An Occasional Hell

by Silvis, Randall;

  Yes, you are a recidivist old fart, DeWalt, but it is the only profession you have the guts for. So go to sleep, DeWalt. Shut it off now. Close your eyes and listen to the rain. Breathe the darkness. Search for the scent of wild mustard.…

  After a while he admitted to himself that he would need the television or something like it to silence the noise in his head. He did not want to abandon his bed for the night-chilled room, so he concentrated on trying to remember the Twenty-third Psalm. He found it in his memory in bits and pieces and it was good work to put it together again. In his voice the joints did not dovetail as neatly as they had when he was a boy, and he worried that he was leaving something out when he could not find any more pieces of it anywhere.

  I’m not praying, he told himself as he began it again in full. This isn’t praying. It’s for the rhythm and the poetry and nothing else. It’s for myself alone.

  Inside his head then he repeated it time after time. It was on a loop of memory and would run continuously now until sleep shut it off. And not even then would it leave him completely, for he dozed off once and then awoke suddenly in mid-verse, a table before me in the presence of mine enemies, thou annointest my head with oil my cup runneth over, and he was finally asleep again.

  A while later it was not the prayer that pulled him up from sleep but the scream of the firehouse siren at the end of town. It blared unwavering for two solid minutes, calling volunteers from their beds and barstools, a common enough plaint in the nights of a countryside summer, but always startling, an almost predatory shriek. This time it was probably a lightning fire, a rended tree, a split power line whipping and snapping at the highway. Good entertainment for a dull rainsoaked night.

  Three minutes after the siren fell silent, the firetruck roared through town, its own siren warbling. DeWalt listened to the shrill noise fade, heard it echo in his memory. Afterward he had to struggle to bring his attention to the rain again. He had had enough of the Twenty-third Psalm for one night. It was not a good habit to get into, he thought, this over-reliance on intangibles.

  As always when he had slept for a few minutes and awakened he had a hard time coaxing a return to sleep. It seemed to him there was something flawed to the structure of a human being. The mind should be able to turn itself off anytime it told itself to. But the mind would not obey itself, even when it knew it should. Nor would the body obey the mind. Who the hell are you listening to? DeWalt asked his own thoughts. Who’s giving the orders here?

  He disobeyed himself a while longer. He lay there and wanted sleep but the desire did nothing to hasten it. You can desire until your head falls off, DeWalt, and it will not do you any good.

  He said, “Gimme a break,” and rolled onto his side. He had no choice but to lie there and wait.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In the morning DeWalt did not feel like cooking for himself and then having to clean up and he did not feel like going to the Colony either, where Della would want to talk about all the things he no longer wanted to think about. So he drove to a market on the way to campus, he bought two oranges and a newspaper, and he went to Tower Hill.

  It was called Tower Hill because of the mushroom-shaped water tank on its summit, a pale blue hundred-foot morel encircled at the base by a high cyclone fence, discouragement to unauthorized climbers. DeWalt and other professors sometimes held their classes on the gentle slope of Tower Hill, even though trying to teach a class there was an exercise in futility, the female students gathered around him in a half-circle as if he were a guru about to reveal the secret path to literary satori, the males lower on the hill so as to better gaze up the girls’ skirts, inspiration for yet another science fiction story. DeWalt himself could be distracted by clouds scraping across the sky, the suggestive scents of autumn, the breath-rhythm of a coed’s distended decolletage; too distracted to be of any use except to urge his students to awaken their senses, to not only see the grass and sunshine but to smell and feel and hear it as well. He would toss them a handful of Hemingway’s old chestnuts, and since few of the students had ever read Hemingway they believed that DeWalt was being riotously original. Sometimes he even thought of himself as a character in a Hemingway novel, one of the lesser characters, a parody, a Harry Morgan, an El Sordo dying on the hill.

  It was what DeWalt would soon enough be doing again, instructing and having his instruction ignored, fighting against the allure of mediocrity. You have to get below the easy surface of impressions, he would tell them. Get below the grass is green and the sun is bright. You have to plumb deeper, he would tell them, and they would titter, sex first and foremost in their minds, and he would recognize again his uselessness to them.

  He did not like to think now of September coming, another school year. There was not much of anything he liked to think about anymore. To stop himself from thinking he began his own exercise, the one he would have his students try when they gathered on the hill.

  Buzz of cicada was the first thing he heard, building to a susurrous crescendo, fading out. The low whoosh of distant traffic, a delivery truck grinding down a narrow campus avenue. Somebody’s lawn mower purring several blocks away. A catbird squawking. The vague bass thump from an open dormitory window. A clicking noise—what was that? A honeybee batting against the blue shell of the water tank, trying to penetrate the world’s largest flower. DeWalt could smell the water inside the tank, fluoridated, chemically pure. He could smell sunshine baking the blue paint, the hard stretch of metal, silent pressure of the underbelly. He could feel gravity pulling hard on those thousands of gallons of elevated water, the water wanting to go home again, deep into the cool earth, hating the cool sling of metal that held it aloft, not understanding this resistance, imprisonment, curtailment of an innate need to flow, move, redefine.…

  He felt the cool grass and the warm ground beneath his legs, he felt his legs, feet, toes itchy in heavy socks. Food aromas wafting from the cafeteria. The scent of orange peel oils on his hands, sticky fingers, orange memory in his mouth. The pungent scent of grass clippings smoldering in somebody’s yard.…

  This last scent reminded him of something and he stopped the exercise. He sat very still for a moment, pulling the memory together. Then he snapped open the newspaper and spread it open on the ground. He scanned the pages. He was curious, he told himself; nothing more. Expecting nothing, really. A confirmation of no suspicions.

  But even as he searched the newspaper he was gathering the bits of memory together, isolated images that had floated into his consciousness last night as he lay in shallow sleep, near-sleep, that gray room between wakefulness and dream. Each image had washed briefly ashore like something from a shipwreck, each piece of flotsam hinting at the ship’s identity but then pulled to sea again, dragged under, pushed into the mud. Now the scent of burning grass clippings had reminded him. And now, finally, he found it in the newspaper, a one-column paragraph near the bottom of page eleven:

  At approximately two thirty this morning local firemen responded to an alarm in a wooded area of Claridge R.D. 3, Adams Township, seven miles north of town. Because of the rain and the firemen’s quick response, the blaze was confined to less than three acres of woodland. Fire chief Bob Landers cited lightning as the probable cause of the blaze. This was the fifth brush fire in the heavily wooded river area in the past twelve months.

  Even after he finished reading the paragraph, DeWalt did not move or look up. What he felt and what brought a kind of tightlipped smile to his face was not so much surprise as … as what? Vindication? No, not that; not just yet anyway. But maybe.… Maybe he had caught a whiff of the elephant.

  The question now was how to properly track the elephant.

  First of all, he told himself, kill the metaphor.

  He refolded the newspaper, rolled it up and shoved it into his hip pocket. On his way to the car he dumped the paper and the orange peels into a trash can. Then he drove to the stationhouse. He was familiar enough with volunteer fire companies to know who would be at the
stationhouse at this time of day: an unpaid EMT or two hanging around to answer the phone and activate the alarm—a housewife, a college student, or an unmarried man, somebody hoping to escape the daily dullness of his or her life.

  But he did not know what his story would be until he saw who the EMTs were. He entered through the building’s side entrance, directly into the kitchen. Seated at opposite ends of the long table, watching a game show on the color TV on the counter, was the young man who worked evenings at Lonnie’s Sub Shop on Third Avenue, and his partner, more than twice his age, a decade older than DeWalt, Amy Weesner, indefatigable public librarian.

  When DeWalt first moved to town, Amy Weesner had placed Suffer No Fools in the library display case, and had kept it there so long that the jacket grew sunfaded. At least six times she had asked him to autograph copies of the book, gifts for friends, she told him. She was a widow whose husband, a lumberyard baron, had left her with a great deal of money. Shortly after DeWalt arrived in town she announced that she would donate to the library $10,000 worth of new books, and then asked DeWalt to recommend specific authors or titles.

  When he returned from his survey of the shelves, he had asked, “Do you think $10,000 will be enough?” And she laughed. “You see why I had to take matters into my own hands?”

  With his help then, which she certainly had no need for, they compiled a list. They played a kind of alphabet game, taking turns naming authors: Atwood, Annunnzio, Bellow, Boll, Beckett, Borges, Barth, Camus, Crane, Conrad … “Maybe I’ll have a special Southern Writers Collection,” she mused. “Percy, Styron, Conroy, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty. I have a special fondness for the southern writers,” she had said. “They, at least, know how to act decorously even when they don’t mean it. Are you a southerner, by any chance, Mr. DeWalt? I sense in you a great respect for civility.”

  She purchased four additional copies of DeWalt’s book two for the shelves and two for “the archives.”

  “It is absolutely thrilling,” she told him once, “to have a real live writer as a patron in my library.”

  “Even a writer who writes commercial trash?” he asked.

  “Nonsense. You have a gift for characterization which very nearly rivals Mr. Faulkner’s.”

  “I’ll try to write a Sanctuary someday,” he told her.

  “Isn’t that book a hoot? I just laugh and laugh everytime I read it. And all those wonderful Snopeses of his. I just can’t get enough of those people. They remind me of my Board of Directors.”

  By virtue of his one-shot profession, then, he had acquired a champion. Now, seeing her there at the stationhouse table, a copy of Library Journal open before her, he knew suddenly how to get all the information he required.

  “I should have known you’d be involved here,” he told her. “You just don’t know how to rest, do you?”

  “There is no rest for the wicked, Mr. DeWalt. I must admit, though, that I’m surprised to see you here—you’re feeling all right, I hope?”

  He realized then that he had his hand on his chest. He had been short of breath ever since reading about the brushfire.

  “I’m fine,” he told her. “The reason I’m here is,” and he smiled conspiratorially, “I’m thinking about starting a new book.”

  Amy Weesner’s face lit up like that of a Jehovah Witness told that Jesus is waiting outside for her in his private limo. “I have been waiting so very long to hear you say that, Mr. DeWalt.”

  He felt a flush of shame, but continued. “The main character is a volunteer fireman. And I was wondering, you see I’ll need to know something about the daily life of a firehouse. How many calls you receive, and of what types, that kind of thing. So what I was wondering is, would it be possible for me to have a look at your logbook? I’ll need to go back at least a year. Preferably more. For verisimilitude, you know.”

  The young man, nodding vigorously, was on his feet even before DeWalt had finished speaking. “I’ll get the logs,” he said.

  Amy Weesner showed DeWalt to a meeting room—a long folding table and twelve hard folding chairs—where he could examine the logs in privacy. He borrowed a pen and paper from her. She tiptoed away and closed the door quietly, reverentially, which made him feel all the more guilty for the deceit.

  The guilt all but evaporated, however, after he had spent an hour with the logbooks—the boy had brought four of them, each covering six months of activity. From these records DeWalt learned that of the five brush fires in the wooded area on the western side of the river north of town, lightning was listed as the probable cause of three, and the two others, occurring as they had in drier weather, were “of unknown origin. Arson suspected.” The firemen had also responded to four separate sightings of smoke in the same general area, only to arrive to find the ground charred, trees scorched, but the fire extinguished.

  Altogether, over the past two years, thirteen brushfires had been reported within a few miles of the inlet where Alex Catanzaro had been killed. In other words, within a few miles of the Jewett home. DeWalt considered again, as he had fleetingly considered last night during those moments of troubled gray sleep, the scorched back door of the Jewett house, the burned-away steps, the blackened ground several yards from the house.

  Somebody likes to play with matches, he thought.

  DeWalt tried to reconstruct what little he knew of the psychological profile of an arsonist. Somebody who feels weak and ineffectual, dominated by circumstance. Somebody, perhaps, with a repressed or aberrant sexuality. Repressed hostility and self-contempt.

  Somebody like me, DeWalt thought, and smiled at the irony of it, the bitter taste.

  Or somebody like Draper Jewett.

  Somebody who, if hired to intimidate or injure a third party, might choose as his weapon a Molotov cocktail?

  Excited then, almost breathless with excitement, DeWalt returned the logbooks to Amy Weesner. He thanked her and the young man for their help and hastily said his goodbyes. Outside again, hurrying toward his car, he inhaled deeply, he filled his lungs with the August sweetness. He felt certain finally that his prey was near, that he had stepped in a pile of fresh, steaming elephant shit. It smelled wonderful.

  Passion is a child born of unknown parents, a child of surprising gifts sometimes; sometimes disturbing; a willful child, enlivening and unpredictable; uncontainable. Even here at this inlet, this place of death sudden and violent, this violated place marked by memory with the stain and scent of blood and the quivering echo of a stifled scream, even here DeWalt felt something akin to passion.

  Which isn’t so strange after all, DeWalt. You needn’t be ashamed of it. There is blood too in every cathedral nave, is there not? And yet passion stirs souls there, else every nave would stand empty. There is passion in the streets of Soweto, the alleys of Beirut, the Serengeti plain and the Amazon jungle, in Central Park and Wall Street and in the Hollywood Hills: all places irrevocably stained, violence upon passionate violence.

  And so maybe we know the child’s parents after all, he thought. He wanted to understand this passion, to define and use it. You were brought forth from sorrow, child, in violence and in pain. Sorrow is your mother. Your father is the quiet side of darkness, the pale morning light, breathless, hopeful and fearing, a silence that trembles.

  DeWalt studied the cattails standing tall on pencil-thick stalks at the edge of the water, the brown water itself and the earth and the enclosing trees. We ascribe our passion to you, he thought. As if it comes from you, reaches out from you to touch and move us here outside, separate. We ascribe to you what in fact is gestated within each of us. It is only in every man and woman alone, not in trees or rivers or sun or sky, it is in man and woman alone that both parents of passion are sanctioned to conjoin.

  And so this is what passion is: no bastard after all. No orphan. It is a child at home, a child abundant in feeling but with nowhere to project those feelings but outward, out through the windows and onto the world, because there are no mirrors in the soul, th
e mind can not see itself, and even if this were possible there exists no soothing image to reflect, the face in the mirror is flat.

  A bass rose to the surface then and struck at a small green dragonfly, in an instant seized and pulled it under, a ripple of brown rings, a shadow moving toward the mud. DeWalt watched the concentric rings until they had shivered away, the river calm. He turned then, and, sensing the passion, the quickening of blood, he regarded the weeds and the tangled growth of brush around the area where Catanzaro had so often parked his car.

  He would find no evidence here, nor did he expect to. The police had examined the area numerous times, and they were better trained to see the invisible than was he. Then why are you here, DeWalt? For courage? Resolve?

  No, not even that.

  For the passion, then. The smell of blood.

  Maybe so, DeWalt. Maybe so.

  Not far away was the narrow path that led uphill to the Jewett property. DeWalt considered the hike to the top, a mere half-mile. But he knew how he would feel at the end of that hike, lungs and calf muscles burning, heart hammering against his chest.

  Remember when you could have sprinted up this hill and not even be out of breath, DeWalt? That’s a way you’ll never be again. A way you were for too short a time and never paused to appreciate.

  What you should do now, old man, is to climb back into your air-conditioned car, drive into town, find Abbott. Have a talk, be nice. Inquire as tactfully as you can if the Jewett house or truck has ever been searched. Were the Jewett’s checked for powderburns, scratches, fibers or hair or blood? Can they provide alibis for the night of the firebombing, the day of the Fort Erie robbery? And will their alibis, like the ones for the day of Catanzaro’s murder, be confirmed by no one but themselves?

  Unfortunately, DeWalt could hear that conversation already, he knew how it would go.