The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “Okay,” Wade said in a tone that allowed no argument. “If I see fire, we’re out of here. You got that?”

  “Got it. Have I thanked you yet?”

  “Later,” he said, with a little laugh that made me fall in love with him all over again. Then he opened the door.

  A gush of smoke black as squid ink billowed out. I had a moment to realize how nuts this was, hearing the nasty crackle of flames from down there, but then the smoke cleared a little and Wade began descending.

  “Smoke alarms didn’t sound,” he observed as he reached the bottom.

  “So they didn’t,” I replied, making my way behind him. I had changed all the batteries, after the oven mishap, and the ones in the carbon monoxide units, too.

  Wade pulled the chain switch; the lights in the basement went on. “Not,” he observed with the excess of calm that I have learned means he is beginning to get angry, “an electrical fire.”

  Pausing at the foot of the stairs, I peered through the smoke, memorizing the cellar layout in case it should suddenly get too thick to see: to my right and behind me were the furnace, the old coal bin, the fuel drums, and about sixty square feet of clear floor space; the gun box was in the far corner, unthreatened—so far—by the flames. Directly ahead was a low, brick archway leading to the crawlspace under the storeroom, and to my left, a dozen or so feet from the stairs where I stood, were two closed wooden doors behind which lay another stair; it led up to the metal Bilco doors that opened onto the back yard.

  I swung the flashlight I’d grabbed from the hall shelf into the coal bin, where the electric lights didn’t reach. No dog.

  “Monday!” No answering whimper, no click of canine nails on old concrete. All I could see, through the despairing lens of my mind’s eye, was a black, motionless heap huddled against a stone foundation scarred by her scratching to get out.

  “Huh,” Wade said, lifting his head at a minute shift in air movement, sniffing it. Smoke ceased flowing from the crude, cavelike entry into the crawlspace under the spare room, and began flowing in the other direction; I could breathe without coughing.

  A jolt of hope bolstered me, but when Wade saw my face he shook his head.

  “Got a draft going through that hole George chopped in the roof, like a chimney. They don’t get enough water in, she’ll go fast, now.”

  Something heavy crashed into the crawlspace in a shower of sparks. Flame brightened its interior: earthen floor, crumbling stonework, a broken wooden shutter somebody had shoved in there.

  “We’d better get a move on,” Wade said. “She flashes over, we could get cooked.” He started around the cellar’s perimeter.

  “Maybe I should look upstairs again.” I had, I realized, only Sam’s report of hearing Monday in the basement. Maybe she wasn’t down here at all.

  “No.” He said it flatly, from the corner where the coal chute used to be, and where those disastrously full fuel-oil drums stood waiting. “No fire escapes, remember. No one’s going up there. If it flashes on the first floor, you’d have no way out.”

  He came back to the cellar steps. “I’m sorry, Jacobia, but she isn’t here. If she’s upstairs, she might still make it out, but I think maybe she went…”

  He pointed at the blazing crawlspace, now an inferno nothing could survive. “In there,” he finished.

  Another crash, louder. Shouts from outside.

  “Listen,” he said, taking my arm, “we’d better get out, now. It could—”

  Monday’s puppy face loomed up in my merciless memory, her cold nose bumping my elbow as she pressed inconveniently in for the attention she adored. Oh, I thought at her, I’m so sorry.

  And then somebody hit me with, it seemed, an enormous flaming sledgehammer as the crawlspace flashed over with a whooshing thump! and a bulging bomb of flames exploded from the entry into the cellar.

  I stumbled back, feeling my nose hairs go crisp with the sudden rush of heat.

  “Damn.” Wade’s voice. We were cut off from the stairway, backed into the corner by the fuse box and the pipe juncture, where the water was routed to the washing machine or to the hose in the backyard. A few yards away, the Bisley’s lockbox hung silently on the wall where Wade had bolted it; once the heat got there, the ammunition closed inside it would begin exploding.

  The water pipes a foot from my nose reminded me of something else: the hose, I realized bitterly, that I had forgotten to bring indoors last fall. If only I had it now; instead it was lying out in the yard, half-covered in slush, probably still frozen solid.

  “Come on,” Wade said, and his voice was so calm that it almost sounded dead. “Maybe the Bilco doors.”

  Flames shot from the crawlspace like orange tongues licking out from the doorway of a furnace. A half-dozen steps from the crawlspace entry, wooden steps led up to the metal Bilco doors that would let us out into the backyard. Or—would they? Had I unlocked the Bilco doors as George had reminded me?

  No. My mind had been in a hundred different places, and I had forgotten about the men who would be bringing down the gravel. We were locked in, I was horribly sure of it, but I kept silent about it. Maybe I was wrong; maybe I’d unlocked them without thinking.

  Or some other miracle would happen. Wade rattled the slide latch on the wooden door leading to the Bilco hatch. It moved open easily, but now the wooden door was jammed in the frame.

  I’d stopped fixing things like that long ago; the house settled this way, and then it settled that way, so if you waited long enough jammed doors opened up again, saving a lot of trouble.

  Except, unfortunately, for the trouble we were in now.

  Wade hurled his body once, hard, against the door, and tore the splintered pieces of wood back, revealing Monday’s body behind them, limp and suffocated, a soft boneless bundle of black fur as I lifted her and wept into her warm neck, while ahead of me Wade shoved against the Bilco doors.

  Which opened at once. Air poured past me, sucking the flames momentarily out of the crawlspace. And even as I scrambled away from them up the hatch steps, I knew:

  I had not remembered to unlock that Bilco door. It was open because someone had gone into the house, found my ring of utility keys, and opened it. Then whoever it was had gone back inside, started the fire, and gone out the Bilco doors—slamming the wooden hatchway door in haste, so that it had jammed—to avoid being seen from the street.

  I knew it as clearly as if I had seen it: Monday was there because she had tried to follow. After all, when you have just committed arson, it will hardly do to have the victims’ dog following you around, frisking and begging for biscuits. Poor Monday hadn’t had a chance.

  But I still did. “Here,” I said, shoving her into Wade’s arms. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Jacobia,” he began patiently, but I was beyond reason.

  Those water pipes were ready to go kablooie, just as George had warned. All they needed was a little help.

  The fire had retreated back into the crawlspace again, like a dragon retreating to catch its breath. I reached up and cranked off the water main valve; moments later and the handle would have been too hot to touch. Predictably, the valve began dripping as the packing inside it, compressed but too ancient to seal, failed to close. Then I cranked it on, again.

  Nothing happened.

  “Tell them to turn off the hoses,” I yelled up the hatch.

  George Valentine’s face appeared in the hatchway. He looked at me, at the main valve, and at the pipes snaking all around the ceiling.

  “The fire hoses are lowering the pressure,” I yelled at him.

  His face lit with understanding. Moments later, I heard the hoses stop.

  I cranked the main valve off hard, waited, and twisted it back on again just as fast as I could.

  There was a little thunk! from inside it, as I did it. Water began spewing merrily from half a dozen pipe joints, and then from a dozen more: soaking the cellar steps, cascading down the brickwork over the crawlspace entry, pouring i
n over the window wells and puddling in the concrete depression where the coal furnace used to hunker.

  The dripping from the main valve slowed as the hoses went back on, but I was pretty sure that didn’t matter, anymore. The first rule of amateur plumbing is that water prefers to flow along the outsides of pipes, and will do so whenever it can.

  Upstairs, water trickled and dribbled and splashed, as if a team of rainmakers had gone to work inside all the plaster walls. Under other circumstances such a flood would have been a disaster, but at that moment I was delighted to know that I would have to replace every ceiling in the house.

  The reason being that, as plumbing per se, old plumbing is decidedly unsatisfactory, but when handled with the proper amount of creativity—such as for instance the kind that will make it go kablooie—it makes one hell of an effective sprinkler system.

  39

  “Mom!” Sam sat in the back seat of Arnold’s squad car. Beside him sat Monday, alive and observing the proceedings with apparent interest, albeit a little blearily.

  I scrambled into the squad car on the other side of her and threw my arm around her, and she let her head fall into my lap with a low, exhausted wuff, sighed deeply, and closed her eyes.

  “One of the guys from the ambulance gave her some oxygen and did CPR on her,” Sam said. He looked worse than the dog, his eyes huge and dark-ringed, lips bloodless and his cuticles bitten raw. “And she woke up!”

  Monday’s tail thumped once in appreciation for the story, and she sneezed.

  “Then she threw up a lot,” he added, “and walked around in circles for a while. I think we’d better be pretty nice to her.” He stroked her coat, which was dirty and dull with smoke, and she shifted comfortably under his hand.

  “Oh, you bet we will.” I put my face against her soft, smooth ear, thinking that if the house had burned flat to the ground, leaving me only what I had here with me in the squad car, I’d have been okay. “We’re all going to be nice to each other for a while.”

  The guys had finally gotten the fire under control; now they were hosing water onto the embers. Steam rose from the hole George had chopped in the roof of the storage room.

  “Mom?” Sam eyed the house. “With the pipes busted, and the smoke and all, are we going to be able to stay here tonight?”

  “Tell you what,” I said, “you go and stay with Tommy Daigle tonight, prize fights or no prize fights, and I’ll camp out in the house. Maybe by tomorrow, George can get some of the water rigged back up, and once we get the smoke aired out of the place, it won’t be so bad.”

  Wade came and crouched by the open car door, seeing how we were doing. The look that had been in his eyes on the porch came back to me, with a little rush of happiness. As you may have noticed, it is not always easy to know how Wade feels.

  But now I did.

  “Hey,” he said, ruffling Sam’s hair, and Sam grinned, tolerating it.

  “Fire guys want to recruit you,” Wade said affectionately to me. “Soon as they can get a rubber coat and some boots your size, they’re gonna teach you to go up a ladder. Seeing,” he added pointedly, “as you are already so familiar with high places.”

  “Very funny,” I said, ignoring his reference to my adventure with Bobby Taylor; probably it was all over town, by now. “I can’t believe it didn’t burn through the kitchen wall. There wasn’t a thing stopping it.”

  Sooty and exhausted, George heard my comment and paused. “Uh, well, I guess I know why.”

  He pulled his cap off, wiped his hand across his head. “All that asbestos I pulled out of your cellar, when you first moved here?”

  He eyed me guiltily. “Well, I was stuck for a place to put it. And you were having that kitchen wall shored up at the time, pulling the old plaster down and all?”

  I nodded. Picking centuries-old plaster dust out of the butter dish was just one of the charming mental images I retained from that project; another was George, suited up like an astronaut to remove the hazardous substance.

  “Well,” George said, kicking a muddy spot with the toe of his boot. “I figured, what’s the harm? Even though I know it is against the rules,” he added shamefacedly, “and if you tell anyone I could lose my asbestos contractor’s license. The fact is, I stuck all that asbestos in the wall, sealed it in there real solid so none of the particles could get out, before the wallboard went up. And I guess it stopped the fire just long enough for you to get that water going.”

  He pulled his asthma inhaler out of his pocket and sucked on it, waited for it to take effect, then took out another and pulled on that one, too, before tucking them both away again.

  “It’s still,” he added, “sealed in there; I checked. Damn, that smoke. I can’t believe anybody breathes smoke on purpose.”

  “Thanks, George,” I said, “for braving it. I appreciate it.”

  His lip twitched minimally, in the downeast Maine version of a broad grin. Then he tromped through the mud to where the other men were hauling the hoses up, tossing gear back onto the truck.

  “Stay with me tonight?” Wade invited. “I mean, over at my place. You could pack a bag, come back and get going on all this in the morning.”

  On the cleanup, he meant, and the repairs. My insurance company would have to be notified, and an adjuster sent out, and after that a ton of phone calls would have to be made. I’d been hoping to pull back on the house-repair expenditures for a while, but now I thought I might as well just nail the checkbook to the back porch, and let people write their own.

  And of course I would have to go and have a talk with Bob Arnold, arson investigation being another of the tasks on my to-do list, but not one that I could accomplish myself.

  “Thanks. I’d better stick around here, keep an eye on things. You going out?” I hadn’t missed the switch from “with me” to “at my place.”

  He nodded. “Boat goes in half an hour. Back late. I could get somebody else to go.”

  “Forget it.” At a couple of thousand dollars per trip, turning work down cost Wade big money, and the ships weren’t always as plentiful as they were right now.

  “I’ll be okay,” I said. “Besides, I wouldn’t be very good company.”

  Wade leaned into the car and put his arms around Sam and me. Monday lifted her head, smiling weakly, her tongue lolling.

  “You are always good company,” he said. “And you were great in there.” He pressed his rough cheek to mine. “See you tomorrow.”

  And then he was gone.

  “He never kisses you in front of me,” Sam observed quietly. Monday put her head back down on my lap with an expressive sigh.

  “I know,” I said. “He’s careful about it. I think he doesn’t want to make you feel funny. About him and me, I mean.”

  Sam watched Wade striding off toward the harbor, a big man with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. From a distance, he didn’t look like anything special, just another downeast Maine guy going to his job, happy to have the work. A regular guy.

  “I don’t,” Sam said thoughtfully, “feel funny.”

  40

  It’s not so bad, I told myself as I went through the house, and objectively I suppose it wasn’t: lots of wet behind the wallpaper, loosening it; plenty of ceiling plaster sagging down. But the house itself remained standing, looking out through the trees over the harbor as it had for nearly two centuries. I was not the first weeping woman who had moved through its rooms, nor would I be the last.

  At first I thought I would try to create a small outpost: a chair, a lamp, the coffeemaker, set up in the dining room where the fireplace still worked and the damage seemed least horrifying.

  But gradually and against my own wishes I knew I couldn’t stay. There were blankets in the cedar chest upstairs where the smoke had not seeped in, but no water to make coffee or bathe in, or even for Monday to drink, and the electricity was probably not safe. Nor was I sure that, as I slept, a hot spot wouldn’t flare up in the storeroom.

  Those smoke de
tectors, I remembered with another throb of pointless anger. Somebody had removed the batteries.

  Thinking this, I put down some of the items I had taken from the cedar chest, including an old Teddy bear of Sam’s that I had put away as a keepsake, and that Monday seized upon immediately. She glanced at me to see if I would take it away from her, but I didn’t have the heart to.

  “Go on, you can have it,” I told her, my voice sounding small in the big old smoke-stinking house, and she trotted off under the dining room table with it, circling twice before lying down with her chin propped on the bear’s red ribbon necktie.

  Which left me standing there holding a blue lace-trimmed baby pillow, a crocheted rattle with a couple of jingle bells in it, and a satin-covered baby book containing newborn Sam’s first footprint and a lock of his hair. Also taped into it was the blue-bead baby bracelet that the nurses had put on him at the hospital, and that he had been wearing when he and I went home in a taxi, my ex-husband being busy excising a pituitary tumor at the time.

  A knock on the soot-smeared back door startled me. It was Bob Arnold, looking as if he thought I might give him an argument. “You can’t stay here,” he began, and I put my hand up to stop him.

  “I know. It’s too awful. Besides, a night at the Motel East might be just what the doctor ordered: a big, clean bed, modern plumbing, and complete silence.”

  “Well. I’m glad you’re seeing reason. I really just stopped by to make sure you were okay.” He gazed unhappily at the damage.

  “Nina’s new houseguest is a likely looking fellow,” I said deliberately.

  “Yeah, he is,” Arnold replied, not missing anything.

  “Think you could put a word in with the immigration fellows? Just ask them to do a quiet checkup?”