Red Dog

by Jason Miller

  I said into the phone, “Hey, babe, let me call you back, okay? Someone’s set my house on fire.”

  7.

  SURE ENOUGH, THE HOUSE WAS ON FIRE. THE HOUSE MY FATHER had built. The house at Indian Vale. My house. More precisely, it had been set on fire. A man in a dark hooded jacket was scampering away through the overgrowth of musclewood and frost grape in the back property. I called after him, called him and his mama terrible names, but he neither slowed nor stopped. A metal can slipped from his hand and hit the ground and rolled onto its side, pumping out the last of its contents. Gasoline. I stopped thinking about the man. I scrambled back around the house and through the door and up the stairs into Anci’s room. A light sleeper, she woke in a bolt.

  “What’s is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” I remembered her trauma of a year earlier. I calmed my voice and said, “Okay, it ain’t exactly nothing.”

  “What, dammit?”

  “Well . . . the house is on fire.”

  “You’re right.” She threw back the sheets and leapt out of bed. “That’s not nothing.”

  “Get outside. Now.”

  She looked at me sharply.

  “The cats!” And she was gone down the stairs.

  Damnation. I chased Anci. Anci chased our house cats, Morris and Anthony. I tripped and fell down the stairs. The house filled with smoke like it was a race. I remembered the phone in my back pocket and called in the emergency, then raced off again to join Anci on the cat hunt. When we finally found the critters, they were huddled together in my office, mad as hell and ready to fight. And fight they did, like little tigers, but a half dozen deep scratches later, I’d shut the cats into the cab of my truck and my family was outside and reasonably safe.

  Anci said, “What can I do?”

  I coughed out a lungful. Black smoke. The house was on fire for real now. A knife of flame sliced through the east-facing gable, and a section of copper flashing bucked its nails and curled quickly into a ball, as though to protect itself. A window exploded. The cedar shingles had nearly caught, I realized, and once that happened it would be all she wrote.

  “There’s a big bundle of hoses in the shed,” I said to Anci. “Garden hoses.”

  “I know it.”

  “Go get them.”

  She tore off. I sucked a deep breath and plunged back into the house. I fumbled through the hallway and into the living room and finally the kitchen, where I found the fuse box and switched off the main circuit. I circled around again and through the back door and outside, where after a few desperate gulps of air I found Anci screwing hoses together. She was crying a little.

  “Goddamn it,” she said.

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “The couplings don’t all match.”

  “It’ll be okay,” I said again. I knelt in the grass to help her. “The trucks will be here any moment.”

  She nodded and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Top of that, I had five bucks in there.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. A fiver. On the bed table. I ran off without grabbing it.”

  “Don’t matter,” I said. “We got each other.”

  “Minus five bucks.”

  We finished attaching all the hoses that were attachable. I dragged them around the house while Anci screwed the other end to the spigot, but I knew it was too late and it was. The fire had climbed too high for the water stream. For a moment, I had a panic-induced vision. Or hallucination. The flames weren’t flames at all but orange orangutans, and these orangutans had climbed onto my roof to dance their tribal dance of war and devastation. I hated them and wanted to spray them with water, but my hose wouldn’t reach. A nightmare.

  A roar snapped me out of it. Not an animal roar. An architectural roar. A large section of soffit at the back of the house collapsed, sending a shower of sparks skyward. Anci yelped and grabbed my arm. I was fixing to head back inside on a final, desperate salvage mission, when at last the fire trucks appeared at the end of Shake-a-Rag, globes blazing, horns wailing their sad song of panic and loss against the country night. Anci and I high-fived. Then we hugged each other and cried.

  A HALF HOUR OF HARD WATER STREAMS AND MUSHROOM clouds later, they’d managed to save the old place. “Save it” is maybe overstating things. The fire had taken most of the rear kitchen wall and the metal pipes were exposed and jutting out at all kinds of crazy angles like a dug-up animal skeleton. The windows in the kitchen were gone, too, and the aluminum porch door had warped and exploded from the heat. The floors squished and buckled menacingly beneath our feet. I called Peggy to tell her what had happened, and she cried a little, too, said she loved us and that she was coming home in the morning.

  “Your sister needs you,” I said. “You should see to that business, then come home.”

  “I’ll wrap up my business here,” she said after a long moment’s hesitation. “Quickly as I can. Then I’m coming your way like a rocket. And save a little for me, darling, because I am going to put a bullet in someone’s ass.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Pretty soon, the fire chief came tromping in to make his report. He was a stub of a guy with arrow-shaped white mustaches and the stiff bearing of a retired soldier. Some of his men called him Major.

  “It’s still in one piece, anyway,” he said, shaking my hand. “Sorry about the mud pit in your yard. Fire engines and pressurized water got a way of making a mess.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  He nodded and said, “For sure it’s the least of your worries. You say you witnessed someone starting this? Some fiend?”

  “I did. His fuel can’s still around back. He dropped it when he ran away.”

  “We found it. A gasoline accelerant, most like. Homemade napalm, even. Looks like it started in the woodpile around back. Those cedar shingles?”

  “Cedar shake, yeah,” I said. “We redid the roof last year.”

  “How’s your insurance?”

  “Cheap,” I said. “But at least we don’t have to worry about the air conditioner for a while.”

  “Son?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I felt like I was coming apart at the seams.

  After a while, Wince and a few of his deputies put in an appearance. Indian Vale isn’t technically inside any town limits, so any policing we might require is handled by the sheriffs. Honestly, I was happy to see him. He spoke with the Major and took down some notes. He ordered the deputies to collect the arsonist’s gas can and search the surrounding area for footprints or clothing fibers or other such clues. Then he followed me outside and around the house.

  “Bad,” he said. “Real bad, but I reckon it could have been a lot worse. I don’t suppose you’ve got an explanation for any of this.”

  “This time, honestly, no.”

  “Anyone make a threat at you lately?”

  “No one not wearing a badge.”

  “Lindley’s tough, I grant you, but this don’t seem like his style.”

  “Agreed.”

  “What about this business you’re tied up in now? The Reach murder. Any sense that this might be connected?”

  “It’s most likely,” I said. “If only by proximity. But damned if I can see how.”

  “Me, neither. Not yet, anyway. So what are you going to do?” he asked. “Bug out or stay?”

  “Stay. Try to, anyway.”

  “Probably not smart.”

  “Probably not, but where would we go? You know as well I do that it’s damn near impossible to disappear around here, unless you’re willing to go completely native. Besides, going someplace else is only like to put others in danger, too, and I don’t think I want to live with that.”

  “That really it?”

  “Mostly,” I said. “Or maybe I just hate the idea of being run off my own place again.”

  Anci wasn’t crazy about it, either. After Wince had collected the evidence and gone, we went back inside to see
what there was to see. Anci went to check her bedroom, me to my office.

  “We can relax,” she said, coming downstairs again. “I found that five dollars.”

  “Oh, good. I was worried something awful about it.”

  “And you can just forget your plan to pack me off with Jeep or Opal Mabry or the mailman or whoever you’ve got in mind.”

  “Oh, do I have a plan?”

  “You do. You know, I know it,” she said. “So just forget it. You try to make me go, I’ll throw a shit fit makes Lindsay Lohan look like Little Miss Sunshine.”

  “Okay,” I said, slightly terrified.

  “I’m serious now.”

  “I can see that.”

  “No tricks.”

  “No tricks,” I said.

  She wasn’t satisfied until I gave her pinkie-swears, though. This settled, we walked through the house to see what we could see.

  She said, “What a mess. And what’s that smell?”

  “Smoke, mostly,” I said. “But some of the wiring burned, too, and that makes it worse.”

  “It smells like someone tried to barbecue a mummy.”

  “We’ll have it cleaned, and then it won’t anymore,” I said.

  “Or a dead horse.”

  “Or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

  I was going to say it smelled like A. Evan Cleaves, but the words caught in my throat like a brick of charred cedar.

  We cleaned up what we could and spent a few hours doing it, too, but in the end it didn’t amount to much of anything. The living room was a sodden mess, so we put down towels and heavy blankets to soak up what water we could. Anci swept ash out of the kitchen and tried to put back the furniture and the pictures that the hoses and firefighters had knocked around. Blessedly, most of the damage was confined to one area of the house. The bedrooms were more-or-less intact, as was the living area. We’d be eating takeout pizza and burgers for the next six months, but the old place was safe to live in. Structurally, anyway.

  Midnight came and went. Anci camped out on the living room sofa. She texted her school friends to let them know what had happened, and even though she was still afraid I could tell that she was enjoying their sympathy. After a while, she tucked into another of her books—The Woman in White—and the next thing I knew she had fallen asleep. I waited until she was snoring and then got off the couch and went outside to walk the perimeter of the house. Nothing but country sounds and a hot dark sky like the inside of a soup pot set to boil. Back inside, I found Anci’s sodden copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles, turned to page one, and made myself comfortable at the foot of the sofa.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I RAN INTO TOWN FOR BREAKFAST: PANCAKES and scrambled eggs in Styrofoam clamshells, coffee for me, coffee and orange juice for Anci. Anci ate on the porch, where the stink wasn’t so bad. I tried to eat but ended up just having the coffee. When Anci was done, we cleaned up our mess and went into the house. I showered and washed my hair. I was still wet and wrapped in a towel when the phone buzzed, a blocked number. I’d been waiting for something like this—knowing it would happen sooner rather than later—and so I took a deep breath or two before answering.

  “We clear on a thing or two now, ball-sucker?” The voice wasn’t quite a hiss, but it was low and rough and unnatural. If it was a person, it would have had on a hat and fake mustache to disguise itself.

  “Wait, wait, wait. Ball-whatter?”

  “You heard me,” he said, but then he acted like I hadn’t. “I said I guess we’re clear now. Ball-sucker.”

  “Rude.”

  “I reckon you’re lucky the whole place didn’t go up, and you with it, too. You ever seen a human body burn? It takes a while. Takes a while for it to die all the way. The brain. Like I said, you are one lucky sonofabitch.”

  “Well, I guess it depends on what you call luck,” I said. “Me, I wouldn’t say that. Perhaps you could come over, and you and I could debate on it. I’ll supply the Cokes and the foot to shove up your ass.”

  “Your good luck just ran out, Dad,” he said. “Your little girl’s, too.”

  “That’s mean.”

  “We’re mean people. Dangerous, too,” he said. “Later.”

  “Hey,” I said before he could disconnect.

  “Hey, what?”

  “A. Evan, I’m going to kill you for this. Twice.”

  But the voice just laughed.

  I was so mad, I didn’t need to finish toweling. The shower water just sorta steamed away. Somehow I dressed myself in matching clothes, managed not to put my underdrawers on my head. Then I put in a call to my old mining buddy and the reigning Most Dangerous Man in Little Egypt, Jeep Mabry.

  “What shift you on, brother?” I asked when he picked up after about twenty rings.

  He muttered something about a monthlong four-to-twelve rotation, and oh the agony, and what business did I have waking a workingman from the dead? And on and on until I gave him the score and he snapped awake and got pissed at the same time.

  “And you think it was this Cleaves asshole?”

  “What it looks like. Sounds like, I mean. Some guys shouldn’t try to do fake voices. On a good day, A. Evan sounds like someone sat on a rattlesnake, and that’s mildly hard to disguise.”

  “Well, let’s go fetch him and introduce him to justice.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “First, though, I ask you a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “Keep an eye on Anci for me.”

  “You got it,” he said. “You want to drop her off?”

  That took some clarifying. I explained my promise to Anci, about not forcing her to leave Indian Vale. Jeep was amused.

  “You’re kidding? Listen to you. Getting bossed around by a thirteen-year-old that way.”

  “A thirteen-year-old daughter,” I said. “It’s one of their magical powers.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. “When?”

  “Right now is best.”

  He showed up twenty minutes later, which means he flew. He was so big he filled the doorway, and his face was puffy and red with sleep. He was still in his PJs, too, gray sweats and a yellow T-shirt. He looked ridiculous and terrifying at the same time.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “They burned your roof. You just did that roof.”

  “Kitchen, too,” I said, pleased that he seemed so honestly outraged about it. “I bought those new countertops last spring. Well, they’re toast, and the wiring is shot, and I think the coffeemaker melted. Anci had one of those Hello Kitty clock radios from way back. You ought to see it now. The kitty looks like a gargoyle.”

  “Poor kid.”

  At which point she appeared. I grinned at her like a dope. She looked at Jeep and then me, from one of us to the other and back, and her face got as red as a devil’s behind, and holy shit, did she raise a squall. It took ten minutes to calm her down enough to cuss.

  “You tricked me, goddamn it,” she said.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I said you could stay. I never said you could stay alone. Besides, it’s just for a few hours.”

  “That’s what you always say. And then you’ll go off and get in a scrape and be gone three days. What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

  Jeep said, “We could do a puzzle.”

  Anci glared at him.

  “I don’t have any puzzles. Did you bring a puzzle?”

  “Maybe we could break something and put it back together.”

  “I got something in mind,” she said.

  “Be cool,” Jeep said.

  “Shove it.”

  She kept it up until it was time to go. Jeep followed me out. He made it look like he needed to talk to me alone, but I think he was really just trying to get away from the hurricane inside.

  “Kid’s a tiger.”

  “She’s a tiger in a Sherman tank,” I said. “I can’t decide whether having you here is protecting her from anyone who mig
ht come out here for trouble, or protecting them from her.”

  “That last thing.”

  “No contest.”

  “Nope.”

  He said, “So this thing with Reach and the Cleaveses and the White Dragons. What do you think it’s all about?”

  And I told him what I thought.

  IT’S TRUE THAT PRIVATE DETECTING EXPOSES YOU TO WHAT you might call the contradictory nature of human behavior. Fine. But a hundred-thousand-dollar payoff followed quickly by an attempted murder by arson was a new one on me. Assuming A. Evan really was behind the fire, as I suspected him to be. I can’t tell you how pleased I was that the hundred thousand dollars in question had been locked away in a fireproof safe.

  My plan was to cruise by the Cleaveses’ Union City farm, see what there was to see. What wasn’t my plan was to get tangled up with them before I had a better idea what the hell was going on, Jeep’s suggestion aside. I guess I could have called Ben Wince with my suspicion, but his office was already on the case, and anyway, it’s not as though I had anything like proof. Plus, if possible, I wanted a crack at them first.

  I drove out to Union City in the heat. The heat was real but the city wasn’t much. There’s not even really much town. A couple of locals gave me a lazy summer version of the small-town stink-eye, and a lonely mutt lifted his leg in salute as I dove by, but that’s about all I got out of it. I knew the Cleaveses’ address, but this was pretty open country and it took me another half hour or so to find their homestead a mile or three east of the limits.

  Houses either look lived in or they don’t, and this one was as still as a petrified log. Even pulling a drive-by I could tell they’d cleared out. I swung around and came back and parked on the road. I put my gun in my pants and went up to the house and inside.