The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

“Came back from …?”

  “From the war. From college, the GI Bill.”

  This was news to Bud. He’d heard no war stories from Pete, no college stories.

  “And then I married Iris. She’d grown up here, like me. She was partly what I came back for. She was a teacher, in Winslow, the high school. English. She’d gone to Plymouth State—it was a normal school then. But she was ready for something new when we married, and she came on board at the paper. Ran everything at the business end. So we had each other. We made a kind of … universe, I guess you could say. A two-occupant universe. We liked it that way.

  “So I didn’t have to concern myself with what you’re talking about. And my feeling is, most of the year-round folks don’t. They just don’t. I may be wrong. But worrying about those issues—well, let’s just say that I see why it was summer folks writing your letter.” He set his bottle down on the table.

  “Any suggestions for me, then?” Bud asked.

  Pete shook his head. “Just, same as always.”

  “Which is?”

  “Enjoy yourself. No point to any of it otherwise.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Bud finished his beer. He said, “You’re my guru. You know that, Pete?”

  “If I’m your guru, my friend, you have more problems than worrying about class issues in Pomeroy, New Hampshire.”

  “Well, I do have more problems than that, but I’m not discussing those with you.”

  “Ah. Because …?”

  “Because they’re women problems. Woman. And not really problems. Just …” He lifted his hand.

  Pete grunted sympathetically. “Just don’t let it mess up your day job, is all I’ll say about that.”

  “So far, so good.”

  They sat. Pete seemed completely relaxed in their silence.

  “What were you reading before I so rudely interrupted you?” Bud asked.

  Pete made a dismissive motion with his hand. “Just stuff I’ve read before. That’s the good news about getting old. At my age, I can just reread all the stuff I’ve read before, and it comes at me fresh. Even when I remember it, it comes at me fresh.”

  “So what is it you’re reading?”

  “Lord Jim.”

  “Ah,” Bud said. “I remember it only vaguely. I haven’t read it since college, I don’t think.”

  “I do Conrad every four or five years,” Pete said.

  “You’re an inspiration, Pete.”

  He snorted.

  After a few moments: “I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot,” Pete said.

  “Who do you think is setting the fires?”

  “I don’t have any idea. But he’s in our midst, that’s all. And that, my friend, will make for an interesting summer.”

  “If he goes on.”

  “Oh, he’ll go on. Till he’s caught, don’t you think? And maybe, somehow, that’s the point.”

  “He wants to be caught?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why would he set them at night?”

  “Well, there has to be the game. If he set them in front of us, where’s the fun?”

  “You’re not arguing that this is conscious.”

  “No, not that. But it is a curious crime, isn’t it? You know, a public crime. We’re supposed to notice it, after all. That’s really the point. You’re supposed to write about it.”

  “But he can’t want to get caught.”

  “Maybe not. But it teeters right there. He’s saying to you, Make me famous. And when he reads you, he thinks, I am famous. But then I can’t stop. I have to stay famous. And that brings me closer and closer to getting caught. Maybe I even up the ante. Maybe I do do it in the day.”

  “Pete, you’re making me think that you’re the arsonist.”

  “I don’t have the energy, my friend. But just keep writing him up. Make him happy. Make yourself happy. Forget class relations. It ain’t your beat.” He shifted forward on the couch, as if to stand, and in response Bud got up, setting his beer bottle on the coffee table next to Pete’s.

  “Thanks, Pete.”

  “Anytime.” They started out of the room.

  “I may take you up on that.”

  Bud sat in his car at the edge of the town green for a few minutes, watching Pete moving around his house, alone. It was dark out now, the green was empty. Pete went back to the kitchen, presumably with their beer bottles. Then the windows there went black, and a moment later he appeared again in the living room. He was carrying his book, the sad story of a young man trying to redeem himself. He sat down at the end of the couch, next to the lamp, and raised the book, bent his head toward it. Bud found himself unexpectedly affected by the sight.

  And then he was imagining himself at Pete’s age, living here, alone. Running the paper, rereading old books.

  Pete wore it well. Bud suspected he wouldn’t.

  He started his noisy engine and watched as Pete’s head lifted up, as he looked out to where Bud turned his headlights on and put the car in gear to start home.

  12

  ON THE POSTER IN THE LIBRARY, the dance had been called a sock hop. And sure enough, people were heeling their shoes off and setting them in a line by the door, though that left a number of them, like Frankie, barefoot rather than sock-footed. The floor was cement, buffed and gleaming, cool under her feet.

  The vast open space of the barn was busy with people. It was a sort of pavilion, Frankie saw. There were wide doors slid open on three sides, so you had the sense of the outside everywhere around you, an outside that was groomed and manicured. “Now this is a lawn,” she’d said as they drove up.

  “Told you so,” Bud said.

  The music was loud and scratchy, someone’s old tape or burned CD of Chuck Berry doing “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.” She felt Bud’s hand—warm, authoritative—on her back, moving her into the crowd. It was the first time he’d touched her, and her body registered this, a kind of thrill along her spine that moved downward. She had the impulse to turn to him, to touch him back, but she kept walking, kept moving where he directed her, her breath just a little uneven.

  At the same time, she was looking around, taking things in. The assembled group, she saw, was more inclusive than the tea had been, which made sense: the tea was launching the summer season, such as it was, and that was of import mostly to the summer people.

  This event had nothing to do with the season, unless you thought of this summer as the arson season. Everyone was here. Several hundred, probably. She saw Marie Pelletier, who cleaned and did household errands for her mother, and Adrian Snell. Harlan Early was hunched over a pair of crutches, deep in conversation with Annie Flowers. Lucy Snell was talking to someone Frankie didn’t know, but there were others she recognized—the Goodyears among them, and the Arderys, Jay McMahon and his wife, whom she’d met at the tea. There were a lot of kids, both teenagers and some young-adult types—some in couples, paired off, some hanging out in groups with others of the same sex. Some beautiful young women, she noted, and remembered, with a sudden pang, what it had been like to be young here in the summer, a place where she had felt freer and more comfortable than in any of the other places she had lived with her family.

  There were a few strays her own age and Bud’s. As they moved toward the bar, on the other side of the huge space, she wondered how they would have been described, she and Bud. When she had told her mother who she was going to the dance with, Sylvia had said, “Bud Jacobs. Well, that makes sense, I suppose—I hear he’s a bit of a womanizer.” Which meant, Frankie assumed, that he’d been seen at town events and elsewhere with other women.

  “Well, Mother dear,” she had said, “in that universe, I would definitely be a manizer. Which is why I don’t live in that universe.”

  “You think not,” her mother said.

  Now she and Bud pushed up to the table. It was a cash bar—beer and wine for those of age, Coke and punch for those not. Loren was stationed there checking IDs, but he didn’
t seem to see them, and she moved quickly to the other end of the table.

  The music had stopped, and now it started again, some doo-wop group. Bud had to shout to get their beers from the guy behind the table. Frankie recognized him as the fire chief, who’d been so awkward at the town meeting. Bud shouted an introduction. Yes, Davey Swann. And the other man—the guy who was serving them—was Gavin Knox.

  “Oh,” she yelled. “You’re for rent.” Wasn’t he one of the men Bud had mentioned?

  “Me and some others.” He grinned. “Interested?” There was definitely something flirty about him.

  “I seem to be managing on my own, thanks.”

  Bud turned to her, holding two large plastic cups of beer. She took hers, and they threaded their way out of the crowd. As they walked, the beer sloshing in the cups, Bud leaned over to speak to her, and she was aware of him physically, suddenly—his solidity, his large head, his pleasant, soapy smell, which encircled them. He was saying he’d take his pictures now and get it over with. Then maybe do just a few more if something fantastic presented itself. He’d warned her about this on the way over—that he was at least partly on duty tonight—and when they’d gotten out of the car, he’d opened the back door to take his camera out. It hung around his neck now.

  The music stopped again, and he straightened up. That thing happened again, Frankie noted, wherein they were looking at each other with what seemed to her, anyway, a consciousness of finding the other attractive, of being found attractive. They were both smiling with the pleasant sense of it, the unspoken thing. Simultaneously, they raised their plastic glasses—womanizer, manizer—and drank. Some further rock and roll started.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you in a bit.” He set his beer down on one of the small, high tables scattered here and there in the big space. He stepped a few paces away from her, then turned, raised his camera, and took her picture. Or pretended to. Maybe he didn’t, maybe it was just a way of reminding her of the day they’d met. In return she raised one hand to cover her face momentarily. She saw that he was grinning in response before he moved away.

  For a while she was on her own, then, and she moved around, talking to people. She took note of the fact that she felt entirely comfortable in a way she hadn’t at the tea. Perhaps it was because of Bud, because she was with somebody in some sense. She saw him now and then as she chatted with one person or another, and each time was startled by how much she liked to look at him, this tall, rangy guy in jeans and his work shirt, with his slightly-too-long graying hair.

  But maybe she felt her sense of comfort because she knew people in Pomeroy now. She had said hello once or twice a week to many of the people in the room. She’d had the odd conversation with them—about the fires, of course, but also about the weather, about something in the news. And in fact, she’d had a kind of social life, limited but pleasurable. Two of the people she’d talked to at the tea had found her through Sylvia, and she’d gone to a few wine-and-cheese gatherings—the specialty of the summer people—and to one dinner party, stunning to her in its organization: they’d been assigned places at the table with little hand-written cards and, afterward, played charades.

  What’s more, it turned out, as she moved from conversation to conversation, that there were many people here solo tonight—maybe that, too, made things friendlier. Solo, because someone needed to stay home to guard the house. “Yeah,” Julie Hess said to her. “I’m supposed to head home at ten-thirty, so Dean can come and dance.”

  “I guess it would be a perfect night for an arsonist, wouldn’t it? Take your pick, they’re all out at the ball.”

  “That’s what we’re afraid of,” Julie said. “I mean, we’ve got the kids at home, but that’s even more reason for one of us to be there.”

  “Of course,” Frankie said.

  She had the same conversation several times over, so much so that she began to worry a bit about Liz’s house, though she’d locked it up carefully before she left, even the windows.

  And then Bud was there. “Dance, miss?” he said.

  “First, I need to unload this.” She pointed to her half-full cup. They moved together to the edge of the barn, where she set it down on one of the open horizontal structural pieces.

  They moved back toward the center of the large room. Bud was a good dancer in the gangly, quasi-autistic mode of her youth. Around them, a few people who seemed to be of her parents’ generation were actually jitterbugging. The teenagers or those a little older were moving against each other suggestively—pumping against each other, in fact. Frankie and Bud were the most free-form, it seemed. Certainly the least intimate as they moved around separately. But Frankie, anyway, was intensely aware of Bud’s rhythm, was trying to form some kind of response to that with her own body. They kept it up for four or five fast songs.

  When a slow number came on, Bud moved in easily to hold her. It wasn’t exactly comfortable—they were both sweaty and pulsing with heat—but she liked his size, she liked the power of his arms holding her, turning her. She liked looking at his face, so close to hers, smiling, inches from a kiss. At the end he did a nifty twirl, with just the suggestion of a dip, which made her squeal.

  After a couple more dances, they fetched their beers and went to stand in one of the open doorways to cool off. There were several others clustered there in groups, out of the noise, talking. Someone asked Bud about the Boston Globe—there was a rumor that one of their reporters was coming to town. They had been talking for only a few minutes when Loren appeared behind Bud, smiling in what Frankie thought of as a hungry way.

  “Bud, Frankie,” he said, by way of greeting. And then, with barely a return greeting from either of them, he launched into his news. “Looks like we got us a suspect or two, thanks to you.”

  “Oh, no,” Frankie said.

  “Is this on the record?” Bud asked.

  “Now, I don’t know about that.”

  “Yes or no?” Bud asked. She was struck by his voice. It was still friendly, but it had toughened, somehow. Professional Bud.

  “You could say some leads have opened up. More’n that, you’ll have to talk to the state troopers. I just wanted to thank Frankie here for coming forward.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “I guess.”

  “Is it just a matter of the taillights?” Bud asked.

  Loren turned to him, sly again, that killer half smile at work. “We got a bit more. We got a bit more. We’re working on it.”

  “What does that mean, ‘working on it’?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say more than that. Just, we’re talking to people of interest.”

  “On the basis of the taillights, or additional information?”

  “Oh, we got more than the taillights, at this point in time.” He nodded and nodded.

  “But you can’t say what.”

  “I wouldn’t like to, nope.”

  “You’re going to make me talk to the state police.”

  “You got that right.” His face was smug. Delighted, really. He nodded to her and then walked away.

  She had some more beer. “This is just what I was afraid of,” she said. She shook her head.

  “What? You didn’t think it would actually help when you talked to Loren?”

  “Do you think it really is? Helping?”

  “It is hard to tell, with Loren.” He smiled. “He’s certainly a guy who likes his job.”

  “Doesn’t it all sound … bogus, though? A little bogus?”

  “He sounds bogus. But he always does. It’s likely there’s something behind it, but you just can’t ever tell with him.”

  “So are you going to talk to the state police?”

  “I am. Yes. There’s a trooper who lives in Winslow who’s been working on the fires, too. The only state trooper I really know. He’s been willing to talk and talk. He’s the anonymous source in this week’s paper.”

  “All I want to know is that they’re not harassing everyone with slanted t
aillights just because of what I said.”

  “Well, that is certainly the most important aspect of all of this, and I’ll try to ascertain that for you.”

  “I’d be grateful.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping.”

  She smiled at him, trying to think of a quick response, when suddenly, inside, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” came on. “Ah, they’re getting closer to my era,” Bud said. They’d both finished their beers. “Dance?”

  They went back in. They danced, and as they danced, Frankie was remembering dancing in Africa. The beer, the heat in the barn, the out-of-date music, all these reminded her of so many nights at various medical stations or field hospitals or feeding centers. The staff, the doctors, the supervisors, all done for the day, all a little drunk, sweaty, a mass moving in the lantern light—laughing, eager not just for the dancing, but for what came next for some. Tonight, with whom? That open, random, sexual charge, the eyes meeting, searching out someone else, meeting again.

  And now, with Bud, she felt that same sexual heaviness in her abdomen, between her legs. Did she want this, again, when she’d be leaving soon? Shouldn’t she be more careful here, where her parents lived? Shouldn’t she be more careful of Bud?

  God, shouldn’t she be more inventive?

  And yet she was so attracted to him.

  It was about eleven when they left the dance. Most of the people still out on the dance floor were teenagers, it seemed. There were plenty of older people staying on, too, but they were mostly standing around the tables, or in the doorways, holding glasses of beer or wine, talking.

  People called to Bud, not to her, and he turned to wave, to call back. His hand rested on her back again as they walked, and she was aware of its light finger touch, then the warm flat of his palm moving down to her waist. It felt like a claim of sorts, and she was pleased, almost in spite of herself.

  They walked in silence to his car. The night had gotten cool, and Frankie shuddered and hugged herself. Her damp hair was clammy on her neck.

  “Cold?” Bud asked. He was opening the door for her.

  “I am, a little. I should have remembered to bring a jacket. I always forget how cold it can get at night, even in summer.” She slid inside.