Vogelsang stood off in the brush, looking dazed. His eyes were shrunken with pain. I saw him wince and snatch at his side when he lifted his hand in a gesture meant to reassure Sapers.
Phil, Gesh, Dowst and Aorta were peering down from the shattered kitchen window, mouths agape, as stunned and bewildered as tourists witnessing bizarre rites in the heart of a savage and little-known region. I was feeling bewildered, too, as if my life had somehow become confused with a Fellini movie.
“So,” Sapers roared, startling me, “I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to meet my wife?”
And thus the menace had withdrawn, retracting its claws as suddenly as it had shown them: Jones, Savoy, the face in the window. Days passed, weeks. We went about our business like blind men, like drudges, the sky didn’t fall, the earth didn’t tremble and the cells at the county jail remained as recondite as the tunnels beneath the Potala. We licked our wounds, drew a deep collective breath and went on weeding and watering, cooking meals, consuming vodka and hauling manure. I began to feel easier (relatively speaking, of course — think of the plummeting skydiver, his parachute tangled behind him, who sees that he will not after all be impaled on the nasty black pointed spires of the wrought-iron fence but hammered to pulp on the sidewalk instead), yet one problem still nagged at me: Petra. I wanted her, wanted her with an ache that tore at my dreams and soured my morning coffee,’ wanted her as a native of the searing plain wants the distant white-tipped mountains. And yet I was powerless to do anything about it. I couldn’t leave the property to phone her, not after what had happened, and I wouldn’t be free to see her until November. The thought was torture. Would she be there in November? Would she want to see me? I could confess to her then, of course, the plants harvested and sold and the operation wrapped up, but how would she react?
It took me a week to hit on the idea of writing her. Phil lifted the phone book from the local Circle K and I found her address — same as the store — and wrote her a fifteen-page epistle in longhand. The first three pages consisted of an elaborate (but witty and self-justifying) apology for my behavior at the heifer festival, and this was followed by an eight-page dissertation on my background, motives, beliefs and desires, and thoughts on subjects ranging from ceramic sculpture to Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems (from which I quoted liberally). The concluding pages marked a return to the exculpatory mode and hinted at the dark, dangerous, enigmatic and stimulating circumstances in which I now found myself, promised full disclosure in due time and concluded with a desperate plea for patience and understanding. I signed it “Love, Felix,” and gave Dowst’s Sausalito address.
Two weeks passed and there was no answer. I wrote again. Twenty-five pages’ worth, a letter so thick I had to have Phil mail it in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope. If the first missive was poised between pathos and wit, this was a howl of anguish, written out of despair and loneliness and the sting of rejection. It was demanding, insinuating, the sort of thing that convinces the addressee to move to Toledo and neglect to leave a forwarding address. I dissected my dreams, compared myself to Manfred, young Werther and James Dean, writhed on the page like an insect pinned to a mounting board and generally made an ass of myself. I even confessed that I loved her (a mistake under any circumstances), and insisted that I would change my name and emigrate if she didn’t return my feelings. The day Phil mailed the second letter, Dowst showed up with a reply to the first.
“Dear Felix,” she’d written in a bold cursive on the back of a prestamped postal service card, “I have neither the time nor patience to play games or carry on a correspondence with an underground man. If you want to see me, see me. But please, no more tortured letters.” She signed it, “Best, Petra.”
She never wrote again.
Neither did I.
Yes, and then there was the fire.
The night was hushed, moonless and black, the night of desert and outback and the wild places of the world beyond the ken of linemen and meter readers. I sat in darkness, thinking nothing, thinking one more drink, another couple of hands, a cold shower, bed. Phil was in the shed refilling the lantern. He was drunk. I was drunk. We’d been playing pitch, talking in low voices against the oppression of the night and the place, killing our various hurts with alcohol, when the lantern fizzled out. DO NOT REFILL WHEN HOT. Though I couldn’t see it, the kitchen door stood open. I listened to the sounds I’d heard a hundred times, flesh, metal, wood: the groan of the hinges as the storage shed door swung open, the rattle of the gas can, Phil’s murmuring heartfelt curses as he blundered into this object or that and burned his fingers on the spigot at the base of the lantern.
But then — sudden, chilling, anomalous — a new sound intruded on the familiar sequence, a sound like the low sucking whoosh of a stubborn gas jet, and before I could react the night exploded with light, a single coruscating flash that illuminated the doorway as if it were noon. My first thought was that lightning had struck the shed, but instead of the rumble of thunder I heard Phil’s shout and the deadly incendiary clank of the gas can hitting the floor. This is it, I thought, flinging myself from the chair as Phil cried out again and a second can of fluid went up with a sickening rush of air. My feet pounded across the rotten planks of the porch, the shed glowing like a jack-o’-lantern before me, and I understood that this was the nightmare that had brooded over us all along, this was the trial — not police, not helicopters, dogs, poachers or informers, not rats, locusts or bears, but the quick licking flames of the refining fire.
When I reached the shed, I saw the spitting lamp, the overturned fuel cans, cold blue flames spilling across the floor in liquid fingers. And I saw Phil, in shock, his torso flaring like a struck match. He’d staggered back against the wall, frantically swiping at his crackling T-shirt and the corona of flame that clung to his head, the flesh of his right arm coated in burning fluid and hissing like a torch as he swept it through the air. More: I saw the flames at the walls, the burning newspapers, collapsed furniture, garbage, the big ten-gallon cans of gasoline lined up like executioners in the far corner.
Drowning in fire, Phil clutched at me. He was dancing — we were dancing — whirling and shouting, frenetic, Laurel and Hardy dropped in the giant’s frying pan. My nostrils dilated round the chemical stink of incinerated hair, my flesh touched his and I burned. For a single terrible runaway instant I was caught up in his panic, frozen, unable to act — WOULD-BE RESCUER DROWNS IN FOUR FEET OF WATER — until I got hold of myself and shoved him from me. His face heaved, he shouted out my name. But I was already on him again, slapping the crown of his head, tearing at his shirt until it dropped from him in luminous strips, and then driving him through the door and out into the merciful night. Tangled like wrestlers, we pitched over the edge of the porch and I pinned him to the ground, buried him beneath me, rubbing, massaging, beating at the flames until they gave in.
We looked at each other, the moment crystallizing round the pained gaping incomprehension of his face, the feel of the blistered flesh of his arm, the dust cool as balm. Phil’s mouth was working, fishlike, trying to close on a bubble of shock, his pompadour was gone and the wicked hungry glare of the fire glistened in his eyes. There was no time for assessments, repairs or solicitude: the jaws were making another pass. “Quick!” I hissed. “The hose, the hose!” And then I was back in the shed, flinging things at the flames — a box of newspapers, a pillow, a pair of gutted mattresses — anything to give us a second’s purchase. Flames sprang up, I slapped them down. The overturned lamp spat like a torch, I kicked it across the room. I felt nothing — neither the heat on my face nor the burns on my hands and arms — nothing but the imperative of the moment: we had to quench the fire, kill it before it killed us and took the house, the woods and the mountain with it.