The Firebug of Balrog County

by David Oppegaard

  Too much light.

  Too much slobbering.

  I made a croaking sound and thrashed around beneath the covers, finally prying one arm free. I shoved the beast’s hairy snout away as laughter came from the foot of my bed, wicked and merry. It was Dad.

  “What do you think, Mack? I think we should call him Chompy. Because, you know, he chomps.”

  Right on cue, the dog chomped on my free arm. Not too hard, not too painful. Just strong enough to let me know he was good at it. I cracked open my bleary eyes, letting more horrible light flood in. The cur was a devilish blend of lab and Border collie, mostly black but with a white ruff and white front paws. A gentleman’s hound complete with formal attire.

  I shook my arm. The beast seemed to actually be smiling at me while the better part of my forearm was crammed into his maw.

  “I see where this is going,” I said. “You’re one of those motherfuckers.”

  The beast growled, low in the throat but soft and buttery, like he was only playing, hardy-har-har. He let go of my arm and panted happily, sending a fresh gust of meaty breath my way. I wiped the drool from my arm and tucked it back under the covers, where it would be safe from further mauling. Dad gave Chompy a scritch behind the ears and both of them grinned, having a real moment together.

  “I picked him up from the animal shelter this morning. Thought I’d give him to Haylee.”

  “Haylee?”

  “She’s always wanted a dog and I thought finally having one would cheer her up. She could take him for walks and stuff like that. It’ll get her out of that damn bedroom.”

  A wave of sloshing hangover nausea swept through my guts. I tried to remember the last time Haylee had talked about getting a dog. When she was ten, maybe?

  “Sure, Dad. Yeah.”

  Dad beamed and gave Chompy a fresh scruffing. “I thought we could spring Chompy on her together. I’m going to make family breakfast.”

  “Family breakfast?”

  “Yes, sir. Any requests?”

  I closed my eyes, wishing I could disappear into a different realm. Perhaps somewhere deep, deep underground, like the Mines of Moria.

  “Coffee. Coffee would be good.”

  “You got it, kid. You’re looking rough there. They work you too late at the Legion? You don’t have to take that job, you know. You can feel free to tell Grandpa Hedley to shove it where the sun don’t shine.”

  “Right. And then he’ll beat me to death with his bare hands. Good plan, Dad.”

  My dad chuckled and whacked Chompy on the butt. The dog leapt off my bed and bounded out of the room.

  “The old man been telling you war stories again? Heck. If only half of what he says is true, he’s the real live Rambo. You take everything he says with a pound of salt and spit it out again if it don’t taste right.”

  “Wouldn’t a pound of salt make anything taste weird?”

  Dad stared at me. “All right, Mr. Smart Mouth. See you downstairs in five.”

  I stumbled downstairs and valiantly made it to my chair in the kitchen. Dad set a mug of coffee in front of me and I drank greedily from it, cupping the warm mug between my hands. Chompy, who was lying in wait beneath the kitchen table, gummed happily on my bare foot, his tail thumping against the floor. Dad was at the stove and working three frying pans, rotating between hash browns and bacon and cinnamon pancakes, short-order style.

  He was actually whistling, too. Whistling while he cooked.

  “Good old family breakfast, huh Mack?”

  I nodded and drank more coffee. I wanted to be buried in hot coffee, swamped with it until it came out of my pores.

  “Remember when we used to have these every Saturday morning? Your mother liked her bacon charred. Stank up the whole kitchen with smoke. I had to open all the windows, and still … ”

  The pounding in my head was slowly receding as the coffee took effect, neutralizing a few of the evil boozing cells. Chompy stopped gnawing on my foot and scrambled to his feet beneath the table. Haylee had appeared in the kitchen doorway, dressed in an old purple bathrobe.

  “Hey, sunshine,” Dad said. “Good morning.”

  Chompy exploded from beneath the table and scrambled toward my sister, his toenails clacking on the linoleum floor. Haylee screamed and brought her hands up, pushing the dog away as he lunged toward her groin.

  “Chompy, down!” Dad shouted, shaking his spatula at the dog. “Down, boy, down!” Chompy gave a few more friendly lunges, Haylee kept pushing him down, and finally he gave up and did some happy circles around her instead, nuzzling the backs of Haylee’s knees with his snout. She tried to swat him away but Chompy, who’d obviously dealt with critics before, dodged her hands with ease and did his best to rub his entire side against her, like a cat.

  “What the hell?” Haylee said, scowling as she tried to create distance between herself and the beast. “Why is there a dog in our kitchen?”

  “Dad got him for you.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you could use some cheering up,” Dad said, theatrically flipping a pancake and catching it with the pan. “You’ve seemed down the last couple weeks.”

  Haylee’s jaw tightened. “So you got me a dog?”

  “And food,” I said, pointing my coffee mug toward Dad and the stove. “Family breakfast, dude.”

  Chompy, his attentions scorned, sat on the floor and stared up at my sister longingly. Did the mutt know, somehow, he was supposed to be hers from now on? It seemed like it, but that was giving the furry idiot a lot of credit. Maybe he was just drawn to people who hated him. Maybe Chompy took all that hate, internalized it, and turned it into drool.

  Haylee groaned. She was hesitating in the doorway like a sparrow ready to take flight.

  “But we don’t do family breakfast anymore. We haven’t in, like, forever.”

  “Well, we’re doing it today,” Dad said, turning back to the stove and pushing around the hash browns. “Get yourself a glass of juice and pull up a chair, little lady. The bacon’s almost ready.”

  Haylee looked from Dad to me to the dog and back to Dad again. You could feel the charge inside her building, filling her body like a ball of heat lightning.

  “Mom’s not here. We can’t have family breakfast without Mom.”

  “She’s here in spirit, sweetheart—”

  “Fuck spirit. I’m not eating family breakfast and I don’t want some stupid fleabag dog.”

  Haylee turned and rushed out of the room, the hem of her robe catching air and fluttering behind her. We listened as she stomped up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door.

  Dad turned off the stove burners. “What the heck is wrong with that girl?”

  I shrugged and brought my plate over to the stove. “Fill’er up, sir. I’m here to report for family breakfast.”

  Dad laughed. He filled my plate and then his own, wielding a spatula with surprising grace. We sat down and the dog settled back under the table, where he prodded us with his snout and breathed noisily, praying for scraps. Dad and I dug into the food, elbows on table, and we ate that breakfast like it was our job.

  After I loaded the dishes and started the dishwasher, I brought Chompy upstairs and led him to my sister’s bedroom door.

  “Be good,” I told him. “Be good you crazy, slobbering beast.”

  I turned the knob on Haylee’s door and cracked it open. Chompy hustled immediately into the breach, his black tail wagging, and disappeared into the shade-drawn darkness beyond. I wished him luck.

  The Tornado

  Balrog County gets its fair share of tornadoes. The worst twister in my lifetime showed up when I was twelve and home alone while the rest of my family was shopping in Thorndale. I was watching a movie when my mother called and told me to get in the basement immediately—a tornado had been spotted south of town. Right as she
called, the town’s emergency sirens sounded and my skin started crawling like it wanted to head off on its own.

  I told my mother I’d go into the basement ASAP but instead I went outside and stood in the driveway. The sky had turned a surreal lemon-yellow and an enormous cloudbank was approaching from the south, dark as night and as big as a Magisterium Zeppelin.

  The wind was blowing like crazy.

  I felt alive, every nerve.

  Firewall

  The Saturday night crowd at the Legion turned out to be a collection of sullen old men with rough hands and furrowed brows. They sat around the bar in ones and twos, staring into the bar’s majestic collection of Budweiser-themed mirrors. They spoke in low, guarded tones, like political radicals, and broke abruptly into lung-rattling coughs.

  “Regulars,” Butch said, nodding to the room. “They wouldn’t sing ‘Sweet Caroline’ if you held a shotgun to their head.”

  One old coot named Ox Haggerton sat in the middle of the bar by himself, directly in front of the taps. Haggerton kept himself propped up very stiffly and seemed to constantly be in the process of lowering his drink (whiskey neat) or raising it to his lips. His face was so wrinkled it was puckered, like an anus, and his nose was beet red from half a century of drinking. I never saw him turn to his right or to his left but I could tell he was listening to every conversation in the bar, his hairy ears perked like a cat’s. Whenever I crossed his line of sight I could feel Old Man Haggerton’s eyes burning a hole through my forehead, searching for what, I did not know.

  Finally, around midnight, Haggerton stood up and pushed his bar stool back. The old man hadn’t tipped me all night, paying for each whiskey as it came with a series of damp one dollar bills. He cleared his throat, a sound somewhere between phlegm and standard German, and glanced around at the other regulars.

  “He’s George Hedley’s grandkid, right?”

  The regulars nodded and murmured amongst themselves.

  “Well, kid don’t look like no veteran to me. He looks like a goddamn pansy boy who thinks he’s smarter than a whore.”

  The regulars chuckled. Butch came down from his spot at the end of the bar, holding his hands up. Haggerton waved off the bartender and started for the door, surprisingly steady on his feet.

  “Go fuck yourself, hippie, and cut that faggot ponytail while you’re at it.”

  The regulars fell silent. Haggerton crossed the room, paused to sneer at us, and shouldered open the door, meeting my eyes as he plowed his way out into the night.

  “Fucking dickhead,” Butch said after the door had swung shut. “He gets mean drunk every Saturday and thinks it’s his goddamn American right because he served two years in Korea flying a helicopter.”

  I grabbed a rag from under the sink and wiped down the bar. I thought about helicopters and high grade explosives and how Ox Haggerton lived eight miles north of the Legion, on land he’d cleared himself by chopping down every tree he could get his hands on. Everybody in the area knew where Ox lived because he’d planted a sign on the main highway, advertising firewood for sale, but as far as I knew nobody had ever needed wood bad enough to visit his house and put up with his grumpy-ass bullshit.

  Haggerton must have been lonely, living out there by himself like that.

  Maybe he could use a visit.

  After Butch and I closed the bar and divvied up the night’s meager tips, I hopped into the Olds and headed north, shouting along with the radio. I pulled out my lighter and thumbed it a few times, enjoying the small lick of flame and how it reflected off the windshield’s dark glass. I wasn’t sure I was actually going to do anything at Haggerton’s place, really, but I told myself it wouldn’t hurt to take a little survey of the property. A little recognizance gander.

  Of course, I was a master of hiding my real pyro intentions, even to myself. I was good at pretending I was just being weird, just fucking around, before the firebug suddenly reared up and smacked the good sense out of me. The urge to burn shit always bubbled below the surface of my thoughts, like magma flowing beneath the earth’s crust, but it took a good opportunity and a sudden loss of willpower to really set me off.

  Ox Haggerton’s sign appeared abruptly amid the pine trees that lined the highway, a square of ghostly white with black block lettering. The old man must have gotten the sign professionally made back in the day. It’d been on the side of the highway for as long as I could remember.

  GOOD FIREWOOD FOR SALE—CHEAP!

  SECOND HOUSE ON THE RIGHT

  I turned left at the sign, leaving the paved highway for a lumpy gravel road. The Olds rocked, creaking like a horse buggy, and I slowed to twenty miles per hour to keep the rust bucket from tearing itself apart. I also turned down the radio because it now seemed too loud, out here in the tree-ridden boonies where it was dark as hell.

  It took five long, bouncing minutes to reach the first driveway and ten more to reach the second. The pine and birch trees, which up until now had run thickly alongside the road, disappeared on my right. They were replaced by sawed-off tree trunks that protruded from the ground like blunted teeth, the handiwork of a man who clearly didn’t care for trees, could handle a chainsaw, and had plenty of free time.

  I kept driving, slowly, and went past Haggerton’s mailbox and the single lamp that lit the driveway’s entrance. With the trees leveled, you could see Haggerton’s house about fifty yards down the gravel road, a couple of windows still lit up, and beyond that a rectangular building that looked like a shed. I drove until the trees reappeared on the right side of the road and swung the Olds back around. I turned off the car’s headlights and lowered her speed even further. “Easy does it, baby,” I whispered, patting the Old’s dashboard. “This is a black-ops mission.”

  I brought the car just short of the clearing and parked it in the middle of the road. I got out and went around to the trunk, surprised at the quiet—even the crickets were subdued tonight, as if they knew some heavy shit was about to go down. I popped the trunk and stared at the gas can. It looked so red and shiny, like fire itself.

  I picked the gas can up.

  Mmm, gasoline. The closest thing to liquid fire. Wars had been fought over it. Cars combusted it. It made the unholy world go round. I unscrewed the gas can and took a long, woozy sniff. I pictured Ox Haggerton sitting at the bar, drinking his beer and being all surly and shit. Calling me a pansy boy. Telling Butch he looked like a faggot.

  Didn’t he know a faggot was actually a bundle of sticks used as kindling in the burning of heretics?

  I took another whiff of gasoline and screwed the cap back on. I pictured Ox Haggerton sitting on his pile of firewood like the dragon Smaug, hoarding his precious gold beneath the Lonely Mountain.

  Fucking Smaug Haggerton.

  I started toward Old Man Haggerton’s house without closing the trunk, the gas can sloshing in my hand. I decided to cross the maze of tree stumps and avoid the lit driveway. It was like walking through a field of land mines that had already been detonated, annoying in a sloggy, tripping way. I had to walk with my head down, watching my feet. It wasn’t until I’d cleared the field and could properly raise my head that I realized that the boxy structure behind Haggerton’s house wasn’t a shed. It was the largest woodpile I’d ever seen.

  “Holy fuck.”

  I craned my head back, trying to take it all in. All the sweet, sweet stacked wood, piled high in neat little rows.

  And it would be bone dry, too. It hadn’t rained in Balrog County for weeks. The drought was all the local boys could talk about when they came into the hardware store.

  “Steady, Mack,” I whispered to myself. “Steady, old boy.” I took a couple of deep breaths and waited for the firebug to calm down. I looked at Haggerton’s house and realized the interior lights had gone out, leaving only the exterior porch light on. The gas can sloshed promisingly as I started forward again, circling around th
e back of the house like a good ninja, sticking to the dark and feeling my way forward. I cleared the house, crossed another fifty yards of tree stumps, and found myself at the foot of a pyromaniac’s wet dream.

  I reached out and touched a cord of wood, one among many covered in rough, dry bark. It felt as if I were stroking a mummy’s cheek.

  “Hello there. I’m Mack. I’ve come to—”

  A round shape leapt out of the woodpile and dropped to the ground. I swore and jumped back, falling on my ass and dropping the gas can. A huge, very pissed raccoon chittered at me, scorning me for my intrusion. Even in the dim light I could see it puffing itself out like a devil’s pom-pom, ready for battle. I scrambled to my feet and held out my hands.

  “Sorry—”

  More angry chittering. For a terrifying moment, I expected the raccoon to jump at my face and claw my eyes out.

  “It’s cool, man. We’re cool.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my lighter. The raccoon watched as I thumbed the lighter and held the flame toward it.

  “See? That’s fire.”

  Jesus, it was big. The size of a bull dog, really. What the hell was it eating around here? Elk?

  I took a tentative step forward. The raccoon chittered again, but with less certainty now, and when I took another step it backed away, watching me as it slinked along the woodpile.

  “Go on, man. This shit’s about to get torched.”

  The raccoon turned tail and ran off into the night. I exhaled loudly and looked at the house, praying the windows would still be dark.

  They were.

  I picked up the gas can and went around the woodpile, using the pile’s bulk to shield myself from Old Man Haggerton’s house. I could see a dude like Haggerton being paranoid, restless, and prone to the kind of night terrors that made a man leap out of bed and scream into the profound darkness of his country house.