The Firebug of Balrog County

by David Oppegaard

  I finished the burrito and went to the bathroom to wash up. The upstairs bathroom, which Haylee and I shared, had two sinks and a big wall mirror. The bathroom also had a toilet, a claw-foot porcelain bathtub, and a tiny wooden door set in the wall above the foot of the bathtub. This tiny, mysterious door had seemed to contain magical properties when Haylee and I were children, as if one day we might open it and discover a family of leprechauns enjoying tea and crumpets on the other side. In reality, the door led to a laundry chute that plunged all the way into the basement. The main opening to the laundry chute, an uncovered vent, was actually on the other side of the wall, set in the corner of Haylee’s walk-in bedroom closet. When the tiny bathroom door was open it was possible to peer into each room from the opposite side.

  Which had been fun when we were kids, since you could pop your head through the doorway and scare the shit out of anybody on the other side, whether they were soaking in the tub or hanging out in the closet. Luckily, the door had a knob on it and could only be opened from the bathroom side and as long as you made sure the door was shut you didn’t have to worry about your little sister (or goblins) popping the door open and seeing you naked in the bathtub.

  I brushed my teeth to get rid of the nasty microwave burrito aftertaste and washed my hands and face. As I combed my untamable blond hair I heard what sounded like a ghost murmuring in the bathroom wall. I put the comb down and placed my ear against the wall.

  Our house was old. Sometimes bats got trapped in the walls—you could hear them scratching at the wood and plaster for a few days, until they either died in the wall or found a way to get out—but as far as I could remember I’d never heard a ghost before. I listened carefully, homing in on the center of the ghost murmuring, and found myself at the tiny door above the bathtub.

  “Shit.”

  I looked at the door and its tiny brass knob. Did I really want to explore this further?

  I heard Grandpa Hedley’s voice in my head, telling me to man up.

  “Fine,” I whispered. “I’ll man up.”

  I reached out, turned the brass knob, and slowly opened the tiny door. The ghost murmuring grew louder and I realized it wasn’t murmuring at all. Haylee was crying.

  And listening to Dido.

  I took a deep breath and peeked through the tiny doorway. My sister was lying on the floor of her closet, wrapped in a Strawberry Shortcake blanket I hadn’t seen in years. She was on her side, facing away from the laundry door and spooning her enormous stuffed panda. Nothing showy, her sobs seemed to come from a place deep within Haystack’s heart, a central location where she had an inexhaustible supply of sadness she could tap at will.

  Hypnotized by this display of unvarnished grief, I stood watching for a minute before I couldn’t take it anymore and slowly, with infinite care, closed the tiny door again.

  The Landfill

  Hickson kids like to use the Balrog County landfill for parties. It’s supposed to be guarded twenty-four/seven, but the night guard is a drunk who’s usually out cold by one a.m. There’s a hole in the landfill’s fence everybody knows about and if the wind’s blowing right the smell’s not so bad, at least when it’s cold out. The cops never sweep the landfill because everything there is destroyed already and you can find lots of cool shit if you dig around a little.

  It’s like a fun drinking game, sifting through all that old trash. I’ve heard stories about people making out and even fucking in the Fill, but I’ve never had the opportunity to give that a go.

  Hickhenge

  Harried by my sister’s display of sorrow, I left the house and went out to our garage. More of a free standing aluminum shed than a traditional attached garage, it was built by my dad from a kit he’d ordered online. He’d ordered the two-car garage kit but they’d delivered a four-car kit by accident so he just built that fucker instead, setting the mammoth beast up right at the end of our gravel driveway and spreading out more gravel for the shed’s floor.

  Our humble shed-garage, which looked more like it belonged on a county fairground than anywhere within city limits, had seen its better days. The gravel floor was stained with oil and was home to all manner of creepy-crawly insects. The shed’s rafters were usually populated by birds, which were good at shitting on parked cars, and occasionally a raccoon snuck inside and caused a ruckus.

  At the rear of the shed—occupying the space of roughly two cars—was a wall of hoarder junk I liked to examine sometimes, meditating as I picked through boxes of old toys and clothes and magazines and whatever else our family didn’t really need anymore but couldn’t bear to part with. As I sat with the junk, which was dimly lit by the shed’s single uncovered bulb, the garage door rumbled to life and slowly rolled up, letting in a batch of fresh air. I kept still as a ninja as the shed was lit up by a pair of headlights and our van pulled inside.

  The headlights went out and the van’s engine stopped. I could see my father sitting in the driver’s seat, staring through the van’s windshield. I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or staring into space. He liked to listen to talk radio and sometimes he got so into it he stopped noticing what was happening around him.

  Dad got out of the van and slammed his door. “Mack?”

  “Hey Pops.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  I shrugged. Dad looked up at the rafters, checking for birds. There weren’t any.

  He walked around the front of the van. “You know, we should really get rid of this crap. We could rent a Dumpster and chuck it all.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of like it out here.”

  Dad laughed. “You would, Mack. You would.”

  He reached into a box and pulled out a paperback novel. “Alice Munro. This must have been one of your mother’s. She loved Alice.”

  We both stared at the paperback, as if it might reply in Mom’s stead, but it kept its bookish silence.

  “Okay,” Dad said, tossing the book back into the box. “I’m going to have a beer and hit the sack. Don’t stay out here too late.”

  “I won’t.”

  Dad left the garage, hitting the door button as he exited through the side door. I retrieved the Alice Munro paperback and thumbed through it, hoping to come across a little note or something, some proof that my mother had read the book. I didn’t find any marks but I shoved the paperback in my back pocket to add to my bedroom library anyway. I started picking through the junk again, wondering what other books I’d missed, and noticed a moving dolly wedged between an old mini-fridge and a treadmill draped in spider webs. I extricated the dolly from its dusty purgatory and gave it a few roll arounds, testing its wheels and overall sturdiness.

  Yes. It would do.

  I threw the dolly in my trunk and drove downtown. The parking lot behind the grocery store was empty and poorly lit by one dim and flickering sulfide lamp. I parked the Olds in the lot’s inkiest shadows and rolled down my window, listening to the rustling night as the firebug made merry in my chest, excited for the glory to come. After twenty minutes I saw a police cruiser cruise by and turn onto Main Street, its engine revving as it peeled out toward the highway.

  Thump thump, went the firebug.

  Thump thump.

  It was time for a new monument to rise, a shrine worthy of the Elder Gods and Kubla Khan. I got out of my car and went to work, hustling the moving dolly onto the grocery store’s loading ramp and scooping up the nearest cube of crushed cardboard. The cube was heavy but not so heavy a true man couldn’t handle it with some swearing, staggering, and painful toe-stubbing. I moved the cube down the loading ramp to the center of the parking lot and then I did the same thing with the eleven other cubes, placing them all in a ring. I worked fast and the night was silent except for my own ragged breathing.

  When the major pieces were in place, I
untied the twine on one cube and pulled a few cardboard chunks loose. I set the chunks lengthwise on top a few random cubes around the ring, creating a crosspiece effect that paired the cubes together.

  Satisfied that I had the look going that I wanted, I returned to the Olds, set the dolly back inside the trunk, and retrieved a gas can and a rag. Humming Druid-like tones of spirituality, I went around the ring of compacted cardboard and blessed each cube with a sloshing of 87 regular-grade gasoline, making certain to leave a nice splashy trail between each piece. Then I put the gas can back in my trunk, started my car, and walked back to the ring, leaving my car door open for getaway purposes.

  The firebug thumped heartily, knowing well what moment was at hand. I took the rag out of my pocket and lit it with my lighter. The rag’s tip caught instantly and I held it before me, dangling it over two cardboard cubes connected by one of the cross-section pieces. “I hereby call upon all the old gods to witness this holy happening,” I intoned. “I call upon them to—”

  I swore and dropped the rag, which was fully lit already. It floated down and landed on the cardboard cross-section, giving me just enough time to jump back as the cubes caught fire, one after another, until the entire ring was radiant with fire.

  And lo …

  Hickhenge was alight.

  I did a quick wild man dance, looked up at the stars to make sure they were paying attention, and sprinted for my idling car, the firebug hammering joyously away in my chest.

  The Legion

  The Hickson Legion was two miles north of town. Like many other American Legions across the United States, it served a multi-functional purpose: it provided a headquarters for Legion members, a dance hall Hicksonites rented for weddings and other events, and, best of all, it featured a dimly lit bar where you could get a cold beer without worrying about some damn commie trying to stab you in the back.

  I’d been to the Legion before, but I’d never hung out in the bar. The bar’s lights were covered by emerald glass shades, the kind you normally saw on banker’s lamps, and they cast an ominous pall over the room, as if everyone who drank there had a touch of jaundice. The wooden floor was covered in an ancient, sticky film of spilt beer and the walls were lined with the mounted heads of deer, elk, moose, and one pissed-looking bear. Three enormous flags—American, Legion, and POW—hung on the wall in heavy glass frames.

  When I entered the bar, five or six steely-eyed old guys turned on their stools to examine me. The bartender was a slim, fifty-ish dude with a salt-and-pepper beard, thick black glasses, and a salt-and-pepper ponytail. He would have made a good 1950s Beatnik.

  “You Mack?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You really eighteen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He waved me over.

  “Come on back. I’m Butch.”

  Butch turned out to be a good guy, totally mellow with a rumbly bullfrog’s voice. He started me on washing beer mugs (the dishwasher was broken) and went back to chatting with the old guys sitting at the bar. The sink’s warm, sudsy water felt good on my hands and I dove into the work, really washing the hell out of those mugs, and when I looked up from the sink over an hour had passed and the place had started to get busy. Not packed, but busy. More men had shown up, old and not so old, and some had brought their wives and girlfriends.

  I asked Butch about the crowd and he told me karaoke started at eight.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do I get hazard pay for this shit?”

  Butch rubbed his stubbly cheek with the flat of his hand and surveyed the crowd.

  “Nope. But they tip pretty good.”

  As far as karaoke systems went, the Legion had sprung for a nice setup. The singer stood on a small raised platform in the corner of the bar, where a karaoke stand was set up with two microphones and a TV monitor, which acted as a teleprompter for the singer. The stand was wired into a big computer-looking deck, which an orange-haired lady named Judy operated from across the room, programming the karaoke playlist from slips of paper given to her by the crowd. Three ceiling-mounted speakers cranked out the backing melodies for each song and two flat-screen monitors, also hung from the ceiling, displayed lyrics so the crowd could sing along themselves.

  The later it got, the more the crowd was into it, clapping and hooting and singing along to “Piano Man” and “Sweet Caroline” and all that rip-roaring cheesy shit. I helped Butch keep the beer flowing, whistling as I darted around. I got lost in the busy flow of a bar on a Friday night, a flow I was in part responsible for maintaining, and it dawned on me that this gig wouldn’t be so bad at all. The worst part of working at the hardware store was all the sitting around. You never forgot about the drag of time passing, how it pulled you under with every slow minute and stole a little bit more of your immortal soul.

  You never forgot it was a job.

  Lisa Sorenson’s Inferno

  Butch let me off early and I drove back to town. Sam was waiting for me outside his grandmother’s house, sitting hunched over on the stoop. He didn’t move when I pulled up, so I laid on the horn and Sam jumped to his feet like he’d been zapped.

  “Jesus,” Sam said as he got in, slamming the passenger door. “You probably woke the whole neighborhood.”

  “Do you really care about this neighborhood and its sleeping?”

  “No.”

  “All right then.” I honked the car’s horn again and peeled the hell out of there.

  Sam scowled and peered at the Olds’ dashboard, looking very Orson Welles-ish in the electric white light, the deeper pockets of his face cast in shadow.

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. “You’re worried about me waking your old lady. Your very, very old lady.”

  Sam snorted and looked out his window, smiling despite himself. We passed the trailer court and headed south on the highway.

  “So, how was the Legion? You pick up any cougars?”

  “Not yet, but I remain hopeful.”

  “That’s good. Hope is good. Hope will save us all.”

  I nodded, unable to tell if Sam was serious or not. It was always hard to tell with him. One minute he could be cracking wise, the next he’d start ranting about how the human race was growing water-soft and how it was inevitable that we’d all be wiped out sooner or later. Sam’s parents had died in a car accident with a semi-truck when he was ten years old and he was still broken up about the whole thing, even if he never talked about it. Sometimes we drove to Thorndale to visit the sports bars and play Big Buck Hunter until the waitresses kicked us out. Watching Sam expertly kill digital bucks with a plastic orange shotgun was a magnificent thing to behold, even if he never wanted to go hunting in real life.

  I turned left at a lit-up Jesus billboard. Two miles later, we came upon dozens of cars parked along both sides of the road. I slowed the Olds down and we checked out the scene, noting the well-lit house a half-mile off the road and the lurching, vaguely humanoid forms in the distance. When we reached the end of the parked cars, I added the Olds to the lineup and killed the engine.

  Sam rubbed his eyes and made an “urrrrrrrrrrrr” noise. I pressed the knob that turned off the car’s headlights and dropped us into countryside dark.

  “Second thoughts, Sammy boy?”

  Sam slumped against the passenger window. “I don’t know, dude. I’m not so good at this type of shit.”

  I sat back. The roof’s fabric was sagging so close to my face I could have licked it. “Once you get drunk enough, every party’s the same,” I said. “There’s the loud stupid guys and the loud stupid girls and after a couple of beers everybody’s best friends.”

  Sam straightened. “That’s true.”

  “Trust me,” I said, opening my door. “Four beers in and showing up will seem like the best decision we’ve ever made.”

  I got out of the car bef
ore Sam could say anything else. What was needed here was motion, the sort of continuous momentum that allowed bookish wallflower dudes like us to venture out into the night and enjoy the company of our fellow man, not to mention college girls. We needed to stop thinking—we already thought too much, by the minute, and it was burning our circuits out.

  Sam got out, slammed his door, and staggered out of the ditch and onto the road. Cars were wedged into Lisa Sorenson’s driveway like Tetris blocks. We could hear voices in the dark, girls laughing. Party people were clustered in groups of four or five all around the front of the house, smoking cigarettes and blowing smoke into the air.

  Inside the house, we were bombarded immediately with hot, sweaty air and loud country music. About thirty people were crammed into the living room, shouting at each other and drinking from red plastic cups. Lisa Sorenson, a big, bubbly girl who liked everybody, stood in the middle of

  the room, holding court. When she saw Sam and me standing in the entryway, her whole face lit up and she came bounding over.

  “Oh my God! Mack and Sam!”

  Lisa gave me a sweaty hug before I could defend myself. Sam, who wasn’t a big hugger, took several steps back and held up his hands in placation. Lisa laughed and wiggled her fingers at him.

  “I can’t believe you guys came! You never show up at anything.”

  I hooked a thumb toward Sam. “It was his idea. Sam cannot stop himself from partying.”

  Lisa smiled and nodded. “Awesome! I’m so glad you made it.”

  I smiled and glanced at Sam, who was glowering at everyone.

  “So, like, the keg’s out back,” Lisa said, holding up her red plastic cup. “There’s a bonfire, too. Huge one.”

  The firebug perked up and sniffed the air, sensing smoke.

  “Sweet,” I said. “We’ll go check that out.”

  “Cool beans,” Lisa said, nodding again. “Then come back and dance, you guys. We’re just getting started!”