Those old movie newsreels of World War II flamethrowers spewing their lovely tongues into Jap-filled foxholes: long flexing membranes of combustion tearing into the bland dullness of the black and white. Lovely. Lovely.
The plot of fire is nebulous and serene, wildly fanatic and calm at the same time, trailing up curtains and along the undersides of carpet padding, taking its own sweet time and then conversely becoming diametric, logarithmic, taking big gulping gorging sweeps of the floorboards and runners — until it sings sweetly the fantastic house-burning lament, blasting out of windows and licking the roof eaves. You drive up to it stunned and bent over with anguish at the very central fact that what was once around your life — objects of so-called sentimental attachment — is now ash.
Burning things came naturally to Fenton, and he did so whenever and wherever he could. His father assured his mother that it was the natural proclivity of a boy to touch a flame to things. As a kid I did so myself, he assured her. It was a phase the boy would outgrow, he added. The rocket ship was makeshift, a couple of tubes of cardboard taped together and stuffed with wax paper (Fenton was sure that nothing burned better than wax paper), capped by a crude twisted cone of construction paper — dark blue, all jury-rigged to a small slab of plywood. It was the gas. He doused the tubing with gas and then the board and laid it near the side of the garage — in that narrow space between his garage and the neighbor’s — then doused a bit more for good measure, counting, five, four, three, two, one, touching the Bic lighter to the edge of the wood, not feeling the lick, the vibration, the uplift of flame — the small barely visible violet underside of the fume-flame touching his tube socks and gathering around the cuff of his jeans, with a combustion point higher than the hair on his ankles — flame opening to flame itself taking one big heaving pop, gulp, and then roaring up to his face, flinching back, falling forward into it, catching his jeans and his socks and up his leg before he knew what was what, and the dry wood along the garage, too; it had been a long dry summer in which the whole region was baked crisp. It was near fall anyhow, that tart dry smell holding the portents of what was going to happen on the first cold frost-snap night. It was all in a half second, until he was on fire doing the STOP, DROP, ROLL thing just as he’d been trained. (In class they had gone over it, throw the blanket over the body or if you’re alone don’t panic and run but roll on the ground.) But there wasn’t room between the two garages, and he rolled back against the neighbor’s wall and then towards the fire — screaming all the while this high, dog-whistle-pitched squeal that couldn’t be heard anyhow because, across the alley that serviced the driveways of this small Midwestern town, Mr. Jones was roaring swaths of grass with his ill-tuned Lawn Boy, drowning out the screams and the first crackles of the fire. He’d be the first to notice the smoke, first to see it, but too late because by that time both garages were engulfed. (He was hard of hearing but his eyesight was a resolute twenty-twenty.) The inferno would soon leap the garage to the porch and, before the fire trucks could arrive, take the whole side of Fenton’s house and part of the neighbor’s, too, destroying both with enough smoke damage to call them total losses on the insurance rosters.
Fenton’s skin is actually giving off smoke, a swamp misting in the early morn, crawling on all fours, looking slightly ridiculous if you were to view it impartially, as if in a movie, knowing it was an actor in a fire suit, some stunt person like a Chaplin tramp, or in blackface, fireface — really, honestly, smoking skin burning still, not able to scream now for the effort he has to put into moving away from the fire that is moving rapidly (following the soft westerly breeze) — but he can sense it licking his heels, although he can’t feel his heels because the soles of his sneakers have melted into his feet, or what remains of them; it’s a ghastly sight that no one gets to see. (He’s a latchkey kid. Usually he goes in and switches on the TV and kills a good hour before getting his books out of his backpack.) No one is there to see his heroic crawl out of the fire into the fresh air, his singed lungs gasping. When the emergency rescue guys and the fire trucks scream up to the curb he’s in the very center of the front lawn, still smoldering, like a heap of campfire residue. But the men have seen stranger sights, still-living souls with flames dancing out of their necks; people dancing fire dances with their hair going like a torch, things that defy even those whose imaginations are trained by computer animation techniques to accept anything on this strange earth; these guys in the course of fighting fires — the older ones — going into roaring farmhouses full of brittle ancient wood — have seen the fire gods make strange faces, with licking tongues. So Fenton wasn’t a strange sight to them the way he’d be to you if you were to come upon his smoking form. The percentage of his skin damaged (like that of my aunt) was given as a statistic, as if the square inches of body tissue could be charted, cubed off, like square acres of farmland in Iowa. Anyone familiar with the rudiments of such news stories — fire-damaged souls who have their skin grafted in a tortuous series of operations that are (according to many accounts) more painful than the actual original burning; bodies hovering in special flotation tanks, suspended in liquid, sponged off, the wounds oozing for months and years. For anyone familiar with such tales, the story of Fenton’s struggles to survive would be pretty routine. Like Christ, he lay in the tank with his arms out. Like Christ, he suffered for all humankind. Like Christ, he sucked into his skin and nerves the pain of the entire universe. It was a holy event. Eyes dark blue open to the ceiling tiles. His lips parted, trying to speak. Like Christ, he walked into the hot fire of hell and departed with only long purple blemishes and a face that was hard to recognize as human. People walked past that face with their eyes at the sky or their feet, knowing that to look at it would be to laugh out loud. It would be a big, blasting laugh that Fenton’s face would produce in most people, the kind you make at the circus when the clown’s dripping eyes and his goofy smile are painted over the saddest-looking, most pathetic clown-school dropout you’ve ever seen, some guy whose family has been in the circus for generations and has no way out except to keep doing what the family does; he hates the job more than life itself but keeps going and going, from Madison Square Garden shows to small county fairs. In the circus there is fire, too. It’s spun in hoops and thrown from the mouth of God.
THE WOODCUTTER
THE FIRST day back he began chopping like a maniac, going at the wood day and night — or so they say. He’d been back six years when I was old enough to notice him, and by that time he went a bit slower (at least that’s what I was told) but still split a good cord, a full cord, in about two hours depending on what kind of wood it was and how large around the tree was; he had a gas powered wedge that halved the logs; then he just threw them into place and took a clean hard swap, usually just one chop was all it took, and then he’d swish them out of the way with his steel-toed boots and do another; all day, most days, seven days a week, barring only the worst kind of weather. When he stopped, there were usually dew drops of sweat and condensation on his black beard; in cold weather, a dangling clot of ice; in the summer there was a fine little braid of red welts under the hairs and just above the skin. Prickly heat. The lumberjack shirt he wore, traditional red and black Pendleton of good wool, graced him deep into summer. When he killed himself — August I, 1985—he was in the shirt, next to a fresh cord of seasoned oak stacked against his garage. His wife was out there undoing the buttons slowly to get to the wound, small and round, produced by a teflon-coated bullet (the papers said) that eased neatly into his chest and right out, lickety split, the wonders of moon-shot technology going a step further than nonstick pans (my father muttered). Theories abounded about the exact reason, but suicide being an unexplainable enigma it didn’t take much to put most of it on Nam, on his role in the siege at Khe Sanh, on buddies lost and all that, although the papers mentioned he was being sued for taking down a red maple on private property without permission, going right up the Jansons’ driveway (one of those washed gravel loops to the front of their ceder sided ranch), tying a rope around the tree and then his pickup hook, getting the chain saw revved up, and then telling me to ease up on the clutch when he gave a shout (being only fourteen I wasn’t versed in the workings of a manual shift, but I did as I was told, easing up slowly, and the truck jerked back, and the tree went down behind me with a loud, dust-clouded whomp). Before I was out of the truck’s cab, he was slicing into the large trunk, getting right into the heart of the tree, which was a good hundred and twenty years old according to my ring count (later). I kept quiet about my role in his demise. It wouldn’t do to let people know that maybe it wasn’t Nam that caused him to shoot a nice, neat hole in his heart, and that maybe it was just other stuff, the value of trees being dissembled, the wonderful easing up of weight when the head of the ax left the arch and pulled him into the chop. (I’d watched a million times.) The threat of not being able to go into the forested yards of his neighbors, or the local parks where he got most of the trees, to take down the excess growth, was too much for him; his lumberjack days were numbered.