The Firebug of Balrog County (4 page)

The Mayor's Corner

Dear Residents of Hickson,

As you have probably heard already, the boathouse of Theodore “Teddy” Giles has been destroyed in what police believe to be an act of criminal arson.

This, of course, is a tremendous black eye for our sleepy community. Those of you who know Teddy (and who doesn't?) know about his exemplary life of service to both Hickson and the United States of America. An all-state quarterback for Hickson High back in the late eighties, Teddy led our beloved Wildcats to not one, not two, but
three
consecutive state championships.

Then, despite being offered several college football scholarships, Teddy joined the Marines and fought in the Gulf War, where he distinguished himself by taking shrapnel in his leg and still completing his mission, which was to relay a visual ground confirmation on an Iraqi troop unit in Kuwait, allowing it to be blown to smithereens by an American bomber.

His leg badly mangled, Teddy returned to our area with a Purple Heart, unable to play football or walk without a limp but still a shining example of everything fine and upstanding about being a man, a soldier, and an American.

To the coward (or cowards) who burned down Teddy's boathouse, I can only say shame on you and ask you to look deep inside your soul, which may need to be washed out with soap.

To everyone else, I ask for continued vigilance until this perpetrator is caught and dealt with appropriately. If you see anything, do not hesitate to call the police. As with any form of terrorism,
we are in this together.

Sincerely,

Mayor George Hedley

The Firebug's
Legend Begins

T
hroughout my pyromaniacal history I'd sought to keep my doings well below the notice of the citizens of Balrog County. I didn't need popular acclaim, or outrage, to soothe my ego and make me feel like a big big man. My work—the controlled fires, medium and small, that I'd ignited throughout the area—was its own glorious reward, the charred ashes of various flammable objects an end in of itself.

I wasn't in it for the money, the glory, or the chattering of the townsfolk.

I was in it for the burn.

Still, celebrity often comes to those of us who seek it not. As I read my grandfather's column in
the
Hickson Herald
, o
ur town newspaper, I cou
ld not help but feel the trappings of vanity slip comfortably around my shoulders, as snug and reassuring as a king's ermine coat. Poor Teddy
—
how could anyone burn down his precious boathouse? How could such a terrible thing befall such a fine, outstanding gentleman?

Ha!

Because this was life, bitches!

Yes. This was life. Apparently neither my grandfather nor anyone else in Hickson had stopped to consider the idea that the arsonist involved had actually no freaking idea who owned that shack
out in the middle of fuckwhere. They could not, or would not, account for the chaotic randomness of chance in the selection process
. T
o acknowledge that Gile
s'
boathouse was burned to cinders not because he was Teddy Giles, big
-
time hero, but simply because it was there, unprotected and tempting, would have been the same thing as acknowledging the fact that the universe didn't give a goddamn who you were and
could turn on you in a second, which was absolutely true and terrifying and best not considered too closely, lest one go insane staring into the abyss of time and space etcetera etcetera.

And this willful blindness, I must say, got me plenty stoked up.

Th
e following Wednesday
,
Sam
Chervenik ambled into the hardware store right before closing.
Sam was in my grade and basically the only dude from school I liked hanging out with or could really tolerate for more than five minutes. Like me, he was a big reader, mostly science fiction and fantasy with some Nazi Germany shit thrown
in. He also didn't plan on going to college, which he considered a racket fit for mindless drones, and worked at a comic book store in Thorndale for ten cents above minimum wage. He lived with his chain-smoking grandma on the north side of Hickson, where he
could stay
rent
-
free as long he took out the garbage and mowed the lawn and did other man-around-the-house stuff. Round
-
faced, broad
-
shouldered, and intense, Sam looked like a young Orson Welles, which he took as a compliment in his own weird Sam way.

I lowered the book I
was
reading. Sam came up and drummed on the front counter, glancing around furtively like he was about to hold the place up.

“Hey man
,
”
he said.

“Hey.”

Sam looked me in the eye. He was always looking you in the eye with mad intensity, but that only meant he was paying attention. Otherwise, he was off in his own private dream world, thinking about dragons and shit.

“How's work?”

“Exhilarating as always.”

“Yeah?”

“
But we close in ten minutes, so I think I'm going to make it. Another week as an employed member of the American econom
y.”

“That's go
od,” Sam said, nodding. “Hey, what are you doing Friday night? There's
a kegger out at Lisa Sorenson's house.”

I crossed my arms and leaned back on my stool. “You want to go to a party, Sam? Do you have a fever?”

Sam sh
rugged.
“I heard there might be some girls there from Thorndale State.”

“Ah. So th
at's your racket.”

Sam wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He'd started to sway slightly on his feet, which meant he was excited.

“I don't know,” I said. “I start working at the Legi
on on Friday. I d
on't know how late that'll go.”

“Shit. Those old fogies go to bed around ten o'clock. You'll be out of there before eleven and I'm betting this thing's going to go until two, three
a.m.
There's going to be a keg and a bonfire.”

“A bonfire?”

“That's the scuttlebutt, Trixie.”

A pagan image of college girls dancing before a colossal fire rose in my mind, coeds sexily removing their clothes in a fit of drunken ecstasy. It was exactly the sort of event the firebug and I needed to avoid.

“All right,” I said. “I'll pick you up after I get off.”

“Sweet.”
Sam rubbed his hands and looked around the store. “Hey, you hear about that Teddy Giles thing? Is that fucking funny or what?”

“Funny?”

“I mean, my grandma never shuts up about that goodie two-dick. He makes me want to puke.”

My stool creaked beneath me as I looked around my friend toward the back of the store, where I expected my football
-
loving, patriotic boss to emerge from his office with a howl of righteous indignation.

“You know,” I told Sam, “you're all right, man.”

“You're fucking right I'm all right.”

Sam smirked and shot me with both index fingers, a real cool cowboy gesture. I felt a sudden urge to tell him my secret identity, to confess that I was the firebug who'd burned down the boathouse and riled up Grandpa Hedley, but Sam turned on
his
heel abruptly and walked out of the store before I could say anything, high-fiving the decorative scarecrow near the entrance on his way out.

The man knew how to make an exit.

After Big Greg and I closed the store I headed home on foot. As I cut through the business district's patchwork of off-street parking lots, I noticed
that
the grocery store's rear loading dock was stacked with cubes of crushed cardboard bound by twine. The cubes were about four
-
by
-
four cubic feet in size and twelve in number. Totally unguarded, they'd most likely been left out for pickup the next day.

I kept walking, the cogs in my brain turning as I whistled a jaunty tune.

The Tiny Door

W
hen I got home from work, Haylee was barricaded in her bedroom and Dad was nowhere to be found. Abandoned by my family, I ate a microwave burrito in my bedroom while I checked my email. Nothing but junk and three new forwards from Grandma Hedley (a long-winded joke about a man on a tractor, a picture of a cat wearing a sombrero, and a list of twenty-five cornpone truisms), so I surfed around a bit and discovered that the
Thorndale Times
website was reporting that investigators had found a fresh shoeprint at the site of the Teddy Giles boathouse fire. It was a men's, size twelve.

I looked down at my feet, feeling a little thrill. Mmm. Not bad sleuthing. I'd be in trouble if they ever got their grubby hands on my sneaks. Next time I worked in soft terrain I'd have to put plastic bags around my shoes and cinch the bags in place with a rubber band, like a hit man in the movies.

I finished the burrito and went to the bathroom to wash up. The upstairs bathroom, which Haylee and I shared, had two sinks and a big wall mirror. The bathroom also had a toilet, a claw-foot porcelain bathtub, and a tiny wooden door set in the wall above the foot of the bathtub. This tiny, mysterious door had seemed to contain magical properties when Haylee and I were children, as if one day we might open it and discover a family of leprechauns enjoying tea and crumpets on the other side. In reality, the door led to a laundry chute that plunged all the way into the basement. The main opening to the laundry chute, an uncovered vent, was actually on the other side of the wall, set in the corner of Haylee's walk-in bedroom closet. When the tiny bathroom door was open it was possible to peer into each room from the opposite side.

Which
had been fun when we were kids, since you could pop your head through the doorway and scare the shit out of anybody on the other side, whether they were soaking in the tub or hanging out in the closet. Luckily, the door had a knob on it and could only be opened from the bathroom side and as long as you made sure the door was shut you didn't have to worry about your little sister (or goblins) popping the door open and seeing you naked in the bathtu
b.

I brushed my teeth to get rid of the nasty microwave burrito aftertaste and washed my hands and face. As I combed my untamable blond hair I heard what sounded like a ghost murmuring in the bathroom wall. I put the comb down and placed my ear agains
t the wall.

Our house was old. Sometimes bats got trapped in the walls—you could hear them scratching at the wood and plaster for a few days, until they either died in the wall or found a way to get out—but as far as I could remember I'd never heard a ghost before. I listened carefully, homing in on the center of the ghost murmuring, and found myself at the tiny door above the bathtub.

“Shit.”

I looked at the door and its tiny brass knob. Did I really want to explore this further?

I heard Grandpa Hedley's voice in my head, telling me to man up.

“Fine,” I whispered. “I'll man up.”

I reached out, turned the brass knob, and slowly opened the tiny door. The ghost murmuring grew louder and I realized it wasn't murmuring at all. Haylee was crying.

And listening to Dido.

I took a deep breath and peeked through the tiny doorway. My sister was lying on the floor of her closet, wrapped in a Strawberry Shortcake blanket I hadn't seen in years. She was on her side, facing away from the laundry door and spooning her enormous stuffed panda. Nothing showy, her sobs seemed to come from a place deep within Haystack's heart, a central location where she had an inexhaustible supply of sadness she could tap at will.

Hypnotized by this display of unvarnished grief, I stood watching for a minute before I couldn't take it anymore and slowly, with infinite care, closed the tiny door again.

The Landfill

H
ickson kids like to use the Balrog County landfill for parties. It's supposed to be guarded twenty-four/seven, but the night guard is a drunk who's usually out cold by one a.m. There's a hole in the landfill's fence everybody knows about and if the wind's blowing right the smell's not so bad, at least when it's cold out. The cops never sweep the landfill because everything there is destroyed already and you can find lots of cool shit if you dig around a little.

It
'
s
like a fun drinking game, sifting through all that old trash. I've heard stories about people making out and even fucking in the Fill, but I've never had the opportunity to give that a go.

Hickhenge

H
arried by my sister's display of sorrow, I left the house and went out to our garage. More of a free standing aluminum shed than a traditional attached garage, it was built by my dad from a kit he'd ordered online. He'd ordered the two-car garage kit but they'd delivered a four-car kit by accident so he just built that fucker instead, setting the mammoth beast up right at the end of our gravel driveway and spreading out more gravel for the shed's floor.

Our humble shed-garage, which looked more like it belonged on a county fairground than anywhere
with
in city limits, had seen its better days. The gravel floor was stained with oil and
was
home to all manner of creepy-crawly insects. The shed's rafters were usually populated by birds, which were good at shitting on parked cars, and occasionally a raccoon snuck inside and caused a ruckus.

At the rear of the shed—occupying the space of roughly two cars—was a wall of hoarder junk I liked to examine sometimes, meditating as I picked through boxes of old toys and clothes and magazines and whatever else our family didn't really need anymore but couldn't bear to part with. As I sat with the junk, which was dimly lit by the shed's single uncovered bulb, the garage door rumbled to life and slowly rolled up, letting in a batch of fresh air. I kept still as a ninja as the
shed
was lit up by a pair of headlights and our van pulled inside.

The headlights went out and the van's engine stopped. I could see my father sitting in the driver's seat, staring through the van's windshield. I couldn't tell if he was looking at me or staring into space. He liked to listen to talk radio and sometimes he got so into it he stopped noticing what was happening around him.

Dad got out of the van and slammed his door.
“Mack?”

“Hey Pops.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

I shrugged. Dad looked up at the rafters, checking for birds. There weren't any.

He
walked around the front of the van.
“You know, we should really get rid of this crap. We could rent a Dumpster and chuck it all.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I kind of like it out here.”

Dad laughed.
“You would, Mack. You would.”

He
reached into a box and pulled out a paperback novel. “Alice Munro. This must have been one of your mother's. She loved Alice.”

We both stared at the paperback, as if
it
might reply in Mom's stead, but it kept its bookish silence.

“Okay,” Dad said, tossing the book back into the box. “I'm going to have a beer and hit the sack. Don't stay out here too late.”

“I won't.”

Dad left the garage, hitting the door button as he exited through the side door. I retrieved the Alice Munro paperback and thumbed through it, hoping to come across a little note or something, some proof that my mother had read the book. I didn't find any marks but I shoved the paperback in my back pocket to add to my bedroom library anyway. I started picking through the junk again, wondering what other books I'd missed, and noticed a moving dolly wedged between an old mini-fridge and a treadmill draped in spider webs. I extricated the dolly from its dusty purgatory and gave it a few roll arounds, testing its wheels and overall sturdiness.

Yes. It would do.

I threw the dolly in my trunk and drove downtown. The parking lot behind the grocery store was empty and poorly lit by one dim and flickering sulfide lamp. I parked the Olds in the lot's inkiest shadows and rolled down my window, listening to the rustling night as the firebug made merry in my chest, excited for the glory to come. After twenty minutes I saw a police cruiser cruise by and turn onto Main Street, its engine revving as
it
peeled out toward the highway.

Thump thump
, went the firebug.

Thump thump
.

It was time for a new monument to rise, a shrine worthy of the Elder Gods and Kubla Khan. I got out of my car and went to work, hustling the moving dolly onto the grocery store's loading ramp and scooping up the nearest cube of crushed cardboard. The cube was heavy but not so heavy a true man couldn't handle it with some swearing, staggering, and painful toe
-
stubbing. I moved the cube down the loading ramp to the center of the parking lot and then I did the same thing with the eleven other cubes, placing them all in a ring. I worked fast and the night was silent except for my own ragged breathing.

When the major pieces were in place, I untied the twine on one cube and pulled a few cardboard chunks loose. I set the chunks lengthwise on top a few random cubes around the ring, creating a crosspiece effect that paired the cubes together.

Satisfied that I had the look going that I wanted, I returned to the Olds, set the dolly back inside the trunk, and retrieved a gas can and a rag. Humming Druid-like tones of spirituality, I went around the ring of compacted cardboard and blessed each cube with a sloshing of 87 regular
-
grade gasoline, making certain to leave a nice splashy trail between each piece. Then I put the gas can back in my trunk, started my car, and
walked back
to the ring, leaving my car door open for getaway purp
oses.

Th
e firebug thumped heartily, knowing well what moment was at hand. I took the rag out of my pocket and lit it with my lighter. The rag's tip caught i
nstantly and I held it before me, dangling it over two cardboard cubes connected by one of the cross-section pieces. “I hereby call upon all the old gods to witness this holy happening,” I intoned. “I call upon them to—”

I swore and dropped the rag, which was fully lit already. It floated down and landed on the cardboard cross-section, giving me just enough time to jump back as the cubes caught fire, one after another, until the entire ring was radiant with fire.

And lo
…

Hickhenge was alight.

I did a quick wild man dance, looked up at the stars to make sure they were paying attention, and sprinted for my idling car, the firebug hammering joyously away in my chest.