“Yeah. She was.”
Katrina took my hand and pulled me along. “Okay. I have something for you, Mack-Attack.”
“Is it sex? Because I don’t think I can handle sex right now. I mean, either physically or mentally.”
“No. It’s even better than sex.”
“Whoa,” I said, allowing her to lead me across the lawn. “This I need to see.”
We went around the back of her house to the fire pit, which was loaded with wooden boxes that had been stacked in a loose pyramid. I looked at Katrina, then again at the boxes. Katrina squeezed my hand and grinned.
“It’s the birdhouses.”
“Your birdhouses?”
“Yep. All of them.”
I stepped closer to the fire pit. “But you love your birdhouses. They’re your dark therapy.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think I need them anymore.” Katrina whipped out a box of matches from her pocket and slapped it onto my palm. “I thought we could do one last burn together before you go straight. You know. For good luck.”
I stared into the fire pit. Crushed balls of newspaper had been stuffed around its base with loving care.
“What happened to the bird skeletons?”
“I buried them,” Katrina said, pointing to the patch of freshly churned dirt in the garden. “Along with a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.”
I smiled at this brilliant touch and opened the box of matches. I took a single stick out and held it up, studying its phosphorus-gelatin head.
Katrina leaned in and gave me a kiss. “Light’er up, dude.”
I crouched down, struck the match, and held it against the balled-up newspaper. We stepped back to watch the show. The firebug, if he was awake, did not offer comment.
Katrina looped her arm around my own and leaned into me. “Where do you think Ox Haggerton went, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “With his personality, I’m guessing Arizona.”
One of the birdhouses popped as the fire really started to take.
“I think I’ll do cows next,” Katrina said. “Cows made out of barbed wire. Maybe a barn, too.”
I nodded. I could dig cows.
“What about you? Can I read one of your stories sometime?”
“Sure,” I said. “But I’ll have to write a new one first. The rest, you know … ” I nodded at the fire.
“Right,” Katrina said. “Well, you’ve got a lot of good material now, I guess.”
“Maybe I’ll write about a dumbshit kid who burns his own house down.”
“But everybody survives, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess they do.”
It was long past dinnertime when I returned to my grandparents’ house. Grandma and Grandpa Hedley had gone to bed but my sister and father were both in the living room, watching TV and eating popcorn. They looked up when I entered the room, and I said hey. They nodded and went back to watching the movie. I’d planned on going directly out to the Grotto but I sat down on the couch instead, on the other side of Haylee with Chompy sleeping between us, lying belly-up as his forepaws twitched.
I stared at the TV but I couldn’t focus on the movie. Instead I pictured our house engulfed in flames and the dark end of Haggerton’s rifle. My mother lying in a hospital bed, impossibly thin and asking where I was.
Haylee reached across Chompy and held out her bowl of popcorn.
“Here,” she said, keeping her gaze on the TV. “I’m full.”
I took the bowl and set it on my lap. I felt an urge to bury my head in the salted popcorn and weep like a lunatic, like a real firebuggy fucker, but I took a deep breath and the feeling passed. Instead I slowly ate a few popcorn kernels, then a few more, and then I was watching the movie right along with my father and sister. Anyone passing by outside on the street might have looked in and seen a family enjoying the fall evening, cozied up and lit by blue light.
Hickson’s Wife
Alfred James Hickson’s wife visited Balrog County ten years after his death. She was a stern, handsome woman with steely gray eyes. She arrived alone, with minimal luggage. She carried a silver single-shot pistol in her purse and spoke with a British accent that made the locals shiver and step to.
Though she’d received her husband’s last letter through the post, sent on by the fellow fur trapper who’d found him tied to his death tree, Hickson’s remains had already been lost to time and spotty frontier record-keeping. Mrs. Hickson had to settle for hiking around the woods in the general vicinity of his death, shooting the first raccoon she came across, and building a town upon the spot where it died.
Why Ox Saved Chompy
We can only conclude that Ox Haggerton released Chompy from his basement kennel and ran the beast off before setting our house on fire. My sister, who has brightened considerably since October, thinks our mother convinced Ox to do it. Haylee believes Mom’s spirit was watching over the house and that our dog’s salvation was her way of saying everything would be okay.
Yeah, well.
I don’t know if I’d go that far.
What I think is that maybe old Ox once had someone truly good in his own life, somebody who’d poured enough of their love and kindness into him that it sparked forth during even his most vindictive hour. And the idea that love can be transferred, stored among the living throughout great periods of darkness and sorrow, and eventually return to the world is why, I suppose, I bothered with this accounting in the first place.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank his agent, Jonathan Lyons at Curtis Brown LTD, editor Brian Farrey-Latz, production editor Sandy Sullivan, publicist Mallory Hayes, book designer Steffani Pitzen, cover designer Lisa Novak (what a cool cover, right?), and everyone else at Flux. He would also like to thank Mark Rapacz, Geoff Herbach, and Dr. Mike “Miguel” Mensink, all of whom contributed in many, many outstanding ways to this fictional bug reaching the wide and crackling world.
©Todd Wardrope
About the Author
David Oppegaard is the author of And the Hills Opened Up, Wormwood, Nevada, and the Bram Stoker–nominated The Suicide Collectors. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his lovable cat Frenchie. David enjoys starting fires, but usually in a controlled and totally legal manner.
Visit the author online at davidoppegaard.com.
The Firebug of Balrog County Page 20