The Arsonist (30 page)

But by the middle of the third month, when Bud had taken a different woman out to dinner in Winslow, Pete said casually to him at work one day, “You can’t be doing what you’re doing, Bud, my friend.” They were standing at the big work table, figuring out the layout for that week’s front page.

“Which is what?”

“You know what.” Pete moved a few things around and stepped back to look again. After a few moments he said, “You have to watch your … spacing, with women. These are all people you’re going to be seeing over and over again. Maybe you’re going to need to talk to them for a story. For information.” He moved to the coffee machine and poured himself another cup. He added sugar and tasted it. He said, “You can’t be embarrassing people. Hurting them. Even if they should know better than to be hurt.”

Bud didn’t say anything. They stood side by side, looking at their work.

“It’s not the city,” Pete said. “You’re not anonymous. Everyone knows your business, sooner or later. And it matters, what they think of your business.”

And then his tone changed. “It was easier for me, being married like I was. And having the wife I had—everyone liked her way better’n they liked me. People put up with me on account of her. You’re gonna have to be more … judicious, let’s say.”

Bud didn’t answer. He felt the weight of his decision to move here, the carelessness, as he suddenly thought of it, of the way he’d reached it.

“I speak as your friend,” Pete said, still without looking at him.

“I know you do, Pete,” he’d answered.

After that, he had been judicious. He let weeks pass between dates with the new woman, a teacher in the Pomeroy grammar school. And when things ended between them—ended with what he felt was agonizing slowness and elaborate, polite care on his part—he waited for months before turning to another woman, a summer resident, one he’d been attracted to the year before. Things were easier with her because she was going to leave, she expected things to end when the summer ended.

And after that, for the most part he kept his pecker in his pants, as his high school football coach used to say. Brandishing it only occasionally when he felt a sort of ease, a lack of intensity, in a woman’s reaction to him.

Frankie was different, he thought now, lying in the warming sun, hearing only the rush of the water. There was a focused responsiveness
in her, a kind of susceptibility, he felt, which both drew him and made him cautious. He felt cautious, too, about her uncertainty. He had the sense that she could matter to him in some deep way, and he didn’t want to start something with her if she was about to leave. She was mobile, he was not. He had made that choice, and he was clear about it. Clearer about it now than he had been when he made it.

He slept then, for what he thought was ten minutes or so. When he woke, his flesh had dried. He stood up and pulled his clothes back on.

On the walk back to the car, he was thinking again about Frankie—just about the way she looked, the timbre of her voice. Then about the fire at her parents’ house.

His mind went to Tink Snell, and he was remembering—how did he know this?—that he lived on this road, somewhere up higher, it must be.

He’d look, he thought. Why not? He must be close.

As he drove up the worn-out dirt road, steering carefully around the exposed boulders in the roadbed, he wondered about how many other corners of this town he’d never cast his eyes on. Early in his life here, he’d tried to drive or walk everywhere. He’d explored the five cemeteries, one of them so overgrown that he wasn’t sure at first he was in the right place. He’d swum in all the ponds in town—Hurd’s and Green Pond, and the man-made one by the inn that had been torn down years before, and the one up here, Silsby. But sometimes, as now, driving somewhere, he’d realize he was seeing a road or a house or a vista that he’d never encountered before.

It made him think about how impossible it was for the fire-watch guys to keep an eye on everything, as Loren had said.

The road kept rising, and then suddenly it opened out to a clearing. To a hilly meadow, he saw, with a dirt track running up it. He stopped where he was, still partly in the woods at the field’s lower edge. At the top of the meadow, he could see a trailer perched on cinder blocks, a car parked next to it.

And a man—Tink—moving from the trailer to the car, loading something into the trunk, then bending over, rearranging things. He was wearing only jeans and work boots. Bud watched him until he stood straight, slammed the trunk closed, and went back inside the trailer.

He sat there, waiting, but Tink didn’t reappear. After a minute or two, he eased the car into neutral and let it roll silently back down the hill. Within a hundred yards or so, he spotted an area big enough to turn around in, and backed into it.

At home again, while he made coffee, while he sliced a piece of bread to put in the toaster, he decided he’d stop by to see Frankie today. Yes. He’d ask her out for dinner. He hadn’t really taken her out yet. He’d gone with her to the dance, yes, but that was different. Civic. Work related—he’d had to take the pictures, after all. Even if they had ended up later lying next to each other in a field, talking, kissing.

He stood at the sink drinking his coffee and looking out the window at the mountains beyond the river, at the road that cut horizontally between them. A lumber truck went by on it, a miniature from here, the logs so many twigs stacked up on its trailer. The mountain peaks were still in shadow. The only radio station you could get here was from Vermont, and the long-winded guy there was discussing the subtleties of weather in his self-satisfied way.

What were his intentions with Frankie? Sex. Well, yes. He’d thought about it, her, numerous times in ways that were at once all too generic—legs opening, et cetera—and very specific. Her face, her smile, the paper white of her skin, her tumbling hair. He liked her physically. He liked looking at her, he liked the way she smelled. He’d liked touching her the other night in the field. He could have made love to her there, then, if she’d responded to him with any answering passion. But she’d seemed hesitant. Not in a way that made him think it couldn’t or wouldn’t happen. In a way, instead, that seemed to him to spring from all that was unclear and unresolved and troubling to her in her life—and that seemed to be just about everything.

On the other hand, they were both freezing their asses off at that point.

The toast popped up noisily. Sometimes it flung itself out so enthusiastically that it landed on the counter, and he always felt cheered when this happened. Not today. “Wuss,” he said to this slice, nicely browned. He buttered it and sat down at the table, chewing contemplatively.
He regarded this bread, from a bakery in Whitehall, flecked with seeds and grains and oats and flavored slightly with molasses, as one of the reasons for living where he did—though he would have been embarrassed to offer it as an argument to any of the friends he’d left behind in Washington.

The toast, and also the view from his house. When he was living in Washington, he’d watched television in the morning, the chatty news shows. Here he listened to the radio and looked up at the hills.

The angle out onto the hills was part of why he’d chosen the house. In itself, it wasn’t much. A small former summer cottage, awkwardly winterized. Its first-floor windows, which he imagined as charmingly multipaned in their previous life, were now huge, fixed, double-glazed picture windows. The ones upstairs had simply been replaced with cheap versions of themselves, but the double glazing up there had leaked at some point long before he had moved in, and the views upstairs were therefore all befogged—when you woke and looked out, the day always seemed grayish and unpromising.

He was watching the light shift in the room and half listening to the news while he ate. And then suddenly he was paying attention—they were talking about Kenya. Kenya and also Tanzania: bombings. He stopped chewing, hurriedly set his toast and coffee down, and crossed the room to the radio. He knocked his chair over in his haste, and it went scudding backward over the uneven floor. He turned the volume up.

The NPR correspondent in Kenya was talking about numbers killed. Large numbers. Thousands wounded. It was at the U.S. embassy. Not inside the embassy, they hadn’t gotten inside, but right in front. The other bombing, the one in Tanzania, was clearly coordinated with it—they had happened within minutes of each other.

He was thinking of Frankie. She might not know this yet, and it would be important to her. She might know people who worked at the embassy or someplace close to it. They said many nearby were wounded or dead. People just walking past, people in the building opposite.

He’d go to her place now, he thought. He’d let her know, if she didn’t already. He could stop by again later, he could ask her out then. He was already upstairs, getting a sweater, brushing his teeth. He didn’t bother to shave.

The sun was just entering the valley as he drove across it. He had the car radio on, in case there was more detail, but the hosts had moved on now—they were discussing the Lewinsky stuff again. He turned it off and drove in the relative silence of his car’s engine noise, wondering what this would mean to Frankie, how she’d receive it.

She came to the door in a bathrobe, her hair in a single braid draped over her shoulder. No makeup. White. Very white.

“
This
is early,” she said, with the gap-tooth smile that made Bud happy every time he saw it, no matter what else was going on.

“Yeah. For a reason,” he said.

“Come in, then. Tell me.” She had stepped back, and he came in. A low morning light streamed into the room through the windows over the sink. There was a book open, facedown, on the kitchen table, a paperback. A coffee mug sat next to it. Her robe was a pale blue, draped, clingy. He watched her hips under it as she walked back to the table and sat down.

He went to stand closer to her, by the table. “I just wondered, did you hear about the African bombings?”

“Oh,
no
!” she cried. She was looking up at him. He could see most of one breast, a minimal, graceful weight to its curve, very white, too. But now, as if in response to his news, her hand rose, and she pulled her robe together at her neck. “What happened?”

He explained what he knew, what he’d heard. He sat down next to her as he talked, watching her face, the anguish he could read there in response to what he was reporting to her.

When he was done, she was silent for a moment. “And they think it was terrorists?” she asked finally.

“Yes. They said some Islamic sect, I think.”

She shook her head. “Ah,” she whispered, frowning. Then, after a few seconds, her light eyes on him: “So, it was just the embassy?”

“I don’t know, Frankie.” He shook his head. “Damage to more than one building, I think they said. But I think it was just collateral damage. The embassy was the target, they seemed pretty sure. And then there’s the other bomb in Tanzania. But I don’t know, actually.”

“There are people I should call,” she said. She stood up abruptly, then stopped. “Ahm.” She was still frowning. “It’s what? Early afternoon
there.” She bit her lip. She wasn’t really talking to him. “Maybe I should go up to my parents’.” She turned away from him. “Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.” She went toward the bedroom doorway.

“You could use my phone,” he said, watching her. “I’ll be out for a while. I’ve got an appointment.” He didn’t, but he could invent something to give her some privacy.

She looked back at him. “You know, that would be great. Just … so much less complicated.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

She went into the bedroom. He could hear her moving around, drawers being opened and closed, the rustle of clothing. He tried not to think of her taking her robe off, dressing, but was unsuccessful and, in spite of himself, turned on. When she emerged, she was wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt. She carried a green sweater. “I’ll just wash my face,” she said.

“Fine. I can wait.”

She was in the bathroom for several minutes. When she came out, she’d loosed her hair from her braid—it fanned out over her shoulders. She’d put on eye makeup, and lipstick, too. He felt pleased, imagining this was for his benefit.

She took her cup to the sink and rinsed it. She picked up her book from the table. “I better take this,” she said. She tucked it into the big straw bag she used for a purse. “Sometimes you wait a long time for a connection. And then it disconnects, and you have to start all over.”

On the way back to town in Bud’s car, he turned the radio on. At seven, the top of the hour, the bombings were discussed again, but again, the hosts moved on quickly to the domestic news. He turned it off.

“I think I’m going to take you to my house,” he said. “Not the office.”

“Okay.” There was a question in the word.

“Yeah, it’s just that the office line will ring off and on, and people will be leaving messages. My line at home is more private, less of a hassle.”

“Okay,” she said again.

“You think you might know someone …?”

“I don’t know. But the wife of a friend—a colleague, really—works at the embassy, or she did. And who knows? Any one of a lot of my
friends might have been there for something or other. I’d just like to check.” There was a silence. “I might call New York first, to see what they know.”

“Okay.” They came to the paved road, and Bud turned left.

“I’ll keep track of the charges,” Frankie said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“And Bud?”

He looked over at her.
What?

“Once I’ve done all that stuff, do you mind if I call around locally a bit?”

“No.”

“I told my mother I’d research care options for my father. She … was having a hard time the other night, after the fire.”

“I’m sorry.”

There was a long silence. “Clearly, I should get a phone.”

“If you’re going to stay,” he said.

“Even if not. Too much going on.” She had turned away and was looking out the window. They were passing the town green. There were two large dogs, one white, one yellowish, wrestling. She turned back to him. “Who’d have thought it?” she said. “I come home—back to the States—for downtime. A sabbatical. A retreat in the country, to think things over. And all hell breaks loose here, and now all hell breaks loose there. What does it mean, you think?”