The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

  “What’s so hard about it? They’re stiffs, right?”

  “You gotta frisk them for rings and shit. I don’t know if I could do that. Now they want to pass a law that you gotta pull their teeth because of the fillings. Like they’re full of mercury. No way I’m yanking a stiff’s teeth. It’s not religious. If a stiff’s got teeth, he should take ’em into the furnace. I mean, they’re his teeth, right? Then you gotta grind the bones. They put them in this thing that’s like a big food blender with bells and whistles. I told Larry I wanted to use it to whip up a batch of margaritas, and he gave me that dead look of his. Me, I want the dirt—a nice casket, not too expensive, not too cheap. Larry was packing some chunks of bone into the grinder and smoking a cigar. You think ash wasn’t dropping onto that dead guy’s bits and pieces? Digger told me that from one stiff to the next you can never get out all the ashes, so everybody’s boxed up with some ashes belonging to someone else. How’d you like to be boxed up with a fat old colored woman? Nah, I want the ground.”

  By now Seymour had parked the ambulance by the hospital. He leaned back and began rolling another joint. Jimmy kept chatting to keep Seymour awake.

  “You know these classes diggers take, I mean, guys training to be diggers? They got this class in the restorative arts and they got all these digger students in a classroom and you know what they do?” Seymour didn’t answer, and Jimmy raised his voice. “You know what they do?”

  “Tell me.” Seymour decided against the joint. Maybe he’d take a little nap.

  “They bring in a bunch of aluminum roasting pans like the ones you use for a Thanksgiving turkey, except each pan holds a head, like cut off at the neck. Isn’t that cool? Each one of them gets to work on a severed head.”

  Seymour grew more alert. “Where do they get heads?”

  “The school buys them. They cost about seven hundred dollars each. You can buy all sorts of shit; you wouldn’t believe the sort of shit you can buy, legal or illegal. But for the legal shit there’s a price list, though you need some sort of license: hands for five hundred dollars, wrists for five hundred, elbows for five hundred, then the whole leg for up to a thousand dollars. And fuckin’ skin, man: ten dollars a square inch. You’re a walking gold mine. It’s like the gooks eating a chicken: they use every bit. Those student diggers powder up the heads, put on lipstick and rouge, just like with fashion models, and all right in the turkey pan.”

  There was a pause, and then Seymour asked, “You got plans about Carl?”

  “Hey, I got lots of plans. I only gotta pick one. We could scare the shit out of him; do somethin’ to drive him right around the bend but we don’t let him know it’s us. That’s the main thing. He’s got a wicked temper. Maybe it’s better if I do it by myself so nothing gets fucked up. Then he quits or gets fired and Digger says to me, ‘We gotta replace Carl. You got any ideas?’ And I say Seymour Hodges is the man for the job. How’s that sound?”

  “Fine by me.” Seymour was quiet for a bit, then said, “If Digger starts burning more people than he buries, you gonna call him Digger or you gonna call him Burner?”

  “Nah, I don’t like that. Maybe the Cooker. No, I’ll call him the Chef. It’s got a classy ring to it. The Chef.”

  • • •

  One o’clock Sunday morning and a pair of coyotes can walk down the middle of Water Street without a care in the world. Sniff a little here, sniff a little there. When Ronnie McBride is sleeping in the doorway of Crandall Investments, the coyotes go by on the far side of the street. Maybe they don’t like how he smells. But tonight Ronnie’s off someplace else, and the coyotes have the whole street to themselves.

  All those people searching for Nina Lefebvre have gone home by now, though cops have her picture taped to the dashboard of their cruisers. Bobby Anderson’s home in bed with his wife. Shawna hasn’t seen Bobby for a while and she’d like a little romance, but Bobby’s sound asleep after hurrying through people’s yards all night.

  Amy Calderone, Harriet’s friend, is wide awake. First she turns one way and then the other. She tells herself if she’s not asleep in ten minutes, she’ll take a sleeping pill. Then ten minutes go by and she gives herself another ten minutes. Most nights she and her husband, Marty, sleep in each other’s arms; they’re close like that. But tonight she keeps pushing him away. These embraces, tonight they’re oppressive. Amy keeps thinking of Harriet. Why doesn’t she call the cops on that Neanderthal? But maybe I’m the one who should call the cops. Harriet would be furious. But isn’t her safety more important? Even more important than her friendship? And the Neanderthal, wouldn’t he be furious as well? Amy pushes Marty away and turns over with her back to him. Ten more minutes and she’ll take a pill for sure.

  Larry Rodman is watching a skin flick. No rings tonight; the families wanted them back. Larry likes to watch the classics from the forties and fifties. These white bitches gotta be dead by now; the studs, too. If they’re alive, the bitches’ tits are flabby as used rubbers. But Larry thinks they’re dead. That blond bitch with the colored guy’s fat cock in her mouth—Larry thinks he’s already toasted her, sent her to the oven. He must have burned a bunch of them. It’s just statistics, that’s all. He’s carried them over the welcome mat like a bridegroom. Then he’s burned them. It’s this that turns him on, not the titties and slick pussies. And when he’s hard enough, he’ll rack off. Shoot his wad onto the TV screen. It’s like pissing in their faces.

  Ginger and Howard Phelps are playing gin rummy, but they’re not giving it the usual attention. Ginger thinks about that missing Lefebvre girl. What could have gotten into her? She’s known Vicki for years, and though she’s not a close friend she would never want anything to happen to Nina. Howard was out searching with some other guys for a while. A snipe hunt, Howard called it. Neither Ginger nor Howard likes how things are going, but they don’t talk about it; rather, it’s like they have a sour taste in their mouths, a sensual discomfort, and they know lots of people who feel the same way. It’s not a feeling that has a name yet, but quite a few are lying awake, trying to figure what to call it. Disquietude is a word on Hercel’s vocabulary test on Monday. Maybe it’s disquietude.

  At one o’clock Woody Potter is sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of chamomile tea with a little honey and a moderate amount of Jack Daniel’s. He promised himself he would go to sleep no matter what. He imagined counting coyotes jumping over a wall and laughed.

  A dog from the canine unit had followed Nina’s scent for six blocks, and then it vanished. The consensus was someone had picked Nina up in a car. Her friends were contacted, but all denied seeing, helping, or hearing from her. She was in eleventh grade at Brewster High School, and so other classmates were also contacted. Nothing. Then Vicki said that Nina’s cell phone was missing, so she had probably called someone; or maybe she had run into someone or flagged someone down.

  Whenever Woody brooded, Ajax would come, sit at his feet, and stare at him. If Woody looked back, Ajax would look away. Sometimes Ajax would bring Woody one of his toys—stuffed things, rubber tug toys, and a rubber Santa Claus now faded and with punctures from the dog’s teeth. It squeaked when it was squeezed. It was the Santa Claus that Ajax brought now. He sat at Woody’s feet with a perky expression, squeaking the Santa over and over, defying him to snatch it away. It made Woody want to give the dog a well-meaning smack.

  “Go lie down. I don’t feel like being cheered up right now.”

  Instead of retreating to his bed, Ajax lay down a few feet away and continued to stare at him with worried eyes.

  “You can be a real pain, you know that?”

  Ajax’s tail thumped on the carpet.

  Woody turned aside so he wouldn’t have to see him. He was reviewing the various events in Brewster to try to form a pattern, but he kept being distracted by their outrageous details. Why would you scalp a person in the twenty-first century? Why would you put a snake in a hospital crib? Then came the rapes of Peggy Summers and Nina Lefebvre, with their
trappings of Satanism. Why? And was Nina pregnant? If she had conceived on Wednesday night, that was three days ago. It would take maybe two or three more to show up on a pregnancy test. Woody knew that much from Susie, who had twice hoped she was pregnant and would fuss with pregnancy strips and a Pyrex measuring cup of piss from four days until her period. Woody had thrown away the measuring cup and got another. Every time he’d seen the cup in the cupboard, it reminded him of the difficulties—by which he meant the failings—in their relationship.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, he thought of Susie again. It irritated him to miss her so much, since he’d known for a long time that their differences were irreconcilable. To marry her would mean quitting his job as a trooper, and he couldn’t imagine doing that. They had discussed this so often he could repeat their discussions verbatim, twenty pages of dialogue that he could put on stage as a one-act play called The Incredibly Dull.

  But then Woody had a surprise. As he conjured up Susie’s face, he instead saw Jill Franklin. He jerked back his head. “Good grief, what a pathetic dope you are,” he said out loud.

  Ajax got to his feet, wagging his tail, and Woody scratched his ears. “Relax, I’m just being dumb again.” But he kept thinking of Jill—her short blond hair, her round face and snub nose. Didn’t she look ridiculous? He didn’t think so.

  When he had coffee with her that afternoon, they didn’t talk about what had been happening in town. Jill hadn’t wanted Woody to think she was pumping him for information. Instead, she talked about her six-year-old son and how she felt bad about not spending more time with him, even though her parents were glad to take care of him. But her son—was his name Luke?—wanted a dog and her parents didn’t want a dog in the house. So that was that.

  Woody hadn’t said much; rather, he mentioned things instead of talking about them. He mentioned growing up in Pawtucket; he mentioned being bored by it; he mentioned hunting trips to New Hampshire; he mentioned Iraq and Operation Desert Storm, a silly name, since he had spent months doing nothing. He didn’t mention being scared shitless by a missile attack on an army barracks in Dhahran, when he’d just been passing through and had stopped for something to eat. After that it seemed he heard the shouting and screams every night. Even now it sometimes happened if he was particularly stressed. Why should he tell her bad news like that? Nor did he mention his temper or his marriage to Cheryl or his time with Susie. He didn’t like talking about himself. It meant revisiting a place that either bored him, scared him, or made him fell guilty. Nor did he say he liked the state police, because everything was clear—not the stuff you dealt with but how you dealt with it, the protocol.

  The series of rationalizations in which Woody next immersed himself hardly bear describing, but they concerned Jill’s work as a reporter and Woody’s questions about how she would write about the hanged cat, Hercel’s flight from the coyotes, and Nina’s disappearance. The more he considered it, the crosser he got, forgetting, it seemed, Jill’s own reservations about writing on such subjects. As he thought of her journalistic responsibility, or lack of it, he also thought about what she looked like—the smoothness of her skin, her muscularity. But he tried to pretend he wasn’t thinking about this. It was only an irritating distraction.

  The pretext that began as wisps of smoke gained substance, or perhaps one might say the bad reason hid itself behind an apparent good reason. Whatever the case, at two o’clock in the morning Woody called Jill Franklin, ready to read her the riot act for irresponsible journalism.

  Jill picked up after the third ring with a mumbled hello. “What’re you doing?” His gruff tone suggested that he hoped to catch her engaged in mischief.

  “Is this Woody? Well, I’m sleeping, oddly enough. I take it you’re not?”

  Woody again grew suspicious that she was in the midst of writing irresponsibly about events in Brewster. But as he spoke, he realized how ridiculous it sounded, and his aggressiveness faded to an apologetic monotone.

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” said Jill. “I was fired.” She explained how that afternoon she had told Ted Pomeroy, the owner of the paper, that she wanted to return to writing social news because she questioned the ethics of helping to create mass hysteria. Though a reporter for only a short time, she had already fallen victim to the solipsism of thinking an event didn’t exist until it was reported in the paper or on a news program. Pomeroy wasn’t sympathetic. He’d seen a surge in sales over the past days and he wanted it to continue. “You think you’re irreplaceable?” he had shouted. “I’m the only one who’s irreplaceable!” So he’d fired her.

  “It seems to me,” Jill told Woody, “that I should blame you for this. After all, you’re the one who’s been yelling at me all week.”

  Woody considered apologizing, but instead he returned to his original question: “So what’re you doing right now?”

  There was a pause. Jill considered his question, as Woody listened to her breathe. “Well, I’m talking to you on the phone. Before that I was sound asleep, and in a few more minutes I hope to be asleep again, if you’ll let me.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Woody, sounding gruff again. “What are you doing for breakfast?”

  “I’m spending the day with Luke and my parents. Are you free Monday?”

  ELEVEN

  IT’S NOT JUST POLICE OFFICERS, firefighters, rescue squads, and ambulance techs who come upon awful events; more often than not it’s those we might call innocent of the world’s darker parts. Some time ago in Detroit an eight-year-old boy poked open a garbage bag he had noticed in a playground for two days. What he first thought he had found was the leg of a deer. What he really found was the dismembered body of a murdered prostitute. Hard to get over something like that, hard to push it from the mind.

  On Monday morning two fourteen-year-old ninth-graders at Brewster Junior High decided to skip school to go squirrel hunting, though they’d be happy to shoot anything bigger if it got in their way. Davie Bottoms was armed with a Daisy DY880, a bolt-action rifle that held fifty BBs; ten pumps sent a BB at its target at seven hundred fifty feet per second. It had cost fifty bucks, which he’d saved in no time by mowing lawns. The previous week it had come in the mail, and Davie was eager to get busy. His mom hated it, but his dad had one as a kid and just laughed. For a boy, it was part of growing up: such was his argument.

  The other boy, Alex Milbank, had a Crosman 1377C multi-pump pneumatic pistol, fourteen inches long. With ten pumps, it could shoot a pellet at six hundred feet per second. It held one pellet, and he had to reload after each shot, but this was done quickly. He’d “borrowed” the pistol from his brother Mikey, a senior in high school, who’d be seriously pissed if he found out.

  Alex carried the weapons in a duffel bag, along with a box of doughnuts, a six-pack of Coke, and a plastic bag for whatever they managed to kill. They rode their bikes south out of town on Whipple Street, through half a dozen blocks of houses ranging from old to new and then passing the last house, an old farmhouse belonging to Sister Asherah MacDonald and her partner, Sister Isis Perry. In another quarter-mile Whipple Street reached a dead end at Trustom Pond National Wildlife Refuge, eight hundred acres of forest extending inland from a two-mile barrier beach and Trustom Pond. The boys pushed their bikes about twenty yards into the woods and then unpacked their weapons.

  There is a transformative moment when a boy puts a gun in his hands. He doesn’t necessarily change from good to bad or from cautious to reckless; rather, he takes on gravitas, a new significance, usually marbled with fantasy as a steak is marbled with fat. Davie and Alex immediately felt older, more mature; they had become hunters, potential breadwinners; they were able to live off the land. This wasn’t something they especially saw in themselves as individuals, but each thought he saw it in the other. They had heard, of course, of Hercel McGarty being pursued by coyotes, and they felt if they were lucky enough to run into a coyote, they could handle it no problem.

  “Lock and load,” said Davie.r />
  “Rock and roll,” said Alex.

  They wore dark sweatshirts and baseball caps. Davie wore camouflage pants, which Alex envied. He only wore jeans. They walked quietly into the woods.

  There had been sun earlier; now it was getting cloudy. The weather was warm for late October. Indian summer, people said. The trees had mostly lost their leaves except the oaks. They didn’t follow a path, and bushwhacking was difficult. If they’d known sweetbriar was also called Pilgrim’s curse, they would have understood the reference. There were also canes of prickly rose. Thorns caught on their sweatshirts and snatched away their caps. Then, after a few minutes, they saw a squirrel high in an oak and they let loose. Perhaps they fired fifty BBs and a dozen pellets. After the first shot, the squirrel darted to the other side of the tree and waited.

  “Did you hit it?” asked Davie.

  Alex would have liked to say yes, but he shook his head. They looked around at the trees. Crows were calling, and they would have shot a crow if the opportunity had arisen, but none did. They’d have even shot a seagull.

  “We need to be more quiet,” said Alex.

  Davie nodded, but this was hard to do as they pushed through the brambles. Still, they had been in these woods before and knew the vines wouldn’t last forever. Again they saw a squirrel, and again they fired and missed.

  “Maybe if we wait for them,” said Davie.

  This seemed better than being scratched to pieces. After another ten yards or so they came to a small open area, where they lay down to watch the surrounding branches.

  And so they waited. The woods were quiet; not even the crows were calling. The breeze through the branches made a faint whispering. Occasionally, they heard a rustling noise, but then it passed and silence returned.