The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Dobyns

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dobyns, Stephen, date.

  The burn palace / Stephen Dobyns.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-61104-3

  I. Title.

  PS3554.O2B87 2013 2012028038

  813'.54—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Phyllis Westberg

  with love and

  gratitude

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

  ALSO BY STEPHEN DOBYNS

  ONE

  NURSE SPANDEX WAS LATE, and as she broke into a run her rubber-soled clogs went squeak-squeak on the floor of the hallway leading to labor and delivery. It was two-thirty on a Thursday morning, and if Tabby Roberts—Tabitha, she called her to her face, because she’d never liked the head nurse—ever learned she had left those two babies alone, she’d be royally screwed, which made her laugh because that was why she was late, she had been getting royally screwed back in 217, where that poor colored woman had died in the afternoon. That’s where Dr. Balfour had pushed her, and that’s where she’d gone—to a bed stripped of sheets and pads—because she’d worked hard to get Dr. Balfour motivated and once she got him unzipping his fly, she wasn’t going to complain where he took her; she’d let him screw her in the toilet since that’s what he wanted, like Dr. Stone last March, but then Dr. Stone took a job at Providence Hospital and so nothing had come of it except a few teary phone calls with her doing the crying, but it didn’t do any good because Dr. Stone had stayed where he was.

  Nurse Spandex was a full-bodied woman in her mid-thirties, but don’t call her fat, “full-bodied” was how she described herself, big-boned, and her scrubs had spandex at the waist and a spandex-and-polyester V-necked top with a pattern of pink and purple flowers. They weren’t loose like most girls’ scrubs, because she’d had her mother fix them a little on the new Singer she had bought her online for Christmas two years ago, so her scrubs went further in showing off her figure, which was why some girls called her Nurse Spandex, which Alice Alessio (her real name) didn’t like.

  The rooms in maternity she hurried past were mostly empty. Only two were occupied with mothers, because October was a slow period and it was still a week till the full moon, which always motivated things and created a fuss. Tonight only two tater-tots were in the nursery, so she didn’t see why Dr. Balfour couldn’t have used one of these rooms instead of one in cardiology. But he had said cardiology was where he had to be, because he was the chief resident and didn’t want to get in hot water, which he should have thought about earlier. Anyway, she was the one who’d get in trouble if Tabby Roberts, the bitch, ever heard she’d been getting laid in cardiology. She’d lose her job.

  The ceiling lights hummed and an elevator dinged; there were distant bubbling noises and buzzing noises, a few moans, a few night mumbles, and an announcement for Dr. Schmitt to come to the ER—linking them all together was the squeak-squeak of Nurse Spandex’s white clogs as she ran toward the nursery. One of the lights had gone out, so she’d have to call maintenance, which always meant calling half a dozen times before they’d do anything, down there smoking weed and listening to rap music, most likely. So the nursery was dim, as if the two babies needed the quiet darkness, which they didn’t, because sleeping was what babies did second best, right after slurping at their mommies’ boobs.

  There were eight cribs, bassinets with Plexiglas sides and stainless-steel cabinets beneath, and in Nurse Spandex’s four years in labor and delivery they had been full to capacity only once and that’d been during tourist season, with out-of-towners dropping their tater-tots far from home instead of in Hartford or Springfield. During the year five babies was the most they had had together, because this was a small fifty-bed hospital in a small town and most girls were on the pill, the sluts, and Nurse Spandex—who went to Mass every Sunday, or pretty near—thought if she’d really got knocked up in cardiology, then Dr. Balfour was in for a surprise. He’d be putty in her hands, is what she told herself; but then she saw something was wrong, and she stopped as if she’d hit a wall. It wasn’t the Petrocelli kid, he was fine, all wrapped up like an Indian papoose. It was the other baby, the Summers baby, he’d gotten unwrapped somehow, and his little yellow blanket with the ducks and chickens and rabbits had gotten on top of him and he was kicking and squirming, because he must be smothering, maybe even dying, and he was kicking to get free.

  Nurse Spandex didn’t have the chance to tell herself she’d never seen anything so strange before, because now she reached the side of the crib and snatched away the blanket, but it wasn’t the Summers baby at all, it wasn’t even a baby. It was a snake, a huge snake with red and yellow stripes, but she hardly saw its colors as it rose up toward her, seemed to want to grab her and squeeze her and have its way with her, which made her fall back, knock aside an empty crib, and then another as she screamed a high, awful noise she’d never made before, like it was somebody else’s scream, somebody else’s mouth, but she kept screaming as the snake twisted and writhed; kept screaming like she meant to shatter glass, as thudding, squeaking footsteps came running down the hall; kept screaming as other nurses and orderlies and doctors and even patients came rushing into the nursery; kept screaming until someone grabbed her arm and slapped her good.

  • • •

  Now, like an airborne camera, we move back from the hospital, which is called Morgan Memorial here in the town of Brewster, Rhode Island. The sky is mostly clear,
and the three-quarter moon lets us see the town under a milky light. A stiff wind out of the northwest energizes the few clouds, tugs the fall leaves and sends them swirling. Windows rattle, and bits of paper and dead leaves swirl down the streets. Already the temperature has dropped to freezing, and those folks who haven’t covered their tomatoes are going to lose them. But isn’t that often a relief? With the garden gone, except for the Swiss chard and winter squash, it’s just one less thing to take care of.

  Rising above the hospital’s lumpy roof with its compressors, heating and cooling units, its elevator, we see the hospital’s two wings and outbuildings and parking lots, its two-story office building with labs and doctors’ offices. An ambulance sits idling near the emergency entrance, its heater turned up and two men snoozing in the front seats. The driver, Seymour Hodges, turns restlessly. Soon he’ll call out, shouted warnings to ephemera, at which point his tech, Jimmy Mooney, who has heard all this before and hasn’t an ounce of patience left, will strike him sharply across the chest and shout: “Cut the shit, Seymour!” Then, with grunts and protests, Seymour Hodges will settle back into silence.

  In the moonlight, the shadows of the maples planted along the driveway to replace the dying elms swing back and forth across the body of the ambulance like predatory cobwebs, while the blowing leaves are like fluttering bats, and dark forms skitter past like goblins, or this is how it seems to Jimmy Mooney, for whom Halloween remains a significant holiday. These ghostly maples line Cottage Street, on which the hospital is situated, not quite at the edge of town, but what was the edge of town seventy years ago.

  Rising higher, we see the town spread out along Water Street—technically, Route 1A—forming a bulge on the five miles of road between Route 1 and Hannaquit at the beach, like an anaconda with a pig in its belly. Even higher we see the shadow of Block Island five miles offshore, while to the south there’s the tip of Montauk on Long Island. To the north shine the lights of Providence, but to the northwest toward West Kingston and Hope Valley are great blocks of darkness—Burlingame State Park, Great Swamp, Trustom Pond National Wildlife Refuge, the Narragansett Indian reservation, Watchaug Pond, and others. You could walk through Burlingame or Great Swamp for miles and never see a soul—that is, if you didn’t sink into the muck, until nothing was left but one hand waving good-bye.

  On the north side of the swamp, past the railroad tracks, an obelisk commemorates the Great Swamp Fight of December 19, 1675, at the start of King Philip’s War. More than one thousand Narragansetts were killed, mostly women, children, and old people, burned to death in their wigwams—two hundred Colonial troops were also killed—but this finished off the Indians as a power in New England. Most of those captured were sent to Jamaica as slaves, to cut sugarcane.

  A few summer camps are scattered around Worden Pond, and for decades counselors have terrified the kids with late-night tales of how the screams of the Indians can still be heard deep in the woods, how boys are lured into the swamp by flickering lights, and how three Boy Scouts wandered off and were never seen again. And sometimes the tales mention a wolf darting among the trees with a severed hand in its mouth, a boy’s hand. Pure silliness, of course.

  A bunch of small roads wind back and forth around the edges of Great Swamp, with half coming to a dead end at the railway tracks and then resuming on the other side. At two-thirty in the morning, the houses scattered along those roads are dark, though most have outside lights to scare away predators, both the two-footed and four-footed variety. But just because the house lights are out doesn’t mean everybody’s asleep. Take that farm backed up against the western side of the swamp. Barton Wilcox and his wife, Bernice—everyone calls her Bernie—have thirty merino sheep, as well as a bunch of other animals—geese, chickens, cats, and a couple of Bouviers. In the sixties, Bernie and Barton lived on a commune in Big Sur, but after five years they moved back to Rhode Island, where they were from. Bernie went into nursing, while Barton went to graduate school in English. Then twenty years ago Barton’s parents died in a car accident, and he inherited enough money to quit his teaching job and buy the farm. Bernie now works part-time at Morgan Memorial. Otherwise, they’re weavers, using the wool from their own sheep, and organic farmers. Barton is sixty-four, but he still has a ponytail, gray now and bald on top, while Bernie favors the colorful peasant skirts she makes herself. Bernie’s a few years younger than her husband, tall and heavyset, more muscular than fat. She and Barton sell eggs and produce, while in spring they sell Easter lambs to the Greeks.

  With them lives their granddaughter Antigone, who’s ten. No telling where her mother is—maybe Big Sur, maybe Berkeley or Boulder, Madison or Ann Arbor. She calls herself a free spirit; her parents call her irresponsible. Sometimes Bernie thinks if they had named her Joan, instead of Blossom, she might be more levelheaded, capable of being a parent, not just a mother. During the summer months, Blossom sells T-shirts, candles, incense, counterculture buttons, hash pipes, rolling papers, bongs, and such stuff at outdoor rock concerts—still a groupie at thirty-three, calling herself a new-age traveler. So Barton and Bernie have had Antigone in their charge almost since she was born, which they find a delight and a blessing, so it’s hard to be critical about the details of her birth. No telling who the father was. Blossom claims not to know, and maybe that’s the truth, but the girl’s high cheekbones and black hair suggest some Hispanic or Native American blood. She’s tall for her age and as thin as a tenpenny nail. She also has long, thin fingers and can work the loom almost as well as her grandparents. In her fifth-grade class, in Brewster, she’s called Tig, which is all right, and several boys call her the Tigster, which is not all right, but she doesn’t get angry or call them names; she just doesn’t look at them or talk to them, ever, so it’s as if they don’t exist.

  It’s Antigone who’s awake at this hour, and she’s listening to the yapping of the coyotes on the far side of the stone wall circling the five-acre pasture. Occasionally the yapping is punctuated by the single bark of one of the hundred-pound Bouviers, either Gray or Rags, dogs she’s known, it seems, for her entire life and that used to pull her on her wagon around the farm when she was smaller. As long as the dogs patrol the walls, no coyote will cross over. Just how many coyotes are out there is what Tig is wondering. Barton has said he recently saw a pack of about ten out on the road at daybreak, and she thinks that’s about how many she hears right now, yapping as if they’re discussing the sheep, how good they taste and what to do about it. Such thoughts normally wouldn’t keep her from sleep, but now Barton’s laid up after knee replacement surgery and she’s sure the coyotes know this, because just this evening she saw two of them streaking across the pasture with Gray in pursuit. The coyotes know Barton is laid up, they know the dogs are getting old, and as Tig listens to the yapping beyond the stone wall she thinks that’s what has the coyotes so excited. Yapping like that, it’s like plans being made.

  • • •

  Actually, the town of Brewster began as Brewster Corners, a post house on the Boston Post Road between Stonington and Providence, built in the 1730s by Wrestling Brewster, great-grandson of Elder William Brewster, the preacher who came over on the Mayflower. Wrestling Brewster was descended from Elder Brewster’s son of the same name, who’d been kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1640 for criticizing the clergy. Pugnacity, perhaps, was an inevitable part of his nature. When Wrestling Brewster opened the post house, Hannaquit was a tiny fishing village seized from the Narragansetts during King Philip’s War. Soon a few houses were built near the post house and blacksmith shop, and then a dry-goods purveyor and church.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century there began a drift toward the sea. More houses were built, and Brewster Corners became simply Brewster, where it stayed, overshadowed by Wakefield to the north and Westerly to the south. Then, in 1907, in a burst of ambition, Brewster absorbed the beach town of Hannaquit, while keeping a toehold on the Post Road, now Route 1. From then until 1950, Brewster grew by
fits and starts, what with the fishing and farming—mostly potato fields—as well as the quarry, a knitting mill, and a small cannery on the river. By mid-century it had a more or less permanent population of seven thousand, a number that doubles after Memorial Day with the summer people. As the town enters the twenty-first century, only one scallop boat remains to compete with the small fleet from Stonington; the potato farms have become turf farms; the quarry that supplied the granite blocks from which the downtown was built produces only crushed stone; the knitting mill—vacant for fifty years—is at the edge of collapse; and the cannery has been ripped down, forgotten by almost everyone except old Mrs. Loy at Ocean Breezes, a home for the elderly on Oak Street, because she lost two fingers at the cannery more than eighty years ago and she’ll wave her mutilated hand at the aides and squawk, “See this hand? The fish bit back,” till everyone is sick to death of her.

  We can see Ocean Breezes four blocks east of the hospital as we rise above the town: a nineteenth-century inn and boardinghouse that was tucked, stretched, expanded, and renovated into a residence for seniors, as it’s called today. Most of the lights are out, though twenty elderly insomniacs stare up at their ceilings in wonder or dismay at where they find themselves. That happens when their numbers lessen. Eighty-year-old Florence Pritchard passed on early in the evening, and it made the others morbidly alert, or at least those for whom alertness remains an option.

  Margaret Hanna is on duty, but it’s hard to know if she’s awake or asleep as she nods over her computer’s Facebook page on the first floor. Dozing, she relives a summer moment at the beach when, partly covered by a towel, she slipped a hand into Marty McGuire’s shorts. Then, awake again, she tells herself she must check on Herman Flynn, former owner of Flynn’s Furnishings, who might not last the night, poor man. Then it’s back again to Marty’s shorts.

  Not much activity at two-thirty in the morning. The twenty-four-hour Citgo station is open, but Shirley O’Rourke is asleep at the cash register. At police headquarters the dispatch officer, Joey Manzetti, nods over his console. But even in daylight Brewster tends to be sleepy, at least during the months when the summerhouses are shut up. Some of the locals commute to jobs in Providence, some to Wakefield, some to the university in Kingston. These days quite a few, relatively speaking, work at home, staying in touch with their jobs by computer. And there are a few small factories. Crenner Millwork Corp. makes high-quality windows, doors, and cabinets, which they ship all over New England and New York. Jack Crenner employs fifty people in good times. Mercurio Inc. makes acoustical materials and also has a contracting side. Duke Power Inc. builds, rebuilds, and repairs electric motors—dynamic balancing, vibration analysis, laser shaft alignment, that sort of thing, as well as having a twenty-four-hour emergency service. Herb Fiore’s on call tonight, but at the moment he’s asleep on a cot in the back room. Donner’s metal fabricators for furnaces and air-conditioning units; Jersey Jackets & Caps specializing in sportswear; Mitchell’s plastic extruders and high-pressure laminates. There’s even a small factory for hot tubs, saunas, and spas. Yes, you’ll find quite a few companies in Brewster, although nothing actually thrives.