The Times Are Never So Bad (4 page)

He comes out with three women. The women are smoking, so I figure they just finished their work and haven't been sitting around with a drink, they're tired and want to go home. A lot of people don't know what a long, hard job that is. I'm right: they all stand on the little porch, but he's not touching any of them, or even standing close; then they come down the steps and one woman heads for a car down on the left near the road, and the other two go to my right, toward the car at the high end of the lot, and he comes for the one straight ahead of him, off to my left maybe a couple of hundred feet. The TransAm: I should have known. I'm out the door and we're both walking at right angles to his car. He looks at me once, then looks straight ahead. Headlights are on his blue suit, and the two women drive down and pass behind him; the other one is just getting to her car, and she waves and they toot the horn, and turn onto the road. I get to the car first and plant myself in front of it and watch his chain. It's gold and something hangs from it, a disc of some kind.

‘Ray,' he says, and stops. ‘How's it going, Ray?' His voice is smooth and deep in his throat, but I can see his eyes now. They look sad, the way scared eyes do. His skin is dark and he is hairy and his shirt is unbuttoned enough to show this, and the swell of his pecs. I think of Alex, and look at Vinnie's hands down by his jacket pockets; I'm looking at his face too, and I keep seeing the gold chain, a short one around his neck so the disc shows high on his chest. My legs are shaky and cool and I need a deep breath, but I don't take it; I swing a left above the chain, see it hit his jaw, then my right is there in his face, and I'm in the eye of the storm, I don't hear us, I don't feel my fists hitting him, but I see them; when my head rocks he's hit me; I hit him fast and his face has a trapped look, then he's inside my arms, grabbing them, his head down, and I turn with him and push him onto the car, his back on the hood. There is a light on his face, and blood; I hold him down with my left hand on his throat and pound him with the right. There is a lot of blood on his mouth and nose and some on his forehead and under an eye. He is limp under my hand, and when I let him go he slides down the hood and his back swings forward like he's sitting up, and he drops between me and the grill. He lies on his side. My foot cocks to kick him but I stop it, looking at his face. The face is enough. The sky feels small, like I could breathe it all in. Then I look into the light. It's the headlights of the waitress's car; the one alone; it's stopped about twenty feet away with the engine running and the lights aimed at me. She's standing beside the car, yelling. I look around. Nobody else is in the lot; it feels small too. I look down at DeLuca, then at her. She's cursing me. I wave at her and walk to my jeep. She is calling me a motherfucking, cocksucking string of other things. I like this girl. With the lights off, I back the jeep up away from the club and make a wide half-circle around her to the road, so she can't read my plates. I pull out and turn on the lights.

I take a beer from the cooler on the floor and light a cigarette. My hands are shaky, but it's the good kind. Kingsley taught me about adrenaline, long before he used it over there, when I started first grade, which for boys means start learning to fight too. He said when you start to tremble, that's not fear, it just feels like it; it's to help you, so put it to use. That is why I didn't say to DeLuca the things I thought of saying. When I know I have to fight I never talk. Adrenaline makes guys start talking at each other, and you can use it up; I hold it in till I've got to either yell or have action.

The street is wide and quiet, most of the houses dark. I pass a cemetery and a school. I don't know why it is, but I know of four schools in this town either next to or across the street from a cemetery. I'm talking elementary schools too. Maybe it's an old custom, but it's weird looking at little girls and boys on a playground, and next door or across the street are all those tombstones over the dead. King is buried in one with trees and no school or anything else around but woods and the Merrimack River. The sky is lit up with stars and moon, the kind of night you could drive in with your lights off if you were the only one on the road, just follow the grey pavement and look at the dark trees and the sky and listen to the air rushing at the window. I turn on the radio and get onto 495 north. My knuckles are sore but the fingers work fine. I suck down the beer and get another from under the ice, and it feels good on my hand. I'm getting WOKQ from Dover, New Hampshire. Every redneck from southern Maine to Boston listens to that station. New Hampshire is also a redneck state, though the natives don't know it because they get snow every winter. When King was at Camp Lejeune he wrote to the family and said they could move New Hampshire down there and everybody would be happy except for the heat, which he wasn't happy with either. The heat got to him in Nam too; he wrote and said the insects and heat and being wet so much of the time were the worst part. I think about that a lot; was he just saying that so we wouldn't worry, or did he mean it? Most of the time I think he meant it, which taught me something I already knew but didn't always know that I knew: it gets down to what's happening to you right now, and if you're hot and wet and itching, that's what you deal with. You'll end up tripping a mine anyways, so you might as well fight the bugs and stay cool and dry till then.

Mostly there's woods on the sides of the highway. People are driving it fast tonight. I pull into the right lane, Crystal Gayle is singing sad, and take the exit. I hope Waylon comes on; I'm in a Waylon mood. I cross the highway on the overpass, cars going under me without a sound I can hear over Crystal, and go on a two-lane into the town square of Merrimac, where they leave off the
k
. I don't know why. The square has a rotary and some lights and is empty. I turn right onto no, two-lane and hilly with curves, and I have to piss. It's not just beer, it's nerve-piss, and I shiver holding it in. Nobody's on the road, and when I turn left toward the lake I cut the lights and can see clearly: the road is narrow with trees on its sides, and up ahead where the road turns left, there are trees too, a thin line of them at the side of the lake. I shift down and turn and back up and turn, and park it facing 11 o. I take the gasoline can from behind my seat, then piss on the grass, looking up at the stars and smelling the pines among the trees. I carry the gasoline can in my left hand, the side away from the road, and walk on grass, close to the trees. I have on my newest jeans, the darkest I've got, and a dark blue shirt with long sleeves. My fingers try to stiffen, holding the can. That's from DeLuca, maybe the first one, that came up from behind my ass and got his jaw; he saw it but only in time to turn his face from it a little, so all he did was stretch his jaw out for me to hit. He should have dropped his chin, caught it on the head. I hear the lake, then see it through the trees. It's bigger than ours but there are more houses too, all around it, and in summer they're filled. We only have a few houses, on the east and north sides, because it's way out in the boondocks and the west and south sides belong to some nature outfit that a rich guy gave his land to, and all you can do there is hike and look at trees and birds. The road turns left, between the woods and the backs of houses, and I follow it near the trees. A dog barks and some others pick it up. But it's just the bitchy barking of pets, there's not a serious one in there, and I keep walking, and nobody talks to the dogs or comes out for a look, and they stop.

All the houses are so close together I won't see Steve's until I'm at it. I know it's on this road and it's brown. King wrote to me and Alex once from there; he didn't want the folks to read it; he wrote about patrols and ambushes. He said
Don't get me wrong, I wish right now I was back there with you guys and a case of Bud in the cooler out on a boat pulling in mackerel. They must be in, about now. But I'll say this: I'll never feel the adrenaline like this again, not even with bluefish or deer or kicking ass. I understand now what makes bankers and such go sky diving on Saturdays
. Then I see Polly's red Subaru and Steve's van, and I freeze, then lower the can to the ground and kneel beside it. I wonder if this is close to what King felt. When I think of the arsenal Steve's got inside, I believe maybe it is. I kneel listening. There's a breeze and the water lapping in front of the house. I listen some more, then unscrew the cap and get up to a crouch and cross the road. I stand behind his van and look up and down the road and in the yards next door. Every yard is small, every house is small, no rich man's lake here, but people that work. Her car and the van are side by side in a short dirt driveway; on the right, by the corner of the house, there's a woodpile. I look at the dark windows, then go for the wood. I'm right under a window, and all I can hear is the breeze and the water. I move up the side of the house, under windows, toward the lake. At the front yard I stop, breathing through my mouth but slow and quiet as I can. There's a tree that looks like an oak in the yard, then the wharf. He's got a cement patio with some chairs and a hammock and a barbecue grill and table with empty beer bottles on it. I run to the lake side of the tree and press my back against it; he has a short wharf with an outboard and a canoe. I look around the tree at the front of the house. Then I step toward the lake, move out far enough so I'm past the branches—it's an oak—and I start pouring: walking backward parallel to the house that I'm watching all the time, and when I clear it, I turn and back toward the road, watching Steve's and the house on my left too. The gasoline is loud, back and forth in the can, and pouring onto the grass.

I back up past their cars and my back is stiff, I'm breathing short and quiet and need more of it but won't; I make a wide circle around their cars, and take the can cap from my pocket and drop it there, and go around the house again, the corner with the woodpile, and I back toward the lake, checking the other house on my left now, my head going back and forth but mostly forth, waiting for Steve to stick a Goddamn .30-06 or 12-gauge out one of the windows, then I'm past the house and feeling the lake behind me and I keep going to the tree and around it, and all I can smell is gasoline. I empty the can near where I started so the lines will meet. Then I straighten up and step down off a low concrete wall to the beach. I go up the beach past three houses, then out between them to the road, and I cross it and lay the can in the woods. Then I cross again and stand at the road with her car and his van between me and the house. I look down till I see the gas cap. Then I take one match from a book and strike it and hold it to the others; they catch with a hiss, and I toss them at the cap: the gasoline flares with a whoosh and runs left and right and dances around the corners into the breeze, curving every which way, and I run back into the road where I can look past the house in time to see the flames coming at each other around the house, doing some front-yard patterns like ice skaters where I emptied the can. Then they meet and I am running on the grass beside the road, down the road and around the corner, on the grass in the dark by the woods, to my jeep up there. The key is in my hand.

In the upstairs bedroom she wakes to firelight and flickering shadows on the walls that do not yet feel like her own, and she is so startled out of sleep that she is for a moment displaced, long enough for this summer's fear—that no walls and roof will ever feel like her own—to rise in her heart before it is dissipated by this new fear she has waked to; then she is throwing back the sheet and crossing the floor. Out the front window she looks at sinuous flames surrounding the yard between her and the lake; calling Steve, she goes to the side window and looks down at fire, then into the back room where Steve's mattress on the floor is empty, still made since morning. She steps on and over it, to the rear window overlooking the yard and car and van and the ring of fire. She switches on the stair light and descends, calling; by the bottom step she knows she is not trapped and her voice softens, becomes quizzical. Downstairs is a kitchen, darkened save for the wavering light on the walls, and a living room where he sleeps sitting on the couch, his feet on the coffee table, the room smelling of beer and cigarette smoke.

‘Steve?' He stirs, shakes his head, drops his feet to the floor. She points out the wide front window. ‘Look.'

He is up, out the front door, turning on the faucet and pulling the coiled hose across the patio. In places the fire has spread toward the house, but it is waning and burns close to the ground.

‘It's all around,' she says, as, facing the lake, he moves the hose in an arc; neighbor men shout and she trots to either side of the house and sees them: the men next door with their hoses and wives and children. Steve belches loudly; she turns and sees him pissing on the fire, using his left hand, while his right moves the hose. He yells thanks over each shoulder; the men call back. The fire is out, and Steve soaks the front lawn, then both sides, joining his stream with the others. He asks her to turn it off, and he coils the hose and she follows him to the backyard. The two men come, and their wives take the children inside.

‘Jeesum Crow,' one says. ‘What do you figure that was about?'

‘Tooth fairy,' Steve says, and offers them a beer. They accept, their voices mischievous as they excuse themselves for drinking at this hour after being wakened. They blame the fire. Polly has come to understand this about men: they need mischief and will even pretend a twelve-ounce can of beer is wicked if that will make them feel collusive while drinking it. Steve brings out four bottles, surprises her by handing her one he had not offered; she is pleased and touches his hand and thanks him as she takes it. She sits on the back stoop and watches the men standing, listens to their strange talk: about who would want to do such a thing, and what did a guy want to get out of doing it, and if they could figure out what he was trying to get done, then maybe they could get an idea of who it might be. But their tone will not stay serious, moves from inquisitive to jestful, without pattern or even harmony: while one supposes aloud that teenaged vandals chose the house at random and another agrees and says it's time for the selectmen to talk strict curfew and for the Goddamn cops to do some enforcing, the first one cackles and wheezes about a teenaged girl he watched water skiing this afternoon, how she could come to his house any night and light some fire. They clap hands on shoulders, grab an arm and pull and push. Steve takes in the empties and brings out four more.