The Auctioneer (24 page)

There was no reason why any of them should ever have trusted Perly. He was an outsider with big talk and they should have been more wary. But Mudgett was one of them. Mudgett should have been one of them. And Mudgett’s was the closest house of all to the pines he had in mind.

And John began moving more forcefully through the brush on the old road, his right foot warming up and the sweat starting beneath his shirt and woolen hunting jacket. Even with the brush and the weight of the gas can and his plan, he felt freer than he had in months. The point was not so much to accomplish anything as that it had become necessary to do something. That he must not be pushed to abandon everything without leaving some mark.

John knew that he had entered the stand of pines from the sound of the wind combing the needles, the silence of his footsteps, and, even in the cold, the fragrance of the pitch. Under the pines, the wind at his back was so strong that he never heard the traffic on Route 37, so the lights from Mudgett’s house caught him before he was quite ready. He stopped.

He was there, standing thirty yards back into the woods, staring out past the pines and the abandoned apple orchard at Mudgett’s house. Though it must have been nearly eleven, every light was blazing and the spotlight under the eaves threw long ropes of light into the woods.

To the left was the James place, too big for Ian James and his wife and their one grown son. There was a light on in the ell, probably in the kitchen. The son would be watching television. The house loomed through the dark the color of driftwood, dry as driftwood.

And to the right, Fayette’s, all dark. Adeline must be in bed already. Over the chimney he could see the pale outline of the tower on the old Fawkes barn. Standing still and listening, he could hear, when the wind hushed, the sounds of the town—a distant motor, a door slamming, a cat crying.

John put the gas can down. He would have to build a fire about a hundred feet long; he hadn’t much reckoned on the actual work of it. He began to act, moving stiffly, unconvinced, now that he was about it, that he could do what he had planned. He picked up dead branches from the ground and tossed them into an elongated heap. When the pile was five feet high and six or seven feet long, he stopped, restored by the rhythm of work to a sense of normalcy. He broke two green branches off one of the smaller pines, and using them as a rake, gathered in layers of nearby pine needles and sprinkled them over the top of the dead branches. Then, putting his makeshift rake down where he would recognize it again, he moved back into the woods and began collecting more dead branches to continue his pile. Bending and straightening, bending and straightening, it was like pitching hay or drawing water or splitting firewood. He worked now without weariness, strong in the faith that the long funeral pyre he planned would be complete in time, just as the raked piles of hay ended up in the loft of the barn each year before the weather cooled.

The gusts of wind piled upon each other furiously, then scattered down the hill into the Parade, occasionally leaving John in a hole of silence. In such moments the branches crashed into the pile like thunder and John straightened up and held his breath, waiting for the wind again. Far away, he had been hearing a dog bark. When the wind died, the sound leaped closer. He stopped to listen. Then he whirled to face Mudgett’s house. The back door was pulled ajar and a white husky came bounding toward him, outlined in silver by the spotlight. Then the spotlight and the light in Mudgett’s kitchen went dark, the door clicked, and John felt rather than saw Mudgett standing in the doorway with a rifle. The big dog barked frantically, dashing halfway across the clearing toward him, ghostlike in the dark, then back up again toward the house.

“Hey, King, hey, boy,” he heard Mudgett call. “What’s up, dog?” Then, “Go get him, boy!” The dog went on barking. The wind was blowing John’s scent straight toward the dog.

John took out the knife and the flashlight. If he ran now, Mudgett would hear him. The gasoline can was sitting out in the open, its red clearly visible in the light from the half moon. The dog was getting bolder now, dashing right up to the edge of the woods, so close that John could see the dark shading on the sides of his muzzle.

Mudgett was moving into the yard, his dark shape clear against the yellow house. John crouched, watching Mudgett through the branches he had piled. He should have spent the last money and bought a gun. Mudgett was a perfect target as he peered down the barrel of his rifle into the woods, moving gingerly but steadily toward John.

Suddenly Mudgett dropped the barrel of the gun and grabbed the dog by its collar. “Damn you, King,” he said. “Damn fool dog. Don’t know the difference between trouble and a coon.” He turned and moved rapidly into the house, and the kitchen light went on again.

The dog stopped bounding at the woods, but went on barking. Gradually it dawned on John that the other noise, the new noise underneath the barking and the thud of the jumping dog, was the sound of a chain pulled and loosened, pulled and loosened, as the dog strained toward him.

John rose stiffly and went to work again as quietly as he could. He swept the pine needles away from the base of a tree and buried the gas can under them. Then he stood still until the dog got tired of barking. When he grew bold enough to take up the rake again, the dog started again. He stopped and the dog stopped. He started and the dog started. This time he kept working. Suddenly the woods were lit up and John jumped. They had turned the spotlight on again. Mudgett’s wife came out in a red robe, screaming, “Shut up. Shut up. You son of a bitch. You’re drivin’ me crazy. You’re worse’n him.” The dog yelped. She hit him across the nose with the flat of her hand. The dog rolled over on his back whining.

Then Mudgett was standing in the doorway, careless of his outline in the light from the kitchen. “God damn you!” he shouted. 111 lock the both of you in the cellar. Get him in here.”

And, in the brightness from the spotlight, Mudgett’s wife dragged the cringing dog into the kitchen after her.

John laughed. The work did not seem so hard now he was used to it. And eventually he found that he was working in back of James’s house. The light was out in the ell now. And all of Mudgett’s lights except the spotlight in the back yard were out as well.

It was about four o’clock in the morning and still pitch dark when John finished his work—a seventy-foot-long arc of piled branches stretching around the backs of Mudgett’s and James’s houses. In an admission that Perly was beyond his reach, John did not continue the pile, as he had planned, behind Fayette’s, which was the house directly opposite Perly’s. The firemen would never let the fire jump the road. He would have to settle for Mudgett and James.

John walked back the length of his pile, giving it a kick here and there, shaky at the thought of setting it on fire. He poured a trickle from the can of gasoline along the back edge of his heap, careful not to leave any gaps. Then he walked back the length of the pile again, dribbling out the gasoline until it was gone.

He carried the can a good way back up the road, screwed on the cap, and left it there. He dropped his gasoline-soaked gloves beside it, and fished the big box of wooden kitchen matches out of his jacket pocket as he walked back. He listened. All he could hear was the wind. The town at that hour was as silent as the woods. The line of gasoline smelled so strongly that he wondered if the town weren’t rousing itself for the chase already, alarmed by the fumes.

He backed up six paces. Then he struck the match on the box and threw it as it flared, starting to run with the same motion. He was almost to the gasoline can before he paused to look over his shoulder. Darkness and silence. He stopped. The match must have fizzled.

He returned, moving cautiously, to within eight feet of the gasoline. If he stood too close there wouldn’t even be any bones to tell the tale. He struck and threw.

This time, before he had run four steps, the earth shuddered and he was knocked forward by the whoop of the explosion. The woods before him lit up with a flash of yellow light. John could feel the flickering light of the gasoline-fed flames burning into his back, framing him with brightness. He caught up the can as he went and kept on running.

The pine crackled and split loudly as it burned. Mudgett’s dog was howling frantically. John crashed through an almost solid wall of juniper. Now Mudgett was hollering. He must be at the door already. John kept running. It was harder and harder to find his footing as the layers of brush accumulating between him and the fire began to obliterate the light. Finally, John risked one quick look over his shoulder as he ran.

He stopped short. Through the brush he could see the ragged wall of flame rising higher and higher. He stood a moment, mesmerized, held by the beauty of the fire he had made. High above the soaring needletips of flame, the green branch of a pine caught fire and a shower of sparks ran off before the wind in the direction of Mudgett’s.

John ran then. He ran wildly, leaping through raspberry brakes as if they weren’t there, barely feeling the thorns as they raked his face. He ran until his chest was burning and he had left behind the last trace of light from the fire. Then he stopped, confused, and found he was already at the wall. He went on, pushing hard but too spent to run, stumbling against stones, bumping into trees. He turned on the flashlight and raced along the wall within its jerky light a hundred yards, then fell full length and smashed the face of the flashlight on a boulder.

The moon was down and it was darker than when he had come. He used his hands, feeling as much as seeing his way along the wall, watching intently for the landmark quartz, stopping now and then to stroke a pale granite boulder that looked, in the dark, as if it might be quartz. The way was endless. He kept listening behind him for the dogs he expected, for the alarm, for the sound of people leaping and shouting. All he could hear was the racket of his own body, panting and crashing through the dense undergrowth. Then, finally, his groping hands were caressing the quartz, its crystal faces slippery as ice.

He started running down the creek bed, slipping and floundering in the confusion of rocks. Before he had traveled twenty yards, his feet flew up before him and he fell backward on his spine and the base of his skull. He lay on his back across the rocky bed of the brook, looking into the wavering dark gray of the sky beyond the darker lace of branches.

At first the noise seemed a new dimension to the pounding in his ears, or the water running underneath the rocks. But stock still and listening as he came to, he recognized the sound fighting its way upwind from the far edge of the world. It was the alarm in the Parade, clanging from the top of the firehouse to rouse the firemen.

As he lay, almost peacefully now, he knew that in town people were throwing off covers, setting bare feet on cold floors. The volunteer firemen, many of them deputies as well, were pulling boots and rubber raincoats over their pajamas. Their wives were covering their curlers with kerchiefs and following more slowly, pouring out into the Parade to see the fire, his fire. Calmly he hoped, the way he hoped a cow would calve without trouble, that someone would think to wake up Adeline Fayette. But the image he fastened on was that of the auctioneer, gliding fully dressed into the road, Dixie waving her tail at his left heel as he indicated with a raised eyebrow just what he had in mind for the firemen to do. He would wait only until his eye, like a fisheye lens, had gathered in the whole scene.

And then he would start. It would be foolhardy to expect flames or underbrush to slow down Perly. He would simply slither through, silently following the dog along John’s trail. It was a matter of minutes now.

John struggled to his feet and floundered on. As he got closer to the pond, dark patches of ice kept giving way beneath him, trapping a boot and yanking him to a stop. When he reached the path around the pond, he started to run again. If they were there already, he would see the commotion in the dooryard: the state police with radios blaring, perhaps Captain Sullivan himself questioning Mim. Perhaps taking her from Ma and Hildie. Perhaps taking them all as hostages to coax him out of the woods. He paused to listen. He could no longer hear the noise from the Parade, but he realized that the sky had brightened from navy to royal blue. He went on, clinging to the edge of the pond, his left foot skidding on the embankment from time to time. Finally, he rounded the twin oaks by the swimming place and came out in view of his own house and yard.

Dark. Peaceful and dark. No light, even in the kitchen. He slowed to a walk and let the empty gas can swing at his side.

But when he got to the road, he started to think about the dark. Mim asleep, or gone without him, or running in the dark somewhere searching for Hildie. He ran up the path to the door and leaned against it. Locked. The sounds of his body beat against the familiar wood. He had no key and was afraid, even in his own yard, to call out. Then, in a burst, the door gave beneath his weight and Mim caught him as he fell in.

They stood a moment in each other’s arms. Ma moved laboriously across the front room in the dark.

“Are you all right?” asked Mim, supporting him.

“Don’t know,” he said, his voice foreign to him.

As a child, he had come running up the path from school, burst in at the door, and let the dammed-up stream of failure overflow. “Be a man. Be a man,” Ma had crooned in the way of comfort. And now he longed to be a small boy, to overflow, to refuse the command to be a man.

“You been runnin’,” Mim said.

John straightened himself up away from her and leaned panting in the doorway.

She struck a match. Her jeans and sweater showed she had been waiting up for him after all. She lifted the chimney from the kerosene lamp on the table and put the match to the wick so it flared. John watched the small yellow flame, caught up in the comfort of fire.

“Dear God. You been fightin’,” Ma said, moving toward John for a closer look.

John shook his head, then he thought to set the gasoline can down. By the door were the piles of cartons just the way he’d left them. Not packed! ’ he cried, panic pounding up in him again. He lifted a carton of dishes and turned to go out.