An Arsonist's Guide To Writers' Homes In New England Part 5

"You quit your job," Thomas said, barely holding on to his patience. I could almost see it against the back of his bared teeth, struggling mightily to escape.

"That's true," I said.

"I called up Pioneer Packaging Friday to tell them that you'd burned down the Emily d.i.c.kinson House and killed my parents, and did they know they had a murderer and an arsonist working for them, and before I could get it all out, they told me you'd already quit." Here he paused, as if letting me catch up to his swift train of thought, which I appreciated. "What do you think you're doing?" he asked for the third time.

"I was drunk!" I told him, realizing for the first time that one of the things drink could transform was one's b.u.mbling. Sober, one's b.u.mbling was a kissing cousin to failure; but drunk, one's b.u.mbling could be triumphant. "I quit my job because I was drunk!" I told him. "And you were right: they didn't know I was a murderer and an arsonist. But I quit before you could tell them! And I didn't even do it on purpose!"

This deflated Thomas. He sighed and sat down across from me; some of the color left his face. Disappointment took its rightful place in him, evicting strength and optimism. I felt a little sad for Thomas until I remembered why we were having this conversation in my parents' house and not my own, and what he'd told Anne Marie.

"Why did you lie about me having an affair?" I said. "Why did you tell Anne Marie I was having an affair with your wife?"

The question cheered Thomas up some. His eyes grew far away and dreamy and this disturbed me more than anything he'd done or said thus far. "She's kind of beautiful, you know," he said. "I can't figure out why you would ever cheat on her."

"I didn't cheat on her," I said, and nearly reached over the table to shake him out of his fiction and into our truth. He must have sensed this, because he stood up from his chair and backed a few feet away from the table. "I burned down that house and killed your parents," I yelled. "Why didn't you tell her cheat on her," I said, and nearly reached over the table to shake him out of his fiction and into our truth. He must have sensed this, because he stood up from his chair and backed a few feet away from the table. "I burned down that house and killed your parents," I yelled. "Why didn't you tell her that? that?"

"Why do you think?" Thomas asked. I could see that he was trying to be a detective, too that is, if being a detective means making someone answer questions that you should be able to answer yourself but can't. This didn't make me feel any better. Did he really not know why he'd told Anne Marie one thing and not another? Did he not know what he was doing here? Was he an amateur life wrecker after all, and if so, would he do more damage as an amateur than he would if he were an expert? There was no way to ask these questions, of course, and expect an answer, and so instead I asked, "Why did you set fire to the Edward Bellamy House?"

"What?" he said. "Who?" Thomas looked genuinely baffled: his eyes retreated a little deeper into their sockets, leaving little lines in their wake, and his mouth puckered as though bewilderment were something sour. Then curiously, his face relaxed: a little, flickering smile illuminated his lips. Thomas c.o.c.ked his head in the general direction of my dad's room and said, "Is your father home?"

"No," I said. "He's at work." And then, "Wait, do you know my father?"

"So long, Sam," he said, and then turned heel and walked out the front door. I sat there for too long, making sure I fixed the details in my head before I lost them for good. Thomas had mentioned my father. But so what: after all, he knew where to find me, and so he also knew that I had a father, as so many people did and as Thomas did not. But there was that c.o.c.k of the head. Was that coincidental? Was it just a tic? Or did he c.o.c.k his head in the direction of my father's room, knowing that it was in fact my father's room? And if so, how did he know that? that?

I got out of my chair and ran to the front door, trying to catch Thomas before he left my life for who knows how long this time. And I might have caught him, too, if the bond a.n.a.lysts hadn't been there, on my porch, blocking my way.

I CALL THEM THE bond a.n.a.lysts, but of course they had names. There was Morgan, as you know, and there were also two Ryans, one Tigue, and one Geoff, whom everyone called G-off. G-off was the only one whom I could keep straight, because he had dark, curly hair and looked slightly by comparison and for lack of a better word ethnic ethnic. The rest I could never tell apart, and looking at them now, I still couldn't. It wasn't especially cold out, but they were wearing duck boots and khaki pants and ribbed turtleneck sweaters, and each of them other than G-off had his hair combed to the side in a youthful, private-school fas.h.i.+on. They were all s.h.i.+fting uncomfortably from foot to foot, as if they'd have liked nothing better than to have something elevated the b.u.mper of a cla.s.sic car, maybe, or a picket fence, or a day boat's prow railing to prop their legs upon. Except for G-off, they kept flicking their hair out of their faces with a twitch of their necks. Since prison (and until the day before in the Book Warehouse), I hadn't thought about them much, which of course is a talent of mine, and it seemed as if time hadn't thought about them much, either: they looked exactly the same as they had ten years earlier. As for me, my belly was a little softer and bigger than it had been, and so, with my half-barrel chest and in right profile, I probably looked like a misshapen version of the letter B B, and while I had kept most of the hair on my head, I had also added some elsewhere. The point is, the bond a.n.a.lysts had not aged and I had, and this was another thing I'd b.u.mbled.

"h.e.l.lo, Sam," one of them said it might have been Morgan. I say that because he'd always been sort of their leader, and on the porch the other four had fallen into a ragged flying V behind him, which I thought was kind of them, to distinguish Morgan as the important one in that way. Other things should organize themselves in the same way. Life, for instance. "Long time no see."

"I don't want to hear it," I said. With Thomas and his surprise visit, it had taken me a few minutes to locate my anger, but with the bond a.n.a.lysts and their their surprise visit, I'd fallen right into it. I figured that if I kept getting surprise visits, I'd start getting angry beforehand, that the anger would in fact announce the arrival of the surprise visitor and not follow it. "You had no right." surprise visit, I'd fallen right into it. I figured that if I kept getting surprise visits, I'd start getting angry beforehand, that the anger would in fact announce the arrival of the surprise visitor and not follow it. "You had no right."

"What?" one of them said maybe it was Tigue. "What did we do?"

"What did we do?" G-off said, and I remembered that one of their talents was to parrot one another to reinforce a point.

"You took my father's story and pa.s.sed it off as your own," I said, and then pointed accusingly at what I hoped was Morgan. It was: he put his head down for a moment in shame, and while he did I got a good look at his part, which was straight and deep, like a ca.n.a.l cutting through the landma.s.s of his hair.

"OK," he said, raising his head. "I'll admit it: that was wrong of me."

"Very wrong," G-off said.

"But I paid for it," Morgan said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"As you know, I wrote the memoir and stole your father's story," Morgan said. "As you also might know, I was on parole when I wrote the book. Well, my parole officer read the book when it came out."

"Lots of people read it," Tigue said.

"It did quite well," G-off said. "It even went into paperback."

"Not all books do, you know," Tigue said.

"Anyway," Morgan said, "when the parole officer read the book, he thought I'd violated my parole by leaving the state. He wanted to put me back in prison. So I had to tell him that I'd made the whole thing up, that I hadn't even left Ma.s.sachusetts and I'd never done those things or gone to those places and that it wasn't my story to begin with."

"Then word got out," Tigue said.

"The publisher found out and was p.i.s.sed," G-off said. "He demanded the advance back, plus all royalties."

"I had to take out a loan to pay back the money," Morgan said. "I even had to move back in with my parents for a while."

"Hey, just like me," I said, meaning for our common experience to cheer him up. Which, of course, it didn't.

"It was humiliating," Morgan said.

"But I don't understand," I admitted. "I don't understand why you had to steal the story in the first place. Why didn't you go out and do something on your own and then then write a book about it?" I'd been in the Book Warehouse, after all, and knew that it could be done. As far as I could tell from the memoir section, if you were a memoirist, you did something anything only so that you could write a book about it afterward. write a book about it?" I'd been in the Book Warehouse, after all, and knew that it could be done. As far as I could tell from the memoir section, if you were a memoirist, you did something anything only so that you could write a book about it afterward.

"That's why we're here, Sam," Morgan said. "We came here for a reason."

"A specific reason," Tigue said. The two Ryans hadn't spoken yet. In the movies these guys would have been the muscle, except they were too trim and they kept their hands in their pockets instead of menacingly smacking their fists into their palms.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Tell him about Africa," Tigue said.

"Shut up," Morgan said, and I had the definite impression that he would have smacked Tigue upside the head if they'd been a little closer in the V. But Morgan didn't smack Tigue upside the head. He drew himself taller, as if to make a rehea.r.s.ed speech. "In the past," he said, "men like us, men of a certain means and of a certain age, if we'd gotten bored or dissatisfied or restless, if we needed to get our blood pumping, take a big, life-affirming risk and so on, we would have gone to Africa, on safari. We would have hired native guides. We would have hunted lions or gazelles; we would have come back with some animal horns or tusks of some kind. We might even have written a book about it after we'd returned. We can't do that anymore."

"Why not?" I asked.

"They're protected," Morgan said. "Lions, rhinos, okapi you can't touch them anymore."

"The veldt is closed, man," G-off said.

"We've even tried bungee jumping," Tigue said. "We thought it might be risky enough."

"You tie a big rubber band around your legs," Morgan said. "You jump. You hang there and wait until someone cuts you down. That's it."

"That's it," Tigue repeated.

"It's humiliating," G-off said, "hanging there like that."

"Hey, listen," I said. "Do you want to come inside, have a drink or something?" I was starting to get nervous, the six of us standing on the porch the way we were. In Camelot no one would have paid any attention, but my parents' neighborhood was different, and there were always people out in their front yards, mulching their mums and tiger lilies, and listening to National Public Radio on their transistor radios while they mulched, and looking around to make sure everyone was listening to the same station. I didn't want to draw any attention to myself; I didn't even want them to know that the guy who'd burned down the you-know-what had moved back into the neighborhood.

"Forget the drinks," Morgan said. "We want you to tell us how to burn down houses like the one you burned down. And after we do, we can write a book about it."

"An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England," G-off said. "We've already come up with the t.i.tle."

"Why do you even need to be an arsonist to write the book?" I asked. "You could always just pretend to have burned down the houses and write the book anyway."

"Ouch," Morgan said. "I deserved that."

"Come on," Tigue said. "Be a pal."

"That has to be some rush," G-off said. "The fire, the smoke, the heat." G-off looked at his hands as if they might tell him what to say next. "The fire," he said again.

"You always seemed so happy," Morgan said. "Happy in a simple way, like a child, only bigger."

"Your jolly red face," Tigue said.

"Elemental," Morgan said. "Primal. Just like the fire you set. Please, we just need a little instruction."

"A little push," G-off said. "Your expertise and know-how."

"But I told you all about it in prison," I said.

"Yeah, yeah," Morgan said. "But then there's that fire you set yesterday."

"Two days ago," G-off said.

"The Belmont House," Morgan said.

"The Bellamy House," G-off corrected.

"Shut up," Morgan said. And then, to me: "The Bellamy House."

"Guys. . . ," I said.

"Sam, buddy, we're in a rut, a big, scary one," Morgan said. "We're scared. There, I said it."

I believed him. They were in serious need, I could tell, because the two mute Ryans actually parted their lips as if preparing to speak. I even felt sorry for them, which was a switch because in prison I always admired them. Now they seemed pathetic and desperate, and I couldn't be mad at them, not even Morgan. No, I couldn't stay angry with them, but I knew they'd be angry with me once I told them what I was going to tell them.

"I'm sorry, guys," I said, "but it wasn't me who set fire to the Bellamy House."

"Oh, come on," Morgan said. "Who else would do it?"

"That's a good question," I admitted. "But whoever it was, it wasn't me."

"Sam ," Morgan began, but I cut him off.

"I can't help you," I said.

I didn't even listen to what came next, the chorus of threats and pleading and further, more detailed threats I knew it all too well from Thomas Coleman's visit to Camelot, knew exactly what the bond a.n.a.lysts would say and how they would say it, and so I stood there and let the white noise of their recriminations wash over me until the bond a.n.a.lysts exhausted themselves, broke the flying V, walked back down the front steps, and piled into a Saab, the humpbacked kind. "You'll be sorry you didn't help us, Sam," Morgan yelled, and he was right: in just a few days I would be very sorry that I hadn't helped them. As though to emphasize the point, Morgan again yelled, "You'll be sorry," then jammed the car into gear and drove off.

I looked at my watch. It was only eleven in the morning. There was the big, yawning day still in front of me, plenty of time for somebody else to appear out of my past. There seemed to me to be two choices: sit around the house and wait for another unwelcome surprise visitor, or leave.

10

I left on foot. For the first time since I'd moved back to my parents' house, I allowed myself to walk the streets of Amherst, to see and be seen, to be recognized and shunned, or worse. I kept thinking of that one Birkenstock, the right one, that someone had thrown through my parents' window those many years earlier. It was in my head that the thrower had kept the left one in his a.r.s.enal all that time, waiting for my return. At every corner I flinched, thinking I would be recognized by some large-footed hippie and brained with that left sandal.

But I wasn't. It was strange. Block after block, I wasn't recognized, and so I began to actively court recognition. I'd stop at houses I knew here, the house where my childhood friend Rob Burnip lived; there, the Shumachers', where my parents would play cribbage every Thursday and linger on the sidewalk, waiting for someone to emerge from the house and say, Hey, it's Sam Pulsifer. I haven't seen you since ... Hey, it's Sam Pulsifer. I haven't seen you since ... And so on. And people did come out of the houses, but they didn't recognize me and I didn't recognize them. They were simply younger versions of the people who used to live there: a.s.sistant professors, or young dot-com near-millionaires with new families who'd moved out from Boston or New York to Amherst because of the good schools and clean air and overabundance of coffee shops, or enviro trust-funders who might still have lived in Berkeley, as their parents did, if the insurance on their Volvos hadn't been so ruinously expensive out there. The town was still old each house and each church probably knew someone who knew Cotton Mather but the people who lived in it were not. And so on. And people did come out of the houses, but they didn't recognize me and I didn't recognize them. They were simply younger versions of the people who used to live there: a.s.sistant professors, or young dot-com near-millionaires with new families who'd moved out from Boston or New York to Amherst because of the good schools and clean air and overabundance of coffee shops, or enviro trust-funders who might still have lived in Berkeley, as their parents did, if the insurance on their Volvos hadn't been so ruinously expensive out there. The town was still old each house and each church probably knew someone who knew Cotton Mather but the people who lived in it were not.

Even the farmers had changed. This was Sunday, the day the farmers traditionally sold their wares. I could see the banner AMHERST FARMERS' MARKET-stretched over the parking lot next to the town green, and memory pulled me toward it, the way only memory can. When I was a child, the Sunday farmers' market was run by the farmers after whom it was named, dour men who wore overalls and had chapped hands and faces and who sold their goods out of the backs of their pickup trucks. They sold b.u.t.ter-and-sugar corn and tomatoes mostly, but also some green beans and garlic and cuc.u.mbers and summer squash in the summer, and hard, crisp McIntosh apples in the fall and even broadleaf tobacco, big, flat boxes full of the stuff, which seemed right because the farmers smoked while they sold their goods, smoked constantly while they put the produce in paper sacks and miscounted my parents' change. Sometimes, when my parents weren't looking, the farmers gave me cubes of sugar probably meant for their nags, and I ate them and had some unhappy dealings with my dentist later on because of it. But even so, those were good days. Those were very, very good days, and by the time I actually reached the market I was feeling nostalgic for that world and time and would have hugged the first farmer I saw. So maybe it was a good thing there weren't any there.

The farmers, apparently, were another part of the past that was gone. There wasn't a pickup truck or a cigarette to be seen. The produce was organic signs told me so and ugly from not having been grown with the fertilizers and insecticides that make fruits and vegetables look and taste so good. It made me sad to see the apples and green beans sitting there, gnarled and unhappy, sold out of the hatchback trunks of Volkswagens, and it also made me sad to see the men and women who sold them, the obviously rich but filthy men and women who could have been the bond a.n.a.lysts' kissing cousins, were their union suits and beards and fleece and flowing skirts and ratty but expensive sandals not largely in the way. My breath left me for a while when I realized how often and fast the world changes, something not even a career in a technologically advanced field like packaging science can prepare you for. It didn't take a genius to see that someday I, too, would be like the farmers, cast aside and obsolete and so completely lost without a world that needed me.

But here, too, no one recognized me; no one seemed to know who I was. As I left the farmers' market, I even walked up to one woman I thought I recognized from high school, a fit woman in expensive running shoes, walking her three children in their complicated, rickshaw-style stroller with its many mesh pockets and cup holders, and I said, "h.e.l.lo, I'm Sam Pulsifer."

"That's fantastic," she said, and then veered around me on her fast-walking way through the farmers' market and around the town green.

"That is is fantastic," I shouted after her. She didn't recognize me; fantastic," I shouted after her. She didn't recognize me; no one recognized me! no one recognized me! It was like Nero coming back to Rome years later and the few singed citizens who remained not knowing who he was. It was like Nero coming back to Rome years later and the few singed citizens who remained not knowing who he was.

There was one more thing to do to test my anonymity, one more bit of final accounting. I walked a couple of blocks to the east, to where the Emily d.i.c.kinson House used to be. They'd cleared away the charred wreckage, of course, the yellow emergency tape, too, but they hadn't built a new house to take the place of the old one. Instead they had planted trees, which were now decent-size eighteen-year-old birches and white pines and maples, and in the midst of this arbor there was a bronze plaque on a four-foot-high metal pole, probably explaining what had once been there and why it wasn't there anymore. I didn't read what was on the plaque, and if you didn't, you probably would have thought that there was nothing there before those trees except for other, older trees. You wouldn't have known about Emily d.i.c.kinson or her house, or about my accidentally burning it down and killing those poor Colemans.

And if you saw me standing there, chances are you wouldn't have recognized me as the boy who, some twenty years earlier, et cetera, even though, as mentioned, I'd once achieved a good deal of local celebrity. Was this so strange? After all, I no longer looked like the boy who had done what he had done: my face was redder even than it had been then, with more wrinkles and some flab and the beginning of jowls; my hair was both higher and curlier on my head and retreating backward; plus, I'd just started growing a beard, which promised one day soon to truly cover large parts of my face. I looked nothing like a boy anymore: I looked like someone else a grown-a.s.s man, maybe, who had a family he loved and had hurt, and who'd been exiled because of it and quit his job and moved back in with his parents and was now ready no, determined determined to make amends. Finally I really was a grown-a.s.s man, and it was about time. I had waited so long to become one. to make amends. Finally I really was a grown-a.s.s man, and it was about time. I had waited so long to become one.

And what does one do when one finally becomes a grown-a.s.s man? Why, one goes back to the people he's loved and lost and tells them, as the poet says, the whole truth and nothing but and then refuses to go anywhere until he is forgiven for lying in the first place. It was time. Hopefully it wasn't past time. I turned away from the Emily d.i.c.kinson House and began to walk back to my van, parked outside my parents' place. I was going back to Camelot, and in doing so, I had the idea that I was walking away from the past and heading toward the future and that I'd better hurry up and get there before I like those poor farmers and their pesticided produce was no longer needed and, if remembered at all, was remembered only as something that was bad for you.

Except then, finally, I was remembered; I was recognized and I learned some useful information when I was. I'd almost made it back through the farmers' market when I ran into Sandy Richards, a tenth-grade biology teacher at Pioneer Regional High School, which was where my mother taught eleventh-grade English. She walked right toward me, and I couldn't avoid her. I also couldn't avoid noticing Sandy had aged the way my mother had not: her face was a map of wrinkles and blotches; she had begun the once-a-week home-permanent routine in order to obscure her thinning hair; and most d.a.m.ning, she was wearing the sort of sweat clothes people wear, not when they exercise, but when they can't feel comfortable in anything else.

"Sam?" she said. "Sam Pulsifer?"

"That's me, Mrs. Richards," I admitted.

"I almost didn't recognize you," she said.

"Almost," I said.

"How have you been?"

"I've been OK," I told her. After that, there was a huge, oppressive silence surrounding us, a silence made up of all the past we couldn't speak of and all the present and future made unspeakable by the past. It was awkward. And in order to break that awkward silence, Sandy Richards said something that ended up being an important fact I learned that day.

"We've missed your mother," she said.

"You have?"

"I wish she was still at school," Sandy said. "We miss her" and here her background in biology betrayed her and she searched long and hard for just the right word to describe what about my mother she missed "spirit," she finally said.