The Fires (2 page)

My mother’s hands were clenched. The fingernails bitten down to the quick and the torn red cuticles resembled my grandfather’s hands, which were huge, out of proportion, even, to his six-foot frame. But my mother’s hands were small—rough white knuckles and fragile fingers with swollen joints—the hands of a woman who worried too much. I knew she just wanted to get this over with, to go back to our routines. That was how she managed, structuring each day like a house she couldn’t leave.

“It’s warm in here,” I said, folding my palms together in my lap. There was a marbled amulet of skin around my left wrist, and though I’d grown used to hiding it, I didn’t now. Its ugliness even pleased me. I stared at the rivulets of pink and white, the strange curvy lunge the scar took toward my thumb.

The driver stopped short at a red light, and the coffin rattled in its straps. It was easier to fathom his death now that they’d closed the coffin and put away the portrait of him in middle age that had been propped on the lid. It had been the undertaker’s idea to do that, “an old Midwestern tradition,” he’d said, but it hadn’t been comforting to see his young face battle with the dead one. I’d noticed my mother looked only at the coffin, but had kept her eyes on the collar of his shirt, the pointed tips and the knot of the tie.

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We drove past the Paradise Lounge, its neon palm tree sign flashing pink and green. It was a place where I could dodge my reflection in the bottles against the bar’s mirror, or disappear in the shadowy tables pushed up against the wall, but people who knew me wouldn’t have believed I ever went there.

“I didn’t see Mrs. Schone, did you?” My mother didn’t really care whether or not this friend of my grandmother’s had come—she was only afraid of what else one of us might say.

“In the back,” I said.

She nodded, her face gray as cement. I wanted to take her hand, but she’d clenched them tightly in her lap on the opposite side and leaned away from me, against the door.

We drove through the graveyard entrance past a white set of praying hands, taller than a man. I thought about pulling the flask of schnapps from my pocket and drinking from it—a small motion, really, just the lift of the fingers, a firm twist—but even a motion this small seemed impossible.

We wound along the narrow gravel road, past stone angels and small, bent trees, and a little farther on we stopped in front of the fenced family plot. We got out of the hearse, and slowly walked to the grave site.

Car doors slammed. A man said, “You never know, do you?

In his sleep? Was it a stroke?”

“Something like that.”

My blouse pinched under the arms, and from the strain of holding tears back, my nose was running. There was a rustle of dress clothes behind me as people whispered about how kind my grandfather had been, how he’d lived a full life, how much he’d loved his roses, how they’d seen him, healthy, only the day before he died. I knew then that his death didn’t belong to him, that our lie had covered his final escape. We didn’t even discuss it, we’d

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learned so well to keep the surface of life unwrinkled and clean, like a well-made bed.

“Dear friends, we are gathered here to remember a man who fought the good fight.” Pastor Beck was standing in front of us, next to the perfect rectangular grave, his white robe blowing dramatically in the breeze. I stood behind Marietta and my mother and looked down at their narrow ankles, their heels sunk into the soil. Pastor Beck bent to gather some dirt, and when he stood up again, dropped it from his fingers over the grave. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” They’d told themselves he hadn’t meant to vanish, but someday we would have to admit he meant to leave us. My mother’s shoulders began to shake, her fingers grasping at air.

I couldn’t listen to most of the homily, but stood separate from it all, as if I were looking on through a screen door—just a thin wire mesh, but I didn’t have anything sharp enough to break through it.

Marietta leaned forward, her eyes watery. My mother glowered at one of the poles holding up the tarp above us, as Pastor Beck went on, “For all of us, but especially for Marietta, for Catherine, Hanna, Ella.” Cars shushed from the highway. No one had seen Hanna, my mother’s older sister, for several years, and her name had been set apart from all the others for so long it had a holy sound that hurt my chest.

As the men lowered the coffin on ropes into the ground and one by one we tossed carnations into the grave, I thought,
She
doesn’t even know this is happening.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead and stared at a tin vase of silk flowers that had tipped over in the grass.

Afterward we went to the graveyard pavilion for coffee and a potluck supper. The smell of tomato sauce and cream of mushroom soup was so thick in the air, something swiveled in my stomach. My best friend Jo was in the corner talking to her fiancé, THE FIRES / 9

but no matter how much I wanted to go over to her and say
Thank
God you’re here. I can’t stand it. Let’s go,
the space between us seemed too loud and crowded to cross. I leaned toward my mother, whispered in her ear that I didn’t feel well, and took a step back. She turned to me, stumbling over her shoe. I knew how badly she wanted to keep her composure for these people, but her grief made her clumsy.

Marietta was distracted, accepting compliments from a group of elderly women on her new black dress. “I didn’t have one,”

she said in a high, prim voice. “I like colors.”
She doesn’t want
anyone to blame her,
I thought.

I slipped out the screen door, hoping not to see anyone. It was dusk by then, and the graveyard looked magnetic and still as I wandered the spindled paths, fingering the torn envelope in my pocket, not exactly telling myself where I was going, but I knew.

My mother would worry when she noticed I’d left the pavilion, and though it pained me to think of her searching the room, asking people if they’d seen me, I was used to her worry, and there usually wasn’t any way to avoid it.

I turned onto the highway and walked on the gravel shoulder.

Seven years before, at my father’s funeral, I’d also watched myself walk among people and my mouth form words, all the while floating above like a torn-up cloud. They hadn’t been able to find an organist to replace him, and the service had been silent. So many tepid voices and gingerly handshakes—as if death made people move in slow motion, disturbingly out of tempo in a way that would have annoyed him.

I walked past the popcorn warehouse and a field of munching cows. By this time the sun had blurred behind the trees, and my head was spinning. I’d gone as far as the paint-tester site and in my pocket felt the flask, the envelope, and the fold of the matchbook.

10 / RENÉ STEINKE

It was a field of shingles, propped up on legs, as if paint samples grew and could be harvested. The company must have figured if a housepaint lasted two winters in Indiana, then it would be durable enough to last two years anywhere in the country. In the dusk, the gray and green boards looked muted, the whites and yellows more intense.

Drinking from the flask, I walked down a row of white shingles, each a slight variation with a different name:
Granite, Shell, Bone.

I stopped in front of one near the end. Where the paint had worn away, the plank showed strands of dull gray wood. Not durable enough. I stood there and looked out at the dozens of shingles on wooden legs like chairbacks in an empty theater, whites, yellows, greens, browns. I straightened up, took a deep breath, and in a steady, clear voice, said, “He poisoned himself.”

Pulling the flask from my pocket, I unscrewed the cap and took a mouthful of schnapps. A sharp sensation cut along my teeth. I didn’t particularly like it, but that was part of its appeal, along with the numbness I first felt along the bridge of my nose.

I was getting pleasantly drunk and didn’t look at my hand pull the matchbook from my pocket, feel along the cover to pluck one out, hold the two sides together as I pulled the head against the sandpaper strip until it snapped and flared. At the funeral I’d felt all those eyes expecting me to come apart, the truth about what happened pulled from my skin like straw out of a stuffed animal.

But I’d kept our secret crinkled next to the flask in my skirt pocket.

With the heat pulsing in my fingertips, I carefully set the match on the flat rotten edge of the gray-white shingle and stood close enough to protect the little paw burning at my waist. It was thin at first. I was afraid it would go out. I cupped my hands around it, and my palms lit up, pale and wrinkled, as the flame swelled THE FIRES / 11

toward them. When I pulled away, it leaped along the top of the board.

The yellow flames muscled and flinched. The wood blackened.

I wished I could have asked him what it felt like to drink arsenic, if it was tasteless or somehow sweet, if it numbed you slowly like alcohol, finger by finger, or if it suddenly stopped your heart like a bullet. I felt a press behind my eyes then, not because I couldn’t ask but because—despite the habitual affection between us—if he’d lived, I wouldn’t have had the courage. I could count on one hand the things he and I could talk about.

When the first Buddhist set himself on fire in Cambodia, my grandfather, rustling his newspaper, had said, “It’s a sad thing, isn’t it, how they believe burning themselves alive is a good religion.” I tossed the envelope with his scrawled marks into the flame, watched it crumple and wither in the blue center. I didn’t think we’d ever know what he’d meant to write, and the thought of how much we’d misunderstood him, how little he’d let us see, put a soreness in my throat I couldn’t swallow.

The fire hurried higher in the air. He’d usually kept his hands fisted, whether leaning back in a chair or walking into the next room, and he’d often stood at the kitchen sink, ferociously scrubbing them ten or twenty times a day, sometimes until they bled. One hand viciously grabbed the other, slid away, and the other, released, did the same, the water coming out so hard from the faucet that it splattered up in the sink and we all had to raise our voices to cover up the clamor.

The yellow light circled around me in the gathering darkness.

The flames jabbed at the air and chewed through the board, fell off the legs and rolled in the dirt. I stepped back, crossed my arms on my chest, and rubbed the lumps of my shoulder bones, my face prickling in the heat.

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It was usually the only relief, this hot, upside-down waterfall and its salty light. It ebbed first beneath my eyelids and then under my tongue, soaked through my muscles and veins and gently wore at them until I lost strength in my legs and could barely stand.

Under my blouse, I touched the silky part of my stomach, then moved my hand under my damp breast to the braided scar, a core of old pain to hang on to. The wind quickened and shrieked.

The fire bent over and flicked sparks into the dry weeds.

W
hen I walked back to town, I went to Jo’s apartment, thinking I would tell her, but when I got there, and we were sitting among her girlhood pink-and-gold bedroom set, the canopy bed shifting above us, I couldn’t. She had been exercising, and a calm, pious female voice on the tape recorder kept giving instructions and counting. Jo tried to comfort me, but I couldn’t hear her. It kept pricking at my skull:
He killed himself. He killed
himself.

I left Jo’s and went back to the hotel and changed. The dress was red and fit so tightly you could see the tilt of my hipbones in the sheen of the silk. Glass beads cuffed the sleeves and ringed the hem in black circles, and a rhinestone hung on the catch to the zipper in back. I’d found it that summer at a yard sale, crumpled under a set of chipped dishes.

At eleven that night I went to the Paradise Lounge to get drunk so that maybe I could sleep. It was so late I hadn’t planned on meeting anyone, but this Billy sat down on the stool next to me.

He was from Appleton, Wisconsin, and said he worked for an insurance company, though with his wide purple mouth and honey-colored skin, he looked awkward and too young in a suit.

When he ordered his drink, he turned to me and asked if I knew any good places to eat. He stared at my breasts and then at my THE FIRES / 13

eyes. He took out a little notebook and wrote down what I said, pushing out his puffy bottom lip and squinting at his pen.

Somehow, the diner on Willow Street led to our talking about basketball. He told me about his high-school team and then about his sister, who was fat and a good card player—but pensively, as if he were eighty years old and these things were already lost to him. In his hunched shoulders, I recognized a choked sadness that reminded me of my grandfather.

To change the subject I said I wanted to go to Paris and asked if he knew any French. “La Porte—that’s a French name, isn’t it?”

He pushed his glass to the edge of the bar. Even as it shunned strangers, Indiana hoarded exotic names—La Porte, Valparaiso, Vincennes—as if it could contain all the world and obliterate the need to travel.

“Doorway to the Midwest,” said the bartender, pouring.

“No. You? Polly whatever?” He turned back with a new drink and a little bounce. His lips were shiny with booze, and I could tell he was nervous. It made it easier.

“A little,” I said, laughing. I glanced down at his fingers wrapped around the glass and saw his thumb cock back.

“Say something.” Gulping his drink, he leaned toward me. He had nice hazel eyes.

“Est-ce que la douche est chaude?”
I said.

He stirred the ice in his glass with his finger. “Say something else.”

“I could say anything, and you wouldn’t know the difference.”

“I know.” He nodded. “Say anything. It sounds nice.”

“Voulez-vous aller à la plage?”
I said.
“Comment allez-vous?”
I could only remember the questions from the phrase book. Tearing his napkin contemplatively into little squares, he said, with the false sincerity of a drunk, “I have a feeling you’ll go there sometime.” He leaned in close to me and spoke softly, “A pretty girl 14 / RENÉ STEINKE