Chapter 33 The Relief and the Terror
BIRDIE spread it out on my kitchen table the next evening, after Hollis Hardware closed and after I’d walked the long way home twice to be sure nobody had walked it with me. Wes brought a folder. I brought three years of a thing I’d been carrying without a place to set it down.
For about two hours I was, in my own kitchen, with the shades pulled and one lamp on, entirely myself, and I had not been entirely myself in front of another human being since a dog farm two hours away.
I want to explain what that costs, being not-yourself, because from the outside it looks like nothing, it looks like a woman being sweet and jumpy at the hardware store.
From the inside it is a full-time job with no days off.
Every conversation, I ran two tracks: the thing I noticed, and the thing Birdie would notice, and then I served the second one and buried the first, all day, every day, for three years.
Marcy would say something and I’d have to translate my own reaction into a dumber, softer one before it reached my face.
Earl would ask me to look at a busted compressor and I’d have to remember, in real time, not to already know what was wrong with it.
You do that long enough and you stop being able to tell which track is you.
That’s the part that scared me. Not getting caught. Forgetting.
And then Wes Calder cleared a space on his kitchen table and said, “Show me,” and I got to run one track for two hours, and it was like taking off a coat I’d been wearing in August.
“Start with the signature,” Wes said. “You keep using that word. Make me see it.”
“Okay.” I moved the salt and pepper into the middle of the table, because I think with my hands, which is a thing Birdie-the-clerk absolutely does not do.
“A person who sets fires for money and a person who sets fires because he needs to — those are two different animals, and they leave two different kinds of mess, and the mess is the man.”
“How.”
“Not the how of it,” I said. “I’m never going to tell you the how of anything, Wes, not the mechanics, that door stays shut for the rest of my life, that’s a promise I made to myself a long time ago and it’s the one part of me I like.
I’m going to tell you the behavior. The how is what a chemist reads.
The behavior is what I read. It’s better, because it’s what tells you what he’ll do next. ”
He set down his pen. “Then teach me the behavior.”
So I taught him. And here is the thing I did not expect, the thing that sat on my chest the whole night: teaching him felt like being handed back my hands.
I showed him, in the pattern of the fires, the difference between a man doing a job and a man scratching an itch.
A man doing a job is tidy. He wants a result — a scared holdout, a clean insurance claim, a building nobody wants anymore.
He picks the empty hours. He picks the empty rooms. He’d rather nobody see the flame at all until it’s someone else’s problem.
Everything about the early fires said that.
The timing, the placement, the restraint.
They were considerate, if you can believe it, in the specific and horrible way of a person who’s been told to make a mess but not a tragedy.
“And Ostrander,” Wes said, following me, quick, he was quick, it was one of the best parts. “Ostrander wasn’t considerate.”
“Ostrander was personal,” I said. “Ostrander was somebody letting a little of himself into the work. The front of the house. The occupied hours. A man in his bed. That’s not a job.
A job doesn’t need George scared in a hospital, a job needs George’s lot.
That’s a man who’s started to enjoy the part he was hired to skip.
” I heard my own voice go flat and far off, the report voice, and I let it, because for once there was somebody in the room who wasn’t going to be frightened by it.
“He’s drifting off his leash. Whoever’s paying him wanted a scare.
He’s giving them a threat. Those diverge, and the gap between them is where somebody dies. ”
Wes was quiet. He’d stopped writing a while back. He was watching me, and it wasn’t the watching I’d spent three years dreading, the watching that catalogs you and files you and hands you a job. It was the watching of a man learning a language from a native speaker and enjoying the lesson.
“You just did it again,” he said.
“Did what.”