The Firebug of Balrog County (19 page)

The Reckoning

T
h
is wasn't some kitchen grease fire. This was an all-encompassing blaze that had already reached the second story of our house and begun to lick at the roof, an incandescent, white-hot scorcher I could feel on my skin. I started running, stupidly penetrating deeper into the heat, but I had to pull up thirty feet short, blinded by the sweat in my eyes. Nothing short of a tidal wave was going to stop this burn. Whatever was still inside our house wasn't making it out.

I stumbled on my heels, reeling from the heat, and stepped onto the grassy edge of the ravine that separated our yard from the train tracks.

“Not as fun when it's yours going up, is it?”

I wiped the sweat from my eyes and turned around. Ox Haggerton was standing on the far side of the ravine. Dressed oddly in denim coveralls and rubber hip waders, his nose was bright red and his blue eyes were unnaturally bright. He had a rifle casually propped on one shoulder and held it like a man so accustomed to its weight that he didn't notice it.

“Damn, boy. You should see the look on your face right now.”

Our living room's bay window detonated, an explosion of glass and belching flame that rolled onto the front porch. My tongue felt stuffed and heavy in my mouth and I wondered if I was dreaming. One of those nightmares where you can't move, or move too slow for it to matter.

My writing journal.

My books.

All my beautiful books.

“Don't worry,” Ox said, grinning. “Your people aren't inside.”

He leaned over and spat chewing tobacco. Haylee and Dad, I realized, would still be in Thorndale, attending her afternoon therapy session.

“Our dog,” I said. “Was he still in there?”

Ox wiped his nose with his sleeve and bore into me with his crazy blue eyes.

“You folks had a dog?”

“Chompy. He could have been in his kennel. In the basement.”

“What the hell kind of name is Chompy?”

A window exploded on the second story. Haylee's bedroom.

“He was a good dog.”

“I bet.” Ox toed the ground with his boot. “Well, shit. I don't think dogs really count as murder, do they?”

I took a step down the slope, toward Ox. He lifted the rifle off his shoulder and held it in both hands.

“You shouldn't have come out to my place, son. None of this would be happening if you'd respected my property.”

“Maybe not, Ox, but you'd still be an asshole nobody can stand.”

Haggerton's mouth tightened into a knot. I still didn't hear any sirens, distant or otherwise.

“You're wondering where the cavalry is,” Haggerton said. “Well, the whole damn neighborhood took off to go watch that ugly straw heap burn in the park. You should have seen them all peeling out of here, like flies to shit. I guess we ain't the only ones who appreciate a good fire.”

“You started that one, too.”

“You got it, kid. Thought I'd finish what you couldn't.”

“And that was you hiding in the outfield.”

Haggerto
n chuckled and spat more chew. “Last night was as much fun as I've had in years. When you climbed over that outfield fence I recognized you straight off as Hedley's grandkid and hunted you for the hell of it. Almost had you, too, but I hadn't figured on a getaway driver. Usually shitbags like y
ou work alone.”

I turned to watch the fire, deciding I didn't care whether the old coot shot me in the back or not. The fire had eaten thro
ugh the roof in patches, exposing the building's innards to the blackened sky. My parents had purchased the house before I was born, right when they'd gotten married. That made for twenty years of Druneswald occupancy, more or less.

I noticed smoke coming from the garage. The garage door was rolled up and a healthy fire was roaring, right where my car was usually parked—

“Motherfuck.”

I sprinted up the driveway, seized with a fresh wave of crazed wildness. I heard a crack and a patch of gravel in front of me kicked up dust. I pulled up.

“No, no,” Haggerton shouted from across the ravine. “You come back here, asshole. I'm not done talking to you.”

I turned around, my eyes and throat aching. The heat had sucked all the moisture from the world.

“You lit my car on fire.”

“That's right,” Haggerton said, nodding. “Right after I found the bullet dent on your trunk. It was a little bitch, all right, but I know a bullet dent when I see one. Particularly one made by my own rifle.”

A whistle blew south of town. Not an ambulance or a fire truck. Just a train, passing through Hickson like this was any other day. I wondered if the conductor could see our house smoking in the distance and what he made of it from his perch in the engine. More likely, he was watching the heavy plume of smoke on the east side of town along with everyone else.

Haggerton scratched his chin with the stock of his rifle.

“So what, kid, you think because your mama kicked the bucket, that makes you special? That you can just do whatever the fuck you want, valuable personal property be damned? You think you're the only one who ever lost somebody?”

“How about you go fuck yourself, Ox.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Ox Haggerton clicked off his rifle's safety and aimed it at my chest, nestling the gun into his shoulder. The sound of the roaring fire behind me, as well as every other sound in the world, dropped away. I peered down the barrel of Haggerton's rifle and saw nothing but a long, dark descent I probably had coming.

The ground shook as the train approached. Something inside our house exploded.

Ox Haggerton lowered his rifle.

“All right. I'm not going to kill you, boy. We're settled, far as I'm concerned.”

The train blew its whistle again, a deep and primal noise the rumbled in my gut. Haggerton set his rifle back on his shoulder, turned around, and crossed the railroad tracks in two fluid strides as he headed for the woods beyond. The train roared out from behind the tree line, all thunder and sparks, and by the time it'd blown through, Old Man Haggerton had vanished into legend.

The Face of God

A
cross town, nearly everyone in Hickson watched the straw castle burn. Later they would speak of its white, incandescent flame in deeply reverent tones, as if they'd seen the face of God and somehow lived to talk about it.

Sam said you had to be there.

The Great Conflagration

T
he Great Conflagration las
ted for three days, blo
tting out the sky and sending the citizens of Balrog County scrambling for safety. Not only had Ox Haggerton set fires on both sides of Hickson, but he'd begun his busy afternoon by igniting a blaze in the woods five miles north of town. This carefully executed trio of burns was a masterwork of arson that put my entire firebug career to shame. Yes, the grumpy old fucker had put one more snot-nosed kid in his place before skipping town.

A warrant had been put out for Ox Haggerton's arrest and all eyes were turned toward him now, believing Haggerton responsible for all the recent fires, but I still could not shake a feeling of vagu
e uneasiness. I told the authorities about my encounter with
Haggerton in my driveway but omitted my own role in cultivating his rage. Unable to stand the soft, periodic weeping of my sister, who mourned her puppy's kennel-trapped death above all, I spent long periods outside, alone in my grandparents' backyard, wrapped in heavy blankets as I watc
hed helicopters fitted with buckets work endlessly, dumping load after load of water they'd collected from a nearby lake.
I felt like a character in Thomas Mann's
The Magic Mountain
, listlessly taking the cure for consumption in a smoky version of the Swiss Alps. I belonged in the cluttered Grotto now and I wouldn't leave it for the rest of my life. Grandma Hedley would bring me food, I'd endure the harsh winter cold, and never would I light a fire or harm a single crea
ture, great or small, ever again.

I kept picturing Old Man Haggerton, standing stiff and ready and trying to decide if I was worth shooting.

That look in his eyes.

On Wednesday, the Conflagration's third afternoon, Grandpa Hedley came out to the Grotto with a cup of coffee and sat down beside me in one of the patio chairs. He and my grandmother had been working nonstop since the fires, helping out with various town emergency-type things, and so I hadn't seen him much. His clothes were blackened by soot and ash and he smelled like he'd stepped directly out of a campfire. When he sat down beside me I turned my head away and stared at the Grotto's statue of Michelangelo, examining it like I'd never seen a big dangling stone penis before.

Grandpa Hedley made soft slurping sounds as he drank his coffee. He leaned back and considered the smoke-hazed sky.

“She got out of hand, didn't she?”

I glanced at my grandfather. Clearly sleep-deprived, he looked so tired and old I could hardly stand it.

“Yeah,” I said, unsure of exactly what he was getting at. “She sure did.”

Nobody said anything for a minute and my grandfather sipped his coffee like he had all the time in the world. It was cold as hell out, but he was just wearing a long-sleeved denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The shirt had a POW logo stitched onto the breast pocket.

Grandpa Hedley sat forward and cupped his hands around his coffee mug.

“I should have nipped it all in the bud, I suppose.”

I licked my lips, which were painfully cracked and dry from the past three days of sitting outside.

“Nipped what in the bud?”

Grandpa Hedley sighed and waved a hand at the gray sky.

“Your firebug hobby. Our little cat-and-mouse game.”

I leaned forward in my chair and stared at the space between my knees. I noticed that the Grotto's concrete patio was rife with cracks, some big enough for weeds to poke through. Even the most cared-for place in town was sliding toward ruin.

“You mean Haggerton's firebug hobby, don't you?”

“No, Mack. I know it was you, setting those earlier fires. Hell, you really expect me to believe Ox burned down his own wood pile? The man loved that wood pile beyond all reason. You set those early
fires, Mack, and then you set off Haggerton like a firecracker. Why else would he pick your
house for his grand finale?”

Grandpa Hedley sipped his coffee
. The world had grown even colder and I could feel it pressing down on me like the lid of a coffin. The jig was up. The screw had turned.

“Actually, I figured it was you ever since that second letter you wrote to the
Herald
's editor. Nobody else around here writes like that.” Grandpa Hedley patted my knee. “Shit. Nobody else around here is like you, Mack.”

I felt my throat swell and threaten to choke me. I grabbed it and tried to massage the lump.

“Then why didn't you call the cops on me? Or tell me to stop?”

Grandpa Hedley shrugged. “I figured you were working through something you needed to get out of your system. Some type of poison. I looked at the burns first-hand and decided you weren't out to hurt anybody. If I'd gone to the police, you'd already turned eighteen and it might have meant jail time and a rough future. If I'd warned you off directly, you might not have listened or you might have quit and eventually drowned in that poison. I've known a lot of troubled young men over the years, Mack. They don't all make it.”

I quit massaging my throat. The lump wasn't going away anytime soon.

“Of c
ourse, I didn't predict Haggerton going wild over one old woodpile,” my grandfather continued, “but I suppose old Ox is as clear a case of a poisoned man as you'll ever see. You're too young to remember this, Mack,
but Ox's wife left him back in the '80s, after they had a third miscarriage and zero kids. He turned mean after that and fell into the bottle.”

I turned to my grandfather. “Do you want me to give myself up? I will. You can bring me in yourself.”

Grandpa Hedley shook his head. “No. I considered it, but I don't see how that'll serve anyone now. You've learned your lesson about starting your little fires, haven't you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, shuddering under my cocoon of blankets. “I have and I am truly sorry.”

“I thought you might be, sitting out here like this.” Grandpa Hedley turned and looked back at the house. “It's not a pleasant thing to hear your sister crying like that, is it?”

“No,” I said, feeling the knot in my throat swell even more. “It's not.”

We listened for a moment but I couldn't hear anything but the wind blowing through the Grotto. Sometimes Haylee would run out of crying and need to drink some water for a couple of minutes. She'd begun to remind me of the professional mourners you could hire in the Far East, the ones really good at keening.

“Well,” Grandpa Hedley said, turning back around in his chair. “I'm not saying I'm as innocent as Mary here either, kid. You know, I was enjoying our little covert war. The letters in the newspaper and the sneaking around. It was fun. It got me amped up for the first time in a long while and I liked it. I ma
y be an old man playing at mayor, but I'm no angel myself. I used to kick around some.”

I stared at my grandfather and imagined him as a young man. A young man running around Vietnam with grenades and a knife and an assault rifle. A young man who'd done that and saw all that and then come back home again to sit quietly behind a desk and raise a family.

“But you're going to do one thing for me, Mack.”

I raised my head. Anything, I thought. Anything the fuck you want.

“You're going to tell your father exactly what you've been up to. You owe the man that much.”