The Coming Storm
Page 43
The fire was not taking. The papers had burned to ash, and now the flames that had so confidently attacked the logs withdrew into the nothing from whence they’d come.
“Fuck,” Noah said.
“Maybe we do need kindling after all,” Tracy suggested, but Noah was not amused. Don’t do this, Tracy thought, but already it was too late. He’d seen this before: how Noah would set himself some unreasonable challenge, then blame himself for failing.
“I’ve started plenty of fires before,” he said. “There’s nothing to it when you know what you’re doing.”
“It’s no big deal,” Tracy tried to assure him, though he knew that the problem was exactly that. It had, instantly, become a big deal. Oh Noah, he thought. Do we have to do this?
But Noah was furiously wadding up more newspaper. “Ow,” he said, shoving his hand into the ash, grazing the hot metal of the grate.
“Careful,” Tracy told him, aware how depressingly like a parent he sounded. “Don’t burn yourself.”
Once again Noah lit a match and set the paper on fire. “You have to want it not to burn,” the boy said with a note of desperation, “and then it’ll burn for sure.”
“What is this?” Tracy asked, once again nonpiussed by the intensity of Noah’s response. “The Fire Sermon?”
“You’ll see.” Noah knelt silently in front of the resurgent flames, which, after a minute, flickered and started to die down again.
Tracy said, tentatively, “I take it you’re wishing for it to go out.”
But Noah didn’t answer. A single small ghost of a flame clung tenaciously to a log. Noah stuffed more paper in, and the whole blazed up again. But this time it didn’t falter. The wood had taken.
“No fair,” Tracy said. “You helped. You put more paper in.”
“I was trying to smother it,” Noah told him. “And see, it didn’t work.”
Secretly Tracy was glad. He desperately wanted Noah to succeed—-at anything.
“Do you do this often? I mean, hope things won’t happen so that they will.”
“All the time,” Noah said over the roar of the fire, enjoying some quiet triumph Tracy was no part of. “Isn’t this great? I wish we’d found the wood before.”
“It’s very romantic,” Tracy said with a pang of self-disgust. Seating himself on the sofa, he patted the cushion beside him. “Now come here, pyromeister.”
Thinking he meant her, Betsy ambled over but then, attracted by the novelty of the fire, folded herself contentedly in front of its warmth.
“Pyromeister,” Noah repeated kiddingly as he settled in next to Tracy. “I’d say this is just picture perfect.” The blaze was prodigious, its sound fierce, like wind rushing in the pines, and as Noah leaned his head against Tracy’s shoulder, it seemed to the haunted young man that fire had always cast a magic circle within whose light everyone was safe, whether from prowling saber-toothed tigers or the equally vicious phantoms of the mind. For the first time in days he lost that sense of precariousness that so dogged him. It was as if, for one protected moment, they had been transported back to that motel in the wilds of western New York. We shouldn’t have stopped, he thought. We should have just kept going, made a run for it. Their great mistake had been to return to all this, to pretend they were still ordinary citizens and not the luminous criminals they had become. We two together, he thought as Noah’s hand rested comfortably, affectionately, on his thigh.
“You mustn’t romanticize,” Claire had told him that afternoon at Chamonix, before he had revealed to her the full extent of his fall. “These affairs always end badly,” and though he had since unburdened himself of everything in half a dozen clandestine meetings they had snatched here and there as if theirs were the improbable affair, he nonetheless retained, despite all her richly textured sympathy for his and Noah’s plight, those first chilling words she had uttered when the issue was wholly one of principle, unmuddied by the particular circumstances her friend found himself in.
Had he been wrong to confide in her, to enlist her aid as accomplice? Louis, no doubt, would be furious to know his wife was keeping secret counsel with the enemy, and in any other circumstances he would have left her out of it, but the one person whose wisdom he keenly longed for was the very person whose experience and suffering and, yes, damage he had shamelessly betrayed. He dreaded the day when he would confess to Arthur what he had been guilty of.
The hand resting on his thigh slipped boldly between his legs; Claire and Arthur alike vanished like ghosts. Sliding his arm around Noah’s shoulder, Tracy kissed him lightly on the lips, lingering there for a moment in a series of chaste pecks (Noah had demurely closed his eyes), then slipping his tongue into Noah’s accepting mouth. The boy sighed, a sound gratifyingly like pure contentment. In the fireplace the fire he had started roared and roared; Tracy could feel its heartbeat, the flush it brought to his face, and he basked in the double warmth, feasting on the long wet kiss, a late-summer wasp lazily enjoying the sweetness of a ripe, fallen peach.
Slipping off the sofa to kneel before him, Noah tugged at Tracy’s pants and Tracy lifted his hips to let them slide down his thighs. As if to prolong the quiver of anticipation, Noah gazed up at him, eyes lustrous with desire. His lips had parted slightly; he worked his jaw to call up extra saliva for the task ahead. Somehow Tracy hadn’t quite expected Noah to be so enthusiastic a cocksucker, a born natural, in his way, no skittish and reluctant prize but a little faggot from the get-go just like Tracy himself had been all those years ago when he’d first bent, panting and faint, over Eric the costume designer’s entrancing erection.
Though it was funny, he thought as Noah’s lips closed arouncf the head of his cock and the boy’s pliable tongue began its teasing, there was a peculiar sense in which such moments felt somehow wasted. He found it hard to explain to himself; it was as if his only real desire was to worship this boy whose beauty was inextricable from his boyness. He should be the one on his knees. His should be the tongue paying homage to that young beauty’s loose sac of balls, the seam of skin beneath them, the secret funky hole.
“Come on up here, beautiful,” he coaxed, pulling from his shirt pocket one of the condoms he kept handy these days, since he’d learned how impetuous their urges could be. To propel Noah, writhing, to that state where suffering and bliss were indistinguishable; it was another form of worship, perhaps the highest, and if there was a tinge of cruelty in the pleasure, it was because the god he worshiped demanded to suffer, at least a little, in return for the abjection of his faithful. Only once had they reversed the sacrament of their usual roles—one night at the Magic Pines when, in the middle of their bedplay, Noah had matter-of-factly announced, “Okay, now I fuck you,” and Tracy had spontaneously ventured, “You’re right. It might be interesting to try something different.” But the episode had proven clumsy, unsatisfactory—even unnatural in their private scheme of things—and they had thereafter reverted to the classic formula of the pederastia.
Stripped of his pants but retaining, in his haste, his socks and shirt, Noah clambered up onto Tracy, straddling him, face to face, and even as they kissed Noah was lowering himself onto Tracy. The young man felt the tip of his sheathed penis begin to ease into the boy’s rectum.
He loved the involuntary animal groan in the back of Noah’s throat, Despite everything—the insane danger, the hopelessness—his heart still beat like mad with exhilaration, knocking and knocking in the cage of his ribs. And at the back door, he realized, someone was hammering with great urgency as well, a series of staccato thumps coming in groups of four like some dire coded message.
Noah leaped off him as if he’d been stung. “What’s that?” he said as Betsy charged frantically into the kitchen.
“I can’t imagine,” Tracy told him, nonetheless imagining a dozen frightful possibilities all in a heartbeat as he struggled to remedy his disarray, stuffing his shirttails, his abruptly crestfallen erection, back into his pants. “You stay there,” he commanded.
“What’re you talking about?” Tracy said, irked and relieved and shaken as Doug shouldered his way past him into the kitchen. “Betsy,” he urged ineffectually. “Calm down now.” But Betsy, with her keen instincts, had taken an instant dislike to their uninvited guest. She would not be silenced.
“I can’t find your phone,” Doug Brill was shouting. “Where’s the damn phone? You’ve got yourself a serious chimney fire out there.”
“What?” Tracy asked. Realizing he still held the condom rolled in the palm of his hand—and what other traces were on him as well?—he deposited it in his pants pocket, to mingle with his keys and spare change.
“I said, your damn chimney’s on fire,” Doug Brill repeated. “Now where’s the phone?”
“There on the wall,” Tracy directed, feeling strangely aloof from the actual emergency at hand, noting, in fact, with cool amusement, that he had never heard Doug Brill use a word like “damn” before even as he ran through a mental checklist: yes, the shades had been down; no, you couldn’t see the living room from the back door.
Leaving his upstanding colleague to parley with 911, Tracy returned to the living room. Noah sat on the sofa, reassembled and looking, thank God, entirely decent. With a dazed expression he stared into the fire, which was roaring as if a freight train had gotten lodged in the chimney’s throat. Tracy wondered grimly: could they both have been so distracted they hadn’t noticed how loud it had grown? Because hadn’t that been the whole problem all along?
“There’s a chimney fire,” he observed, for lack of anything better.
“I heard,” Noah said without looking up.
“Let’s go take a look. Mr. Brill’s called the fire department.”
“I said I heard,” Noah said petulantly.
“We should probably go outside,” Tracy coaxed.
“That’s okay. I’ll wait here.”
But Tracy didn’t want him just to wait there. He resisted mightily the urge to suggest that Noah might want to make a discreet exit by the front door while there was still time. Only there wasn’t still time. Doug stood in the doorway, the hood of his parka still over his head, a scientist about to make some terrible discovery in the ice: a crashed saucer, a dinosaur in suspended animation. As a kid, Tracy had loved those films on rainy Saturday afternoons.
“The fire department’s on their way over,” Doug reported, his wary attention focused entirely on the disheveled boy on the sofa. “Mr. Lathrop.” He spoke sharply over Tracy’s shoulder. “I thought you were going into the city this weekend. Didn’t I see your name on the sign-out sheet?”
Noah rose to the challenge. He hardly missed a beat. “I did sign out, yeah. I didn’t make my train. Taxi was late. Tracy here’s going to take me to the next one.”
Doug squinted with skepticism. It occurred to him, finally, to push his hood back. He had made his discovery. “You went all the way to the station and then came back here?”
“Kind of dumb, huh?” Noah said blithely. Tracy had to admire his composure, though it bothered him to see his accomplice so skilled at lying. Be careful, Tracy warned silently, you’ll get us both in trouble.
“I’d say Mr. Parker’s being extremely generous,” Doug said. “Way beyond the call of duty.” His eyes darted to the fireplace, then back to Noah, but it was Tracy he addressed. “That’s some fire you’ve got going there. I hope you weren’t planning to go off to the train station and leave it burning like that.”
His tone stung, and for an instant Tracy glimpsed his colleague as he must appear to his students. No wonder they hated him. No wonder they called him the Brill.
From the distance came a siren’s blur. “Well that was quick,” the Brill said approvingly. “Let’s go outside. I sure hope the roof’s not on fire. These flue fires are tricky. They can burn right through the mortar and be inside the attic before you know it.” He seemed pleased to be able to take charge, to treat both Noah and Tracy as irresponsible children caught in the midst of some prank. Caught, as it were, with their pants down—and their shoes off. Tracy glanced down at the trail of slush Doug had tracked in behind him, his boots casually defiling the cleanliness of Tracy’s housekeeping. But it made sense, Brill’s proprietary behavior; this house was as good as his. He and his family and the miniature railroad were set to move in the first of July, and though that date seemed infinitely distant, Doug was already looking out for his own.
Guiltily Tracy sat on the bench in the mudroom and pulled on his shoes, then followed his colleague outdoors onto the snowy lawn. Sparks spit from the roaring chimney, beautiful in their way, rising into the dark sky then vanishing. Tracy’s heart was roaring as well, and he tried to follow the fate of this or that bright bit of fire as it was home aloft toward Orion, the only constellation he could ever recognize. He and Noah had stood out here only nights ago, contemplating the shivery infinity of space, a moment that seemed, in retrospect, somehow rapturous, as if they too might have soared away.
Lights flashing but its siren mercifully stilled—the less attention the better, Tracy prayed—the fire engine pulled into the cul-de-sac. Men spilled from the cab and Doug waved to them, then pointed at the chimney.
“You know,” he said meditatively, as if it needed to be said before all the commotion began, “with all that environmental mumbo jumbo you pitch to the kids, I’d have thought you’d be against building fireplace fires. Air pollution and all that.”
It was a knife discreetly slipped between the ribs while no one else was looking. Tracy had understood, in principle, that the man despised him; it was nonetheless something of a shock to hear his words. He knew he should say nothing, let it pass, but he couldn’t help himself. “I’m not the threat to this planet,” he spat out tersely as the firemen approached. “The threat that’s going to kill us is people having kids and more kids. As far as I’m concerned, those are the real criminals.”
Doug looked at him and said simply, “I pity you. I really do.” Then, turning to the firemen trundling up the snowy lawn, he called out, “Over there. See that smoke? I hope the roof’s not on fire.”
With practiced calm, the firemen threw a ladder up against the chimney, and one man climbed up to lower a set of chains down the creosote-coated shaft. Other men carried tubs of sand into the house.
Silent as a shark, the Forge’s one security car pulled over to the curb a discreet distance behind the fire truck. From the passenger side, looking surprisingly frail and distressed, emerged Louis Tremper. Tracy watched the headmaster pick his way up the driveway with an old man’s exaggerated care. He forced himself to saunter down, as if nothing were amiss, to meet Louis halfway.
“I came right over when I heard,” Louis said. “Security called me. Is everything all right?” On the headmaster’s condensing breath Tracy thought he could catch the hint of scotch. Was that what he was doing with himself these days, sitting in a darkened living room with a half-full tumbler beside him while Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang of wandering and lost love?
Materializing at Tracy’s side, Doug answered for him. “I think we have everything under control here, sir,” he assured Louis. “The firemen are inside taking the fire out. It’s a good thing somebody noticed before the situation got out of control.” He narrated with relish, rocking back and forth on his heels and rubbing his hands together excitedly. “See, I was out taking my after-dinner walk, getting my exercise, enjoying the chance to collect my thoughts. I was coming from over yonder. Going this way.” As if it mattered, he gestured with military precision. “And I noticed a lot of smoke coming from Tracy’s chimney here. Then, when I got closer, I could see sparks shooting out. Oh my gosh, I thought, he’s going to burn the house down. I thought the fireplace in this
house was never supposed to be used. I thought there was a strict prohibition against that.”
“No one told me,” Tracy said, thinking of all the richly useless things Louis had told him instead.
“Dear me,” Louis said. “Perhaps I forgot. There’s no permanent damage done, is there?” he asked querulously.
“You’d have to put that to the fire marshal,” Doug said officiously. “Let’s just hope the Lord was with us tonight.”
And perhaps He had been. Already, Tracy could see, the sparks were vastly diminished. The roar in the chimney’s throat had subsided, and the firemen were carrying out the embers. They set the tubs in the snow and stood around as if to warm themselves over the fading coals. Had their presence even been necessary? Tracy was under the distinct impression that chimney fires usually burned themselves out on their own. “We could well have had a catastrophe on our hands,” Doug went on, the possibility seeming to titillate as much as alarm him. He was waiting for the Second Coming, after all. “I’d suggest we should get someone in pronto to clean the chimney so this doesn’t happen again.”
Back off, already, Tracy yearned to tell him. Chastened, though, he kept his silence.
“Yes, yes,” Louis said. “Excellent idea. In the meantime”—he wagged a finger at Tracy in what almost seemed a vein of humorous rebuke (was it possible the old man was more than a little drunk this evening?)—“no more fires. We want to be cautious. We don’t want to live dangerously. Now do we?”