Firestarter

  "Is Mommy here?"

  "No. Just get in, Charlie." He couldn't deal with that now. Now, somehow, he had to deal with these witnesses.

  "What the hell is this?" the man from the information booth asked, bewildered.

  "My eyes," the man who had had his gun up to Charlie's head screamed. "My eyes, my eyes. What did you do to my eyes, you son of a bitch?" He got up. There was a sandwich bag sticking to one of his hands. He began to totter off toward the information booth, and the man in the bluejeans darted back inside.

  "Go, Charlie."

  "Will you come, Daddy?"

  "Yes, in just a second. Now go."

  Charlie went, blond pigtails bouncing. Her packsack was still hanging askew.

  Andy walked past the sleeping Shop agent, thought about his gun, and decided he didn't want it. He walked over to the young people at the picnic table. Keep it small, he told himself. Easy. Little taps. Don't go starting any echoes. The object is not to hurt these people.

  The young woman grabbed her baby from its carrier seat rudely, waking it. It began to cry. "Don't come near me, you crazy person!" she said.

  Andy looked at the man and his wife.

  "None of this is very important," he said, and pushed. Fresh pain settled over the back of his head like a spider ... and sank in.

  The young man looked relieved. "Well, thank God."

  His wife offered a tentative smile. The push hadn't taken so well with her; her maternity had been aroused.

  "Lovely baby you have there," Andy said. "Little boy, isn't it?".

  The blind man stepped off the curbing, pitched forward, and struck his head on the doorpost of the red Pinto that probably belonged to the two girls. He howled. Blood flowed from his temple. "I'm blind!" he screamed again.

  The young woman's tentative smile became radiant. "Yes, a boy," she said. "His name is Michael."

  "Hi, Mike," Andy said. He ruffled the baby's mostly bald head.

  "I can't think why he's crying," the young woman said. "He was sleeping so well until just now. He must be hungry."

  "Sure, that's it," her husband said.

  "Excuse me." Andy walked toward the information booth. There was no time to lose now. Someone else could turn into this roadside bedlam at any time.

  "What is it, man?" the fellow in bluejeans asked. "Is it a bust?"

  "Nah, nothing happened," Andy said, and gave another light push. It was starting to make him feel sick now. His head thudded and pounded.

  "Oh," the fellow said. "Well, I was just trying to figure out how to get to Chagrin Falls from here. Excuse me." And he sauntered back inside the information booth.

  The two girls had retreated to the security fence that separated the turn-out from the private farmland beyond it. They stared at him with wide eyes. The blind man was now shuffling around on the pavement in a circle with his arms held stiffly out in front of him. He was cursing and weeping.

  Andy advanced slowly toward the girls, holding his hands out to show them there was nothing in them. He spoke to them. One of them asked him a question and he spoke again. Shortly they both began to smile relieved smiles and to nod. Andy waved to them and they both waved in return. Then he walked rapidly across the grass toward the station wagon. His forehead was beaded with cold sweat and his stomach was rolling greasily. He could only pray that no one would drive in before he and Charlie got away, because there was nothing left. He was completely tipped over. He slid in behind the wheel and keyed the engine.

  "Daddy," Charlie said, and threw herself at him, buried her face against his chest. He hugged her briefly and then backed out of the parking slot. Turning his head was agony. The black horse. In the aftermath, that was the thought that always came to him. He had let the black horse out of its stall somewhere in the dark barn of his subconscious and now it would again batter its way up and down through his brain. He would have to get them someplace and lay up. Quick. He wasn't going to be capable of driving for long.

  "The black horse," he said thickly. It was coming. No ... no. It wasn't coming; it was here. Thud ... thud ... thud. Yes, it was here. It was free.

  "Daddy, look out!" Charlie screamed.

  The blind man had staggered directly across their path. Andy braked. The blind man began to pound on the hood of the wagon and scream for help. To their right, the young mother had begun to breast-feed her baby. Her husband was reading a paperback. The man from the information booth had gone over to talk to the two girls from the red Pinto--perhaps hoping for some quickie experience kinky enough to write up for the Penthouse Forum. Sprawled out on the pavement, Baldy slept on.

  The other operative pounded on the hood of the wagon again and again. "Help mel" he screamed. "I'm blind! Dirty bastard did something to my eyes! Im blind!"

  "Daddy," Charlie moaned.

  For a crazy instant, he almost floored the accelerator. Inside his aching head he could hear the sound the tires would make, could feel the dull thudding of the wheels as they passed over the body. He had kidnapped Charlie and held a gun to her head. Perhaps he had been the one who had stuffed the rag into Vicky's mouth so she wouldn't scream when they pulled out her fingernails. It would be so very good to kill him ... except then what would separate him from them?

  He laid on the horn instead. It sent another bright spear of agony through his head. The blind man leaped away from the car as if stung. Andy hauled the wheel around and drove past him. The last thing he saw in the rearview mirror as he drove down the reentry lane was the blind man sitting on the pavement, his face twisted in anger and terror ... and the young woman placidly raising baby Michael to her shoulder to burp him.

  He entered the flow of turnpike traffic without looking. A horn blared; tires squalled. A big Lincoln swerved around the wagon and the driver shook his fist at them.

  "Daddy, are you okay?"

  "I will be," he said. His voice seemed to come from far away. "Charlie, look at the toll ticket and see what the next exit is."

  The traffic blurred in front of his eyes. It doubled, trebled, came back together, then drifted into prismatic fragments again. Sun reflecting off bright chrome everywhere.

  "And fasten your seatbelt, Charlie."

  The next exit was Hammersmith, twenty miles farther up. Somehow he made it. He thought later that it was only the consciousness of Charlie sitting next to him, depending on him, that kept him on the road. Just as Charlie had got him through all the things that came after--the knowledge of Charlie, needing him. Charlie McGee, whose parents had once needed two hundred dollars.

  There was a Best Western at the foot of the Hammersmith ramp, and Andy managed to get them checked in, specifying a room away from the turnpike. He used a bogus name.

  "They'll be after us, Charlie," he said. "I need to sleep. But only until dark, that's all the time we can take ... all we dare to take. Wake me up when it's dark."

  She said something else, but then he was falling on the bed. The world was blurring down to a gray point, and then even the point was gone and everything was darkness, where the pain couldn't reach. There was no pain and there were no dreams. When Charlie shook him awake again on that hot August evening at quarter past seven, the room was stifling hot and his clothes were soaked with sweat. She had tried to make the air conditioner work but hadn't been able to figure out the controls.

  "It's okay," he said. He swung his feet onto the floor and put his hands on his temples, squeezing his head so it wouldn't blow up.

  "Is it any better, Daddy?" she asked anxiously.

  "A little," he said. And it was ... but only a little. "We'll stop in a little while and get some chow. That'll help some more."

  "Where are we going?"

  He shook his head slowly back and forth. He had only the money he had left the house with that morning--about seventeen dollars. He had his Master Charge and Visa, but he paid for their room with the two twenties he always kept in the back of his wallet (my run-out money, he sometimes told Vicky, joking, but how hellishly tr
ue that had turned out to be) rather than use either one of them. Using either of those cards would be like painting a sign: THIS WAY TO THE FUGITIVE COLLEGE INSTRUCTOR AND HIS DAUGHTER. The seventeen dollars would buy them some burgers and top off the wagon's gas tank once. Then they would be stone broke.

  "I don't know, Charlie," he said. "Just away."

  "When are we going to get Mommy?"

  Andy looked up at her and his headache started to get worse again. He thought of the drops of blood on the floor and on the washing-machine porthole. He thought of the smell of Pledge.

  "Charlie--" he said, and could say no more. There was no need, anyway.

  She looked at him with slowly widening eyes. Her hand drifted up to her trembling mouth.

  "Oh no, Daddy... please say it's no."

  "Charlie--"

  She screamed, "Oh pleasesay it's no!"

  "Charlie, those people who--"

  "Please say she's all right, say she's all right, say she's all right!"

  The room, the room was so hot, the air conditioning was off, that was all it was, but it was so hot, his head aching, the sweat rolling down his face, not cold sweat now but hot, like oil, hot--

  "No," Charlie was saying, "No, no, no, no, no." She shook her head. Her pigtails flew back and forth, making him think absurdly of the first time he and Vicky had taken her to the amusement park, the carousel--

  It wasn't the lack of air conditioning.

  "Charlie!" he yelled. "Charlie, the bathtub! The water"

  She screamed. She turned her head toward the open bathroom door and there was a sudden blue flash in there like a lightbulb burning out. The showerhead fell off the wall and clattered into the tub, twisted and black. Several of the blue tiles shattered to fragments.

  He barely caught her when she fell, sobbing.

  "Daddy, I'm sorry, I'm sorry--"

  "It's all right," he said shakily, and enfolded her. From the bathroom, thin smoke drifted out of the fused tub. All the porcelain surfaces had crack-glazed instantly. It was as if the entire bathroom had been run through some powerful but defective firing kiln. The towels were smoldering.

  "It's all right," he said, holding her, rocking her. "Charlie, it's all right, it's gonna be all right, somehow it'll come right, I promise."

  "I want Mommy," she sobbed.

  He nodded. He wanted her, too. He held Charlie tightly to him and smelled ozone and porcelain and cooked Best Western towels. She had almost flash-fried them both.

  "It's gonna be all right," he told her, and rocked her, not really believing it, but it was the litany, it was the Psalter, the voice of the adult calling down the black well of years into the miserable pit of terrorized childhood; it was what you said when things went wrong; it was the nightlight that could not banish the monster from the closet but perhaps only keep it at bay for a little while; it was the voice without power that must speak nevertheless.

  "It's gonna be all right," he told her, not really believing it, knowing as every adult knows in his secret heart that nothing is really all right, ever. "It's gonna be all right."

  He was crying. He couldn't help it now. His tears came in a flood and he held her to his chest as tightly as he could.

  "Charlie, I swear to you, somehow it's gonna be all right. "

  5

  The one thing they had not been able to hang around his neck--as much as they might have liked to--was the murder of Vicky. Instead, they had elected to simply erase what had happened in the laundry room. Less trouble for them. Sometimes--not often--Andy wondered what their neighbors back in Lakeland might have speculated. Bill collectors? Marital problems? Maybe a drug habit or an incident of child abuse? They hadn't known anyone on Conifer Place well enough for it to have been any more than idle dinnertable chat, a nine days' wonder soon forgotten when the bank that held their mortgage released their house.

  Sitting on the deck now and looking out into the darkness, Andy thought he might have had more luck that day than he had known (or been able to appreciate). He had arrived too late to save Vicky, but he had left before the Removal People arrived.

  There had never been a thing about it in the paper, not even a squib about how--funny thing!--an English instructor named Andrew McGee and his family had just up and disappeared. Perhaps the Shop had got that quashed, too. Surely he had been reported missing; one or all of the guys he had been eating lunch with that day would have done that much. But it hadn't made the papers, and of course, bill collectors don't advertise.

  "They would have hung it on me if they could," he said, unaware that he had spoken aloud.

  But they couldn't have. The medical examiner could have fixed the time of death, and Andy, who had been in plain sight of some disinterested third party (and in the case of Eh-116, Style and the Short Story, from ten to eleven-thirty, twenty-five disinterested third parties) all that day, could not have been set up to take the fall. Even if he'd been unable to provide substantiation for his movements during the critical time, there was no motive.

  So the two of them had killed Vicky and then gone haring off after Charlie--but not without notifying what Andy thought of as the Removal People (and in his mind's eye he even saw them that way, smooth-faced young men dressed in white coveralls). And sometime after he had gone haring off after Charlie, maybe as short a time as five minutes, but almost surely no longer than an hour, the Removal People would have rolled up to his door. While Conifer Place dozed the afternoon away, Vicky had been Removed.

  They might even have reasoned--correctly--that a missing wife would have been more of a problem for Andy than a provably dead one. No body, no estimated time of death. No estimated time of death, no alibi. He would be watched, cosseted, politely tied down. Of course they would have put Charlie's description out on the wire--Vicky's too, for that matter--but Andy would not have been free to simply go tearing off on his own. So she had been Removed, and now he didn't even know where she was buried. Or maybe she had been cremated. Or--

  Oh shit why are you doing this to yourself ?

  He stood up abruptly and poured the remainder of Granther's mule-kick over the deck railing. It was all in the past; none of it could be changed; it was time to stop thinking about it.

  A neat trick if you could do it.

  He looked up at the dark shapes of the trees and squeezed the glass tightly in his right hand, and the thought crossed his mind again.

  Charlie I swear to you, somehow it's gonna be all right.

  6

  That winter in Tashmore, so long after his miserable awakening in that Ohio motel, it seemed his desperate prediction had finally come true.

  It was not an idyllic winter for them. Not long after Christmas, Charlie caught a cold and snuffled and coughed her way through to early April, when it finally cleared up for good. For a while she ran a fever. Andy fed her aspirin halves and told himself that if the fever did not go down in three days' time, he would have to take her to the doctor across the lake in Bradford, no matter what the consequences. But her fever did go down, and for the rest of the winter Charlie's cold was only a constant annoyance to her. Andy managed to get himself a minor case of frostbite on one memorable occasion in March and nearly managed to burn them both up one screaming, subzero night in February by overloading the woodstove. Ironically, it was Charlie who woke up in the middle of the night and discovered the cottage was much too hot.

  On December 14 they celebrated his birthday and on March 24 they celebrated Charlie's. She was eight, and sometimes Andy looked at her with a kind of wonder, as if catching sight of her for the first time. She was not a little girl anymore; she stood to past his elbow. Her hair had got long again, and she had taken to braiding it to keep it out of her eyes. She was going to be beautiful. She already was, red nose and all.

  They were without a car. Irv Manders's Willys had frozen solid in January, and Andy thought the block was cracked. He had started it every day, more from a sense of responsibility than anything else, because not even four-whe
el drive would have pulled them out of Granther's camp after the New Year. The snow, undisturbed except for the tracks of squirrels, chipmunks, a few deer, and a persistent raccoon that came around to sniff hopefully at the garbage hold, was almost two feet deep by then.

  There were old-fashioned cross-country skis in the small shed behind the cottage--three pairs of them, but none that would fit Charlie. It was just as well. Andy kept her indoors as much as possible. They could live with her cold, but he did not want to risk a return of the fever.

  He found an old pair of Granther's ski boots, dusty and cracked with age, tucked away in a cardboard toilet-tissue box under the table where the old man had once planed shutters and made doors. Andy oiled them, flexed them, and then found he still could not fill Granther's shoes without stuffing the toes full of newspaper. There was something funny about that, but he also found it a touch ominous. He thought about Granther a lot that long winter and wondered what he would have made of their predicament.

  Half a dozen times that winter he hooked up the cross-country skis (no modern snap-bindings here, only a confusing and irritating tangle of straps, buckles, and rings) and worked his way across the wide, frozen expanse of Tashmore Pond to the Bradford Town Landing. From there, a small, winding road lead into the village, tucked neatly away in the hills two miles east of the lake.

  He always left before first light, with Granther's knapsack on his back, and never arrived back before three in the afternoon. On one occasion he barely beat a howling snowstorm that would have left him blinded and directionless and wandering on the ice. Charlie cried with relief when he came in--and then went into a long, alarming coughing fit.

  The trips to Bradford were for supplies and clothes for him and Charlie. He had Granther's struttin money, and later on, he broke into three of the larger camps at the far end of Tashmore Pond and stole money. He was not proud of this, but it seemed to him a matter of survival. The camps he chose might have sold on the real-estate market for eighty thousand dollars apiece, and he supposed the owners could afford to lose their thirty or forty dollars' worth of cookie-jar money--which was exactly where most of them kept it. The only other thing he touched that winter was the large range-oil drum behind a large, modern cottage quaintly named CAMP CONFUSION. From this drum he took about forty gallons of oil.