Wildlife (18 page)

‘What’s going on out here, Jerry?’ Warren Miller said, not very loudly. He took a step closer to my father as if he wanted to see better what was happening. And he must’ve smelled gasoline, because he took a step back. Gasoline must’ve been everywhere.

My father stood up straight and said something I could not exactly hear, although it sounded like he said ‘hat on, hat on,’ the same words twice. Then my father squatted down very quickly, exactly in front of Warren Miller, just as if he was about to tie his boot lace. But what he did was strike a match. And I heard Warren say, ‘What in the world, Jerry!’

And then the porch was on fire all around them. The bottle my father was holding was on fire inside and out; the boards where my father and Warren were standing were all on fire. A strip of blue and yellow flame moved in an almost lazy way back to the front wall of the house and then down along the porch to the end, and began to go up the wood siding where my father had first splashed gasoline. The house looked all on fire to me then, or at least the front of it did. I began to move myself out of the car in a hurry, because my father’s boots and the bottoms of his pants were
on fire, and he was trying to hit it all out with his hands, and seemed frantic and was jumping.

Warren Miller simply disappeared. I didn’t see him go, but he was gone the instant the flames started. I guessed he was calling for someone to come and help. And my father was left on the front porch alone, trying to keep himself from burning up in the fire he himself had started by some act of jealousy or anger or just insanity–all of which seemed suddenly far in the past and out of any proportion to what was going on.

‘I’m on fire here, Joe,’ my father called out from the porch as I ran up the concrete steps toward him.

‘I know it,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to do this. I certainly didn’t.’ He seemed both excited and calm at once, even though one of his boots was on fire. He had put out the other boot and the bottom of his pants leg with his hands. And he had moved from the place where he’d set fire to the edge of the porch, so that he was sitting with one leg over the side and the other one, the one with the boot on fire, beside him, and he was hitting it with his bare hand, not very hard but trying to put out the flame. Behind him, the porch was on fire. I could smell it burning and smoking. I could see the wood front of the house in flames, and feel the heat from it on the air.

I took off my jacket when I got to my father, and I put it over his boot foot where it was burning, and I held it down hard and put my arms around it to close out the flames.

‘I can’t really see myself now,’ my father said. ‘That’s good.’ He did not seem excited anymore. His face was very pale, and both his hands looked black as though they’d been burned. He placed them in his lap, and I thought that maybe he didn’t know what he had just done, or that he had burned himself and could not feel it. ‘Your mother’s not in there,’ he said to me very calmly. ‘Don’t worry. I established that.’ Light snow was beginning to collect on both of us.

‘Why did you light this?’ I said, holding on to his foot.

‘To get things back on track, I guess,’ he said, looking down at his hands in his lap. He raised them a little for some reason, then put them back down. Far away I heard a siren begin. Someone had called the fire department about this. ‘My hands don’t hurt,’ my father said.

‘Good,’ I said. And I let go of his foot and pulled my jacket from on top of it. It looked fine. It did not look like it had been burning even though I could smell the leather and the gasoline that had soaked it. ‘Do you want to get in the car,’ I asked, because that is what I wanted.

‘No,’ he said, ‘That’s not the right thing to do now.’ He turned and looked at the house behind him. There were still flames on the porch and up the boards of the front wall. The bottle he’d had with him had broken. But the fire was dying off from the damp wood and was smoking more than burning, and it did not look to me like the house would burn much more, and would not burn down as I had thought at first. ‘This is all unnecessary,’ my father said, when he turned around to me. ‘Uncalled for. Your mother doesn’t trust me. That’s all. This whole thing is a matter of trust.’ He shook his head and wiggled all ten fingers in his lap as though he was trying to feel them but couldn’t, and it made him nervous, and he wanted to do something to feel them again. They were related in his mind to something important.

Warren Miller came out of the front door of his house in a hurry then. He had put on the coat that went with his suit pants, and he had a woman with him, a tall, slender woman with a long, pale face, who had on a man’s wool overcoat and silver high-heeled shoes. I recognized the shoes as the ones in Warren’s closet. He was moving her in a hurry, with his big limp, down the wooden front steps past where my father and I were, and out onto the driveway away from the house, which he probably thought was burning down but wasn’t. He had his hand in the middle of her back. When he
got her out to the sidewalk at the end of the driveway, he turned and he looked at us and at the house which still had some blue flames flickering and smoking on the outside walls, but which was mostly not on fire anymore. People up and down the street had come out of their houses and into their yards, including the two older people from next door, who I recognized and who went across the street to watch from the yard there. I could hear someone, a woman’s voice, yelling, ‘Come see this. You won’t believe it. Oh, my Lord.’ I began to hear sirens closer and the engines of the pumper truck as it came across the bridge with a bell ringing. And I stood there beside my father, waiting to see what would happen.

‘This will turn out better than it seems,’ my father said. He was looking around. He must’ve been amazed at what he’d done, at all the people who were looking at him and at me.

‘It’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘Not that much happened.’

‘I wish it was all right now,’ he said. ‘I wish.’

Warren said something to the tall woman in the man’s coat. I thought it was his coat, though it was not the one my mother had worn. The woman said something to him and looked at my father and me and shook her head. Then Warren Miller began limping toward us, up onto the grass of his own yard in the melting snow. We were just waiting for him, I guess, and for something to happen to us–for the police or the fire department to come, or whatever would happen officially. My father had decided to stay where he was and to take what was coming to him. He had no place to go. This must’ve seemed as good as any other place.

‘You’re a goddamned drunk, aren’t you?’ Warren Miller said, before he even got to us, while he was still limping across his yard. He was mad. I saw that. His voice seemed deeper than it had when I was in his house the night before. His face was pale and damp. ‘God
damn
it, Jerry,’ he said. ‘You’re all drunked up, and you’ve ruined my house.’

My father didn’t say anything to answer. I don’t know what he could’ve said. But when Warren Miller got to where we were–my father sitting on the edge of the porch and me beside him–he grabbed my father by his shirt front, just grabbed up the front of it, and hit him in the face with his fist, hit him so hard my father rocked backward. Though he didn’t go far back because Warren kept hold of him. Warren pulled his fist back to hit my father in the face again, but I reached up and put my hands over my father’s face, and said very loudly, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t do it again.’

And Warren Miller turned loose of his shirt instantly and put both his hands into his coat pockets. Though he didn’t leave, he stayed where he was, did not even move back a step. His glasses looked dirty and fogged up, and his face was wet and so was his suit coat. He was breathing hard. I looked out where people were standing in the street. Someone there was pointing at us or at Warren Miller, who had hit my father. I saw a boy running across the yards to get to a place where he could see better. I heard sirens coming, and I could taste smoke.

‘God damn it, you have a son here, Jerry,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I don’t know why you’d do a thing like this.’ He was staring at my father, who was blinking his eyes. He wasn’t bleeding and there were no marks on his face where Warren had hit him, but he must’ve been dizzy or sick from it. I wanted to tell Warren to leave, that we were finished, but it was his house we were sitting in front of.

‘Who’s that?’ my father said. He was looking at the woman waiting out on the sidewalk in the long coat and the silver shoes.

‘What do you mean?’ Warren Miller said. He seemed astonished. ‘That’s none of your business who that is. It’s not your wife.’ He was still angry, I could feel it just being beside him. ‘I’ve got a pistol inside there, Jerry,’ he said. ‘I could shoot you and nobody’d say anything. They’d probably be glad.’

‘I know that,’ my father said, though I was shocked to hear that.

‘How old are you, for God’s sake?’ Warren Miller said.

‘Thirty-nine,’ my father said.

‘Weren’t you a college man? Didn’t you attend a college?’ Warren Miller said.

‘Yes,’ my father said.

Warren Miller turned and looked out in the front yard then. Some cars had stopped and the fire truck was blowing its horn to clear a way down the street. But the fire had put itself out by then. The snow had done it, and there wasn’t any need to have firemen come.

Warren Miller looked at me, his hands still in his pockets. His blue eyes were wide behind his glasses. ‘I knew you were in the house today,’ he said. ‘I could’ve broken in there, but I didn’t want this to get out of hand.’ He shook his head. ‘I ought to beat the hell out of you right now.’ Then he looked at my father again. I think he was trying to decide what to do, and didn’t exactly know what the right thing was. It was a peculiar moment for all of us. ‘You should’ve known about this, Jerry,’ Warren Miller said. ‘God damn you. You can’t stop these things. You can’t go off from home and expect people to just stay put. You can’t blame anybody but yourself. You’re a fool is what you are. And that’s all you are.’

‘Maybe so,’ my father said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He was staring down. Out in the town I could hear other sirens, ones that had nothing to do with us, but with other people in town who were afraid of fires starting.

‘She was throwing things up to see where they’d land,’ Warren Miller said. ‘It was over before you even knew about it. At least as far as I was concerned.’ He turned and looked at the street again.

Headlights from the fire trucks lit the pavement. I could hear the big engines throbbing. In the yard across the street a man was using a hose to wet his roof. Two firemen were
walking out of the dark, wearing their big firemen’s hats and coats and boots and holding fire extinguisher cans and flashlights. The flames were all out on the house, now. Some neighbors were talking to the firemen who were on the truck. Someone laughed out loud.

‘What did you think?’ Warren Miller said to my father, who was sitting with his burned hands in his lap, his face beginning to swell from where he’d been punched. ‘Don’t you think this is a pretty big mistake? What do you think all these people think of you? A house-burner like this. In front of his own son. I’d be ashamed.’

‘Maybe they think it was important to me,’ my father said. He wiped his hands over his damp face then, and took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I could hear it go out.

‘They think
nothing’s
important to you,’ Warren said loudly. ‘They think you wanted to commit suicide, that’s all. They feel sorry for you. You’re out of your mind.’

He turned around and limped out into the front yard where snow was beginning to frost up on the damp grass, and the firemen were halfway up toward the house, pointing their flashlights in front of them and smiling and beginning to talk. They seemed to know Warren Miller. Warren Miller knew people. And we, my father and I, and my mother, didn’t know anyone. We were alone there in Great Falls. Strangers. We only had ourselves to answer for us if things went bad and turned against us as they had done at that moment.

In the end, not very much happened–not what you would expect to happen when one man sets another man’s house on fire and gets caught doing it in front of a street filled with people and at a time when they are afraid of fires. People have been hanged for such a thing as that in Montana.

The two firemen who Warren Miller knew came up and
looked at where the fire had burned the porch and around the side of the house. They did not put water on anything, and they didn’t talk to my father or me, though Warren told them that there had been a misunderstanding between himself and my father. Both firemen looked at us then, but just briefly. And then Warren Miller went back down to the street and sat in the back of the chief’s red car. They talked there while we waited. I saw that Warren signed something. The neighbors began to drift away back inside, and the man who had been hosing his house quit and disappeared. The fire trucks left, and the tall woman who had come out of the house with Warren got cold and went and sat in the Oldsmobile and started it to get the heater going. We were the only ones left outside, still sitting on the lighted porch in the cold snowy night. I could smell the smell of burned wood.

My father did not say anything while we waited. He watched the chief’s car, which is what I did, too. Though after a while, maybe fifteen minutes, Warren Miller climbed out of the chief’s car, walked down the sidewalk in front of his own house and up the driveway, where he got in his car, the one he’d been in with my mother and where the woman was waiting on him, and they backed out and drove away down Prospect Street into the night. I didn’t know where they were going, though I never saw him again in my life.

It was then that my father said, very calmly, ‘They’re probably going to arrest me. A fireman can arrest you, too. They’re qualified. I’m sorry about all of this.’

One of the two firemen got out of the chief’s car then. He was the older of the two who had come up and looked at the house. He was smoking a cigarette and he threw it in the grass as he walked up on the yard to where we were still sitting on the edge of the porch. We both knew not to leave, though no one had said that.