The Firebug of Balrog County

by David Oppegaard

  “Hey,” my sister shouted. “Is that her?”

  I looked at Katrina. She was watching us but hadn’t stopped dancing. She was wearing a little black dress that fluttered when she moved. She reminded me of a gypsy minus all the rings and bracelets.

  “She’s so old,” Haylee shouted. “Is she twenty-one?”

  “I like your dress,” Katrina shouted back across the dance floor. “Lilac’s a good color for you.”

  Haylee stared at Katrina, pursing her lips so tight they almost disappeared entirely. I had no idea what her deal was, but she definitely didn’t look like someone who was enjoying a homecoming dance.

  No. More like someone who was going to bomb a homecoming dance.

  The fast song ended and a slower song started, some terrible heartstring of a country song that made the girls whoop and rush the dance floor. A sophomore girl grabbed Haylee by the hand and pulled her into the crowd, shouting something unintelligible. Katrina stepped closer and put her arms around my neck. I put my hands on her waist and we started slow dancing. I could feel the warmth of her hips through the fabric of her dress.

  “Who was that girl?”

  “That’s Haylee. She’s my sister.”

  Katrina nodded. “I like her. She seems tough.”

  “Oh, she’s a real badger, all right.”

  Even though Katrina was in heels, I loomed over her shoulder with my tottering height. So this was a high school dance without the loneliness, alienation, or the terrible, cellular-level despair. This was dancing with the prettiest girl in the joint while your heart went thumpity-thump in your chest and your mouth dried out and sweat welled along your hairline, just waiting to break free and stream down your face.

  “I could get used to this,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Katrina said. “Well, don’t.”

  I forced myself to focus on the crowd as a steadying measure as my fellow Wildcats drifted around the dance floor. Fog drifted knee-high around the room, obscuring ankles and shoes, while the mirror ball dotted the darkness with luminous white flares. I noticed Haylee dancing at the edge of the floor with some ginger-haired dude with broad shoulders and I gave her a nod, some brotherly hey-there support, but she didn’t notice me. She was frowning in concentration, the boy handling her like he was dancing with a mannequin or his favorite blow-up doll, and when the song ended my sister pulled away from him and practically sprinted out of the gym.

  “Ugh,” Katrina said, stepping back and scowling at the DJ. “I hate this song. Let’s go sit down.”

  We went to sit in the auditorium. Watching the dancing couples and clumps of dancing friends wasn’t that different from taking in a basketball game or a really loosely plotted play.

  “So this is it,” Katrina said. “These are the days of our lives.”

  “You really never went to a school dance? Not once?”

  Katrina shook her head. “I didn’t like boys much. I thought I might be a lesbian but I kind of hated girls, too. I hated everybody except my cat, Bauhaus.”

  “We just got a dog. He’s a lunatic.”

  “I liked to lie on the floor of my bedroom and pretend I was dead. I imagined what my funeral would be like and waited to see how long it would take Bauhaus to find me on the floor. He’d come up and meow in my face. If I didn’t get up, he’d curl up under my chin and start purring.”

  “What was being dead like?”

  Katrina shrugged and took out her cell phone. “Quiet, I guess.”

  The song changed and Katrina started texting someone. I left her and walked up to the entryway to get us punch. I’d filled one plastic cup when Sam appeared, sweating and wearing the same black suit he’d worn to my mother’s funeral. It was a wee bit tighter on him now.

  “Hey dude. You did show up.”

  “Mack, you need to come with me.”

  “What?”

  “Just come on.”

  I tossed the punch back and left the cup on the table. Sam was clearly agitated, his lunky head bobbing between his shoulders, and he walked at double-time speed. He led me out of the auditorium’s entryway and into the school’s main hall. Couples were whispering against the wall, cozied up in corners. Sam ignored them and kept walking down the main hall, passing the principal’s office and the gym’s side entrance.

  “What is it, Sam? Katrina’s waiting for me.”

  “It’s Haylee. She got in a fight.”

  “What?”

  We reached a crowd of students huddled outside the girl’s bathroom. You could hear a woman talking sternly on the other side of the bathroom door and then, as sudden as a car bomb, Haylee screeching back at her.

  “Oh shit,” somebody said, and somebody else laughed.

  The screeching increased and the bathroom door flew open, almost bashing me in the face. Haylee shot out of the bathroom, her eyes gleaming and her gauzy lilac dress rippling behind her like a war banner. She pushed through the crowd of students and started running down the hall. Mrs. Daly emerged from the bathroom with her arm around a junior girl named Madison Lambert, who was crying into a bloody wad of paper towels. Mrs. Daly frowned at the gathered crowd and led Madison down the hall toward the principal’s office.

  “Oh yeah,” Sam said, grinning. “Haylee smacked her good.”

  According to Sam (who sure loved his hallway gossip for such an anti-social dude), Madison Lambert’s date had danced with Haylee without asking Madison’s permission. Perturbed by this, Madison approached my sister in the bathroom, ugly things were said, and suddenly Haylee smacked Madison so hard her nose started to bleed. Mrs. Daly got called in and there you were: Haylee “Haystack” Druneswald was in deep shit.

  The crowd hovering around the bathroom dispersed, but I knew this was only the beginning. These seven or eight students would fan out through the school, repeat the story of the fight to anybody who’d listen, and fifteen minutes from now everybody in Hickson High would know about the fight. A fight over a boy Haylee probably didn’t even give a flip about. Everybody would laugh and mock and everything would be about a hundred times worse for little old Haystack.

  The only thing that could stem such a gossipy tide would be a bigger story …

  A tale of smoke and fire.

  “Sam, I need you to watch the bathroom door. Keep everybody away.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it, man.”

  I pushed opened the door and went into the girl’s bathroom. I gazed at myself in one of the mirrors. I was looking pretty good in my charcoal suit. Like a classy undertaker.

  “You shouldn’t do this, Mack,” I said to Mirror Mack. “This is stupid.”

  We stared at each other.

  Neither of us was backing down.

  “You’re just trying to justify your dirty little urges. This is not a solution to anything.”

  Mirror Mack was right, of course. This was the kind of ill-considered stunt that could get me expelled from school, or at least seriously affect my college application if I ever went that route.

  Yet the moment was here for the taking. Right now, tonight. Smoke bubbled inside my heart, waiting to escape and rise up.

  Was I going to live forever?

  No.

  Nobody lived forever. Mom sure hadn’t.

  I grabbed the bathroom’s trash can and set it in the center of the room, beneath the fire detector. The can was half full of wadded-up paper towels and tissues and I filled the rest of it with dry paper towels, yanking them from the dispenser in greedy pulls. I pulled a lighter out of my pocket and lit the top strata of towels in several places. While they began to burn I went into a stall and unspooled an entire roll of toilet paper, swathing it around my hand. I fed the smoldering fire with scraps of toilet paper until flames rose steadily from the bin and smoke drifted toward the ceiling.

  I left the bathroom
and found Sam alone in the hallway, looking worried.

  “All right, Sammy. I’d suggest exiting the school right now if you don’t want to get your one good suit wet.”

  “What?”

  “Run, Orson, run.”

  The school’s fire alarm erupted and the sprinklers came on in the hallway. Sam swore and started sprinting toward the front doors, moving good for a big man. I went back into the gymnasium, which was now pure chaos as everybody fled, hollering and laughing and shoving each other, the DJ desperately trying to cover his equipment. I found Katrina still sitting in her auditorium seat while sprinkler water rained on her from above, causing her mascara to run and her black dress to cling somehow even more tightly to her body. She grinned as I dropped from the raised gym floor and approached her.

  “Did you do this, Mack-Attack?”

  I tried my best to look cool, peering off into the distance at the wet chaos by the auditorium’s entrance.

  “Oh,” I said, “you know me.”

  End Times

  When someone is put on an artificial respirator, they are transformed into something even more tenuous than your average human being. They need help. They need help to breathe, to push oxygen through their blood stream, to live to see another day. Besieged by one kind of physical calamity or another, a person on a respirator is no longer able to exist within the cage of their body without the artifice and ingenuity of science. They’ve become dependant on a machine (which itself is dependant on manipulated electrical current) to do something human beings do every day without conscious thought.

  What I didn’t expect, the first time I saw my mother on artificial respiration, was how it made her look so different that I thought the critical care nurse had directed me to the wrong room. The woman lying in bed in this room had a rattler’s nest of wires and tubes running out of her, with the biggest tube of all crammed into her mouth and secured with white medical tape. The woman in this room was so thin you could almost see her lungs rising through her narrow, concave chest and the white blanket covering it.

  This woman, I could clearly see, was fucked.

  “Mom?”

  I stepped up to the side of the woman’s hospital bed and placed my hands on its aluminum railing. The respirator made horrible whooshing sounds in the back corner of the room, really working its ass off. The woman had Mom’s shoulder-length brown hair. The woman had a face, behind the tubes and the medical tape, which appeared to be a rough approximation of my mother’s face, like a wax museum replica.

  The ground shifted beneath my feet. I felt as if I might pitch forward on top of the bed. Right on top of her.

  My weight would probably crush her.

  End everything.

  End times.

  We had finally come to the end times.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m sorry I came late.”

  My first urge was to hunker down in that hospital room and refuse to get up again until she woke up. I lasted ten minutes before I had to leave the room, unable to stand the sounds of the beeping monitors and the whooshing respirator and the terrible, unnatural hitch in my mother’s chest as she breathed. Was forced, forced to breathe, her body air-raped so she could use it again when she finally woke up.

  The problem, my father told me as I rejoined everyone in the waiting room, was that the infection had spread deeper into her lungs while her kidneys were failing. She would remain sedated until her body rallied and she was strong enough to breathe on her own again. I tried to imagine what it would be like to wake with a respirator tube crammed down your esophagus. The panic that would seize you, the immediate urge you’d feel to rip the fucker out. It was like something out of Alien, really, but medical professionals had done this to my mother on purpose because they’d felt they had no other choice.

  “This is bad, isn’t it, Dad?”

  “It’ll be okay, Mack. She’s a fighter.”

  Haylee, who’d recently turned fourteen, was sitting on the other side of my father, clinging to his arm like a koala cub. Her eyes had gone blank and she was staring into the waiting room floor as if she could see through it to whatever lay below. Grandpa and Grandma Hedley were sitting more naturally on her other side, hands folded on their laps. They had the calm, determined air of older folks who’d spent plenty of time in waiting rooms and understood that the waiting never really ended. I felt a heady urge to stand up and slap both of them—SLAP SLAP—and shout an incoherent stream of obscenities in prelude to running out of the hospital, jumping into my car, and driving until I hit water.

  Haylee made a tiny, animal-like sound. My head dropped to my chest. A woman’s crackling voice paged some dude named Rick Appleton over the waiting room intercom.

  “I should have come sooner. I should have come right away.”

  Dad put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed me against him. I rested my head against his shoulder.

  “Fucking history test.”

  “It happened so fast, Mack. It’s all right.”

  “But—”

  Dad squeezed me again, surprisingly strong for a lifelong paper pusher.

  “It wasn’t very cool there, Mack. Before they put her under.”

  Haylee made another animal sound and I closed my mouth, pushing away all the useless talk that wanted to flood out of my mouth. Nobody needed to hear me bitch about myself at that moment—we just needed to wait and steel ourselves for whatever terrible thing came next.

  Around ten, a doctor came out and told us we could go home for the night. They expected no major changes in her condition. She could be under for several days.

  Nobody went back to school or work the next day. Dad, Haylee, and I visited the hospital and spent an hour sitting beside my mother’s bed—a horrible, agonizing hour in which the steady whooshing of her respirator resonated throughout my body. The rest of the day we hung around at home, stuffed into our various rooms/cocoons. After Day Two, Haylee and Dad went back to their regular lives. I understood this. They couldn’t tolerate sitting still and doing nothing. They knew, we all knew, that each day that passed with Mom unable to breathe on her own made it less likely she’d come back at all. Better to keep busy, busy busy busy, and think about Mom only ninety percent of the time instead of a full hundred percent. Perhaps a watched mother never wakes.

  But I wanted the pain that came with worrying about her. I craved it. I thought the pain meant that Mom was still with us, that her life was still in play and its length still undecided. I thought about medical miracles, comeback stories. I thought about praying, really, really thought about it, and finally gave it a try while sitting on her couch, wrapped in her quilt:

  God, please let my mom wake up.

  God, please don’t be an asshole.

  I even tried writing. I wrote a story about a woman who’s kicked in the head by a horse and lies in a coma for two weeks on the edge of death. Finally, when everything looks bleak as hell, the woman is visited in the night by a cat. The nurses and doctors in the hospital all know about this cat—it’s a hospital legend—but nobody’s ever managed to catch it. It sort of haunts the hospital, like a ghost, and when it visits the comatose woman in her hospital room, the cat jumps onto her bed, climbs across her body, and lies down on top of her head, right over her bandages. The cat starts purring, louder and louder, and after a few minutes the woman opens her eyes and asks who left the air conditioning on.

  On Day Three, Mom’s two brothers arrived with their wives and kids. They stayed in a hotel near the hospital in Thorndale and took turns holding vigil beside her bed. They meant well, but their appearance alone was an ominous sign that even I, deluded optimist that I was, could not help but recognize. I called Sam and told him the end was nearing. He surprised me by asking if I’d take him to see her that night, after the other relatives and friends had left the hospital.

  Sam’s grandmother drov
e us to the hospital after supper but stayed in the waiting room. Sam and I found Mom alone in her room, surrounded by a small garden of flowers, plants, and get-well cards. She looked smaller than ever, her hands folded across her sunken chest.

  “Hey, Mom. I brought Sam.”

  “Hey,” Sam said, stepping up to the bed. “Good to see you, Mrs. Druneswald.”

  I reached out and held one of Mom’s hands. They’d filled with fluid during her forced coma and had grown to three times their normal size, like plastic gloves filled with hot water, or clown hands, and they looked ridiculously huge in comparison to the rest of her. I gave her hand a hard squeeze and imagined I felt a slight squeeze back, a spasm of recognition.

  Sam looked around, taking in the machines, the flowers. “She doesn’t look so bad, dude.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No. She looks like she could wake up any time now. They just need to get rid of that monster tube and all that tape. That’s some freaky shit.”

  “I know, right?”

  Sam sat down. I took out a folded wad of paper from my back pocket and unfolded it, smoothing out the creases. It was a story I’d written a few years before, a funny one about a hobby chicken farmer who loses his farm to a tornado but manages to save all the baby chicks. Bringing the story and reading it aloud to my mother was Sam’s idea. He said it would be better than sitting around in silence like a couple of monks.

  I started to read aloud, my eyes darting to my mother’s face during each pause, and I read the whole twelve-page story, the room around me gradually retreating as I was drawn into the hobby farmer’s trouble. The tornado came, the farmer saved what he could save, and when it was over he had a box of chickadees in his arms, chirping away.

  When I looked up from the last line, Sam was watching the heart rate monitor with wide eyes.

  “Her heart line changed. It blipped during the funny parts.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Really.”

  I folded the pages back up and stuffed the story back into my pocket. We watched my mother, wondering.