Forty Martyrs

by Philip F. Deaver

  “Hey,” Lowell said to him, “this is good duty. It’s pretty hot on the other end.”

  “You got that right,” the fireman said. His dirty yellow fireman’s jacket had the name “Burroughs” on it. “Listen, you gotta get back behind the tape, sir.” He pointed.

  “What?”

  “You gotta get back behind the yellow tape down there. See it?” He pointed at the perimeter the police had set up. “We’re clearing the building of people.”

  “No, no, I’ve gotta go in the building.” Lowell smiled at him.

  “You’ve gotta what?”

  “There’s not a lot of time. I’ve got to get some stuff. I’ll hurry.”

  Burroughs was young, the age of a lot of the older college students. “Sir, I’m telling you, get away from the building.” The fireman’s gloved hand was pointing the way.

  Right then Lowell punched him—hard, just below the ear, a quick right jab––and then shoved him over the porch’s pipe railing, ax and all. It was about a six-foot drop squarely onto his helmet, the fall broken by shrubs. Lowell’s hand hurt because the punch caught a little bit of the helmet, but he was in the building.

  He bounded up the first flight. The smoke in the air was poison—the one short breath he took told him he better not take another. On the second floor, he looked down the long hall toward the fire, a rolling ball of red-orange rage in a havoc of black smoke. There seemed to be a lot of noise and no noise all at once. At the top of the next flight, he was across the hall from his office door. No keys, of course, and needing air, he didn’t take time to try the door. He went right into it with his shoulder. Old Main’s doors were old, tall, and heavy, and this one held with the first hit. He stepped back and went at it again, this time like there was no tomorrow. When the door popped he ran inside and quickly pushed it shut.

  The air was acrid, but he could breathe okay. He stepped up to his file cabinet. In the past he’d never have attempted to move this monster, but in the past, of course, he’d never considered punching a fireman. He grabbed it and would not accept that it was heavy and wouldn’t move. He shoved it with his shoulder, all the way to the window. He tipped it so that the upper part rested on the windowsill, then lifted the goddamned thing from the bottom, a five-drawer steel cabinet chock full, and blew it right through the closed window. It fell three stories, landed in the bushes with a crunch. Through the destroyed window, he saw his daughter going crazy out by the yellow tape. He waved. “Hi, Baby,” he said to himself. He saw Veronica, too, wearing a bright yellow blouse. She was staring toward him, her arms folded across her, motionless in a group of people under the line of maples that bordered the north drive. He jerked the cords out and tossed the computer, making sure it didn’t land on the cabinet. Then he tossed down the cords. He heaved his father’s sheathed hunting knife in the direction of his daughter, who scampered under the yellow tape to fetch it. He grabbed his laptop, the hard copy of the anthropology dissertation, the zip drive, his blue and orange Fighting Illini coffee cup, then from his desk drawer his wedding ring that he’d had cut off after he gained weight, his grandfather’s magnifying glass, a great picture of Veronica from the desk, a picture of his parents from off the wall above his bookcase. He put it all in a copy-paper box. Smoke was coming up through the floor. He looked around for what else. The books. The painting with the peephole. The desk chair he’d bought himself when he turned fifty. He grabbed a loose pile of CDs that was part of the clutter on a bookshelf. He could hear people yelling outside. Smoke was whipping past the windows. What else could he carry? What wasn’t he remembering? The fire was coming. Sirens. The place was a blur. Goodbye. Goodbye to all of it.

  He decided he didn’t want to come face-to-face with the fireman when he exited the building. Burroughs would probably still be mad. Box under his arm, he took a breath and with a free hand opened the door to the great old secret spiral staircase—at last, a use for it. Looking in, the first thing he noticed was that the air in the stairwell was still good. The second thing he noticed was Wally Brown, cowering in the shadows a few steps down in the dark.

  “Hey, bro,” Wally muttered, looking up at him.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” Lowell said.

  The ordinariness of the question made Wally laugh. “Not too bad,” he said. Tears streamed down his sooty face.

  •

  Lowell and Wally spent the night of the fire in the little Douglas County jail, Lowell because he hit the fireman and Wally because he burst out of the building with the assailant himself––blasted through the locked but decrepit side door at the bottom of the spiral stairs with his ample lowered shoulder. Lowell followed him out carrying the box of stuff from his office. Deputies “subdued” them, so the newspaper read a few days later, and hauled them off. Around seven that evening, Misty came by the jail with Lowell’s checkbook, some jeans (blue), and a sweatshirt. Lowell was still wearing his running shorts. He was escorted out by a female deputy.

  “My goodness,” his daughter said, using her mock-motherly tone, looking at his handcuffs. “Are those real?”

  They both laughed for a minute, until the nice deputy jerked his chain. “You got your clothes. Let’s go.”

  Before he went back, he slipped the closed loop of his arms over his daughter’s head and down around her shoulders and hugged her. “How’s your mom?” he said.

  “That’s not allowed,” the nice deputy advised them.

  “Mom’s a little stressed out,” Misty said as he was being towed back to the lock-up. “She wasn’t about to come over here with me, I’ll tell you that.” She gave him a “chin up” smile just before the big door bammed closed.

  The following morning, a Sunday, the judge phoned the jail from home before church, talked to the sheriff, who passed the message along. The judge said he could understand what Lowell did and why. Still, he said, there was the matter of a public servant who was injured trying to do his job. He assessed Lowell a fine of four hundred dollars, to be paid directly to the Brotherhood of Tuscola Volunteer Firefighters’ Fund. The judge had Fireman Burroughs go over to the jail, him and his wife, so Lowell could apologize. It was a small town, and people did what the judge said. Lowell came out of the lockup with his wallet, belt, running clothes in a paper sack, and female deputy escort. He handed the check directly to Burroughs, who was standing there, exhausted, gauze taped over his eyebrow, now looking smaller in his ironed Levis, farmer’s tan, wet hair slicked back, his young wife next to him glaring at the lunatic who’d hit her husband.

  Lowell looked them both in the eye. “Sorry,” he said.

  •

  Nobody was sure why Wally was arrested. He’d been with Lowell in the building, so they took him in, figuring they’d sort it out later. Fraternities, the whole football team, a lot of the faculty who had offices there, had run into the burning building, helped save critical records, grabbed the heirlooms and books they couldn’t live without. None of them was hauled to jail but Lowell and Wally. That next morning the judge let Wally go, no questions asked.

  That morning, the community was shell shocked, of course. It was the biggest fire ever, bigger than when the Douglas Hotel burned and left the downtown looking like it was missing its front teeth. A single-file line of cars streamed down Main Street to stare at the ruin still burning in its own crater.

  That night Lowell and Veronica went to bed early. He hadn’t slept much in jail the night before. Though he was stressed and distracted, the music coming from Misty’s room was comforting. He could feel the safety of his home and people. Within their locked bedroom, he and Veronica made love. Afterwards, after a civilized interval in the dark, Veronica yawned her affected yawn, which was how she would begin a discussion she really needed with an attempt at casualness. “Did you think about us when you ran in there?” She was standing at the bedside, a shadow sliding back into her nightgown.

  “I guess I didn’t, no.” He knew he didn’t. There’d been no reflection. “I was sure I could
get in and out fine if I didn’t stand there and talk about it.” In the dark, the room threatened to capsize like those nights he came to bed drunk, but this time that wasn’t it. “Do we have to talk now?” he heard himself say.

  “Did you think about your daughter?”

  There’d been a picture of Misty as a baby in his desk drawer. Had he grabbed it? “I saw you both, out the window. You were on my side. Misty was jumping up and down.”

  “In horror.”

  “She was cheering. Stop it. And you—you were with me all the way.”

  “Horror, my love. Bushels of it. I watched them arrest you! Oh my God!”

  They were quiet for a while. She went to the bathroom. “It was a new low, babe,” she said, splashing her face with water. That made him thirstier, and he got up and he filled his bedside glass, though something stronger would have been nice. He forgave himself the lapse. You aren’t human if you don’t think that after a fire. Then they were back in bed. She said, “Did you listen to the messages? People called all day. Buddy Blue phoned at the crack of dawn. He was laughing. He goes, ‘Good luck saving a computer by dropping it three floors into the dirt’.”

  Lowell laughed. “Such a cynic.” Buddy’s real name was Wilbur Gray, Sociology Department, a marathoner. He was too quick to run with, but he and Lowell played a lot of racquetball.

  “Vasco Whirly phoned saying he was ‘proud to know you’—those were the words.” After leaving the college and the mine, Vasco had become sort of a local shaman. Every town needs one.

  “Vasco said that he and a couple of your other jock pals got your filing cabinet and stowed it where the college is storing things for the time being, and not to worry.”

  “Some of these people actually like me.”

  “Mike O’Meara called, too. He apparently helped Vasco. He said he got in the office before you, rescued a few of your things. So that’s good. He said he left the office door unlocked.”

  “Hmm. That explains some things,” Lowell said. Such as how Wally got in.

  “We all love you, crazy man. Think how we’d have felt if today we were matching burnt bone to dental records.”

  “Okay.” Despite Veronica’s attempts at distraction, Lowell was upset. He was thinking about Wally Brown in the old stairwell, Carol in the driver’s seat out on the countryside on that day. Carol’s pretty legs in her nice dress, foot-tapping, eyes averted, observed through the hole in the waiting room wall. He was thinking about all that was confused and teetering, all that he didn’t know, and all that was lost.

  “And by the way,” Veronica whispered to him. “Misty’s worried about you. Now that you’re off the sauce, she wants you to live.”

  Lowell stayed quiet.

  “So wear the heart monitor, will you?”

  “Grrrrrrr.”

  She laughed and was apparently waiting for more of a response, but none came. “You’re off somewhere, aren’t you?” Lowell knew his distraction made Veronica’s world uncertain. She stirred and started talking. “Do you remember that time in Yugoslavia when we got so hungry in the middle of the night that we stopped and heated a can of stew in the ditch?”

  “Dinty Moore.”

  “We were insane.”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  She sighed and snuggled for a few minutes. “Lowell. Do you remember in Charlottesville in the townhouse when I caught you panning the high rise across the street with the binoculars?”

  They were the Rolling Thunder binoculars. Damn. Gone in the fire. A small camera, too, with half a roll of pictures in it. Lowell sighed.

  “Did you want to see a naked woman?”

  Charlottesville. Okay. What was he doing that night, he now began to wonder. “A naked woman would have been nice, I guess. I think what I was doing, I was looking at slices of lives. Like Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Or something. I don’t know.”

  “You felt guilty about it. You tried to hide the binoculars when I walked in.”

  Yes, he supposed he did. “Honey, I was curious about how people acted. I was like a dog that eats grass. I had an experiential vitamin deficiency.”

  “Now you do all this leering for a living.”

  Quiet a while in the dark. “That’s clever, but inexact.”

  “I guess if there’s anything good to come out of this, it’s that your sneaky little peek-a-boo painting at the office is torched.”

  Sometimes Lowell swore to himself that she had mental telepathy. He wouldn’t tell her right away that he’d saved it.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked him. “You’ve got to talk this through, honey.”

  “I’m thinking about Wally.” Actually, he was thinking about Carol. “I’m thinking about AA. Vasco and Mike lugging my filing cabinet.”

  “Wally looked real peculiar when the two of you scrambled out of there.” Now Veronica sighed. “For friends, you have this whole brotherhood of wounded weirdoes.”

  Prozac. Lowell hadn’t called Wally’s doctor.

  “So what else are you thinking about?”

  He stood up abruptly, went into the bathroom for some more water. He looked at his very thirsty, rumpled, transparently whackedout self in the bathroom mirror. “You know,” he said, “later on that night Wally was fine—quite lucid and funny.”

  “You mean, in the slammer?”

  “Well, yes, we were in jail.” They laughed. He climbed back in bed, sitting up. “He was on the upper bunk in our cell. He was quoting Chuang Tzu, as translated by Merton, about finding happiness by not pursuing it. And some Stoic from one hundred years AD about how we must wish for things to happen as they do happen instead of how we want them to.”

  “Pretty good,” she said. “He was confessing, right?”

  “Wally was one overeducated prisoner, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Where was Carol? Are the kids with her?”

  “I don’t have a clue about Carol,” Lowell said much too quickly, though he truly didn’t. Veronica had him all self-conscious about Carol now. The room turned again. In the old days, Lowell kept a bottle behind the furnace in the basement.

  “Do you remember when Shadrak—back in Muncie, at the Sycamore house—when he chased that rabbit and ran into that wire fence at full tilt and knocked himself out?” Veronica was chuckling. “What a goof. I miss him.”

  Their common past. Ballast. Shadrak, their malamute, stolen in Charlottesville. It reminded Lowell of a picture of him and Shadrak next to their old blue VW, on the office bookshelf. Had he saved it? “Honey, do you know where that box is, that I carried out yesterday?”

  “It’s in the trunk of the Toyota, all safe,” she said. She stretched and then was quiet a while. Maybe a yawn. “Mike said he grabbed a camera you had in the office, a few other things. He said give him a call.”

  “Hmm. There’s hope for a few things then,” Lowell mumbled. “Hope is good.” Things had been going right there for a while—so it seemed, looking back. But he was back in the struggle now, for sure, one-day-at-a-timing it.

  Veronica cleared her throat a few times. Something was on her mind, and it was going to get said, of that Lowell was certain. “Also,” she said, her voice a little bigger than it had been, “I think the jury is in on the Browns. Since they’ve actively figured in your two most recent near-death experiences that I know of.” She kissed him. “Don’t you think? Carol needs a new shrink, somebody who’ll kick her around a little.” He felt Veronica looking at him, her eyelashes brushing his skin as she blinked. Finally, she said, “Lowell. You know Wally burned down the fucking building, right?”

  Okay. He needed a drink. How bad would it get? Veronica, in their dark bedroom, her dark French beauty and voice that he loved, her smile that he knew was there even in the absence of light—her hands that he remembered from when she was seventeen, twentyone, thirty, forty, fifty, her arm across him, her legs braided into his, dear God the years—she pulled him down into the covers. “There’s tons of hope, babe.” She got hi
m face to face with her. He could hear the thump of rock ‘n’ roll coming down the hall from Misty’s room, or was that his heart beating. Then the sheets flew away, and Veronica rolled on top of him. He looked up into the dark where he knew her eyes were. She was staring down at him. She bent toward him, lips close to his ear. “I love the Stoics, don’t you?” It made them laugh. “Remember the blue VW?” she said. “That perfect color of blue?” She leaned way back. “God,” she whispered toward the ceiling. “Remember the Alps, honey?” she said in a hot whisper. He took deep breaths. He had ahold of her. Her hands pushed down on his chest, she lifted and came down again, and then very much in earnest she started to move.

  COAL GROVE

  Nick was glad it was raining. Walking Dave, his dog, long before a June dawn, passing under streetlights that showed a medium downpour (not the annoyance of drizzle nor the thrill of rain in windy sheets), Nick got a glimpse of his own shadow, and it reminded him of Buck, his son—how the shadow walked, how the head was carried, the shoulders when they were properly back, the odd attitude it conveyed, a strange combination of optimism and nothaving-a-single-clue. Rain falling, Nick tried to hum a happy tune but he couldn’t remember one. Buck, twenty-three, was home in bed. It was just the two of them these recent years. And Dave.

  Nick wore a bucket hat, the wet canvas brim soaked and dripping. Dave, the chocolate brown Springer Spaniel trotting along ahead of him on the leash, didn’t give a shit if the rain was coming down. Water was his thing. He rounded his ears, and his eyes got blinky, and maybe his head was lower, but overall he was the same old Dave wet as he was dry, watching the bushes for adventure and lining up to piss his whole dog-autobiography on everything that was upright and would stand for it. Rain didn’t addle him like it did some dogs, so why should it addle Nick? Occasionally Dave glanced back for the approval of the dog-slave on the other end of the tether. It was a forty-five minute walk Nick had devised, across the campus and along the canal that fed into the Hocking, and then back into the neighborhood and down the streets among the big old Midwestern deaver houses. They walked fairly fast this morning, and Nick mostly ignored the dog and thought about Carol. He’d be seeing her today.