Rise (9 page)

“Come back,” he shouted, and he swung his stick around. “You can't hide from me.” He was short of breath. He gasped and couldn't find any air.

Helen led him back inside. She took the stick from him and set it down, and she heated up some milk for him and sweetened it with honey.

“It's no good what you're doing. You're going to get yourself hurt,” she said. “We need to think this through.” She brought him his cup and sat with him at the table. She talked about townhouses again, all those nice ones they were building off Powers and Academy. The master sergeant was up there. He grew his tomatoes on the balcony now. He had one of those hydroponic systems, and it was nicer than a garden. Not even two inches of snow, and the management boys were out there shoveling.

He pretended to listen to what she said. He waited for her to finish. “Go back to bed,” he said. “I'll be along in a bit.” He should have been grateful she was there with him. She was better than he deserved, but he felt only anger at her curlers and her tired eyes and how she'd pestered him years ago to sell his old revolver. He waited until she was asleep before he climbed beside her.

Every Tuesday morning Helen took her military ID and went to Walgreens for the discount. She'd be gone an hour or maybe two if she met someone there she knew. He brought the air gun out as
soon as she'd left. He set the stock against his hip and broke the barrel open. He had a Beeman gun, and it was quiet when it shot. He took a handful of pellets from the tin. He dropped all but one into his shirt pocket. He set a single pellet in and pulled the barrel back until it locked.

There was nobody in the yard next door. Travis was probably sleeping, and his wife was somewhere inside. He carried the rifle through his back door, past the deck and the empty pond. He didn't look down at the water. He went to the gardening shed near the back fence. He'd built it for Helen almost twenty years before, and it was time to paint the door again and the window boxes. He walked back and forth behind the shed until he found the best spot.

He shouldered the rifle and pointed it toward the Fishers' maple tree. The crows were up high in the branches. He looked through the scope. He wasn't more than thirty yards away, and he could see all their feathers and how they shone blue. The gun made only a soft sound when he fired. Only a whoosh and a bird fell from the branch. It fell with one wing open and whirled downward to the grass. The other crows were riled. They cawed and flapped their wings and flew upward all at once. More birds came from other trees and circled the maple. He reached for another pellet. He crouched behind Helen's shed and waited for them to settle down. He'd get a half dozen more if he was patient. Let the cats eat the birds he killed. Let them stay out of his yard for once and choke on the bones. He thought these things and regretted them, and for the first time since the war his hands trembled when he held his gun.

The bail bondsman put his house up for sale from one day to the next. His back was still in a brace from the disc surgery, but he pounded in the sign himself. He waved at Frank when he was done and shrugged a little. It was the only other house left on the block that still had a lawn and flower beds. “It's time,” he shouted from across the street. “We're moving out to Calhan. We've got some acres there.”

Frank waved back and went inside with his paper. He sat in the living room which they never used because the TV was in the kitchen. He looked around at the things they'd collected. Helen's
showcase with her figurines and her watercolors. She liked to paint roses and hydrangeas in round vases, and she'd taken classes over the years at the community college. The first few were horrible and not even he could muster up a compliment and make it sound sincere, but she'd gotten better now and the flowers looked almost real. He stretched his legs out on the ottoman. He'd put up paneling in '73 and laid down wall-to-wall shag, and he took it all out again ten years later and refinished the oak floors. He hung lamps where she wanted them and painted the walls, and he'd made an entryway by framing out a wall and hanging it with paisley paper. It was their paradise, this house.

He opened the newspaper across his lap. Just last night somebody took a gun into the Radisson and shot the desk clerk dead. Gangs were coming in from Chicago and from Los Angeles, the police chief was saying. They were shooting each other even in the daytime. It made him tired to read the stories. The city was changing, and he wanted to lie down. He wanted things to stay the way they were. Every month another house sold, and the new people who came didn't water their gardens or sit in front on their lawn chairs. They parked snow mobiles and broken trucks in the middle of their yards, and their children had no manners. Always running and shouting even at ten o'clock at night. They ran outside when it rained and splashed barefoot in the storm gutters, and they were going to cut themselves one day. They were going to get infected.

The clock chimed in the hallway, and it sounded like a church bell. He folded up the paper and set it aside. It was better not to know. He wasn't fast the way he used to be, and things kept moving anyway. They were pulling him along. His boy would be almost forty. He'd have gray hairs of his own.

Helen came in from the garden with cut roses and tiger lilies. She whistled while she filled the vase. She jumped when she saw him sitting in the chair. “I didn't know you were in here,” she told him. “You gave me a little scare.” She tilted her head, and when he didn't say anything she came to him and put her hands on both his shoulders. He wondered if she ever thought about their boy. He wanted to know, but he would never ask.

•

They were up on the corner when they first heard the sirens. Fire trucks lined both sides of their street. He parked three houses up, and he hadn't unlatched his seat belt yet and Helen was off running. She was quick even in her stockings and her church shoes. By the time he caught up, her eyes were red from the smoke. She was stopped in the middle of the street. They stood together in front of their house and watched it burn. Sparks fluttered in the air and fell back down. The firemen uncoiled the hoses. They ran for the hydrant, and one of them shouted and waved his hands.

Helen pulled him. “We've got to move,” she said. “They're telling us to go.” He let her take him by the arm, and they went to the bail bondsman's porch and stood there on the steps. The engine driver was on top working the panel, and the others ran with the nozzles. It didn't even take a minute and the water arced high over their roof. The streams met and crossed, and it was almost like a fountain how they danced in the air. She was telling him something. He could hear her voice and how calm it was. She pointed and shook her head, but he didn't listen. All he could see was the firemen and how they ran across his grass in their boots and trampled his blooming lilies.

It began on the deck. He learned this only later. Travis must have waited for them to leave for church, and then he'd jumped the fence one last time. The cushions on the loungers must have gone up first and then the firewood they'd stacked against the deck. The junipers in the rock beds would be next and the ponderosa pine that grew beside the house. It was dry that tree and always dropped its needles. He should have cut it down. Helen had said so more than once, but he'd left it because it was beautiful.

The wind blew the sparks upward. It carried them to the roof tiles and into the attic vents, and that's where they must have found a place. They shuddered and grew, and the house burned from the inside out. The windows broke one after the next. The beams burned and the interior walls and only the brick was left untouched, those pale gray and pink bricks that nobody else had, not on any of the streets.

The firemen moved faster now. They were running around like soldiers. The hydrant wasn't enough anymore, and they used the tanker and all the pumps. Everybody from the nearest houses came
out to the street and watched. Everybody except the Fishers, whose truck was gone. The neighbors' kids ran along the walk. They shouted and pointed. It was better than fireworks or a carnival seeing those trucks up close and how the flames moved in the wind.

“They're wrecking all my lilies,” he said. “Look how they're crushing them down.”

She shook her head at that. She looked a little worried. “Sit,” she said. “You need to sit for a while.” But he didn't move and he didn't budge and he watched the flames instead. The wind gusted beneath his jacket. One of those dry mountain winds that come in May and last until August and dry out all his beds. Always blowing. Always bending the treetops and clearing the clouds from the sky.

The fence was burning, that picket fence he'd just built. It burned before he'd even painted it, and the old tarp that covered the boat went next and then the boat itself. The fuel tank and the lines went up because Travis hadn't drained them. Burning pieces of fiberglass went high into the trees, and the steering wheel flew like a Frisbee over the street.
Sweet mother Mary
, Helen was saying,
sweet Mary look at that
. Her hands were over her mouth.

The firemen added more hoses, but all their water didn't stop the flames or the smoke cloud that mushroomed over the treetops. Blacker than asphalt that smoke and he could taste it in his throat. Every time he thought they had the fire doused, it began to burn again. He'd never seen anything burn like that boat, not even in the army. It must have been the resin in the fiberglass. It turned into a powder.

He climbed down the steps and across the bondsman's lawn and stood beside the For Sale sign. More sparks were coming. The trees were shedding them like leaves. Firebrands fell over the Fishers' yard and onto their sloping roof. He knew what would happen next. Travis was lazy with his gutters. Ponderosa needles were up there and dried bird nests and the accumulated leaves of a dozen years. They burned now with a popping sound like a thousand cap guns, and the flames swayed in the wind and moved across to the wooden eaves. For the first time the firemen were really shouting. The leader ran for the truck. They turned their cannon toward the Fisher house because it was wood that house and so was the next one up. They
swiveled it until the aim was right, and the water came out like fifty hoses combined.

The foam came next. The firemen filled both houses like cream puffs. Some of the neighbors came and shook his hand or patted him on the shoulder. “We'll be alright,” he told them. “We'll build her back better than she was.” He talked about adding a gazebo this time and a covered porch out back, and they'd put metal screens on all the attic vents. It wasn't true, he knew this already. In September he'd be eighty-four, and Helen had started circling ads in the real estate section and leaving them by his chair. For planned communities with recreation centers and art tours of the city and bus trips to New England to see the falling leaves. “By Christmas we'll be back,” he said. “Maybe even sooner.” The neighbors looked doubtful, but they nodded anyway.

The firemen had begun to coil their hoses. A few were in his yard again and stepping on his lilies. They were breaking all the rose plants, and his lawn had turned to mud. Only the maple tree behind the Fisher house was untouched. Not even its crown was scorched. Another day or maybe two and the crows would come back in its branches. He looked at the tree and the twisted husk of the boat. It was too bad Travis hadn't stayed to watch.

She came up beside him. “I've talked to the Musselmans,” she said. “They've got the air bed ready.” She stepped back and gave him a hard look. “Why are you smiling? You're scaring me.” She touched his forehead with her fingertips, and they were cool against his skin. It was time to leave. It was time to go, but she looked so young just then. She looked how she did when they'd first met in school, and he reached for her hand and held it.

H
is hands began to shake again in the Safeway checkout line. The woman in front had eighteen items when the limit was fifteen. Diapers and canned soups and a shabby head of lettuce. Comet and ten different Weight Watchers dinners, and her baby was crying in its seat. It wailed just like a siren. His hands shook so hard he almost dropped his wallet. The regular cashier was gone, the pretty Korean lady with the long black hair. This new one had a goiter. He looked around at the other aisles, but they were just as busy. He had to stay because he needed turkey to make his chili. That's the only reason he came. Turkey and kidney beans and a fat green pepper, but not any spices. He ordered those on the Internet because he didn't like those cheap glass bottles. The light stripped out all their flavors. Might as well use wood shavings the way they tasted.

The mother up front was looking for her Club Card. “It's in here somewhere,” she said. “I can never find things in this purse.” She wore a blue down parka that was torn at the collar. Her boots were wet from the melting snow. Her baby was still crying, and people two aisles over were starting to look, but she didn't seem to care.

She started to empty out her bag, a dirty suede bag that needed the brush. She fished out a Kleenex wad and a pair of rusty nail clippers, a cigarette lighter, and a comb. She put these things on the little platform where people signed their checks. “I saw it just the other day,” she was saying. An asthma inhaler came next, some baby wipes,
a Ziploc bag with coupons. She lifted up her bag sideways so she could see inside it better, and it was too much, the mess she was making. He felt a throbbing behind his eyes.