But there’s no one in sight.
Now comes the sound of — firecrackers? Coming from the direction of the school.
There is a roaring and crackling in the dogleg of number 5. Rounding the salient of woods and all of a sudden knowing what it is before I see it, I see it: the Bledsoe Spanish-mission house burning from the inside. The fire is a cheerful uproarious blaze going like sixty at every window, twenty windows and twenty roaring hearths, fat pine joists popping sociably and not a soul in sight No fire department, no spectators, nothing but the bustling commerce of flames in the still sunlight.
I watch from the green cave of a shelter. Yonder in the streaked stucco house dwelled the childless Bledsoes for thirty years while golf balls caromed off the walls, broke the windows and rooftiles, ricocheted around the patio.
The house roars and crackles busily in the silence. Flames lick out the iron grills and up the blackened stucco.
Into these very woods came I as a boy while the house was a-building, picked up triangles of new copper flashing, scraps of aluminum, freshly sawn blocks of two-by-fours — man’s excellent geometries wrought from God’s somewhat lumpish handiwork. Here amid the interesting carpenter’s litter, I caressed the glossy copper, smelled the heart pine, thought impure thoughts and defiled myself in the skeletal bathroom above the stuffed stumps of plumbing, a thirteen-year-old’s lonesome leaping love on a still summer afternoon.
My chest is buzzing. Ach, a heart attack for sure! Clutching at my shirt, I shrink into the corner. For sure it is calcium dislodged and rattling like dice in my heart’s pitiful artery. Poor Thomas! Dead at forty-five of a coronary! Not at all unusual either, especially in Knothead circles here in Paradise: many a good Christian and loving father, family man, and churchgoer has kicked off in his thirties. A vice clamps under my sternum and with it comes belated contrition. God, don’t let me die. I haven’t lived, and there’s the summer ahead and music and science and girls — No. No girls! No more lewd thoughts! No more lusting after my neighbors’ wives and daughters! No hankering after strange women! No more humbug! No more great vaulting lewd daytime longings, no whispering into pretty ears, no more assignations in closets, no more friendly bumping of nurses from behind, no more night adventures in bunkers and sand traps, no more inviting Texas girls out into the gloaming: “I am Thomas More. You are lovely and I love you. I have a heart full of love. Could we go out into the gloaming?” No more.
My chest buzzes away.
Clutching at my shirt in a great greasy cold sweat, I encounter it, the buzzing box. Whew! Well. It is not my heart after all but my Anser-Phone calling me, clipped to my shirt pocket and devised just for the purpose of reaching docs out on the golf links.
Whew. Lying back and closing my eyes, I let it buzz. If it wasn’t a heart attack, it’s enough to give you one.
It is Ellen Oglethorpe. Switch off the buzzer and move around to a shady quarter of the green cave to escape the heat of the fire.
Now resting in the corner and listening to Ellen and giving myself another brain massage. I could use an Early Times too.
“What is it, Ellen?”
“Oh, Chief, where have you been? I’ve been out of my mind! You just don’t know. Where’ve you been all night?” Comes the tiny insectile voice, an angry cricket in my pocket.
“What’s the trouble?”
“You’ve got to get down here right away, Chief.”
“Where are you?”
“At the office.”
“It’s the Fourth of July and I have an engagement.”
“Engagement my foot. You mean a date. You’re not fooling me.”
“O.K., I’m not fooling you.”
“I know who you have a date with and where, don’t worry about that.”
“All right, I won’t.”
“Chief—”
“Ellen, listen to me, I want you to call the fire department and send them out to Paradise. The Bledsoe house is on fire.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Eh? I can hardly hear you.” I incline my ear to my bosom.
“They’re not taking calls out there, not the police or anybody. That’s why I was so worried about you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s some sort of disturbance out there. Riffraff from the swamp, I believe.”
“Nonsense. There’s not a soul here.”
“Everybody out there has moved into town. It’s an armed camp here, Chief. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“What happened?”
“It started with the atrocity last night — right where you are. At the Bledsoes’.”
“Atrocity?”
“Mrs. Bledsoe was killed with that barbecue thing. Mr. Bledsoe has disappeared. No doubt he’s dead too. The work of madmen.”
Mrs. Bledsoe. Skewered with P.T.’s kebab skewer.
“Chief, you better get out of there!”
“There’s no one here,” I say absently.
“Oh, and we’ve got a roomful of patients.”
“On the Fourth of July?”
“Your new assistant is treating them.”
“Who? Speak up, Ellen, I can’t hear you.”
“I can’t talk any louder, Chief. I’m hiding in the EEG room. I said Dr. Immelmann has a roomful of patients and some very strange patients, I must say.”
“Dr. Immelmann! What the hell is he doing there?”
“Treating patients with your lapsometer. He said you would understand, that it was part of your partnership agreement. But, Chief, there’s something wrong here.”
“What?”
“They’re fighting. In your waiting room and in the street.”
“Who’s fighting?”
“Mr. Ledbetter and Mr. Tennis got in a fight, and—”
“Let me speak to Art Immelmann.”
“He just left. I can see him going down the street.”
“All right, Ellen, here’s what you do. Are the lapsometers still there?”
“Well, only half of them. And only because I hid them.”
“Where did you hide them?”
“In a crate of Bayonne-rayon training members.”
“Good girl. Now here’s what you do. Take the crate to your car. Lock it in the trunk. Go home. I’ll get back to you later.”
“When?”
“Shortly. I have something to attend to first.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what it is.”
“All right I won’t.”
Ellen begins to scold. I unclip the Anser-Phone and hang it in the rafters among the dirt-daubers. While Ellen buzzes away, I take a small knock of Early Times and administer a plus-four Sodium jolt to Brodmann 11, the zone of the musical-erotic.
Waltzing now to Wine, Women and Song while Ellen Oglethorpe chirrups away in the rafters, a tiny angry Presbyterian cricket.
“Chief,” says the insectile voice. “You’re not living up to the best that’s in you.”
“The best? Isn’t happiness better than misery?”
“Because the best that’s in you is so fine.”
“Thank you.” From the edge of the woods comes a winey smell where the fire’s heat strikes the scuppernongs.
“People like that, Chief, are not worthy of you.”
“People like what?” People pronounced by Ellen in that tone has a feminine gender. Female people.
“You know who I mean.”
“I’m not sure. Who?”
“People like that Miss Schaffner and Miss Rhoades.”
“Are you jealous?’
“Don’t flatter yourself, Doctor.”