The Firebug of Balrog County (10 page)

The Scarecrow

I
left the house after dinner and wandered around town on foot, hoping to find Haylee, but all I saw were people walking their dogs one more time before bed or sitting in their living rooms watching TV. I hovered at each bright window, drawn to the diorama-like scenes inside like a peeping moth. Oblivious to the nighttime dark outside their windows, the people of Hickson appeared happy and content. They cuddled under blankets. They drank soda. They ate popcorn from comically oversized plastic bowls.

I kept walk
ing until I got to the outskirts of town. The houses went dark one by one as their owners turned in for the night and eventually I was walking alone through a ghost town of rustling leaves and humming streetlights. I came to a darkened house in a darkened neighborhood with an elaborately ornamented front yard. The theme was autumn and they had the hay bales, pumpkins, gourds, bagged leaves, and full-sized mounted scarecrow
to prove it.

Dressed in ragged denim overalls, the scarecrow had black button eyes, no nose, and a squiggle of thread for a mouth. His
skin was a white canvas-like material through which pieces of straw stuck out in random spots, as if he were literally bursting with straw. In lieu of the farmer's straw hat, the scarecrow wore a classic gray fedora Frank Sinatra might have apprec
iated.

He was so cute.

So homey.

I took out my lighter, thumbed it a few times, and touched the tentative flame to the scarecrow's chin. The fabric blackened for a second before igniting in a small flame that quickly began to spread.

“Fuck you, buddy,” I whispered, staring directly into the scarecrow's button eyes.

The scarecrow didn't reply. I crossed the street and stepped behind an evergreen to watch him go up in incandescent flame, the firebug overjoyed at this sudden and unexpected treat. It wasn't until the scarecrow's sackcloth body started to sag and fall away from its post that I realized what would soon remain—two wooden poles hammered together in the shape of a cross.

“Shit.”

I took off my coat, prepared to rush back across the street and smother the fire, but just then a light came on inside the scarecrow's house as someone woke up.

“Shit shit s
hit.”

A second light came on inside the house. The time of secret lurking was over. I lowered my head and started walking briskly home, keeping to the shadows as the fireb
ug (the stupid, stupid firebug) pleaded with me to go back and watch until the last lick of flame died out.

The Hunt

O
n Saturday I woke to t
he sound of heavy footsteps outside my bedroom. It was still pitch dark and my digital alarm clock read six a.m. I'd gotten home from the Legion only five hours before.

The knob of my bedroom door turned and the door swung open. I sat up as a shadowy figure entered the room and stood at the foot of my bed. My visitor looked around the room slowly, as if he could see everything perfectly despite the dark. I wondered where I'd put my old pocket knife and wondered if I had the balls needed to stab a vicious intrud
er.

“Hey Mack. You awake?”

I reached over to my nightstand and clicked on the lamp. It was Grandpa Hedley, dressed in army boots, canvas army pants, and a blaze-orange jacket. He winced at the sudden light and shielded his eyes.

“Hey kid. Morning.”

“Morning.”

Grandpa Hedley surveyed my room again, frowning. “Awful messy around here. Why do you have so many goddamn books?”

“Is that why you broke into our house at six in the morning? To talk about my personal library?”

“No,” my grandfather said, scratching his stomach. “I thought we could go hunting today. Bag us some birds.”

“Birds?”

“That's right. Pheasant season starts today. Thought we'd head up to Elroy County and try our luck.”

“You want to go hunting? We haven't been since—”

“Sure. Thought we'd bring your mutt with us. Let him stretch his legs.”

I rubbed my face in my hands. “You want to take Chompy … hunting?”

“Sure. Looks like a hunting dog to me.”

I laughed, trying to picture this. Chompy in nature. Chompy gnawing on every tree in sight. Chompy lunging after squirrels.

“Get dressed, kid. I'll meet you downstairs. I already put the coffee on.”

Grandpa Hedley shuffled into the hallway and started down the stairs.

“Fuck,” I said aloud. “Why not?”

I slid out of bed and kicked around the clothes piled on the floor, seeking out the warmest options. I dressed slowly, my sleep-numbed brain focusing on one item at a time. By the time I made it downstairs, the whole first floor smelled like coffee. Grandpa Hedley was sitting at our table, leafing through the week's collection of bills and mail order catalogues.

After coffee, we woke the beast and released him from his basement kennel. Chompy scarfed his breakfast and happily followed us out to Grandpa's truck, where he hopped into the cab's back seat like this was something we did all the time, curling up against a plastic cooler and two compound bow cases.

“We're loaded up, huh?”

“Here,” Grandpa Hedley said, reaching into the back seat and pulling out a blaze-orange coat that matched his own. “Brought one for you.”

We drove north for an hour and crossed into Elroy County, stopping for breakfast at a fast food drive-thru and buying our hunting licenses at a gas station. Grandpa paid for everything, generous as a king, and we listened to country music as we rolled along, Chompy sleeping soundly in the back seat, his hind legs occasionally twitching as he ran through his dreams.

The landscape gradually changed from wooded hills to flat plains and corn fields. Grandpa studied the terrain carefully, driving with one hand hanging loosely on the truck's steering wheel. We saw a few other hunters already out, walking ditches and field edges in groups of three or four, studying the ground carefully. Eventually, when we came to a field that looked the same as every other harvested field, Grandpa pulled the truck over into the ditch and parked it on the ditch floor. Chompy stood up in the back seat and stuck his face between ours, panting happily.

“This looks good a place as any,” Grandpa Hedley said. “What do you think?”

I peered through the windshield. “Yep. Looks like a field to me.”

Grandpa Hedley nodded as if this wasn't a smart-ass thing for me to say and looked out his window.

“I know the guy who owns this field. Hell, he owns almost every field in this part of the state.”

“You do?”

“Yes, sir. We served together.”

“No shit?”

“He's an ornery bastard, but he won't mind us hunting his field. I saved him from getting stabbed by a whore once in Saigon. She came at him with a switchblade after he took up with her sister.”

“Whoa.”

Grandpa popped his door open and unbuckled his seat belt. “Even whores get jealous, Mack.”

We got out and released Chompy, who dropped silently to the ground and ran to the edge of the field, where he lifted his leg and peed. I stood beside my grandfather in front of the truck and followed his gaze across the field.

“The birds are out here, Mack. I can feel them.”

I glanced at Chompy, who hadn't bolted straight off as I'd expected but sat beside my grandfather in eerie obedience. I blew into my hands. A chilly fall day with a slight, moaning wind and no clouds. A day for hunting.

We worked the edge of the field. I'd never hunted pheasant before, only deer, but I knew pheasants liked to feed in the morning, doze in tall weeds during midday, and come out again near dusk. They liked gravel because the grit helped them digest their food and they were easiest to shoot if you flushed them from cover and they decided to fly, which gave you a big, flapping target.

Grandpa Hedley worked four rows deep into the field while I walked its edge and watched the tall ditch grass. Chompy, who was just fucking full of surprises today, was running twenty yards ahead of us, zigzagging along as if he'd been an English squire's hunting dog in a prior life, methodically scenting both the field and the ditch as his furry black tail wagged happily. I walked with my bow lowered at my side, a carbon arrow notched and at the ready. Grandpa Hedley preferred bow hunting to rifles or shotguns because he thought bow hunting was more difficult and required more skill—my grandfather was a caveman at heart, a real Beowulf-type warrior. Part of me hoped we wouldn't find anything, not one damn bird, and another part wanted to slay a dozen of the unlucky and cook up a feast right there in the woods.

We walked for about a half hour, nobody speaking as we eyed the ground, until finally Chompy stopped, coiled on his haunches, and leapt into a dense patch of cornstalks, barking with a hellhound's fury.

A blur of pheasant darted from the cornstalks, through the field's last few rows, and into the ditch. I raised my bow and drew a bead on a bird, drawing back the arrow. I hoped the bird would take flight but it stayed low, moving fast and jittery. I aimed for a point just ahead of its trajectory and loosed my arrow.

The arrow whistled through the air and planted into the ground. The bird juked around it and kept running.

I lowered my bow. The bird grew smaller and disappeared into the weeds.

“Fuck me.”

Chompy burst out of the field, furry head rotating. He sniffed the air and looked at me, his eyes full of reproach.

“What? It was fast, you dick.”

Chompy barked and sniffed the ground, tail wagging as he found the scent and started up the ditch. Grandpa Hedley came tromping out of the field, his bow raised and his eyes on the dog.

“Ran off on you?”

“Yeah. I missed.”

Grandpa Hedley stared at the dog. He didn't look mad or disappointed. Just intense.

“It's all right, letting the first one go. Lets the other ones know we mean business.”

I walked to the arrow and pulled it out of the ground. I rubbed dirt off the tip.

“You think so?”

“Sure. More sporting this way.”

Chompy, who'd disappeared into the weedy yonder, popped back out and barked at us, urging us on.

“Okay, asshole. We get it.”

Grandpa Hedley laughed, which was rare for him. The old man often grinned cannily, or smiled knowingly, but he wasn't a big laugh-out-loud sort of guy. We started up the ditch, now walking side-by-side as we followed the dog through the weeds.

“You know, back in Nam we had a rifleman in our platoon who could drink half a bottle of whiskey and still shoot the tits off a mouse,” Grandpa Hedley said. “Reggie Henderson, his name was. Yes, sir, Old Reggie was funny as hell. You played poker with him and he'd have everybody busting a gut by the third hand. He had a way of telling a story that could draw you in and then, right when you thought you knew what the punch line was, he'd turn the whole thing upside down.”

“Huh. He sounds cool.”

Grandpa nodded, his eyes still fixed on the weeds in front us. I'd gotten a burr in my sock but didn't want to stop and take it out during the story. I could feel the burr scraping against my ankle, hungry for a taste.

“Funny guy, but Reggie did have a temper. I think something real bad happened to him once and he never let it go. You could hear it in his voice sometimes. Late at night, when we'd all stayed up one round too long, he'd get a nasty edge that made his jokes sound mean.”

Grandpa scratched his nose with the sleeve of his coat.

“One day, when we were out on patrol, a little Vietnamese kid popped out of the weeds and ran in front of our squad. Not at our squad, mind you, but in front of it, about fifty yards off. The kid couldn't have been more than five years old and was skinny as a goddamn mule.

“Reggie raised his rifle and sighted the kid. The rest of us thought Reggie was joking, but he fired. One shot and the kid dropped like he'd been knocked on the head with a mall
et. Reggie turned and looked at us. ‘How'd y'all like that one?' he said and then winked like the whole thing was a big joke. Our staff sergeant, who'd been standing beside me the whole time, pulled out his pistol and shot Reggie right between the eyes, like the whole thing was a Western on TV.”

Grandpa wet his lips. A whippoorwill called out from the rows of broken corn stalks and we started walking again, following the dog and listening to the wind rustle the high grass. Finally Chompy, who must have lost the bird's scent, bounded out of the ditch and ran back down the road to rejoin us. Grandpa Hedley scratched the dog behind the ears, telling him he was a good boy.

“What do you think Reggie couldn't let go of?” I asked. Chompy rolled onto his back, showing us his white belly.

“Hell if I know, Mack. But it didn't really matter, did it? Not after Reggie was lying in that field with a bullet between his eyes.”

I knelt and scratched the beast, picturing a skinny little kid running across the field, scared as hell and about to die.

“What about your staff sergeant? Did he get court marshaled for shooting Reggie?”

“Shit no. It was Vietnam, kid. We took fire the next day
and Sarge bought the farm, too.”

I stood up and looked at my grandfather. I saw the canny glint in his eye and I realized he suspected me of … something. Maybe he thought I
was the county firebug, maybe he just thought I'd been stepping out in other unseemly ways. Maybe he could just sense all the crazy jumping beans inside my head and thought he could freak me out before I went down The Wrong Path. He'd already gotten me a second job on the weekends—the time for making trouble—and he was always studying me like I was one of his bonsai trees. Maybe he thought he could be both my hunting grandpa and my new mommy, all rolled into one bristly war vet package. And if Grandpa Hedley thought that … well Jesus, he was in for a big-time case of disappointment.

A critter, unseen, rustled in the distant weeds. Chompy rolled back onto his feet and shot forward. The hunt was back on but we didn't see another bird until dusk, when two beautiful ring-necks flew up on the edge of the road. Grandpa brought them down with one arrow each, smiling as they fell from the sky and Chompy ran out after them. Then we threw the dead birds in the bed of the pickup and headed for home, the dog happily snoring in the back seat while Grandpa and I watched the road in companionable silence, thinking about whatever the hell it is men think about in Ernest Hemingway stories.