“Call me,” he said. And then added, “If you need me.”
“You too,” she said and kissed him good-bye.
Orlynne had come around from the side of the house where she unwound one of the long watering hoses. She waved to Laura’s car as it swung around in the driveway on its way off the mountain.
“You don’t need to fool with that, Orlynne. I can manage today without any help, I think.”
“Yeah, it looks like you’re managing quite a bit on your own these days.”
He didn’t like her tone.
“You have something you want to tell me?”
She shrugged her shoulders, kept dragging the hose out like some wayward script drawn across a page.
“I imagine you can gather my feelings.”
“You don’t like Laura? You all talked like you were getting along.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like her. You’re awful stupid for a man your age, you know that? I’m worried about you, is all. Worried about her too, for that matter. You’d be surprised the nasty things that can turn up when you start sleeping with a woman who wears a ring on her finger, or do I really need to explain that to you?”
Kyle took a minute before he answered.
“No, you don’t need to explain that to me.”
She started to mess with the hose again.
“I told you I don’t need any help today,” he told her. “In fact, I’ll let you know when I need help again. You don’t need to come up here unless I call you.”
The look she gave him could have slammed a door. She flung the hose aside.
“Lose my number.”
He could tell that she meant it.
18
GAVIN POSTED THE VIDEO OF THE WOMAN ATTACKING HIM ACROSS every active discussion board he could find. The number of hits simply cascaded. He watched it spread across the internet with its own kind of furious intelligence, drawing praise and condemnation. But most importantly, it gathered notice. It was becoming big enough that it couldn’t be ignored.
He settled back in his chair and watched the clip crawl across social media. Occasionally, some moderator would delete the content, citing it as inflammatory, but a few minutes later it would appear somewhere else like a regenerated limb. His email began to ping. He moved his hand to the mouse and silenced the speakers.
His phone buzzed. The name he’d been waiting on appeared on the screen.
“Hello, Mr. Sealy. I’ve been expecting your call.”
“Hi, Mr. Noon. I’m writing a follow-up about yesterday. I’ve already got something about the event, but I wanted to work something in about what’s going on online. Especially with what the lieutenant governor had to say . . .”
“I’m afraid I haven’t seen what you’re referring to.”
“Are you near a computer?”
“I am.”
“Go to Tom Sheeply’s Twitter account.”
Gavin opened the browser and clicked over. There, pinned to the top of the page, was a retweet with the video attached. Headlining it were the lieutenant governor’s own words: FREEDOM OF SPEECH MEANS FREEDOM FOR ALL SPEECH.
Gavin smiled, said, “Mr. Sealy, you should come over. This really is the sort of thing that demands a face-to-face exchange. I’ll even have a cup of freshly brewed coffee waiting for you.”
THEY HAD been clearing thorn since daybreak, but now it had grown hot and each swing of the machete felt more useless than the last. A dry rattling as the blade carried through, lopped without any sense of progress. Just sun and the lack of effect. Jonathan straightened, hurled his blade into a patch of earth. Its point stuck in place.
“What, you quitting?” One of Gavin’s lesser men, Conner Polk, wanted to know. Like an animal with no greater use, he had been sentenced to the present task. Laboring like something broken.
“I suggest you watch your tone of voice, young man,” Jonathan offered.
“You ain’t my daddy,” Polk spat. “Neither you nor Gavin. At least I can say I’m not afraid of work.”
As if to prove this, he turned back toward the thorn and crashed through with wild strokes. The looping brush shuddered but little broke or gave way. Jonathan had ceased clearing now and watched as Polk attacked the thorn as though it was something capable of suffering pain. He shook his head and smiled.
“I believe you’re tiring out.”
“Shut up, you motherfucker. I know what I’m doing.”
Despite this claim, he soon spent himself and slung the blade on the ground. It bounced and flexed in the relentless sun.
“Let me ask you something,” Jonathan said. “You ever been told you remind them of the burnt fuse of a dud firecracker?”
Polk told him to shut up, turned back toward the thorn patch and yelled, “Goddammnit! How are we supposed to get this done?”
“Now you’re beginning to ask the important questions,” Jonathan said, nodded. “Now you’re making that important first step.”
“The hell you talking about?”
“There’s easier ways of doing things. You remember that gas can in the back of the van?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you go grab that? Why don’t you get me one of those rubber bands out of the console too?”
Polk loped up to the side of the asylum and pulled the vehicle’s side door open. A minute later he came back with the metal can under his arm.
“You are shitting me.”
“I wouldn’t shit you. You’re my favorite turd.”
Jonathan uncapped the can and it made a gentle puff when he upturned it and the gasoline fed the ground with its blue stream. He walked the line of thorn, wet it all until there was nothing left in the can to pour. Once it had all dribbled out he stepped back a few paces and squatted, gave it time to soak in.
“You’re crazy, you know that? What makes you think you won’t set the whole woods on fire?”
“You see anything between here and the river that ain’t something needs chopping down?”
Polk looked, shrugged.
“No, I don’t guess so, no.”
“Then shut your goddamn mouth and give me your cigarette lighter.”
He reached down into his hip pocket and pulled out a parti-colored Bic. It said WILD LIFE in graffiti style letters.
“Why you need my lighter? You smoke cigarettes too. Why don’t you use your own?”
After he had taken the lighter in hand, Jonathan struck it and then double-looped and snugged the band around the lighter so that the flame stayed lit. “Because,” he said as he tossed the lighter toward the brush, “I still want to smoke.”
The lighter and its small twist of flame arced and dropped amid the thorn. There was a sudden bump of heat and light. Polk felt the warmth push into and then past him. He staggered back and watched the fire enlarge itself on the supply of fuel. It crackled and snapped and sputtered. The air around it bent into waves like pieces of distorted and dripping glass.
PART III
19
KYLE WAS sure there was something wrong. Laura hadn’t been herself for much of the afternoon. They’d driven up to Abingdon, Virginia, together, walked the downtown and had a nice steak dinner at the restaurant, but when it was time to go to the Barter Theater she’d said that she wasn’t well, that she needed to go back to the hotel. He didn’t press her about it, but once they were in the room she turned over in bed to face the wall, and he could feel the gulf between them as clearly as if it were something registered on a map. He placed his hand on her hip and let it stay there over her silk nightgown, but nothing in her nor him moved.
“We going to talk?” he asked.
“You’re already doing it, aren’t you?”
“It kind of takes a little something on the other end of the line, you know?”
“I’m sorry. I’m just feeling sad.”
“I know you are. I just can’t figure out why.”
“Can’t you?”
He knew not to answer too quickly.
“There’s nothing that says we can’t change things, Laura. Can’t make arrangements to have something together that’s more than slipping off to a hotel from time to time.”
She sat up, looked at him.
“Don’t start promising things that you don’t mean,” she said.
“I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t say I wanted things different if I didn’t mean it.”
She placed her fingers over her closed eyelids, pushed hard there.
“Goddammit, I wish I smoked.”
He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and slipped his hiking shoes on.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“You said you wanted to smoke, didn’t you? There’s a convenience store next door.”
“I said I wished I did, not that I wanted to.”
She turned her head over her shoulder; an approximation of a smile had worked its way into the corners of her mouth. Good, at least he’d found something to pry out a portion of the gloom.
“You just wait here, girlfriend. I’m a man on a mission.”
She sat up, shook her head and said, “Come here, stupid.”
He kicked off the shoes and spread out against her. She relaxed into him.
“It’s not going to be easy, is it?” he asked.
“No, none of it is going to be easy.”
But as she answered, she closed her hand over his and brought it around to her breast, held it there at the clavicle. At that moment, whether it was easy or not seemed utterly beside the point.
THEY LEFT early the next morning and rode back to where they’d left her car in the parking lot of a Kingsport Kroger. They sat there and talked for a while, drank their cups of McDonald’s coffee until the sun was well up. Laura said she’d need a little time to figure out how to phrase things; she didn’t want to be needlessly cruel to her husband. There was still a lot of history there, after all. Kyle had said that he understood, that he wouldn’t want her to do things but how they felt right to her. Then they had kissed and held each other for maybe half an hour without saying another word.
When he drove back home he stopped into his office at the courthouse. Because his position as commissioner was merely part-time, Kyle was allotted little more than a junked corner of a subdivided section that had once served as a holding area for overnight drunks and other misdemeanor offenders who were deemed harmless enough to avoid detention in the more secure basement level. The bars had been pulled, though the walls still bore the scars of heavy duty bolt holes that spackle had failed to plug.
He went up the hall and filled the coffee carafe from the water fountain, then came back and flipped the coffee maker on, sat and read through a short pile of new business the commissioners’ secretary had left for him. By the time the coffee was ready, he was pretty much done with what he had to do, but he sat and drank the coffee, watched through the slim grimy window what passed in the courtyard. He could see the American flag flap, its halyards thunking against the pole. He thought of calling Laura, just to hear her voice really, but he decided to let her have a little time to herself. He didn’t want to make things any harder on her than he already had.
Sheriff Holston dropped by after a while, went and poured coffee into his personal cup. In block letters it said BAD COP. NO DONUT.
“Go ahead and help yourself,” Kyle told him after Holston had already begun to sip the Folger’s and pulled up a chair.
“You decide to do your service for the taxpayers, I see,” Holston said, pointed at the skinny leavings of paperwork. “Glad to see it’s not above your attention.”
“Is there a reason you’re sucking up all the air in here?”
“Nothing in particular. Simply keeping the lines of communication open with my legislative colleague. Working for the commonweal, you know. How about you?”
“How about me what?”
“How are you managing your late problems with Mister Noon?”
“My problems? Funny you put it that way. Seems like he’d be your problem as much as anyone’s.”
Holston tipped his head back, studied a long damp crack in the plaster ceiling. When he next spoke, it was as though he were addressing the building’s rift itself.
“I deny we have a problem, Commissioner. We had a disturbance, yes. But when you allow things to expend themselves, to run the course they’re destined to run, then you are practicing a kind of husbandry. You are protecting the people from shortsightedness and immediate gratification. That’s our charge as public servants. If, however, we overreact or countermand, then we give those who would oppose good order the means to subvert the rule of law. They need inconsistency because inconsistency of government gives these men the means to resist. Consistency then. Consistency and understanding is what keeps communities like ours safe and true.”
“You really believe that?”
Holston faintly smiled, polished off his coffee.
“Don’t get weighed down in the particulars, Pettus. It’s enough to drive you to the loony bin.”
KYLE STOPPED off at a few places in town to tally stock and keep up to date on refilling standing orders before he drove back home. He passed Orlynne’s trailer on the way, tried his best not to dwell on her and what had passed between them, though the spot of woods there was like something pressing up hard against the wall of his brain. He pulled off the road just above the river, sat there and watched it long enough to finish the Diet Coke he was drinking. He put the truck back in gear and turned around in the road and drove down the driveway where the goats were pegged on either side of the porch steps. When he stepped out from the Tacoma they yelled.
“Hush your cussing,” Gerald called down to them. They cocked their heads in a contemplative moment before they turned and unleashed their screams on him. The old man brayed in turn, his lungs as full of satyric rage as perhaps uttered by any man. Completely baffled, the pair fell silent.
“Glad I had you here to translate,” Kyle said as he stepped up on the porch.
“A man picks up many pieces of small wisdom across the years. Are you looking for Orlynne?”
“I am.”
“What the hell got said between the two of you? She come back over here the other day mad enough to chew a drill bit.”
“Yeah, it was a bit of a two-way street. I was hoping I might come over here and say a few words that might be taken for a truce.”
“Well, good luck. Woman is a mystery with depths no man is meant to fully discern.”
“That more of your small wisdom?”
“Naw. I think I read that on the internet somewhere. Anyhow, she’s not going to be back until later this evening. She got her some part-time work at the Walmart. Working over there in the garden center.”
Kyle would have laughed if it didn’t hurt him as much as it did. He said he’d need to go on then.
“You not going to set here with me for a while? Figure out the inner riddles of existence?”
“Not right now, I’m afraid. I’ve got some work to do up in the greenhouses.”
“I’ll tell her you came by. I’ll be up to see you at the meeting next week.”
“All right.”
ONCE HE got back to the house he worked through the afternoon, took his supper of a tuna fish sandwich onto the porch steps while he watched the sun bury itself behind the ridgeline. Afterward, he cleaned up in the outside shower so he wouldn’t track everything onto the floors. He made a note to look up a cleaning lady somewhere in town. Things weren’t disreputable yet, but they were headed that way in a hurry. To his own embarrassment, he’d come to realize how much he relied on Orlynne to keep the place presentable. Leaned on her like something that wouldn’t ever give way.
He went to bed early but came awake with a sharp awareness of an otherwise still night. He lay there for some time, only vaguely registered the scratching at the back window because he was unsure if he was dreaming. He sat up and the world reeled. Everything seemed magnified yet vertiginous
ly distant. Still, he knew those sounds were human, thought he heard a man’s grunt as he tried to force his way inside the house. Kyle felt his way back down the darkened hallway toward the office, reached into the desk drawer where he kept the .380. It wasn’t loaded and it took his clumsy hands a minute to turn over a box of shells and feed them into the pistol’s magazine, rack a round into the chamber and go back out at the sound of busted glass.
He waited for a whisper of movement inside and when he heard it he stepped around the corner and saw the shape of a man. He raised the gun and fired twice. The intruder made an alarmed sound and staggered back and as he crashed into the sideboard.
“Oh my God, I’m shot! Oh Jesus!”
Kyle flipped the dining room switch and saw, sprawled and clutching his left thigh, Laura’s husband, Peter Carson. Blood had begun to soak through his flannel trousers and his face had paled with terror. Kyle saw no weapon, only a cell phone that lay broken on the floor.
“You motherfucker,” Carson whimpered. “You tried to kill me.”
Kyle set the .380 on the dining table and snatched a hand towel from the basket on the sideboard, gave it to Carson and told him to press down hard. He tried but was useless with panic. Kyle knelt beside him and pressed the hasty bandage in place, told Carson to keep it there. The flow had already begun to subside.
“You’re a goddamn fool, you know that?”
Carson made a sound that approximated assent as he tried to stand. Kyle helped him up and headed toward the door. Somehow, he managed the useless weight out to the truck.
They rode together without talking. At first, Kyle had thought the wound was serious and that he was hauling a dead man to the hospital, but in time he could tell that Carson’s life wasn’t threatened.
“You going to tell me what exactly you had in mind?”
Carson lifted his head in what must have been intended to be a defiant pose, though it only made him appear strained and theatrical, a man claiming his abject moment with a flourish.
“Was she there?”
“What?”
“My wife. Was she there?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
How Fire Runs Page 14