“Tyler, you’re drunk,” I heard one of them yell at him, “so just shut up!”
Hands reached down to help me to my feet, voices clucked over me in concern for me and indignation at him.
By that time, only the gaunt, handsome man who looked like an El Greco painting was left standing in the circle, staring directly into my eyes when I looked at him. With my shoulders, my hands, my face, my entire body, I tried to signal apology to him. But when I moved in his direction, he turned and hurried away from all of us.
I got plenty of help and sympathy brushing myself off.
“That’s okay,’ I joked, “I’m getting used to it.”
Not that anybody knew what I meant by that.
Maybe I’d have new battle wounds to show off to Geof tonight, I thought, which even I realized was a hilariously extreme case of making lemonade out of the proverbial lemons of life. When nobody was looking, I peeked at my skin under the flannel shirt I was wearing. It was with a feeling of absolutely perverse satisfaction that I took in the sight of fresh blood where the corner of the cross had torn both my shirt and my flesh.
Another day, another Band-Aid, I thought, a shade hysterically.
Facetiously, I wondered what the morrow would bring.
But I wasn’t going to have to wait that long for the next call for medical supplies; by evening, our town would be calling for more serious healing than any mere bandages could ever give to us.
15
WHEN I TOLD GEOF AND DAVID THE STORY AND GOT TO THE PART about the Holy Ghost advancing on the fundamentalists, they laughed until Geof cried and David begged for mercy on behalf of his broken clavicle. But Geof sobered up quickly when I related the next part, the one where I ended up on the ground.
“Did he hurt you?”
“Not really.”
“He did.” Geof stood up. “What did he do? Where are you hurt?”
We were all in the living room, because that’s where David was still hunkered under blankets. Geof had cooked hamburgers and soup for the two of them before I got home. I was inhaling a take-out tenderloin that I’d picked up from the diner on my way home. It was pork, of course, pounded to perfection, crunchy and greasy in a garlic-laced breading, and huge—hanging over the edges of the giant buttered and toasted bun, with pickles, onions, lettuce, tomato, and mayo spilling over the rim, too. Eating like this, it was no wonder I’d put on a few pounds during the busy months of preparation for the festival, not to mention that I had probably already turned my arteries to wallpaper paste. I licked mayo from my upper lip and attempted to make light of the incident. “He only hurt my dignity.” I pointed, vaguely, toward my chest. “And a little scratch, is all.”
“I wondered how you tore your shirt,” David said, which went a little way toward proving what I often suspected—that he noticed us, even though he liked to act sometimes as if we were invisible.
Geof, looking as angry as a father whose daughter has just been groped on a first date, came over to where I sat hunched over a TV tray dripping grease onto my plate. The television was silently tuned to a cops and robbers show they’d been watching. Shielding me from David’s view, Geof delicately peeled back the torn edges of the rip in the shirt I’d lifted from his closet and swore at what he saw. I was surprised, myself, to see that what had originally looked like a deepish scratch was now a large, swollen red welt above the left side of my bra. He’d gouged me pretty good, I saw. No wonder it stung every time I lifted the pork tenderloin to my mouth! When I had arrived home, I had been far too hungry to worry about doctoring my latest injury.
“The mark of the cross,” I intoned, trying for humor as I patted the shirt fragment back into place.
“What’s this jerk’s name, Jenny?”
I flapped a hand at him. “Sit down, honey, please.”
He obeyed, though he leaned toward me, looking intense.
“His name, Jen?”
“I heard somebody call him Tyler.”
“Jenny, you realize I can arrest the SOB, bring some fairly serious charges against him?”
“He’ll just say I tackled him first, which is kind of true.”
“And how many witnesses do you have to tell the judge how it really played out?” The lieutenant was gently sarcastic with me, reserving his anger for the drunken joker. “Who else saw him do this? Give me names, so I can locate him.”
“Yeah,” David chimed in from the couch, “sue the bastard.”
“Wait, guys.” I held up my greasy hands. “Wait. If you go looking for him, Geof … if I were to sue him, David … then we bring this Tyler person into our lives in a hig way. I don’t want anything more to do with him. Okay? I don’t want to have to identify him, or charge him, or talk to prosecutors about him, or be deposed by defense attorneys, or spend a single second of my life or a single penny of our money in any sort of effort to get revenge on him. I don’t want him knowing who I am, much less have him directing any personal animosity at any of us.”
“But, sweetheart—”
“Aw, come on, Jenny, you’re no fun—”
“He was just a dumb drunk, that’s all.” I smiled at them and said lightly, “I have spoken.”
They could tell I meant it, though. David didn’t appear to care one way or another, and there was no reason he should, he was just egging me on for the entertainment of it. But Geof was not looking convinced by my arguments.
“Please,” I said, just to him, “forget it. I’ll heal. I’m alive, a status which was never in doubt anyway. This is no big deal. Running backs go through much worse a hundred times a season, and they don’t try to have the defensive linemen arrested for assault, do they?”
“They’re in training for it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m getting there,” I said dryly, alluding to my week of pratfalls. “Next time something like this happens, I may be able to break tackle and run downfield.” Because Geof still didn’t look satisfied, I tried a diversion. “Come into the kitchen with me, will you? There’a funny thing I’ve remembered, and it’s stored in the phone in there.”
He insisted on moving the TV tray out of my way and on carrying my empty plate for me—as if I hadn’t already managed both of those lightweight tasks on my own already that night. It was a sweet gesture, however, and I wasn’t about to object to my husband’s show of concern for me.
It was dark outside by then, the time when our home often felt the most cozy to me—our cottage on its isolated curve of rocky ground and tall old trees, with the ocean little more than a stone’s throw away from our front door. We had once flown down the coast at night in a friend’s single-engine private plane, and we picked out our house from up there. We’d purposely left lights on, just so we might be able to spot it along the dark coast, and there it was—our small, warm, golden point of light in the deep black landscape of the Atlantic night.
As Geof and I left David behind in the living room, I heard the sound come back on the television.
“Is he feeling better?” I asked in the hallway.
“Oh, yeah. He slept ail afternoon and woke up complaining, so I figure he’s almost back to normal. What is it I’m supposed to see?”
“Remember when I did that phone interview for the TV station?”
Walking in front of me, he nodded.
“Well, in the middle of all that chaos, I got a call, a quick one. I had to get off the phone, because of the interview. But it was some woman who said I should shut down the highway.”
He held open the kitchen door for me, looking mildly intrigued.
“She sounded extremely upset,” I told him, as he crossed in front of me again, carrying my dishes. “It seemed as if she was pleading with me.” I smiled in deprecation of my own words. “Understand, I’m reading all of this into about ten seconds’ worth of conversation. Anyway, I’ve got her name and number stored, and I thought you might want it, since you’re looking for people who could have strong feelings about that trail crossing. I realize this is pro
bably no big deal—”
“Let’s have a look at her.”
While he ran water over the dirty dishes, I punched up the stored information from the caller identification feature of our telephone. Geof came up and looked over my shoulder, wiping his hands on a towel.
I wrote it all down for him, saying the number out loud.
“Wilheim, Dorothy,” I read off the little window. “Never heard of her, have you?”
“I think maybe I have.” Geof stuck the note into his shirt pocket. “I’ll check it out Monday.”
“Who is she?”
“Oh, that I don’t know. She just sounds familiar.”
I erased Dorothy Wilheim, whoever she was, from the memory of our telephone. She had, bless her, served my purpose of distracting my husband from his desire for vengence on the drunk. Now, if I could just quietly disappear upstairs, I would get out of the ruined shirt that still posed a clear and present red flag to him.
“Hey, you guys in there!”
It was David, paging us from the front of the house. When we entered the living room, he pointed at the television screen.
“Look at this,” he commanded us.
What we saw was a special local news bulletin.
There was Marilyn Stuben, the anchorwoman who had interviewed me, standing with her microphone in hand, talking to our local fire chief, Roy Stabaugh, he who had caused me no end of grief with his excessive (in my opinion) fire prevention and insurance worries.
Marilyn was saying, “Are we looking at an act of arson here, Chief Stabaugh?”
Geof said sharply, “Arson, where?”
“Wait!” David shushed him.
“Oh, we won’t know that for some time, Marilyn,” the fire chief was saying. “Not until we get this thing put out, and our investigators are able to get in there.”
“What a tragedy!” the anchorwoman said.
“Dave,” Geof began again, but again an upturned young hand stopped him, so we could listen.
“Yes, it is,” responded Chief Stabaugh, who, in my embittered opinion, looked as if he could have stood there all night being interviewed while his men risked their lives trying to extinguish whatever it was that was burning offscreen.
Finally, a camera showed us our first glimpse of the actual flames.
Something large was being utterly consumed by a true inferno, from the looks of it, even while we watched as fascinated voyeurs.
Geof recognized what it was before I did.
“Jenny, it’s the Dime Store.”
“Oh, my God!” My hands flew to my mouth in shock. “Oh, no!”
“Man,” said David, with delighted relish, “look at that sucker burn.”
I stood there only long enough to hear the anchorwoman say in a voice-over, “Chief, would you say this tragic fire points up the importance of the city having adequate fire protection and insurance coverage for the festival that’s coming up next weekend?”
Guess what the fire chief said?
“Yes, Marilyn, I would say that it certainly does.”
I raced upstairs then, to slip on a different shirt. When I got back downstairs, Geof was already wearing a jacket, waiting at the bottom of the stairway, and he was holding out a jacket for me. I stuffed my arms into it, hiding my winces.
“You guys can’t leave me!”
It was an indignant shout from the living room.
“You’ll be all right!” Geof called back, without pity. “Just don’t get scared and shoot yourself!”
I expected an outburst of profanity in response to that, but there was only silence from the front room. I walked to the doorway and looked in on him. There he was, still a hump of teenager under blankets.
“The owners of the store are friends of mine,” I told him. “We want to offer any help we can. Will you really be okay, if we leave you here by yourself?”
My attention seemed to surprise him, even disarm him. I had the feeling that his next words slipped out before he had time to censor them. “Hey, listen, I understand. Don’t worry about it. You guys go on and do what you gotta do. I’m fine.”
I smiled my appreciation at him, but he had already turned back to the television. They were still showing the burning of the Dime Store. It was big, big news on a Saturday night in our town, and from what I could see, the firemen weren’t having much luck in putting out the fire.
Only on the way into town did I finally remember to tell Geof about the whispered conversation I had overheard while I was underneath the speaker’s platform that day.
“With this fire, we’ll be lucky if we can spare anybody to go out there,” he said, but he got on his car phone to talk to the dispatcher. When he hung up, he looked frustrated. “She’ll try. I suppose I could do it. But I’d rather send somebody they won’t recognize.”
I asked him why.
“Because if our guy gets detected, as a last ditch he can claim he’s a local nature lover who heard about the meeting and wants to join in. If Lew saw me, that would be the end of it right there.” He shook his head. “No, I can’t be the one. We’ll have to hope she comes up with somebody else.”
All that wood. It burned like a bonfire. The modest and old-fashioned retail store that had been a beloved institution in Port Frederick was half gone to ashes by the time we got there.
It was amazing, how people reacted to that fire.
They walked, drove, wandered over from miles around—pulled to the sight of the end of a tradition in so many of their—our—families for generations. The fire blocked traffic, snarling it completely, but that didn’t seem to matter to any of us. All of the fire-fighting equipment was already in place, along with most of our police force, both the on-duty cops and the ones who were supposed to be off-duty at that time. Like everybody else, they came streaming in, leaving their own cars parked wherever they found space, then threading their way into the heart of things to take on assignments in crowd control, or in helping the firemen however they could.
It wasn’t one of those avid crowds, where people are just there to ogle and there’s laughter and, eventually, hot dog stands.
No, this was family, this crowd.
They were shocked, saddened—there were many tears shed over childhood memories of visits to the Dime Store for Halloween costumes and birthday party favors and Valentine’s cards and Christmas ornaments and Hanukkah candles and school supplies. Rulers and pencils and water colors and Big Chief notebooks, we’d bought them all at the Dime Store, along with licorice whips and our first pairs of earrings and sets of plastic dishes for our dolls and toy guns and colored construction paper and … and it was all drifting away in the smoke.
After Geof went off to lend a hand, I ran into many, many friends and acquaintances. To a person, they seemed to feel the fire as a personal loss, a blow, even.
Nellie Kennedy I located among a circle of concerned customers who included Melissa Barney and her two boys. Bringing them there—after so much grief of their own—wasn’t what I would have done, I thought, as I watched the three red heads glow in the flickering light. Too much morbid excitement, I’d have decided, which probably only went to show that it was a good thing I wasn’t a mom. And, what did I know from baby-sitters, anyway? If Melissa wanted to rush to the moral support of the Kennedys—as Nellie had come to hers—she couldn’t very well leave a three-year-old and an eight-year-old home alone.
The Barneys didn’t notice me.
Like so many others, they only had eyes for the flames.
Nellie was sobbing. Bill was staring at their store, looking stunned and bewildered. You could almost read his thoughts in his face: How could this happen to us?
Everyone else looked helpless to help them, and that’s how I felt. But Nellie saw me standing near and reached out for one of my hands.
“Your festival,” she said through her tears. “All the things you still need …”
I’m human. I couldn’t deny that thought had also crossed my mind, but I didn’t want
her to worry about it now.
“Oh, please, Nellie,” I said, “don’t give it a thought! Heck, it’s less than a week away now, and we’ve got almost everything we need. We’ll sort it all out, don’t you worry.”
I wasn’t going to ask her, “What happened?”
I figured that she and Bill had already been asked that question too many times already. I’d find out, like everyone else, sooner or later.
But Nellie told me anyway.
Or, rather, she told me that she didn’t know.
“There were just suddenly flames, Jenny. Some customers smelled smoke, and they told Bill, and he came looking for me. We didn’t have time for anything except getting everybody out.”
My God. My own knees weakened at the thought I hadn’t thought before: Of course, the store had still been open for business, probably packed on the last Saturday night before Halloween. Suddenly, I realized how terrible it could have been. Again, I didn’t even have to ask Nellie the question that was in my mind. She offered the answer.
“We got everybody out, Jenny. Oh, thank God. The children—”
I put my arms around her as she started to sob. Bill heard her and came toward us, and I turned Nellie around and literally placed her in his arms. Slowly, sweetly, without saying anything, Bill patted Nellie’s back as they held each other, the short, sturdy woman in her sensible dark dress enveloped by the tall, lanky frame of her husband.
Their daughter, I saw, was wasting no opportunity to make political hay out of her own family’s tragedy.
Illuminated by television lights, interviewed by the omnipresent anchorwoman, Ardyth cut a memorable figure standing beside the fire chief—he in full battle regalia—and both of them visible to everyone—most of whom were registered voters—from everywhere.
“Jenny,” I muttered to myself, as I stepped over cables to try to hear what Ardyth and Chief Stabaugh were saying, “you are such a cynic.”
What mayoral candidate Ardyth Kennedy was saying so sincerely to the camera was this: “And when I am elected, I will bring into office with me my memories of this night’s loss, so personal to me, along with a strengthened conviction to protect the citizens of this city. This terrible night will not be without meaning, not if I can help it. I will wrest from the ashes of my family’s sad loss an utter devotion to the cause of protecting the families of our city from the depredations of fire, crime …”