by Brett Lott
He turned just slightly and laid his eyes on his daughter, who looked hard and cold. "Whatcha want, honey?" he said.
"I think it's okay if Grandma tries my bike," he said. "But maybe you ought to buy her one that's for her."
"We can do that, sweetheart," he told his grandson.
"But it's okay if she tries it. She'll probably like it," the boy said. "It's got three speeds."
"You're kidding," Wilf said.
"I got a horn, too, for beeping."
"For beeping, huh?" Wilf said.
"It goes real fast," Kurtis said.
"Maybe too fast for Grandma," he said to his grandson.
"May-be," the boy said.
Wilf Staab had prayed before in his life. In Vietnam, often enough. And when Eleanor had some female problems Doc Beckering had to explain in a tone of voice that made him worry far more than the words. Sometimes in church—often enough for Janna and Craig—and the kids, too, in the middle of all this darkness.
But here he was, going uphill in the darkness with just the faintest glimpse of day's end over the mountains west, and in his mind the words of his grandson who was starting to do what all of us want to do, he thought, what all of us try often enough: hide—starting already at five years old, the kind of dumping people try when they can't bring themselves to think about what it is that stands so directly and awfully in front of them. It's in all of us, he thought, me too. We all do it. And that's why he prayed what he did in the darkness, one little sentence to a God a man or a woman almost had to believe in. Inside his head, with nothing above him in the bright and clear desert sky, not even the roof of his fishing truck, he said, "Good Lord, make me, please, a whole lot better than I am."
It was almost thirty hours of driving, and he still wasn't tired. For an old mason with shot shoulders, he thought that wasn't all bad. But he knew that sooner or later, Janna would want to talk, and once again the good Lord would have to give him words to say it all just right.
JAMES CALVIN SCHAAP grew up in the small town of Oosburg, Wisconsin. He has two older sisters, and is proudly Dutch American and is part of the Dutch Reformed community. He has been a teacher and professor of English throughout his professional life, and has been an English professor at Dordt College since 1982. He has published several books, including novels, historical short fiction, meditations, essays, and stories, and has also had numerous short stories and essays published in a number of magazines, literary journals, and newspapers. He has two children and lives with his wife in Sioux Center, Iowa.
THINGS WE
KNEW WHEN
THE HOUSE
CAUGHT FIRE
DAVID DRURY
THIS MANIC AND DELIGHTFULLY CLOSE-TO-THE-BONE STORY tells the truth of what it means to be a kid, from the accepted norms of brutality inflicted one on the other to the wonder and awe at unexpected joy and mercy and peace, no matter one's station or status. In his indictment of the Bainer family, the narrator indicts himself and every other kid on the block, and every parent too, but it is Alleray's tangible expression of faith—and her generosity to a neighborhood that doesn't deserve it—that resonates even in the deepest recesses of the heart.
—BRET LOTT
When the neighbor's house burned down, the massive motorized doors on the firehouse would not open. Why the doors jammed, why the fire trucks never rolled out, we of Magnolia Park Drive did not know. But we saw it all. The firehouse was less than a block away.
They were the Bainers, and while their house blazed and smoked, the rest of us gathered on the safe side of the street. It was morning, early and cold. First light in the sky early, frost quivering on the grass in anticipation of the sun. And as the adults took their positions, tightening bathrobes and blowing steam off coffee mugs, the newspaper delivery man came rattling around the corner in his station wagon, right on schedule, steering with one hand, launching papers from his window with the other. Fabulous terror on his face. I was just one kid, but speaking on behalf of all the neighborhood kids, we couldn't have been more ecstatic.
Calamity, tragedy, houses afire. You see, these are the daydreams that children dream. High-flying motorcycles, ninjas wielding samurai swords, the playground bully falling backward from a kick to the neck. Godzilla versus monster trucks. Bank robbers with two guns apiece. High-speed car chases that end with police vehicles lifting off the ground and spiraling through the air, lights and sirens a-blazing. Explosions that end with money raining down out of the sky. Wolves fighting bears. And houses burning to the ground. Even if those houses belonged to the Bainers. Especially if those houses belonged to the Bainers.
They were the bad neighbors. That was the thinking. But let me back up.
Here is a list of things:
BMW (him)
Sport utility vehicle (her)
Franchise coffee (whole bean, bought by the pound, kept in the freezer)
A Martha Stewart garden that you pay someone to tend
A clean house, brightly lit
A divorce
A family who downhill skis (with helmets on) and participates in organized community sports
A sixty-hour work week
A daycare you pay overtime
A babysitter who sleeps over
A dog with a new leash, who eats biscotti
The perfect suburb is a delicate thing. It takes a careful balance of ingredients—all the perks of being near to the big city without all the ugly side effects that would turn it into a strip mall or ghetto: crime, traffic, malt liquor billboards, diapers, and dog-food cans blowing around in the street like urban tumbleweeds.
Larkspur, California, was a cozy "high-income" community one bridge-length north of San Francisco, tucked in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais. The schools all won national awards; the streets were kept clean and safe. Then came the Bainers, tracking mud inside our paradise.
The family inherited the house from an aunt, and rather than sell it through real estate agents, they picked up and moved to California from one of the states in the middle. Brought their yellowing RV and parked it right out front. Because of an addendum in the "General Unsightliness" parking ordinance, they were forced to move it within three days, but not before the tow truck actually showed up.
Mr. Bainer brought daughter Allaray and son Kendall from his first marriage. Mrs. Bainer brought sons Kennel and baby Glen from hers. At eleven years, Allaray was the oldest and shrewdest, Kendall and Kennel, made brothers by the union of parents, not only shared nearly identical names, which would have been strange enough, but they had been born on the same day nine years earlier. We thought of them as twins. Baby Glen, old enough to walk but young enough to slobber, was born of giants. He was huge. A freak of nature. We clung to the belief that he outweighed his siblings.
The Bainers did not fit. You needed only catch sight of them to know it. Dirty bare feet. Tattered corduroys. Little-House-on-the Prairie dresses worn over jeans. T-shirts with stretched-out neck holes and peeling iron-ons: The Incredible Hulk, E.T., Heroes of Motocross. And there was never a time they didn't have Kool-Aid-stained faces and purple-popsicle tongues. By comparison we must have looked like model citizens or department store mannequins, decked out in our squeaky white Reeboks and designer backpacks. We even accessorized.
They didn't look the part, and it was our duty to make them aware of it. What did I know? I was just a kid among kids. None of us tall enough yet to see that the world was bigger than Magnolia Park Drive. Each and every one of us with that secret desperate longing to fit. The transition from childhood to adulthood is one long freeze-frame moment when the needle has been pulled off the record, and there aren't enough musical chairs for everybody. Scrambling for a seat, everyone frets that it will be only a little while before he or she is squeezed out, exposed, rejected, the die cast, the number up, and the parents stand around ever-smiling in party hats, unaware of the magnitude of this.
There's no time for conjecture. You don't stop and ask why the need is so strong or
how you will meet it. It's the law of the jungle. Survival instinct doesn't pause for introspection. It moves too fast to be held to the scientific method. It is spirit-material. It floats in the air. But fitting is everything. In high school, it would express itself in want of popularity or scholastics, or jackets with square letters and sports accomplishments sewn on so no one will forget. But for now, while we ourselves were searching to fit, we felt a sense of place in at least knowing that the Bainers did not.
They didn't look right, they didn't play right. They were mischief makers, always up to something. Digging holes in the neighbor's yard, walloping the sidewalks with golf clubs. Clearly they exerted their will over the Bainer parents. From our vantage point, they were never spanked, never put on restriction, never punished. They seemed happy, but had they earned it? Not on our Swatches. We wasted no time in finding opportunity to let them know it.
When we approached, all four Bainer kids were sitting on the curb, smashing worms with a rock. "You better not do that." We said with a scowl. "Why are you doing that?"
Allaray shrugged as if it didn't matter why.
"Because it's fun," one of the boys said without looking up.
"Where are you from? Why'd you move here? Can't you talk? Are you retarded? I guess you must be retarded then. Ha ha, you're retarded." Our volley of inquiries came so quickly, nobody could actually answer them. We laughed and pointed until we were oxygen deprived and had to catch our breath.
"We just moved in," said Allaray, biting at a hangnail.
"Didn't you hear us? We already knew that. Are you going to our school? We have a tree house, but you can't come. We have Atari, but you can't play. How much is your allowance? Where'd you get those clothes?" No response. Now they were absorbed in flattening a Hot Wheels convertible with the rock, after placing a worm in the front seat. When they were finished pounding, they smiled up at us as if we would be pleased to share in their accomplishment. Baby Glen licked the worm-smashing rock clean and squealed.
It was no use. We failed to coax out of them the tears we were looking for. No crying. No running home to Mommy. No swearing. No giving the finger. It was only as we walked away, when we threw rocks at their feet and told them to dance, that we got a response. Little Allaray picked up the rocks and, with a naive joy in her face, threw them back at us with deadly aim.
Allaray might have been a skin-and-bones little girl, but she also had the best rock-throwing arm we'd ever seen. A major-league- baseball arm. A catapult. She could have taken out a first-grader at forty yards. A kindergartner at fifty. And as she fired on us, she was smiling. Giggling. Hopping up and down holding her sides, stringy blond hair bouncing in her face, her brothers clapping behind her. She didn't throw like she was vengeful or afraid. She had no fear. She threw rocks for the fun of seeing us run scared. Like our insults had been the anticipated opening volley in some time-honored game, some ritual of glee, and now it was her turn to play. She was the happiest rock thrower we knew.
Of course we ran away laughing victoriously, but beneath the shelter of our little arms covering our little heads as the rocks rained down upon us, we secretly felt cheated. Like the sword got knocked out of our hands.
A day later, we tried again. The three oldest children were riding their Schwinns in the street. We pedaled past them on our lightweight shiny racing bikes. After a few passes we popped wheelies. A few more passes and we were whistling inches from them. We circled like vultures, teasing them, throwing insults to the air, calling attention to their duct-taped banana seats, goosey handlebars, and mismatched reflectors.
We reconvened, conceived a new plan, and dispersed again. One of us called out that he had found a wounded bird in the gutter. We all dropped our bikes and went running. The Bainers followed suit, curious to see the find for themselves. That was the cue. Three of us, myself included, made a dash for their bikes, hopping on and pedaling away furiously. Not for our own, not to steal or destroy, but just long enough to gloat and play an innocent game of keep-away.
They stood there contemplating whether they would take the bait and run after us. We passed back and forth, faces hot with insults and wind. The Bainers just watched. They didn't take chase. We made closer passes, swerving as if we might hit them, making more direct our insults. They turned and ran into their garage. To get their parents. Ha. They folded, I thought. They would come back, sucking their fingers to stop the tears, forcing their parents to intervene, opening new avenues of insult and humiliation for weeks to come.
But when they returned, it was not parents they dragged with them, but something else, down the driveway and into the middle of the street. A wooden structure pounded full of nails. A plywood ramp nailed to a stack of two-by-fours. And the Bainers looked back at us to see what we would do. They didn't have to say anything. We were suckers. We went straight for it, pedaling like mad for liftoff. It was only when my front tire hit the ramp that I wondered, What if this is a ploy? The collapsing ramp trick, the perfect revenge, and they would have the last laugh as I went sprawling in the street? But then I was airborne, my buddies right behind me, and on my wobbly landing, it was the Bainers, clapping and jumping and whooping like we were the Heroes of Motocross ironed onto their T-shirts. Our own cheering section. "More! More! More!" they squealed. "Higher! Faster! Farther!" I bit my smiling lip into a straight face. And hit the jump again.
The Bainer family stood on their lawn, fixed like pegs in a sundial, and watched their home go up. Only their shadows moved, flickering and lengthening as the house burned toward the ground. Their dog, Furler, stood beside them and whimpered. And we all sensed a final justification. Retribution. Revenge. We could barely contain ourselves. What goes around, man, it comes around.
"Move out of the way, kids!" Mr. Stuckey barked out the window as he frantically backed his Cadillac Seville from the street onto the driveway and into his garage, afraid, in his paranoia, that the fire might spread to his luxury sedan. Then he said two words—one started with a capital G and the second one ended with "it." Until Mr. Stuckey, I had believed that all old people went to church and never sinned.
Ash and cinders swirled around the Bainers, settling in their hair and on their sleeping clothes and obscuring them nearly from view at times. They were frozen there, like plastic figures in a giant horrible snow globe, the kind you shake vigorously to see white flakes swirl around a pleasant little cityscape and settle to the bottom. But the snow was black, and their expressions lacked that Christmas spirit that is always captured so well in plastic. They were the anti-carolers in a snow globe of shame—and it was God who did the shaking. For the eleven months leading up to this day, when the house was not on fire, the neighborhood adults had muttered similar sentiments with the same folding of arms and tsk-tsks in their appraisals that they were muttering now. That they didn't appreciate having a squalid unkempt wreck of a home framed in their picture windows. Unsightliness is next to ungodliness.
As the newspaper delivery man came upon the unsettling scene, his sense of duty must have been throttled by the pandemonium. He leaned on the gas pedal as he passed. We know because we heard the engine gunning. And in his confusion, his arm already crooked out the window with a thousand rubber-band bracelets waving in the wind, he let fly a paper with force and trajectory such that it sailed up onto the Bainers' roof. The paper promptly burst into flames and fell into the living room through the collapsing ceiling. We children were so enthralled at all the chaos, we cheered and did jumping jacks in our pajamas and bed hair.
We wanted to see the Bainer kids suffer. Just a little. No more than any other person. Just general panic and loss-type suffering. Learning life's lessons. We had been under their curse forever. We wanted fairness. Balance. But we weren't alone. Our parents were in on it too. They had their reasons.
Apparently the Bainer parents, who were rarely ever seen by us, were also rarely seen at community meetings, council sessions, and parent-teacher events. They attended no church, they gave to none of
the local charities, they didn't frequent the local businesses. They seemed fine with letting their children wreak unsupervised havoc in public view. But improprieties in lawn care were the greatest of their sins.
If measured in terms of devotion and attention, the Bainers ranked among squatters, recluses, and heroin junkies when it came to lawn maintenance. They let the grass grow. They let the weeds take over. The front sidewalk was consumed, the path to their door impeded. The tallest weeds tickled their windows. The "It-Gets-the-Corners" sprinkler that was on the lawn when they moved in, hose snaking back to the house, had never moved and was soon swallowed in the undergrowth. A cloud of pollen and dander hung in the air. Allergy season hit our street hard. Something finally appeared on the town council agenda, and no wonder, considering that the moniker "Our Town Is a Clean Town" took larger billing than "Welcome to Larkspur" on the signpost erected at the edge of town. At first the council issued an official request that the Bainers cut their lawn, but nothing changed. Except that dragonflies came to nest.
In a show of smug solidarity, we local kids, with the trickle-down politics of our parents, came wielding scissors (household, fabric, safety, toenail). We stooped down and snipped at the grass, taunting with gestures that we intended to carry out the council ruling. At first, Allaray, with that silly smile, charged at each one of us through the weeds, a child torso coming at us like a cartoon ghost, driving us back and knocking us off our balance. She blasted a third-grade boy so hard he rolled backward, right off the sidewalk and into the street.
When we started closing in, Allaray improvised her reign of terror. She ducked down, out of our line of sight, then reemerged with the long-buried hose and sprinkler. She gripped the hose halfway back to the spigot. She lifted it up over her head and began swinging it around, the bulky sprinkler out in front, churning like a helicopter blade. Faster. Rustling the tops of the waist-high weeds. Her brothers, who were behind her, dropped to the ground. The rest of us moved back with a ripple, knowing that stitches and ugly scars would be branded on anyone who came in contact with the hunk of metal at the end of the hose. She swung it around. Faster, higher, letting out slack. You could hear the hose beating the air with a heavy hum and the sprinkler warbling and whistling its warning. There we were, gathered on the outermost edges of the lawn, the corners, out of the death radius, but still on the lawn when one of us realized the truth and yelled out, "It gets the corners!" immediately scattering us in a panic. Except me. I held my ground. I was not willing to let this undernourished girl rule us with fear.