The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  As he listened to their discussion, however, as he realized how desperate they were, a new plan occurred to him. The idea of burning this house down was ludicrous. He would never have imagined a bunch of kids from Tanglewood doing such a thing. But since they were planning to do it anyway, Joe decided he would join them. He would help them burn down the house. When they saw how dedicated he was, how selfless he was, the five boys would have no choice but admit him.

  He listened for the details. They planned to come back later with cans of gasoline. So Joe would be ready with his own can.

  There would be no sleep for him tonight.

  50

  Ever since the last sleepover, when Alicia overheard an unfortunate conversation about her father, her feelings toward Brandi had cooled. She wondered, naturally, if Brandi was judgmental like her parents were, if she maybe said cruel things about Alicia when Alicia wasn’t around.

  But that line of reasoning meant Alicia was really the one guilty of judgment, so she tried to put the memory out of her mind when Brandi called her on the phone. It was nearly 10 o’clock and past her bedtime.

  “I can’t believe this!” Brandi squealed. “First you’re in love with Jonathan and now you’re kissing David Clark! What a slut!”

  “Brandi.”

  “You know I’m kidding. So are you guys going together now?”

  “He asked me. We talked about Jonathan and I told him what happened, and after that he asked me. So I said ‘yes.’”

  More squealing from Brandi.

  “I still don’t know what happened to Jonathan,” Alicia said. “I don’t know why he never called me back. I really like him.”

  “I never understood what you saw in Jonathan.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Alicia said. “He’s interesting and different. Nothing like the dumb guys you drool over.”

  Brandi didn’t appear to hear. “I mean, he’s better-looking than David, but David has so much more confidence.”

  “But when Jonathan and I talk to each other, it’s like we’re best friends. Not like you and I are best friends, but everything he says is, like, something I was just thinking. He knows about planets and stuff and he actually writes his own stories. How many guys do you know who write stories?”

  “Maybe you and Jonathan just weren’t meant to end up together,” Brandi said, as if she had put the phone down the whole time Alicia was talking. As if she hadn’t heard anything.

  “I think you’ll be much happier with David,” Brandi continued. “The reason I like going with jocks is how confident they are. They just come right up and take what they want. Last week Brock and me were kissing over by the school, and he put his hand between my legs.”

  “Brandi!”

  “It was just on the outside of my jeans. It wasn’t nasty or anything. I sort of liked it.”

  “How did it feel? When he put his hand there?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing much. What excited me was that it was Brock doing it, Brock Harris. Star running back. It made me want to kiss him harder. I even thought about giving him a blow job.”

  “Oh, gag.”

  “You’re not going to be very popular with the guys if that’s your opinion.”

  “Brandi, how many girls do you know in our grade who have given a blow job?”

  “Well, none, but—”

  “Then don’t form an opinion about giving blow jobs until you know what it’s like.”

  Alicia heard something behind her. She turned around, slowly, and there was her father, knocking lightly on her door, which was standing ajar by an inch or two.

  “But all the high school girls—”

  Alicia held the phone away from her ear.

  “Hey, Dad.” Her voice wavered with fear, but she pretended like everything was completely normal. “What’s up?”

  “Time for bed.”

  “Oh, okay. Let me just hang up with Brandi.”

  “Do it quickly,” he said. “You should have been in bed half an hour ago.”

  Alicia was mortified. What would her dad think of her? She would never do anything like that. At least not yet. But when she was older . . . what would it be like? To be in bed with a man, to lie right next to him. . . .

  “ . . . you there? Talk to me, Alicia!”

  “I’m here. That was my dad. I think he heard me.”

  “Heard what?”

  “We were talking about blow jobs,” Alicia reminded her.

  “Oops.”

  “Yeah, oops is right. Anyway, I gotta go. It’s past my bedtime.”

  “All right, then. Picture David naked until you fall asleep and see if you can have some sweet dreams about him.”

  Alicia chuckled and hung up the phone. A few minutes later she was lying in the dark, eyes closed, thinking graphic thoughts. Brandi wasn’t a tactful person, she usually said the wrong thing at the wrong time, but her ideas were typically on the money. Alicia was insanely curious what it would be like to be caressed and kissed, to feel a boy on top of her, to feel him inside her. Giving herself to someone so openly, so intimately, was a concept she didn’t yet understand. But when the time came, who would it be? Was it already decided?

  Sleep approached her, covered her like a warm blanket. Alicia smiled as she drifted away, and she dreamed scandalous dreams of a faraway hotel, meeting a boy there, being kissed by him all over her body.

  51

  Humid darkness. Clear, moonlit sky. A soundtrack of crickets. Coyotes in the woods patrolled their side of the barbed-wire border, stopping sometimes to consider the geometric human settlements, the hovering rectangles of light. Raccoons ignored the boundary between wilderness and civilization and raided outdoor trash cans for an easy dinner. House cats searched the neighborhood for mice and rabbits and unsuspecting birds, but kept their distance from the raccoons. Alien-looking opossums kept their distance from everything.

  Including five boys, trudging through the trees, carrying steel and plastic cans of gasoline. Todd was in the lead, directing their every move, feeling like the king he was.

  They wore gloves this time, rubber gloves that would later be hidden in the woods, in a deep hole that would be refilled and ignored for three months. Eventually they would dig up the gloves and burn them. Any clothing fibers or strands of hair that fell into the grass would be washed away by the fire department, they felt sure. Accelerant would be used in the den, in the master bedroom, and any other room where they may have left traces of evidence. But it would be used sparingly, and come from three different gas cans, so that no one father would be missing an appreciable amount of fuel.

  Through the trees they jogged, approaching the house, and then through the sliding glass door. The first fire would be set at the opposite end of the house—in the master bedroom—and from there they would work backward, to the dining room and the sliding glass door again. Working backward would reduce the chance of getting burned, and also keep gasoline off their shoes, which could leave a trail for someone to find later.

  Adam pointed a flashlight while David, Jonathan, and Bobby stepped into the room with their cans of gasoline.

  “If anyone wants out,” Todd said to them, “if anyone thinks we shouldn’t do this, now is the time to speak up.”

  They all looked at each other, but no one said anything. Todd knew they were frightened, as he was frightened, but since they had come this far he knew they could come a little further.

  “All right, then. David and Jonathan, pour gasoline around the perimeter of the room, working backward as you go. Bobby, you start in the middle and pour a line backward toward the door.”

  Once the work was done, the five of them retreated into the hallway. Adam was carrying six knotted handkerchiefs, and Todd reached for one.

  “When I throw this, we have to move fast. We have no idea how quickly the fire will spread. Go to the next room, soak it with gas, throw in a handkerchief, and then do the next room, then the den, and then we’re out. In less than two minutes. All right
?”

  Everyone nodded.

  The loose end of the knotted handkerchief was lit. A tongue of yellow flame twisted the cotton fabric, devouring it, turning it black.

  “It’s better to burn out,” Todd said, “than fade away.”

  He tossed the handkerchief into the room with a flick of his wrist. As it tumbled toward the ground, Todd wondered briefly if his idea would even work. Maybe he would miss the gasoline on the carpet altogether, or maybe he would succeed in burning a hole in the carpet and nothing more. But then the very air seemed to ignite, before the handkerchief even bothered to land on the floor. Heat rushed into the hallway, and flames turned nighttime to day.

  “Holy shit!” said Bobby and David simultaneously.

  “Come on!” Adam yelled. “Let’s go!”

  They replicated their work in the next room, then the next, and in less than a minute they had gathered in the den. Fire roared from the hallway. Heat baked the air, air that gagged them with the heavy smell of burning gasoline and drywall and carpet. Jonathan and Bobby retreated to the back porch. David was on his way out. Todd was readying the last of his handkerchiefs, and Adam was standing against the bar between the kitchen and den, directing the flashlight.

  That’s when Todd saw the eyes. Someone else was in the house with them.

  “Who is that?” he asked.

  The flashlight beam wobbled. Todd turned and saw Adam looking at this unknown boy, his eyes wide and terrified. The other boys had also stopped. Were also looking.

  Flames crackled, devouring the house. Todd could feel heat drifting toward them from the other rooms. There wasn’t much time.

  The figure moved forward. Said something Todd couldn’t hear.

  “What are you doing here?” Adam replied.

  It was only then that Todd realized this was the kid from before, the one who wanted to join their club. He must have been watching them the whole time. Since they arrived at the house, or since this afternoon, or maybe he’d been spying on them since the day they caught him in the fort.

  “We have to get out of here!” Adam yelled. “Come on, Todd! Let’s go!”

  Todd stood there, indecisive. He didn’t understand why Joe hadn’t fled the house already. Was he frightened? In shock? Todd knew he should grab the kid and drag him to safety, but he was confused and didn’t know what to do. He was suddenly afraid this little kid would ruin everything.

  But one way or another they had to get him out of here. He was about to tell Adam to grab him when the kid turned and ran. Away from them. Toward the front of the house. Toward the fire.

  “Where are you going?” Todd yelled. “Come back!”

  The kid disappeared into a hallway dark with smoke and glowing with fire.

  Disbelief washed over Todd.

  “Throw the last handkerchief!” Adam hissed. “We have to get the hell out of here!”

  Todd turned back toward the others. All four of them were staring at the place where the kid had disappeared.

  Time seemed to stop, if it had ever been flowing in the first place.

  Todd backed out of the den and threw the last handkerchief. From the porch the flames were so bright it appeared someone had turned on all the lights in the house. All the windows were lit yellow. He shut the sliding glass door and beckoned them to run. Which they did, through the woods, between two houses, eventually emerging on the street.

  “That fucking thing is going up like a rocket,” Todd said. “It’ll light up this neighborhood like the sun in a few minutes.”

  The others looked at him, paralyzed by a hyperkinetic rush of fear and excitement and uncertainty.

  Then David said, “That kid, Joe. What the hell was he doing in there?”

  “We just left him,” Jonathan moaned. “What if he’s burning up in there?”

  “He’s not,” Todd told them. “He ran away from us. He must have gone out the front door.”

  “Are you sure?” David asked.

  “He had to have,” Todd said, but they could all hear the doubt in his voice.

  “We should go back,” Jonathan said. “What if he’s still in there? We can’t just leave him in there.”

  “We can’t do anything about it now,” Todd countered. “If he didn’t make it out the front door, not even a fireman could save him.”

  “We can’t just leave him!” Jonathan said.

  “Todd’s right,” David said. “Maybe we should have tried harder to help him, but he ran away on his own. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  Bobby just stood there, silent, as if he were working through a difficult math problem.

  “We have to get out of here,” Adam told them. “We can’t stand here in the street like this. Someone’s going to look out their window and see us.”

  “What are we going to do?” Jonathan wailed.

  “We’re going home,” David told him. “It’s all we can do.”

  52

  Adam ran hard, counting steps as he pounded the asphalt road. , Probably he should have been walking, since running would make him look guilty, but he couldn’t help himself. He ran from the fire, he ran from those glowing eyes, he ran from himself.

  Occasionally he stopped and looked back in the direction of the house. He thought he could see a glow above the silhouette of roofs and treetops, but maybe that was just his eyes playing tricks on him. Finally he made it home and crept through the back door, to his bedroom, where he stripped down to his underwear and crawled into bed and shivered in the sheets.

  A desperate part of him hoped Joe was dead. Because if he had made it out alive, there was no chance in the world he would keep his mouth shut about the house. Tomorrow Joe would tell his parents, and his parents would call the police, and pretty soon the phone at Adam’s own house would ring. Then it would all be over.

  Who was he kidding? It had always been over.

  It had been over the moment Evelyn had lifted up her dress and let Adam see what he shouldn’t have seen. The terrible thing was it hadn’t been Adam who asked to play peek-a-boo. Evelyn had asked him.

  He crawled out of bed and knelt before the Lord, and was about to begin praying when he heard the warning sound of sirens. It was the fire trucks, of course, on their way to the burning house. But to Adam the sound was not warning but a message. A message from God. His mom’s voice had screamed when she found him with Evelyn. The tornado sirens screamed when Christi was killed. And now the fire trucks were screaming to him, the voice of God reminding Adam that he was not welcome in Heaven, that there was no special plan for him. And since his parents would surely renounce him for good when they learned about the house fire, Adam realized he was alone.

  Except for his friends, he was completely alone in the world.

  53

  David’s house was closest to the fire. Sirens grew louder by the second as the fire trucks approached. His heart thumped in his chest as he lay there in darkness, waiting for the sound of his dad’s footsteps in the hallway, for the hall light to switch on. And still the sirens grew louder.

  It seemed like forever as he stared into the darkness. David was near tears. How could they have left that kid behind? For some reason he had been paralyzed—they all had—and no one had done a sensible thing like grab Joe and drag him out of the house. They just let him run away. Why had the kid done that? What had he been thinking? What was he doing there, anyway?

  David wanted to cry, but he couldn’t allow it to happen. He couldn’t betray himself when his dad finally woke up.

  Eventually he heard the transmission whine of the fire trucks, at first far away and eventually outside his window. The thump of a hand on the wall, the flick of a light switch. David rolled out of bed and stumbled into the hallway to meet his dad.

  “What is it?” he called groggily.

  “Looks like a fire truck,” said his dad, who was wearing a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and no shirt. “Get dressed and we’ll go see what’s up.”

  David pulle
d on a pair of corduroy walking shorts and an Op T-shirt and listened to the murmur of bedroom conversation between his mom and dad. He wondered how many of the other guys were doing the same thing, waiting on their parents to wake up, to get dressed and look outside. He realized his hands were shaking. If Joe had gone out of the front door safely, as Todd suggested, the kid was surely going to tell on them. Maybe it was a bad idea to go back over there. Wasn’t that how criminals were always caught? By returning to the scene of the crime?

  But then his father emerged from his bedroom and said, “Let’s go.”

  It was a quick walk around the corner. Over the tops of the intervening houses David could make out a smoky, yellow glow, but he could not yet see the flames directly. He could hear them, though, and it was a deep, creaking sound, almost a growl. Beneath that were the groans and snaps of burning wood. He hurried along to keep up with his father, and noticed plenty of other people were awake as well. Lights in windows. Robed silhouettes in doorways. A few onlookers were also walking toward the spectacle of the house. David and his father turned the corner, onto the street, and here was the inferno, blazing orange.

  Flames were shooting out of a gaping hole in the roof. Storm clouds of smoke rose above the flames. Windows glowed. The heat was scorching, as hot as the pit room when briskets were cooking, even though they were seventy or eighty yards away.

  Firemen were yelling and maneuvering and shooting geysers of water at the house. The flames themselves didn’t seem to notice.

  “Holy shit,” his dad said. “That’s one hell of a fire.”

  David wanted to throw up. He couldn’t believe they had left that kid behind. Was he here now? Would he point out David in the crowd? Or was he burning alive inside the house?

  A man in a robe and jeans burst out of an adjacent home and began yelling something at the firemen. One of the firemen yelled something back and then pointed a hose at the roof of the man’s house, soaking it. David was pretty sure the man was Joe Henreid’s father.