Fire Point

by John Smolens

  When he arrived home and opened the screen door, he found Hannah sitting in the kitchen, crying. Her arms rested on the drop cloth that covered the table, and her forehead was red—she’d had her head on her arms before he’d come in.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t know what’s happening to us.”

  Hannah wiped her face with the back of her hand.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  She stood up and put her arms around him. “It’s not you.”

  After that, they didn’t say anything else. They undressed each other as they worked their way toward the bedroom, but they didn’t make it, ending up on the rug in the living room. They went at it so hard that Hannah developed a small series of rug burns down her spine. Eventually, they awoke and moved into the bedroom, where they were slow and tender with each other.

  Later, Martin ran his finger along the scar on Hannah’s breast. He was nearly asleep but he asked, “How’d this happen?”

  “While I was working a rock loose with the crowbar—it slipped in my hands.”

  There was something in her voice that he didn’t recognize. For a moment he thought she might be lying to him, which he didn’t think she’d ever done before. But why would she lie about a scratch? Closing his eyes, he said, “You’ve got to be careful with tools.”

  PEARLY STOPPED IN at the Portage for last call. Sally was working the bar and it was mostly locals left standing.

  Bettina Laakso came in a few minutes later. “Cubs win?”

  “Four-two, in ten,” Sally said.

  “My hangover’s arriving ahead of schedule,” Bettina said, “so I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary for a nightcap.”

  “A woman who plans ahead,” Pearly said.

  Bettina removed her glasses, made a fist, and rubbed her left eye with her knuckles—so hard that when she took her hand away, the pupil was watery and bloodshot. When she put her glasses back on, the lenses made her eyes comically monstrous. A lot of people thought she was always trying to stir up trouble, and because she lived alone, there was speculation about whether she was not only the last of the pinko Commies but a lesbian as well. Pearly liked her.

  “I consider the Portage at last call good research,” Bettina said.

  “Me, too,” Pearly said. “Summer nights it’s kinda Margaret Mead.”

  “Exactly. An anthropological study where you get an idea what people do at night and whom they do it with.”

  “I didn’t know we had any ‘whoms’ this far north,” Pearly said.

  Sally placed the Bloody Mary on the bar. “Bettina, you’re just a Peeping Tom.”

  “I prefer to call it journalism,” Bettina said.

  Pearly said, “Well, thanks for going easy on me in that piece on the Colbys.”

  Bettina sipped her drink. “You provide comic relief, Pearly. You’re Falstaff.”

  “Somebody has to be the peasant.”

  A customer called Sally from the far end of the bar.

  Bettina said quietly, “The Colby thing—it’s about to get worse.”

  “That’ll sell a few newspapers,” Pearly said.

  “You know how some people, particularly local merchants, have been supporting Frank Colby while he’s been walking his beat?” she asked. “Well, this backlash has developed. People—people who live outside the village, in particular—have been calling in to the police station, asking for assistance.” She leaned back and allowed Pearly to savor the implications. “Of course, Colby can’t respond because he can’t drive and it’s making it tough on Buzz Gagnon. He’s working this new summer kid he hired like he was a regular cop, which isn’t making people happy, either. Let’s face it, a cop walking a beat these days—it’s an anachronism. So complaints have been made to members of the town council.”

  “And,” Pearly said, “certain members of the town council will find this useful.”

  “Exactly.” Bettina ate some of her celery stalk. “My guess is that some of the councilmen got this whole thing started. And then there’s the kid, Sean. Something wrong with that boy.” She drained the rest of her Bloody Mary. “But you’ll have to wait until the next edition to read about that.” She got off her bar stool. “You know, Pearly, the story I really want to write someday—sometime in the off-season, when there’s not much going on—is the mystery of the stolen town hall flagpole. Everyone knows you cut down that old ship’s mast and took it, but where’d you put it?”

  “I took the fifth on that.”

  “My guess is you weren’t alone. You had accomplices. Listen, nobody’ll ever accuse you of ratting on your friends.” She leaned over so she could whisper. “Trust me, Pearly, I could write it so that none of you would be incriminated.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  As Bettina walked up the bar and out the front door, Pearly noticed that none of the men at the bar turned to watch. The fact that the woman held no sexual appeal was one factor, and the other was they were afraid of her.

  As Sally came down the bar again, Pearly took some bills out of his pocket. “Anybody feeling anthropologically inclined tonight?” he asked.

  She took the bills and fretted. “’Fraid not, hon.”

  “Wrong season,” he said. “That a convertible I saw you in the other day?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  17

  SEAN RARELY LEFT the apartment above Superior Gas & Lube. Though it usually became stifling by noon, he had taken to wearing a turtleneck pullover to cover the welts on his neck. When Arnie asked what had happened to his voice, Sean whispered he didn’t know, it was probably some kind of laryngitis.

  He pretty much lived on the couch. He could operate the television with the remote control. He could listen to CDs on headphones. He could flip through the stack of porn magazines Arnie kept on the lower bookshelf next to the couch, page after glossy page of naked women and men: blowjobs, daisy chains, and gobs of come. Sean spent a good deal of his time jerking off. He often tried to remember what it had been like with Hannah. He’d concentrate on a particular time, a place, such as his mother’s car, when a certain song was on the radio. It was disappointing how little clarity there was to his recollections, as though he’d only imagined that she’d willingly had sex with him. He tried to think of what she sounded like; he knew that she had moaned and whispered to him, but he couldn’t hear it now. Retreating to the couch was not in his best interests. Sometimes it seemed that if he could only identify the root of the problem, the moment when his life took the essential wrong turn, he could go back to that moment and do something different that would change everything that followed. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew it was defeating him, pushing him down, down into the cushions of that couch.

  Wednesday afternoon Arnie came upstairs with the new edition of the Herald and said, “Hey asshole, you’re still a local celebrity.” He dropped the paper on the coffee table, then went into the kitchenette and made one of his liverwurst-and-onion sandwiches.

  Sean picked up the newspaper and looked at the front page. There were two stories, one about his father, which was accompanied by a photograph of him walking down the sidewalk on Ottawa Street. The headline read COMPLAINTS MOUNT OVER FOOT PATROL. But it was the larger photograph on the right that stunned Sean.

  Before he could begin to read either piece, Arnie came into the living room and, gesturing with the sandwich in his hand, said, “That’s so weird. Where’d you find that girl? She’s a perfect Hannah LeClaire—it’s unbelievable.”

  “I hate the smell of liverwurst. How can you eat that stuff?” Sean looked down at the photograph of himself with Nikki at a table in the Mare Adriatico, and next to them was Loomis with Zoya sitting on his lap—the one whose throat got slashed at the Ancona train station. The headline read MILITARY DUTY?

  HANNAH DECIDED TO take a bubble bath before going to bed. She was in the tub, reading the Herald, when Martin knocked on the door.

  “Can I show you something?” he sa
id.

  “Well, sure . . .”

  The door opened, and as he came into the bathroom, she slid down until the bubbles touched her chin. He had a gas can in his hand, an old one made of metal, with rust coming through the red paint around the base of the spout. “I found this in the bushes on the other side of the driveway. I think it means Sean’s been here. Did you know he tried to burn the place down again?”

  She shook her head. She was holding the folded newspaper above the bubbles and she didn’t know what to do with it.

  “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why he stopped.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Gas—you can smell it out there in the driveway. I couldn’t figure it out. At first I thought it was coming from the car, but it seemed to be on the house. He must have started to douse the walls, but why did he stop? Why did he leave this can in the bushes?”

  “A warning?”

  “No, he’s past that.”

  Then she saw his face change as he focused on the newspaper in her hand. He put the can on the floor and reached out for the newspaper. She drew her arm back. Her muscles were sore from laying bricks in the patio, and she realized that her arm had begun to tremble.

  “Please,” he said.

  She gave him the newspaper. He sat on the lid of the toilet seat, and as he looked at the photograph, his eyes became confused and alarmed. “It’s incredible,” he whispered. “It’s you.”

  “It’s pretty strange.” She tried to giggle, to make it light, but it didn’t work at all.

  When he finished reading the article, he looked over the top of the newspaper at her. His eyes drifted down; he was not looking at her face, and she felt caught. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “What?” She didn’t move.

  He nodded; he meant her collarbone. Then he reached out but didn’t touch her skin. When he withdrew his hand, his fingers glistened with small clusters of soap bubbles. “It must hurt.”

  She could only stare back at him.

  “You do that working on the patio?”

  She tried to will the tears away but it was too late. They came quickly and she could feel their weight building up on her lower lids.

  He saw them, too. “Thank you for not lying to me,” he said. “What happened?”

  She couldn’t speak. The tears were now streaming down her face, and she could see that her eyes were telling him what he wanted to know.

  “He was here, in the house—with you?”

  Her mouth trembled and she could only nod her head.

  He glanced down the length of the tub full of bubbles. “Let me see,” he said. “I need to see what he did to you.”

  “Please, Martin.”

  “You don’t need to hide anything from me.” Then his voice was pleading. “Don’t you know that?”

  So she stood up in the bathtub. The air was cool on her wet skin, but that wasn’t why she was shaking. With his hand he wiped bubbles away from her ribs, her breasts, and his face became full of wonder and horror.

  “Nothing happened,” she said.

  “Nothing? This isn’t ‘nothing.’ You let him in?”

  “No. I—I was asleep. It was the night Pearly was in jail.”

  “You were asleep and Sean came in the house?”

  “I’d left the back door unlocked for you. It was so late. At first, in the dark—I thought it was you coming into the bedroom.”

  “And he did this?”

  “He came—” She put her hand on her stomach. “He came here. And then—God, Martin—and then I strangled him. With his own belt. I thought he was dead, but he must have just passed out, I guess, because suddenly he got up and staggered out of the house. I was here, in the bathroom then, and when I heard him I thought he was coming for me again, so I picked up those scissors from the basket and I stood here waiting for him to come down the hall. But he didn’t. He left.”

  Martin was still and something seemed to have been wiped clean from his eyes, his expression. And then he stood up. His bathrobe was hanging on the back of the door. He took it off the hook and draped it around her shoulders. He saw that she was shivering and his hand rubbed her back gently.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  Martin withdrew his arm, leaned over, and picked up the gas can from the floor.

  She pulled the robe tightly about her. “He’s gone from the house.”

  “But he will come back.” Martin opened the bathroom door and paused in the hallway. “You know he will, Hannah.”

  She sat on the edge of the tub and listened to his footsteps as he left the house.

  SEAN WAS DOZING on the couch when he heard someone coming up the outside stairs. He thought it was Arnie, but then there was a knock on the door. Sean got up off the couch, his bare feet kicking over empty beer bottles on the floor. He could see Martin standing on the landing. He went to the door and opened it.

  Martin said, “You’re coming with me.”

  “I am?” Sean said hoarsely.

  “You are.”

  Sean saw that he had the gas can—his gas can, which he had left in the bushes by Martin’s driveway—in one hand, and quickly his arms came up in a pumping motion. Gasoline covered Sean’s face, his chest, his arms, his legs. The smell, which was always faintly present in the apartment, was now so strong it made Sean gag as he staggered backward. Martin came into the kitchenette, extending his right arm. He flicked a lighter, a cheap pink plastic Bic, and held it within inches of Sean’s face. “You drive,” he said.

  “All right.”

  Martin shut down the flame but continued to hold the lighter out toward him. He turned so that Sean could lead him outside and down the stairs. In the garage office Arnie had a ball game on the radio. There was no sign of Martin’s car.

  “Where’s that Mercedes of yours?”

  Martin didn’t answer.

  They walked to Sean’s truck, parked near the back corner of the building.

  “Where we going?” Sean asked.

  “Shut up and get in.”

  WHEN HANNAH CALLED Pearly her voice quivered and she wasn’t clear about what had happened, but he understood that she wanted him to go to Superior Gas & Lube, where she was sure Martin had gone to look for Sean.

  “Martin found out,” she said, “what he tried to do to me.”

  She didn’t have to be any more specific. Pearly had seen the photo of her look-alike in the newspaper. He said, “I’m on my way,” and hung up.

  When Pearly reached the garage, it was nearly dark and he pulled up in front of the office. Arnie was sitting behind the desk, listening to the ball game. He came to the doorway, a can of beer in his hand, and said, “Hey, Pearly. I’ve shut down the pumps for the night, but if you need gas I can unlock them—”

  “Where’s Sean?”

  “Think he just left a few minutes ago.”

  “Alone?”

  “Dunno. I was in the garage—just heard his truck leave.”

  “Which way?”

  Arnie nodded, indicating that Sean had driven toward Petit Marais.

  Pearly pulled out of the station and headed south. He barely slowed down for corners and his toolboxes slid back and forth, slamming into the sides of the truck bed. It was nearly dark and the narrow road seemed to rush out of nowhere into his headlights. This was a stretch where there was a lot of roadkill, and several times a year somebody missed a curve. Often, trees arched over the road, so it felt like driving through a tube. Rounding a sharp bend, he came out of the trees, and the black water of Petit Marais spread out beyond the road.

  He slowed down to check each of the turnouts overlooking Petit Marais but passed only a few parked cars. He picked up speed as he wound north again, doing seventy on the straightaways. It was dark when he reached Martin’s house, and he saw there were no lights on in any of the windows. Pearly expected to see Sean’s truck but there was nothing—until he noticed something in the driveway. He pulled in and in the headl
ight beams he could see a man in jeans and a sweatshirt, lying with his back toward the street. One arm was stretched out on the pavement at an odd angle. He didn’t move.

  Pearly got out of the truck, and as he walked up the driveway, he could see a pool of blood beneath the shaved skull.

  AFTER SHE HAD CALLED PEARLY, Hannah lay down on the bed in Martin’s bathrobe. There was nothing else she could do. She couldn’t leave the house. She could only wait. She had been crying so hard in the bathroom, her ribs ached and she was exhausted. Suddenly, perhaps even thankfully, everything seemed to shut down and she lost consciousness.

  Not sleep exactly; more a descent into a floating state. Occasionally she heard a car passing or a puff of wind coming through the open window. Gracie lept onto the bed and curled up against her legs.

  At one point Hannah was aware of the sound of an engine, of a vehicle that seemed to slow down, perhaps even stop near the house. There was the grind of gears, and then the sound of the engine and tires grew faint and disappeared.

  There came a loud noise and Gracie jumped off the bed. At first Hannah was confused, until she realized someone was knocking on the front door. People seldom came to the front door. She got up and walked out to the main hall in her bare feet, switching on lights as she went. Opening the door, she found Pearly on the stoop.

  “It’s Martin.” He nodded toward the driveway. “We need to call—” And here he hesitated. “Someone,” he said.

  She came out on the stoop. “The police?” The absurdity of this—calling the police—struck her hard.

  Pearly seemed to understand. “He needs medical attention more than anything.”

  She ran down the steps and across the yard to the driveway, which was still lit by the headlights of the Datsun. When she knelt beside him on the pavement, blood quickly soaked the bottom of her bathrobe. She kept saying Martin’s name, but he didn’t respond.

  18

  THERE WAS ONLY one time when Pearly considered the possibility that he might die.

  It was 1974, the summer after his mother had been killed in her car accident. Since his father had drowned in Lake Superior when he was small, he’d always felt a great ambivalence toward water. But that summer, when he was twenty-two, he felt some need to deal with the lake. He bought a skiff at a yard sale. No outboard, just a fourteen-foot aluminum boat with oars that he could row out on the lake.