The Arsonist (26 page)

After a couple more dances, they fetched their beers and went to stand in one of the open doorways to cool off. There were several others clustered there in groups, out of the noise, talking. Someone asked Bud about the
Boston Globe
—there was a rumor that one of their reporters was coming to town. They had been talking for only a few minutes when Loren appeared behind Bud, smiling in what Frankie thought of as a hungry way.

“Bud, Frankie,” he said, by way of greeting. And then, with barely a return greeting from either of them, he launched into his news. “Looks like we got us a suspect or two, thanks to you.”

“Oh,
no
,” Frankie said.

“Is this on the record?” Bud asked.

“Now, I don’t know about
that
.”

“Yes or no?” Bud asked. She was struck by his voice. It was still friendly, but it had toughened, somehow.
Professional Bud
.

“You could say some leads have opened up. More’n that, you’ll have to talk to the state troopers. I just wanted to thank Frankie here for coming forward.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “I guess.”

“Is it just a matter of the taillights?” Bud asked.

Loren turned to him, sly again, that killer half smile at work. “We got a bit more. We got a bit more. We’re working on it.”

“What does that mean, ‘working on it’?”

“I’m not at liberty to say more than that. Just, we’re talking to people of interest.”

“On the basis of the taillights, or additional information?”

“Oh, we got more than the taillights, at this point in time.” He nodded and nodded.

“But you can’t say what.”

“I wouldn’t like to, nope.”

“You’re going to make me talk to the state police.”

“You got that right.” His face was smug. Delighted, really. He nodded to her and then walked away.

She had some more beer. “This is just what I was afraid of,” she said. She shook her head.

“What? You didn’t think it would actually help when you talked to Loren?”

“Do you think it really
is
? Helping?”

“It is hard to tell, with Loren.” He smiled. “He’s certainly a guy who likes his job.”

“Doesn’t it all sound … bogus, though? A little bogus?”

“
He
sounds bogus. But he always does. It’s likely there’s something behind it, but you just can’t ever tell with him.”

“So
are
you going to talk to the state police?”

“I am. Yes. There’s a trooper who lives in Winslow who’s been working on the fires, too. The only state trooper I really know. He’s been willing to talk and talk. He’s the anonymous source in this week’s paper.”

“All I want to know is that they’re not harassing everyone with slanted taillights just because of what I said.”

“Well, that is
certainly
the most important aspect of all of this, and I’ll try to ascertain that for you.”

“I’d be grateful.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

She smiled at him, trying to think of a quick response, when suddenly, inside, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” came on. “Ah, they’re getting closer to my era,” Bud said. They’d both finished their beers. “Dance?”

They went back in. They danced, and as they danced, Frankie was remembering dancing in Africa. The beer, the heat in the barn, the out-of-date music, all these reminded her of so many nights at various medical stations or field hospitals or feeding centers. The staff, the doctors, the supervisors, all done for the day, all a little drunk, sweaty, a mass moving in the lantern light—laughing, eager not just for the dancing, but for what came next for some. Tonight, with whom? That open, random, sexual charge, the eyes meeting, searching out someone else, meeting again.

And now, with Bud, she felt that same sexual heaviness in her abdomen, between her legs. Did she want this, again, when she’d be leaving
soon? Shouldn’t she be more careful here, where her parents lived? Shouldn’t she be more careful of Bud?

God, shouldn’t she be more
inventive
?

And yet she was so attracted to him.

It was about eleven when they left the dance. Most of the people still out on the dance floor were teenagers, it seemed. There were plenty of older people staying on, too, but they were mostly standing around the tables, or in the doorways, holding glasses of beer or wine, talking.

People called to Bud, not to her, and he turned to wave, to call back. His hand rested on her back again as they walked, and she was aware of its light finger touch, then the warm flat of his palm moving down to her waist. It felt like a claim of sorts, and she was pleased, almost in spite of herself.

They walked in silence to his car. The night had gotten cool, and Frankie shuddered and hugged herself. Her damp hair was clammy on her neck.

“Cold?” Bud asked. He was opening the door for her.

“I am, a little. I should have remembered to bring a jacket. I always forget how cold it can get at night, even in summer.” She slid inside.

“Reach around back and see what you find. I think I’ve got a couple of sweaters back there.”

Frankie turned and got up on her knees. The backseat was a mess. There were stacks of papers, shoes, wrappers, several unidentifiable shapeless garments. She felt around. Yes! A sweater. She sat back with it, turning it to get ready to pull it on. Bud got in on his side. “But what about you?” she asked him, the sweater still in her lap. “Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m not, honestly. Go ahead.”

She pulled the sweater over her head and wiggled into it. It was big, and it had Bud’s pleasant smell. The sleeves were so long they covered her hands entirely.

He started the car and it made its preposterous noise as they drove away. “In a couple of minutes, the engine should be warm enough to turn the heat on.”

“I’m okay now.”

They drove down to the town, talking about whom they’d seen, what
they’d heard. They’d just started back uphill in the direction of Liz’s and her parents’ houses when he said, “Oh my God!” He swerved suddenly, and they were on the shoulder, stopping, tilted almost into the ditch.

“What! What is it?”
A fire
, she was thinking, looking around for it on her side.

“Come on, come on,” he said quickly. He got out. She opened her door and he was there, holding his hand out to her.

“What?”

“Come.”

She took his hand and stood up. He put his arm around her, turning her around to face north across the Louds’ field, and she saw it. The night sky was shimmering slowly, green changing to pink, long shining passages of light, like immense, slowly moving colored flames.

“The northern lights!” she whispered.

“Aurora borealis,” he said. “I’ve never seen them.”

“I did. Once. Here. As a child.” Alfie had waked them, and they all went out and sat in the meadow. Now the long pale flames shifted slowly, mysteriously to blue. “Oh!” she cried.

With his arm around her, they walked forward, into the field. She stumbled over the uneven ground, almost dizzy, and his arm pulled her closer against him.

“Let’s sit,” he said. They did, awkwardly. After a minute or so, almost as one, they lay down on their backs. Bud’s arm was under her neck and head, and she turned slightly into him.

They watched. The sky to the north kept shifting, kept changing color, sometimes throbbing close to the horizon, sometimes radiating so far across the heavens that the colors fingered almost overhead.

In between and around the light show, they talked, their voices made whispery by what seemed so vast above them. About the lights, about what caused them—Bud knew, and he explained them to her. About the last fire, at the Cotts’ house. For the first time, Bud hadn’t responded to the page. “I feel like I’ve seen the fire. And I wanted to sleep, more than anything.”

After a silence, she said, “Did you know you had a reputation in this town?”

“I did not. A reputation for what?”

“My mother told me you were—and I believe I am quoting directly—‘a bit of a womanizer.’ ”

There was silence for a moment. “Just a
bit
?”

“This is what they say, apparently.”

“And it’s not going to help, showing up with you tonight. Yet another woman.”

“So you plead guilty?”

“I plead guilty to living in a small town, mostly. And being an unmarried, and therefore pretty visible, male.”

“It would work that way, wouldn’t it?”

“You wait.”

“I probably won’t.”

“Won’t wait?”

“Yes.”

“Meaning, won’t wait around to see?”

It felt as though they’d come around to this point in their conversations before, that she’d told him this before—that she didn’t think she was staying. She said that to him. There was a long silence.

“I suppose it’s something I’d like to know for sure, one way or another, before I … what? Decide to put my womanizer’s moves on you.”

“A true womanizer would need no such assurances.”

“There you have it.”

“Have what?”

“Proof that I am not a true womanizer.” His body shifted next to hers. “Should you need it.”

“Though you got me horizontal pretty easily.”

“But arranging the aurora borealis—that took a long time.”

“Thank you, then. It’s really spectacular.”

They lay still for a while. Occasionally one of them raised a pointing hand to be sure the other saw some changing aspect of it—the flickering motion of one licking light, the abrupt change in color of another, green to pink, pink to blue.

He leaned over her and kissed her. Her whole body seemed to soften inside, and she moved her face, her mouth, against his. He made a noise,
and she pulled back, just slightly. Enough so that, after a moment, he did, too. She felt torn, wanting him, not wanting to start another unfinishable thing.

They lay silent for a while.

“Why did you leave Africa, anyway?” he whispered.

“I told you. I don’t know where to be. Where I want to be.”

“Was there a guy?”

Frankie smiled in the dark. “I must be transparent. My mother asked me that, too.”

“And what did you tell your mother?”

“There was, yes. But he mattered less than, I guess, the nature of our relationship.”

“Which was?”

“Temporary. Impermanent. All the people I met—I guess I mean men, but women, too, actually—were impermanent. Fugitives. From divorces or boring careers or too much sorrow. Or themselves, maybe. I had one affair after another with people essentially in transit. And I was in transit.”

He didn’t say anything.

After a minute, she said, “And my work life was the same. You fix one thing over here, and then there’s another one over there, and while you’re in the second place, bad stuff happens and the first place falls apart again.” Bud shifted next to her, rose up on his elbow. She could barely see his face in the dark, but she felt his breath, his presence, warm over her. “Sometimes I felt … complicit in that. And sometimes we were. We
were
complicit. If you flood a place with free food, for instance, farmers don’t bother to plant. What would be the point? So you perpetuate hunger, in a way, by trying to alleviate it. And sometimes you end up feeding fighters. Prolonging conflict. Or they prolong the conflict because they see it as a means of access.”

“Access to?”

“Aid: Food. Money. Medicine. Sometimes, and I only slowly understood this, they used hunger, they used starvation, as a way to
get
aid, to position themselves. Famine as a weapon.” She took an audible breath, then shook her head. “But that’s only part of it.

“Oh!” she said, and pointed. He turned. A kind of low, warm incandescence spread out across the horizon, as if some new, brilliant, midnight sun were about to rise.

When it shifted, she spoke again. “Philip, the man I was involved with, used to say that it was better to know your role, to know your place. You get in, you get out. He didn’t pretend he was changing things. I think it made it easier for him in some ways.”

What Philip had said to her was
Whatever I’ve learned from doing this work—and I’m not sure what I’ve learned—I don’t delude myself. Exactly the opposite. It’s instruction in how fucking useless I am, in any larger sense. As you are also, my darling
.

Now Bud said, “So did that make it easier for him than it was for you? That … that attitude? What was his name?”

“Philip.” She said, “In some way, yes, I think it did. In the short run, I know what kept me there. The people. The children, especially. Seeing them get better. It was like a transformation. In the mothers, too. Saving lives, after all.

“But in the long run, less and less did. And I suppose I’d begun to notice the long run. He helped me with that. Both his … philosophy, I suppose you could call it, and then, actually, the very nature of our relationship. Because it seemed like more of the same.”

“A metaphor for your dilemma.”

“You might say so. I felt I was temporizing, as I’ve told you. With my life.”

“Yes,” he said.

Frankie was ashamed, suddenly. She felt she’d talked too much. She’d complained, when she had no right to.

After a long silence, she said, “And you?”

“And me what?”

“And you. Your history. Work. Women. Are
you
temporizing?”

He seemed to be pondering it. Finally he said, “No. I don’t feel I am. I have a kind of stake in things, I guess you’d say. Literally, having bought the paper. Actually, I think that was my answer to that notion.”

“The notion of temporizing.”

“Yes. Coming here. Making it my home. Writing about it, so making
it my work, too.” Bud lay down, flat on his back again. “You know Pete, the guy who owned the paper before me?”

“Mmm.” She was glad he was talking, glad to be hearing about him.

“He said an interesting thing to me. That he couldn’t have stayed here without the paper. That it gave him a way to be here, a way to be at home here—without, maybe, buying into everything involved. So, maybe like your friend …”

“Philip?”

“Yeah. Old Philip. A way to be in and out at the same time.”