I call the police. They come with sirens on and in droves, order me to close for the night, shut all the lights and we sit in an unmarked van across the street waiting for anyone suspicious to stop in front of the bar with something that could have inside it a firebomb or can of gasoline. Nobody stops for anything except the bakery driver, who at daybreak leaves against my door his daily bag of breadloafs and rolls.
Hour later one of the three policemen in the van says “Nothing’s getting effaced today and I’m starving, so what do you guys say?” and we go into the bar for coffee and eggs I’ll make and some of those rolls. A few minutes later the phone rings.
“So there you are,” my landlady at home says. “I’ve been calling and calling and getting more worried every second and already was accepting the fate you were so charred you didn’t leave a single trace.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your apartment early this morning. The fire, where all your rooms except the toilet were almost altogether destroyed. Thank heavens we saved the rest of the building and our lives because your nextdoor neighbors had the foresight to put in smoke alarms. The fire marshal’s right beside me and he—”
“Let me speak to him,” I hear a man say.
“He wants to know if you left something cooking on your stove or can remember a cigarette in your ashtray or lit match.”
“Mr. Fleet?” a man says on the phone.
“Listen,” I say to him. “I left for work almost twenty-four hours ago. You think it would’ve taken that long or whatever hours it was to start a fire if I ever had the dumbness to leave anything cooking there? Well I don’t have the dumbness for that and gave up smoking a dozen years ago and throwing away lit matches without watching where they dropped about twenty years before that and nobody but me and my landlady who has the keys and a plumber or two has been in my apartment for five years. That fire was deliberately done by some company that’s trying to steamroll me to doing something I don’t want to do and if you want to talk to anyone about it, come over here and speak to the police.”
“You stay there — someone will watch your apartment — and I’ll be right over.”
“Goddammit I’m mad,” I yell, slamming down the phone. I throw the eggs on, scoop out the shells from the yolks because I threw them on so fast and then slice the rolls so quick I sliver my hands twice and my blood sizzles on the grill. “I’m mad, those bastards,” and I throw the spatula against the wall and punch my palm till it hurts.
“You want us to take over the stove?” one of the policemen says.
The marshal comes in while we’re sitting around a table eating and I say “Want breakfast? I know I can’t touch mine,” and he says “No, I go home for dinner right after this — I got the moon shift, lucky me. But what’ve you guys got that’s so hot?” and a policeman shows him the note the man left last night.
“This spit-stained napkin’s supposed to prove something to me?”
“Well I didn’t write it,” I say. “Besides, you don’t believe me, the hell with you — I got to see my apartment.”
“Whoa, whoa. Lookit, not that I’m saying what I’m going to say happened or even implying you were any way in the wrong. But knowledgeably speaking, anyone could have written this napkin for you so you could get your insurance company, we’ll say, to think your apartment fire wasn’t paid for or invited by you.”
“I don’t have apartment insurance. If I burned anything down it would be this unprofitable bar, but without first calling the police there’ll be a fire, though maybe even there you think that’s another ruse. Besides which I never hurt anyone except some dumb — wait a minute. You see a parrot in the apartment?”
“A statue of one?”
“Real.”
“No.”
“No parrot, live or dead or anything looking like a bird?”
“No, why, you had one?”
“Would I be asking? Maybe she flew away. I always kept the window open a little so she could get fresh air, though when it really matters to them, animals can squeeze out of anywheres. But I had my windows wide open last summer and she never flew away yet. And plenty of times had the chance, having picked open the latch with her beak or I let her free to fly and crap all over the place and me because I suddenly couldn’t see her caged, though a fire’s another thing.”
“It was a pretty serious one, so your bird’s body could have gotten hid under the debris.”
“I’ll just have to hope she flew away and someone caught her before she froze. But I never hurt anyone I was saying except some bum who was hurting someone else in my bar and wouldn’t stop or with his big mouth causing all my customers to flee, and then I only hurt his feelings some if he still wouldn’t go. Showed him the club and even used it on him light at times when he tried to rush me with a knife. Another thing: think I’d be fool enough to knock out the place I’ve lived in for fifteen years? And which to duplicate somewhere else, or even the same one, because they can charge me what they want once I’m burnt out and they put it back in shape — forget the cost to my soul if even one smelly puppy goes up in smoke because of me — I’d have to shell out three times the rent I now pay? Don’t be stupid.”
“And don’t shoot off your mouth like that to me.”
“I don’t deserve to? Being accused by you, threatened by others, my apartment burnt out, parrot gone, a hotel to go to now — you’re going to put me up?”
“Easy, fellas,” a policeman says.
“Then tell him to lay off. I’ve enough troubles.”
“Lookit,” the marshal says. “I know you’ve a good rep in your apartment building. Quiet and courteous and Mr. Joe Concerned Dogooder Citizen when you’ve the time to and so forth.”
“Oh please. Stop chopping and packaging the bullcrap.”
“That’s what she said — your landlady and other tenants. And your record for arson or suspected with my department and your whole family line of bar licenses is bloodbank clean. I checked. But I have to think of every possibility what started the fire — that’s my job.”
“Go to Stovin’s then — you with these men. Show them the note. Don’t be afraid. Show them it and say point blank they wrote it and watch their faces lie in their protests.”
“All we can do is go there, if these officers are willing, and question them about your charges and see what’s what. I’m sure though that if anyone was intimidating you for the reasons you said, then with that fire he’s stopped.”
The policemen and marshal go. I’m exhausted and because I never could get anyone to work for me steady, being every mopman and bartender I had the past few years turned out to be the worst sort of loafer, drunk or thief or all three, I close up for the first time in my barowning life when there’s still daylight out, other than for my mother’s funeral. A policeman’s to stay in front of my place guarding it but I don’t see one. Hell, let Stovin’s burn down the bar. At least I’ll get insurance on it, though I make sure to take all the cash I keep under the counter for the next day’s change and things.
I go home. Home’s a burnt-out two rooms but a john which still works. I take a last pee in it, retrieve what I can which isn’t much but shaving and tooth-cleaning things and a pure pewter beer mug of my grandfather’s for a sausage-eating contest he won a hundred years ago and which is almost still too hot to touch, and give a last look around for the parrot before I choke to death. I find her half dug in by her beak and claws to my one floor plant. Sara wasn’t originally mine but a gift, though her owner said “on loan,” in lieu of six months of unpaid bar bills. But I grew fond of her and she of me and I liked to talk to her when I got home from work or Sundays when I couldn’t by law open the bar till noon. “Got a match?” she’d say from the previous owner every time I walked in the door and I’d say, hanging up my coat, “Sara, how you doing? Don’t you know by now I don’t smoke?”