“We aren’t that interested in your football season, you’re forty or more years old. Who are you, setting these fires? Stand off us. Betty has a gun, you ugly idiot.”
All three crept warily toward a low-watt bulb hung over the door to a homemade recreation vehicle the size of two outhouses. Jimmy Canarsis was in awful pain but some righteous battle was still in him. He’d been playing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the Martin Luther classic, when the fire surrounded him. He was not interested in the mobile hut, and now he saw Betty Dew was holding no gun, only a long screwdriver from the tackle of their boat. He saw how thin these old women were, one short, one taller.
“This man set no fires, Jo,” said Betty. “He’s burned bad. Unless by his own gasoline. I know who he is. It’s the Canarsis child, a savant, a pianist. He could play. He could play in the Ford Arts Center, but he won’t leave the church. He can drive a car but doesn’t need to, he said. His parents brought him over to my house for a medical opinion. I’d told them I’d never practiced, but they insisted I was in baby doctor school seven years and wasn’t no way you’d forgot it all and you’re called doctor as we heard on it and some said a genius where they give you a award too big to get in this living room.”
Betty detailed the case of this giant in a daze, looking past Jimmy at the tall glow of the church. The sounds of the county fire trucks, police, and ambulances were all over the night then. At last there were nineteen vehicles howling.
“It didn’t take long for me to figure out the question here was financial, to get him on some concert tour. But they were not greedy. He was a big mouth to feed and he wouldn’t leave the church. They were exasperated for him, even as church people. Where you’d never know a church could ever be. You’ve got the beavers and the hard rains. It’s always been flood land.”
“I don’t believe it’s there yet. Just the fire of it,” said Jo.
“Women, I’m going back in the lake. I can’t stand this no more. You talking about me like I’m a baby right in front of my face. And Dr. Dew a real doctor. The church is real and I’m real.”
Jimmy acted on his words. They heard him sloshing in the water and both felt very ashamed. Ashamed in a common dream, watching the fire and hearing the men around it now five football fields away.
They had nothing but a screwdriver and a cell phone, and they were eighty, healthy but each minute brought to them personally like a tornado in the night come into their frailty, a thief before their eyes could perceive that death was a train in the window, permitting no peace. You were just old guts.
Sick Soldier at Your Door
ANSE BURDEN AT YOUR SERVICE. HERE IN OXFORD I’VE FOUND SIX soldiers from the ’91 desert war with Iraq. I flew the F-18 Hornet off the Roosevelt carrier, I believe. At the time I was loaded on Percodan and Dexedrine so maybe it was another. In the ready room we watched ourselves bombing and missing on CNN. Nobody else in my squadron was even nicked.
But a Stinger blew my tail off and I bailed, blown horizontally into the air as the plane was corkscrewing. The ejection seat was dead solid perfect, all it was supposed to be. I was in love with it and was not conscious the ejection had broken my back a little. It seemed I floated onto a beach of the Persian Gulf for no more than twenty seconds. I must have hit the silk at an altitude of less than three hundred feet. I believe I was in shock briefly because I was sitting in a shallow surf with black sand under me, still attached to the chute out in front of me in deeper surf water, rising up and down like a dirty white whale pulling gently at me with strings from its mouth.
Adrenaline, what a beauty, flowed through my shock and the Dex and Percodan. I felt wonderful, the finest high I’ve ever had. I was a child in an illuminated storybook, way off in a foreign brilliant home. The whale pulled on me and Persia was singing to me from across the water. And I was speaking baby talk into my radio, they said. Me down, me unhurt, me giggle, me see the spotter plane so Father will have the copter here soon.
What father? I later wondered.
I am certain it was Jesus Christ. Father, son, and brother, and most apparent of all, ghost, by all evidence. He carried a lamb under one arm and a Roman sword upraised by the other. This is how I saw him in a dream, a very hard-edged dream with red mountains behind him. Six feet tall. He was in a rough beige robe parted at the chest. Defined pectorals. Forearms lean and sinewy. I dreamt the dream that very night asleep below decks in the hospital.
Some decided it was not a Stinger missile, no SAM at all. They believe I shot my own jet out of the air. They did not court-martial me but they busted me down to lieutenant. I didn’t care. I kept smiling for days even when the break in my tailbone and one of my vertebrae began a long explosion of pain.
My squadron liked me and so did the skipper and an admiral. I had built up a store of good will and beat the drug dependency forthwith. The fact was I flew twenty missions and was terrified around the third one on. Maybe it was nerves. I have nerves. They got harder and harder to hide. I was a ninny among true men.