Town Burning

by Thomas Williams

  William Cotter came back upstairs rubbing his hands and arms with handfuls of stringy toilet paper. He still looked a little guilty.

  “I just had a fight,” John said.

  “You did!”

  “I won, too,” John said. His father threw the toilet paper away and sat down to listen, lighting a cigarette quickly and expertly with his Zippo. The gesture was very youthful, like that of a college boy who is proud of his expertness with cigarettes. John told him about the fight. “I looked kind of mean,” he said.

  “You don’t really know how you looked. I mean you just felt that way,” William Cotter said quickly.

  “No, I’ve always fought differently. I can generally get a guy down, but I never felt so expert about a fight. This fight looked good, you know? I felt sort of professional. It was too easy.”

  “Keith Joubert’s a good-sized boy….”

  “Look,” John said hesitantly, “you know how I’ve always felt about Leah. You have, too—felt the same way, I mean. I think you have….” He could tell that his father was becoming excited by this intimacy. A little afraid, perhaps, yet eager. It had never happened before, and for a moment he thought he had better veer off, then went on, “I mean we’re both sort of misfits in Leah.” He hoped his father would not admit everything for the sake of the moment, and went on without waiting for an answer, “Only, I can take off when it gets bad, and you can’t.”

  “That’s right. We’re both the same!”

  Do you believe it? John wanted to ask. “You’re a misfit too,” he said carefully.

  “Don’t I know it!” his father said.

  “But do you know what kind? Why?”

  “I’m no businessman, Johnny, like Bruce was. Is,” he added.

  “I don’t mean that.”

  His father looked away, a suggestion of pain on his face. Then, surprisingly , he said, “Seems to me you’re still feeling a little mean.”

  “I could be a businessman.”

  “I hope you can. I hope you will,” William Cotter said.

  “But I don’t mean that. I mean the way we get along with people. We aren’t really treated right. We aren’t! They think they know everything and they really don’t.”

  “Maybe they really do, Johnny.”

  “They don’t know anything about me! I’m different when I’m not in Leah. I get along fine, like everybody else. In Leah they look down their goddam noses and I can hear them think. That’s why I picked a fight with Keith Joubert—because the son of a bitch has had himself convinced for years that he could lick me. Well, he can’t lick me, but I’ll bet he’s home right now convincing himself all over that he can. I could kill that bastard and he’d still think he could lick me! What the hell can you do?”

  “I thought it was Junior Stevens who used to pick on you, Johnny.”

  “Oh, sure. But he can lick me.”

  “It seems to me,” William Cotter said diffidently, with a hesitant sort of respect, “that most people don’t always figure whether they can lick somebody else or not.”

  “They do here; I can see them thinking it. But that isn’t what I mean. I don’t want to be king of the hill or anything like that, I just want to make them stop judging me all the time. I want to be a zero, an unknown quantity.”

  “You know, Johnny, lots of people go all through their lives without ever having a fight.”

  “So I feel persecuted. The only thing is, I never feel persecuted unless I’m in this one particular little town. I swear I get along perfectly everyplace else. Nobody ever gave me a hard time—for long—even in the Army. Why the hell should Leah do it to me?”

  “You were born here.”

  “I’ve thought of that, too. Did you ever think you could go somewhere else and start over with a clean slate?”

  “I used to, Johnny. I even thought I could be a businessman, once. I don’t believe it any more.”

  “You believe that saying—that you can’t run away from yourself? You know—you get somewhere new and there you are, exactly the same as you were before you took off. I don’t. I think maybe you’re the same, but the place isn’t the same and the people don’t look at you the same, and that’s part of what you are—how the people look at you.” He put his feet up on the desk, noticing that his father liked the gesture. He had been a little surprised at his father’s attitude. Perhaps a little disappointed that his father hadn’t gone along all the way as he thought he would. He hadn’t expected any difference of opinion at all.

  “I want you to stay here, Johnny. I know you’re interested in more than a contracting business. I know you went to Paris and to college and all that. I mean, I went to college too, but not the way you did—to learn all that stuff. Now, I know you know a lot more than I do about a lot of things. But I always wanted you to come back here to Leah. I’ll tell you, Johnny. I always liked you better than Bruce. It was hard to like Bruce. I mean I love Bruce and all that. You know that, and I’d always do anything I could for you two boys, but what I want to say is that I always got along better with you—not as well as I’d want to, because, as they say, you’re a different generation and all that, but you weren’t so mean as Bruce could be. He was like he was always getting revenge for something, and God knows I never did anything to Bruce—I don’t know. I gave him a spanking now and then, but I never did it mean. I gave you a few, too, but I was never mean about it, or really mad at you, was I?”

  “No. You were always fair.”

  “See? I was always fair to you boys! I was always fair! So I can’t figure it out. What was Bruce so mad about? What did I ever do to Bruce to make him so mean? He could die and never say a good word to me. And his mother, the same to her. God knows she never gave him—or you, Johnny—anything but pure one-hundred-percent love. Now I don’t give a tinker’s damn about the town, Johnny. That don’t worry me one little bit. Live and let live. I just want to be a father to you two boys and have you two boys feel I’m your father. Is that so much to ask?” He fooled with a cigarette butt, then decided that it was long enough to light. His hands were trembling.

  “It seems to me that it isn’t something you can ask for,” John said coolly. As he said it the coolness vanished, and he interrupted himself, raising his voice to make it seem that he hadn’t finished the sentence: “Like that,” he said. “Like that! I mean it’s…of course I feel you’re my father. You’ve always done anything I wanted—given me anything I wanted—and Bruce, too.”

  William Cotter slumped back in his chair. “Of course you can’t just up and ask for…that,” he said.

  “No! No!” John said desperately. “You don’t have to ask for it. You can’t talk to most fathers. Let me tell you! Nobody ever talks with his father the way I’m talking to you. I’m telling you! There just isn’t any communication at all. You don’t know. None of my friends ever talk with their fathers. They’ve got it all figured out what the old man will say already and they’re never wrong. They’ve heard it all before. I mean it!”

  “But they…” his father said, “But they…” and he looked at his wrist watch. “Christ! It’s midnight! Gladys will be worried I got burned up. If I call her she’ll have a fit before she answers the phone. I’ll see you later, Johnny. Can you take it till, say, three? Walk around the yard once in a while and just take a look.” He spoke quickly, as if he were out of breath, gathered up his frogs’ legs and left, leaving John with a sick welling of pity, a pang of inadequacy so sharp he wanted to bang his head on the desk.

  The wind had stopped for the first time since he’d come home to Leah. The silence hummed in his ears and he could clearly make out the cracklings and snappings of Poverty Street, the pumper-engines and occasional shouting. He could see the huge red pillar of smoke climb straight up. Then the whole sky began to fill with smoke, and the stars went out. The air along the ground began to fill, as if the whole sky were crammed with smoke, and the brown haze had nowhere to go except down along the ground. He got down on his knees and lo
oked up along the railroad siding. As he watched, the smoke settled until it held a level about one foot from the ground. The ceiling of Leah had fallen, and a reddish umber glazed all lights and bright surfaces. The streetlights retired inside their bulbs and glowed faintly. The oppressive stink of burned tarpaper and paint mixed with the once-pleasant odor of burning leaves and poisoned it, made it cloying and suffocating. He went back into the office and shut the windows.

  He tried to read a circular on the installation of aluminum drainpipes, then an illustrated manual on the installation of Heatilator fireplaces, then an expensively bound book of samples and specifications of asphalt siding. All of the flyers were grimy, and hundreds more were piled in one corner of the office, beneath the counter. Some were full of pictures of pretty girls, and he pulled them all out to look at the grimy, pretty girls.

  None of the symmetrical, characterless smiles were Jane’s. None of the famished, angular bodies were hers. He kicked the pile back into the corner. “Hell of a note,” he said. Then he tried it a little louder, “Hell of a note! HELL OF A NOTE!” he screamed into the empty office. He began aimlessly pulling out the drawers of Bruce’s desk. One was locked. A new Yale doorlock had been installed in it. The desk was oak, but the locked drawer was on the bottom and the bottom of the drawer was flimsy plywood. He pried it out with his knife, and the contents of the drawer fell to the floor. He looked around guiltily, but Bruce was not there. A metal box, not locked, sat on top of a book—a standard account book in red-and-black binding with the word Record stamped in gold on the cover. The metal box was heavy. He opened it cautiously and stared for a minute at a dark, angular pistol. Carefully oiled and set into a sheepskin form, the blue pistol waited coldly and silently. It seemed to create its own alien darkness, as if he had stared suddenly into a nest of snakes. He picked it out and worked the slide. A fat round jumped out and rolled on the desk top. He removed the clip and ejected the chambered shell. On the left side of the slide he read the small, delicate stampings: Ortgies Patent. 7.65 mm. and a long German word he didn’t know, but which seemed in its combining long harshness the perfect comment upon the cruel, beautiful Germanness of the weapon.

  He held the pistol until it began to warm in his hand; then unloaded the clip and wiped everything, even the shells, with the sheepskin and put them back in the box with the gun. He opened the record book and read, in Bruce’s large round handwriting: “Whoever breaks in here, do not go any farther or I will find out who did it and kill you. I mean it.”

  He knew that Bruce probably just about did mean it. If Bruce had been—he almost thought, “alive”—if Bruce had been around, up and around, John knew he would have taken many precautions before going any farther. He knew very little about his brother. Bruce never talked honestly or confidingly about himself, and John realized that he had never been very interested in any of Bruce’s secrets. Just getting along with him, or away from him, had taken up most of his time.

  On the second green, lined page, Bruce had written, “I am writing this all down so I can remember what I thought and what I wanted when I thought it. Bruce Cotter, Oct., 1946.”

  Eleven years ago. He leafed through the book quickly. It was crammed with words, right over the margins on all the pages, and the last entry was made on the night Bruce went to the hospital. John held it in both hands and found himself shivering. A sentence had jumped out at him: “Nobody gives a good sweet Jesus if I die.” He began to read from the beginning: “They are all getting ready for that jerk to come home in triumph from the whorehouses of Manila. I am supposed to welcome our hero with modesty befitting a slacker who just stayed home through this ‘glorious living hell,’ etc. etc. etc.! and tell the little mama’s boy what a hero he is. I hope he has syphilis. Let him try to get along in civilian life and see what a flop he turns out to be! He had better not try to tell me any war stories!

  “Five more years if there is no depression and I can take off.

  “Figured Minetta Randolf is about 18 yrs. old. One more time and I think she will spread for me.

  “My father is not only lazy, he is stupider than anybody. Freddie the Idiot would be more help. Eightball fired—he is stupider than my father, if that is possible.”

  No secrets there—except about taking off, and Minetta. And yet it still seemed like indecent exposure. Because Bruce seemed so fearful and predatory, he should have been capable of a deadlier hatred, more vindictiveness than the crude, childish words revealed.

  “He had better not try to tell me any war stories,” seemed so pitifully inadequate, so much like a small boy who could think of nothing to say.

  “I would like to see Mrs. Rutherford raped by a buck nigger in front of the Women’s Club with the Eastern Stars as guests. Ha. Ha.”

  That was better for Bruce. But the “Ha. Ha.” at the end…

  He read on. So much poison, so much hatred. John began to skip pages, scanning the repetitious passages of spite. Every once in a while he came upon references to Bruce’s “taking off.” “Three more years and I can take off…” set in the middle of a paragraph, or what would have been a paragraph if Bruce had used indentations. Minetta Randolf was mentioned often, and her father: “Howard Randolf is a stupid loud mouth failure. He didn’t even know what we were doing downstairs. Her mother knew, the dirty old bitch. She was enjoying it and her own daughter! I was enjoying it until Minetta started crying and I got the hell out. I didn’t think she was the type to cry about it. Says she loves me. I bet.”

  Bruce hated New England. New England was too cosy, he said. But the subject of Minetta’s loving him evidently fascinated him: “Right afterwards she always says she loves me. Sometimes she cries. She gets soft all over. It is funny. All of a sudden she gets as soft as goose down. Her lips get all sticky and soft. She feels like she is going to turn to water and run right out from under me. Maybe that means she means it. Ha! Whore in Montreal said the same thing. Minetta says it all the time lately. She said I just look at her and she melts. Her mother is hinting around we should be engaged. Ha. Ha.

  “Pretty soon now and I can go look for the place.”

  This must have meant the taking-off idea. John skipped through the book looking for it.

  “I want to work for it, don’t want it to be so easy. I want to climb mountains, get in ambushes, have to kill men for it. I want to ride a horse and carry a pistol, a big pistol right out in the open where everybody does and nobody thinks twice. That is where I want to go. I have to fight and struggle and almost get killed finding it or it does not seem worth anything when I get it. Like in the dream when I was flying the secondhand Kaiser-Frazer, hell of a funny name for an airplane. God I was happy!! It was early in the morning in China, with the Flying Tigers or something. This great big Junkers transport came over with the black crosses on it. It was a hospital plane, only it was a fake hospital plane full of German troops. Machineguns sticking out. I left her in the doorway. I loved her. She waited for me, beautiful, passionate, she loved me. I went out and warmed up the secondhand Kaiser-Frazer and took off after the Junkers transport. I shot it down. They hit my plane, too. I flew back just as the sun came up yellow and clean. Hot steamy morning but cool, sort of. I flew back around the field and the huts and the clean place. I was afraid when I shot down the plane but that made it feel so good and clean when I landed and she was waiting for me and all the congratulations and comradeship of the brave men, too!”

  John shut the book with the sudden, real knowledge that if Bruce knew he had read that, Bruce would kill him. Closer to Bruce at that moment than he had ever been, for a fearful second he felt Bruce’s presence in the office. He thought of the pistol, made a panicky motion toward it as if to snatch it out of its box. Then he got up and walked around nervously, looking out of the windows. When he first came home, he remembered, his father had looked up, seen his face in the window and been afraid that it was Bruce. He clearly remembered the quick look of fear on his father’s face.

  But the reco
rd book was there, open and defenseless. Bruce must have believed that he would come through the operation or he would have destroyed it. Maybe. Maybe he couldn’t do it even if he wanted to. It would be a form of suicide to destroy the only sincere expression of himself, his love, his desire to live.

  The fear had gone, and in its place was an unfamiliar emotion toward Bruce he wanted at first to resent, to ward off. His brother, his flesh and blood—the old words out of a past mostly read about, mostly felt but not experienced—now seemed forceful as a blow. He had been too busy escaping the man to be aware of his humanity. He had pitied more any number of tragic strangers, objects of fate and the newspapers. And yet his relationship with Bruce had been intensely personal, in a way. It had always been between the two of them alone: no mediators, not his father and mother, surely, had ever entered into it. No judges, no rules—they had fought each other all their lives, guided only by their own wit and strength. No quarter had ever been given, and he had been as guilty as Bruce.

  He had never suspected in Bruce a desire for happiness, even in fantasy, and he knew why—he himself was capable of the same destructive, eternal hatred. They both hated Leah and wanted to escape. That much they had in common. Bruce had never made it, though. The scalpels, bludgeons against the infinite complexity of his brain, had left him comatose, permanently deranged. He would most likely die.

  They had an attendant for Bruce now, a pale creature of the night in a dead-white uniform who sat at the side of the bed and listened to his breath, turned him over and pressed the feeding tubes through his nose every two hours. Bruce’s eyes remained closed and would be closed forever—except for the impersonal brutality of examination, the doctors’ purposeful fingering, the eye-ball living and bright but insensitive as a grape in the needle of light.