He saw her shoulders tilt, her extended leafy arm, then saw the man on the camper’s roof reach up with his binoculars. Then he heard a huffing below the window and lowered the glasses and when he looked down he saw the shadow of the other man, running away across the yard and through the plot of staked tomato plants, vines and dark dirt flying, and then he lifted the glasses and smelled something and looked to the tree again. Her own glasses were lifted now, “and she might have been looking directly at me, but I couldn’t tell, and in moments there was a cloud of smoke in the dawn between us, obscuring her as she climbed down through the limbs and into the man’s extended arms, and I lowered the glasses again and leaned out the window and saw flames crawling up the clapboards toward me, and when I turned back into the hazy room my legs were in a foot of smoke and I stumbled to the hall and saw it seeping through the door frame at the barricade, flames eating at the panels, and as I watched, the easy chair I’d pushed against the knob came suddenly alive like a bloody throne in flames, and I turned and opened the bathroom door across the hall and stepped inside and closed it behind me, then crossed among cardboard boxes and broken screens to the old claw-foot tub and turned the handles, but there was nothing.
“I got down on my hands and knees on the hot tile, my shoulder striking the metal of the ruined vacuum cleaner beside the toilet, then reached behind and got the knobs and turned them and heard the pipes groan and cough and air hiss from the spigots, and then the spurts came and finally the rush of rusty water, and I struggled to my feet again, and when I turned I saw flames sawing through the door, and I reached down to the vacuum cleaner and detached the hose, then lifted the canister and staggered in smoke to the small window and rammed it against the pane, and in the shatter of glass I felt the damp morning air flood in, then quickly heat to a boiling as it fed the flames, and I could feel the fire licking at my back now and could smell the fabric burning there and the hair at my nape, and when I turned again the door was a sheet of flame, and I reached into the tub and gathered the sodden rags and old clothing in my arms and threw them at the door and heard them hiss and watched as the flames devoured them, and I could feel my shoulders pulling back as my shirt burned and the skin beneath it puckered, and I could smell it roasting through a bright new pain.
“I had the hose and the tub of roiling water, and that was all I had, and I believe I thought of the wherewithal in a child’s story as I stumbled to the window and pushed the hose through and wedged it against a spike of broken glass, but I was sucking smoke and the image of a child breathing through a reed in a pond quickly left me as I saw the bracelet of fire at my sleeve, then turned away from the window and stepped through fallen plaster toward the tub, then climbed into the warming water, the spigots spraying and the wake rising and spilling to the floor as I sunk to my shoulders, hearing the hissing of my back and hair, extinguished as I went completely under, then came up again. I had the hose in my hand, and for a moment I sat looking into the smoke. All the walls of the room were now aflame, and I could feel my brows curling in the heat and could smell the singeing. Then I took the metal flange at the hose end in my mouth and sunk down under that turgid surface. Meteors of flaming lath and tumbling red nails had begun to rain down by then, and though I could see them only vaguely through the whirling water, I could feel the heat in their small craters bubbling against my face.
“I remember reaching back into the heat to turn the hot water spigot and that it made no difference. I remember my legs drifting to the surface, then seeing my pants come alive in flame along my shins. I remember the shadow of a falling timber and then its splash and another body turning and boiling in the tub beside me and bumping against my hip. I think I remember the tub shaking oddly, then settling, then the foot tipping and a waterfall and my head rising up into flame, and I think it might have hissed as the other end of the tub fell down and I went back under again.
“I remember flames rising into smoke in the morning sky and the realization that I was seeing the sky, and I remember my arm jerked from the water, the hose dragging me up into smoke and fire as the tub fell away below me. Then I was hanging there, turning on a spit, and when I released the hose I was falling through the fire. And I remember the feeling of landing in the water and the splash rising into steam in the air around me as after a fall into the sea from a crumbling precipice. And the sea itself was falling then, the tub drifting under a light-show canopy of joists and fiery doorways, tilted floors, and flaming furniture tumbling by, and it was rocked by timbers bouncing off its sides and was falling slowly, as on some magic carpet. I looked over the lip and could see the floor coming up toward me, and I think I tried to turn the tub, maneuver it with my hands somehow. Then I heard a scraping under my body, and felt the tub settle into the ruins with no more than a shudder.
“I looked above, into the sky through smoke and dying flames and a matrix of tilted and charred timbers. Then I saw the high and red glowing arches of the copper water pipes. They were rising from the spigots behind my head to the second story, then looping down again, until they met the floor and went through it to the basement, and I knew the fire had bent them, its heat that of a torch, as the wall containing them had burned away, and had let the tub fall down gracefully from above and come to its final resting place in the steaming rubble of what had once been my living room. The water was flooding from the spigots still, and I could hear the hum of the pump still chugging in the basement.
“I climbed out of the tub, then reached back in and turned the handles. I could feel my wet shirt pulling at my arms, the fabric melted into the burned skin of my back, and I stepped in my sodden clothing through the ruin to the place of the absent doorway, then climbed down into the dirt where the porch had been and moved slowly across the gravel to the grassy verge beyond.
“I turned back then and the house was gone, no longer obscuring sight of the rise behind it, and I saw the oak tree shimmering above the ruins in the last thin clouds of rising smoke. And before I sat down on the ground, then lay down, I think I heard the sound of sirens in the distance, though it could have been my own voice, searching for this place of dead ambition that has been within me since.”
Kelly
Arthur has been moving the valuables out, making a show of it for anyone who might be watching. He’s borrowed a pickup truck and he loads it with furniture and boxes, and last evening we sat in the kitchen and drank tea once he was finished, and he looked over his cup and watched me and glanced at the shotgun resting on the counter near the stove. I’ve settled weapons near windows at the three exposed sides of the house, those hunting rifles my father cared for, and Arthur knew it was no use to argue, even though they seem ludicrous and even comic there, and simply took a marble out of his pocket and placed it on the floor at his feet, and we both watched as it rolled quickly across the linoleum and clicked against the baseboard below the sink. He looked up at me then, quite seriously, then he was wistfully smiling, returning my own smile and shaking his head slowly, because he knows I cannot leave the house, though wind blows up from the cellar to shake the candle flames and carpets rise in ghostly ripples on the bedroom floor.