Town Burning (31 page)

“Army Specialized Training Program. I was supposed to be an engineer. Then came the Bulge and we were all Infantry.”

“You see any combat?” Keith’s eyes gleamed—either he was looking for a brother in that mystique, or he knew. Suddenly John had an irresistible desire to smash Keith Joubert. The red, stupid head, the bright aggressive gleam of insensitivity in the eyes, the intense poise of ignorance! He tried the expression himself, with the insane desire to keep it and let it grow. He would be one of them—sure of himself and of his rectitude and virility and strength. He would know nothing and therefore everything. He would
know.
He looked steadily at Keith.

“I killed a man once. I shot him four times, three times in the chest and one time in the face. You should have seen him. Shot him at about one-foot range with the M. 1911 Al .45 automatic. I’ve always wanted to do it again. God! It squashed that son of a bitch! Knocked him clear on his ass, blood all over the goddam place. You should have heard them gook women scream. Man, you should of heard ’em! Them big slugs mashed that gook, man!”

“Women?” Keith asked, no disapproval in the question, just curiosity. John looked at him, leering.

“Just gooks. Just Flips. The guy shot at me through the door. Boy, did I cream that bastard! Four times.
Zug, zug, zug, zug!”
He poked Keith each time with his finger, where the bullets went in. This time Keith began to smell a rat. He drew back disapprovingly.

“You off your rocker?”

“I get that blood lust, is all,” John purred at him.
“Zug, zug, zug…”
Poking.

“Cut it out!”

“Whatsamatter? I’m just telling you!
Zugt Squish!
Combat, boy!”

Keith drew back farther, then seemed to remember that attack was his prerogative, not John Cotter’s. He stood up and leaned forward menacingly.

“Who you trying to snow, Sonny? You’re acting kind of unfriendly.”

John looked at him some more. The look seemed to have a fine kind of power. Keith couldn’t move so long as he looked at him. He waited until Keith was about to speak, then went on in his newfound, lovely, purring voice:

“Aren’t you the Keith Joubert I used to go to school with? Seems to me you and Donald Ramsey—he’s the coward who works in the Post Office now—and Junior Stevens—it seems I remember the three of you throwing me in the fountain just before the DeMolay dance. That was fun, wasn’t it? Then there was the time at the scrape you spent the afternoon ducking me. Remember that? Then there were the times you chased me home, and the times you goosed me in class when the teacher wasn’t looking, and the times you jumped me on the way home from school are too many to remember. I didn’t have much fun at all because of the three of you. The funny thing was that if I met any of the three of you alone you were nice as pie. Isn’t that funny? Alone, you were almost polite. Remember that? Remember the time we had a little fight all by ourselves because anybody could beat up on John Cotter? Remember I gave you a bloody nose and twisted your arm until you said ‘Uncle’?”

“You always was a sissy,” Keith said.

“I cried, I remember. When I was a junior in high school you and your friends made me cry. A junior in high school. I cried because of the unfairness, and because I was tired after fighting you, and you ganged up on me. You made me cry when I was sixteen years old—much to old to cry. Imagine crying at sixteen, like a girl. Just a sissy.”

Keith stood back, his face strangely softening. “That was in high school. We shouldn’t of done that.” A look of pity. “But you was such a easy one to git all riled up…”

“No, I wasn’t. I tried to let it go by. I laughed like a coward at your stupid jokes. I never fought until you laid hands on me. I tried to avoid you. I spent most of my time trying to keep away from you. Nothing I did or might have done would have changed it. I could beat you up, alone. Ramsey I could beat up with my left hand, alone. Junior Stevens I couldn’t beat up, but alone he never started anything. The three of you or Junior and one other of you—those were the odds. And now you’ve got the nerve to pity the little sissy! Pity or cruelty, those are the only strong emotions you’ll ever have, except the one that fades and comes like a wave, but is always there: Fear, Buster, fear! You’re afraid even when you’re marching to the drums in your pretty uniform. You’re afraid because it’s too pretty, or because it isn’t pretty enough. You’re afraid of women—you always were. You’re afraid of men. You’re afraid of Godl”

“Don’t you say nothing about my religion!”

“I’ll bet if I called you a son of a bitch you’d say I insulted your mother.”

“Don’t you say nothing about my mother!”

“How about your father?” John asked.

He watched Keith carefully, gauging the amount of pressure in Keith’s increasingly rabbity motions. The object of experiment again assumed the predicted role, came close and leaned menacingly.

“Think you’re wise, huh?”

“Compared to you, Buster, I’m the brightest star in all the firmament.” He judged that if he used one more word Keith could not understand, or tried to stand up, Keith would have to fight. Several bystanders had caught the meaning of Keith’s ceremonial struttings, and now observed.

“You watch your mouth!” Keith said, stuttering, pumping up his rage.

“Don’t you remember that you can’t beat me up alone?” John asked.

“You little bastard, I ain’t taking nothing from you! You don’t scare me none!”

“Ayuh,” John said, “only I can see you’re scared of something. It must be my piercing eyes. I can smell it on you. You stink of fear like a whipped dog.”

Ten or more men had gathered now, Howard among them. John tried to make up his mind before his own rage made it up for him. Keith seemed frozen in his menacing stance, but one word could break the spell. If he made the slightest move toward getting up, Keith would swing. If he merely sat still, Keith would think up the worst insult he could—something about yellow—deliver it and go home. This seemed unsatisfactory. Yet a grubby, rolling-around fight would be even worse. He’d just have to end the fight neatly, and he wasn’t sure he could. At least he knew what Keith would do first—try to hit him as he stood up. He decided to stand.

Keith was no fighter. His fist came slowly, almost hesitantly. It had always been that way with him. He didn’t telegraph his punches; he wrote letters. His bullying had been that way too—weirdly harmless and picky, at first; then savage and cruel.

After the fist passed by, John helped the arm along, turning Keith all the way around. Then he put a simple stranglehold and a hammerlock on him. These carefully applied, he sat down on the bench with Keith completely helpless in his lap. As he expected, he was much stronger than Keith, who cursed in a high, spitty voice. John found that by regulating the pressure of the stranglehold he could make peculiar bagpipe effects with Keith’s sounds. Some of the spectators seemed to find these amusing.

When Keith stopped screaming John asked calmly, “You had enough?”

More incoherent curses, stopped this time by pressure on the hammerlock.

“Say ‘Uncle’ again for old time’s sake,” John suggested.

“I’ll kill you!” Keith screamed.

John had been working one foot up behind Keith’s back, balancing Keith on his other knee, the stranglehold exchanged for a double hammerlock. Suddenly he braced his back against the bench and kicked Keith down the driveway. Keith got up slowly, examining a long tear in the knee of his satin pants.

“He tore his pretty pants,” John said. He sat calmly on the bench.

“Don’t overdo it, Johnny.” It was Bob Paquette, who had come out of the firehouse with the others to watch. Junior Stevens stood beside Bob, a fierce, interested smile on his red face.

Keith came slowly and ominously back toward John, who still did not get up. “You want the next lesson?” John asked.

He braced himself as Keith charged, arms flailing. At the last moment Keith shut his eyes and landed sitting down, two dirty footprints on his chest.

“I ought to kick your guts out,” John said.

Keith raged as he scrambled away. He was crying, or nearly crying backward. From his bawling, disintegrated face issued a coning backward. From his bawling, disintegrated face issued a continual, hoarse, incoherent blat. It was still audible half a block away.

Howard sat down next to him, a surprising amount of admiration in his eyes. “That was about the most
conclusive
fight I’ve seen since Louis and Schmeling,” he said. Billy Muldrow had been watching, too. He came diffidently through the crowd and put a hand on John’s shoulder.

“Oh, Johnny!” he whispered. “You showed that son of a bitch! You did it so beautiful. Cool? You never even got up off your ass, God
damn
it all!”

“What started the fight?” Howard asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You was cool!” Billy said.

“Cold, I’d say,” Howard said.

Bob Paquette hadn’t come over, hadn’t done more than look at John before turning away. When John met Bob’s glance no sign of recognition had passed between them. He had turned back into the firehouse with the others. Inside, the phone rang steadily for a long time and then there was a longer silence, until Mr. Bemis’ voice called out, “Where?”

“What’s happened?” Howard said, listening.

John got up stiffly, knowing that he must go down to the yard to relieve his father, and nearly bumped into Eightball, who had come running out. “Started up again!” Eightball said, grinning slyly. Billy pushed Eightball back.

“Goddam moron,” Billy mumbled.

Bob Paquette ran out ahead of the crowd. “Poverty Street’s caught again. The fire crossed over. Don’t ask me what they’re going to do now!” The men all climbed on the Northlee pumper and chugged off around the square, leaving John alone on the sidewalk. He walked down River Street toward the yard.

He’d let the goddam town of Leah burn to the ground. They made him seem vicious; they disapproved! He wondered if Bob Paquette had disapproved, in high school, when Junior and his buddies tormented John Cotter. Maybe Bob just stood there then with the same expression of superior distaste on his face: the expression of Leah secure in its own rituals. But how did John Cotter, born with a fair amount of brains, the possessor of perhaps a good amount of strength for his size—how did he manage to separate himself from this set of rituals? Nobody had bullied Bob Paquette; nobody bullied some of the flagrantly superior idiots of high school, the apple polishers, the ass kissers. Why John Cotter? Maybe one little incident in some forgotten time at the beginning of memory had begun the irreversible progression—perhaps that time when he was four years old and filled his pants at the playground and smeared the slide. One thing was increasingly certain—the problems of high school could not be solved thirteen years later. He had just picked a fight with and degraded a thirty-two-year-old man, a veteran of his country’s wars, the father of three children. It was too late to explain to Leah that the seeds of this harvest of rage had been planted long ago.

He should have fought so hard, so bitterly, so dedicatedly—once upon a time—that they would have had to leave him alone. It could only have happened once: the first time. Instead, he had given up his right to be a fighter and an inviolate person, and the result had been a long education in the ways of sadism. He could see it even in the faces of strangers. One night in Paris an incident had brought him straight back to Leah. It was on the corner of rue du Four and rue des Canettes, by a bakery. A small woman in a bright blue plastic raincoat had come around the corner toward him, and for a moment he thought it was a young girl, because of her light, skipping walk. She turned around to face a man who followed her; and it was then, with a familiar dread, that he saw that she was middle-aged, and that her skipping walk was a taut dance of fear. The man hunched down and made a tearing, growling noise in his throat. She whimpered, but didn’t run away—couldn’t run. The man turned her with his eyes and she walked back ahead of him—to what room of pain and execution? In spite of a lust so terrible he couldn’t speak, the man must take her inside before he hurt her. Sadism picked its scene as rage did not, could not. Perhaps the man needed a certain audience—his children…? As he watched the two of them go down the narrow sidewalk of rue des Canettes he’d been nearly smothered by memories of Leah.

As he crossed the railroad siding on Water Street he picked up a heavy clinker and threw it as hard as he could against a clapboard wall. The loose boards slapped together with the hollow boom of a shotgun, and part of the clinker stuck in the wood and stayed there. His finger began to sting—the sharp edge of the clinker had bruised and cut. A small glob of blood grew alongside his nail, and as he crossed over to the lighted office he wiped it on his dirty shirt.

In the Spinellis’ kitchen Jane sipped her wine and heard the indecision of the wind as it changed. No indecision appeared in Mrs. Spinelli’s watching eyes. Black in her Indian’s face, they moved to inspect the order of her kitchen; pots and pans, the oilcloth on the table, Jane sitting across from her. She still caressed her pillow.

“Father Demon,” she said.

“Father Desmond,” Jane said, startled. “You know Father Desmond.”

“No good.” The old woman kneaded her pillow.

“It’s all right not to like him, Mother. Lots of people don’t like him too much, but he tries to do the right things. Where did you hear that ‘Father Demon’?”

“Somebody told me.” Then she whispered, “They trick me.”

“Who tricks you?”

“Everybody. Not you, Janie. Good girl.” She smiled. “You come when I need you. You make that no-good Irish go away and leave me be.” She got up and came around the table, patted Jane on the head and took Jane’s glass to refill it from the half-gallon bottle on its stand beside the refrigerator. She dropped her rosary and absently scooped it up again. The Virgin’s candle guttered low, and she replaced it, lighting the new one from the old and then pushing it firmly into the soft wax in the ruby tumbler. When she settled in her chair again she gave a long, theatrical sigh and tilted her head as if from weariness.