. You’re picking it up.”

It took Bobby a good five minutes to get that hamster out of the wall. The thing must have been jammed in there real tight. Me, I wouldn’t have had the patience, but Bobby wiggled it back and forth real slow. Like he didn’t want to leave even the smallest piece of it behind.

Bobby carried the hamster back downstairs like it was still alive, cradled it in his hands right up next to his shirt.

“That thing probably has bugs in it,” I said. “Worms. They’re gonna come crawling out all over you.”

“Shut up.”

“Slither right up your arm—”

“Shut up.”

“—crawl in your nose—”

“Shut up!”

“—and eat out your brain.”

“Shut up, shut up! You don’t know anything about it!”

Bobby never yelled at me. Never got so mad at me that spit flew out of his mouth and his face got all blotchy red.

I stopped on the stairs and just stared at him. For the first time, Bobby looked ugly to me. Just for a second I saw some of Bobby’s old man in his face, saw other kids with black hair and permanent tans and mean eyes who hid guns and knives in their baggy pants, and I knew that was what other people saw when they looked at Bobby.

He turned away from me and started down the stairs again. Me, he yelled at, but he talked baby talk to the dead hamster, walking down the stairs real slow and deliberate like he was at a real funeral.

“So, where are we going to do this?” I asked him just for something to say.

Bobby didn’t answer me, so I followed him downstairs and through the house as he walked from room to room. He was looking for a place to do it. I thought he’d pick the fireplace just because that’s where somebody like Bobby would start a fire. No imagination. No great ideas. But he surprised me. He took that thing to the kitchen and stopped in front of the sink.

“Here,” Bobby said. “This is a good place.”

He looked at me like he expected me to argue. I didn’t. I was too jazzed. Finally, we were going to do what we came here for. I’d make him pay for yelling at me later.

The kitchen sink was full of gunked-up paintbrushes and dirty rags, and a couple of old cans with some kind of dirty, muddy-looking liquid in them. Something to clean the brushes, I guessed. Not water, because it stank to high heaven. I moved the junk out of the sink, piled all of it on the countertop next to the stove.

“What are we going to use for the pyre?” I asked.

“Wood,” Bobby said, like I was the stupidest person in the world. “Funeral pyres are always made out of wood.”

And there was plenty of wood, right outside in that junk pile next to the fence. I knew better than to tell Bobby to get it. He was still talking baby talk to the stupid hamster, standing there sweating in the afternoon sunshine from the window behind the sink. Fine. I’d get the wood. Better than listening to Bobby anyway.

Finding dead-hamster funeral-pyre size pieces of wood turned out to be harder than it looked. I ended up with scraps of two-by-fours, building-block size, plus a couple of bigger pieces just because they looked cool. I used the front of my shirt like a sling to haul the scraps back to the kitchen, and I dumped the scraps in the sink. The scraps didn’t make a very big pile of wood. I wanted more of a fire than that.

Bobby smoothed down the top of the scrap pile and put the hamster on it.

“Gimme the lighter,” Bobby said.

No way. This fire was mine.

“I’ll do it. It’s my lighter.”

Bobby actually tried to dig the lighter out of my pocket. I pushed him off me. “Get away from me, pervert!” I yelled at him.

“You won’t do it right. You don’t care.”

“You didn’t even want to do it. Roberto.”

“Yeah, well, I do now. You’ll mess it up.”

He kept grabbing at me, clawing at my jeans, at my arms when I tried to push him away. His nails dug scratches in my skin. I was shocked when he yelled at me before, but now I was just mad. He was ruining the game.

“What the hell is your problem, Roberto?!”

I still had one of the two-by-four pieces in my hand. I hit him in the shoulder with it to shove him back. He bounced against the counter, his arms flailing out to keep his balance. His hand knocked one of the cans of paint cleaner over, and the muddy liquid splashed over the countertop and ran in dirty rivers onto the floor.

“Gimme the lighter!” he screamed at me. “This one’s gonna be right, I’m gonna do it right, nobody’s gonna screw it up this time, not even you!”

Bobby charged me. He must have pushed himself off the counter because he hit me like a football tackle, shoulder hard into my stomach. I fell backwards on the kitchen floor. My head bounced against the hardwood and Bobby fell on top of me. My breath whooshed out in one great lungful. I never knew Bobby was that heavy.

I tried to yell at him to get off me, tried to hit him, but my arms didn’t want to work. I felt him dig in the pocket of my jeans, heard him shout when he grabbed the lighter.

My lighter.

Bobby stood up and flicked the lighter on, right in front of me, making sure I could see him do it. I didn’t say anything, just glared at him, worked on getting my breath back. My head hurt, my stomach hurt, and I was so mad, all I could think about was getting the lighter back.

“You don’t know how to do this,” Bobby said. “You don’t know anything at all, just how to make trouble.” His voice was flat and terrible, and I knew this really was the Bobby everyone else saw.

Bobby turned back toward the sink, turned his back on me. I heard the click as he flicked the lighter on again.

Not with my lighter, you don’t.

I had my breath back by then. I reached my hands out to push myself up off the floor and I felt the two-by-four I’d dropped when Bobby hit me. I grabbed it, held it like a baseball bat with both hands. I took two steps toward Bobby and swung hard.

“The fire is mine!” I screamed at him.

The two-by-four hit Bobby in the back of his head. He never even saw me coming. He pitched forward face first into the sink, probably kissed that stupid piece of dead hamster, but he held on to the lighter. Still lit, the lighter and his arm came down on the countertop. Right in the middle of the muddy paint cleaner and the dirty rags.

Suddenly the whole countertop was on fire. Bobby screamed and reared back. Fire climbed up his arm toward his face, like I told him the worms would. His shirt caught on fire, and then his jeans, and I saw his hair start to smoke. Little lines of fire ran down the counter to the wooden floor, reaching out toward me. I backed away, terrified and awed at the same time. I couldn’t let the fire catch me. I couldn’t let it turn on me, not like Bobby had.

Bobby’d quit screaming. He took a stottery step toward me. I backed away farther, into the dining room. The curtains over the kitchen sink were burning, the wooden cabinets, thick smoke choking my lungs. Bobby fell to his knees. Through the flames I could still see the lighter clutched in his hand. The smell... the smell was worse than anything I’d ever smelled, but underneath it all was the smell of barbecue, and my stomach heaved.

I turned and ran.

Bobby’s memorial service is tomorrow. Mom told me I have to go, and that I have to wear a dress. I hate wearing dresses. Bobby’d make fun of me, just like I would if he had to wear a suit.

I think Mom wonders why I haven’t cried about Bobby. I should, and I’ll probably force myself to at the service tomorrow. Tears work almost as well as my sweet, innocent face. So I’ll sit there with all of Bobby’s relatives while they talk in a language I can’t understand, and I’ll look all sad like I should.

Maybe Bobby’s piece-of-shit old man will be there. Someday I’m going to play the game with him. He’s the reason Bobby went crazy about the dead hamster, whatever he did to Bobby’s dog. Bobby would still be here if it wasn’t for his old man. I should do something about that.

Bobby was my friend.

Copyright © 2005 by Annie Reed.