At the End of the Road (8 page)

Up until now, Kenny Ahearn’s life had been about cultivating the persona of Kenny Ahearn—building him piece by piece like a playwright creating a character for the stage. The character of Kenny that Kenny had created was a low-key figure. Likeable, but forgettable. He owned his own tow truck and built Kenny’s Towing around it. It was a masculine profession. And of course he was a church deacon—a position of negligible importance in the church, but expected as a man reached a certain age. And he did good deeds within the church, serving the community, but nothing that would draw undue attention. Yes, he’d visited his own fair share of the lame and enfeebled.

He’d never married or fathered children, but in this part of the South, there were always certain men who lived with their widowed mothers long into adulthood. It was a cultural stereotype.

But all that was behind him now. There’d be no more Kenny’s Towing. Now he’d be drawing a disability check every month. No more going to church and praying for other people. Now they’d be praying for him. The stroke had cost him the use of half his body, but it had freed him of all those artificial roles society expected him to play out. Now society expected him to be nothing more than a cripple, someone they could bring casseroles to and then forget. Which was fine by him. Yes sir. He’d never really wanted to play those parts. Never actually wanted to drive a tow truck. And, truth be told, he hadn’t shed a tear when Mama had died. They could do the good deeds within the community their own selves. He’d never wanted any of it.

And, more than anything else, Kenny had never wanted to be a fucking deacon in the fucking church in the first fucking place.

Kenny Ahearn sighed contentedly and licked his lips.

long tendrils of morning glory, towering stalks of polk salad, and hard tufts of crabgrass buffered the stretch of woods behind their house. Grace and Kyle played there sometimes, digging holes and marking them for the treasure hunt game. And it was a good spot for starting fires.

They were both fascinated by fire.

It had been about a month since the woman’s car had flipped over on Eden Road. The police lady had not come back in all that time, so Kyle had put the event out of his mind. He had decided that someone must have come along and helped the woman turn her car back over, and probably she had not been hurt as bad as it looked.

This day Kyle took a single kitchen match from the cabinet over the stove. It was the strike-anywhere kind with a fat red phosphorus head. It was late summer, and the weed-covered field was baked dry, the dirt hard as rock, the dense weeds were dead and straw-like. There was a pretty good breeze blowing, so, shoulder-to-shoulder, they hunched over the match and struck it on a rock.

Mama had been in the basement hunting for something when he took the match. He’d seen her come back up carrying three boxes of Mason jars, and pulling her pressure cooker from under the cabinet. Kyle knew that she would be in the kitchen the rest of the day canning green beans or pickling okra or putting up muscadine jelly. So this was their one match, their single opportunity to play with fire.

They went to the farthest corner of the field, out of sight in case Mama looked out the kitchen window. They scooped out a hole as best they could and hunted up some rocks and built up a stone ring to hold the fire. Their bodies formed a little cave over the pit. Kyle struck the match, and it flared beautifully into life—the flame piercing their eyes and awakening something ancient in their minds. The sulfur smell stung in their noses. Once the phosphorus died down and it was just the wood stick burning, a gust of hot wind snuck through their body barrier, and the flame flickered. Kyle was sure it had gone out. But they pressed their bodies together even harder and hunched down a little tighter, and the flame sprang back up, licking the wood. With the utmost care, Kyle lowered the burning match down to the little pyramid of dry leaves, straw grass, and tiny twigs.

The kindling took immediately and Kyle and Grace rocked back away from it as the fire leapt up.

growing it. It was fun adding progressively bigger sticks, careful not to put on too much at one time. Once the fire was going good with a solid bed of coals, they started finding different things to burn. They found some red berries in the woods that would at first sizzle then blow open when the heat caused gases inside them to rapidly expand.

With Wonder Woman in one hand, Grace raced back into the woods and found a whole bough that drooped with the berries. Kyle was the Fire Master, so she presented him with the heavy cluster of berries. First he added some more sticks to the fire and got the flames roaring high. He held the berries out, putting them in the heart of the dancing flames. They sizzled like Chinese noodles, then turned black. Then, like a string of firecrackers, the berries exploded—bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam. Grace and Kyle both screamed—not from the little explosions, but because the scalding hot berry pulp struck them like shrapnel.

Kyle wasn’t wearing shoes or a shirt, so the exploding pulp caught him full in the chest. And each hit hurt bad, like a bee sting. But he couldn’t stop to inspect his wounds. Grace was screaming. His first thought was that her piercing cry would carry to Mama in the house and she’d come out to find out what had happened. In his mind, he saw Mama furious that he’d gotten Grace hurt and sending him to the crape myrtle tree in the front yard to pick out his own switch for the whipping that would leave raised red welts on the tender backs of his legs. Mama would be so mad, she might not stop until the welts beaded with blood. So, it wasn’t altruism that propelled Kyle to disregard his own wounds and tend to Grace’s first.

Grace had both hands cupped to her face, screaming bloody murder so loud it hurt his ears. Kyle pulled her to him, cradling her head against his chest. He soothed her with a long sonorous shushing sound right into her ear, “Shhhhhhhhhh . . . Shhhhhhhhhhh . . . Shhhhhhhhhhhh. . . .” He stroked her long brown hair and held her tight as he could. And before long Kyle felt some of the tension leave her body. She started moaning in a baby voice, “I want Mama. I want Mama. I want Mamaaaaaaa.” This sounded bad. If he had to, he’d take her to Mama, but he wanted to see for himself first.

“Let me see,” he said. “Let me look at it.” Gentle, Kyle pulled her hands away from her face and looked. It wasn’t bad. There were three pinprick burn marks in a short diagonal. One at the scalp line, then in the middle of her forehead, and one right at the corner of her eye. The red spots were already fading. They didn’t look any worse than mosquito bites. And that’s what they would say they were if asked. The one at the corner of her eye scared him. Mama was always warning them not to do certain things because they might put out an eye, and this certainly looked like it could have put out an eye. But it hadn’t, and the physical damage could be explained away. They were safe.

His chest was a different story. Kyle had been standing a lot closer to the fire than Grace, so the scalding berry flesh had been hotter when it hit him, and there was a lot more of it. They both looked at his torso. Kyle’s belly and chest were covered in raised red dots. And each dot stung like an ant bite. He looked a lot like he had the year before when he had a bad case of the chicken pox. He wouldn’t be able to explain this. But his face was unmarred. It was all on his chest and belly. Kyle knew all he had to do was keep himself covered, be careful not to undress in front of Mama, and she’d never know. He was safe. They had managed to do something very stupid, get themselves hurt in the process, but not have to suffer their mama’s wrath.

This took away some of their enthusiasm for experimenting with the fire. They just sat there, hurt, and glad they weren’t hurt any worse than what they were. After a while, Kyle picked up a pinecone and tossed it onto the ashy embers. It smoked a minute, then caught fire, the pinesap acting as an accelerant. Then Grace saw a seedpod from a magnolia tree and threw it on the fire, but it didn’t burn so good. Then she got to looking around for something that would burn better. Kyle too. And soon they were right back in it, their wounds just fading memories.

Kyle found a plastic milk jug mostly buried in the dirt. He dug it up and held it out to the fire. The jug blackened then bubbled then burned. It was amazing. The plastic drooped and elasticized. A poisonous smelling smoke stung his nose. Green flames took hold of the bubbling plastic. Grace stopped what she was doing to watch. Kyle was, after all, the Fire Master.

The melting plastic started to drip from the burning end. Fat drops of green flame that made laser beam sounds as they fell, that sounded to Kyle like sound effects in a science fiction movie. But the Fire Master had to drop the jug into the fire when the flames raced up toward his hand. They stood over the fire and watched the plastic coalesce into a burning, molten pool. Kyle found a fat stick and stuck it in. He wrapped the burning blob around the end of the stick like spaghetti on a fork. Now he had a stick that dripped sizzling green orbs of fire.

When Kyle wasn’t paying attention, a drop of molten plastic landed square on the top of his bare foot in a quarter-size dollop. It stung like the devil and seriously burned his skin—far worse than the berries. He couldn’t brush it off. The plastic had seemingly melted right into his skin, hardening immediately. Kyle reached down and pulled it off—taking a goodly layer of flesh with it. It hurt bad, but he was too fascinated with his wand of dripping green fire to stop and appreciate the pain. It was just one more wound he’d have to hide. In fact, Kyle would be hiding this one for months to come. He would have to wear shoes and socks every day to cover it. And every day the burn would seep plasma and platelets that would soak into his sock and then harden into a scab. And every night, no matter how carefully he tried, when he took off the sock it would pull off the scab. The wound took three months to heal. And Kyle would have a perfectly round scar on the top of his foot for the rest of his life. But Mama never found out.

Right that moment though, the amazing green liquid fire took prominence over pain. As it got hotter, the flaming green drips progressed into a steady stream and Kyle was able to draw out lines and circles and patterns of fire in the dirt. Grace clutched Wonder Woman and watched him drawing with liquid fire.

All good things come to an end, and eventually the plastic consumed itself. Kyle headed off for the trash cans lined up behind the house to see if he couldn’t find another milk jug.

“Kyle!”

“What?”

“Look.”

Kyle turned and saw three places where the weeds had caught fire. The fallow field was more or less bare dirt in the little spot they had tramped down and used for playing, but farther out it was clotted with husky stalks, unruly weeds, and assorted undergrowth—most of it dry as bone.

The three little fires didn’t worry him too much, but they clearly needed to be dealt with before they grew unmanageable. He went to the farthest one and stamped it out with his bare foot. The next one was too hot for that, so Kyle found a flat rock and stamped it out that way. He went to the third little fire and threw the rock on top of it.

“Kyle, look.”

The second fire was still out, but three more fires had sprung up in circumference around it. These were in the denser undergrowth, and the dead dry vegetation caught like it was drenched in kerosene. Kyle smashed the flat rock down on one fire and extinguished it with two good blows, but then he saw what the problem was: The force of the tamping motion and the feathery dryness of the weeds and brambles sent tiny sparks and embers into the air, little emissaries of fire that touched down and repopulated their kind.

“Help me, dammit!” Kyle yelled at Grace. And he thought it must have been the edge of fear in his voice that broke her from her blank staring fascination, and prodded her into action. He was the Fire Master, and if the Fire Master sounded scared, the time for action was at hand.

Grace dropped Wonder Woman and sprang into wild movement, stamping out the little fires. But she didn’t understand the nature of the problem like Kyle did. Later, when Kyle learned the story of the Hydra at school, it would have special relevance for him. For every fire that Grace stamped out with her little sandled foot, three more took its place. There was no way to keep ahead of it.

After a few minutes they both just stopped and watched. The field was afire. And it amazed them. They were adrift in a sea of flame, little sorcerers whose magic had gotten away from them. They’d never seen anything like it. And a sense of the deepness of the trouble and level of punishment that Kyle had just created for himself began to dawn. But that sense was soon dwarfed when the strong breeze pushed the fire forward and it jumped the field and took hold in the woods. The towering pine trees caught in no time, their sticky, inflammable sap hissing and screaming in protest. It was a hundred-foot wall of flame, growing by the second. All told, by the end of this day, despite the best efforts of the Douglas County Fire Department, the fire would take out seventy-five acres of trees. Banked by Sweetwater Creek on one side, and Eden Road on the other, the wind pushed it straight to the reservoir.

Even today, when Kyle Edwards says his prayers at night, he thanks God for letting the wind blow northeasterly that day, into the woods, and away from his house and the other houses on Eden Road.

Kyle came to realize that in truth, this was the day that everything changed. That the black path to damnation was paved with ash. It wasn’t because of the woman on the road; it was because of the fire. God might have been looking the other way on the day Kyle caused the woman to wreck her car. But not on this day. On this day God was watching. He saw. On this day, He took notice.

On this day, the Fire Master became Servant of the Ash.