What Burns

by Dale Peck

  I told him I didn’t believe him.

  Neither did the court.

  Why should I believe you?

  Look, the reason why I went to jail is cause if I hadn’t of been in that house your mother wouldn’t’ve died. Everything else is just kind of incidental. If it makes you feel better to think I pushed your mom down the stairs, fine: I pushed your mom down the stairs.

  I suppose I liked that fact least of all.

  Mead Pritchard was the one person nobody ever talked about in Group, Mead Pritchard and Howard Firth. Howard Firth had served seven years for shooting Mead Pritchard in the stomach during the course of a liquor store holdup, and when he was released Mead Pritchard had staked out Howard Firth’s front porch for several weeks in an effort to befriend him, and then he’d disappeared, later to be found at the bottom of Pheasant Pond with an unopened sack of cement tied to his scarred belly. In the absence of Mead Pritchard, Howard Firth’s name never came up, but when Mead’s did people tended to say he did what he had to do. I wondered if they would say that about me, but I doubted it.

  I sensed my interest in Group waning after Shen finally told me how my mother died, but for some reason my interest in him seemed to grow; though I continued to go to meetings, I’d sometimes sneak out during a coffee break. I’d drive home and park down the block, and then I’d stand outside the windows spying on Shen as he watched TV with the lights off or slept with the lights on, until the night I came home and saw neither lamplight nor the TV’s flickering glow. And I admit: the first emotion I felt was relief, but it was almost immediately blotted out by loss. I thought Shen had finally left me, but something, either nineteen years in prison or the few months we’d spent together, had skewed his sense of priorities. Shenandoah Waters could have gotten away if he’d wanted, but he chose to get laid first.

  My first thought was that the woman in Shen’s bed looked like the kind of woman who might sleep with a man even if she knew he was a paroled murderer: too tan, too plump, too trying to pretend she was still thirty-nine. When I snapped on the light she reacted calmly, lazily pulling the sheet over her body, but it took me a moment to realize Shen was calm too. He hadn’t jumped when I came into the room, only laid on his back with his uncovered eyes pointed at the ceiling. I told myself it was the woman who angered me, her lack of shame, and it was her I lashed out at.

  Don’t you know what he did? I said to her. He killed my mother. And then I added, Not yours.

  I clocked her reaction on her face: oh-my-god, oh-you’re-joking, oh-my-god-you’re-not-joking. Before I left the room I picked up Shen’s glasses from the floor. I waited in the hallway, and after I heard the front door close I went back to the maid’s room. Shen was still on the bed, his face still pointed at the ceiling, and I went over and sat on the edge of the little twin mattress. They hadn’t gotten very far. At any rate Shen’s underwear was still on, right side out this time. The bed was so narrow that my hip pressed against the thin fabric.

  Can I have my glasses back.

  Shen’s voice was not quite flat when he spoke. There was an edge to his words, and I wondered if I should be afraid of him. But the truth is I wasn’t afraid. The truth is it was hard for me to believe Shenandoah Waters had killed my mother, let alone that he could kill me.

  Aloud, I said: I used to wonder if you’d saved me. If she would’ve married some jerk who would’ve beat the shit out of me. Who knows, maybe you even saved her. He could’ve beat her, taken everything she worked so hard for. But that was before I met you.

  Can I have my glasses back.

  It was only after I met you that I realized I’d been deprived of something. I’m sure I felt it before, that’s why I went to Group, but it was only as I got to know you and realized you were a real person that I began to realize my mom had been a person too, although what kind of person I’d never know.

  I want my glasses back.

  You probably never saw her, did you? With your glasses, I mean. She was pretty. A lot prettier than that whore you just had in here.

  He rolled over then. I don’t know if he did it out of disgust or shame or if he simply didn’t want to be touching me anymore, but he rolled away from me onto his stomach. But as soon as he did it he froze. The little wing on his left shoulder blade fluttered as a muscle underneath it twitched, but it became nothing more than a shadow after I put on his glasses, and my hand was a pale triangle at the end of my arm as it reached towards the shadow on his back. It seemed to me that the tattoo was colder than the rest of his skin, but that was probably just my imagination. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as my hand slipped down the length of Shen’s spine, until it came to rest on the rattlesnake’s tail poking toward the thin nest of hair in the small of his back. I wondered if this is what Shen had felt when he pried open our window that night, this inexorable pull into the near future.

  Shen, I said, but he didn’t answer me. He didn’t move either, and I squeezed onto the bed until my lips were right next to his ear. I’ll trade you, I said. For your glasses.

  —2000

  III.

  Idleness, not illness, has addled my brain. My thoughts are as slack as atrophied muscles, but with every loss comes a compensation. Strength fades; what remains is pliable, tenacious. I’m too weak to lift myself from bed, but my thoughts curve and twist into every nook and cranny of your life—and yours, and yours too. I miss the sunlight and the breeze, unmediated by glass and screen. I miss the cars, the people, movement. Birds. I miss birds. Pigeons, hawks, vultures, plastic pink flamingos. Some people say the universe has a dual nature: corporeal; conceptual. The physical world and the scrims through which we perceive it. They say what separates humanity from lesser creatures is our ability to negotiate the second aspect. I used to be one of those people. Then I decided those people were wrong. Now I realize they’re just pragmatic. This is the privilege of the dying, of course: obnoxiousness and insight folded together, neither quite canceling the other out. Some people would say I’ve been dying all my life.

  Sky Writing

  My latest victim was a blonde. Though hipless as Wallis Simpson, she still found it necessary to negotiate the aisle with that sideways gait peculiar to novice flyers. You know the type. The ones who have this expression on their face, like at any moment they’re going to get wedged between the seats and traffic behind them will roll up on them like the inevitable end of a Hollywood car chase. As this one crept along her eyes, shaded by delicately drooping straw-colored wings, flickered nervously between the ticket clutched to her chest and the numbers printed on the luggage rack. What is it about airplanes that makes people lose their short-term memory? I mean really. How hard can it be to remember “5D”?

  Oh, I know. It’s all theater. Mime without the makeup. Kabuki without the kimonos. Beckett without the black box. But even so, if this sweet young thing wanted me to stand so she could get to her precious window seat, she was going to have to ask. But she just opened the luggage rack, unzipped her carry-on, pulled out a book—Something Something Pathology Something Anatomy—tucked it between her skinny thighs, stowed first her bag, then her jacket, then her sweatshirt—“BC,” as if we should all know what that stands for—and then just stood there fingering her textbook. I’m a lot of things, but patient isn’t one of them. After about three seconds I jerked my head up, only to find myself confronted by skin as pink as a pink carnation. Cheekbones like arrowheads, eyes blue enough to make the Navajo renounce turquoise. The girl was a vision, innocence itself, and against such unvarnished youth it was all I could do to stammer,

  I-I’m sorry. The airline neglected to mention 5C was located in such close proximity to beauty.

  I think I was as shocked as the girl by what came out of my mouth. She looked around, used one finger to scrape her face free of hair still wet from a recent shower—when, I wondered, was the last time I’d bathed?—and then, no longer able to deny I was addr
essing her, answered me in a white-trash accent compared to which Laird Swope would have sounded like a Brahmin:

  Do what?

  Accent undid what looks had wrought. I was working up the words to light into her when she was granted a reprieve by the flight attendant. He snapped the luggage rack shut and admonished the girl to take her seat so the plane could push back, and even as I stood to allow her by the attendant’s eyes caught mine and lingered, I thought, a moment too long, and then he turned and hurried toward the front of the cabin. The girl strapped herself in and turned her whole body to stare out the window as the plane limped toward the runway, and only her whitening knuckles betrayed her when the great beast flapped its wings and took to the air. She turned from the window and stroked the cover of her textbook as though it were a small nervous animal, her open mouth sucking in air with almost as much ferocity as the three engines of the MD-11 propelling us up and over the North Atlantic.

  The clunks and clanks of trolleys began to emanate from the fore and aft galleys. I glanced at my watch, looked over at my seat companion, then at my watch again, as if impatiently.

  Almost . . . almost, I said. As if to myself.

  Pardon? Etiquette laid its veil of safety over the fear in the girl’s voice like smoke from the last cigarette of a prisoner facing a firing squad.

  This—no, wait—this is the very moment Swissair 111 exploded off the coast of Nova Scotia. Two hundred twenty-nine dead, most of the bodies never recovered.

  In fact Swissair 111 had taken off from JFK and flown for an hour and half before it broke apart; we probably hadn’t reached Newport, but I was guessing from the glazed look on my companion’s face that she had yet to learn to calculate relative distances. I failed to suppress my disappointment at our continued existence with a world-weary sigh.

  What do you say we order a drink to celebrate the fact of our survival?

  The textbook in the girl’s lap featured one of those suppurated bodies crisscrossed by a red and blue roadmap of arteries and veins, which she traced with one well-manicured finger. It was hard to believe her smooth white skin and opalescent nail concealed such grisly infrastructure, and for the second time in our acquaintance my resolve wavered. But however inconsequential or esoteric, I have my task in life, and, steeling myself, I punched the call button.

  Logan to Johannesburg, via Heathrow. For her sake, I could only hope my companion was en route to her European vacation, or twenty hours from now her poor little brain was going to be as shredded as the body beneath her hand.

  Ah, but flying is dangerous folly. In pursuit of the clouds men feathered themselves with aluminum and glass, carbon fiber and fiber optics, gutted their bodies with wire and plastic and gorged on kerosene and compressed air. The cockpit is their helmet, the fuselage their breastplate, their epaulets truly wings. In their armored exoskeletons they assault the heavens in order to conquer the earth. Girded with wings they have girdled the globe: yea, verily, they’ve cinched it in at the waist, shrunk it down to size, made it possible for the merest of mortals to skirt the horizon’s portal, and for that most men lift up their hands in praise of the aviators. But not, obviously, my seat companion, who, along with an accent and enough money to afford a first-class ticket across the Atlantic, shared a loathing for airplanes almost equal to that of Laird Swope. I stress almost, for no one could hate flying more than Laird. He hated not just the act but the accoutrements: hated the continually deteriorating smell of the monster’s innards, hated the feel of polyester against the back of his neck and every flight attendant uniform ever designed, hated tray tables and smoking restrictions and the magazine selection and the suck of air on his testicles when he flushed the pneumatic toilet, and he especially, especially in first class, hated the food.

  Thank gawd, he always said, for the booze.

  They bill at the end of the flight, is what I told the girl as I pocketed the five she gave me for her drink, a rum and cherry Coke. Don’t worry your pretty little head, I’ll take care of it. I beg your pardon, I added as, chagrined, she put away her college ID, my name is Francis Kaplan Pelton, but you may call me Francis.

  Feather, she said, in between nervous gulps at her drink. Fay-ther.

  A fitting name for a wingless angel. I clinked my whiskey against her cocktail.

  Heather, she insisted. My name’s Heather Beaumont. I’m from Texas. Tix-us.

  I refuse to hear it. Once christened, so named. Imagine if Adam had allowed the original inhabitants of Eden a second chance. Turtles would be swans, lions mere bacilli. Feather it is, for the duration of our journey.

  In answer, she glanced out the window—nothing but cloudless sky—then practically jerked her face back toward mine. She sipped, swallowed, sipped again; seemed surprised to find her glass empty. I’m going to the Velt.

  There is a d in there, my darling, but don’t let it deter you. Let us dispense with d’s. I—I waved my own empty glass, more to attract the flight attendant than for dramatic emphasis, but the effect was the same—am going nowhere.

  She burst into laughter. Oh my god! Are folks on airplanes always this weird?

  Tuesday, I suddenly remembered. I had showered last Tuesday, six days ago, in Sky Harbor. On Friday I’d given myself a fairly decent sponge bath in the Admiral’s Club in Orly, and I’d just had time to wash my face in Dulles before catching the shuttle to Logan this morning. As discreetly as possible, I sniffed at my underarms. They were good—good enough anyway. At any rate, Heather seemed far too preoccupied with breathing through her mouth to notice.

  Feather, I said, and was rewarded with a blush. Feather, I’ve spent the last year and a half on airplanes. Despite the various diversions, I said, and indicated the textbook in her lap, the monitors mounted in the seat-backs in front of us, and the round ass of the first-class flight attendant making his way up the aisle, despite all of this, flying is essentially a static experience. So I’ve had to invent a few games to amuse myself. To distract my somewhat floribund imagination from the fact that I and my fellow passengers are separated from death by the thinnest membrane of steel and plastic. I like to think of flying as fucking the sky in a giant condom, I practically drolled my way to the punchline, but even the roughest sex can be smoothed over with enough lubrication, don’t you think? I rattled the ice in my drink.

  It was a good thing that real glasses were used in first class: Heather’s clutching hands would have cracked mere plastic.

  Well, I could get into that, she said after a moment. I don’t know about you but I could sure use more lubrication right about now.

  Our flight attendant, him of the once-overs and double-takes and well-rounded ass, was called Gavin, and he sighed dramatically when, finally, he responded to my call button. He puckered his lips and forced a gush of breath from his mouth as though he were attempting to blow the hair out of his eyes, a gesture made all the more symbolic by the slick mousse that held his close-cropped bristles off his high forehead.

  How may I help you? he panted, sir.

  I held out my glass. Another, I said. And, I added, since you seem so pressed for time, one in reserve.

  Gavin opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. He took my glass from me and held it under his nose. Then he fished in the pocket of his apron until he came up with a tiny bottle of Maker’s Mark, which he presented to me with a flourish.

  And also for my friend, I said, handing him Heather’s glass. Rum and—

  Cherry Coke. The naive smile Heather gave Gavin was completely misdirected, as was the five she gave me, but Gavin chose not to comment on either phenomenon.

  So—I kept one eye on Gavin’s retreating form—B is for Boston, I presume.

  Heather crunched a piece of ice between her jaws. Do what?

  C is for College?

  Oh. Heather stroked the phantom letters on her chest in a gesture that would have made a straight boy cry. Stat
istically speaking, she had a fifty percent chance of being raped, but each of those breasts raised the odds another twenty-five percent, and of course she was a blonde. I felt another twinge of pity but didn’t let it hold me back.

  I go to Bates, she said. In Maine. But the airport in Bangor—banger, she said, the way a hoodlum might have said fuck her—doesn’t fly direct to anywhere except Boston. I have to spend like a day and a half on airplanes.

  Is that all? I handed her the drink Gavin had brought while she’d been talking. Attitude or no, he was almost as nice to look at head-on as he was from the rear, and the wry, sly smile that played on his face made him all the more intriguing. Forget about a bath, I thought. When was the last time I’d gotten laid? Well, I could probably figure that one out to the day as well, if I cared to.

  Y’all are gonna get me so plastered, Heather giggled, and I realized her you all lumped me and Gavin together: the fags. Perhaps she wasn’t as naive as I’d assumed. She sipped at her second drink, using the cocktail stirrer as a straw. What about you?

  I can assure you I have every intention of getting plastered.