This ain’t my place but I’m here to burn it down.

I crawled in through the bathroom window. I’m using a cigarette lighter to see because there’s hardly any moon tonight, overcast. My plan is to set it off in the living room, in the couch cushions. Barbara Walters had a story on about this fire chief out in Kansas somewhere who liked to watch things burn. He lit up a Wal-Mart in the middle of the day. He got off she said on the black smoke and the flames, folks hollering, the sirens. He wrapped a bunch of matches around a cigarette with a rubber band, folded it in a sheet of legal paper for kindling, stuffed the whole thing in a mattress in the furniture aisle. The cigarette burned down slow before setting off the matches and the paper, giving him time to get out. I don’t want to be here when this house goes up neither, so I’m borrowing his technique.

But I forgot the matches.

I slide the medicine cabinet open. I see cotton balls and tweezers and a dozen orange bottles. There’s shampoo in the shower and a toothbrush in a little holder on the vanity. A denture case too. Miss Nona told me she had to make it look like a person still lives here to keep the insurance up. I was hoping she thought of matches to burn after a make-believe shit,  but she didn’t. One of the medicine bottles says “hydrochlorothiazide” and another “furosemide.” The name on them is Mary Seabaugh. I ran around with a Seabaugh boy in highschool, but this ain’t my town.

I open the first bottle up and pop the last few pills in my mouth. I do the same with the second. I toss all the other bottles in the pocket of my field jacket. My head is crazy. I woke up this morning, stood up out of bed, and fell right into the wall. Inner ear infection, the flu maybe, shit’s going around. The dizziness and blurry vision the fever gives me, like trying to look through a block of ice strapped to your face. But I gotta do this tonight. She wanted it done yesterday.

I slip into the kitchen and dig into the junk drawer. Quiet, quiet. There’s old brass hinges, thumb tacks, and two decks of playing cards. Q, J, 4 of hearts. A flash of gold, a book of matches. It says “King’s Club, Memphis TN,” below a drawing of a dancing lady, both printed in glittering letters. I open the book’s flap, and the matches greet me, all lined up like little soldiers marching into a battle. Fire ain’t no joke … A car passes on the street and I duck behind the sink. I feel my head spin and  take a deep breath. I hold on to the counter and pull myself back up. My eyes feel like they are trying to fly out of my head and dance on the ceiling.

The revolver in my belt pokes my ribs. It’s a Charter Arms Bulldog, .44 special. It belonged to Daddy. Most of the good memories I have are of him taking me to shoot and him eating pancakes and potted meat with us on Sunday mornings. We would sit at the table, just us and Mother and my baby brother, eating and talking and listening to Mother’s old records and Daddy telling his dirty jokes before driving off in a big blue truck across the country.

The truck I drove here ain’t mine. I took it from the parking lot of the Shamrock. The owner had left his keys in the sun visor, a Jerry Clower record in the tape player, and a J.C. Higgins single barrel shotgun hanging in the gun rack. The plan is to sell that gun for a few bucks when this is over. I swapped the truck’s plate with one I had stolen from a van in front of the Freewill Baptist Church. I didn’t pick a winner. This truck has some kind of short. Every big bump in the road causes all the lights to go out, the dashboard, the dome, headlights too, all of it. Total dark half the way here, but I managed.

Miss Nona said she’d pay me seventy-five dollars to torch this place, and she would forgive the rent I owe her. The steel mill is on shutdown, has been for three months. I was the newest on so the first to go. White hats figured I was young enough to find another job, but the aluminum tube factory and the shoe factory are on a freeze too.

A nice little house, old, a shotgun with a few rooms built on. Much nicer than my trailer. I can make out a table, with salt and pepper shakers and a tablecloth. Cans of sugar and flour and baking powder on the counter. A refrigerator, stove. A framed picture of spotted cows in the field hanging on the wall, and sitting on the record player cabinet are three tall empty liquor bottles.

Mother drank Galliano too. She filled the empty bottles with colored water and set them on our counter. I liked them because they had a picture of a soldier on them. He looked like Napoleon. When Daddy came home from the VA, he knocked one of the soldiers over onto the kitchen floor. She yelled at him cause she said we would never get all the glass cleaned up and my little brother would cut his feet. He told her to get rid of “those fucking ugly things.” He looked at us kids when he said that. And he smiled, but there was heat behind it. He would shake and yell and carry on, try to hit us sometimes and call us names. I grew afraid of him, and I stopped talking around him and just spent as much time as I could in the woods or at Bill’s shooting rats.

I finish my work in the living room and slip back out to the truck, my jacket pockets stuffed with the pill bottles and in my jeans a can of Vienna sausages I found above the stove. I move the gear shift to N so I can push it back down the gravel alley. I look at the house. It and the small yard are as dark as the other trailers and houses around here. There is a guard light across the road at a metal shop of some kind. I can make out rows of flighting and auger tubes laying on the gravel beyond the chain link fence.

I imagine the house a few minutes from now, the fire eating the couch and the table and the little cows, burning the shotgun’s insides till it breaks through the roof, the flames reaching higher and higher against the cloudy night sky. My stomach turns, has to be my head again.

We couldn’t pay the power bill one winter, so the trailer was dark. And we couldn’t pay the propane man either, so it was cold. One night, I woke up to yelling. That was normal since Daddy came back from the hospital. He would come out screaming from his nightmares. But it was Mother’s voice this time. The walls were paper. She was yelling so loud they could have been granite and steel. Never heard such yelling, shrieking, shrieking is what it was.

“Get up, get up. Get up you son of a bitch! Get up!”

My brother and me didn’t have a room of our own, so we always slept in the den on the floor with blankets. I told him to hush and that everything would be alright. I came down the hall and I opened the door. The room was lit by a pair of green hurricane lamps Mother kept on the dresser. That was the only furniture in the room besides the bed. We had sold the chester drawers and the mirror earlier that year.

Daddy was on the floor, on his back. I could tell by the way the covers were wrapped around his legs that he had fallen, maybe out of the bed. He was crying and blubbering about this back. His arms were stiff and reaching up toward the ceiling.

She stood over him, naked as the moon. I had never seen her like that. Her skin looked hot and fluid under that weak light, like the skin of some Greek snake goddess we’d learned about in school. I couldn’t tell where she ended and the shadows began. The room smelled strange. She had in one hand a jar of Vaseline. She would kick him and then yell. And then kick harder and yell again, louder each time. Her large breasts hung down and swayed as she moved and jumped as she kicked at Daddy. Her nipples were large and erect.

I heard my brother crying from the living room. I called his name. Mother saw me then for the first time in the doorway. She stopped kicking. She looked around the dim room. She put her hands over her face. She put her nightgown on. She ran out to the truck and drove off.

A few days after, Mother came back with Miss Nona. She told us that Miss Nona was going to stay at night to help with Daddy. Her father, Miss Nona’s, had lost his mind too, and she took care of him until he died. Mother said she had gotten a late shift job behind the desk at the Beshears’ motel up on the highway. My brother and me had to eat breakfast at school after that. We didn’t mind. It was hot, usually.

There’s a light on.

A glow in the window off the back porch. It is too cool and uniform to be flames. It’s a lamp or a ceiling fan. Someone flipped a switch. Someone is home. Someone is inside. I imagine now the sheriff finding a charred body. I imagine him saying this is the worst thing he has ever seen and wiping sweat from his pudgy face with a handkerchief in the middle of the rubble. I imagine myself in handcuffs. In court. In prison. What if there is more than one body? A whole family. A dog and a cat too, a parakeet maybe. I couldn’t have missed that. The squawking. That light had to have been on already.

I hear popping. I thought I had more time, but the house may be going full on now. The living room white hot like the blast furnace at the steel mill. Flames slithering up the walls and across the ceiling. I want to stay, to watch, but I gotta get. Maybe I got more in common with that fire chief than I know.

Yelling at the back window.

The backdoor flying open and smoke.

A dark figure falls onto the porch, stands, and then falls again off the porch to the ground.

I jump into the truck. The engine sputters. The headlights pop on. Goddamn backwards ass piece of shit. I hear a voice groaning and cussing over the coughing of the starter motor. I try the ignition again and pump the accelerator as fast as I can. It turns over. The man does too.

I put the truck in R

All the lights come on now. I pull and twist the headlight knob. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I look at the house. In the headlights, I see a man standing now, holding his shoulder. He sees me too cause of the dome light I’m sure of it.

That Miss Nona is slimier than a rice field slick, man.

P

I jog to him. I realize in the truck lights he is more of a boy than a man. Skinny. Shirtless. Holey jeans. No shoes. Long black hair, big nose. A tattoo of a whiskey bottle on his chest. His face is all mushed up with pain. Flames are lapping out from under the roof like giant tongues now, hot and slick. The boy seems more familiar than he should. It makes me uncomfortable, almost as uncomfortable as the smoke filling my eyes and nose.

“What happened?”

Snot runs down his colorless face. He is shaking. Crying.

“You ok? Is there anyone else inside?” I am acting now like I just got here, just drove up, doing my best to stay out of prison.

He shakes his head no.

His left forearm is a mess. I see black and pink and brown and yellow flesh. I take my jacket off and throw it around him. I lead him toward the truck like a dog, my hand gripping his collar. I get him in the passenger seat and tell him to put his arm out. I take the gallon of distilled water I got in the floorboard and pour half of it directly on the wound and the other half on the inside of the jacket. I tell him to put his arm back under it. That will keep it cool, and that’s the best I can do right now.

I wipe the handle of the jug with my shirt and throw it into the grass. I ask him again if anyone else is inside. I close the door. I could shoot him. He is not supposed to be here anyway it looks like. Just shoot him. Shoot him through the glass. Shoot him. Set this fucking truck on fire. And run.

D

I take us through the alley and hit the county line road that runs around the end of the town. I tell the kid it’s the fastest way to the hospital in Jonesboro. There’s an ER there. He doesn’t know any better or is in too much pain to protest. The highway is faster. There’s a hospital in Newport too that’s closer. I need to not be seen. I’m going to stay on gravel and dump this kid where few people know me, and get the hell out of the state as soon as I can, go to Memphis, St. Louis maybe, Louisiana. I need to piss.

When we lost the trailer, Miss Nona took us in. My brother and me got our own room with a mattress on the floor. Mother spent more and more time at her friend’s house. Daddy got a little better. Miss Nona sometimes let me sleep in her bed when Mother wasn’t there and I was cold.

Hitting nearly 50 miles per hour on the straights. Gravel crunching, truck rear end sliding around. The headlights go out again. I can’t see shit. “It’s ok,” I tell the kid in the darkness. “I know this road.”

But I don’t.

I imagine us running headlong into a ditch any time now. I can tell they are deep and wide. I roll down my window and stick my head out. Doesn’t help. The smell of the cold dirt and air is strong. The road is bordered beyond the ditches with empty fields and some woods. The kid can’t sit still. He is shaking and flopping around, fighting with the coat around him, like an unsatisfied woman kicking off the covers in the night.

He yells out.

Lights on.

“Calm down. Tell me your name?”

I can see his eyes are closed tight and he is rocking back and forth and holding himself.

“T-Thomas.”

I look at him more closely than before. I’m trying hard not to piss my pants in front of him.

“You remind me of someone I went to school with.”

He doesn’t say anything. He pulls the collar of the coat around his face and bites it and rocks harder.

“Goddamn, are you Pudge Seabaugh’s boy?”

“No.”

“You sure? You look a hell of a lot like him not to have come from him.”

I realize I’ve given him a clue just now to identify me when this is all over, and I fucking hate myself for it. Shoot him. It’s not too late to shoot him.

“He told me I wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what?”

“His son no more … Can we turn this shit off”

“The tape’s jammed in, can’t turn it down neither.”

I reach over to the glovebox and bump the kid’s arm. He howls. I apologize. I take out four beers, warm now, and offer one to him. I take his can off the plastic ring and open it for him.

Every year around Thanksgiving before the accident, Daddy would drive me to go shooting. He’d stop the jeep out past the bayou and if it was cold there would be pumpkins sometimes still in the Beshears’ field. We’d take turns shooting at them. That little 44  bulldog would roar and spit fire. Daddy said to breathe. He said to make orange lollipops out of the pumpkins, to sit them on the front sight post. If I did that, I would get a hit every time, he said. And if I shot good enough, he would give me a drink of his beer or his whiskey and a pecan pinwheel from the box he always had under the passenger seat.

Lights off.

I hear the kid crumple his second beer can. It clinks when it hits the floorboard.

I open mine with my left hand. I take a sip, and reach out the window and pour the can out, careful not to drop the motherfucker. I sit the can between my legs in the dark and use my buck knife to start to cut out the top. I’m steering with my knees. I have never had to piss so bad in my entire fucking life.

I cut my finger on the can top. The kid asks for the last beer.

Lights on. We hit a sharp curve way faster than we should. I grab the wheel and jerk the truck to the left. I feel the backend sliding out and hit the brakes and then the gas to try to correct. The truck acts like it is going to flip over but slides to a stop instead just before the ditch and the treeline.

The shotgun jumps out of the window rack and falls between us. The butt smacks me hard in the head. I’m just glad I didn’t have my lizard inside the sharp can when it did.

The kid looks straight ahead. I can see in the light his chest moving up and down as fast as a treed coon. He chugs down the beer, and yelps. I know you’re hurting, I tell him, but I gotta piss. You keep that jacket around you, stay warm.

I get out and leave the truck running. I walk to the side of the gravel to the ditch and the trees. The clouds have broken now, the stars and three-quarters of a moon illuminate the gravel.

The ditch is a wide, black pit, but as my eyes adjust I see in it the old white husks of refrigerators and washing machines. Kitchen chairs, a table, a whole house-full of junk dumped by folks who live around here. I pretend the stoves are soldiers, and I am a machine gunner. I try to hit as many of them as I can with my stream as they march toward me.

“Motherfucker!”

The shotgun blast hits me and I stumble into the ditch. I hit the dirt hard on my back and neck. I hear the engine popping and gravel flying as the truck speeds off. That fucking kid shot me.

I sit up. Being stung by a hundred bees, and a wetness in my hair. I rip off my shirt and put pressure on the wound. My head is still there. My scalp is still there. I am alive. Dizziness worse than ever, I feel the cold.

I reckon the kid found those pill bottles in my jacket. I reckon the shotgun was loaded with birdshot, and he has never shot a 12 gauge with one hand before.

I make it to my feet. I draw my pistol and peek at the road. The truck and the kid are long gone. I keep pressure on my head by tying the shirt around it in a knot. See the moon? It is brighter than before. The moon hates me. Where was it when I needed it to see? All around me the junk shines.

I set one of the trashed chairs upright. I pull it up to the broken table. I remove the can of Vienna sausages from my pocket and put it on the table in front of me. I open the lid and fish out two sausages with my fingers. I offer my little brother one, but he shakes his head and says “gross.” Daddy calls him a pussy and takes the can from me and drinks the juice. My brother makes a face, and Daddy chuckles.

Daddy sits opposite me at the head of the table, Mother to his left, and my brother beside her. A stack of pancakes stands in the middle of us with a can of sorghum. Daddy has his beer, and we have glasses of frozen orange juice. Blueberry Hill crackles out of the record player. The kitchen is warm from the stove, and bright.

“What’s Peter Pan’s favorite place to eat out?” Daddy says. … “Wendy’s”

Mother giggles and slaps his arm. Daddy grins. I don’t get the joke, but I laugh hard anyway, thankful for the chance to dwell again in this place. I’ll sit here with my family until the cold puts me to sleep.