He drove slowly down Main Street, past the Glenvale Cinema where he and Dave had gone to Saturday afternoon movies back in the days when Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe were considered the most beautiful women on earth (depending on whether you liked women lean or lush) and the good old guys like Tracy and Bogart and his all-time favorite, Robert Mitchum, were still making movies.
He kept going. It was Saturday, pushing noon; traffic was heavy, and the trip along Main took ten minutes. It was a warmish day for early May; sun beat down on the car as he stalled in line after line of cars waiting for parking places, and he started to sweat. He noticed that Dave’s face was shiny and he looked in the rearview mirror at the woman. She sat with her head bowed slightly and seemed to be looking at her hands. She wasn’t nervous about whether he’d found out she was a fraud; she knew he had not.
She was also sweating a little, and the sheen on her skin improved her looks, made her almost pretty. Then he realized she was pretty, had a nice, nonthreatening kind of prettiness that would take you a while to notice. Nothing blatant about it, any more than there was about the little gold bird pinned to her sweater, unless you just happened to have the kind of sharp eyes that could differentiate solid gold from yellow crap and real diamonds from glass.
The line of traffic broke a little and he picked up speed. They were away from the town center now; they passed the IGA where Mary did most of their shopping and where Jenny Nevins probably bought her family’s food. Then they entered a residential section of small houses, not far from where his folks and Dave’s once lived. Then they were out of town, and he finally knew where he was headed. Ten minutes later, he pulled up at the abandoned gravel quarry, now full of milky water, with the old ten- or fifteen-story crusher that looked like a monstrous funnel standing next to it.
He pulled up at a strip of brown weeds that were showing the first signs of life in response to the warmth and sunshine.
No one ever came here except kids who’d been warned how dangerous it was, and never under any circumstances to go near the water or the crusher, and certainly never to climb the crisscross metal frame supporting the huge funnel. It was just made for climbing, of course, and the water for swimming, and he and Dave had done both.
The Caddy idled smoothly for a moment, then he shut it off.
The woman looked up; Dave turned to him.
“You don’t need me to tell you, do you?” Bunner said, looking at her in the rearview mirror. She shook her head.
“But you do, don’t you, David.”
Latovsky nodded.
“His palms are solid burn scars, third-degree burns. Must’ve been very bad, unbelievably painful. They should have done a much better job with the skin grafts, but it was almost thirty years ago.
“He was in the room with his mother that day, May tenth, he thinks, but he’s not sure. Doesn’t want to be sure, and I don’t blame him. Anyway, he was left alone with her in that room, with the window open only a crack, and the TV on, and the room full of smoke because his mother was a chain smoker or next thing to it. And she had on that... negligee...” He almost choked on the word.
“Blue synthetic,” he went on, and he got hold of himself. “Just as you told us. Maybe it was nylon, but whatever it was, they didn’t make fire-retardant fabric in those days, at least it wasn’t a law like now, or something. I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”
She shook her head a fraction, then looked out the window at the standing water in the old quarry. She knew what he was going to say, didn’t have to listen, and he hated her.
He cleared his throat. “Doesn’t matter what it was made of.” He raised his voice and she looked back. “Because it went up like tinder, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said softly.
“Ken had fallen asleep in the chair by the window. It was warm and he was just a kid, and the other kids’ voices outside must’ve lulled him, or maybe it was the TV. He fell asleep, then she did too with the cigarette in her hand. Just nodded off over a book or something, and the crackle woke him up. That’s what he told me. The crackle of the fire woke him up, and he saw his mother lying on a bed of flames. Still there, still recognizable under the veil of fire. But the whole bed was burning and she must’ve been unconscious from the smoke by that time, or even dead. But he was only seven, he didn’t know that, and he tried to save her. She was too big for him to drag out of the bed, he didn’t have the strength or leverage, so he tried to beat out the flames with his bare hands. The burning nylon or whatever shit that robe was made of stuck to his palms and kept burning, but he didn’t stop. Finally he ran out of the room looking for something big enough to throw over his mama and smother the fire. He was smart enough for that, and to know that the sheer curtains in the bedroom wouldn’t do the job. He pulled down the drapes in the dining room—green brocade, he just told me. Put me in mind of the drapes in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett made a dress of... only that was velvet, wasn’t it?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, he tugged the drapes down somehow; the palms must’ve been black by then, burned to the bone, and the flesh would have come off on the brocade. The pain would have been excruciating, but he did it and ran back with the drapes to try to smother the flames. An adult would have known it was hopeless, would’ve given up by then, and of course had the sense to call the fire department. But he was only seven, remember. He got back to the room. The bed was still burning. The fire didn’t spread. But the bed was turning black, and under the flames, he saw his mother was too, and her face had melted—like candle wax, he said. Of course, it really hadn’t. That’s just his memory. It would be crisp and turn black like the rest of her; meat doesn’t melt when it’s burned, after all. It chars...”
He took a long shuddering breath and glared at Dave Latovsky; he’d never seen his old friend look so sick. He went on. “Anyway, he threw the drapes over her, and that probably helped some, but it was way too late by then. And then he heard sirens, and he knew someone was coming to help. And that’s all he remembers. Didn’t even remember that much until I helped him along, after you helped me along,” he said, looking at her again in the rearview mirror. She nodded in silence. Was she ever happy? he wondered suddenly. Could she laugh? What incredible horrors lived in that head of hers?
“He knows some of the rest, not because he remembers, although with time and work I believe he will, but because his older brother told him. He was curled up on the floor when the firemen got there. Fetal position, I imagine. That fits, because according to his brother, it took him over a week to straighten his legs out and walk, and during that time his older brother and his father had to take turns carrying him to the crapper.”
He took another long breath and let it out shakily, then said, “So, whatever your name is, that’s the story and the secret. And now that I know, and he knows, at least sort of... now maybe I can save his life.
“Ken should be grateful to you. So should I. But I’m not. Maybe because you just shit all over my ego, did in forty-five seconds what I haven’t been able to do in a year of digging. That hurts. Of course, I shouldn’t put my ego over a patient’s welfare, and I don’t. And I know I should thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I do. But lady, you just shit on a whole lot more than my ego—you shit on everything I and most of the people I’ve ever known believe, would stake their lives on probably. Which is, there ain’t no such thing as what you are, and no one can do what you can. So you’ll understand that I’ll be glad to see the last of you. Most people would be.”