Chapter 23 Civic Hero — Ii
I put it together the way you put a fire together, origin and fuel and air.
Holloway needed holdouts encouraged. Cody needed money and had a skill for making property go away.
Somewhere in the last year they’d struck the kind of arrangement that men strike without ever writing it down, small scares, controlled, nobody hurt, just enough to move a stubborn owner off a lot. That was the deal.
And the deal had broken. That was the burn pattern I couldn’t stop reading.
Because the fires were escalating, and controlled scares don’t escalate, and a subcontractor doing a controlled job doesn’t put a box against a gas meter behind a building with a single mother and a kid asleep inside.
That’s not a job anymore. That’s a man off the leash.
Holloway had lost control of Cody Rourke, and either didn’t know it or couldn’t admit it, because admitting it meant admitting all of it, and Grant Holloway does not have a story in which he is the man who hired the fire that killed somebody.
He has no room in his heart for that story. So he wasn’t going to look.
Which left it to me. And that was the week it got quietly made clear to me that I should perhaps look somewhere else.
I want to be fair to Cody Rourke too, because the bible of my own head requires it, and because a man you’ve cartooned is a man you’ll underestimate.
He wasn’t wrong about everything. This town did use people up.
The glass factory ate two generations of hands and then closed on a Friday with a notice taped to the gate.
Holloway’s outfit had, from what I could gather, hired Cody for the ugly work and paid him late and cut him first, the way outfits do, and a man can carry that and stay honest, most men do, but a man carrying that who also happens to be genuinely skilled at making buildings burn is a different arithmetic.
He’d started off doing what he was told, small and controlled, and somewhere in there he’d realized he was the one holding the actual power in the arrangement, that the beloved man in the office over the bank couldn’t do a single thing without the man with the tools, and that realization had gone to his head like the first drink after a dry year.
He wasn’t burning for Holloway anymore. He was burning because it was the one thing in his life nobody could take away from him, and that is not a man you reason with. That is a man you get ahead of.
It came the way these things come in a small county, soft, from every direction at once.
My oversight is partly a county board that Holloway golfs with.
The chair called me “just to check in,” warm as pie, and mentioned twice how much good the redevelopment would do, and how he’d hate to see the marshal’s office “get out over its skis on speculation” about “one of the finest men in this county” during “a delicate financing window.” Pastor Dave, who is a good man and had no idea he was being used, mentioned that Grant had funded the new roof.
Even Earl Hollis, who I’ve come to like, said to me over a box of smoke detectors, not unkindly, “Grant’s not the devil, son.
He’s just a man trying to keep the lights on for a town that already died once.
Go easy,” and I understood that Earl believed it, and that half the town believed it, and that I was the outsider from the city job I don’t talk about, three years in, telling their favorite son he was funding fires.
I drove home that night the long way, along the river, past the dark Flats and the Sokols’ porch light and the two-flat on Larch where the hardware clerk lives downstairs and the holdout mother and her boy live up. All of it lined up on Holloway’s map with tiny plastic trees where the houses are.
I had a beloved man who wouldn’t see it and a dangerous man he couldn’t stop and a town that would fight me if I said either name out loud.
And I had one asset in the whole county who could look at what Cody Rourke built and tell me what it wanted before it did it, and she’d sooner faint on my shoes than admit she existed.
I was going to have to go back to the hardware store.