Arson

In a dry season, any little spark can start a blaze. Sometimes, I see the sparks when they happen -- a careless cigarette butt from the car ahead of me, a lightning strike far off, and I know what's going to happen.

Some sparks, though, I only see later. They're a special type of spark, and while I know that something is happening, when I'm actually there, I don't realize what was going on until long afterwards, and even then I have to wonder. I wonder if that was, in fact, the spark, or if that was a fire in and of itself, caused by another spark, earlier.

Tolstoy said that happy families are all alike, but every sad family is sad in its own way. When I look at old pictures, sepia and halftones, there is a feeling of an unreachable distance, as if the colors, being unreal, make the people from some distant planet. When I look at pictures of my parents, I feel the same sensation.

Katie would come over, after school, and we'd watch reruns of Gilligan's Island. I remember that, now, and what I remember particularly was that the earlier shows were filmed in black and white, and the later ones were filmed in color. But now, remembering those long afternoons of Katie's laughter and Mom's chocolate chip cookies, I see in my head all of the shows, even the one where the Professor made the huge mirror, and Gilligan swung through it on a rope, breaking it, I remember all of them in black and white. Except Gilligan. He's always in color, in this sweeping world of black and white, the lagoon, the trees, the movie star. I always liked Mary Anne better, then and now, but Gilligan, who never knew what was going on, who lived in a smiling world of oblivion, he's the one that is in color for me.

Katie came over after school every day. Her mother didn't get home until four, and she stayed with us until then. Sometimes she stayed until dinner, if her mom was going out, and we'd sit opposite each other, laughing. We laughed at each other all the time. We still do. I fly to Los Angeles for a business trip, and I go out to dinner with Katie and her husband, and the two of us laugh together.

Other people had names. Mrs. Allison was Katie's mother. Mr. Hathaway was the teacher. We called him Mister Halfway, because he only had half his hair. But my parents didn't have names like that. They were Mom and Dad. Oh, sure, other people called them Rick and Janie, and I knew, somehow, that those were their names, but in my world, there were three people who didn't have normal names, and those were Mom, Dad, and God. That was the correct order to put them in, too.

Dad travelled to different cities. He'd be gone for a week, then come back, smiling. He always smelled vaguely of cologne, and he laughed a lot, sometimes, and he'd pick me up, whirl me around. "You, Jeffrey, boy, are going to be a great troubleshooter. I can tell." I had this vision that he shot troubles, and it really was lovely. I knew he didn't use a gun, but the name seemed so straightforward. It was a loss to realize that he typed on computers all day long, and a strangeness to konw that people would fly him across the country to fix their computers. People worked for him, and he said, when he came home, not every time but just some times, that he wasn't going to travel any more, that he was going to stay here with us.

Mom was always home. She worked, but she worked while I was at school. She'd drive me to school, I'd go home on the bus, and she'd be there. She was tall, and she wore green a lot -- vests, long dark green pants. Katie's mom seemed frail. She wasn't thin, or short, or old; I knew people who were these things. But she always seemed delicate to me. Mom wasn't fat, or tall, or particularly young. She was old, she'd been old since I met her, but she wasn't as old as Mrs. Allison, and she could pick up chairs with one hand while she was vacuuming, in the evenings. She was always there.

Dad would come home, and Mom would smile, and I'd be in between them and feel this comfort of the three of us, there, and then, the next day, when I came home from school, and we sat down at the table, after Katie had gone home, Dad would come in from the garage and there would be this entirely different feeling -- I cannot say what it was. They didn't look at each other as much, and they didn't talk as much, and they spent their time asking me questions at dinner. "Jeff, what did you do?" "Jeff, did you make anything today?" "Jeff, what is 5 times 7?"

Katie told me about her parents, before her dad left, and how they'd talk all nice and sweet until she went to bed, and then she'd lie in the dark and listen to her mother scream, her father shout, and finally, to the sound of his car driving away. My parents didn't really wait until I was in bed. They didn't shout, and they'd politely ask me to go to my room and study for a while, while they talked. But, it was the sort of polite you get from a substitute teacher after four hours. So I'd go to my room, and I'd read Hardy Boys books, because I'd read almost everything else in my room except for my American Reading Book, and I wasn't about to read that, until I had to.

One phrase, that I remember vividly, I overheard while I was on the way to the bathroom. I went to the bathroom a lot, during those little conversations, and I chose to use the bathroom down by the kitchen, rather than the one beside my bedroom. I wasn't sneaking; they could hear me flush the toilet, and they knew I could hear them. But this phrase, that stayed with me, as I stood in front of the mirror, washing my hands with Dial soap, was my mom saying, "You dug your hole, now you lie in it, Rick." I'll come back to why I remember this.

So, I'd go back to my room, feeling unsettled, and I'd play with Legos. But, really, there isn't much you can build to compete with people arguing in the next room, and I never really got anywhere useful, those nights. Maybe a rubber band gun, or maybe something that had a secret knack of pushing and worming a finger in, to expose a little chamber in the mass of Legos. Not that I really had anything worth hiding in it, but it was fun to do, like it was fun to make air tents with a big box fan and a sheet. When I did that, I was inside and I could hear everyone outside, I could even see them with my eyes close to the sheet, but they didn't know if I was in there or not. Or maybe I'd go over to Katie's and we'd look at her mom's flower books, which was fun for about a minute and a half, or at her dad's old books about rodeo clowns, which occupied me for sometimes the whole evening. I didn't even need the pictures after the first couple minutes. They just served to imspire me, get me started, like a spark. I knew that being a rodeo clown wasn't any real sort of job at all. I knew that bulls were big, huge, hairy, fast-moving animals with sharp horns. The picture of a guy flying through the air, with the bull beneath him, and the bull's left horn almost entirely buried in the man's stomach, stayed with me for a long time. That picture was in black and white, too, but somehow I could fill in the missing color without any trouble. So, as I said, I didn't really have any interest in being a rodeo clown, but the thought of being out there, in front of all those people, and saving some guy from being trampled, putting myself in front of the bull and having everyone watch me, was plenty for an evening of thought. Katie would finally drag me out from my cocoon, their big overstuffed couch, and I'd leave the book on the table, open to a page with a clown diving into a barrel, inches ahead of the bull, and we'd go outside and stomp on grasshoppers. We both took immense pleasure in stomping grasshoppers, or, later, in shooting them with BB guns. We liked to catch them and throw them at each other, too, but there was a technique to this, which was: you catch the grasshopper between your fingers, holding only its rearmost two legs, and then you hold it for a minute so that it spits. Then you throw it. If you catch it anywhere else, it'll spit on you, and that defeats the whole point of the game. Then you drop it and stomp it. Our rules were quite strict, and the grasshoppers always lost in our games.

Anyway, I said I remembered that phrase, the one my mom used. It has a special significance to me. Dad would leave for a week, starting Monday, and come back the next Monday. He'd do that, almost every other week, so he was home about half the time. We only had the one car, because he always used the bus. Mom used the car, to drive me to school (as I've told you) and to get groceries, to take me to church on Sunday. What I remember is that she'd get groceries by herself, and then I would stay at Katie's, or at home, by myself, and I'd read.

I was over at Katie's that afternoon, and I was sitting on the sofa, pretending to pay attention to what she was reading, and actually thinking about bravely facing a bull named Tornado, after I'd been gashed horribly by him. No one else could get near Tornado, and as he walked towards me, slowly, all black, his horns red with my blood and saliva and foam covering the ring in his nose, people shrieking as they watched, calling to me, "Run! run!" -- as he walked to me, I reached out with my hand, and he stopped, leaned over to sniff my fingers, and just stood there, while the poor cowboy scrambled to safety. As I thought of this, I saw my Dad walk up the driveway to the house, and I thought to myself, It's Wednesday. Dad never comes home on a Wednesday afternoon.

So I said, "I'll be right back" to Mrs. Allison, and whispered to Katie to keep her mom in the house. Parents tend to interrupt important things. I walked home, alone, and let myself in.

Dad was in the living room, on the phone and he was holding a printed letter in his hand, and he wasn't laughing, he wasn't happy. He had a look to him that I'd never seen before, and he was saying, "Yes, sir, yes, ok, yes" on the phone, and finally said, "Ok, when is the court date again? Two weeks?" He wrote something down on the letter he had, and he turned around and saw me.

"Jeff." That was all he said, when he looked at me.

"Mom's at the grocery store. What are you doing home?"

He sat there for a long time, with his head tilted over, looking at me. He pursed his lips out, the same way I do, and he said, "I dug my hole, and now I get to lie in it."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing, Jeff. Go back over to Katie's. I have to go."

I walked out of the house again, and I went across the lawn to Katie's house, and I sat in her couch. So I could see him from my window, as he walked out the front door, with two suitcases, and locked the door behind him. He walked down to the bus stop, in the slow evening move towards dusk, his shadow twenty feet tall and all legs, his coloring all browns and halftones.

I never saw him again.