Fly Away Home

by Marge Piercy

  Now he was sweating hard, still staring. She felt as if he was trying to stare her down or alternately, to read through her face to her brain. The sweat was standing out on his forehead, over the wide open light brown eyes. Finally he shook his head hard, breaking the stare. “He said he burned them,” he muttered. “Some goddamn smart lawyer he turned out to be.”

  “Ross isn’t big on cleaning up after himself,” Daria said.

  “I didn’t like the job in Lexington. I don’t know that neighborhood. It’s awful quiet at night. And he didn’t tell me there were so many people. He said you were living there alone.”

  “What would that have mattered to you?” Fay snapped. “You burned that woman and her daughter out once already, in Number Sixty-nine. You had two cracks at killing her. Like Bobbie, remember? Little Bobbie Rosario? And whoever that tramp was they said had taken refuge in the hall.”

  “This hand really hurts, you know that?” Lou turned from one to the other. He held up his hand. “You mean that little kid was in all the papers, I didn’t have nothing to do with that one. They had somebody else burn that. That’s before I started working for them.”

  “Who did it, then?” Tom asked.

  “How do I know? Some punk, some kid don’t know his ass. Look here, are you really calling the cops on me?”

  “I think we may try the attorney general’s office.” Mac was standing braced, hands in belt loops again, smiling expansively. “I’ve been developing a contact there. Look, we know you’re small fry—”

  “I got four kids to support! I’m no millionaire—”

  “We’ll send you to Walpole with pleasure,” Mac said. “But if you don’t look forward to ten years hard time, understand we’d rather go after the guys who hired you.”

  “Yeah,” Fay said. “We know we can put you away. We have you over the fire and toasty warm. But those guys have us. They’re our real enemies.

  “Maybe we should call our friend Eleni to look at your hand,” Elroy said. “She’s an RN.”

  “It hurts a lot. Get somebody to look at it! You mean work out a deal with the DA? How do you know they’d do it? They’d just take me and forget the guys who hired me. They don’t want to mess with guys with money. These guys are loaded. Walker’s like that with the bank.” He held up his left hand, fingers crossed.

  “My contact in the attorney general’s office is interested,” Mac said self-importantly. “It might work out to their advantage politically. Big crusading deal. The AG has ambitions. That is, if we can give them the case on a platter.”

  Elroy grinned at Lou. “Nice slight fair guy like you. It don’t matter you’re thirty-five, you’re still in good shape. Pretty face, tight ass. They’re gonna have a time with you, mmm. In Walpole, you’re gonna be one popular gal.”

  Tom said, “Of course you can trust your wife all that time. Too bad you won’t see your kids till they’ve grown up.”

  “Ah, shit, what do you guys really have on me? Nothing!”

  “Nothing?” Mac roared. “Nothing but a whole pile of circumstantial evidence, a whole slew of witnesses and you just confessed to torching Mrs. Walker’s house. In front of all of us.”

  “Are you ever going to call that nurse?” Lou whined.

  “You still planning to sue us?” Fay asked.

  “Listen, I just try to get along. Just try to make a living,” he said. “My hand really hurts. They hired me and they tell me what they want and I do the job. At Sixty-nine the boss says—”

  “Chuck Petris?” Daria butted in.

  “Yeah, he says, just the roof and a bit of internal damage around the stairwell. Only the front apartment. Nothing major. Same for Seventy-one. Now your husband, he wants it totalled. I don’t choose. I do what they pay me for. I give them just the kind of burn they want.”

  “Doesn’t that take a lot of skill?” Mac asked innocently. Tom turned his back on all of them and went to stand at the window, scowling out.

  “I’m calling Eleni,” Elroy said. “Right now. She’ll fix you up.”

  They were going to have to coddle him. They were going to have a relationship with him. He was going to be their creature. Daria felt at once light-headed with relief and disgusted. She moved back behind Lou. Mac was fussing over him now, questioning him more gently, in almost flattering terms. “How did you do that technically, just burn enough to clear a building? How do you contain a fire?”

  Daria sat down beside Mikey and Johnny on the couch. They had been wakened when things got noisy to follow the interrogation. “Mom really gave it to him,” Mikey whispered to her.

  She stared at Lou’s slight back, the man whose footsteps had briefly wakened her that night. She would like to cast Torte’s death in his face, but of course what was an old dog to anybody whose dog he had not been? She understood why Tom was scowling into the yard outside Fay’s kitchen window. He had half hoped Lou would continue to resist them. Just as he had wanted to confront Lou personally on the roof, his anger driving him into danger, so he wanted Lou to hold out now. The victory was too easy. He could not savor it, and neither could she. Although she had invested Lou with little energy of hostile fantasy, she found him disgusting, banal and disgusting. A worm who turned too easily. He had been bought by greed; now as Tom had predicted, he could be bought by fear. He was theirs and she shuddered at the proximity. Your enemy has a face. It was neither handsome (in spite of Elroy’s flattery) nor ugly, simply a pinched nervous face, a sharp face, a hungry face, a thirty-five-year-old father of four who was still a gangling adolescent.

  “I got to go home,” Lou whined. “My wife gets crazy if I stay out too late. I always go home by three. Always! It’s after five.”

  “If you think she’s awake, we’ll call her for you,” Fay said.

  “Yeah? A woman calls up, I’m dead. Let me call her. Don’t worry, I’m not planning to give her some secret message in code. Tell her to burn the files. I got no files. It’s all in my head.” He tapped his narrow high forehead. Eleni arrived, a big woman with iron grey hair in a bun, to look at his hand. “I remember the floor plans, I remember the wiring in every building I ever worked on.”

  “Doesn’t your wife know where you are?” Fay perched on the table.

  “She thinks I tend bar sometimes, filling in for a friend. That’s what I tell her. She knows I get paid. It’s none of her business, just so I pay the bills, right?”

  That’s how Ross had felt. Two worlds. Two personae. But they became one. Perhaps what Ross sought with Gail was permission to be entire again, to slough off the dead skins of values he no longer held and emerge in his bright bold colors as entrepreneur, real estate developer, sculptor of neighborhoods, master of tax shelters and mortgage pyramiding schemes.

  From the window Tom turned and stared at Lou, paced around him, then fled to the window again. The questions he wanted to ask: she could feel them seething in him, an angry confrontation he must contain. She experienced the physical connection between Tom and herself more sharply than she ever had, not this time in sexual attraction but in empathy. It was being arranged that Fay and Elroy were to sit up with Lou, for they did not dare let him out of their sight. In the morning Mac would talk to his contact in the attorney general’s office and try to give Lou over to them. At the last moment as they were dispersing, Mac decided he too would sit up. In exhaustion Tom and she stumbled out into the dawn, heading for his apartment merely because it was closer than hers.

  25

  “But we were up all night. It’s crazy to try to go to work as usual. You could hurt yourself.”

  “I’m a working man, Daria. I’m no professional—”

  “You take time off more easily than Ross ever did—”

  “More willingly. Not more easily. I took off to help you move. I took off to help you with the insurance adjuster. I’m going to start on your kitchen this weekend.”

  “Tom, I don’t want you to do anything for me. I’m just worried because you’re exhausted.”


  “I haven’t been carrying my load in Aardvark. Everybody’s pissed. I have to show up today. We’re getting behind and it’s my fault.”

  “Nobody else ever gets sick? Nobody takes a trip? You told me Jenny had a baby last year and was out for three months.”

  “Yeah, but we had nine months notice to plan around it.… I have to go and don’t drive me crazy about it. I feel too mean this morning. Let’s just stay out of each other’s way.”

  As she walked the two blocks to her new flat, she wasn’t sure what they had been quarrelling about. She had not actually expected him to stay home from work; perhaps she was merely asserting her right to care. He was then asserting other commitments? She did not know, except that she retained a tingle of anger as she was sure he did.

  Their new phone rang all day, as she was trying to work with Peggy under extremely minimal conditions. Mac was hogging negotiations with the attorney general’s office; but Mac was the best person to talk to the state. He could speak bureaucrat’s language. He was a Harvard man and assumed command even when he wasn’t granted it. Their best argument with the attorney general was their inability to persuade city officials to listen to their complaints, and Fay was frantically putting together the documentation on their failed efforts to interest other authorities.

  Tom was disqualified from the maneuvers because he could not remain in the same room with smokers. That kept him out of meetings with the attorney general, even if he had taken off work. Tom felt a little sorry for himself, being excluded. Fay was angry about Mac’s domination of the new offensive. Lou followed Mac around like a puppy dog, she said. They had agreed to tell nothing to the SON membership at large yet, because the AG had talked of wiring Lou and sending him back to record his business dealings with the landlords he worked for.

  Donald was being officially brought in. Tom had persuaded him to take char samples and photographs of the previous fires starting with the one that killed Bobbie and the presumed tramp in the house where Daria now lived, but SON and Donald had lacked the funds to do the lab work or print the pictures. Now he was to be paid as a consultant to work on the evidence he had collected and locked away but never analyzed.

  In the back of her mind Daria was brooding over Tom as she was proofreading the manuscript being retyped. Peggy was coming in four days a week now, to redo what had been water damaged. Maybe Daria’s moving into Tom’s neighborhood worried him; perhaps he thought she would make many more demands, and wasn’t he right? Here she was with a house screaming for renovation and she did need his help every day. If Dorothy could only pull her settlement out of Ross, she could hire someone to do the work. Sandra María, Mariela and she needed a functioning kitchen, needed it badly and soon. They must create together some new pleasant daily rituals. She did not know who felt guiltier toward Mariela, still cross and sulky, Sandra María or herself. Sandra María felt she had failed to make a decent life for her daughter. Daria felt she had persuaded them to move in, and exposed them to danger brought on by her acrimonious divorce.

  The new sink had finally been plumbed; the gas company was to send someone to turn on her old six-burner stove today. Ángel, Elroy and Tom had wrestled in the refrigerator from Lexington. Sandra María and Ángel had laid a slate floor in a mosaic of greys and grey-greens. Daria had painted the kitchen a pale gold. But the old metal cabinets had been taken down and no new wooden cabinets put up. They were still eating from paper plates and drinking from sodden paper cups. She wanted her appliances standing in efficient rows on the counters ready to chop and whip and grind. She wanted the right tool in the right drawer. She wanted the order out of which she could create pleasure. She needed Tom’s help, and perhaps that need itself was dangerous. Assuredly something had gone wrong between them over the last week. He was acting broody, sore.

  She dreaded the evening. She had invited Tom to supper, assuming the stove would be connected. She intended to try to cook her first true and full meal in the new dwelling, even if it must be served on paper, a braised dish she called Sweet California Beef, because her recipe used California port.

  Finally at three the gasman came. The last bottles of her wine cellar had been destroyed in the fire, but Ángel had promised to pick up something. For all the improvisation and difficulties as she cooked on her own six-burner stove, she decided this could be made a better kitchen than her old one. It was large and more rationally shaped, without a stairway and back hall cut out of it; it was much lighter and the ceiling considerably higher, giving the heat from cooking someplace to go. As she grated the zest of an orange, she worried about Tracy. As soon as Daria had cash in hand, she must start the alteration. Tracy had been given far more to deal with than was fair. At least she must have her own nice room. With two floors, they would go at once from being jammed in, to being spaciously and luxuriously spread out.

  Supper was like a good picnic. Everybody ate well and even Tom seemed relaxed. The evening was mild, the door to the yard standing open. Daria imagined a deck just outside the kitchen but she said nothing, fearful that Tom would feel drafted. How varied were the sounds that drifted in: bird cries as in Lexington, yes, because the neighborhood had just as many trees, and in fact a more varied bird population because often the yards held fruit trees, but more human sounds, radios tuned to salsa, Chopin, punk rock, all news; the whack of a ball next door; hammering from the corner where Mr. Vernalli was working on his roof when he got home from work; the steady drone of conversation from the Schulmans’ yard where they sat out on mild evenings, the invalid wife, Mr. Schulman, the old people upstairs, their friends next door, drinking endless pots of coffee and eating cake.

  After supper, Sandra María and Ángel took Mariela off to see a movie while Daria sat on the doggy sofa beside Tom in an uneasy silence she was not accustomed to, with him. Did all men run out of words after an initial burst of passionate interest? His being so attracted to her had been in the nature of an irrational miracle. Had it worn itself out?

  “Tom. Don’t tell me you’re not mad at me this time.”

  “Okay. I won’t.”

  “What are you angry about?”

  His profile seemed wrapped in the dark clouds of sullen anger. “I don’t know, if you don’t. What would I ever be sore about?”

  “Because I hit Lou with the brick? That’s macho silliness.”

  “I was pissed about that, but I admit it’s stupid. I thought you could have trusted me to handle him. Then I thought I wouldn’t have stood there watching like a spectator either. So I forgive you.”

  “Forgive me! For doing the right thing?”

  “For doing the right thing.” Briefly he grinned. He was still facing straight ahead, as if he were driving down a treacherous road. She had a strong desire to stand in front of him waving her arms and making faces. “Okay, I’m forgiven for keeping you from getting carved like a Christmas goose. What am I not forgiven for?”

  “Lying.”

  “Lying?”

  “Lying. To me!”

  “Oh.” She had a flash of Lou in the chair sweating. “Because I told Lou I’d seen Ross give him money.”

  “That’s part of it. You said you hadn’t seen anything.”

  “I saw Ross hand him something. I never saw what it was. I had no idea then who Lou was—I was looking for lovers, not business connections. I’d never heard of arson, except as a minor item in the morning papers.”

  “But you remembered. And you didn’t tell me. You lied.”

  “Tom, I didn’t remember right away. We never spoke of it again after that first time I recognized Lou. I did tell you where I’d seen him and that I’d seen Ross with him.”

  “You’re telling me you remembered later about Walker handing Lou something? And about all those notes? Suddenly you remembered.”

  Daria was silent, her hands tightening on each other in her lap. “No. I remembered it all right away. Although I couldn’t remember what the notes said till I’d concentrated for a long time. I was s
till protecting Ross—”

  “Why? Why in hell?”

  “I didn’t think he could ever have burned people out. I just didn’t believe it. I thought you had a grudge against him—that you were making him into a villain.”

  “Until he tried to kill you. Other people were just fine.”

  “Tom, please listen! Until you turned out to be right, when Schulman found Lou with the gasoline, I didn’t believe it, but then I did!” Tom wanted total acceptance, but she was still coming to know him. He wanted from her a kind of belief and trust in him they had not earned between them, but she could think of no way to phrase that, that might not alienate him further. She was in no state to offer the trust he demanded, for her propensity to think the best had landed her in sorrow and trouble. “Only after that did I think about those notes and set out to try to remember what they said. Ross burned them all. But I didn’t let Lou know that. I read one of them by chance—” She stopped abruptly, her mind flashing on that October Monday.

  “I’ll never believe you forgot you’d read them.” He sat like a fortress, squared off, retracted.

  “I may have forgotten something better than that.” She jumped up. “I may have saved that first one. Wait a minute!” She ran into her bedroom, tripping over the bamboo blind she had been trying to install. Then she caught up her jewelry case and brought it back. Opening it on her lap she felt for the loose spot in the velvet lining. “Here it is.” She unfolded the note carefully. “It’s the very first I ever saw. After that I steamed them open as they came because I thought they were from Ross’s girlfriend. After he read them, he burned them each time.”

  “You hold it. I don’t want my fingerprints on it too.” He leaned forward to read aloud:

  “Dear Rusty,

  You can expect our little visitor Tuesday night. I won’t disappoint you.