Town Burning

by Thomas Williams

  “We never knew for sure,” Sam said. “Some was so ashamed about what they’d said they never asked, preferring to forgit it altogether. Some say ‘twas yellow smoke, high in the sky, come from forest fires way out in New York State and further off even than that.”

  “No stink to it,” Aubrey said.

  “Some said ‘twas smoke from a volcano blew its top ‘way out in the Pacific Ocean. Some said ‘twas God’s warning we should mend our sinful ways. Nobody never knew for sure.”

  “No raddios in them days,” Aubrey said. “A man had to make up his own mind.” They were all silent for a minute, and then Sam turned on the radio again.

  “We better go, Janie,” John said. “It’s getting pretty dark.”

  They said good night, and Mrs. Pettibone called to them to have a good time.

  As she got into the car with John, it seemed like a dream of ten years ago, and wrong to be getting into a car to go on a date with a boy. But she wasn’t married any more; she was a widow. A widow! It made her think of spiders, or anything black and in corners, chimney corners, spinning webs or knitting socks. She could remember going on dates and not being married to Michael Spinelli, but not very clearly. After they were married, they would get into Mr. Spinelli’s old car and they would drive to Anna’s or the Red and White, get the beer and then to the Drive-in and sit and look at the movie and when it was over without talking about it they would drive home, Mike a little irritable because the beer had given him a headache. At home if it wasn’t too late Mr. and Mrs. Spinelli would be looking at television. Then they would all go to bed, and Mike would be asleep in one minute fiat. The minute he put his head on the pillow he would be asleep. Or maybe if they went to the Legion Hall he would have talked the sleepiness out of himself, and when they got home they would go right upstairs after having come in, Mike laughing and his eyes bright. The old people would watch television longer and keep the volume up, knowing very well what was going on upstairs. Mike never seemed to mind that. “What’s wrong with them knowing?” he would say. “They did it themselves.” “Oh, it’s not that,” she would say. “Mike, I know they know and that’s all right, but don’t you ever want some privacy?” “Nobody’s looking at us,” he’d say. “The shades are pulled and they can’t hear nothing over the television.”

  But she wanted to be in her own house where they could do it and nobody would know or have to know how often or when or under the influence of how much beer. “You act so proud of it, as if it were something only you could do,” she would say, “and you want to do it and tell about it. I’ll bet you’d do it out in the town square.” “Nothing wrong with it, is there?” he’d say. Then there would be the business of preparation, because Mike didn’t want to have children. “Let’s wait a while,” he’d say. “Wait till we git our house.” And afterward he would draw away just a little bit when she didn’t want him to and she would say: “No, there’s nothing wrong with it. I love you. Put your arms around me.” And for a while he would put his wiry arms, now weak when they had been so strong a few minutes before, around her and he would go to sleep like a puppy with his head against her neck.

  They had driven for quite a while in silence, the headlights just able to compete with the fading brightness of the sky. Along the road beneath the trees it was already dark. In Cascom Center, John stopped in front of the filling station and general store.

  “Do you want to get some beer?” he asked.

  “If you do, John,” she said.

  “I mean, will you have one with me in the movies? I won’t get any if you won’t.” He sat undecided until she said she would, then got out of the car and walked quickly up the wide steps to the store, almost too civilized-looking in his neat sport clothes. It seemed that he couldn’t belong to her—be her date—dressed like that. His short, controlled body, wide shoulders and small feet were so different from the men she had had around her: Mike, Junior and their large friends, or Sam and the hired men. He seemed to be a kind of foreigner. She might call it also a kind of social gracefulness; he walked carefully, evenly, and when he stood still he was entirely still, not stooped and gangly-armed like Junior, for instance, who always cocked his elbows as if he were being crowded, or was about to be crowded. She did remember seeing John Cotter try to act that way, in high school. It never fitted him at all, and now he had evidently given it up. That was good. It was not for toughness she had always liked him. Wanted him? But what was the reason? It was not for weakness. She knew enough about herself to know she could never admire or desire weakness. She had seen too much of it, swaggering or otherwise.

  She didn’t consider him weak. Physically he was obviously not weak. In character, perhaps—yet even his ability to fade away and be gone was a kind of strength if it kept his personality intact. He left and he came back and then he left again, and he never seemed to change very much at all. She had never seen him drunk; he never got into trouble, never blew up or fought, just faded away, still clear-eyed and calm, politely saying goodbye.

  He came out of the store with the beer, got into the car and reached across to lock the door on her side. His arm brushed hers, his face was close to hers, and suddenly she shivered and had to sneeze.

  She began to recall the moves and hesitations of a code of action he had probably never stopped using. At least not for ten years, as she had. Now how must she act? Like a young virgin, the firm callow shell holding a treasure and a fear? Surprisingly enough, that would not be very difficult at all. She was at once uncomfortably and luxuriously aware of her body, of her hips and the smooth muscles along the insides of her thighs. She was aware of the hardness of his body and of his strength.

  The movie turned out to be Abbott and Costello.

  “I should have looked before we came out,” John said.

  “Why don’t we just ride around?”

  They took the road along the Cascom River, toward Leah.

  “I seem to foul everything up,” he said.

  She thought of saying, And what have you ever done to foul up? But this was a strange projection of an idea not her own. She felt that John Cotter had done quite a lot of things, even if “things” were measured only in miles traveled, places seen. It was John who seemed to think that he had never done anything. Or maybe he had decided to give her this impression. No, one funny thing about John Cotter was that he was honest. What he said was true. It was the way he acted, the way he preserved himself, his immobility that was dishonest—as if he wanted to prove himself a liar by his gestures—or lack of gestures. He spoke like a man, and yet the man’s voice came from that quiet, animal’s body—a split personality? Perhaps the cleavage between the animal and the man was a little wider in him than in other people. In herself, she could not find the border, if there was a definite one, between the animal and the woman. Perhaps such a border was like the coast of Maine: as the crow flies, not so far, but following all indentations—hesitations—it might be a thousand miles long.

  They followed the new directions for rotary traffic around the Town Square and crossed the covered bridge into Vermont.

  “I feel almost as if I had to make things up to you,” he said, “It’s a long sort of thing. I mean when we were young we didn’t really spend much time together. But to myself, in my mind, I spent a lot of time with you.”

  “You did?”

  “When I thought about girls, I thought about you. Mostly about you. I used to have daydreams—only they were at night, just before I went to sleep. Funny damn’ things. I remember one I used to think up pretty often. I’d be in a jungle, in a loincloth, and here you’d come along, stark naked, scared. You know. And then I’d be up in a tree above your head and I’d grab a vine and swing down beside you and put my arms around you. I could feel your skin sort of cool and bare. Some dream! Only the thing about the jungle was that it was mine. I invented it and caused you to be in it. Sometimes I had other girls kidnaped out of their beds and put into my jungle, but mostly it was you.” He looked at h
er for a second, and she saw a glint of teeth in the semidarkness. “I had another one, too. In this one you and I were lying in a little hole, on the side of a mountain—sort of a little foxhole, with a small ridge of dirt in front, and I had a rifle. Somebody—Japs, Germans—some enemy of the time—sometimes it was the Ku Klux Klan, was attacking up the hill. I’d shoot them and you’d hand me ammunition. You always had one arm around me. I remember it was very comfortable and warm in the hole, and I’d keep picking off those attackers. It was always you in that one.”

  “Always me?”

  “Yes. Believe me, it was. This was when I was fourteen or fifteen. But I’ll never forget that feeling when we were in that foxhole. In a way it had everything that I wanted—everything all together and at the same time. Sex, comfort, danger. A little natural sadism mixed with honorable danger. What else is necessary?”

  “Sadism? What do you mean, ‘natural sadism’? I thought it wasn’t very natural.”

  He drove slowly along the river, slowing down to let cars pass. “Of course it’s natural. How else can you explain it? People are always cruel, and the ones who say they aren’t are the crudest. Did you ever know anybody who was never cruel? Wait a minute. The only people who aren’t really sadistic are the ones who admit it in their natures. You know what I mean?” He turned toward her for a long moment—so long she began to worry about going off the road. She put her hand on the dashboard, and he immediately saw it, turned back to his driving and said, “Sorry.”

  “Mike’s father,” she said, and surprisingly a wave of pity came over her and tears came into her eyes. She saw the little man coping with his wife, and the word “gutted” occurred to her. Without his son he seemed as incomplete as a hung deer, and she could hear her grandfather say the words, gutted and done.

  “Mr. Spinelli?” John said. “He has the Silver Star. He didn’t kill twenty-seven Germans in self-defense. Listen. When you get the Silver Star it’s not for doing something you actually have to do.”

  “Maybe he got rid of it then,” she said, “because he’s a good man.” Tears again, and she distrusted easy tears. “I’ve never seen him do anything cruel. Never.”

  John put his hand on her arm. “Yes, I know,” he said, “but he’s a man who had to admit it. Can you see all those dead men? I can.”

  They came out from under the black branches of the elms as if from a tunnel. The moon was about to come up, and a red glow like a false sunrise shone above the Vermont hills. A tall pasture-pine with craggy branches like arms stood in a field, and as they rode along, it passed from the red glow back into darkness. She could smell fire in the night air, and as the black crown of a hill passed, the great red moon sailed out and followed them along.

  “Haven’t you ever done something mean?” he asked.

  “Yes. I was mean to Junior when he brought the Riders to see me. I made him feel as bad as I could. I gave him an awfully hard time.”

  “Junior,” he said.

  “And once…maybe I shouldn’t tell you this. It happened a long time ago, when we were pretty young. You were a freshman in high school.”

  “When we were kids. What difference does it make now?”

  “These things aren’t very funny to the kids,” she said. “I sicked Junior on you once. Deliberately.”

  “He didn’t have to be sicked,” he said, a certain amount of bitterness in his voice.

  “You see? It still isn’t very funny, is it?”

  “The funny thing is, I remember,” he said, and now she heard a new emotion: he was ashamed of himself. “One of my many little shamefulnesses. I was thinking about it a while ago. I remember things very well—especially the things I don’t want to remember.”

  “No, wait. This is my shameful piece,” she said.

  “Do you remember that time at the scrape? Sure you do. Whatever happened afterward I deserved it. You told me you loved me and I hurt you. Just kid stuff? Bob fell when the rope broke, and we ducked you—my idea entirely—and then I took my towel and snapped you raw and you went home bawling. Kid stuff? And Junior and Keith Joubert caught me that night at the Community House.”

  “I sicked him on you, but I never told him why.”

  “I knew you didn’t. You don’t know how much I admired you and how much worse I felt because you didn’t tell him what I’d done.”

  “God! How mad I was!” she said, but then reconsidered: No, not angry. And it was very easy to remember. First his hands touching her, even though he grabbed her to duck her—the joy of that contact. And how it turned slowly, as the minutes went by, into desperation; into a real fear of drowning. The acid bite of water in her nose—she could feel that again—but most important was the terrible shame, the shame of her protruding buttocks, the shame of her breasts and the poor worn bathing suit that could not conceal them (but had, a short season before. It was as if her growth itself were a kind of shameful disease). Shame as when all the girls in school were afraid on their periods that their dresses would be spotted when the bell rang and they had to stand up; had to stand up and couldn’t look.

  “I know you didn’t like getting ducked, Janie,” he said in a soft, nervous voice. “It was childish and cruel of me. But when I snapped you with the towel, that was sadistic. It was a dirty thing to do.”

  “Maybe you were getting back at Junior.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. I just couldn’t take it when you said you loved me. I remember thinking what a tremendous responsibility it meant for me, and I got scared. I felt the same about you, you know, only I’d never dare say anything or do anything about it.”

  “It was a long time ago,” she said, and began to laugh without quite knowing why.

  “I’d like to think it was funny,” he said, “but it wasn’t really too long ago, Leah time.”

  “Yes. You can take one year and change it around with another and never know the difference. I know that.”

  “The rest of the country isn’t like that, I’ll tell you. You come back after a while and it’s all changed. People have been walking all over it and building horrible things everywhere. Let me tell you. I always think of Leah as a center—no, a starting place, a calm starting place. Maybe it’s more like the center of a whirlpool, where it’s relatively quiet. But I never forget that the hole’s right underneath. For me it would be safer out on the edge of it. I don’t like Leah. I feel wounded here. I feel like a mental basket case. But everything means more here. Little things I’d forget, ignore, just laugh at; here in Leah they paralyze me. For some reason everything’s real here.”

  “Weren’t things real in Paris?”

  “No, nothing’s real in Paris. Nothing matters there. There are some things I can’t imagine doing in Paris. I can’t imagine doing anything worth while or serious in Paris.”

  “But you could in Leah?” she asked. He turned onto the bridge that led back across the river to Northlee. In the pale fluorescent light on the modern bridge his face was greenish and unhealthy looking. She was glad he didn’t turn and look at her at that moment, and as she realized this she became terribly impatient with his self-consciousness.

  “Yes, I’m afraid I could in Leah,” he said.

  “You’re afraid,” she said.

  He turned toward her, and smiled. “I’m afraid of you, Janie. Always have been. Afraid of Junior, too. God knows why. If I met him anywhere else we’d get along. If I met you anywhere else I’d…” He stopped, then began to hum to himself.

  “You’d what?”

  “Well, you see, I didn’t meet you anywhere else, or I’d tell you straight out.”

  She made an impatient noise.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. “Look! It’s stupid. You’re more real to me. Too real to me.”

  Too real for you, she thought, and suddenly the picture of an old-fashioned can-opener came into her mind. John Cotter needed to be let out. At least she would then find if anything were inside. She kept silent as they w
ent through Northlee and the campus, remembering a poem she’d written, or started to write, when she was a high-school senior and wanted to go to college:

  Across the college campus

  In the gloom of winter night,

  A thousand men are sitting

  In their rooms of yellow light.

  Now that was a wonderful combination of yearnings: romance and higher education!

  “Why didn’t you go to Northlee?” she asked.

  “Because I didn’t want to commute. Things were crowded after the war. Number two: too close to Leah. But look, Janie, I don’t want to go on with this business. I’m going to shut up about it for good and all. God knows what I’ll talk about. No, let’s see. I used to think what I’d do….” He turned sharply onto a dirt road that led to Slocum Pond, Scrotum Pond to the students; a parking place.

  “Oh I” he said. “Do you mind if we park by the pond?”

  “No, I don’t mind. I’m not scared of you,” she said, and was immediately sorry. “What was it you used to think you’d do, Johnny?”

  “Well, it was another dream—daydream. You and I were caught in a place where there was a huge forest fire. We knew we were going to be burned up. No chance of getting out. So what to do? Believe me it was worth it.” He laughed and was embarrassed again.

  “It’s not too different now,” she said. The air was heavy with the smell of fire. He parked beside the little pond beneath a tall pine whose broad branches made whisking noises in the wind. Summer session at the college was over, and they had the pond to themselves.

  “You always seemed more valuable to me than Mike,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t know.”

  “Valuable?”

  “Mike was just…”

  “Mike just didn’t care about school. He wasn’t stupid. He just never lit anywhere.” She was afraid that she sounded angry, and didn’t want to give that impression.

  “I used to envy him in high school,” John said. “He was so damned free and easy. He was witty, in a kind of goosing way. How could he smile so damned easily?”