I shoved the toe-stubbing stack of books against the wall and flung myself onto my bed. After staring at the ceiling for a few restful moments, I picked up my writing notebook from my nightstand and opened it.
Story Ideas
- Man befriends chipmunk. Relationship soon sours.
- A humble plumber marries into a rich family in New England. Sleeps with every member of the family.
- The Mississippi River dries up. A man starts walking down it from Minnesota and a woman starts walking up it from Louisiana. They meet in the middle of the river and discover they both are related to Mark Twain.
- A talking baby squid appears in a toilet one day, offering free advice. The advice is terrible.
I grabbed a pen and started to ponder. It’d been a while since I’d written a new short story and none of my current ideas seemed too great. I liked writing stories but I always had a hard time coming up with an idea that didn’t seem derivative. Part of the problem with reading a lot of books was finding out how lame and unoriginal you were in comparison to every other writer who’d ever lived.
Flashing upon a new idea, I wrote:
- An extraordinarily pale girl moves to a small town. She discovers everyone is an asshole zombie and must fight her way back to freedom using only her wits and her incredible paleness, which allows her to hide in the moonlight.
I tapped the notebook and looked around my bedroom.
Why not?
I rolled over onto my stomach, turned to a fresh page, and started writing. The world fell away.
Dad called us down to dinner an hour later. I stopped writing and listened for sounds of rustling in the room next door, where my sister was listening to truly atrocious pop music. A minute passed and the music continued unchecked. I left my room and went out into the hallway, where I stared at my sister’s bedroom door. She’d taped a mini-poster of some constipated bad boy to the outside of her door and his eyes followed me like burning coals whenever I passed through the hallway.
“Yo, Haystack,” I shouted. “Pizza’s here.”
No response. The terrible music continued to bump, rattling her door. I knocked on the bad boy’s slick poster face.
“Hey.”
The music lessened.
“What?”
I opened her door and the pungent scent of lavender candles washed over me. Haylee was sitting on the floor, her pencil-stick legs crossed in front of her. She had her laptop open on her lap and the glowing screen lit up her face. A bopsy brunette, she had elfin, triangular ears, a button nose, and gray eyes flecked with splinters of green. She’d gotten straight A’s her entire damn life and wanted to be a corporate lawyer in New York City someday, with a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. A shark in training, this one.
“Come on, Haystack. Pizza’s here.”
“So what?”
“So … pizza’s here?”
“I’m not hungry. I’ll eat later.”
I scanned the room, wondering how long it had been since I’d last visited the Haystack’s lair. I saw fewer stuffed animals and unicorn posters than I remembered and more pictures of other teens I assumed were her friends. The pictures had all been printed on standard office paper and trimmed to size. Mashed together over an entire bedroom wall, the smiley good-time effect was the sort of mosaic creation you’d expect to find in the room of a serial killer.
“What?”
I looked down at again at my sister, so stern in the bright wash of her computer.
“I like your pictures. It’s like Facebook for your bedroom.”
Haylee looked back at her computer. I got the sense I could strip naked and start flapping my arms around and she still wouldn’t deign to look at me again.
“You sure you don’t want any pizza? You know Dad likes it when we eat together.”
“I’m bloated, all right? Just go.”
“All right, all right.”
I stepped back and shut her door. The smell of lavender candle trailed me as I went downstairs and found my father sitting at the kitchen table, an untouched slice of pepperoni and pineapple on a plate in front of him. He’d gotten out the real plates and set the table with silverware and paper-towel napkins. He’d even poured us three glasses of ice water.
“Where’s your sister?”
“She says she’s not feeling well. Lady stuff.”
Dad grunted and picked up his pizza. I sat down and grabbed a slice of my own. The pizza was from Panda Pies, the only pizza joint in Hickson. We’d had their pepperoni and pineapple so many times it was like eating homemade.
My father finished his slice and pushed back from the table. He stared at the empty chair across from him. Mom’s old chair.
“Hey,” I said. “Where’s the cheesy garlic bread?”
“The Panda idiots forgot it.”
“Oh. No prob.”
I grabbed a second slice of pizza, though I wasn’t really all that hungry anymore. Our house felt small and stuffy, its other brooding residents too close at hand.
It was time to venture forth.
The Radio Tower
Cell phone service isn’t too great in Balrog County due to all the trees and the hills and whatever, but we seem to get radio stations all right. They’re all terrible, these small-market stations, with the least terrible being the classic rock station, whose DJs at least have the decency to be alcoholic druggies who seem to genuinely yearn to get fired and head down the road again.
We had an older kid in our school named Willy Barnes who lived next to a radio tower. Willy said you could hear one of the country stations playing through their kitchen toaster at random hours of the day. When he got braces, he could hear the station all the time, faintly caterwauling in the back of his head. Taking a shower, he heard modern country. Trying to sleep, modern country. He got so sick of it he decided to get his braces removed and live with crooked teeth.
After he graduated, Willy shaved his head and moved to Nepal.
The Shack
Hickson did not take long to drive through. Darkness had fallen upon the land and the streets were empty, as if it were a time of plague and everyone had gone home to die reasonably in bed. My car, an enormous, maroon colored 1978 Oldsmobile Delta 88, rocked merrily on the road. Its dashboard was backlit in bright white, like the controls of an old-timey rocket ship, and its gas tank was accessible only by lifting up the rear license plate. Best of all, my Olds had a huge trunk where you could easily keep a spare five-gallon can of gasoline with plenty of room to spare.
I rolled my window down and leaned into the balmy night. I was going a comfortable fifty-five, in no hurry with no exact destination. I’d passed through the east side of town and headed out on CR-8, a paved two-lane that wound around fifty miles of scraggly apple farms, private houses, and a whole shitload of trees. Meth labs were rumored to operate along CR-8 but I’d never seen any myself, just a slew of tacky designer mail boxes, ugly lawn ornaments, and enormous American flags.
Twenty miles into my aimless wandering I noticed a glint of silver amid a patch of grassland to the north. I turned onto a gravel road that seemed headed in its general direction, feeling whimsically adventurous. The Olds slammed painfully on the pocketed road, its worn struts crunching even when I dropped my speed to thirty, but I took the shitty road as a good sign—it meant the road led somewhere, but not somewhere important or trodden enough to be well-tended.
The Olds bottomed out a half-mile down the gravel road and I pictured the sloshing metal gas can in the trunk, too heavy for tipping. The glint of silver I’d noticed from the highway slowly became a small oval lake reflecting the moonlight. I tapped the brakes and the Olds came to a crunching stop thirty yards from the lake’s shore. I turned off the engine and the headlights and sat quietly, letting my eyes get accustomed to the near dark.
The crickets were loud. They
chirped their hearts out at the crescent moon and the dotted stars and the tall grass swaying above them. The lake was smooth and reflected the moonlight like a mirror. The only structure in sight was a single wooden shack the size of a one-car garage.
No houses, no people.
Just a shack.
A cozy little shack.
I got out of the car. I could smell the skim of algae on the lake, baked all day beneath the sun. I turned in a full circle, searching the horizon for artificial light. Nothing. I opened the trunk of my car and took out the gas can.
I shook the can and listened to the gasoline slosh. The firebug frolicked in my chest, ready to light the lights.
“Hey, buddy, we don’t have to do this,” I said aloud, trying to reason with it. “We don’t have to burn anything down.”
The firebug hopped up and down, growing impatient. It couldn’t speak directly to me, but it could mime like a pro.
“This is a shitty thing to do, you know?”
The firebug hopped and hopped.
“This is someone’s private property,” I said, gesturing grandly to the bucolic scene before us. “They probably love this old shack. Maybe their gruff yet kindhearted grandfather built it with his work-chapped hands. Or maybe when they were little kids they pretended this shack was a portal to a magical kingdom filled with dragons, elves, and chaste good times. Do you really want to be responsible for the destruction of happy memories like that?”
The firebug did not give a goddamn about happy memories. The firebug wasn’t about happy memories at all. No, it hopped and hopped and grew hotter and hotter until I felt something akin to bad heartburn mixed with a handful of magma. The firebug was a natural force inside of me, like a blizzard or a thunderstorm, and you couldn’t reason with shit like that. You could only hope to subdue it with minimal collateral damage.
I brought the can over to the shack and set it on the grass. I pounded on the shack’s padlocked door.
“Hello? Anyone in there?”
No answer, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I knocked three more times and waited in case someone was taking a nap.
“All right, shack. Say your prayers.”
The shack prayed to its shack gods as I circled it, splashing gasoline along its base. The smell of gasoline was strong, real fumy. When I’d finished the dousing, I brought the can back to the car, set it in the trunk, and slammed the trunk’s lid shut. I always put away the can first—I imagined most pyros got caught because they got sloppy and overexcited and ended up, sooner or later, torching their balls off. Which I found understandable, since once that old firebug started bopping around it was harder to control yourself and take the necessary precautions.
The wind died down. I returned to the shack’s perimeter and took a matchbook out of my pocket. I studied the shack, a dark, boxy outline against the clear night sky, and savored the leaping in my heart. I plucked a match.
“Goodbye, old friend.”
I struck the match and tossed it against the building. The match’s light darkened for a second, threatening to go out, and then the gasoline caught and whooshed into flame. The firebug sang rapturously inside my chest, droning out the moonstruck crickets and sending wave after wave of electricity through my body.
The flames engulfed the shack quickly. I was forced to take a few steps back, then a few more. A hole opened in the building’s side and I could see a boat inside. It looked like a small fishing vessel, with some metal framing that might have been a dock. I wondered if the gas inside the boat’s trolling motor would ignite and what that would be like, if it would shoot off into the stars, like a fiery rocket, or if it would simply go boom.
The fire’s intensity grew, the building’s interior now white hot, and the shack’s frame wavered uncertainly. The roof began to tilt and then fell in altogether, collapsing what remained of the shack’s walls and crashing onto the fishing boat. I retreated farther and turned my back on the fire.
You could see the lake’s shoreline as clearly as if it were daytime. My eyes stung from the smoke and the burning gas. I took off my clothes and walked into the lake, slowly feeling my way forward. The lake only came up to my knees for the first ten or twelve feet, but then I reached a drop-off and dove headfirst into the silvered water. After the heat of the fire, the lake’s coolness felt wonderful and even the algae scum didn’t bother me.
I swam toward the lake’s center, happy in my swimming nakedness and kicking my legs in strong, convulsive arcs. I didn’t look at the shore until I’d reached the middle of the lake, the exact center of the silvered water, and when I finally turned to look, the beauty of the fire, with such a starry backdrop, threatened to overwhelm me and I had to remind my legs to keep churning. The firebug and I did not want to sink.
The Good Old Days
The House of Druneswald had not always known such troubled times. We’d once been blessed with a period of goodness and light and mildly ambitious family vacations. A time when my father smiled honestly and without effort. A time when Haylee talked too much and hugged dogs on the sidewalk without asking their owner’s permission. A time when I wasn’t quite so dopey or lazy, and I was ignorant of the firebug’s morally questionable hunger.
Sadly, I didn’t fully appreciate this golden epoch at the time. The problem is that when you’re little you’re a slobbery, bumbling fool, happily knocking things over and ignorant of even the most basic concepts, such as the passage of time and the inevitable decay of all living matter. You simply run about and live so fully in the moment you cannot imagine the future.
When you’re little, you get into all kinds of stupid shit, and the person who inevitably pulls you out of that shit is your mother. At least, that’s how it went in our family, where everybody had their specialized role.
Simply put:
The firstborn son, I liked trouble and back-talking and things that went boom.
Haylee, the chirpy kid sister, was usually either my unwitting target or my accomplice. She enjoyed drama on a near operatic scale and milked it for every emotive note she could get.
Dad, the fully domesticated adult male, worked in an insurance office where the florescent blandness crept in behind his eyes all day, every day, like an invasive alien life force, and when he came home he just wanted to drink beer and watch PBS programming without being hassled.
And Mom, well, Mom was calm. A steadfast presence, Mom could step into a heated situation and sort it out with an ease that bordered on the miraculous. If you had a complaint, however morose or idiotic, she’d hear you through to the end and offer a perfectly sensible solution, whether you really wanted one or not.
You were bored?
Go mow the lawn. Only boring people are bored.
Your sister was bugging you?
Shut your door.
You hated your homework?
Fine, don’t do it. You can be a bum and see how you like living in a cardboard box all winter.
My parents both grew up in Hickson, but Dad was five years older and they didn’t meet until Mom was twenty-one. A recent graduate of Thorndale State with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Mom was volunteering at a church-basement dinner, scooping spaghetti out of the spaghetti vat to everybody in line when my father, a hungry young man just starting out in the insurance business, fell in love with her at first sight. Dad got her phone number, called the next day, and proceeded to court our mother with the same steady, workmanlike manner he applied to wooing a new client. My mother said she’d liked my father’s kind smile, his honesty, and his outspoken dislike of war of any kind, which was a refreshing change from all the Vietnam talk she’d grown up with in Grandpa Hedley’s house. They dated for seven months, got engaged, and were married within a year while already expecting me, a not-unheard-of timetable in Hickson.
Growing up, Haylee and I knew our parents loved each other and that they lov
ed us, too. We were lucky. Our only responsibility was to be kids with other kids. We biked around the neighborhood, explored the woods behind our house, and watched trains roar through the clearing. We’d tear grass and mud from the earth and throw it at each other, laughing, and life was pretty good, pretty fucking good.
When I was seven and Haylee was old enough for preschool Mom started working on a master’s degree in counseling at Thorndale State. Pursuing the degree, while raising two kids, took her an intense two years. We all went to her commencement and Mom was so happy that day she seemed to glow, outshining even the other glowing graduates on the podium. We could see she’d slain some wicked dragon in her own heart, a shadow that she’d never spoken of outright to any of us.
With her newly minted degree, Mom got a job at Planned Parenthood as a counselor, offering guidance to women, men, and couples forty hours a week. Mostly pregnancy options and post-abortion counseling, with some life coaching sprinkled in. Her calm nature must have served her well in a job like that and I can imagine her at work right now. She’s holding a clipboard, small and finely boned like her own mother, and she’s dressed in a sensible black skirt, white blouse, and light wool sweater. She’s pretty in an understated kind of way.
When we went on car trips, Mom would point out the leaves on the trees, the birds in the air, and the signs along the road. All the shit the rest of us took for granted as bland traveling backdrop she appreciated with a childlike sense of wonder that both baffled our father and, I think, made him envious, having himself looked at the material world for so long as something that either needed to be repaired or would need to be repaired in the future.
Haylee and I took to mimicking our mother from the back seat, pointing out things and declaring in our best dopey Mom voice:
“Look at that mailbox! The red flag is up!”
“Hey, look at that dead skunk! He looks like a bloody pancake!”
“Oh guys, how about that?! Those are clouds right up there!”
The Firebug of Balrog County Page 2