The Disinherited (11 page)

They let themselves in the basement window and then went up to the kitchen. Scotch-taped to the walls of the kitchen and hall were Brian’s drawings. “I guess I’ll go home soon,” the boy said. Brian lit a match and held it to one of his drawings. At first nothing happened. Then the drawing began to curl and blacken, sending flames and smoke towards the ceiling. When it had burned he started on the next one. Soon all the drawings in the kitchen were gone. Remnants were still stuck to the walls
and the walls and ceiling were scorched. They went into the hall.

“Here,” Brian said, “you do it.” He gave the matches to the boy.

“It’s your house,” the boy said.

“I don’t mind.”

The boy chose the biggest drawing. He tore it at the bottom corners so that it was partly rolled up. When he set the flame to it he ran it carefully along the bottom, licking it with the burning match. “The wallpaper’s caught,” Brian said. The boy had already moved on to the next drawing, without even waiting for the first one to finish

“That’s good,” he said. When he had all the drawings going he stepped back to watch. Brian ran into the kitchen and came back with a pot of water. He threw the water on the wall. It made a loud hissing noise. Part of the wall turned brown and steamy. Surfaces took on a new texture. They were red and alive, the flames sending out messages to each other, biting deeper into the wall and sporadically shooting long, curling tendrils towards the ceiling. There was so much smoke on the ceiling that it took them a while to realize that it too was on fire. Then it began to seethe and bubble, sending down bits of plaster and glowing chips of wood. The heat forced the boys into the front vestibule. The fire had travelled across the stairway; the bannister posts, carved wooden spirals, wreathed themselves in flames. “Come on,” the boy whispered. He ran up the stairs to the first landing. There was a window: he tore off the curtain and threw it down into the fire. Then he disappeared into the upstairs. He came back, his arms loaded with sheets and blankets. He dumped them down into the hall and went back for more. “Come on,” he shouted to Brian but the stairs were barred by heat and smoke. The books and toys from Brian’s room came tumbling down into the hall. Brian could see the boy, dancing up and down the stairs, veiled by the fire, his arms waving wildly. “Open the door,” the boy shouted, “open the door.” Brian fumbled with the lock, the metal was hot to the touch, and finally forced it back. Then the door burst open; Brian was sucked into the hall as the fire rushed up the stairwell. The boy didn’t move.
He stood on the stairs, his arms outstretched and swaying vaguely to the beat of the flames. “It’s too hot,” he said. His voice was quite ordinary. There was an explosion.

Brian drove with the visor down, the light reduced to a long wide slit with the sun burning out the edges. Like a robot in a space suit, he could see almost nothing at all through the glare except the vague outlines of the paved road and the more intense reflections of metal roofs. He had his foot to the floor and the radio on so loud that the buzz of the bass notes in the speakers competed with the music. As he drove, he tapped his fingers on the wheel, keeping time. Nancy was half-lying on the seat, her head against his shoulder and her feet sticking out the open window. She was smoking a cigarette and singing along with the chorus, shaping the smoke as she mouthed the words. When the song ended, the announcer came on with the news. Brian reached down and turned off the radio. Nancy shifted around so she was sitting normally and turned the radio back on, looking for a station that was playing music.

“It’s all news,” Brian said. He had his hair cut short on the sides and long in the front, so periodically he had to push his hair back from his face, either with his hand or, more often, a quick movement with his neck that he could remember practising and mastering. They were coming to a junction in the road; the pavement was covered with gravel and Brian jammed on the brakes, locking the rear wheels and then letting them spring loose into a fishtail. He waved the steering wheel from side to side, gradually straightening out the car as it slowed down. Nancy had slid away from him and was leaning against the door, smoking a cigarette and looking at him intently.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital tonight,” she said. Brian nodded. He flicked the butt of the cigarette out of the window, watching it spark against the road. Then he turned onto the gravel road, driving north and away from Kingston. He pushed the visor up and lit another cigarette.

“They don’t own us,” Brian said. “Pat Frank told me that Richard is going to give the farm to Erik.”

“He doesn’t know anything.”

“They could have given us the house. But they didn’t do that; they put us in the trailer like hired help.”

“They make me nervous,” Nancy said. “Sometimes Miranda won’t even talk to me.”

“That’s what they say about the Thomases,” Brian said. “When they need you they can’t do enough for you, but then when they’re finished with you they just forget you. Remember when Mark Frank came back, Richard hired him for the summer, but then he let him go again when winter came, even though he knew it was too late for him to get taken on somewhere else.”

“They say Katherine Malone’s children look more like the Thomas family than anyone else. The first one was buried before she had even laid eyes on Peter Malone. And it wasn’t Richard either but Simon Thomas who was its father.”

“Old Peter was always bragging he couldn’t get it on to save his life, but they caught him with the wife of the manager of the hardware store. They were up in the loft of the old blacksmith’s shop and they say you could hear her right across town. When he got home Katherine sent him down to the basement for some pickles. Then she locked him in. Wouldn’t let him out for a week, even to do the chores.” She called one of her children Richard whether after some relative or Richard Thomas was unknown. But there was a spring when she told everyone she was going to marry Richard Thomas; the next fall he went away to college and Peter Malone, Simon Thomas’s new hired hand, began to visit her every evening. Richard Malone had been the same age as Brian, and Brian remembered him as thin and always sick; he died of pneumonia the same winter they built the new school.

“Well,” Nancy said. “What are you going to do when the old man dies and Erik tells us to leave?”

“I don’t know,” Brian said. His voice sounded like it was whining inside his head. Every day she seemed to ask the same questions, to push him that much further. He slowed the car and went onto a narrow dirt road. The road wound between cedar trees, gradually losing height until finally it ended on a massive slab of rock that jutted out over a lake.

Nancy took a blanket from the back seat and spread it out on the rock. “We could have gone to a movie,” she said. “It’s still early.”

Lying flat on his stomach, feeling the rock against the V of his ribs and his elbows, Brian narrowed his eyes again. This time there was no road but only the tiny ripples of water and the shadows of surrounding trees. He had lit a cigarette and was half-absently puffing on it, sending the smoke out across the lake, breaking apart in the light and then coming together again in large hazy swirls. He lay with his chin propped up by his hands, the cords of muscle in his neck standing out thick and round. Sun and cold had already permanently weathered his skin, turned it brown and tough so that the scar tissue on his face and arms was barely noticeable, appeared only as a subtle indentation that ran full-length along both forearms and, on his face, a smoothness as if worn by tears beneath one eye.

The lake buzzed with the sounds of feeding and hunting, the sharp splashes of fish coming to the surface for the insects that skimmed across the water. Occasionally, making everything else seem silent, the staccato scream of a loon crossed the lake; the sound bounced and twisted off the steeply rising shores, rising into the hazy sky and filling everything like a light. Brian liked to watch the loons fly. Huge and unwieldy, they seemed almost too awkward to overcome gravity, as if the earth’s atmosphere was not exactly what they had been bred for and they were meant to glide through space as, the boy insisted, they once had, carrying the spores of dinosaurs and certain mushrooms: a series of underwater corals and plants that are still undiscovered at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. He had told Richard about the loons once, when they had walked down to the lake and back through the maple bush, and Richard had shown him how some of the fallen trees were decomposing into the ground, how eventually they would be covered by other trees and vegetation, compressed and aged so that the whole bewildering array of what was not green and moist would eventually be hard and black, pure carbon like a piece of wood that has been heated without burning.

Now the loons were diving again. There were two of them
and they seemed to take turns. In between dives they floated across the water, appearing as weightless on its surface as they seemed cumbersome in the air. They never seemed to look down before they dove, but moved suddenly, unpredictably toppling over and knifing soundlessly into the water. They seemed to stay under for a long time, emerging far away from where they had begun. Richard had told him that they travelled so far underwater because they expended no effort — just floated with the currents that ran along the bottom of the lake.

Brian lay flat on his stomach, feeling the rock against his bones and the soft glare of light from the water trying to pry open his eyes, like the fire had sought to enter and possess him, making him follow the boy up the stairs. The mist was beginning to roll over the lake. Later it would settle like transparent jelly into the hollow pockets of the road, absorbing and diffusing the light from the car so that the car and the mist were part of one unified machine, floating slow and crab-like through some imaginary ether. The boy had told him that the dinosaurs’ planet was spotted with trees and ponds, connected by shallow canals etched into the benevolent desert. They had found no trace of the boy after the fire, not even bones to be rebuilt by future explorers. They had found no trace of him, so it was vaguely possible, Brian thought, though he knew better, that somehow the boy had been blown free by the explosion and had run away. For years after the fire he would dream of it, waking up hot and with the flames before his eyes. There would be no panic or even desire to move: an awareness of lying in bed in the midst of the fire, that soon it would consume him and the dream would be over. But while he waited, the flames would recede, leaving him with only whatever light the night could offer. Sometimes in those dreams he would see the boy framed in the doorway or outlined against the wall, moving towards him in that slow way he had had, seeming dreamy and disconnected even in the dream, possessed of whatever knowledge would reduce the world to being that simple. In school he would often think about the boy, hoping that he might have found his address and be at home waiting for him after school. Sometimes he considered hitch-hiking to see the house, to see if he still lived there. Then
he thought that they wouldn’t meet until later, years after. The boy would appear one day at the door of the farm, wearing old dusty clothes and a wide-brimmed hat to shade what the fire had done to him. He would be half-crazy, only his sight would be whole and he would move in his own dreamy and unreal way through the world, dispensing death and justice, just as Richard decided which animals would live and which would be slaughtered, which would be bred and which would be sold, which would be allowed indoors and which would have to fend for themselves, expendable and ignored, too unimportant to be worth the effort of killing.

When they took him back to the farm, Brian had trusted neither Erik nor Miranda, but had wanted to be with Richard all the time, as if he was somehow part of the boy’s world. And, when he had been in the attic with the boy, it was only Richard he remembered, the boy having replaced Erik. The boy would tell him of his father and the way he searched for traces of ancient times beneath the surface of the earth (like the orange inside the orange peel the boy once said) and in return Brian had spoken of Richard who seemed to share something with the boy’s father, and who, Brian felt, would somehow be at home in the roomful of bones and discarded furs. They brought him back from the hospital and he lay in bed, his arms bandaged still and the burn on his face like a flame, for two weeks in what he knew was punishment for the murder of the boy, punishment for his murder and the destruction of the house; and also a sign that he would always carry with him so that what he had done would be publicly visible. He was willing to play with Erik and accept food from Miranda, but it was Richard he needed; he told him everything that he had learned from the boy because his message had been intended for Richard too. For Richard had shown him the cow’s skull in the old creek bed and had taken him outside one night to watch the meteors: all night he and Richard and Erik had lain on the blankets, head to head, watching for falling stars. They were made out of an old disintegrated planet, Richard had told them. Another time he showed them a bit of white fuzz in the sky, long and elongated, like a pod. While they were watching it, they saw more shooting stars, and
Richard explained to them that what they saw was a comet making its centennial visit to the sun and that the shooting stars were stray bits from its tail which, like a huge gaping net, was sifting planets through it as it travelled.

And so every night after supper Richard would come up and sit with him in a special chair they put beside his bed. They would talk of the boy and the fire and planets and dinosaurs, but of the city Richard had nothing at all to say. It seemed, Brian thought then and later — a subject even more closed than death or sex, as if the centre of the meaning of the city was so horrible that no one should be exposed to it, as if, in fact, he was saying to him that he had already gone through what the city had to offer and he would be foolish to enquire further.

“And what will you do when Richard dies and Erik sells the farm?” When she spoke it was always the sound of her voice that startled him, the words demanding that everything else be pushed back because it was thought but not noise.