Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  “Don’t you think you should call 911?” I asked.

  Stefan grimaced, rifled his pockets for the cell phone, and dialed. “Someone’s been mugged,” he said, sounding amazingly calm. “Parker Hall, second floor. Yes, he’s conscious, bleeding a little, no broken bones, but I think— Okay.” Stefan sat down next to me. “Tell me what

  happened.”

  I tried to, but it sounded fuzzy. He worked at my cheek with the handkerchief, gently. “It’s a tiny cut,” he said under his breath. “I can’t believe it looked so bad. Does it hurt?”

  I felt exhausted and spaced out, not least because the men’s room looked even larger and more cavernous from the floor. What was I doing there?

  That’s when I started to shiver and pulled my coat tightly around me. Stefan held me and rocked me. “Last year,” I said, trying to block out what had happened right there in Parker Hall.

  “I know.”

  We heard a siren, and right after that, someone was

  stomping up the stairs, the noise echoing through the building like the T-Rex’s crushing steps in Jurassic Park. Stefan rose, and I might have giggled, because he seemed as expectant as a party host waiting for the first guest.

  The door was flung open—it was Detective Valley, of

  course, since all 911 calls went to SUM’s campus police, unfortunately, and Parker Hall seemed to be his beat.

  “Are you hurt?” he said. “Do we need an ambulance?”

  I shook my head. “Stunned.” I sat up straighter, as if practicing my posture.

  Valley walked over to the window and sat on the wide

  ledge, but he still seemed very high above me. I stood up, Stefan helping me, and leaned back against a sink, not half as dizzy as I would have expected to feel. Valley eyed me up and down, inspecting my face.

  “What were you doing here on a Saturday night?” His

  very flatness made the question sound leading and obscene.

  “I came to take a leak—”

  “We were checking our mail and picking up student

  papers,” Stefan interrupted.

  “Why tonight?”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you missing anything? Wallet? Keys?”

  I searched my pockets slowly, shook my head.

  “Okay. When did it happen?”

  I looked at Stefan because I wasn’t sure. He checked his watch and said, “Fifteen minutes ago.” He explained again that we were supposed to meet outside at the car, but I’d come up to the main office and then stopped at the john.

  “Did you see the assailant?”

  I bristled. “I told you, it was dark, and—”

  “I meant him.” He pointed at Stefan with his pen. “No?

  There’s only one staircase here, right? You came up the stairs, but nobody came down them?”

  Stefan thought about it, shook his head. “There’s another floor above this one.”

  “I know that,” Valley snapped. “Were you meeting

  someone?”

  “In the john?” Stefan asked, and I started to chuckle, remembering a Poirot episode on A&E where Captain Hastings had used the same tone of alarm when saying, “Kidnapped? In England?”

  Now Valley was really suspicious. “You think this is

  funny?”

  I sighed. “Can we finish this? I want to go to the clinic.

  Isn’t the KwikKare open Saturday nights?”

  “Okay. Was the assailant male? Female?”

  I gave him as much detail as I could muster: big, male, rough voice, very strong. “He told me to leave it alone.”

  “What did you think he meant?”

  I shrugged, eyeing the floor. It might be very nice to just curl up there and go to sleep. “Wait. Maybe he said, ‘Leave her alone.’”

  “Which is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Valley looked disgusted, and I answered his next few

  questions mechanically, thinking about what a lousy witness I would be in a criminal case. I could barely summon the details of what had happened to me less than—what?—twenty minutes ago now. How could I have been suspicious of Juno when she couldn’t replay what happened to her at the

  reception?

  “Juno,” I said, and from Valley’s and Stefan’s

  expressions, I realized I must have been unexpectedly loud.

  “Juno was attacked at the reception, now me.”

  “What’s the connection?” Valley asked, but neither

  Stefan nor I could think of one, and Stefan ended the interview by saying we had to go to the clinic to make sure I was all right.

  Valley nodded grimly. “I’ll want to talk to you again.” He left, and we trailed after him. I was surprised that walking and even handling stairs was so easy, but of course, Stefan was by my side, ready to catch me if I stumbled.

  When we were outside, I said, “I can walk to the clinic.”

  “Bullshit. Get in the car, and we’ll drive over.”

  We did. The clinic was only a few city blocks away, but light years in other ways because the building was so modern.

  The redbrick-and-glass box had replaced a crumbling neo-Gothic structure that had never recovered from being sacked in the 1960s by Ohio State fans after they lost a major football game against SUM. KwikKare was a new service, funded by alumni grants, obviously alums who knew how heavy the weekend drinking was, and how many students hurt

  themselves or others.

  The small waiting room was like any other doctor’s

  office, decorated in chairs that matched the lampshades that matched the wallpaper that matched the rugs, everything aqua, beige, and gray. Even the silk plants matched, in colors that I suppose were meant to be calming. Stefan checked me in with the efficient-looking nurse, showed them my faculty ID and insurance card, and I joined the half-dozen students who were watching or ignoring a movie playing on the widescreen TV. It seemed to be about talking dogs.

  I sunk into a haze, but popped out of it when I said, “Where are my papers?” Stefan assured me he’d brought the envelope down to the car. I studied the students, counting their piercings to keep myself focused. When I hit twenty, my name was called, which made me wonder if these kids were just waiting for friends, not patients themselves.

  Another young nurse led us down to a surprisingly

  cheerful room, despite all the medical equipment, thanks to framed posters of campus views. She took notes while Stefan helped me out of my coat and hung it on the wall. She left, and we waited for a while in silence, with conversations in the hallway drifting into the room.

  The sixtyish doctor who appeared was as fat as Orson

  Welles, but far more jovial. He reeked of cigarette smoke, and when he examined me, I felt like I was in a bar at three in the morning. He needed a shave, and bristly hair poked out of his ears and nostrils at crazy angles. I told him everything in the kind of stop-and-start way you always seem to have with a doctor, feeling apologetic and stupid for having left something out. He nodded as if faculty getting attacked on campus was nothing new. I was fascinated by his name tag: “Damon Tiplady.”

  Stefan got me out of my sweater, and the doctor felt my arms, chest, and back, listened to me breathe through his stethoscope, took my pulse. It all seemed disarmingly normal, though my pulse was quite high. “No surprise,” he said, turning to my cheek. He cleaned that off with an antiseptic, went “Huh” as he applied a butterfly-shaped bandage. “It’ll be a great bruise, but you don’t need stitches.” Eyeing Stefan, who hovered over me, he said, “Fight with an ex?”

  “Ex-what?” Stefan snarled.

  “Touchy, huh?” He shrugged. I’ll give you a prescription for Tylenol with codeine you can get filled at the pharmacy.

  You may need it to sleep. You’ll be sore, but you’ll live.” He waddled off after that was done, his parting words, “Stay home Saturday night. That’s my advice. It’s always safer.”

  Stefan put me to bed, tucke
d the sheets around me as if I were an invalid, and got me a large glass of Seagram’s. I drank greedily, aware that I hadn’t yet looked at myself in a mirror. I was afraid to see the face of someone who had been attacked so ignominiously.

  Stefan stayed dressed, as if he might have to rush out any minute for some emergency.

  “Is this hard for you?” I asked.

  “Of course it is.”

  “No, I mean, because of high school, when you were

  beat up?”

  “Oh.” He nodded heavily. “I wasn’t thinking about it, but things like that don’t go away, no matter how old you are.”

  “How long before I forget all the crap that’s gone on at SUM?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe never.”

  I was beginning to feel like Ethan Frome, whose “plate was heaped up with trouble.”

  “How’s your headache?”

  “I’m angry more than anything else. Look at all the shit we have to put up with, and now somebody beats me up, too?

  God, if Sharon weren’t sick, I’d call her, but—”

  “She’d just quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail at you,” Stefan said with a sly smile.

  “Which line?”

  “‘Run away—run away!’”

  I slept dreamlessly and very late, and Stefan brought me breakfast in bed Sunday morning: buttermilk blueberry pancakes with turkey sausages. I could smell a fire going, and Stefan had brought up a pad for the coffeepot, which he set on the night-stand on my side of the bed.

  “Good,” I said, “I’ll need it.”

  He set the tray down across my legs. “I’ve been thinking about last night,” he said. “About who attacked you. It wasn’t random.”

  “No shit.”

  “It’s connected to the Diversity Tree.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You were the most outspoken critic. Well, you and

  Cash. And didn’t you say you went into the main office to look at it? And whoever it was said, ‘Leave it alone’?”

  I reminded him that the phantom could have said “her.”

  “But if you’re right, do you think someone’s mounting guard on it? Where would he have been hiding?”

  “I don’t know. But doesn’t it stand to reason it was

  someone at the meeting?”

  “Great—that’s fifty suspects.”

  “You could probably take me and Juno off the list. Juno may be a whirling dervish, but she likes you. She wouldn’t do that or hire someone to do that.”

  “You actually said something nice about her.”

  Before he could answer, my phone rang. Stefan got it, smiled, and handed me the receiver.

  “Nick!” Juno shouted. “Have you found the assailant?”

  “Yours or mine?” I asked, and when she demanded an

  explanation, I gave it to her. She punctuated my account with howls of outrage: “Those fuckers!” That made it sound as if a whole team of assassins was on our tail.

  Then she summed it all up for me, neat and tidy: “Nick, you know what you need to do.” When she hung up, I didn’t repeat that admonition to Stefan, who would have scoffed at my plans.

  I snoozed on and off through the day, Stefan plying me with hot soup and an occasional brandy, which was much tastier than Tylenol with codeine would have been, and probably as effective.

  We watched TV, played some cards. It was just like

  being ten years old and home sick from school—except for the brandy, that is.

  Even when I finally showered, I was reluctant to look at myself in the full-length mirror, but I peeked. There were bruises scattered across my body, but nothing especially noteworthy, nothing you couldn’t get by yourself at the gym or at home. The one on my cheek, though, was starting to look like a George Lucas special effect, and it seemed ridiculous, given that I hadn’t even needed any stitches.

  Monday morning I ate breakfast quickly, told Stefan that I had some errands to run, and drove ten minutes away to the closest gun shop, one that I’d found in the yellow pages on Sunday without having let Stefan know I was looking it up.

  The weather was unusually mild for December in

  Michiganapolis, hovering near fifty, and so I only felt besieged inside, aching far more from the shock and humiliation of having been jumped, roughed up, and threatened than from any actual pain.

  The gun shop was in a fairly new stereotypically bland strip mall along with a branch of Old Kent Bank, a hobby and crafts store, a nail salon, something called the Divine Tabernacle of the Lord, and a pizza place whose pizza we’d never tried, even though it wasn’t part of a chain. Improbably, the gun shop was called “Aux Armes.”

  An old-fashioned bell over the door rang as I stepped inside, and from behind a low glass counter, an elderly short woman tossed me a cheerful “Good morning!” with as much energy as if it were a lifesaver and I were drowning. She was not at all what I expected. Pixyish, with permed silver hair, glasses on a chain, and a pale blue linen suit, she wore huge faux pearl earrings, necklace, and bracelet. I had expected the shop to be filled with grizzled, obese Bubba types in overalls who would take one look at me and pull out tire irons to beat against their open palms.

  “Is the name of your store a reference to the

  ‘Marseillaise?’” I blurted out.

  She smiled grandly and held out her arms as if

  welcoming a long-lost cousin. “Why, of course, young man.

  What else could it be? My husband and I wanted to appeal to a better class of customer, though of course we’d never turn away anyone who pronounced it Ox Arms. I’m Jasmine

  Fennebresque.” She spelled it for me. “I know, it’s a name better suited to someone’s nanny or a heroine in a book with Fabio on the cover, but what can you do?” She pointed to a small bulletin board where envelopes were tacked up. I approached the counter filled with guns in open cases and leaned closer to read. “You can’t imagine how people mangle my name.” The envelopes from various sources all had

  imaginative spellings of her first and last names, my favorite being “Fannybrisk.”

  I looked around me. The low-ceilinged space was

  perhaps twenty by thirty feet and looked like a very clean and well-run hardware store, except the shelves were packed with ammunition and cans and boxes whose purpose I couldn’t begin to guess. Along the far wall rifles and shotguns were displayed as reverently as golf clubs. It seemed almost pleasant. It helped that the store was so brightly lit and clean, and that there wasn’t anyone in it besides her, and that there were pots of potpourri out of sight. I sniffed. Freesia.

  “Now then, how can I help you today?”

  I wanted to joke and say, “I’m looking for something for a Christmas gift,” but it probably would have sounded serious to her. I settled for, “I don’t know anything about guns. Not much, anyway. Can you help a beginner?”

  “Of course I can,” she all but warbled. “I’d be

  delighted!” I could have been her grandson asking her to bake another batch of oatmeal cookies. “What were you looking for exactly?”

  “A gun.”

  “Yes, of course. For target practice? Personal safety?”

  She glanced discreetly at the bandage on my cheek and the bruise that seemed to leak out from under it.

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Semiautomatic or revolver?”

  I felt like I was in grade school, being hounded by a teacher armed with flash cards. “Uh…”

  “Semiautomatics have more fire power. And of course

  they’re safer.” She slipped a smallish, blunt, gray gun out from under the counter like a jeweler showing off a necklace.

  “Safer?”

  “Revolvers don’t have safeties on them, though the

  bullets are cheaper, and of course that’s always a

  consideration.” She went on to give me a perky mini-lecture, some of the details of which I knew from my reading of mysteries or from mov
ies, but most of it started to wheel and blur in my head like a flock of starlings. As her sweet voice poured forth details about calibers and stopping power and gun weight and recoil and racking and the local gun laws, I felt almost paralyzed to be in a gun shop at all. I couldn’t imagine what my parents or Sharon or Stefan would say. Off to her left was a small poster labeled “Ten Commandments of Gun Ownership.” The first one read, “Treat every gun as if it’s loaded.”

  “Now, if you’re learning how to use a gun for the first time,” she said, “I’d recommend this.” She pulled out what looked like a cannon compared to the others. “It’s a .357

  magnum.”

  “Dirty Harry,” I said.

  “Indeed. People make fun of it, but look at the barrel.”

  She held it out for me, and when I took it from her, I was amazed at how heavy it was, but also at how strangely natural it felt in my hand. Had I expected it to sear my flesh the way holy water was supposed to scar a vampire?

  “With a longer barrel,” she said, “there’s more to sight down, and you might find it easier to learn how to aim and fire.” Then she went on about the bullets, though she stopped when she could sense I had reached information overload.

  “There’s a lot to absorb,” she said kindly. “Let me give you some lovely reading material to study.” She reached behind her to a rack that held thick, glossy brochures like the kind you’d find at a car dealership, but these all had names like Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Walther, Ruger. “And here’s information about local firing ranges, gun safety courses.”

  She added several fliers and mimeographed brochures to the pile.

  “I’ll have to come back,” I said, thinking I’d need a tutor to wade through all that stuff.

  “Of course.” She studied me, but not because of the bruise. “I’ve seen your photo in the Tribune. You’re that professor,” she concluded. “The one at the college who keeps getting mixed up with criminals.”

  I nodded.

  “It sounds very exciting! And dangerous. You’ll be much better off with a gun.”

  “That’s what a friend tells me. She owns a Glock.”

  Mrs. Fennebresque nodded sagely, as if I were a novice sailor talking about an acquaintance’s yacht. When I thanked her and started to leave, she said, “Thank you for stopping by, and remember, there are no evil guns, only evil people.”