The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

  The angry handsome man began to argue with the conductor. He wanted to get off the train. He pointed out that they were in a town. “There are bound to be cab stands or cars to rent, and they’re right over there!” His finger jabbed the air in the direction of the window. Why couldn’t the conductor just open the fucking doors and let him out? Him and others, he was sure. They could just hike across the tracks, the man said. If he asked around, probably half the people in each car would rather get out and find their way to New York on their own, forget taking fucking Amtrak.

  The conductor, who seemed amused rather than alarmed, started to answer several times, mentioning insurance, mentioning the long drop to the tracks, but the guy had wound himself up too tight to listen.

  “Why not?” he interrupted. “Why the fuck not? Look where we’re sitting, like stupid assholes waiting for some … rescue by a group of incompetents. All you need to do is open the fucking door …”

  As he went on, Frankie picked up her empty cup and her napkin and threw them away. She left the car. She passed through the two coaches in front of the café car and entered her own. Before she took her seat, she looked again at the woman behind her. She was in almost the same position, her face a mask of sorrow.

  Frankie sat down. After a few minutes had passed, she reached across the aisle and touched the sleeve of the man seated there. She asked if she could borrow his phone. He showed her how to place the call, and she got through to Diann.

  Who was so gracious as to seem almost relieved, Frankie thought. “Okay,” she said when Frankie had explained to her what was happening. “Well, just call if you’re able to get here by, say, four. Four-thirty is probably too late to really have enough time. Actually, four might be. But no,” she said. “No, come. Come. Even if it is four when you get here, come.”

  When Frankie got off the phone, the woman behind her was talking again. Very softly—she must be turned to the window, Frankie thought, but she didn’t look around to see. The words, the ones Frankie caught, were much the same. Please. She was coming. She didn’t know when. He had to wait. He had to. Because she loved him. She still did. It was her fault. They could work it out. Please.

  The man seated next to Frankie caught her glance and rolled his eyes. Frankie smiled and turned away.

  When the conductor came through again, at almost noon, Frankie stopped him to ask about the schedule. He asked when her connection was. She said 12:11. “We won’t make that,” he said, shaking his head.

  “No kidding,” Frankie’s seatmate said.

  The conductor got a schedule out of his pocket and unfolded it. Tracing the columns of figures with his fingers, he said that the next train out of New Haven for New York was at 1:18, which would get her in at 2:45. There was another leaving at 1:45, and then at 2:18.

  “What time does that one get in?”

  “Three forty-five. Then there’s one at three-eighteen that gets in at four forty-five, and one at four …”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “If I’m later than that, it doesn’t work anyway. Thanks,” she said.

  “Thanks for nothing,” the man next to her said, when the conductor had moved on.

  But Frankie was listening to the woman behind her, who’d asked the conductor to go over the schedule once more, with her. Then she got on the phone again. She said she was hoping she’d be there at 2:45. She’d call again if that changed. If he got this message, could he just stay? Could he wait? And maybe—she knew it was a lot to ask, given what she’d done—could he call her back?

  By now it was harder to hear her, conversation in the car had gotten so general. There were people standing in the aisles talking, as well as the seatmates who’d fallen into deep, friendly conversations, full of personal histories, full of coincidences being remarked on. And, of course, there were people steadily on their phones. Most people in this situation apparently wanted—needed—to talk to someone else.

  But Frankie was listening for the woman, and thinking about her. How could it be that so much was riding on this one meeting? Why couldn’t she reach him later if they missed connections? Was he joining the army? Marrying someone else? It was hard to imagine that the timing could be so important.

  But maybe the woman just liked the drama of it. She remembered Bud—Bud!—in one of their long conversations in bed, talking about Beverly, his second wife, about how she had to keep things constantly stirred up, how, without the drama of that, she seemed to collapse in on some deep fundamental sadness in herself. He had said then, “That’s why I like you, Frankie.” He was sitting propped up, pillows behind him. The sun made a bright square on the quilt they’d pulled up to their waists. “You just don’t go there. You don’t look for the theater in life.” He had pronounced it “theah-tah.”

  But maybe that was a weakness, she thought now. One of her many weaknesses. Because surely the theah-tah was part of life. The dramatic, real sorrow of the girl—the woman—behind her. The willingness to feel that, to want someone else to know you felt it.

  “You’re being awfully decent about all this,” Philip had said to her near the end, after he’d told her he was leaving, this time for good.

  “What choice do I have?” she’d said.

  And he’d laughed, ruefully. “None, I expect.”

  But she had had a choice, she was thinking now. She could have behaved like the woman behind her. She could have wept and insisted. She could have said, Please. Please.

  If she had wanted Philip as much as this woman wanted the man she kept calling.

  And for all the good it would have done.

  But maybe that wasn’t even the point. Maybe the point was you said what you felt, you tried for what you wanted. Maybe the point was that Frankie had taught herself how not to do that, from early on. Maybe some dynamic between her mother and herself had made her believe that’s what she had to do—teach herself that. Maybe even her work had been part of the discipline she seemed to have embraced—a kind of daily instruction in the insolubility of human problems, in the unremediability of human suffering.

  Did she believe that, as Philip said he did? She didn’t know.

  She didn’t know how she had ended up here.

  She looked out the window. Just beyond the trees you could see the backyard of a suburban house, a worn swing set between it and the bushes at the edge of the property. No one had used the swing set for a long time. The chain on one side of one of the swings had broken, and the swing dangled vertically, moving a little every now and then in the breeze. It seemed to Frankie, suddenly, nearly tragic in its expression of desolation, of human loss. She looked away, down the aisle of the car.

  Her seatmate had gotten up a little bit earlier, and now he was halfway down the car, deep in conversation with a group of three men, one of whom was seated, looking up at the others. Their faces were animated. They were enjoying their catastrophe. Frankie had a sense, suddenly, familiar and yet new, of her aloneness.

  It had to do with the suspension she felt—in time, in place: the no-where-ness of being stuck here. The sense of others around her finding a way to be comfortable with it or else struggling hard against it.

  While to her it felt like a sad confirmation of sorts—You are nowhere, you belong nowhere. There is nowhere you’re going, nowhere you’re coming from.

  “You have too many choices,” her mother had said.

  Over to you, Frankie.

  She saw the handsome man from the café car come in. She watched him as he spoke to several people, as he slowly drew a small group around him. He was talking intently, gesturing out the window. His plan, no doubt. She could hear the odd phrase. Outta here. Fucking Amtrak.

  There was an argument, from her seat she could hear one of the men say, “Aw, Jesus, come on.” There was laughter, too. But there was also clearly some assent. After a few minutes, the man came up the aisle toward Frankie, followed by a few others—to find the conductor, probably, to talk to him again. They left the car.

 
; It was a little before one when the conductor came back in. He announced loudly as he walked through the car that the train with the repair crew was just arriving in New Haven. That no one knew yet how long it would be, but he would let them know, “the minute that I do.”

  The man in the seat in front of Frankie stopped him with a raised hand and said, “So we won’t make the one-eighteen train to New York.”

  The conductor shook his head. “Out of the question,” he said cheerfully.

  “What about the one forty-five?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you, okay?” He started to move off. He raised his voice. “I’m hiding nothing, folks! I swear to God!”

  The girl behind Frankie leaned forward, her head appeared just over the seat next to Frankie. “He doesn’t know about the one forty-five?” she said.

  “That’s right,” Frankie said.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Frankie heard her make her call again. Calmer this time. Defeated. But still pleading. She didn’t know when she’d be there, but she could stay. She’d stay overnight if she had to. They could meet tomorrow. He should call, or just … she’d call again. As soon as anything was clear, she’d call again.

  When she hung up, Frankie could hear her start to weep—long, jagged intakes of breath—a sound, she thought, that made you feel your heart was breaking, too. Her own throat cottoned, and she turned to the window so no one could see the tears rising to her eyes.

  They pulled into New Haven a little after 1:30 with plenty of time to make the 1:45, although you couldn’t have told that from the anxious line of Frankie’s fellow passengers forming in the aisle. Or from the way they scrambled off the train when it stopped, some of them actually running toward the station to find out what tracks their trains were on. From her vantage at the end of the line, Frankie saw the handsome would-be mutineer outside pushing his way through the crowd on the platform. Ahead of her the sad ballerina hurried, too, but not as rudely.

  Frankie was glad for the fresh air as she stepped from the train, as she walked slowly along the platform. Inside the station, she went to the window for the Vermonter and bought a return ticket for the next train back to the town near her parents’ new apartment, the town where she’d caught the train to New Haven early this morning.

  Then she looked for a pay phone to call Diann, to tell her she wasn’t going to make it, that she wasn’t coming at all.

  22

  IS IT OVER? This was the first sentence in Bud’s article about the possibility of an ending to the fires, an article he started to write a week and a half after Frankie Rowley had left town.

  He stopped and looked at what he’d typed, and then he laughed out loud, a quick bark. “Yes, my friend,” he said to himself. “It is.”

  But he went on typing. This is what residents of the town of Pomeroy are asking themselves two weeks after the arrest of Tink Snell.

  Though in fact, that question had begun to be answered. Since the police had taken Tink in, day after day had gone by without another fire. People had gradually begun to relax, begun to assume that it was over—the long nightmare—though there was still disagreement about what this meant. There were those who were willing to accede to the obvious: They arrested Tink, the fires stopped. Good enough for me. But there were others who argued that the guilty man was still out there. That he had just decided that this would be a good time to stop, when someone else would take the fall. Well, if you want to have people think someone else was guilty, the argument went, wouldn’t you stop setting them now? Let everyone make the easy assumption, and there you are, off scot-free, and Tink to take all the blame.

  As far as Bud could tell from his unscientific polling, the split was about fifty-fifty—though even among those who thought Tink must have done it there seemed a surprising sympathy for him. Undefined, a bit inchoate, but still, sympathy that you wouldn’t expect anyone in town would feel for the person who’d terrorized everyone for a season. He must have had help, some of these people said. Someone must have put him up to it.

  There was, of course, the undeniable matter of the confession, but again, there was a divide between those who believed, simply, that if you weren’t guilty of something, you wouldn’t confess to it, and those who felt that Tink had been coerced into signing it, that he’d been chosen because everyone in charge knew he would be vulnerable to that coercion.

  Adrian told Bud in the store one rainy afternoon that they’d promised Tink special treatment if he confessed, that they’d held him for hours after Alfred Rowley’s rescue, questioning him, that they’d told him—or implied anyway—that he could go home once he signed. Adrian said Tink had told him that he was so tired and confused by the beginning of the second day that he’d agreed, that he would have signed anything they asked him to.

  That was crap, the state trooper in Winslow told Bud. They didn’t even need the confession, they had so much else. “That confession was just the icing on the fucking cake.” He said that Loren had found what he called “ignition materials” in Tink’s car, which Tink had left unlocked outside Liz Swenson’s house when he joined the search teams looking for her father. These were the same materials found on the ground outside the senior Rowleys’ barn the night of the fire there.

  Oh, come on, Adrian said when Bud asked him about it. It was cotton balls and Vaseline. All the search guys carried cotton balls with Vaseline when they were going out looking for someone, in case they needed to start a fire in tough conditions. Half the volunteers probably had such materials.

  “Sure. In their packs,” Loren said. “Not fifteen or twenty laying around on the floor of their car.”

  And so it went. It was interesting, in some ways more interesting than the fires had been. But there was less, actually, to write about, so Bud was back for the most part to his standard material for the fall, the daily small events that constituted the pulse of the town—the recording of which, he reminded himself, was the reason he’d come here in the first place.

  This was something he needed to remind himself of, over and over. That he’d chosen this place, that he’d wanted to be here. Even so, he was restless, which he knew was part of his response to Frankie’s departure. Since she’d gone, he’d been second-guessing himself, wondering again, as he had in the first days after he landed in Pomeroy, whether he’d made a mistake, whether there might be something retrievable for him in the world out there, in the world of greater consequence, as it seemed to him now in these long empty days.

  He told himself that the reason for these feelings was just that he was mourning Frankie, that this was temporary. That it would end.

  Though it didn’t feel as if it ever would, right now.

  He tried to give himself permission to do whatever he needed to do to get over her. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what that was. He drank himself to sleep every night for the first four or five days after she’d gone, but he felt so crappy the next day that he decided the temporary oblivion wasn’t worth the pain. He wept several times—once extravagantly, driving home after bundling the papers the second Monday in October. Louise Hinton was helping that night, and she’d talked to Frankie’s mother recently. Frankie was such a help, Sylvia had told Louise, though she’d also said that she felt guilty for keeping her away from her work. “By which she appears to mean New York,” Louise had said as she handed one of her newspapers to Conor.

  Yes, Bud had said. That was his understanding, that there was work in New York she was eager to do.

  Even after he got home that night, he had sat outside his house for maybe fifteen minutes and let himself make the strange grunting, gasping noises that were coming out of him, let his nose and eyes run freely. Until finally it all seemed self-indulgent, and he stopped.

  He stopped, he came inside and washed his face, and he went to Pete’s house.

  He saw Pete more often than he usually did in these weeks. Most times he called ahead, and always he brought two
six-packs of beer with him, some to drink, some to leave with Pete. It wasn’t good beer, because Pete didn’t care whether it was good beer or not, and because Bud was pretty certain Pete would think him a fool for caring about such a thing—though he did. But he also cared, too much probably, what Pete thought of him.

  They didn’t speak of what was bothering Bud, of why he was suddenly coming by so much. Mostly they talked about the paper. The paper and the news.

  Bud had gone to interview Tink in jail, finding him as inscrutable as ever, and he told Pete about that. “I asked him why he’d confessed,” Bud said.

  “Ya-ah?”

  “Yes. He said, ‘To get them off my back.’ ”

  Pete nodded several times, judiciously. “That worked well,” he said.

  Bud laughed, aware of feeling a wash of gratitude just for that—to be laughing, to be thoughtless for a moment.

  He told Pete about the new regular column he was adding to the paper, a summary each week of the events of the same seven days twenty-five years earlier. Louise Hinton was scanning in all the old files and had the idea. She’d offered to write this piece up each week. Easy enough, she had said.

  They talked about what Pete was reading now. He’d finished all of Conrad and was starting on Robert Louis Stevenson, whom Bud confessed he’d never read.

  “Lucky man. Some good stuff waiting for you.”

  “I’m glad to know that. I could use some good stuff.”

  After a long moment, Pete said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  And that was as close as they came to talking about Frankie.

  They talked often about the fires—who was rebuilding, who wasn’t. They talked about the developments in the court case. Tink’s lawyer was still trying to get him out on bail.

  Pete thought this was unlikely to happen, even though there were townspeople who believed in his innocence and were trying to raise the money, to be ready if the judge should rule in Tink’s favor.