by Pete Hautman
“They quickly go into shock,” said the doctor. “I don’t think they feel a thing after the first few seconds.”
This supports my preference for fire over ice. In fact, since I showed him the article, Andy has come around to my point of view.
I sit up in bed and put my feet on the floor. The throbbing from my hepatic vein fades. Maybe I’m not about to die after all. I go to the window and look across the fence at Andy’s window. It’s dark and the blinds are closed. Andy must not be home. Of course he’s not home—it’s Friday night.
Andy is playing football.
I think of myself as a shadow, skirting the perimeter of the stadium. Actually, it is just a football field with twelve tiers of bleachers running down each side, surrounded by a chain-link fence. I blend in with the blacks and grays, circling the colorful house of games, listening to the shouts and cheers. I pause at one corner of the field where I can see through the chain-link fence between the stands. Metal halide lamps blast photons onto a bright green grass rectangle. Little men in costume run and crash into one another, our home team, the Hornets, in blue and yellow, the other team in red and white. All primary colors represented.
The stands are mostly empty; only about two hundred spectators have showed up, most of them clustered at the fifty yard line. There is room for ten times that many, but the only time the stadium fills up is for the homecoming game, and that was last week. I hope Andy isn’t disappointed in tonight’s crowd.
I watch through the fence for about twelve minutes, but I am frustrated by the poor view. I could buy a ticket, but I would have to pay full price for a game that is more than half over. I look left, I look right, I look up. I shift into ninja mode and plunge my fingers into the chain-link and scramble up and over, dropping catlike into the carefully guarded compound, unobserved. I walk nonchalantly between the stands, then climb up to the top tier at the seventeen yard line and sit. No one notices me.
I watch the game carefully for a few minutes. The other team has the ball, so Andy is on the bench, but I can’t pick him out of the cluster of blue and yellow Hornets. Bored, I look down between my feet. I can see the ground beneath the stands. It is littered with paper cups and hot dog trays and candy wrappers and all sorts of other junk. They still haven’t cleaned up the mess from last week’s homecoming game.
The crowd roars; I look up and see a Hornet running hard. He disappears into a mass of red and white on the twenty yard line. Somehow the Hornets have intercepted the ball. They send their offensive line out onto the field, where they form a huddle. The huddle breaks; number seventeen—that’s Andy—takes a stance close behind the center. Sudden movement, Andy has the ball, he’s backing up, he throws a perfect pass … but the ball slips from the receiver’s hands.
I look down, disappointed. The litter below is stirring. At first I think its the wind, but then I see a small dark shape scurry off with something white in its mouth. A rat. I shudder, remembering another conversation Andy and I had about death: Would you rather be strangled by a serial killer or devoured by rats? As I recall, we both went with the serial killer.
I watch for a time, but the rat does not return. I hear a groan from the crowd. When I look up, the red and white team has the ball. I shift my attention to the crowd, trying to pick out individual faces. I see Aron Wiseman’s bushy red hair. I see Gracie Monroe—she’s easy to pick out because she weighs about three hundred pounds and dresses in purple. I recognize several other students and a couple of teachers. And I see a blond girl that might or might not be Melissa Haverman. I focus my eyes on her, staring hard. Finally she turns her head so that the light hits her face and I see that it is another girl, one I do not know.
I look down. The rat is back, his head in a discarded popcorn cup. I can see his naked tail. He backs out of the cup holding a popped kernel in his mouth and scurries off through the litter.
My hands are getting cold. I bury them in my pockets and feel several hard sticklike objects. Farmer matches. Like the ones I’ve been scraping the heads off of so I can use the sticks to build my suspension bridge. The matches in my pocket still have their heads, red and white, strike anywhere. I take one from my pocket and hold its white tip against the rough wood of the bleacher and wait, counting. At 348 seconds the rat returns right on schedule. I wait until his head is deep inside the popcorn cup, then strike the match and drop it. The flaming match lands three inches away from the cup. The rat leaps straight up, sending the cup and popcorn flying, and hits the ground running. I am laughing.
The match continues to burn. It is only a few millimeters away from a crumpled napkin. I watch until the match burns out. A wisp of back smoke curls upward and disappears, and all is still.
I watch and count. I count to five hundred, but the rat does not return.
The litter below me takes on an evil taint, and I become angry with the nameless, faceless people whose job it is to clean beneath the stands. I am thinking about rats and the bubonic plague. Garbage-eating rats covered with lice and fleas and bacteria. I saw only one rat, but there are probably hundreds of them feeding off the popcorn and chips and half-eaten hot dogs. Rats multiplying and spreading disease and filth. Rats in the school. Rats nosing around our homes in the night, searching for a crevice large enough to wriggle through.
I light another match and drop it. It hits a patch of bare dirt and goes out. I try again and get one to land right in a mustard-smeared hot dog tray, but it only burns for three seconds. I count the remaining matches. Fourteen.
The crowd roars; I look up to see a Hornet dancing in the end zone, holding the ball high. It is number seventeen. Andy has made a touchdown. I hold seven matches together and strike them and drop them into the litter. Five of them go out on impact, one gets caught in a bleacher support and burns out against the steel, and one burns for a full ten seconds, the flame licking at the side of a soda cup, then dies. The crowd groans; the Hornets have missed kicking their extra point.
I go back to lighting matches one at a time. I manage to land the last match on a napkin that puffs into a bright yellow flame, but the only thing touching the napkin is a waxy soda cup that refuses to ignite.
Oh, well. Rats, cockroaches, and vultures will inherit the earth. The Hornets are ahead twenty-three to six. Twenty-three minus six is seventeen. It is seventeen minutes before ten o’clock.
I am out of matches. Time to go home.
10
BUTTERFINGERS
The last time Andy and I climbed the old cottonwood to our treehouse was the second winter after we built it, eight days before Christmas. A foot and a half of light snow had fallen the night before. We were up to our knees in it.
The woods are a different place after a heavy snow. The paths disappear, and the low brush is hidden. Tree branches are topped with tall ridges of snow, the rough trunks spotted and veined with white.
It is very quiet. If you stand perfectly still, you can hear the clumps fall from the trees and strike the soft, sparkly surface with a soft whuff.
Andy and I had brought presents for each other. Another eight days seemed like too long to wait, so we went to the treehouse to celebrate our own private Christmas. I had bought Andy a giant bag of Butterfingers. They were in an old shoe box wrapped in the Sunday comic section, the closest thing I had to real wrapping paper. Butterfingers were Andy’s favorite candy. They were my favorite too. I was hoping he might share them with me.
It took us a while to find the big cottonwood. Everything looked so different, and the deep snow was full of surprises: invisible logs and holes and branches to trip over. The ground beneath the snow was still squishy and unfrozen. At one point Andy stepped into a sinkhole and went in up to his knee. When he pulled his leg out it was completely soaked and his boot was covered with muck. He laughed and kept on walking.
We finally found the cottonwood. Andy quickly climbed the steps up to the treehouse. I shoved Andy’s present into my jacket and followed, testing each step carefully. The nails wer
e more than a year old, and some of the steps wiggled alarmingly. I never liked climbing that tree. Andy outweighed me by a good twenty pounds, so I knew the steps would hold me, but I still didn’t like the climb.
Inside, the treehouse was dry and cold. A pile of seeds had appeared in one corner, probably stashed there by a squirrel. We threw out the seeds, brushed the snow from the window ledges, and shook out the carpet samples that covered the floor.
“We should get one of those portable heaters,” Andy said.
“There’s no place to plug it in.”
“We could get a really long extension cord.”
“Or we could get a kerosene heater.”
“How about an air conditioner for the summer?”
“And a TV.”
“And an elevator, so you don’t have to climb those steps.”
“I hate those steps.”
Andy laughed. “Oh well.” He pulled a small gift-wrapped package from his jacket pocket. “Merry Christmas, Dougie.”
I opened that package in about two seconds, and when I saw what it was, I felt incredibly good and incredibly awful all at once.
“Andy … it’s—wow—it’s really nice.”
“I knew you’d like it.”
I turned the knife in my hands, admiring the smooth, hard red case. “An Explorer,” I said. “Victorinox Explorer. Wow.”
“It has seventeen tools. That’s your number, right?”
“Yeah.” I unfolded the knife blade, the scissors, the screwdriver, the magnifying glass. … “It must have cost you a fortune.” In fact, I knew exactly how much the Swiss Army knife went for: $44.90 plus tax at Pike’s Hardware. Twelve times as much as I’d paid for the bag of Butterfingers.
Andy shrugged. “I got a deal on it. Pike traded it to me for cleaning out his basement.”
I folded the tools back into the knife and squeezed it in my fist. “It’s heavy,” I said. “It feels really solid.”
Andy was grinning, enjoying the moment. I opened the small knife blade and began to carve the date on the wall. Andy watched me for a few minutes, then asked, “What’s in the box?”
“Huh?”
“That box you’ve got.” He pointed at the shoe box with the Butterfingers inside.
“Oh. Um … it’s for you.” I pushed it toward him, then watched him peel away the paper and pull the top off.
His eyes opened wide and he said, “Oh, man, my favorite!” He tore open the bag of candy. “You got me the big size! Awesome!” He ripped into a Butterfinger and took a huge bite, rolling his eyes with pleasure as he crunched away. “I love these things,” he said, his mouth full of gold and brown candy.
“It’s not as nice as what you gave me,” I said.
“Are you kidding? You can’t eat that knife, can you? Here!” He thrust the bag at me, and I took a Butterfinger for myself.
I’m making a short story long. The point is, Andy is the one who gave me the Victorinox Explorer seventeen-tool Swiss Army knife that later on got us in so much trouble. But what I really wanted to tell you is why it was the last time we ever climbed up that old cottonwood.
11
TO BUILD A FIRE
It was quite cold that day, and Andy’s right leg was soaked with ice-cold water from stepping in the sinkhole. We each ate a couple Butterfingers, which helped me feel not so guilty, but it didn’t really warm us up much. Andy was pretty miserable with his wet foot, so I suggested that we make a little campfire right there on the floor of the treehouse.
“You can’t have a fire in a treehouse,” Andy said. “It’s made out of wood. It’ll burn.”
“Not if we make a ring of snow around it.”
“The snow will just melt.”
“Yeah, and the floor will get wet so it can’t burn. And if it gets out of control, we can just throw more snow on it.”
Andy wasn’t so sure about that, but I can be very convincing. My position was highly logical, and it is hard to argue with logic.
We climbed down the tree and gathered some dry twigs and branches and carried them back up to the treehouse and piled them in the middle of the floor. We scooped a few armloads of snow off the roof and packed it into a ring around the wood, then stuffed some candy wrappers and the Sunday comic section into the twigs.
“I don’t know about this,” Andy said.
“It’ll be okay,” I said, pulling a book of matches from my jacket pocket. You never know when you might need a fire. One of my all-time favorite stories is To Build a Fire by Jack London. A man in the Arctic wilderness falls through the ice into a stream and gets his legs soaked. He has to build a fire fast or he will freeze to death. I won’t tell you what happens in the end, but it is very interesting.
I lit the fire.
At first it was very exciting because the Butterfinger wrappers burned fast and flaming bits of paper floated up and started landing where they shouldn’t. We quickly stomped them out, and the fire settled down and started to behave itself. Once it calmed down, Andy took off his wet boot and sock and put his foot near the fire.
“That feels good,” he said.
After a few minutes it started to get pretty smoky. Some of it went out the windows and door, but most of the smoke wanted to hang around. As long as we kept our faces close to the floor we were okay. Andy stretched out on his back, toasting his foot like a marshmallow. He was on his third Butterfinger.
“Y’know, the Butterfingers are just my first present for you,” I said. “I’m going to get you something else. Something really nice.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yeah, but I’m gonna. Maybe I’ll buy you a motorcycle.”
“If you get me a motorcycle, I’ll buy you a car.”
“I’ll buy you a tank.”
“Then I’ll have to get you an F-sixteen.”
“I’d rather have a stealth bomber.”
“How about a space shuttle?”
The room was so full of smoke that we couldn’t see the ceiling. It was like being under a low cloud. The tops of the flames disappeared into gray murk.
It was Andy who first noticed how hot the floor was getting.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” I said.
“I don’t know. …” Andy crawled to the door and hung his head out. “Hey, Dougie, I think we better get out of here.”
“Why? It’s not that smoky.”
“C’mere and look underneath us.”
I crawled over next to him—the floor was getting really hot—and stuck my head out and looked at the underside of the treehouse and saw a sheet of flame. The underside of the floor was completely on fire.
“Come on!” Andy was out the door, his feet on the top step. I started after him, then remembered I’d left my knife stuck in the wall.
“Wait—my knife!” I crawled back inside where the fire was suddenly roaring and groped for my Swiss Army knife. I was blind from the smoke when I finally felt the smooth plastic handle hit my palm. I felt my way back to the door, choking and coughing, my palms blistering, and went out headfirst, forgetting that I was thirty feet up a tree.
Andy caught me. I don’t know how he did it, or how that top step held under our combined weight, but somehow his arm was around me and I slammed into the trunk and the burning floor fell out of the treehouse and crashed, hissing, into the snow. We climbed shakily down the steps and stood there watching as the rest of the treehouse went up in flames.
I looked at Andy, who was standing on one leg, holding his bare foot up out of the snow.
“Well,” I said, “you were right.”
“My Butterfingers must be all melted,” he said.
“I’ll get you another bag.”
He looked down at his bare foot. “How am I gonna walk out of here?”
I took off my stocking cap and we used the string from his parka hood to tie it around his ankle. It wasn’t the best boot, but it helped. By the time we got home, his toes and my ears were frostbit, and I had blisters all ov
er my palms. But it wasn’t so bad. The cottonwood itself didn’t burn up, I still had my Swiss Army knife, and we didn’t get into trouble. I washed my own smoky-smelling clothes and bandaged my own hands. I told my mother that I had fallen down and scraped my palms on the sidewalk. My mother is extremely intelligent, but for some reason she believed me. I bought Andy another bag of Butterfingers, and I also bought him a pair of battery-powered electric socks.
It’s become a tradition with us. Every year I buy him a brand-new pair of electric socks. I don’t want him to ever have cold feet again.
12
SIGIL
You might get the idea that Andy and I have an unhealthy relationship with fire, but you would be wrong. Fire is simply a tool to be used responsibly, like a hammer or a car or a train. We never start a fire just to watch something burn. We use it to accomplish definite goals, like to stay warm.
For example, we started the fire in the treehouse for a very important purpose. Andy’s foot was cold and wet, and we had to do something about it. True, the fire did not work out as planned, but sometimes you just can’t control the way things go. What happened at the Tuttle place was another example of that. And that’s all I have to say about that.
Although art is my worst subject at school, I do not hate it. In fact, I am quite interested in lettering. I have been working on the sigil. The idea of combining our initials into one symbolic design started back at the Tuttle place. A few weeks after that, I added serifs to the letters and came up with a more refined version:
Since then I have been using my time in art class to improve the design. Mrs. Felko is quite patient with me, although she is constantly telling me to “draw from the heart.”
“I am drawing from the heart,” I say.
“You could liven up your lines, Douglas. Hold the pen loosely, let your hand talk to the paper.”