The Fireman (46 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

12

He got up to stir the fire and came back holding the longbow that had sat in the corner all winter long. He stretched out on his cot, holding the bow as if it were a guitar and thwanging its one atonal string.

“Do you think Keith Richards is still alive?” he asked.

“Sure. Nothing can kill him. He’ll outlast us all.”

“Beatles or Stones?” he asked.

She sang the opening lines of “Love Me Do.”

“Is that a vote for the Beatles?”

“Of course I pick the Beatles. It’s a stupid question. It’s like asking what you like better: silk or pubic hair?”

“Ah, that’s disappointing.”

“Of
course
you’d pick the Stones. Anyone who’d walk around pretending he’s a fireman when he isn’t—”

“What does
that
have to do with anything?”

“Men who love the Stones are fixated on cock. I’m sorry, but that’s the only word. And a firehose is a symbolic fantasy cock. It’s pathetic. Male Stones fans are frozen at eighteen months old, just discovering the thrill of yanking on the rubber band of their own phallus. Female Stones fans are even
worse
. Mick Jagger has a weird gross mouth that makes him look like a cod, and this turns them on. They’re sexually aroused by fish-men. They’re deviants.”

“So what are Beatles fans fixated on? The glory of pussy?”

“Exactly. Strawberry Fields is not just a park in London, Mr. Rookwood.” She held out her hand. “Give me that. Every time you twang the cable you’re putting unnecessary torque on the cams.”

“You talk like an auto mechanic when you’re drunk. Did you know that?”

“I’m not drunk. You’re drunk. I’m a former archery instructor. Now give it.”

He gave her the bow. She stood it upright, ran her fingers down the slick of the cable.

“An archery instructor?”

“When I was in high school. For the town rec department.”

“What inspired you? Jennifer Lawrence? Did you have Catsass Everdame fantasies? Jennifer Lawrence was a corker. I hope she didn’t burn to death.”

“No, this was pre–
Hunger Games
. I went on this whole Robin Hood jag when I was nine years old. I started saying
thy
and
thou
and when my parents asked me to do a chore I’d drop to one knee and bow. At the peak of my obsession I wore a Robin Hood costume to school.”

“For Halloween?”

“No. Just because I liked the way it made me feel.”

“Oh God. And your parents let you? I didn’t know you were neglected as a child. That gives me a sad feeling in my”—he paused, to try and figure out where his sad feelings were located—“emotions.”

“My parents are sturdy, practical people who own several ratlike dogs. They were very good to me and I miss them very much.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I don’t think they’re dead. But they are in Florida.”

“The first stage of decline.” He nodded sadly. “I suppose they dress their dogs in sweaters.”

“Sometimes, if it’s cold. But how did you know?”

“They let you cavort about in public wearing a Robin Hood outfit, to what I can only assume was a deluge of cruel taunts from your peers. It’s easy enough to guess how they’ll treat their pets.”

“Oh, no. They didn’t know about my Robin Hood outfit. I had it in my backpack and changed into it in the bathroom at school. But you’re right about the taunts. That was a dark day for Harper Frances Willowes.”

“Frances! Lovely. May I call you Frannie?”

“No. You may call me Harper.” She rested her chin on the top of the bow. “My dad got me my first bow for Christmas, when I was ten. But he took it away before New Year’s.”

“Did you shoot someone?”

“He caught me soaking arrows in lighter fluid. I just really, really wanted to shoot a flaming arrow at something. It didn’t matter what. Still do. I feel like that would complete me: to see a burning arrow go
thwock
into something and set it afire. I suppose it’s how men feel when they imagine sinking balls-deep into the perfect piece of ass. I just want one sexy little
thwock
.”

John choked on another mouthful of banana rum. She had to pound him between the shoulders to get him breathing again.

“I am certain you are drunk,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I’ve limited myself to a very responsible two cups of banana-flavored dog vomit. I’m pregnant.”

He gasped, began to cough once more.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go shoot flaming arrows. Want to? The fresh air will do you good. You need to get out of this hole more often.”

He gave her a look through watering eyes. “What are we going to shoot?”

“The moon.”

“Ah,” he said. “A nice fat target. Do I get to shoot, too?”

“Sure,” she said, and pushed back her chair. “I’ll get the arrows. All you have to do is bring the fire.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

13

The cold was so sharp after the banana-scented heat of the Fireman’s shed, it drove the breath out of her and stung her cheeks like a slap.

She led him around the shed, up through the long tough sea grass, and down the dune to the ocean-facing side of the island, out of sight from shore. When he struggled in the sand, she reached back and took his hand to help him along.

They stopped at one corner of the big cruising sloop, sitting in its steel carriage. From here, Harper could see the name written across the stern in sparkling gold cursive:
the bobbi shaw
.
The Bobbi Shaw
featured prominently in their plans, appearing in steps
F, H,
and
M–Q.

The Fireman looked around, wearing his rubber fireman’s jacket like a cape and clutching himself inside of it. Finally he found what he was hunting for—the moon, an ice-colored button pinned to the black cape of the sky.

“There it is. Kill it so we can go back inside where it’s warm.”

She had the bow in one hand, a clutch of arrows in the other. She dropped all but one of the arrows onto the blue shale, held the last out to him, point first.

“Got a light?”

He closed his fist around the black carbon of the arrow and slid his hand along it. Blue fire followed, as if the arrow were soaked in gasoline and he had touched a match to it.

She nocked the arrow and sighted along the burning shaft. Fire lashed off it in a red banner. She aimed for the moon and let go.

A blazing red comet sliced through the darkness. The arrow climbed two hundred feet, hooked hard to the right, and dropped in a shower of embers.

She closed her hands into fists and jumped up and down, holding the bow over her head, feeling joyously savage.

“Isn’t that beautiful!” he said.

She turned his hand over and looked at his palm. “And it didn’t hurt?”

“Not even a little. It isn’t so hard to understand. Not really. The Dragonscale will burn a host to the ground if it has to, but it won’t destroy itself. I taught it to stop thinking of me as a host. I hacked the code and reprogrammed it to forget there’s any difference between
me
and
it
.”

“I hate when you explain things. By the time you’re done explaining something, I always feel like I know less than I did before you started talking.”

“Look at it this way, Willowes. You know it’s in your brain. You know it
feels,
just not in words. Feed it stress and panic, it’ll read that as a threat, and will burst into flame to start its reproductive cycle and escape. Feed it harmony and contentment and a sense of belonging, and it will read that as security. It doesn’t just sense your pleasure, but
amplifies
it. It provides you with pleasurable feedback, gives you the world’s cheapest high. But in both cases, it’s not
acting,
it’s
re
acting. What Nick taught me—”

“What?” Harper said. “Nick? What
Nick
taught you?”

He blinked at her, flustered, losing his way. “Yes,
well,
Nick—Nick won’t—doesn’t—I mean, obviously not anymore, not after—” He shook his head, waved a dismissive hand in the air. “Why are you bringing Nick into this, anyway? You’re throwing me off.”

I didn’t bring Nick into it,
she was going to say.
You did
. She even got as far as opening her mouth. Then she shut it again and let him go on.

“When you’re all together in church, you
sing
to it. It
likes
that. That’s how you pacify it. But you’re still mucking about with words and it doesn’t care about words. There was some writer who said language is no way to communicate, and the Dragonscale couldn’t agree more. All those words in your head are constant reminders that
you’re a
host
. You have to think about what you want the Dragonscale to do for you
without
words. Imagine what it must be like to be deaf, to think deaf thoughts, with sign as your first and primary language.”

“Like Nick,” Harper murmured.

“Yes, if you like,” he said, waving a hand in the air again, as if brushing off an irritating midge. “Nick can feel the thump of a drumbeat in his bones, and if you teach him the lyrics to a song, he will sing to himself, but in the wordless words of the deaf. If you can sing to the Dragonscale
without
words, then,
then
you’re speaking
its
language. Then it no longer looks at you as
separate,
but as the same. That’s all I did. That’s all I ever do. I sing it one of my favorite songs, but without words. I sing for my coat of flame and my sword of fire, and the Dragonscale produces them.”

“And Nick taught you how? Nick can do it too? Cast flame, like you?”

He gave her a bleary, baffled, miserable look. Then, in a voice so soft she hardly heard, he said, “Quite a bit better than me, actually.”

She nodded. “But not anymore?”

The Fireman shook his head. She absorbed that, decided they could return to it later.

“What song do you sing to it?”

“Ah. You don’t know it.” Waving the hand again and looking away. She thought, though, he was relieved to be off the subject of Nick. “Although I thought when I met you—well, one of the first things you said to me was a line from the song. For a half moment I thought I had encountered someone who loved Dire Straits as much as myself.”

She stepped back from him. Swayed in the frozen air. Shut her eyes, inhaled deeply, and began to sing, in a soft, low-pitched, tuneful hush.

“A lovestruck Romeo

sings the streets a serenade

laying everybody low

with a love song that he made

finds a streetlight

steps out of the shade

says summin’ like:

‘You and me, babe—

how ’bout it?’ ”

She opened her eyes. He stared at her with his mouth hanging open, eyes bright and watery, as if he might start crying.

“You’re
glowing,
” he said. “You’re singing my favorite song in the world and you’re glowing like a diamond on an engagement ring.”

She looked down and noticed it was true. Her throat was a collar of coral light. She was shining through her sweater.

He leaned toward her and kissed her then—a warm, affectionate kiss that tasted of rum and coffee and butter and pecans and cigarettes and Englishman. He drew back, looked at her uncertainly.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I hope not.”

“You taste like a candy bar.”

“A spoonful of sugar, I understand,
does
make the medicine go down.”

“Is it medicine?”

“An important part of your recovery. Take two and call me in the morning.”

“Two?”

She kissed him again, then pulled back and laughed at his expression. “Come on now, John. Your turn to shoot. You’ll be good at it. You’re English. You have the blood of Robin Hood coursing in your veins. Here.”

She gave him the bow. Showed him where to put his hands, kicked at his feet to make him spread his legs.

“You pull the cable to the corner of your mouth, like this,” she said, miming it for him. “Practice without an arrow for a moment.”

He practiced, swaying in the bitter cold, his nostrils red and the rest of his face the color of pale wax.

“How’s that? Do I look like Errol Flynn?”

“You are a dashing motherfucker,” she told him.

She picked an arrow off the rocks, held it in one fist, closed her eyes, and frowned in concentration.

“What are you doing there?”

She didn’t look at him, but felt his gaze upon her and was glad. In that moment she knew she was going to do it. It was like knowing you were going to hit a bull’s-eye before the arrow left the bow.

Harper saw it in her head, the way she would move her hands in sequence to say
you and me, babe, how ’bout it,
without using any words at all. She saw it all and in that moment she knew how easy it was. You didn’t have to do anything to connect with the Dragonscale. In that way it was just like being pregnant. She felt the song in her tendons and nerve endings, felt it flow like blood, without a sound, without words, without even the memory of words. You and me, babe, how ’bout it?

She lit up. Harper opened her eyes to see the cup of her hand spurt a heatless flame—a blue, mystic flame—all around the arrow, and she cried out in shock and dropped it.

The Fireman snatched at her arm and clapped her hand under his turnout jacket to extinguish the blaze. Red freckles appeared high in his cheeks. His eyes strained behind his glasses.

“What are you
doing
?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing? Do you want to die?”

“I—I just wanted to see—”

But he had turned away, his coat flapping, and began to lurch back up the dune.

She caught up to him at the top of the ridge, the highest point of the island. The shed was below, built right into the side of the slope. Moss and sea grass carpeted the roof. She tried to take his shoulder, but he spun around, throwing her hand off him.

He gave her a bewildered, bookish look, eyes straining behind his square glasses. “Is that what this was all about? Get me drunk and make out with me to see if you can
trick
me into teaching you how to burn yourself to death?”

“No. John.
No
. I kissed you because I felt like kissing you.”

“Do you know what happened to the last person who decided she wanted to pull a burning rabbit out of a hat?”

“I know what happened.”

“No, you don’t. You have no idea. She turned to cinders.” As he spoke he was backing unsteadily away from her.

“I know she died. I know it was terrible.”

“Shut up. You don’t know anything except I have something you want and you’ll do whatever you need to get it: booze me up, flounce around, fuck me if necessary.”

“No,”
she said. She felt she was caught in nettles. She couldn’t struggle free and everything she said was another step deeper into the thorny tangle. “John.
Please
.”

“You don’t know
what
happened to her. You don’t know what’s
still
happening to her. You don’t understand a thing about us.” He threw the bow over the side of the roof, which was when she realized he had retreated out onto the top of his shed. He reeled back another step.

“Get away from me. And never do what you just did again.” He held out his hands. Golden light throbbed in his Dragonscale. His palms became shallow dishes, brimming with flame. “Unless you want to burn like this forever.”

“John, stop it, stop moving. Just stay where you are and—”

He wasn’t listening. He took another step back and spread his arms. Wings of brightest fire spread in a cape from his hands, down to his sides. Black smoke gushed from his nostrils.

“Unless you want to be in hell for the rest of your life,” he said. “Like m-m-muh-muh—”

His eyes widened with surprise. He began to whirl his arms around and around for balance, drawing flaming hoops in the air. His right foot slid out from under him and down the roof. He dropped to one knee, lunged, and grabbed a fistful of grass. For one moment of perfect stillness he hung at a crooked angle. The long tough grass turned to threads of copper and burnt away in his hot hand.

“John!” she cried.

He dropped, banged down the tin roof, off the edge and into the night. She heard him hit the dune with a thud, a thump, a gasp, a soft whump.

Silence.

Nothing broken!” he called. “Don’t worry! All right!”

He was quiet again.

“Except maybe my wrist,” he said, in a suddenly disconsolate voice.

Harper closed her eyes and exhaled with relief.

“Ow,” the Fireman said.