What Burns

by Dale Peck

  The antonym to history is prophecy. Historical patterns only emerge when we look back in time; they exist in the future as nothing more than guesses. That we make such projections speaks of a kind of faith, though whether that faith is in the past or the future, the predictability of human nature, or physics, or god, is anybody’s guess. But in the end, it always takes you by surprise. By which I mean that when I fought my way through the clouds of dust and crowds of dusty people to Charlie’s apartment, I found Fletcher had beaten me there. Who could have foreseen that?

  In the days to come, I rode my bike around the city, watched as walls and windows and trees and lampposts filled up with pictures of the missing. Dust clogged my lungs and coated the chain of Adam’s creaking bicycle, making it harder and harder to turn the pedals, but it was three days before I stopped wandering aimlessly and actually started looking for him.

  I found him, finally, a day and a half later, at the armory on Lexington and 26th. Indian restaurants lined that stretch of Lex, and the air was usually tinged with curry, but all the restaurants had been closed for days. There were thousands of pictures taped to the wall of the armory, hundreds of people queuing to look at them. Many of the pictures had smeared into unrecognizable blurs after two days of thunderstorms. Where there was a television crew, dozens of people holding up Polaroids and snapshots and flyers jockeyed to get on camera.

  By common will the line moved from left to right. Heads nodded up and down as feet shuffled side to side. I tried not to look in anyone’s eyes, living or photographed. I did look at the living, just in case, but mostly I looked at the pictures on the wall.

  Sometimes A leads to Z. But sometimes Z leads to A. What I mean is, I was looking for Adam, but I found Zach. Zach: You won’t believe his prices. Zach: They’re probably all stolen, but what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Bicycles, Zach had said. Come on.

  I looked at his face for a long time. He hadn’t been a close friend, but someone I’d known off and on for almost fifteen years, and as I looked at him I was suddenly reminded of everyone I’d known who had died of AIDS in the eighties and nineties, the tragic consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The memory was as unexpected as Adam’s blow to my head but produced in me an odd, almost eerie sense of calm. Z had led to A, and A to Z, and Z back to A, but now it was a different A. History wasn’t even a circle but a diminishing spiral, twisting into a tinier and tinier point.

  And then:

  Keith? Keith, is that you?

  I didn’t recognize him at first. He was shorter than I remembered, his features less fine. His eyes weren’t gray but blue. But the hair was the same, thick and black and sticking out of his head in a dozen directions. It was streaked with soot now too, as if he hadn’t washed in days. His T-shirt was also filthy, and pinned to his chest were three pictures that I hardly had time to take in—two women and one man, all smiling the hopelessly naive smiles of the doomed—before Adam grabbed me up in a huge embrace. His arms collapsed around me, one and then the other, and his tears salved the faded remnants of my wounded face.

  Oh my god, Keith! Adam cried. You’re alive!

  —2004

  VI.

  That time you swallowed a lifesaver without sucking on it first: it stuck in your throat and when your parents heard the whistle/wheeze coming out of you their mouths closed and all thought of their fight vanished from their faces. Black-rimmed bright circles spotted your vision, sounds came from the far end of a tunnel. You remember your father holding you upside down, smacking you on the back again and again and yelling, Is it out yet, is it out? until finally there was a pop, like a cork, and then the lifesaver was there on the floor, and your mouth tasted like cherry saliva and blood and the lifesaver was so small. And all you could think as he turned you over and pulled you close to him, wrapping his arms around your throbbing back, was, He was hitting me, he was hitting me even though he didn’t want to hurt me, and you wondered if that’s what he’d been doing to your mother as well.

  St. Anthony of the Vine

  It was one of those things where everybody said they saw it coming, but no one did see it coming, so you have to ask yourself: were people talking to console themselves, or to make themselves feel guilty? At any rate the only one who saw it coming was me. Well, saw her coming. I suppose it’s fair to say I was watching for her. I mean, there was a vacuum in my hand, but so much of my attention was directed out the window that the brush was zigzagging lines into the bedroom carpet like a little kid’s drawing of a Christmas tree. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t know who I was watching for, but whoever she was today, she was cutting it awful close. It was nearly four. Nicky Junger’s shift out to the canning factory ended at three and it wasn’t an hour back to town; Theresa left the bank at four on the nose on Thursdays—the bank was open an hour later on Thursdays—and the drive home took her twenty minutes. Thursday afternoon, three to four-twenty. Anthony called it his window of opportunity. He said he showered at Nicky’s but had to be home by the time Theresa walked through the door, hair dry, half-finished kir perched precariously on the round arm of the recliner, the television tuned to The People’s Court or Judge Judy and turned up just that little bit too loud. Afternoon TV’s all about blame, Theresa always said, rescuing Anthony’s glass with one hand and confiscating the clicker with the other—CNN to see if the world had ended and Oprah to see if anyone was crying about it, back to People’s Court. You stole my country, she’d mimic, you stole my woman, you stole my car, and in one practiced gesture she’d surrender the clicker and run an index finger around Anthony’s fringe of hair, and depending on how well he’d timed things that day she’d rub her finger and thumb together, or smell them, or drain his glass and walk away. That view, he said to me one time, and whistled low. That ass. Heart-shaped, even at forty-seven. All my life I have stared after women wondering what men mean by heart-shaped. I’ve found myself walking behind one or another of Anthony’s women scouring their behinds for even a hint of Valentine geometry, but I have yet to come up with anything more than basic biological similarity, each to the others. But that was the thing about Anthony. Flat or fat—in back or up front—when Anthony Divine curtained up his lids to focus those Mediterranean blue eyes on a woman she always felt a little prettier than her last look in the mirror. She’d smooth her blouse over a waist a few inches skinnier than it had been a moment earlier, arch her back to accentuate a rear end no one had ever seen fit to comment on, and even if she didn’t notice herself doing these things Anthony did. A woman says yes a long time before she opens her mouth, Anthony said to me another time. Locks that pesky strand of hair behind her ear, can’t seem to get her bottom and top lips to meet. Just women? I’d said that time—by that time I was answering him back. Men are impervious to the female gaze? Oh come on Mira, Anthony drawled, don’t get your skirt in a twist. When have you ever known a man to say no?

  Like I said: I was watching for her, but I still managed to miss the moment she stepped outside. By the time I made it to the kitchen window she was halfway down Nicky Junger’s sidewalk, and all I could see was a cotton-candy mass that seemed to have swallowed her head. Good lord, girl, I thought when I saw that rat’s nest, pull a comb through that mane, you want everyone in town to know you been on your back? And: Good lord, Anthony, I thought as well, does she always have to be blond? This one’s hair was such a fright I couldn’t get a clear view of her face, and at first it looked like I wasn’t going to because she headed straight down the sidewalk instead of cutting across Nicky Junger’s patch of lawn to mine. There was a car parked on Front Court, one of those silver bubble–type things, and I thought she was going to take herself on home and fix herself there. He didn’t always send them to me. But then I saw there was something wrong with the way she was walking. Short jerky steps, one foot swinging out wide before landing directly in front of the other, like a gymnast learning the balance beam. And as I’m sure you know it was th
e middle of March but Nicky Junger’s raggedy lawn already needed mowing, which is why it took me a moment to see that today’s victim only had the one shoe on, a wooden-soled Candie with enough of a heel to carousel her body up and down as she made her way to the street, her hands clutched to her stomach and her back so bent I wondered if maybe he’d punched her. But then she reached the street and turned away from her car, turned toward my trailer, and I saw it was worse than all that. I saw it was Kennedy Albright this time, and I saw the blood on the front of her sweater. I had to move to the dining room to keep her in sight. I dropped the vacuum and squeezed around the table, but I kept my eyes on her. On her legs, swinging in wide arcs to accommodate the ample flesh of her thighs and that one elevated foot, and on her second shoe, heelless, dangling from her hands in front of her stomach, its slope paralleling the wet red stain on her sweater like a pair of stockings hung from a mantel. Behind me the abandoned vacuum chewed up a single square of carpet as, zombielike, Kennedy advanced on my trailer. There was a disconnect there, Kennedy’s silent lopsided progress down Front Court and the deafening whine inside my trailer, which is maybe why I could suddenly hear Anthony saying, It’s a difference Mira, between people who call what they live in a home and who call it a trailer. Said it, I remembered, only after he’d moved out of his own tin shell around the corner from me on Back Court. Trailer’s such a hopeless word, he said when he no longer lived in one, something left over, left behind. The word, I said, or the thing? I waved his answer away before he could give it. The residents of the Borderlands Trailer Court are left behinds, I said. Left behind by life or leaving something behind, take your pick. Certainly no one had left behind more than Anthony Divine. His hair for one thing—just that gray fringe wreathing his sun-browned skull like dried-up laurel—and, too, Linda Diego said there wasn’t nothing but three suitcases in the trunk of the gray Cadillac he parked in front of the trailer court office. A matched set, was all Linda Diego said about Anthony’s suitcases, each bigger than the last. When she showed him round to Lot 17 Back Court, she said he took all three of those suitcases out and stacked them one on top of the other, smallest to largest, like one of them ziggurats in the desert that Cardo, my daughter’s husband, took pictures of when he was in Iraq, but upside down. Linda Diego said the suitcases were made of rich brown leather and even stacked up like that, inverted, precarious, they still seemed more solid than the trailer she showed him into, leaving me to wonder, among other things, if Linda Diego wasn’t the first—the first in Saches, I mean. Eyes like . . . like blue things, Linda Diego said, and thanks to her I knew to be on guard against them the first time Anthony Divine strolled into the café and ordered a bowl of tomato soup and turned in the diamond on his pinkie ring before picking up his spoon, and after he left I found myself wondering what the fuss was about. It was only later on that I realized he hadn’t bothered to show them to me. His eyes, I mean. Like he said: a woman says no a long time before she opens her mouth.

  I was standing in the open door by the time Kennedy Albright staggered up the steps but she pressed the doorbell anyway. She used the loose red heel of her broken shoe to stab the button, and what with the door open the bell’s buzz was loud enough to make her and me both jump—I’d shut the vacuum off by then, though too late to save that particular square of carpet. Kennedy Albright’s hands hung in front of the oozing stain on her sweater, limp helpless things like the front paws of a rabbit standing up on its hind legs. The tips of her fingers were red too, and their jangly-spoked spread made it look like she was knitting the stain out of her blood like a sock. But there was still a connection I wasn’t making, the stain on her sweater, the stained splintered heel, and this was what finally drove me to speak. Honey? I said. Kennedy, baby, what happened? There was the same flush to her cheeks that all of them had when he finished with them, in some ways the faraway look in her eyes was the same too, but there was also a long scratch along her jaw and her eyes were looking to another place. Did he fuck her first? I wondered then, surprising myself with the ugliness of the word, which I’d never consciously applied to what Anthony did to the women he took to Nicky Junger’s trailer. But now I had to wonder, did he actually fuck her before he did whatever he did that cut her jaw open and . . . and stained her sweater? But even as Kennedy looked up at me I saw two things: saw first of all that it wasn’t her blood on her sweater, and saw, over her shoulder, coming down Front Court, Nicky Junger’s car heading for her driveway. My god, Mira, Kennedy said again, but even that was what they all said, tottering up the stairs, one hand on the small of their back, My god, and I clung to that. I held on to the familiarity of the words, the safety of them. There will be a rational explanation for all of this is what I was telling myself, but Kennedy was still talking. Theresa’s gonna kill me when she finds out, she said, picking at the edges of the stain on her sweater as though it were a sticker she could peel off, and when Nicky Junger started screaming Kennedy looked up and over my head as if a bird was calling out, or an angel. My sister’s husband, Kennedy said after Nicky finally stopped screaming. My god. She touched the cut on her chin and stared at the reddened fingertip and then, frowning, licked it clean, and when she looked at the red-tipped heel in her hand I almost thought she was going to lick that too, but all she did was shake it from her fingers, not in horror or even in surprise, but like it was a sticky candy wrapper she had to flick away to get off her skin. The shoe fell between two of the loose cinder blocks that make up my porch. A genuine Candie, not some retro knockoff. Thirty years out of style that shoe must’ve been, just like Kennedy’s beehive. The police had to take my whole porch apart to find it there among the spiders’ nests and mulching leaves and a Visa bill from July 1998, and they never did put it back together. Cardo built that porch on one of their trips down from Dallas, and he promised that when they came for Thanksgiving he’d rebuild it but until then I had to climb in and out of my trailer on one up-ended block, making sure not to trip on the police tape: crime scene do not cross. But that was all in the future. Just then it was still the stain on Kennedy’s sweater, and Anthony’s eyes. He wouldn’t even look at me, Mira, is the last thing Kennedy said before she came inside, he couldn’t be bothered, and if it’s true what she said, that that’s when I invited her in—I honestly don’t remember—then it’s because I understood what she meant, if not what had happened. I understood her because of the afternoon Anthony took his first midday meal at the café. Am I too late for lunch? he’d said that day, and in fact it was two-thirty, which is to say shift-change time. He’d been in a few times before, like I said, tomato soup to stay or Earl Grey to go—not a trailer, Mira, a home—but now it was shift-change time, and it was his future wife herself who said, What’re you trying to do, Anthony, maximize your waitress potential? Said it to him the very first time he sat at her table, which was his second day in a row in the café: you could accuse Anthony of a lot of things but you could never accuse him of not knowing what he wanted. Anthony smiled at Theresa without looking up, but he managed to catch her hand in his when he intercepted the cup of coffee Theresa was aiming for the table. I saw her wince a little as the turned-in diamond of Anthony’s pinkie ring pressed into her flesh, and then I saw, for the first time, Anthony’s eyes, and I realized I’d been guarding myself against an attack that hadn’t come. The lids didn’t lift as much as fold into each other, fifty-some-odd years of squint wrinkles closing in upon themselves like what they call Roman blinds, and then, glowing slightly, the palest blue eyes I have ever seen lit up the restaurant. Eyes that seemed innocent as water flowing under ice and experienced as a thousand-year-old harbor, eyes as full of potential as a wishing well. Eyes you could believe in. Anthony wasn’t even looking at me and still I found myself wanting to believe in him. Potential, is the first word anyone ever heard Anthony Divine say to Theresa Blanchette. Now that’s got a nice sound to it. Even before Theresa got back to the waitress station she was stage-whispering, My god, Mira, but if Anthony heard her he
didn’t look up. Did you see that, Mira? Theresa said to me. I seen it before, I said. I’ll see it again. But what I was thinking was, No. No I have never seen nothing like that in my life. I haven’t seen it because he couldn’t be bothered to show it to me. The impudent son of a—Theresa was still saying. I am a married woman. But then, married or single, shift change or swollen ankles—Rolanda Ezquivel was at that very moment rolling up her knee-highs in the stockroom—Theresa grabbed the coffeepot and marched straight back to Anthony’s table. Refill, Mr. Divine? she called out, and Anthony said, Not Divine actually. De-Vine. As in, of the vine. St. Anthony of the Vine, Theresa said, though where the first word came from is anybody’s guess. Well Mr. De-Vine, my name is Theresa Blan-chette. As in Jock Blanchette, my husband. Can’t say I’ve made his acquaintance, Anthony said without looking up, at which point Theresa pivoted on her heel and marched back to me one more time, her cheeks diaper-rash red. Did you ever? Mira? Did you? Many times, I said, but I was looking at myself in the mirror behind the dessert rack, wondering what Theresa had that I didn’t, besides Angie Dickinson’s hair dye. Why, Mira Beller, Theresa interrupted my reverie. I do believe you doubt my integrity. Theresa, I said then, taking the pot from her and putting it back on the burner. He didn’t order coffee. He ordered a bowl of tomato soup. He only ever orders a bowl of tomato soup or a cup of Earl Grey tea. To go.