The Fires (14 page)

For a long time I concentrated on the hypnotic revolutions of the neon wheel, the movement of a circle: whole and empty. I must have been drunk or strangely dreaming, because the wheel began to lower itself slowly. When the rim hit the ground, it broke off the stand, dragged itself upright, and tilted for a moment before there was a break in traffic and it weaved its way between cars. Some horns honked, but no one crashed, and in a minute the wheel careened into the distance, spinning so fast its yellow and red lights formed a brilliant orange ball.

S
tatic crackled on the radio. A tap on the window. I woke with my face pressed into the ridged vinyl seat and saw a man staring in at me. He had a stern, angular nose—three lines like the ones children draw—and in the flick of light that hurt my eyes, he tapped his fingertips against the glass, looking as if he thought I might be dead. I tried to raise myself up, but my shoul-104 / RENÉ STEINKE

der caught under the steering wheel. He ducked low to see farther into the car. My blouse had come unbuttoned, and my black skirt had bunched up high on my thighs. I flinched to cover up the scar under my bra. The man tapped again on the window. Swallowing hard, I struggled with buttons as I maneuvered around the steering wheel, felt a swell of nausea as I unwound the window handle.

He was wearing a little gold cross pin on the lapel of his suit, and I thought it must be Sunday. “Have car trouble?” he asked, grinning.

My voice was hoarse. “No, I just fell asleep…. I was waiting.”

I rubbed the heavy bones around my eyes, too tired to make up an excuse. If it was Sunday, that would have meant I’d slept two days. “What day is it?” There was already traffic on Lincoln, the hot morning sun eclipsed by the Big Wheel sign.

He must have smelled the bourbon then, or heard me kick the bottle on the floorboard. His lip curled in awkwardly. “Saturday, the fifteenth.”

“Thanks.” I turned the key in the ignition, my fingers weak and shaky. “I need to get home.”

He gathered his eyebrows in a way that ruined the symmetry of his face, nodded so the top of his balding forehead turned shiny. “Can I help you?”

I looked beyond him at his blue Lincoln, where his wife with thin red lips watched out her window.

“I don’t think so,” I said, feeling feverish and wanting to get away. “I’m just going home.”

He put his hand over mine on the steering wheel. “Are you well enough to drive?”

“Of course.” His hands were soft and firm, and something in his timid grip, something about the tension in his fingers and the THE FIRES / 105

way he seemed to want me to tell him what was wrong reminded me of my father. He took back his hand and nodded. I rolled up the window, and after he turned away, watched him walk back to his car.

I bent the rearview mirror so I could see my sleep-swollen face.

A grid of lines pressed into my right cheek, and green shadows cusped beneath my eyes.
If my father were alive, I wouldn’t be like
this,
I thought.

Something webbed in my throat. When he thought something was bothering me, he’d wait to ask me about it in the morning in the truck as he drove us to school, the flat road pulling under us, his fist working the gear shift. I took several deep breaths, then backed out of the parking lot, a dark lace of leaf shade sweeping the windshield.

VII

T
wo guests had just checked out, and after I returned the keys to their dusty boxes, I sat down to glance over the reservations for that night. The day clerk’s ladybug cursive was almost indecipherable. I worried it was only a matter of time before someone asked the right questions of the neighbors or the girl at the drive-in counter, and discovered the fire at the Housemans’

wasn’t an accident.

Jo, wearing a sweater with a yoke of flowers, came in through the side door, pushed through the gate, and sat down purposefully beside me. She heaved her chest and sighed. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s wrong.” We hadn’t spoken since the Wednesday before, and guiltily, I thought about how she’d never told anyone but me how her father sometimes cheated on his bill and drank whiskey in his truck when he was supposed to be fixing someone’s stove. I tried not to look in her eyes.

“Why do you always think something’s wrong? I’m okay.”

She leaned back in her chair and cleared her throat, staring at the desk drawer in front of us. “Why are you sleeping with strangers? You think no one else would want to?”

My chest unclamped. I’d forgotten. Of course she didn’t know about the fire. Not yet anyway. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, 106

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getting up to walk around her. She grabbed my arm and squeezed it. Jo didn’t understand how much control I had over the situation, how they didn’t see me at all, how it wasn’t a question of my sacrificing myself for them the way she assumed. I felt my voice go calm and small. “I know what it looked like, but we just had a drink and talked. He needed to know some things about Porter.”

“That wasn’t it.” She pointed her pretty chin at me.

I closed the guest registry. “You don’t have to believe me.”

“Ella, you have to be more careful. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” She was blinking rapidly, her hair stuck up in three tiny horns near her forehead. She reminded me of cotton dipped in antiseptic, soft and stinging.

“Leave the worrying to my mother,” I said, trying to laugh, but coughed instead. “Believe me, she does it enough.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You didn’t even know him. Was he so irresistible?”

I’d blotted out the banker’s face by then and could only remember his sticky, damp hand. “He was all right.”

She leaned forward, rested her chin on her fist, so her cheekbone jutted out. “Ella, people are talking. David says they’re getting the wrong idea. And I don’t know how you can do it, when there’re plenty of nice guys here in Porter who’d—” There she went again.

“I don’t want to go out with any of them.”

“Why not? Tell me that.” She smelled of deodorant and toothpaste, her paste, her pale complexion blank as silk.

“Because they’re here, and they’re happy.” She drew back and shook her head. “Because they know too much about me already.

A thousand reasons. Don’t you ever do something you know you shouldn’t? Are you so good?”

She puckered her lips, pushed them to the side, and got up. “If 108 / RENÉ STEINKE

you’re going to be like that, I’m going up to Seven to finish the books.” She slid the key from its box and went up the stairs, stamping her feet. I heard her unlock an empty room and slam the door.

If there was gossip about me, there would soon be gossip about her, too, and she worried about those things more than I ever did. She pretended she didn’t care about popularity, but one of her favorite things to do when we were twelve and had just become friends was to play popcorn queen. Because of Umlacher’s popcorn factory, there was a popcorn festival and parade each October, when a high-school girl was crowned. The game embarrassed me because I thought we were too old for it, but to please Jo, I dutifully played. We made a crown out of a headband and some of Marietta’s jewelry and took a tablecloth from someone’s garbage for a cape. We filled paper bags with as much popcorn as we could make, and when the queen was crowned, the other one showered her with popcorn as she walked, lipsticked and rouged, down the street.

Jo went moony-eyed to the popcorn parade and studied the queen’s every move, how she stood and waved as if she were wiping a mirror to see herself better, how she smiled, how she’d done her hair, how she laughed. Jo’s mother had been a queen herself, years before she’d married, had Jo, and finally left for New York.

About an hour later, Jo finally came slowly down the stairs, slapping her foot deliberately on each step. “Ella, I’m sorry.” She was near the bottom. “I shouldn’t tell you what to do, should I?

Just be careful, will you?” She swung around the banister’s last curve and landed squarely on the lobby carpet. “You’re not yourself these days.”

I heard someone singing in the shower in the room above us.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

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She gave me a wary, sideways look, then came toward the desk. “You look more nervous or something. Tired. And you’ve been snapping. Ever since the funeral. Snapping.” She pulled her sweater tightly closed in the front. “I know you’re worried about your mother being skinny and all that about finding your aunt, but don’t get carried away yourself.”

It occurred to me that Jo was the kind of person who would know what to do immediately in an emergency, that I’d never asked her, but she probably even knew CPR.

“I’ll try not to,” I said, putting my head down on the desk.

She’d even told me three or four times about the hotel’s plan for a fire escape.

“Just try to calm down,” she said, coming through the desk gate. “It doesn’t do any good to worry. That’s why it’s a sin.”

B
y the time the firemen got to the Housemans’, part of the kitchen had burned. “Apparently caused by an electrical malfunction,” said the
Vidette,
alongside a picture of the house with what looked like black teeth marks. Fred was quoted, saying he was just grateful not to have lost his home. “In the face of forces like this, electricity, fire, you realize how small we all are, almost insignificant,” he said. He almost sounded grateful for the lesson.

When my mother came to the hotel to tell me the news, her face sagged, but the edge of her skirt and the collar of her blouse were so precisely pressed they looked like tin. She ran her gaze over the sparkles flecking the tight dress I wore and said calmly,

“There’s been an accident. A fire.” I think she’d wanted to make sure I heard it from her first.

I folded my arms and squeezed my shoulders to keep from shaking. As she spoke, running her fingers over the sash to her skirt, her voice trembling, it was as if she were telling me about 110 / RENÉ STEINKE

the first fire I couldn’t remember and she pretended to have forgotten. “It seemed to start in the garage and then spread to the house. I don’t know all the details.” Her ruby ring flared as she opened up her pocketbook, rummaged around for a moment before she clapped it shut again. Narrowing her eyes, she said,

“They were on vacation, you know, in Door County. Don’t worry, no one was hurt.”

I didn’t want her to have any part in cleaning up the cinders.

“That’s a shame,” I said. “At least it wasn’t the whole house.”

In that instant, it seemed only vaguely connected to me.

“That’s right.” She tried to smile and fixed her collar. I could see her nerves strung tightly beneath her papery skin, and I knew, at any moment, one of them could snap.

“And thank goodness no one was in there,” I said. I meant that much—I had only wanted to scare them.

F
ire is meant to be stolen. If we’d been born with it, as a natural secretion from under our fingernails or from the moisture in our lips,
if it were an element tricked from the rub of skin against skin, or some
electricity in our hair, if it ignited our livers, or trilled in our blood, no
one would bother hoarding it If it couldn’t burn us, it wouldn’t kindle
happiness either.

A window eave browns and curls into a witch hat, a brass doorknob
blackens to a crusty rock, a doll’s head melts into a perfect pink puddle.

No matter how morbid my mood, afterward I always feel nimble, quick,
and light, a phoenix flapping over its spoils.

I
began to listen for Paul’s footsteps. They creaked in the hallway upstairs, and his boot soles tapped on the pavement in the side alley, but in the lobby, silenced by the carpet, he star-THE FIRES / 111

tled me. It amused him to see me start or gasp, and he never warned me.

Until he’d come to the hotel, we’d never had any trouble. Two weeks after he started, a brawl broke out between a couple of drunks—they danced down the stairs holding one another by the shoulders. A few days later, I saw a block-faced man, his hair greased boyishly into his forehead, staring at me through the window. Paul calmed the drunks and chased off the Peeping Tom as if we’d needed him all along and had just been lucky nothing bad had happened there before. It made him happy, I thought, to feel that he was protecting us.

He slid into the lobby three or four times a night for his break.

The blue of his uniform would catch at the edge of my field of vision and, as he stepped closer, magnified the blue of his eyes, which were deep and intense, but he had the squat nose of a boy.

I’d find some work to do then—dusting out the key boxes or polishing the keys, re-counting the money in the change box. I didn’t want to be drawn into another one of his spiral-staircase kinds of conversations. He asked me once or twice if anything was wrong, but I just said there was a lot of work to do.

Whenever he got up from the chair to get ready to do another round, he had a way of opening and closing his mouth as if he were tasting something. He’d stuff his hands into his pants pockets, jiggle the change and keys. Except for the times he sneaked up behind me in the lobby, he usually made as much noise as someone walking alone in the woods, trying to make the wild animals aware of his presence.

After a few weeks I noticed his walk began to slow down. He seemed to pause more on his rounds—at the curb outside, at the window on the stair’s landing—and I wondered what he was waiting for, at these points without windows or locks, if he was just

112 / RENÉ STEINKE

resting, or had heard something suspicious, or was only hoping for company.

W
hen they burned witches at the stake, it was proof of their guilt
if they didn’t ignite immediately and tried to get away, or if at
the end, anything was left besides charred bones. These things meant
they’d publicly demonstrated their magic, but only because they’d been
forced to. I wondered what they said about the ones they’d burned who’d
proved innocent?