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The Firebug of Balrog County © 2015 by David Oppegaard.
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First e-book edition ©2015
E-book ISBN: 9780738746548
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oppegaard, David.
The firebug of Balrog County / David Oppegaard.—First edition.
pages cm
Summary: “Haunted by his mother’s death, eighteen-year-old Mack Druneswald roams Balrog County looking for things to burn, staying one step ahead of his grandfather, the mayor, who is investigating the recent spat of arson”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-7387-4543-5
[1. Arson—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.1.O67 Fi 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2015014186
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In memory of my mother, Kayc Kline
Part One
The Firebug
A firebug has woken inside my heart. He feeds on smoke and char and he is always hungry, even when it appears he’s asleep and his flaming eye turned inward. I have done my best to feed him well, slinging him a diet of fires both large and small, yet this has not always held him in check. In fact, nourishing my inner firebug only made him stronger, increasing his appetite tenfold and bringing all manner of calamity to myself and the semi-innocent inhabitants of Balrog County.
My name is Mack Druneswald. This is an accounting I plan to put before God, who I don’t really believe in, with little hope inside my firebug heart that it’ll change a single goddamn thing.
A Brief Survey
of Balrog County
Balrog County is not actually called Balrog County. A balrog is a fictional creature from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that happens to be shrouded in fire, somehow, and wields a fiery whip that would go nicely with my collection of gas cans, oil rags, and colorful plastic lighters.
Balrog County, however, is simply my nickname for a territorial division somewhere in the United States of America that is far, far away from any ocean. The county is dotted with seven or eight small towns, little hamlets populated by dazed white people and a sprinkling of minorities. The three biggest towns are Thorndale (pop. 38,739), Dylan (pop. 12,345), and Hickson (pop. 3,476). Thorndale has two malls, the county hospital, and a state university. Dylan has a sawmill and a bunch of seedy bars that offer free popcorn. Hickson, where I grew up, is barely large enough to maintain its own high school and is notable mostly for its location, which is a convenient fifteen minutes south of Thorndale down a four-lane highway.
Unlike the rest of our state, Balrog County is still thick with old-growth trees that the pioneers never got around to chopping down because the area’s rocky soil is unfit for growing crops. The first white men to see this area were fur trappers—hard-drinking, horse-whispering, bear-fighting dudes—and most of the towns are named after trappers who either died of some horrible disease, froze to death during one of our trademark bitch-ass winters, or killed a bunch of Indians before returning to the East Coast as wealthy, wild-eyed men in pimping fur coats.
Our town was named after Alfred James Hickson, a real hard case who came over from England in 1840 looking to get rich but ended up dying of rabies. Legend has it old Alfred was out a-trapping one fine spring day when a raccoon jumped out of a rotten log and bit his leg before scrambling away, foaming at the mouth for all to see. Alfred, who was a classic frontier realist, sat down in the woods, wrote a final letter to his wife back in England, and tied himself to a tree. Thus secured, he proceeded to die a slow and lonely death, trying to drink away the rabies with gut-rot whiskey while deliriously screaming at the forest around him.
They say Alfred’s rabid ghost still haunts the woods around Hickson, which shows you how intelligent “they” are around here. We have a couple of wolves, though, and so many deer that the highway between Hickson and Thorndale often looks like the floor of a half-assed slaughterhouse. Indeed. When I was growing up, my grandfather and I would go deer hunting three or four times every fall and considered it a public service. We’d head out in the dark blue of early morning with our high-tension bows, climb into a rickety wooden stand, and wait until the sun rose and it was legal to start firing away.
Back then, deer hunting seemed like a reliable pastime, a fun, arrow-filled way to spend the day, but when I was fifteen—the year Mom died—we stopped hunting altogether. I guess we’d had our fill of death for a while, even if there were more deer running around than ever, terrorizing the highways and gardens of Balrog County like the skittish sons-of-bitches they are.
The Shiny Hellscape
Last fall, roughly two months before what I shall call the Great Conflagration, I passed through the double doors of Hickson High and gave myself over once again to the shiny hellscape that is public school. I sat through the first week of my senior year, the second, and the third.
I felt numb.
Plumb stupefied.
I had no clue why I was bothering with such a charade, since I had no plans of attending college or leading anything remotely like a productive life. I’d long dropped out of any extracurricular activities, didn’t have many friends, and couldn’t even be bothered to work up an unrequited crush on the six or seven hot girls in my grade. Our entire school only had three hundred and ninety students—I’d seen all these fools for so long it was like hanging out with turnips that could walk and talk and enjoyed calling me Drunesdick.
Sure, I did my homework and got decent grades—A’s in English, B’s in most other stuff, C’s in math and science—but that was only because I didn’t want to be hassled by well-meaning teachers. Class itself was the worst part—each hour was a fresh wave of white noise, a barrage of marker-board scratchings that resembled obscure hieroglyphics handed down to our teachers from some ancient race of busybody dullard
s. I spent the majority of class time thinking of ways I could burn the school down without getting caught (fake a boiler room explosion? Ignite something in the chemistry lab?) and laboring on the mighty speech I’d deliver when I finally lost my shit, stood up in class, and let everyone have it.
“You all suck!” I’d say, leading with a strong declarative sentence. “None of you know shit about fuck and you probably never will. You sit in these small desks, thinking small thoughts, while your brains rot inside your cotton candy skulls, slowly melting into a gooey raw hamburger-like substance barely capable of processing reality TV. You think any of this regurgitated ‘education’ is going to help you lead meaningful lives? Get good jobs? Fuck. You wouldn’t know meaningful if it slapped you in the face with its big meaningful cock!”
Here I would pause, both to catch my breath and glare at everyone in the classroom, including the astonished teacher. The room would be filled with a particularly profound brand of awed silence, the proper response to such bold truth-telling. I’d have their attention.
“You shamble now, and you will shamble evermore,” I’d continue, my voice lowered a notch, yet still razor sharp. “You will shamble throughout your small, stupid lives and when you get to the end of it all, you will find only death and more ignorance waiting for you. Memorized historical facts won’t save you. Elaborate algebraic equations won’t save you. Even copious amounts of oral sex won’t save you. Life is a vast, horrific net, and it’s caught us all. We can only trudge ever forward and hope to squeeze some small enjoyment from it before we, too, are tits-up in the dirt.
“And school,” I’d conclude, “school … is … not … enjoyable.”
Then I’d gather my books and materials, walk out of the classroom, and chuck everything into the nearest garbage bin. I’d imagine thunderous applause following me as I walked out of the school, a moment of supreme triumph. I pictured the school going up in flames behind me, combusting into an entire city block of fire you’d be able to see for miles and miles, a defiant signal to a blind and callous god.
Ah, daydreaming.
Good stuff!
The Pale Girl
On my eighteenth birthday, mighty September 24th, I endured another long day of school and afterward went to my part-time job at Hickson Hardware per usual. Groggy and dull-eyed, I was sweeping the store’s linoleum aisles for the millionth time when the front door chimed. My boss, Big Greg, was behind the front counter reading a hot-rod magazine. Approaching him was a girl who looked around twenty and had cascading ringlets of jet-black hair and the palest skin I’d ever seen. She was dressed in a black T-shirt, black canvas skirt, black fishnet tights, and black army boots. She asked Big Greg a question I couldn’t hear and he pointed to the back of the store. When she turned to look, I saw a pale heart-shaped face, dark eyes, and a nose piercing that glittered as it caught the light.
My God, she was beautiful.
I retreated to where Big Greg had pointed and circulated with my dust mop in a holding pattern. The pale girl entered my aisle. Her boots made a heavy clopping sound as she approached—clop clop clop—that caused my brain to spike in fluttery agitation. I straightened and squared my shoulders.
“Hello. Can I help you find something?”
The pale girl frowned and looked me over. I imagined how I looked to her—a tall, skinny dude clad in a red smock, with messy blond hair, a big nose, and large blue eyes frequently described as “intense”—and I felt the jittery excitement of a born idiot with nothing to lose.
“Something’s weird about you,” she said, folding her arms across her chest.
“Yeah,” I said. “I get that sometimes.”
“How old are you?”
I coughed into my hand, summoning all my manliness. “Eighteen. Today’s my birthday.”
The pale girl took a step forward, still hugging herself. She had narrow shoulders, a nice rack, and the kind of slender wrists you wanted to encircle with your thumb and forefinger and just hold for a while.
“All right, birthday boy. Can you tell me where the hacksaw blades are?”
“Mack,” I said, pointing to the nametag on my smock. “My name is Mack.”
“Right. Mack.”
Nobody spoke for a moment and I wondered what the pale girl planned to do with a hacksaw. You could hear the florescent lights humming above our heads like tiny, demonic angels.
“Saw blades are at the end of this aisle,” I announced, jerking my thumb over my shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ve got a fuckload of them.”
The Home Front
Hickson appeared less flammable than usual as I walked home from work, wistfully preoccupied by thoughts of the pale girl, she of the metallic blades and dark curly hair. Though I was a reluctant virgin and relatively unschooled in the ways of lady folk, I figured girls like the pale girl were a little goth, a little artsy, and a whole lot of naughty. At least, that’s what I hoped. How crushing would it be to grow close to such a dark angel, to infiltrate her spiky outer perimeter, and find not a freaky deeky sexpot but merely your average polite young lady with a bright future in multimedia ahead of her?
I turned onto my street. My family lived on the west end of town, which wasn’t as nice as the east side but not nearly as shitty as the south side, which had both the Spruce Tree Trailer Court and, farther out, the Balrog County landfill, where you could find yourself a hubcap or rats the size of Boston terriers. Our house was on the north side of the street and came last. A forest of maple, oak, and birch trees lined our backyard. The woods ran three miles deep and were home to all sorts of leaf-rustling critters, including red squirrels, possums, and some pretty husky beavers.
A shallow ravine served as buffer between the western edge of our yard and the woods beyond it. An elevated railroad track ran along the opposite side of the ravine, visible where it cut through a clearing maybe twenty yards wide. Freight trains rolled through the clearing three or four times a day, whistles shrieking. My sister and I had loved watching for trains when we were kids. The long-awaited passing of each train was an event to us, a happy arrival, as if we’d summoned it ourselves from the depths of the forest with our own special little-kid magic. We’d wave furiously to the engine car as the train passed by, the slipstream wind it generated buffeting our rag-doll bodies as we shouted and hopped with joy.
Our house was a standard two-story whatever with a gravel driveway running alongside its west side that terminated at a detached two-car garage. It had a large front porch, a side door that opened onto the driveway, and a narrow back porch. The house itself was over a hundred years old and tough as hell, with hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings. It had four bedrooms (three upstairs and one down) and two baths. The living room faced the street and had a wide bay window that looked out on the front porch and let in a healthy amount of light during the day.
I walked up the front steps, passed through the porch, and stepped into the musty coat hall. I could hear a TV yammering through the coat hall door. I opened the door and saw my father sitting in his leather recliner. He was watching the wall-mounted high definition TV to my right. In his late forties, Peter Druneswald was a lanky blond guy like myself. He had a sharply angular face but his blue eyes were soft and reasonable. He wore nerdy wire-rim glasses that made him look vaguely academic.
My father had his big feet kicked up on the recliner’s footrest, showing off his ancient black socks. When he noticed me, he grabbed the remote sitting in his lap and turned the television down.
“Hey, Mack.”
“Hey. You home already?”
“Yeah. Called it quits early today. Everybody was hung over.”
Dad worked for a health insurance company in Thorndale and was friends with all the pale, pudgy dudes who worked there. The night before had been Thursday, their big poker night. They drank Heineken, snacked on pretzel thins, and called themselves the Fallen Deductibles.
“How was school today?”
“The usual blasted, gimp-ridden wasteland.”
“What about work?”
“I sold a pack of saw blades to a hottie. That was something.”
“Really? Good for you. My son the salesman.”
“Did you know your socks have holes in them? You should get those darned.”
Dad pulled the lever at his side and the footrest folded into the recliner’s base with a gunshot crack. “I’ll give that some thought. How about pizza for dinner?”
I raised my hands above my head and clenched my fists. “Friday night!”
Dad grinned, humoring me. “That’s right, Big Mack. Nothing but the best for us.”
“Cheesy garlic bread?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Fuck yeah.”
Dad shook his head sadly. “You know, Mack, if your mother was here, she’d wash your dang mouth out with soap.”
“Sorry. I meant heck yeah.”
Dad’s eyes slid back to the TV. He thumbed the remote and reintroduced the noisy drone of the evening news to the room. He’d obviously forgotten it was my birthday, but I didn’t take it personally. Birthdays had been Mom’s big thing. He’d remember sooner or later and slip me some cash.
I went upstairs and entered my bedroom. As usual, I immediately stubbed my toe on a stack of books, one of many scattered around my bedroom floor like literary land mines. I’d gotten into reading real, non-electronic books back in the day and over the years I’d gone from connoisseur to straight-up hoarder. Not only was my bedroom crammed with five overloaded bookshelves and a dozen random book stacks, but I’d put several boxes of books in the spare bedroom and hidden eight more in the basement nobody else even knew about. I had my own personal ten-percent discount at the two used bookstores in Thorndale and their owners smiled happily when they saw me.
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