Everything Burns Page 5

I quickly change into my running clothes and head out the back sliding glass door. Making my way over the wood deck and then through the fence gate, I walk the length of the driveway past my Ford Escape. Turning north on the road, I start a slow, steady jog, trying my best just to breathe in the cool spring air and not think about the events of the morning. I just want to feel human again, with the sun on my face and a good novel in my head.

  I take the scenic route through the Albany Rural Cemetery, jogging past century- and two-century-old headstones that have turned gray over time and succumbed to the forces of gravity by leaning at odd angles. Not far from where I’m jogging is the old brick crematorium. It’s set down in a valley on the far side of the cemetery. On any given day, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, you can smell the smoke from the incinerator fire that burns the dead.

  When I was a kid, my friends and I used to dare one another to run down to the crematorium and sneak inside while the fires were burning. It was a dark, foreboding place that could have been lifted right out of a Stephen King novel. Nothing has changed in the thirty-plus years since I first set foot in this place. It is still dark, gothic, and glowing of death.

  Truth be told, I used to visit the crematorium on my own sometimes. Mostly during the hours of sad silence that usually accompanied my dad’s occasional drinking binges. Binges that almost always ended with his passing out in his easy chair before the television, his whispering my mother’s and brothers’ names in his drunken sleep, one after the other.

  The feeling I got from being close to the crematorium is not easy to describe. It was a combination of fear, curiosity, and a sort of high. The attraction, of course, was not death, but fire. The fact that fire was utilized to entirely consume a human body that only days before had been living, breathing, talking, eating, dreaming, only made the place all the more fascinating.

  Once, when I was just piddling around the crematorium on a lonely Saturday afternoon, I saw a hearse pull up outside its front overhead door. Hiding around the corner of the old brick, castle-like structure, I watched one of the overall-wearing workers assist the black-suited mortician with sliding a simple wood casket out of the hearse and setting it onto a gurney. I watched as they wheeled the box in through the open overhead door.

  As they worked, I snuck my way around the corner of the building and sprinted to the front of the hearse. From there I had a clear view of what the men were doing to the body inside the casket. I saw the man in overalls open the big iron door on the furnace. The fire inside it was raging. So much so, I swear I felt its heat even from where I was standing out in the front lot. I watched as the casket was slowly rolled into the fire and the iron door closed behind it. I felt an odd sense of satisfaction at watching that body enter into the fire and for a long time, I just stood there, mesmerized.

  When the two men turned to walk back out to the hearse, they spotted me.

  “Hey, kid,” the man in overalls shouted. “Get the hell out of here.”

  I wanted to shout back, “This is hell.”

  But instead, I ran into the woods and scaled the hill back up into the cemetery. The top of the hill was a good place for watching the smoke that came from the burned bodies pour out from the brick chimney, black at first until it eventually turned snow white. No one bothered you there, because the only people around you were dead. The old cemetery contains many hills, but only one that looks down on the crematorium.

  Today, I make sure to run a few of the steeper hills so that by the time I’ve run a complete lap around the entire cemetery, I’ve worked up a good sweat. As soon as I exit the cemetery gates, I hook a right and jog along the main road until I arrive back in Lisa’s neighborhood. There I reduce my speed to a brisk walk and, with my hands pressed against my hips and my lungs filled with fresh oxygen, I head in the direction of Lisa’s ranch house.

  The house is barely in view when I spot the strange but all too familiar vehicle parked in the driveway.

  Chapter 10

  It’s nothing special. The vehicle, I mean. One of those cheap 4x4 Honda CR-V hatchbacks that looks barely large enough to fit the driver, much less any passengers or cargo. It’s an older model, tan or puke brown, for lack of a better authorly description.

  There’s a man standing by the driver’s-side door.

  From where I’m walking along the sleepy suburban road, he looks tall. Taller than me, anyway. Thin, with thick, wavy black hair and dark eyes masked by black horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He’s wearing “skinny” cut blue jeans, loafers, and a brown T-shirt that says “HOLLYWOOD” across the front in big black letters. I peg him for maybe forty-three or -four, but going on twenty-six.

  The closer I come to the driveway, I can see he’s smiling that wide smile I now recall from his Facebook page. He’s also holding something in his right hand. Flowers. A small bouquet of red roses wrapped in purple tissue paper. He is David.

  The David.

  “Can I help you?” I say, forcing the words from the back of my throat.

  He smiles. Friendly. Too friendly. His half-squinted brown eyes not looking at me, but into me. Maybe even through me.

  “How’s Lisa doing?” he asks. “Her procedure?”

  I take a step forward. “I’m sorry,” I say. “But who exactly am I speaking to?”

  He lets loose with a short, faux laugh. “Gosh, where the hell are my manners?” Holding out his free hand. “I’m David. We’ve met before. A bunch of years ago, in the house you and Lisa shared, before you . . . well . . . you know.”

  I shake my head. “No, I don’t know. And I don’t remember meeting you.”

  “No biggie, bro. We can start all over.”

  His hand is still there, waiting for mine.

  I look at it. It’s the hand that touched Lisa in so many ways for so many years. I feel the blood in my veins beginning to simmer. The hand . . . I want to take hold of it and break it. Crush it. Maybe even cut it off and feed it to a pack of wild dogs. Or, better yet, toss it into a fire and watch it burn until there’s nothing left but white bone.

  But that would be insensitive of me.

  Instead of hurting him, I inhale, wipe my sweaty palm on my running shorts, and take the hand in mine. It feels cold, smooth, rubbery, and it sends a charge of ice water up and down my spine. If the hand could talk, it would say, Never a hard day’s labor in my life. I shake it quickly, then release the cold fish of a limb.

  “So how the hell are you, Reece? You’ve been killing it on the best-seller lists, bro.”

  “You read my stuff?”

  He lights up, wide-eyed. “Dude, The Damned is like my favorite novel. Fucking great read. Fire, pyromaniacs, and burning people in caskets . . . What’s not to like? I’ve coined a new term for your particular brand of noir. Do you wanna hear it, bro?”

  Is he going to stop calling me “bro”?

  “My guess is you’re going to tell me anyway.”

  “Ha, ha. You sound like you know my ass, almost as well as Lisa does.” Then, catching himself: “Oh, shit. Sorry, man. Didn’t mean that to sound like . . . well, you know.”

  I nod. I just want him gone. “Okay, what do you call my particular brand of noir?”

  “Pyro noir,” he says, shaking the flowers so that one of the petals falls off one of the rose stems. I watch the red petal float gently down to the black driveway. “Whaddaya think?”

  As much as it bugs me to admit it, he’s right. It does have a nice, badass ring.

  “Cool,” I say.

  “I’ve devoured The Damned three times. I never even read Franzen that much, and that dude rawks. Your protagonist is so despicable, but at the same time you can’t help but pull for him, you know? Even while he’s tormenting that family he abducts in their own home, setting out separate pine caskets for each of them, setting them up in the living room. And then later on, when he burns them inside the caske
ts? And in the end, him getting his due with his own pine casket and a one-way trip to hell thanks to some gasoline and a lit match. Powerful shit. Yet you can’t help but like the dude. I don’t know how you can write like that. Wish I could.”

  “It’s noir, David,” I say. “Or pyro noir, I guess. You’re not really supposed to like or hate him. I wrote it from his point of view so that readers might gain some perspective into the essence of a pyromaniacal killer. A coldhearted killer. Mailer’s done it. Capote, too, with In Cold Blood. Then there’s Cain, and even Bukowski.”

  “The essence of a killer,” he says, once more shaking the flowers and once more losing some petals. “Another title for you. You can have it if you want it. No charge, bro.”

  “Thanks, but Dave Zeltserman already snatched it up for one of his novels.” Then, pointing to the flowers, “Those aren’t for me, I presume.”

  He bursts out laughing. “God, what a sense of humor you have. Lisa’s lucky to have you back, let me tell you.” More laughing. “Well, if you must know, they’re for your significant other, bro.”

  “Oh, that so? Tell me, how did you come to be aware of her surgical procedure today?”

  “She Facebooked it.”

  “I thought she might have mentioned it during one of your telephone conversations or texts or e-mails.”

  He purses his lips. “You know about those? Hope you don’t mind. Lisa and I are still friends. I mean, we were together for nine years. That’s like forever.”

  But he and Lisa got together after we split up eight years ago. He must have his math wrong.

  “Forever,” I repeat slowly, distastefully, like it’s an ugly, bad word.

  “Hey, you know, I never did blame you for trying to start that fire at the old house way back when. I realize you were under a lot of strain then. Losing Lisa. Writing the first draft of The Damned. I can see where you borrowed from real life with your fiction.”

  The sweat from my run in the cemetery has now evaporated. But that doesn’t mean my blood isn’t heating up.

  “Thanks, I appreciate it. So you and Lisa are friends?”

  “I wouldn’t say BFFs. But good friends. Hope it isn’t going to be a problem, bro.” His face lights up like a Christmas bulb. “Say, how’s my little Anna? What a pip that girl is. She’s a rock star in the making. You know, I offered to give her guitar lessons.”

  I bite down on my bottom lip. “Your little Anna?”

  “Figure of speech,” he says, reaching out with his free hand, patting my shoulder. “You wanna know something, Reece? Lisa has been talking about getting her tear ducts fixed for so long now. She used to talk about it all the time.” More shaking of the flowers, more red petals floating down to the asphalt. “I guess she didn’t have the money back then, much less the medical insurance to cover it. It’s before her parents agreed to give her a monthly allowance since you weren’t sending that much her way. You hadn’t hit it like you have in recent years. Thank God for e-books, right?” He’s back to smiling. “Guess I can’t blame Lisa for wanting you back now that you’re flush, bro.”

  While my brain burns with adrenaline, my gut starts speaking to me. Whispering. It tells me David is baiting me. Doing it with a smile and a fistful of flowers for his ex-girlfriend. I have a choice here: I can either take the bait and tell him to fuck off, or I can just pull off the exit onto the higher road by nodding in agreement.

  I choose the latter.

  “Yup,” I say. “It’s no wonder . . . bro.” Holding out my hand. “I’ll take those off of you, give them to Lisa.”

  “Would you? Thanks a bunch. I thought about waiting until she got home, but then I thought she could use a pick-me-up now while she’s fresh out of surgery.” Handing me the flowers. “You will give them to her, right, Reece?” He shoots me a wink of his left eye. The untrustworthy eye.

  “Sure,” I lie, gripping the life out of the bouquet. “Don’t worry.”

  I walk toward the house.

  “Oh, hey, Reece, bro,” he calls out.

  I stop, turn, exhale. “What is it, David?”

  He opens the door to his ride, reaches inside, comes back out with something. It’s a book. What’s known in the industry as a trade paperback. A novel that isn’t as big as a hardcover but isn’t as small and squat as an old-fashioned mass-market paperback.

  “You mind doing me the honor of signing your latest? I know it’s probably weird, but what the hell. I loved it, bro.”

  Exhaling a second breath, I head back down the driveway, the flowers brushing up against my naked leg. The thorn that scratches against my shin only adds to my annoyance. When I get to him, I take the book in my free hand. It’s a copy of Killer Be Mine, which came out about a year ago. The novel has been selling steady, but none of my novels do as well as The Damned still does, years after its original publication. Judging by the way the book has been dog-eared and soiled, I’d say David has read this one more than once also.

  “You got a pen?” I say.

  “Do us writers always have ink on hand?” he says, reaching into the console area of his ride and coming back out with a pen. It’s a black push-button pen, and there’s some special writing on the side. It says, “David Bourenhem, Freelance Writer.” Printed below that is a website and a phone number.

  I thumb the pen’s button and I open up to the dedication page. The dedication is for Lisa, even though we were still broken up at the time and she was still involved with David. It reads, “For Lisa, for what we once had and what we might have again one day.” When Rachael read it, she hit the roof. She broke up with me for about a month, but then took me back one last time. The next time she broke up with me several months later, it was for good.

  How the hell can I possibly sign this thing?

  I write, “For David, thanks for reading.”

  But what I really want to write is, “For David, How I would love for you to burn a path away from this place.”

  I hand him back the novel and the pen.

  “Oh no,” he insists. “I want you to have the pen. You know, if you ever need someone to do research for you or edit your manuscripts, I’m your man.” He looks over one shoulder, then the other, like he’s making sure we’re not being watched. “I’ll be frank,” he goes on. “I found three typos in Killer Be Mine that wouldn’t have been there had I gone through it prior to pub date.” He puts on a sour face. “Stupid, silly, careless mistakes like that sort of cheapen the novel, wouldn’t you say, bro?”

  I just look at him, holding back the urge to pummel his skin and bones in the driveway.

  “Oh my God,” he says. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m rather outspoken on matters of writing and writers. Sometimes I don’t know when to stop.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Think you’ll ever bring back the protagonist—or, should I say, antagonist—of The Damned for a sequel?” he asks. “What was his name? Drew Brennen?”

  “Be kind of hard when he burned himself to death at the end.”

  “But you could write a prequel. You know, you could focus on when he was a boy, soon after he lost his family in the fire, and his slow, painful regression into pyromania. It would make a great book.”

  I hate to admit it, but it’s not a bad idea. I wonder if it shows on my face, because he’s back to smiling that awful smile that somehow must have attracted Lisa way back when.

  “No dice,” I say. “Now if you don’t mind . . .”

  Once again, I start back up the drive.

  I can hear him getting back inside the Honda, shutting the door, turning over the little engine. I’m just about to ascend the three concrete steps up to the landing when he hits the horn, startling the living crap out of me.

  I turn. Fast.

  “Oh, Reece, I almost forgot,” he calls out, his head sticking up and out of the driver’s-side
window.

  I have no choice but to go back down to the center of the driveway. That is, if I want to clearly make out what he’s saying. “Forgot what?” I say.

  His head and shoulders are hanging out the window, his eyes squinting behind the black-rimmed glasses, thick hair mussed up.

  “This might sound a little strange,” he says. “But if you should happen to come upon any, ummm, let’s call them personal photos of Lisa, would you mind terribly packing them up and sending them my way? They sort of belong to me.”

  My blood shoots from simmer to boil. It’s all I can do not to sprint back down the driveway and head-butt him like a bull. Once more I’m put in one hell of a precarious position: I can either take the bait or pretend I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “Personal pictures of Lisa,” I say through grinding teeth. “Sure thing, Davey bro. I’ll do my best to see that they’re returned.”

  As much as it hurts, I make sure to smile when I say it.

  “Hey, thanks, Reece man. You wanna know something?”

  “What is it?”

  “You and I are gonna be awesome pals.”

  His shoulders and head retreat back into the vehicle, and I watch him back out of the driveway. Before pulling away, he gives the horn a couple of honks and tosses me an awesome-pal wave through the passenger-side window.

  I watch him disappear from view, hoping that on the way home he head-ons a tractor trailer and bursts into flames.

  Chapter 11

  Are you really going to take shit from that guy? Dad asks as he follows me back across the driveway and up the concrete stoop to the front door of the house.

  Bad enough he used to have sex with Lisa. He’s baiting you, Reece. Tormenting you. He wants you to get angry. Wants you to take a swing. Maybe he even wants you to come after him with fire, just like Drew Brennen did when he went after his enemies in The Damned.

  When that happens, he’ll call the police. The police will arrest you. Maybe they’ll even toss you back in the hospital.