by Brett Lott
I postured. I sneered. I tried to look undaunted, even though my muscles were prepared to bolt at the last possible second. I lurched forward a step as if I might take the offensive. That's when my foot came down wrong, on some toy or ball hidden in the thick grass, and I fell hard, flattening the weeds below me. The breath went out of me. On my back, looking up—that was the moment when I KNEW. The momentum, the trajectory, the angle of her arm and the arc of the sprinkler coming around like brass knuckles on a right hook. There was no stopping it. I would get what I deserved. In that half second I made eye contact with Allaray. And though I knew she could hardly change the laws of momentum now, much less want to, I'd like to think I saw a brief softness in her eyes, the slightest tweak in her wrist, a kink in the affectation of her rotor, the delayed release that saved my life. Instead of lodging in my temple, the sprinkler turned a few degrees north, whistling through the air, smashing through the Bainers' front window and landing on their dining room table. My buddies ran home, their siren cries of "Ooooh . . . You're gonna get in TROU-BLE" fading down the street behind them. Allaray Bainer stood staring at me. Our half second of shared silence lasted long enough to make me wonder if she really had missed me on purpose. And Kendall and Kennel shuttled through the weeds giggling, racing to see who could turn the spigot on first.
The council eventually exercised a more reasonable and effective tactic when it came to cleaning up the overgrown lawn. Volunteer firemen were handed weed whackers and clippers on a Saturday afternoon in August, paid from an emergency fund to give the house a once-over. The neighborhood came out, even set up lawn chairs to watch.
The firemen could have walked the few hundred feet from the firehouse at the end of the block, but they loaded up the big red fire truck with lawn mowers, trimmers, and the rest and pulled up out front. They went right to work on the yard. The tactic would have been an embarrassment to any other family in town, but the Bainers acted as though they had won a prize. At least the children did. They joined in the work. Kendall brought out very sharp adult scissors and stabbed and cut at the grass, until he swung too wildly and nearly stabbed a fireman in the knee. The other Bainer kids ran in circles through the grass, pulling up fistfuls of it and throwing it above them in a ritual dance. The Bainer mother came out with a tray of lemonade, gushing as though the volunteer landscapers were truly there of their own goodwill.
One of the firemen gathered the kids together. We could see him talking to them and shooing them toward the fire truck, and that was the moment our hearts dropped. The most undeserving kids in the whole county, and they get an invite to play on a million-dollar playground. The daydreams that children dream, when they are not dreaming of houses burning to the ground, are of living in the toy store and playing on fire trucks without adult supervision. To scramble unfettered and free over the smooth red surfaces, leave your breath on the shiny chrome gadgets, make fingerprints on the mirrors, tug on the handles, climb over the step-ups, slide behind the wheel, burrow and nestle in the hiding places. It was the Promised Land on wheels. We couldn't have been more jealous.
Meanwhile it was hot, and the firemen, now freed from ambling children, were ready to work. They pulled off their heavy coats and hats and set them on the sidewalk. They didn't seem to notice or care when the kids came off the truck to try on the heavy garments. Allaray struggled to button one of the coats while it was freestanding on the sidewalk like a big yellow teepee. Kendall's thin greasy head popped out one arm of the coat, Kennel's out the other. Finally Allaray slid underneath and her head came out the top. They looked frightening, like a melting girl giant with two heads for hands. Allaray reached out between buttons in the coat to grab a red helmet and put it on her head. Furler, freed for the day from his backyard collar, barked and growled at them while they stumbled up one side of the driveway, down the other, and into the street, where they eventually fell apart. Baby Glen saw all of this and tried to mimic them, but his head got stuck in the sleeve and he began screaming. While the two older brothers pulled him free, Allaray abruptly crossed the street and came over to all of us who had been watching. She was holding something in her hands and offering it to us. She had found a stash of candies in one of the pockets of the fireman's jacket, and went up and down the row of neighbor kids, placing them in our begrudging, outstretched little hands until they were gone. She crossed back and joined her brothers as they all donned fire helmets and head-butted each other.
When the firemen finished their exercise, the neighborhood folded up its lawn chairs and went inside to escape the heat. Disdain by way of yard irreverence was abated for a time. But yard irreverence would rear its head again and reach blasphemous new levels against a backdrop of cardinal neighborhood virtues that blossomed during Christmas season.
Our town was one of those communities where extravagant displays of light and sound and decoration were a matter of homeowner pride. A matter of communal pride, where a dizzying display of lights and Santas and angels and reindeer and holiday exclamations meant that the Christmas spirit lived here, and more so than elsewhere. We expected, I think, the Bainers to bow out of this to-do, owing to the notion that they probably didn't believe in Christmas, much less participate in neighborhoodliness. And for the first half of the month their property looked like a black tooth in our street's Christmas smile. But the Bainer kids finally caught on. Their first plan, since they didn't have their own stockpile of holiday regalia, consisted of stealing one item of decoration from each house and placing it on their own. That worked until 8 a.m. the next morning when all the neighbors came by and loudly snatched up their absconded items. The next plan was to utilize that which they did have. They spread their toys out over the yard, inside a corral made of Legos, army men, Hot Wheels, stuffed animals, and a Barbie with burned hair.
"Those are the shepherds," Allaray told us, first pointing to the army men, "and those are the wise men, and the animals, and that is Mary," pointing to the Barbie doll. Then she ran in the house and returned with the baby Jesus, a Cabbage Patch doll with crayon all over its face. She laid it in the center of the yard, gently resting its head on the sprinkler. Creator of Heaven and Earth, Savior of Lost Souls, Teacher of Army Men, Son of Barbie. The boys were busy tying flashlights to the shrubs to shine like spotlights on the nativity scene. At night, the Bainer creche looked eerie, especially in the glow of all the rest of the lights on the street. But the biggest blow was yet to come.
Coordinators for Larkspur's annual Christmas Craft Fair were raffling off a delicate blown-glass Baby Jesus this year, hand-painted and detailed, wrapped in silk swaddling clothes. Blemishless Jesus. With jewels for eyes, and a hole in his back for lighting purposes. Everyone who came to the event got one ticket, and you could buy more for five dollars each. The elementary school was raising money for a new playground with scientifically engineered tanbark—the kind of tanbark that won't give you slivers and that makes you something-percentage safer from breaking your spine or neck, or someone else's spine or neck. The glass Jesus was the creation of a world-renowned glass-blowing artist, one of our most famous local residents, a man who never came around really, but spent a lot of time in Europe and drinking wine on his yacht. Baby Jesus raised the eyebrows of more than a few. The latest trend in holiday yard-spirit was to prove you knew more of the "real meaning" of Christmas and employ a manger scene with hay and life-size or mechanical moving animals and figures. A throwback. The glass-blown baby Jesus was going to make a nice prize pony for anyone who wished to not just one-up other yard display participants, but blow the competition out of the water. It was appraised at a value of between $5,000 and $9,000, and came with a motion sensor alarm, so that thieves or Bainers would be discouraged from selfish urges.
When the ticket was drawn and the number announced, bounding down front were none other than the Bainer children with the winning ticket in hand. The artist made the presentation and handed Jesus to them, pleased to the core of his philanthropic ego to see the jubilation of the
recipients. Had he known the Bainers, he would have hesitated. Kendall grabbed Baby Jesus by one foot and hoisted him up over his head like a carnival prize. He ran around the room with the other kids chasing. We all sat stunned. They were going to break Jesus into a million shards or value him at less than he had been appraised. They had no consideration for the quality craftsmanship, value, and beauty of the piece of art with which they ran whooping with joy, shoelaces untied and flapping behind them.
The Bainers didn't sell Jesus. Maybe they didn't realize they could. It would have been for the best. The parents let the kids have him, and the kids went bouncing up a ladder and tied him to the chimney with lengths of yellow rope (stolen, we believed, from both tetherball poles at school). The ascending Jesus, with a flashlight in his baby backside.
Now, by holy and cleansing fire, God was bringing the hammer of justice down, and saying, "No more!" Parents shook their heads at the prospect of having a burnt-out black shell on their block for weeks and months to come. They whispered back and forth that they had seen this coming, what with the way the Bainer parents kept the house, and the way they probably let their children play with matches.
"It's too bad," our parents sighed. "It's a shame, and at Christmastime." But they wouldn't have had it any other way. This was the great purging, a judgment handed down from on high, things being made right again.
Only none of us was convinced that even now—with their house on fire—the Bainers were getting it. Leave it to the Bainer kids to rejoice in tragedy. To wear it like the "S" on Superman's cape. Little Kendall lay down and made snow angels in the two inches of black gunk that covered the lawn. He had feared the delights of winter were a thing of the past, gone forever when his family moved to California. After watching the cast of Sesame Street do snow angels in Central Park, Kendall mourned out loud, yelling that he wanted to do snow angels. He hadn't stopped yelling it for fourteen weeks. Now he saw his chance to do snow angels, be it in snow or wet black residue from his burning home. His parents didn't stop him. Kennel jumped up and down with glee and sucked on all ten fingers. Baby Glen clutched his mother's leg with one hand, and with the other reached for the dewy ash, putting it into his mouth one baby fistful at a time. Once he discovered that it turned his baby-white skin black, he rubbed it all over himself, on his face and diaper and up and down his mother's leg. Mr. Stuckey was swearing out loud again, fumbling with a ladder and tugging on the garden hose in his yard. He propped his ladder against the roof, careful not to set the legs in the garden plot beneath his window, and began climbing with the hose looped over his arm and tucked into his belt. He was shaking as he made his way up, trying to keep his balance as best an old seething man can, and his ladder rattled against the rain gutters. With his head cocked to one side, he yelled for someone to turn on the hose, and he began spraying his roof.
We squirmed with delicious excitement, and while our house-socks and pajama bottoms soaked up morning dew like thirsty trees in the grass, we listened for sirens. We never heard them. The firehouse doors did not budge. The shiny red fire engines did not come.
Mr. Stuckey noticed it too, convinced his roof would catch fire before the firemen ever arrived. He pulled hard to get a kink out of his hose. He yanked once and then again. The water barely trickled. He cut the air to one side and then the other as if he was doing karate with his old arms, a series of epileptic seizures aimed at unkinking the hose. Finally, with one mighty yank, reeling in an imaginary two-hundred-pound fighting sturgeon, he tore the hose right at the spigot and water gushed out, instantly drowning his precious garden. The floodwaters spilled over, carrying potting soil and flower petals into the garage through the eight inches of cat space in the garage door.
We looked back at the fire station. Where were they? We could hardly contain ourselves. Our thoughts were malicious. That the firemen were playing a well-thought-out prank on the Bainers. For having to come cut their lawn. The Bainers were facing the music. Reaping what they had sowed. The world made sense again.
The firemen must have sat in their trucks for a full two minutes, waiting for the doors to go up, certain that they would at any second. When it was clear that there was a problem, they got out of the truck and tried to manually lift the doors from the inside. We heard something, even over the roar of the fire and the snapping of timbers. We heard banging, men yelling. Then we saw them. Firemen pouring out through side exits like bees from a thumped hive. Swarming around the doors. Scrambling and tugging at them from the outside. Trying to free their rolling fire-fighting machines. It was the trucks that gave them strength, that made them firemen. It was the trucks that held the tools and hoses and power to form water into the kind of H20 canon that could put out a burning house. They were useless without them. But the doors were too heavy.
When the firemen finally gave up, they barely knew what to do. They turned and came sprinting down the street, pulling on heavy fire coats as they ran, gripping things tightly—small fire extinguishers, loose hoses dangling, large shiny axes. They were dedicated civil servants to the end, but they were in emotional distress. It was written all over their faces. Panic. They'd lost their cool. They'd broken the first rule.
A fireman on the verge of breaking down and weeping in the road is a confusing and sad sight to see. Something from the pages of Life magazine or on a heart-wrenching television documentary, but not on your own street. However, here they were. Large men who had trained and lifted weights and dreamed the daydreams that young men dream—being a life-saving hero in the face of danger. These who had practiced CPR on rubber corpses, ridden in parades, who led school assemblies on how to not panic in a fire. They were running past our lawn chairs, sobbing loudly, dragging equipment behind them, the most frightened faces I have ever seen. One lost a boot while running. Others nearly tripped over themselves. They were out of their element. Emotion blistered on the thick skin and moistened their old-world mustaches. The tears rolled back from their eyes, dripping off their ears.
Groaning, crying, screaming. Gnashing of teeth. Visible regret. Profound sorrow. We wanted all these things, but we wanted them from the Bainers, not the firemen.
And, though no one ever knew for sure why, in that moment of confusion, little Allaray Bainer charged back at her burning home. She disappeared into the thick smoke. The Bainers' dog, Furler, cited in police logs for noise and meanness, broke character. Sensing this new desperation maybe, he stood in and crooned his own sad siren laments while the house crackled like a record player.
We couldn't know if any of Allaray's family would have run in after her. The firemen were arriving now, moving the family back and dashing in after Allaray. The firemen kept running in and out, asking Mr. Bainer if anyone else was inside. He plainly told them each time that no, everybody was here. The firemen, still unorganized, ran wildly, fumbling with their equipment and bumping into each other. They circled the house, kicking in doors and yelling. One of them injured a shoulder knocking down a door. Another stepped through a floorboard and fell headlong into a smoldering section of wall, breaking his leg.
When the smoke cleared for a moment in front of the house, we saw Allaray. Our mouths fell open. She was standing beneath the chimney, gripping the bright green yard hose, spraying it up onto the roof as best she could manage in the blinding smoke. She was focused. We stared, frozen, making no sound, too shocked to gasp or pull her back ourselves before a wall fell on her.
If Mr. Stuckey was watching her from his rooftop, he was certainly regretting his eighty-six years of life on this earth, for he must have been forced to admit he couldn't handle a Sears garden hose the way Allaray did—thumb pressed over the ring spout for maximum velocity, sweeping back and forth. She stood her ground until a fireman ducked into the smoke and retrieved her under his arm.
The fire, which had burned so intensely, began dying down now. There wasn't much left to burn, and the firemen finally were getting hoses on the flareups and smoldering ruins. The Salvation Army arrived and put
blankets on the Bainers' shoulders. Firemen sat on the curb, hanging their heads and passing around a cigarette, and while the medics gave Allaray oxygen on a stretcher, the Bainer boys threw off their blankets and tromped through the ashes, round and round the chimney. Allaray, by her efforts it appeared, had saved the chimney (non-flammable), the front window (badly melted), and a jagged halo of roof around the chimney. Was Allaray a hero? Saving what needed no saving? But there it stood, nonetheless.
At the top of the chimney was the true, confirmed miracle—Baby Jesus, swallowed in smoke but still hanging on, his ropes blackened and frayed, but not burned through. No way it could have been from Allaray keeping them wet. The ropes should have snapped, the delicate glass object smashed against the ground. And in any case, Jesus should have melted in the heat, like the windows.
It was one of the neighbor children who told me that Allaray spent a night or two in the hospital. She was so close to the fire she had breathed in smoke and suffered minor burns on her face. They said that the only part of her face not red from her burns were two thin lines from the corners of her eyes to underneath her chin where a small but steady stream of tears had protected her eleven-year-old skin.
When the Bainers came back one last time a few days later, they pulled up in their drab, clunky RV and parked it right out front. The kids ran around while the parents sifted through the mess, looking for anything they could salvage. The kids found the blackened aluminum ladder where the garage had been and hauled it to the chimney where they leaned it precariously. Up the ladder ambled Allaray, bandages on her face and all.