Chapter 4
Grady
The new fog manifold is overkill, and I build it anyway, because the alternative is thinking.
Four zones, individually valved, timed off a controller I salvaged from an irrigation system.
Nobody needs this. The dragon needs one good fog bed and a light rig.
But Monday night I stood at the fence a long while looking at her porch — at the drape rail she remounted, into the corner post, with the right lag bolt, like she does listen, she just files it under her own ideas — and I caught myself wondering what her table lift ran on, whether she'd sourced a linear actuator or built a cam, and that's a problem.
So. Manifold.
"You're going to fog your own house off the map," Ravi says Tuesday, when he stops by to borrow my post-hole digger and stays two hours, in the tradition of his people. He walks the zone lines, whistles. "What's zone four even for?"
"Coverage."
"Coverage." He looks at the layout, then at the fence, then at me, and I watch him do the math I've been not doing on purpose. Zone four throws along the north property line. Her line. "Huh," he says, with his whole face.
"Density reads different against her lights now. Her build changes my backdrop."
"Sure. Backdrop." He hands me the digger like a man declining to press charges. "You know what's funny? Nine years I've known you, and the most words I've ever heard you say in a row have been about fog placement."
"That's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
He leaves. I run the lines, and while I trench the last one I catch the sounds from over the fence, the way you catch a radio through a wall.
Her jigsaw, going in short confident bursts.
A power chord of hammering. Her voice, narrating something to somebody — the cat, the wig stand, the porch itself, no way to know.
At one point she laughs at her own joke, alone, over there, and the jigsaw starts up again.
Six years, that house was quiet in the evenings. I hadn't noticed until it stopped. And Wednesday at dusk, because the forecast says still air and I believe forecasts like a rookie, I open all four zones for a full-system test.
Zones one through three perform beautifully.
Zone four performs a war crime.
The wind shifts out of the north — flurries have a way of lying and so does every weather app built by man — and my entire fog budget for the evening rolls off the property line in one slow, biblical bank, crosses her yard, climbs her porch steps like it's been invited, and pours itself through the window screen she's had propped open all week to vent paint fumes.
For one second it's almost beautiful. Her séance parlor, filling with real fog, drapes going ghostly, the wig-stand medium looming up out of the murk like the exact thing she's been trying to fake.
Then her smoke alarm goes off.
Then a second one, deeper in the house, joins in harmony.
Then twenty-two pounds of black cat comes out through the propped screen like a mortar round, crosses the porch rail, hits the lawn already at speed, and goes up the big maple on the property line so fast it looks like the tree absorbed him.
The porch door bangs. She comes out into the fog in the paint shirt, hair tied up in a bandana, yelling over the alarms, "Is the house on fire or is this you?"
"It's me."
"Great. Wonderful." She's scanning, head on a swivel — checking her build first, the professional — and then she goes still. "Where's the cat."
I point up.
Beetlejuice has stopped at the first big fork, twenty feet, and is gripping the bark in the drifting fog with the posture of a cat who has made a large decision quickly and is now living inside its consequences.
He looks down at us. He makes a sound I have never heard a cat make. It's not a meow. It's testimony.
"Okay, buddy." Her voice drops instantly into the register you use for kids at bad accidents. "Okay. You're fine. You're so embarrassing. I love you." She toes off her shoes, actually toes off her shoes, and grabs the low limb, and that's my cue.
"No."
"He's my cat."
"It's my fog." I'm already moving. "And in about four minutes it'll be full dark.
Two people in that tree in the dark is a run I've been on before, and it ends with a ladder truck and everyone on the group chat.
" I look at the fork, the branch loading, the approach.
Solid maple, good structure. "I've got him. "
"He doesn't like men."
"Nobody up a tree likes anybody. It's not personal."
I climb. It's easy climbing, honest limbs the whole way, and the fog makes it strange and quiet up there, streetlight coming through in bars.
Beetlejuice watches me arrive at his fork with huge black-rimmed eyes, and I do what you do — come up beside, not underneath, give him my shoulder line, talk low.
"Hey. Rough night. Fog's mine. My fault.
" He puts his ears back. Reconsiders. Smells my sleeve like a customs official.
Then he steps onto my shoulders like I'm municipal infrastructure, all twenty-two pounds, and settles across the back of my neck.
Below, on the lawn, in the fog, she's laughing.
Not polite laughing. Doubled over, hands on knees, wheezing, and the alarms are still going in stereo behind her and the medium is looming in the drape-glow and the whole scene is deranged, and her laugh comes up through it like the one thing that isn't. I come down the last limbs with a cat wearing me like a stole, and she straightens, breathless, cheeks wet from laughing or fog, and says, "The scarf really works on you. Very Parisian."
"He's heavier than he looks."
"He's exactly as heavy as he looks." She lifts him off my neck, and it happens — her forearms across my shoulder, cat transferring between us, her face two inches from mine in the drift, both of us fog-damp and stupid, and everything goes exactly as quiet as it shouldn't.
I know this feeling from the job. The pocket of still air inside a burning building. It's not safety. It's the opposite. It's where you're standing when the something happens.
Her smile goes uncertain at the edges. Not away — uncertain, like a door left off the latch.
The second smoke alarm chooses that exact moment to die of exhaustion with one long falling shriek, like a bagpiper going over a cliff, and the moment breaks. She steps back with the cat. I step back with nothing.
"Your fog is trespassing," she says, chin up, walls audibly re-stacking.
"Send it back over when you're done with it."
"I'm keeping it as damages." She marches inside, cat over her shoulder, and Beetlejuice watches me the whole way in, and I swear to God the animal looks smug.
Thursday I walk into the station for shift and the bay has been redecorated.
There's a stuffed cat zip-tied to the ladder truck.
Black. Someone has fashioned it a tiny scarf.
On the whiteboard where the duty roster goes, somebody with real artistic range has drawn a maple tree, a stick figure with my haircut, and a speech bubble that says IT'S NOT PERSONAL.
The probie can't even look at me. He's vibrating.
"Okay," I say.
"Engine Two responded at eighteen forty-two," Ravi announces from the kitchen doorway, reading off his phone like a citation at a banquet, "to reports of heavy smoke on Foxglove Lane.
Upon arrival, crews discovered no fire, but did locate one off-duty member of this department at elevation, wearing what the caller described as a live fur garment. "
"The caller did not say that."
"Denise said that. Denise photographs everything, brother.
You're the group chat's whole week." He turns his phone around.
There I am, halfway down the maple in the fog, lit by streetlight, Beetlejuice draped across my neck like a czar's collar, and — I take the phone and look closer, because I don't remember this part — I'm grinning.
Not the polite one. The real one, the one that shows up about four times a year.
Below the photo, ninety-one messages. I hand the phone back.
"You want to talk about it?" Ravi asks, in the voice that means he's already made up his mind about what it is.
"There's nothing to talk about."
"Man goes up a tree for a cat that hates men, comes down smiling like it's Christmas, nothing to talk about. Sure." He pockets the phone, and then, because Ravi knows where every load-bearing wall in me is located, he stops kidding. "You did the math yet? On what happens if she wins?"
"She's not going to win. Have you seen the dragon?"
"I've seen the dragon. I've also seen you check her porch light every night like it's a gauge.
" He picks up the stuffed cat, straightens its little scarf, sets it on my locker.
"All I'm saying is, the town cut that budget line once already.
The town can vote on it like grown-ups if it comes to that.
It was never supposed to be your spine holding it up forever, no matter what the letter says. "
"It says what it says."
"It says keep it alive, Grady. It doesn't say keep it alive alone." He heads for the engine. "Check the manifold on Three. And take your cat. He watches me when I open my locker and I don't like it."
Thursday evening, the doorbell rings, and it's the government.
Dottie Pruitt stands on my porch flanked by Ruth from the registration table and Behrens, who is holding a clipboard like it's the nuclear football. Committee business, then. Full delegation. Somebody's in trouble, and I own the porch they picked.
"Grady." Dottie doesn't come in. This is a doorstep matter, ceremonially. "Lovely evening. This is a formal call."
"I figured, when Behrens brought the good clipboard."
"Item one." Ruth reads it off. "Monday. A projector operated by entrant thirteen Foxglove was redirected onto the Henderson property, generating," she squints, "eleven phone calls, one of which was from Mrs. Henderson's mother in Arizona, who saw it on the group chat and thought the house was haunted. "
"That wasn't my—"
"Item two. Tuesday. Skeletal remains on the Merriweather lawn were arranged to spell a discouraging message. We have photographs. The G, Grady." Ruth looks at me over the paper, and there's forty years of Sunday school in it. "The G."
"Item three," Dottie says, taking over, and her voice loses the fun it never officially had.
"Yesterday. A fog discharge from this property set off interior alarms at a neighboring residence, resulted in a cat in a tree, and — this is the part you'll care about — was visible from Route Nine, where two cars pulled over because they thought Foxglove Lane was on fire.
One of them called it in. Your own station, Grady.
Your own people ran the truck two blocks to find you up a maple wearing a cat. "
Silence. Down the street, faintly, the Hendersons' reaper sighs.
"The committee met this afternoon," Dottie says. "Founders' Fright has run for forty-one years on one principle: the town against the dark, together. Not the town against each other. So here's the ruling, and it's unanimous, and Behrens will read it because he typed it and he's proud of it."
Behrens clears his throat. "Entrants Ellis and Merriweather are hereby issued a joint formal warning.
Any further incident involving either property, either entrant, or," he checks the page, "any decorative equipment, projected imagery, skeletal staging, or atmospheric discharge crossing either property line, will result in the immediate disqualification of both entries. "
"Both," I say.
"Both," Dottie confirms, and she watches me take that in with her glasses down her nose, because she knows exactly what she's built.
She's chained us together at the ankle. I can't take a swing at her without hitting the Fright's own funding, and the girl can't take a swing at me without shooting her own roof.
"Marvelous system, isn't it. Behrens is delivering her copy now. "
I look across the fence. Porch lights on. Somewhere over there, Behrens is reading the same paragraph off the same clipboard to a woman in a paint shirt, and I'd pay real money for the audio.
"There's one more item," Dottie says, "but it's not on the clipboard.
" She waves Ruth and Behrens toward the car, waits until they're out of range, and turns back to me, and for a second the committee chair is gone and it's just Dottie, who sat with Bee every Thursday at the end, who knows where the deposits go.
"That was the most alive that girl has looked since the funeral, tonight, on that lawn.
I could hear her laughing from the corner.
" She pats my arm, once, like tamping soil.
"I don't know what you're doing, Grady. Neither do you.
Try not to do it through the fire department. "
She goes down my walk into the dark. The Gourd glows orange over the trees on the green, ten days lit, twenty-two to judging.
Inside, I stand in the kitchen a while. Then I do a thing I decide not to examine.
The box has been sitting in my garage since Friday — I told myself it was overstock.
A hundred feet of twelve-gauge exterior cord, contractor grade, the yellow kind that doesn't apologize.
A box of twenty ceramic fuses in the correct amperage, because I looked at her panel through the basement window the day of the estate walkthrough, which sounds worse than it was.
A ground-fault adapter. Heat-shrink, because if she's splicing over there, and she's absolutely splicing over there, she should at least splice right.
No note. A note makes it a favor, and I've been told about my favors.
I walk it over at eleven, when her lights are out except the porch, and set it on the rail next to the orange cord she made me keep, and I'm back over the fence line in under a minute, clean, no witnesses.
Except one. The window lamp clicks off as I hit my steps, and in the last of it I see the silhouette in the frame, ears and judgment, watching me the way he watched me come down the maple.
"Don't tell her," I say to a cat, out loud, in my own yard, at eleven at night.
I stand on my porch and do not look at the maple, or the porch where the fog finally thinned, or the window where the lamp just went dark.
I stand on my porch and do not look at the maple, or the porch where the fog finally thinned, or the window where a black shape is sitting in the lamplight, watching my house like a border guard.
The committee wants peace. Bee wanted her looked after. And I want—
I stop the thought at the fence line, where it belongs.