The Arsonist (8 page)

“Yeah, yeah,” Frankie said, smiling at him.

“So, you? What shall I say about you?”

“ ‘Visiting from Kenya, where she does all manner of noble stuff, was Frankie Rowley, the oldest child of Alfie and Sylvia Rowley,’ ba-da, ba-da, ba-da.”

“Kenya!” He was surprised.

But people usually were, and Frankie recognized the familiar pulse of pleasure she felt in his response, and then another quick pulse of something like embarrassment at feeling that yet again.
Grow up
.

She shrugged. “I’m an aid worker,” she said.

“Aha. And how long have you been doing that?”

“About fifteen years now.”

“Oh! A long time, then,” he said. More surprise.

“Yeah,” she said. “But it seems shorter. And then again, longer, too.”

“Like so much of life,” Bud said. There was a moment of silence, just long enough to make Frankie feel awkward. Then he said, “So. Duration of stay?” He held up an imaginary pad, a nonexistent pen.

“Unclear.”

“Ah. Because?”

“Because … of burnout, let’s say. Brownout, anyway.”

He smiled. “By coincidence, the same reason I’m here.”

“In your case, burnout with …?”

“Oh, with real life, I suppose. At least as a newsperson encounters it.”

Frankie looked around again. One of the parents, a mother, was dealing with the kids on the porch now. You could hear the sharp words springing out of her mouth as she bent toward them:
“Never
 … can
not
 …
Right now!”
They stood silent, looking up at her, scared, resentful.

“Little risk of that with this crowd,” Frankie said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Anyway, I’m here to test that notion.”

“And so far?”

“So far, real life knocks from time to time.” He nodded. “Yes, even here.”

“As in?”

“Births. Deaths. Illness.” He shrugged again. He smiled at Frankie. “Zoning often does the trick. There’s nothing like zoning for passion.” He shook his head. “Zoning:
real life
.”

Frankie laughed.

“A big fire the other night,” he offered. “That was pretty real.”

“Oh, I heard about it.” She thought again about the faraway, mechanical call, the smell of smoke in the dark. “Were you there?”

“Yeah, I went. I have a pager for the fire department calls. Fires, accidents, the proverbial cat in the proverbial tree, the dog fallen through the ice, et cetera. But I missed most of this one. We all did. It was pretty much over, I think, before a call even went in. All the guys could do was try to be sure it didn’t jump to the trees.”

“So, essentially, a bunch of men standing around watching a bonfire.”

“Well, yes. And squirting their hoses on it.” He nodded. “As men will.” A little silence fell again. “It’s sad though,” he said. “It was a fine old house.”

“So they can’t rebuild it?”

“Have you
seen
it?”

“No.” Frankie shook her head.

“There’s just nothing there. Nothing much. The chimney. A stove. I’m going to head over there after this, to get some daylight photos. If you want to come along, you can take a look.” He made a moue. “A look at what’s
not
there.”

“I am curious, I confess. I’d like to see it.”

“Okay, it’s a deal. I’ll find you when I’m leaving.” He turned, his hand on his camera again.

“But Bud …”

He stopped, looking back.

“I wonder, would you be willing to drop me off at home afterward?”

“Home,” he said. “Your parents’ home?”

“Yeah. Mine, too, for the moment.”

“That’s right there on Carson Road, too, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Easy enough, then. I’ll be happy to, madam,” he said, bowing his head, then moving away.

Frankie moved, too, back to one of the shifting groups.

By the time she saw Bud coming toward her again, the lawn was even more crowded with people and alive with conversation, and she was experiencing a sweeping sense of exhaustion—she would have gone with him no matter what, she thought, just because he was leaving before her parents were going to. She excused herself to Bud for a moment and went to find them. They were sitting up on the porch, along with several other couples, in the rockers. She bent over her mother’s chair from behind, touching her shoulder, and told her that Bud,
this guy
—she waved behind herself vaguely—would take her home after they stopped to look at the fire at the Kershaws’. Her mother raised her eyebrows, and Frankie said, “I’m just a zombie at this point. I’ve got to get back as soon as I can.”

“Fine, then,” her mother said. “We’ll be along in a while.”

Frankie and Bud walked down the lawn together, and then along the row of parked cars, until they came to one he gestured at. “Here we are,” he said. It was an old Saab, dented and rusty. He opened the door for her, and she got in, sinking gratefully into the passenger seat. It had an old-car smell. Not unpleasant, but funky. She noted that the fabric was worn away on the driver’s seat and, when he swung himself in behind the wheel, she noted again how tall he was, how large. He started the engine. It made an almost comical amount of noise. She saw a few people at the edge of the lawn turned to watch them as they drove away.

“How did you do?” he said after a moment. She must have looked puzzled, because he explained: “The social whirl. Remembering people.”

“Oh. Fine,” she said. “They’re all more or less
imprinted
on me. I probably couldn’t forget them if I wanted to.”

“So, what we learn from this is that you
can
go home again?”

“Well, this isn’t quite home, of course.”

“Africa is home.” This was both a statement and a question.

“Mmmh,” she said. “Also not quite.” They were starting down the long, slow series of hills into the town. Bud had the car in low gear, and it whined steadily.

“Where is, then?” he asked.

She was quiet for a moment, feeling the emptiness of her fatigue, and, beyond that, a kind of general emptiness. “Damned if I know,” she said. She looked at him. “Through no particular intention of my own, I seem to have succeeded at making myself a functionally homeless person.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I know that feeling, I think.” The expression on his face seemed gently rueful to Frankie.

After a minute, she asked, “Don’t you feel at home here? You’ve been here, what?”

“Three years now. I’m working on it.” He laughed, quickly. “I’m discovering I feel more at home in the summer, in some ways, with the summer people. But I get what that’s about. They’re transient, and maybe I am, too. Or at least I’m seen that way.”

“Wait a minute—
they
don’t think of themselves as transient. The summer people. They are
permanent
summer people.”

“Well, sure.” He smiled over at her and then looked back at the road.
“But I think it’s possible that the permanent
winter
people think of them as transient. In any case, they still think of me that way, I’m pretty sure.”

“Well, if they think of me at all, they probably think of me that way, too.” She lifted her hands. “Why not? I do.”

“But where did you actually grow up?”

“Oh, all over the place. My father, Alfie …” She stopped and looked over at him. “Do you know my parents?”

“I’ve met them. Can’t claim to know them, but I know who they are.”

“Well, anyway, Alfie was making his way in the academic world all through my childhood.” She smiled. “Mostly sideways, it must be said.”

“So, how many places?”

“Five? Six? Something like that. He took a while to find his … niche, as it were.”

“That must have been hard.” When she didn’t answer after a moment, he turned his head to look at her. “Or was it?”

“I don’t know.” And then she was remembering. “Actually, for a while, I think my sister and I thought it was a privilege, we thought it was exciting. Something other kids didn’t get to do. All these fresh starts. Another chance to be a great success at … whatever.”

“That’s a nice spin to put on it. On … transience.”

“Yeah. My mother’s spin, I think. At
that
time.” Frankie was thinking of her mother’s irritation with her father later, of the sarcasm that had slowly taken over her tone. When had that happened? “At some point, it seems clear, it started to piss her off that he couldn’t make a go of it anywhere. Until finally he sort of did. But early on I remember her—or I think I remember her—as insistent on his valor.” She straightened up and made a fist. “His
value
. His
worth
.”

“Hmm,” he said.

After a moment, Frankie said, “Here’s an example: Once I asked her what class we were. We must have been studying something about it in school. Or maybe I read the phrases somewhere. Upper class, middle class. Anyway, she said to me something like, ‘Class has no relevance to our lives.’ ” And then Frankie changed her voice, made it fluty, definitely upper class.
“ ‘Your father is an intellectual.’ ”

Even as he laughed, lightly, hoarsely, Frankie felt a vague embarrassment.
She had parlayed this anecdote widely in the African world she’d inhabited, where it was risible, fantasy, to imagine you could escape the insistence of history, economics, tribe, race, class. “Anyway,” she said, “right now, I’d settle for anyplace with a bed, I’m so jet-lagged.”

“Oh.” He looked over again. “You
just
got here.”

“Yeah. Two days ago, in fact.”

“Do you want me just to take you home then? To your parents’?”

“No, I’m interested in this, actually. Curious, I guess.”

“Okay. I’ll be quick. I only need the one good shot. Then I’ll take you home.” He smiled at her. “Or whatever you call it.”

She leaned back. There was a comfortable silence between them as they swung off the paved road onto dirt. At least she felt it as comfortable. She was watching the patchy sunlight moving through the thick trees they were passing as the car mounted the hill. Her window was open. The fresh air was blowing her hair back from her face. She shook her head and thought suddenly of the Muslim girls on the ferry from Lamu.

They had passed the turnoff to Liz and Clark’s little house in the field and to her parents’ house. About three-quarters of a mile beyond that, they turned in at the Kershaws’ driveway. And then she smelled it. The fire. It was different from the kinder, more melancholic smell of two nights ago. It smelled scorched, and dampness was a part of the odor—something to do with all the water that had been poured on it, no doubt. The driveway was narrow and overhung. The trees on her side almost touched her arm, which rested on the open window’s edge.

After about a hundred feet, they came out into a clearing, a lawn. In the middle of it stood what had been the house. There were a few partially burned trees keeping vigil around it, but it was what was left in the center that Frankie was looking at. Several structural timbers still stood in the sodden rectangle that was the house’s footprint and, recognizably, a refrigerator, a blackened toilet, plus some other charred lumps of what could have been appliances or furniture. Aside from those, it seemed that all that was left was the fieldstone fireplace and the brick chimney above it, which rose straight up, pointing into the blue sky overhead.

They got out of the car. The smell was almost overpowering. Wisps
of smoke still rose from the thick ash piled within the border of the stone foundation. The grass around the house was flattened, sodden—footprints visible everywhere.

Bud said, “I’ll just be a few minutes.” He started to move around the site with the camera held in front of his face, first horizontally, then vertically. He squatted, turning his head this way and that, then he stood up, trying for the best shot he could get of the chimney.

Frankie, to her surprise, was feeling almost tearful, swept by some sense of sorrow, of loss—though she couldn’t remember ever having seen the house when it was whole; though it meant nothing to her personally.

What was it then? She supposed the complete obliteration of all that must have been richly personal here, the way in which the meaning of the house, whatever that was to the Kershaws, the Olsens, had been swallowed up in the fire. She thought of her parents’ house, trying to imagine it destroyed in this way, burned up. She wondered if she would feel a sense of dislocation. She had actually been discomfited to some degree, she realized now, just by the little renovation they’d done—the blandness of the guest room they’d made out of their old bedroom upstairs, the startling, somehow naked newness of the fixtures in the enlarged bathroom off the kitchen hallway. She leaned back against the car and felt again a wave of physical exhaustion.

Bud was on the other side of the black hole now, still snapping away. Frankie watched him. It was like a dance, his quick movements, his whole long body turning now this way, now that.

Then suddenly she could tell that he was photographing her again from the other side of the blackened hole. In spite of the impulse she felt to cover her face this time, too, she didn’t, she looked straight at him. After a few more snaps, he moved the camera away from his face, and they stood there for a long moment. Then he called across in his strange voice, “You’ve had enough?”

“I think so,” she said, unsure of exactly what he meant. Enough of trying to stay awake? Of looking at the house? Of looking at him?

He stood still a moment more, and then he started back around the black pit toward her.

——

That night, after an improvised supper, Alfie went to bed first, which gave Frankie permission, too, or so she felt, even though there was still a lingering light outside. Upstairs, she lay in her bed in the darkening room, thinking again about what had seemed like Alfie’s confusion down at Liz’s house, and then the way he’d seemed utterly himself when they’d gotten back home only minutes later. She thought about the tea, about the carful of boys and the discomfort they’d brought. She thought of Bud Jacobs’s face on the opposite side of the burned-out house and the quick sense of sexual possibility she’d felt. That was it, wasn’t it, what had passed between them? Something exciting but too familiar. Apparently the only way she had to respond to a man she liked.
Time to learn a few new tricks
.