‘Does your mother’s boyfriend live in Black Eagle on Prospect Street?’ my father said as he drove along. Up ahead of us was the bridge to Black Eagle and beyond it the white grain elevators, lighted in the misting, snowy air. ‘You said you were there, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘So you know where he lives?’ my father said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s where it is.’
‘All right,’ my father said. ‘Let’s go by there.’
He turned left onto the Fifteenth Street Bridge and we drove over the Missouri River and into Black Eagle, where there were only lights of houses against the bluff hills, and the snowy night up behind it like a curtain.
We drove halfway up the hill and turned right. It was eight o’clock at night, and many of the houses we passed had their porch lights on, and lights shining inside. My father seemed to know where he was going because he only looked now and then at the house numbers. Down the street I began to see the blue light of the Italian steakhouse. I could not see people in the street or any cars parked outside, and if it had not been Friday I would’ve thought it was closed.
‘It’s not a glamorous street, is it?’ my father said.
‘No, it isn’t,’ I said, watching the houses.
‘That’s surprising,’ he said. ‘I guess nobody sees through the eyes of a rich man.’ He was quiet then for a moment as he drove slowly down Warren Miller’s street. ‘I wish I could get your mother to back out on this.’
‘So do I,’ I said.
‘It’s not a good deal for her,’ he said.
‘Not that I can see.’
He stopped the car across the street from Warren’s house, in the place where my mother had parked the night before. I started to think what I had been thinking, sitting here with my mother: that I had no choice but to go inside with her when she went, and that I had gone. Then I stopped thinking that because it seemed like an entirely different subject now, one that had practically nothing to do with what had happened the night before, or any other night. I was with my father now, and everything was different.
Lights were on inside the house, though the porch was dark. Warren’s Oldsmobile sat parked in the steep driveway, behind the powerboat, just as it had been. My father turned off the engine and opened the window and looked out at the house. I could hear piano music. I thought it was coming from Warren Miller’s house, and that Warren was probably playing it as we sat in the dark watching.
‘I’d like to have a look in there, I guess,’ my father said. He turned and looked at me in the dark. ‘What do you think about that?’
‘Okay,’ I said. I looked past him at the house, where I could see no one at the window where the old-fashioned lamp was burning.
‘I’ll come right back, Joe.’
‘All right,’ I said.
He got out of the car, closed the door, and walked across the street and up the concrete steps. I could hear the piano music playing out into the night, and thought I heard someone singing with it. A man. I thought no one would notice my father now unless he wanted them to or unless he rang the doorbell or knocked, and I didn’t think he would do that. I wondered who my father had called from The Presidential bar. My mother? Or Warren Miller, to see if he was at home? Or possibly someone else entirely?
My father walked to the top of the steps and onto the porch. He turned around and looked at the car and then above it at the town lighted beyond the street of houses and the river. Then he walked to the front window and looked inside the house, bent over so he could see. He didn’t try to hide, just stood in the window, looking, so that anybody who would’ve glanced at the window at that moment would’ve seen him.
He did not stay at the window long, just long enough to look around inside at the living room and at whatever he could see through there, the other rooms, the kitchen. Then he turned around and came back down the steps to the street and across to the car where I was sitting, waiting. He did not get in the car with me, only leaned in the window.
‘How do you feel now, son?’ he said. He looked in at me.
‘I feel good,’ I said, though that was not exactly how I felt. I felt nervous to be there, and I wished we could leave.
‘Are you cold?’ he said. He wasn’t talking very loud.
‘No sir,’ I said. I could hear the piano still going inside the house. And I was cold. My arms were cold.
My father turned his head and looked down the street. There was nothing to see. No movement. ‘Maybe I can’t be in love anymore,’ he said, then let out a breath. ‘I’d love to improve things, though. You know?’
‘Yes sir,’ I said. Then I saw Warren Miller. He came right to the window where my father had been looking inside. He stopped a moment and stared out, I thought, at our car, then walked away. He was wearing a white shirt just the way he had the night before. I wondered if my mother was inside the house with him, and if that was what my father had seen when he looked and the reason he’d said what he’d just said. And I decided that she was definitely not inside there, and that she was still at home where we had left her and would find her again if we would just go back.
‘Something’s going to happen,’ my father said, and he tapped his hands, both of them, on the metal window molding. He looked down at the street as if he was thinking. ‘I wish I didn’t feel that way.’
I didn’t say anything for a moment, and then I said, ‘So do I.’
My father breathed out a sigh again. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I know that.’ He was quiet for a moment himself while he looked down at the pavement. ‘I just wonder,’ he said, ‘what would have to happen to make me ever leave your mother.’ He looked up at me.
‘Maybe nothing would,’ I said.
‘Nothing I can think of would. That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘Things do have to be able to surprise you,’ he said. ‘This is an odd day, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s an important day.’
‘I guess it is,’ I said.
‘I feel exhausted by it,’ he said. ‘Just exhausted.’
And that is what I felt, too, and he must’ve known it. ‘Maybe we should go back home now,’ I said quietly to him.
‘We should. We certainly should,’ he said. ‘We’ll do that in a minute.’
He stood up then and walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I looked back, but I couldn’t see what he was doing and did not hear anything. He didn’t say anything that I could hear. He closed the trunk lid, and when I looked out the side window I saw him. He was hurrying up the concrete steps towards Warren Miller’s white house, where the lights were on and piano music was coming out still. He was carrying something–I didn’t know what, but something I thought he had taken out of the trunk of our car. He held it in both hands in front of him. And I had the feeling I have heard about since then that comes with disaster, the feeling of seeing things from a long way away, as if you were looking at them through a telescope backward, but they are right in front of you, only you are fixed there and helpless. It makes you feel cold, and then it makes you feel warm, as if what you’re afraid of is not going to happen, only then it does and you are all the more unprepared to see it and have it happen to you.
What I saw was my father coming to the top of the steps and moving onto the little porch that ran partway along the front of the house. He turned and walked to the very end of the porch, right across in front of the window. I could hear his feet on the porch boards. I heard the faint sound of something being poured out of a bottle. And then I knew what he was doing, or trying to do. The music inside Warren Miller’s house stopped. And it was quiet except for the sound of my father’s boots and the noise of pouring out of a gallon jug, which is what he was holding. He was pouring whatever it was–the gasoline or the kerosene he had bought–out onto the house where the porch boards met the front wall. And I wanted to stop him, but he was moving fast, and I couldn’t move fast enough in the car, just couldn’t seem to work my hands fast or make a noise tha
t would get his attention so I could tell him to stop what he was doing. I saw his silhouette as it passed in front of the window. Then the porch light came on and Warren Miller opened the door just as my father had gotten almost even with it. Warren stepped out onto the lighted porch–I saw his limp. He and my father were standing there together, my father holding the glass gallon jug of gasoline, and Warren holding nothing. It was a strange thing to see. And I thought for an instant that things would be all right, that Warren Miller would take hold of matters, which I knew he could do, and that my father would abandon whatever his plans were–to burn down Warren Miller’s house or to throw his own life and mine and my mother’s away as if they didn’t matter and could just as easily be given up.
‘What’s going on out here, Jerry?’ Warren Miller said, not very loudly. He took a step closer to my father as if he wanted to see better what was happening. And he must’ve smelled gasoline, because he took a step back. Gasoline must’ve been everywhere.
My father stood up straight and said something I could not exactly hear, although it sounded like he said ‘hat on, hat on,’ the same words twice. Then my father squatted down very quickly, exactly in front of Warren Miller, just as if he was about to tie his boot lace. But what he did was strike a match. And I heard Warren say, ‘What in the world, Jerry!’
And then the porch was on fire all around them. The bottle my father was holding was on fire inside and out; the boards where my father and Warren were standing were all on fire. A strip of blue and yellow flame moved in an almost lazy way back to the front wall of the house and then down along the porch to the end, and began to go up the wood siding where my father had first splashed gasoline. The house looked all on fire to me then, or at least the front of it did. I began to move myself out of the car in a hurry, because my father’s boots and the bottoms of his pants were on fire, and he was trying to hit it all out with his hands, and seemed frantic and was jumping.
Warren Miller simply disappeared. I didn’t see him go, but he was gone the instant the flames started. I guessed he was calling for someone to come and help. And my father was left on the front porch alone, trying to keep himself from burning up in the fire he himself had started by some act of jealousy or anger or just insanity–all of which seemed suddenly far in the past and out of any proportion to what was going on.
‘I’m on fire here, Joe,’ my father called out from the porch as I ran up the concrete steps toward him.
‘I know it,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to do this. I certainly didn’t.’ He seemed both excited and calm at once, even though one of his boots was on fire. He had put out the other boot and the bottom of his pants leg with his hands. And he had moved from the place where he’d set fire to the edge of the porch, so that he was sitting with one leg over the side and the other one, the one with the boot on fire, beside him, and he was hitting it with his bare hand, not very hard but trying to put out the flame. Behind him, the porch was on fire. I could smell it burning and smoking. I could see the wood front of the house in flames, and feel the heat from it on the air.
I took off my jacket when I got to my father, and I put it over his boot foot where it was burning, and I held it down hard and put my arms around it to close out the flames.
‘I can’t really see myself now,’ my father said. ‘That’s good.’ He did not seem excited anymore. His face was very pale, and both his hands looked black as though they’d been burned. He placed them in his lap, and I thought that maybe he didn’t know what he had just done, or that he had burned himself and could not feel it. ‘Your mother’s not in there,’ he said to me very calmly. ‘Don’t worry. I established that.’ Light snow was beginning to collect on both of us.
‘Why did you light this?’ I said, holding on to his foot.
‘To get things back on track, I guess,’ he said, looking down at his hands in his lap. He raised them a little for some reason, then put them back down. Far away I heard a siren begin. Someone had called the fire department about this. ‘My hands don’t hurt,’ my father said.
‘Good,’ I said. And I let go of his foot and pulled my jacket from on top of it. It looked fine. It did not look like it had been burning even though I could smell the leather and the gasoline that had soaked it. ‘Do you want to get in the car,’ I asked, because that is what I wanted.
‘No,’ he said, ‘That’s not the right thing to do now.’ He turned and looked at the house behind him. There were still flames on the porch and up the boards of the front wall. The bottle he’d had with him had broken. But the fire was dying off from the damp wood and was smoking more than burning, and it did not look to me like the house would burn much more, and would not burn down as I had thought at first. ‘This is all unnecessary,’ my father said, when he turned around to me. ‘Uncalled for. Your mother doesn’t trust me. That’s all. This whole thing is a matter of trust.’ He shook his head and wiggled all ten fingers in his lap as though he was trying to feel them but couldn’t, and it made him nervous, and he wanted to do something to feel them again. They were related in his mind to something important.
Warren Miller came out of the front door of his house in a hurry then. He had put on the coat that went with his suit pants, and he had a woman with him, a tall, slender woman with a long, pale face, who had on a man’s wool overcoat and silver high-heeled shoes. I recognized the shoes as the ones in Warren’s closet. He was moving her in a hurry, with his big limp, down the wooden front steps past where my father and I were, and out onto the driveway away from the house, which he probably thought was burning down but wasn’t. He had his hand in the middle of her back. When he got her out to the sidewalk at the end of the driveway, he turned and he looked at us and at the house which still had some blue flames flickering and smoking on the outside walls, but which was mostly not on fire anymore. People up and down the street had come out of their houses and into their yards, including the two older people from next door, who I recognized and who went across the street to watch from the yard there. I could hear someone, a woman’s voice, yelling, ‘Come see this. You won’t believe it. Oh, my Lord.’ I began to hear sirens closer and the engines of the pumper truck as it came across the bridge with a bell ringing. And I stood there beside my father, waiting to see what would happen.
‘This will turn out better than it seems,’ my father said. He was looking around. He must’ve been amazed at what he’d done, at all the people who were looking at him and at me.
‘It’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘Not that much happened.’
‘I wish it was all right now,’ he said. ‘I wish.’
Warren said something to the tall woman in the man’s coat. I thought it was his coat, though it was not the one my mother had worn. The woman said something to him and looked at my father and me and shook her head. Then Warren Miller began limping toward us, up onto the grass of his own yard in the melting snow. We were just waiting for him, I guess, and for something to happen to us–for the police or the fire department to come, or whatever would happen officially. My father had decided to stay where he was and to take what was coming to him. He had no place to go. This must’ve seemed as good as any other place.
‘You’re a goddamned drunk, aren’t you?’ Warren Miller said, before he even got to us, while he was still limping across his yard. He was mad. I saw that. His voice seemed deeper than it had when I was in his house the night before. His face was pale and damp. ‘God damn it, Jerry,’ he said. ‘You’re all drunked up, and you’ve ruined my house.’
My father didn’t say anything to answer. I don’t know what he could’ve said. But when Warren Miller got to where we were–my father sitting on the edge of the porch and me beside him–he grabbed my father by his shirt front, just grabbed up the front of it, and hit him in the face with his fist, hit him so hard my father rocked backward. Though he didn’t go far back because Warren kept hold of him. Warren pulled his fist back to hit my father in the face again, but
I reached up and put my hands over my father’s face, and said very loudly, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t do it again.’
And Warren Miller turned loose of his shirt instantly and put both his hands into his coat pockets. Though he didn’t leave, he stayed where he was, did not even move back a step. His glasses looked dirty and fogged up, and his face was wet and so was his suit coat. He was breathing hard. I looked out where people were standing in the street. Someone there was pointing at us or at Warren Miller, who had hit my father. I saw a boy running across the yards to get to a place where he could see better. I heard sirens coming, and I could taste smoke.
‘God damn it, you have a son here, Jerry,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I don’t know why you’d do a thing like this.’ He was staring at my father, who was blinking his eyes. He wasn’t bleeding and there were no marks on his face where Warren had hit him, but he must’ve been dizzy or sick from it. I wanted to tell Warren to leave, that we were finished, but it was his house we were sitting in front of.
‘Who’s that?’ my father said. He was looking at the woman waiting out on the sidewalk in the long coat and the silver shoes.
‘What do you mean?’ Warren Miller said. He seemed astonished. ‘That’s none of your business who that is. It’s not your wife.’ He was still angry, I could feel it just being beside him. ‘I’ve got a pistol inside there, Jerry,’ he said. ‘I could shoot you and nobody’d say anything. They’d probably be glad.’
‘I know that,’ my father said, though I was shocked to hear that.
‘How old are you, for God’s sake?’ Warren Miller said.
‘Thirty-nine,’ my father said.
‘Weren’t you a college man? Didn’t you attend a college?’ Warren Miller said.
‘Yes,’ my father said.
Warren Miller turned and looked out in the front yard then. Some cars had stopped and the fire truck was blowing its horn to clear a way down the street. But the fire had put itself out by then. The snow had done it, and there wasn’t any need to have firemen come.