The Fires (7 page)

I’d come to like bar talk, that benevolent, inquiring chatter that didn’t ask or answer much, but if you said more than you wanted to, if you got careless, it wouldn’t hurt anything either.

He tucked his rag into his pants pocket, folded his arms on the bar, and asked where I worked. “The Linden,” I told him.

“Oh.” He arched his brows and nodded. “Good job?”

I nodded. “I get tired of seeing all the same faces I went to school with. At work, at least I get to meet new people.”

He pulled out his gray rag and swiped it across the circle-stained, shellacked bar. “People are friendly here,” he said, and I thought he must have misunderstood me.
Of course they are,
I thought.
They have no choice.
The circles cut into one another, formed tangled chains. I pictured the place Hanna lived, a city, I was certain, a place where it was safe to be rude once in a while.

The door opened, and in the last afternoon light, all I could see was a narrow silhouette walking forward until the door shut behind him and his face cleared out of the shadows. He sat down on the stool next to me and flattened his palms on the bar.

“Bourbon, please.”

He had a long, handsome face, pale eyes, and curly hair. Right away, I could tell he was from out of town. He put a cigarette between his lips and struck a match. “You smoke?” he said through the corner of his mouth. I stared into the wiggling seed in his fingertips, thinking of the field of yellow it could grow.

“No,” I said.

His name was Strom, which reminded me of an old cowboy’s guitar. He was a high-school teacher, in town to comfort a brother whose wife had left him, but he drank like one trying to drown his own misery, and I liked him.

We started talking about local legends and characters. I could make Porter sound exotic when I wanted to. I told him about the octogenarian twins who owned a restaurant and a bike shop and THE FIRES / 47

spoke a private language somewhere between Spanish and glos-solalia, about the wooly mammoth someone had found in the moraine, which the judge ruled had to be split in half between the finder and the landowner, making it practically worthless.

The front half was in the natural-history museum in Gary, hung up like stuffed game; the rear end was in somebody’s attic.

“Really,”
he said to everything, not smiling, but nodding. I told him about the cursed white house said to be haunted by the mad wife of the mayor who used to live there. “There’s a statue of Venus in what used to be the garden. Supposedly she puts rocks in the statue’s hand whenever a Porter girl loses her virginity.”

He seemed impressed by this, judiciously extending his lower lip. “If you go there,” I said, “her hand is always overflowing.”

Encouraged by his interest, I told him about Mr. Bell, who owned the hardware store, how he changed the stock so inad-equately there were still packages of wire with pictures of men wearing stiff hats and paint cans with labels showing women wearing aprons and sausage curls. He talked constantly and once told me about a Klan speech he’d heard as a boy. A grand wizard stood up in front of a large crowd over by the courthouse and preached about the dangers of Catholicism, saying the nuns and priests held orgies and that they wanted the Pope to gain control of the country, take away our religious liberties and economic freedom for the sinister uses of the Vatican. The grand wizard was jumping up and down as he talked and said, “The Pope’s going to start right here with Indiana because he knows we’ve got good people. In fact, the Pope himself is on that five-o’clock train,” and he pointed toward the station. A crowd ran from the courthouse to meet the train. The cars were all empty except the last one, which held just one passenger, a man. The men rushed in and pulled him off by his coat collar, threatening to lynch him.

I paused a moment, “He was a carpet salesman from Detroit.”

48 / RENÉ STEINKE

Strom laughed, shaking his leg, letting the side of it graze mine.

Jiggling the ice in his glass, he looked into it and finished off the last sip. “I get the feeling people can be happy here, but a lot of them must ferment. My brother will probably never leave now, but he just gets more and more bitter every time I come.”

He didn’t seem to feel my hand brush his knee, and this made me nervous. I didn’t know what to make of it.

“You’re not, I can tell,” he said. “You’ve got a sense of humor about all this.” He circled his glass around in the air. There was a song I liked on the jukebox, about black-haired girls and their blue eyes, and I felt myself humming.

The bar was filling up, and we had to lean in close to hear one another. I told him about my great-aunt Emily, who’d become famous as the window-smasher of Calumet, years before I was born. One day she left her husband with their three small children and walked into town with a shovel. She smashed the windows of a storefront, a lawyer’s office, and a barbershop. Then she got on a train to Bloomington and smashed the windows of a beauty parlor, a hat shop, a feed store, and a bakery. She’d bought a cross-country ticket. She made it through Crawfordsville before they put her in jail and called her husband. As soon as they brought her home, she was at it again. She went on like this for three years, smashing windows in a pattern the police couldn’t follow, sometimes three towns in a week, sometimes none for six months. Since her husband paid generously for the damages, no one pressed charges. It got to the point where people began to recognize her face from the newspapers, and when they saw her coming, they’d press themselves against the back walls of the room and protect their faces with chairbacks and catalogues.

Amazingly, no one was ever hurt, and after a while she seemed to get bored with it. She sighed and shuffled along with the shovel slung across her shoulder as if it were her job.

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In Marietta’s house there were newspaper clippings of her sister in frames in the hallway. “Oh, there was nothing wrong with Emily,” my grandmother would say. “She just got angry one day and couldn’t stop herself.”

“You inherit any of that?” Strom jiggled his leg, so his knee caught on my skirt a couple of times.

The whiskey sours twisted through my rib cage. “She’s old now,” I said. “I only see her at family reunions.” (She’d been ill the day of my grandfather’s funeral and hadn’t been able to come.) I pulled at a strand of hair near my eyes. “But I can get reckless.”

He told me about the basketball team he coached, the Wolves, and about Winter Garden, where he liked to go camping in Minnesota and the deer would come right to the flap of your tent.

He was looking at my breasts as if he could see right through my dress, but of course he couldn’t, or he wouldn’t have begun to stroke the velvet against my arm. He turned my hand over and traced spirals in my palm. In the candlelight I could see my veins.

Only skin set boundaries between me and him, just that thin, porous covering. It didn’t seem like enough protection. He was too sober. Before I left with him, I wanted to see him trip and stumble, or tell me something he’d later regret.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around. It took a second for me to recognize my father’s old friend, Mr.

Schultz, he looked so out of place in that smoky air. His face wadded up awkwardly so his eyes turned to specks. “Ella? I wasn’t sure if that was you.”

I pulled my hand away from Strom’s and sat up straight. “It’s me.” I felt my face redden.

He tried to smile. “Having a cocktail?” Placing his index finger just under his ear, he quickly glanced back at Strom. The linoleum floor tilted uncertainly, like a checkerboard someone had grabbed.

50 / RENÉ STEINKE

I tried to smile. “I was just about to leave, actually,” I said, getting down from my stool.

“I’ve never been here before,” Mr. Schultz went on. “I was just waiting for the train to come in and thought I’d pop over for a beer. Popular spot, huh?”

I blindly gathered up my purse and sweater. Strom threw a bill down on the bar and stood up, too. I wished he’d have stayed put. I didn’t want to have to introduce them. “Well, nice running into you,” I said, waving.

Mr. Schultz waved limply and turned back to the bar.

Strom followed me out. “Who is
he?
”

I thought I might vomit again, the whiskey sours suddenly swirling in my stomach like crazy music. I wanted to get away from Strom and be alone somewhere. “An old friend of my father’s. I’m sorry. I don’t feel well,” I said, weakly. “I’m just a few blocks away.”

He looked confused, and I realized he was shorter than I was, and when he spoke, his lips turned inward. “Aren’t you going to invite me?” He seemed even easier to fool now, standing out here on the timid sidewalk, but I wasn’t in the mood anymore.

I
hadn’t seen Mr. Shultz in a long while. He taught math at Grace Lutheran school and used to go bowling with my father on Fridays. He was quiet as my father had been, with a habit of tugging on his earlobe when he talked, and he walked with a slouched shoulder, as if he were hiding something among the pens in his shirt pocket. Because Mr. Schultz had developed an appreciation for music in Cleveland, where he’d grown up, he loved the Bach my father played, and he came by the house often, saying, “I’ve got a problem for you, Louis,” and my father would give him advice.

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Once the two of them were in the living room, drinking beers.

I was walking past the doorway to get a glass of water in the kitchen, and I heard Mr. Schultz mention his wife’s name, Dorothy, a couple of times in this steady, subdued voice, but I didn’t hear what he was saying about her.

As I was filling up my glass at the sink, I heard my father scream, “You what?” and almost dropped my glass. “You can’t let that go on, William.” My father’s anger was always so sudden and strange, it seemed not to belong to him.

There was more talk, a mutter through the walls, and I was afraid now to go back to the book in my room, which would mean walking past the door near where they sat. I stood there in the kitchen, frozen, and heard my father’s voice again, blunt and hard as a brick. “I wish to God you had never told me.” And I wasn’t sure, but thought I heard Mr. Schultz weeping.

My father had a happy, distracted way about him most of the time, a half smile on his lips, a busyness in his eyes, and this made his rage all the more frightening. It seemed to come from nowhere, like the twisters that picked at Porter in the fall and spring, and my mother and I never knew what to do, how to salvage the furniture he’d broken, how to calm him. She blamed his temper on the deaths of his parents in a car accident when he was a boy and the orphanage where he’d been sent to share a room with seven others, and said that after all he’d been through, we were lucky it happened only once in a while. But it felt strange to see Mr. Schultz have to endure my father’s temper.

I didn’t want them to glance up and see me walking past the doorway, furtive, letting my long hair fall over my ears, the glass of water trembly in my hand.

Sometimes my mother tried to goad him out of it. “Calm down, Louis. There’s no need to make a fuss. Maybe we’ll even laugh about this tomorrow.”

52 / RENÉ STEINKE

Quietly, I went out the back door in the kitchen and sat in the backyard tire swing, until I heard Mr. Schultz leave through the front door and the hoarse start of his car.

Later, I learned from Jo, whose father was a good source of gossip, that Mr. Schultz had ended an affair with the school secretary and she’d been following him around town in her car, drunk, and had passed out more than once in the front seat of her yellow Buick.

IV

W
hen I let myself into my mother’s house, I went to the kitchen. The sunlight, ruffled by the curtains, fidgeted on the walls and glanced off all the bright surfaces. I put the food I’d brought on the table and bent down to trace my thumb over the black heel marks in the yellow linoleum that curved and met to form a perfect wing. This was where she’d collapsed the day before and broken her ankle.

The stairs were steep and the wood worn blond in the middle, as if some milky liquid were running down them. I dragged my hand along the banister as I went up. There were photographs of me on the wall: one of me in a smocked white dress before the fire, my arms strangely unscarred and pale, one of me two years later in a green long-sleeved dress and a closed-mouth smile, and other tentative school pictures with a curtain-sky background, school-bright colors. In each of them I look as if I’m waiting inside the rectangular borders of the frame—calm, prepared, expectant—but waiting for what?

The bedroom door was halfway open, a crescent of light on the floor. I knocked lightly before nudging it open and going inside.

The bedspread and linens were so smooth and sculpted, they had the look of stone. “Ella.” My mother sat up quickly when 53

54 / RENÉ STEINKE

she saw me and brushed back her loose hair. She was never as adorned as my grandmother, but now she looked pale and drawn, and the shadows beneath her eyes had darkened in a way that made me feel sorry for both of us.

“Thank you, I love daisies,” she said, taking them from me.

I looked at the lump of her ankle under the covers. “Does it hurt?”

“No, sit down,” she said. The mattress creaked when I sat down near her feet.

“I was just reaching for the flour on the top shelf when I fell,”

she said.

“I brought you some lunch,” I said, getting up. I watched myself keep my voice light and casual, my smile steady, but her lie made me angry. The doctor had told me she’d fainted from hunger.

“I’ll go get it.”

She pulled me back down to the bed. “I’ll eat later. I can get around, you know.” It was her plucky voice that she used to cover up sadness. “Sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself.”

Tell her,
I thought to myself.
Get her to eat.
“I want to find Hanna,” I said. She let go of my hand and slowly stroked the brownish lids of her eyes.

“Now, why do you want to do that?” She looked around the room as if it were dark and she didn’t know where I was. She hadn’t always been this vague. She had sometimes fought back at him.
Whoever you’re angry with, tell them, but don’t scream at us.