The Firebug of Balrog County (2 page)

The Home Front

H
ickson appeared less flammable than usual as I walked home from work, wistfully preoccupied by thoughts of the pale girl, she of the metallic blades and dark curly hair. Though I was a reluctant virgin and relatively unschooled in the ways of lady folk, I figured girls like the pale girl were a little goth, a little artsy, and a whole lot of naughty. At least, that's what I hoped. How crushing would it be to grow close to such a dark angel, to infiltrate her spiky outer perimeter, and find not a freaky deeky sexpot but merely your average polite young lady with a bright future in multimedia ahead of her?

I turned onto my street. My family lived on the west end of town, which wasn't as nice as the east side but not nearly as shitty as the south side, which had both the Spruce Tree Trailer Court and,
farther
out, the Balrog County landfill, where you could find yourself a hubcap or rats the size of Boston terriers. Our house was on the north side of the street and came last. A forest of maple, oak, and
birch
trees lined our backyard. The woods ran three miles deep and were home to all sorts of leaf
-
rustling critters, including red squirrels, possums, and some pretty husky beavers.

A shallow ravine served as buffer between the western edge of our yard and the woods beyond it. An elevated railroad track ran along the opposite side of the ravine
,
visible
where
i
t cut
through a clearing maybe twenty yards wide. Freight trains rolled through the clearing three or four times a day, whistles shrieking. My sister and I had loved watching for trains when we were kids. The long-awaited passing of each train was an event to us, a happy arrival, as if we'd summoned it ourselves from the depths of the forest with our own special little
-
kid magic. We'd wave furiously to the engine car as the train passed by, the slipstream wind it generated buffeting our rag
-
doll bodies as we shouted and hopped with joy.

Our house
was a standard two-story whatever with a gravel driveway running alongside its west side that terminated at a detached two-car garage. It had a large front porch, a side door that opened onto the driveway, and a narrow back porch. The house itself was over a hundred years old and tough as hell, with hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings. It had four bedrooms (three upstairs and one down) and two baths. The living room faced the street and had a wide bay window that l
ooked out on the front porch and let in a healthy amount of light during the day.

I walked up the front steps, passed through the porch, and stepped into the musty coat hall. I could hear a TV yammering through the coat hall door. I opened the door and saw my father sitting in his leather recliner. He was watching the wall-mounted high definition TV to my right. In his late forties, Peter Druneswald was a lanky blond guy like myself. He had a sharply angular face but his blue eyes were soft and reasonable. He wore nerdy wire
-
rim glasses that made him look vaguely academic.

My father had his big feet kicked up on the recliner's footrest, showing off his ancient black socks. When he noticed me, he grabbed the remote sitting in his lap and turned the television down.

“Hey, Mack.”

“Hey. You home already?”

“Yeah. Called it quits early today. Everybody was hung over.”

Dad worked for a health insurance company in Thorndale and was friends with all the pale, pudgy dudes who worked t
here. The night before had been Thursday, t
heir big poker night. They drank Heineken, snacked on pretzel thins, and called themsel
ves the Fallen Deductibles.

“How was school today?”

“The usual blasted, gimp
-
ridden wasteland.”

“What about work?”

“I sold a pack of saw blades to a hottie. That was something.”

“Really? Good for you. My son the salesman.”

“Did you know your socks have holes in them? You should get those darned.”

Dad pulled the lever at his side and the footrest folded into the recliner's base with a gunshot crack. “I'll give that some thought. How about pizza for dinner?”

I raised
my hands above my head and clenched my fists.
“Friday night!”

Dad grinned, humoring me.
“That's right, Big Mack. Nothing but the best for us.”

“Cheesy garlic bread?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Dad shook his head sadly. “You know, Mack, if your mother was here, she'd wash your dang mouth out with soap.”

“Sorry. I meant heck yeah.”

Dad's eyes slid back to the TV. He thumbed the remote and reintroduced the noisy drone of the evening news to the room. He'd obviously forgotten it was my birthday, but I didn't take it personally. Birthdays had been Mom's big thing. He'd remember sooner or later and slip me some cash.

I went upstairs and entered my bedroom. As usual, I immediately stubbed my toe on a stack of books, one of many scattered around my bedroom floor like literary land
mines. I'd gotten into reading real, non-electronic books back in the day and over the years I'd gone from connoisseur to straight-up hoarder. Not only was my bedroom crammed with five overloaded bookshelves and a dozen random book stacks,
but
I'd put several boxes of books in the spare bedroom and hidden eight more in the basement nobody else even knew about. I had
my own personal ten
-
percent discount at the two used bookstores in Thorndale
and their owners smiled happily when they saw me.

I shoved the toe-stubbing stack of books against the wall and flung myself onto my bed. After staring at the ceiling for a few restful moments, I picked
up
my writing notebook
from
my nightstand and opened it.

Story Ideas

-
Man befriends chipmunk. Relationship soon sours.

-
A humble plumber marries into a rich family in New England. Sleeps with every member of the family.

-
The Mississippi River dries up. A man starts walking down it from Minnesota and a woman starts walking up it from Louisiana. They meet in the middle of the river and discover they both are related to Mark Twain.

-
A talking baby squid appears in a toilet one day, offering free advice. The advice is terrible.

I grabbed a pen and started to ponder. It'd been a while since I'd written a new short story and none of my current ideas seemed too great. I liked writing stories but I always had a hard time coming up with an idea that didn't seem derivative. Part of the problem with reading a lot of books was finding out how lame and unoriginal you were in comparison to every other writer who'd ever lived.

Flashing upon a new idea, I wrote:

-
A
n extraordinarily pale girl moves to a small town. She discovers everyone is an asshole zombie and must fight her way back to freedom using only her wits and her incredible paleness, which allows her to hide in the moonlight.

I tapped the notebook and looked around my bedroom.

Why not?

I rolled over onto my stomach, turned to a fresh page, and started writing. The world fell away.

Dad called us down to dinner an hour later. I stopped writing and listened for sounds of rustling in the room next door, where my sister was listening to truly atrocious pop music. A minute passed and the music continued unchecked. I left my room and went out into the hallway, where I stared at my sister's bedroom door. She'd taped a mini-poster of some constipated bad boy to the outside of her door and his eyes followed me like burning coals whenever I passed through the hal
lway.

“Yo, Haystack,” I shouted. “Pizza's here.”

No response. The terrible music continued to bump, rattling her door. I knocked on the bad boy's slick poster face.

“Hey.”

The music lessened.

“What?”

I opened her door and the pungent scent of lavender candles washed over me. Haylee was sitting on the floor, her pencil
-
stick legs crossed
in front of her
. She had her laptop open on her lap and the glowing screen lit up her face. A bopsy brunette, she had elfin, triangular ears, a button nose, and gray eyes flecked with splinters of green. She'd gotten straight A's her entire damn life and wanted to be a corporate lawyer in New York City someday, with a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. A shark in training, this one.

“Come on, Haystack. Pizza's here.”

“So what?”

“So
…
pizza's here?”

“I'm not hungry. I'll eat later.”

I scanned the room, wondering how long it had been since I'd last visited the Haystack's lair. I saw fewer stuffed animals and unicorn posters than I remembered and more pictures of other teens I assumed were her friends. The pictures had all been printed on standard office paper and trimmed to size
. M
ashed together over an entire bedroom wall, the smiley good
-
time effect was the sort of mosaic creation you'd expect to find in the room of a serial killer.

“What?”

I looked down at again at my sister, so stern in the bright wash of her computer.

“I like your pictures. It's like Facebook for your bedroom.”

Haylee looked back at her computer. I got the sense I could strip naked and start flapping my arms around and she still wouldn't deign to look at me again.

“You sure you don't want any pizza? You know Dad likes it when we eat together.”

“I'm bloated, all right? Just go.”

“All right, all right.”

I stepped back and shut her door. The smell of lavender candle trailed me as I went downstairs
and
found my
father sitting at the kitchen table, an untouched slice of pepperoni and pineapple on a plate in front of him. He'd gotten out the real plates and set the table with silverware and paper
-
towel napkins. He'd even poured us three glasses of ice water.

“Where's your sister?”

“She says she's not feeling well. Lady stuff.”

Dad grunted and picked up his pizza. I sat down and grabbed a slice of my own. The pizza was from Panda Pies, the only pizza joint in Hickson. We'd had their pepperoni and pineapple so many times it was like eating homemade.

My father finished his slice and pushed back from the table. He stared at the empty chair across from him. Mom's old chair.

“Hey,” I said. “Where's the cheesy garlic bread?”

“The Panda idiots forgot it.”

“Oh. No prob.”

I grabbed a second slice of pizza, though I wasn't really all that hungry anymore. Our house felt small and stuffy, its other brooding residents too close at hand.

It was time to venture forth.

The Radio Tower

C
ell phone service isn't too great in Balrog County due to all the trees and the hills and whatever, but we seem to get radio stations all right. They're all terrible, these small-market stations, with the least terrible being the classic rock station, whose DJs at least have the decency to be alcoholic druggies who seem to genuinely yearn to get fired and head down the road again
.

We had an older kid in our school named Willy Barnes who lived next to a radio tower. Willy said you could hear one of the country stations playing through their kitchen toaster at random hours of the day. When he got braces, he could hear the station all the time, faintly caterwauling in the back of his head. Taking a shower, he heard modern country. Trying to sleep, modern country. He got so sick of it he decided to get his braces removed and live with crooked teeth.

After he graduated, Willy shaved his head and moved to Nepal.

The Shack

H
ickson did not take long to drive through. Darkness had fallen upon the land and the streets were empty, as if it were a time of plague and everyone had gone home to die reasonably in bed. My car, an enormous, maroon colored 1978 Oldsmobile Delta 88, rocked merrily on the road. Its dashboard was backlit in bright white, like the controls of an old-timey rocket ship, and its gas tank was accessible only by lifting up the rear license plate. Best of all, my Olds had a huge trunk where you could easily keep a spare five-gallon can of gasoline with plenty of room to spare.

I rolled my window down and leaned into the balmy night. I was going a comfortable fifty-five, in no hurry with no exact destination. I'd passed through the east side of town and headed out on CR-8, a paved two-lane that wound around fifty miles of scraggly apple farms, private houses, and a whole shitload of trees. Meth labs were rumored to operate along CR-8 but I'd never seen any myself, just a slew of tacky designer mail boxes, ugly lawn ornaments, and enormous American flags
.

Twenty miles into my aimless wandering I noticed a glint of silver amid a patch of grassland to the north. I turned onto a gravel road that seemed headed in its general direction, feeling whimsically adventurous. The Olds slammed painfully on the pocketed road, its worn struts crunching even when I dropped my speed to thirty, but I took the shitty road as a good sign—it meant the road led somewhere, but not somewhere important or trodden enough to be well
-
tended.

The Olds bottomed out a half-mile down the gravel road and I pictured the sloshing metal gas can in the trunk, too heavy for tipping. The glint of silver I'd noticed from the highway slowly became a small oval lake reflecting the moonlight. I tapped the brakes and the Olds came to a crunching stop thirty yards from the lake's shore. I turned off the engine and the headlights and sat quietly, letting my eyes get accustomed to the near dark.

The crickets were loud. They chirped their hearts out at the crescent moon and the dotted stars and the tall grass swaying above them. The lake was smooth and reflected the moonlight like a mirror. The only structure in sight was a single wooden shack the size of a one-car garage.

No houses, no people.

Just a shack.

A
cozy
little shack.

I got out of the car. I could smell the skim of algae on the lake, baked all day beneath the sun. I turned in a full circle, searching the horizon for artificial light. Nothing. I opened the trunk of my car and took out the gas can.

I shook the can and listened to the gasoline slosh. The firebug frolicked in my chest, ready to light the lights.

“Hey, buddy, we don't have to do this,” I said aloud, trying to reason with it. “We don't have to burn anything down.”

The firebug hopped up and down, growing impatient. It couldn't speak directly to me, but it could mime like a pro.

“This is a shitty thing to do, you know?”

The firebug hopped and hopped.

“This is someone's private property,” I said, gesturing grandly to the bucolic scene before us. “They probably love this old shack. Maybe their gruff yet kindhearted grandfather built it with his work-chapped hands. Or maybe when they were little kids they pretended this shack was a portal to a magical kingdom filled with dragons, elves, and chaste good times. Do you really want to be responsible for the destruction of happy memories like that?
”

The firebug did not give a goddamn about happy memories. The firebug wasn't about happy memories at all. No, it hopped and hopped and grew hotter and hotter until I felt something akin to bad heartburn mixed with a handful of magma. The firebug was a natural force inside of me, like a blizzard or a thunderstorm, and you couldn't reason with shit like that. You could only hope to subdue it with minimal collateral damage.

I brought the can over to the shack and set it on the grass. I pounded on the shack's padlocked door.

“Hello? Anyone in there?”

No answer, but I wasn't taking any chances. I knocked three more times and waited in case someone was taking a nap.

“All right, shack. Say your prayers.”

The shack prayed to its shack gods as I circled it, splashing gasoline along its base. The smell of gasoline was strong, real fumy. When I'd finished the dousing, I brought the can back to the car, set it in the trunk, and slammed the trunk's lid shut. I always put away the can first—I imagined most pyros got caught because they got sloppy and overexcited and ended up, sooner or later, torching their balls off. Which I found understandable, since once that old firebug started bopping around it was harder to control yourself and take the necessary precautions.

The wind died down. I returned to the shack's
perimeter
and took a matchbook out of my pocket. I studied the shack, a dark, boxy outline against the clear night sky, and savored the leaping in my heart. I plucked a match.

“Goodbye,
old friend
.”

I struck the match and tossed it against the building. The match's light darkened for a second, threatening to go out, and then the gasoline caught and whooshed into flame. The firebug sang rapturously inside my chest, droning out the moonstruck crickets and sending wave after wave of electricity through my body.

The flames engulfed th
e shack quickly. I was forced to take a few steps back, then a few more. A hole opened in the building's side and I could see a boat inside. It looked like a small fishing vessel, with some metal framin
g that might have been a dock. I wondered if the gas inside the boat's trolling motor would ignite and what that would be like, if it would shoot off into the stars
,
like a fiery rocket, or if it would simply go boom.

The fire's intensity grew, the building's interior now white hot, and the shack's frame wavered uncertainly. The roof began to tilt and then fell in altogether, collapsing what remained of the shack's walls and crashing onto the fishing boat. I retreated
farther
and turned my back on the fire.

You could see the lake's shoreline as clearly as if it were daytime. My eyes stung from the smoke and the burning gas. I took off my clothes and walked into the lake, slowly feeling my way forward. The lake only came up to my knees for the first ten or twelve feet, but then I reached a drop
-
off and dove headfirst into the silvered water. After the heat of the fire, the lake's coolness felt wonderful and even the algae scum didn
'
t bother me.

I swam toward the lake's center, happy in my swimming nakedness and kicking my legs in strong, convulsive arcs. I didn't look at the shore until I'd reached the middle of the lake, the exact center of the silvered water, and when I finally turned to look
,
the beauty of the fire, with such a starry backdrop, threatened to overwhelm me and I had to remind my legs to keep churning. The firebug and I did not want to sink.