The Fireman (17 page)

He waited to see if anyone would applaud for him but no one did, and finally Harper reached up and held his hot damp hand while he climbed down out of his chair. She wasn’t annoyed with him anymore. Conversation returned to the room, but it was subdued and troubled.

He sat poking his plastic fork at some smears of gravy on his plate. Renée leaned forward to look around Harper and said, “Are you all right, Ben?”

“It was bad enough being the guy who took away the cell phones,” Ben said. “Now I’m the guy who took away lunch. Aw, frick it.”

He pulled himself up off the bench, took his plate to the counter, and dumped it in a bin full of gray soapy water.

“I don’t care if
I
miss lunches.” Renée watched Ben turn up his collar and exit the cafeteria without a look back. “They were pretty terrible anyway, and I was hoping to lose ten pounds. Of course, he’s got it all wrong. People weren’t angry at him when he took away the cell phones. They were glad! They were relieved someone was thinking about how to keep us all safe. They don’t hold one single thing he’s done against him. Not even what he did to Harold Cross. The only person who blames Ben Patchett for what happened to Harold is Ben Patchett.”

“Harold Cross,” Harper said. “I’ve heard that name before. Who’s Harold Cross and what did Ben do to him?”

Renée blinked, staring at Harper in surprise. “Shot him. You didn’t know that? Shot him right in the throat.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

9

There were little triangles of coconut custard pie on a graham cracker crust for desert, the best and sweetest thing Harper had eaten since she came to camp. She closed her eyes after each spoonful, to better concentrate on the creamy taste of it. It was so good, she felt a little like crying, or at least writing Norma Heald a sincere thank-you card.

Renée was gone for a bit, helping to prepare cocoa for the children, and when she returned she had two mugs of black coffee, and Don Lewiston and Allie Storey in tow. Nick Storey was there, too, trailing along in his big sister’s wake. He carried a mug of hot chocolate before him, with a kind of reverence, not unlike a child bearing the wedding rings at a marriage.

“Are you all right?” Renée asked. “You’re making a face.”

“That’s my orgasm face,” Harper said, around her last bite of pie.

“I don’t think it’s any accident that a slice of pie comes in the exact same shape as a slice of pussy,” Allie said.

“Do you girls want to talk amongst yourselves?” Don asked. “I could come back another time. This conversation is headin’ in a direction what might be upsettin’ to the ears of an innocent like myself.”

“You can sit down,” Renée said, “and tell what happened to Harold Cross. I think Harper ought to know about it, and the both of you can tell it better than I can. Don, you worked with him. Allie, you knew him better than most. And you were both there at the end.”

“I wouldn’t say I knew him all that well. It got to a point where I couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with him,” Allie said.

“But you tried,” Renée said. “You made an effort. There aren’t many other people here who can say that.”

Nick perched on the bench to Allie’s left. He looked from Allie to Renée and back, then moved his hands in the air, asking something of his sister. Allie furrowed her brow and began to make minute gestures with her fingers.

“My mom was a lot better at sign,” Allie said. “I’m only really confident about my finger-spelling. He wants to know what we’re talking about. One good thing about the little guy being deaf. We don’t have to worry about him overhearing the really rotten bits and getting sad.”

“And he doesn’t read lips at all?” Harper asked.

“That’s only in movies.”

Don sipped at his coffee and grimaced. “Tell you what, nothing will cure a case of feeling good faster than a sip of this coffee. Except maybe for talkin’ about Harold Cross.” He set his mug down. “Harold was pretty much always alone. Kind of a fat kid no one liked. Too smart for his own good, y’unnerstand? Smarter than everyone else and happy to let you know it. If you were diggin’ a latrine, he’d tell you a better, more scientific way to do it . . . but he wouldn’t pick up a shovel himself. Would say his back hurt or summin’. You know the type.”

“He wore this striped T-shirt and a pair of black denim shorts and I never saw him wear anything else. He had a booger on that shirt once that was there for three days. Swear to Jesus,” Allie said.

“I remember that booger!” Don said. “He had that thing on his shirt so long, he shoulda given it a name!”

Nick was still watching, and now he asked Allie something else, in a few slow, careful gestures. Allie’s reply was faster this time, and involved a knuckle screwed into her nose, miming the act of digging for boogers. Nick grinned. He dug a stub of pencil out of his jeans and wrote something on his turkey-shaped placemat. He pushed the mat across the table to Harper.

He’d get smoky sometimes, too. Not bad, but like if you throw a lot of wet moss on a campfire. Just a little
nasty
smoke coming out from under his shorts. Allie said it was coming from his
butt-chimney
.

When Harper looked back, Nick had a hand clamped over his mouth and was making a thin, quavering whistle. He might lack the power of speech, but the giggles, it seemed, remained available even to the mute.

Renée said, “He was a former med student, and when I came to camp, he was in charge of the infirmary. I’d guess he was twenty-four years old, maybe twenty-five. He went around with a little reporter’s notebook and sometimes he’d sit on a rock and start scribbling in it. I think that worried some people. You felt like he was taking notes on you.”

Allie said, “Now and then one of the girls would try to snatch his notebook away, to see what he was writing. That would get his Dragonscale acting up and he’d storm off in a haze.
Literally
fuming, you know?”

“From the butt-chimney,” Don Lewiston said, and this time they all laughed,
except
for Nick, who had lost the thread, and could only smile quizzically.

“The first time he joined the Bright, he lit up fast,” Allie said. “Some people get it right away and some people don’t. In Harold’s case, it maybe came over him
too
quickly. He fell into the Bright so fast and hard, it scared him. He screamed and dropped to the floor and rolled around like he was burning. Later he said he didn’t like how it felt, having other people in his head. Which doesn’t
really
happen. It
isn’t
telepathy. No one gets inside your head. It’s just a good feeling, coming off the people around you. It’s like being held. Like the perfect hug. After that first time, Harold just about never lit up. He kept himself at a distance from the rest of us. He wasn’t participating—he was just watching us.”

“Yuh. That’s right,” Don agreed. “Then, one day, after he’d been in camp about two weeks, he stood up at the end of services and said he’d like to address the room. Kinda dumbstruck everyone. As a rule, if there’s any talkin’ to do in chapel, Father Storey or Carol are the ones to do it. It was like watchin’ a TV show and suddenly one a the extras decides to deliver a speech ain’t in the script.”

“Father Storey,” Renée added, “God love that man, he just poked his thinking rock in his mouth and sat down to listen, like a student settling in for a lecture on his favorite subject.”

Allie rasped a hand over the bristly curve of her head. “Harold told us all we had a moral obligation to let the world know about our ‘discovery.’ He said we didn’t belong in hiding. He said we ought to be on cable news, that we ought to go public about what we could do. He said our process of subduing the Dragonscale was of scientific interest and there were lots of people who wanted to know more about us. Aunt Carol said, ‘Harold, darling, what do you mean,
lots
of people want to know about us?’ And Harold said he had been texting with a doctor in Berkeley who thought our community might represent a real breakthrough. There was another doctor in Argentina who wanted Harold to take blood samples after a successful chorus. Harold said all this like it was no big deal. He didn’t seem to have any idea what he had done.”

“Oh, Harper, it was bad,” Renée said. “That was a bad night.”

“Mr. Patchett jumped up and asked how many people he’d been texting with and if he’d been texting from inside camp. Mr. Patchett said tracing the location of a smartphone was the easiest thing in the world and for all Harold knew he was drawing a big X on a map for the local Quarantine Patrols. People started crying, grabbing their kids. We were like people on an airplane who have just heard from the pilot that there’s a terrorist in the cockpit.” Allie’s gaze came unfocused. She wasn’t seeing Harper anymore, but was looking back into a summer night of alarm and commotion. “Mr. Patchett made him give up his cell. He spent three minutes scrolling through Harold’s texts. It turned out he had been in contact with thirty different people, all over the country. All over the world! Sending them photos, too, stuff that would make it easy to identify where we were hiding.”

“Harold wanted the camp to have a vote,” Don Lewiston put in. “Well. He got one all right. Ben led a vote to confiscate every cell phone in camp, had Allie ’n’ Mikey collect ’em all in a great trash bag.”

“I didn’t like what happened to Harold after that,” Renée said. “If we ever did him wrong, it was then.”

Allie nodded. “After the phones got taken away, it was like Harold was a poisonous bug, and the whole camp wanted to keep him under a jar, where he couldn’t sting anyone. Little kids started calling him Horrid instead of Harold. No one would sit with him in the cafeteria, except for Granddad, who can get along with anyone. Then, one day, one of the girls chucked a Frisbee right in Harold’s face and smashed his glasses. She pretended it was an accident, like she meant for him to catch it, but it was really shitty, and I told her it was shitty. I felt like someone had to
try
and stick up for him. I felt like it was bad for all of us, not to care about him. So I helped fix his glasses and I started sitting with him and Granddad at lunch. I signed up for chores with him, so he wouldn’t have to work alone. I had this whole idea I was going to unearth the
real
Harold. Only I did and it was as nasty as the rest of him. We were doing dishes together for Mrs. Heald in the cafeteria one day, and all of a sudden he stuck his hand down my shorts. When I asked him what the fuck he was doing, he said there was no reason for me to be picky about who I screwed, since the whole human race was going down the toilet anyway. I shoved him so hard his glasses fell off and broke again. So that was Harold.”

Nick was looking from face to face with great, fascinated eyes. His cocoa was mostly gone, and there was a smear of chocolate around his mouth, and he was the most Norman Rockwell thing Harper had ever seen. He showed Allie something he had written on his placemat. She borrowed his pencil to reply. Nick nodded, then bent, wrote something more, and pushed it across to Harper.

I tried to warn Allie she couldn’t trust him. He used to make his nastiest butt-smoke whenever he was around her. Deaf people can smell things most peeple can’t, and I could
smell
the
evil
in it.

Harper turned the placemat so Renée could read it. Renée looked at it and looked up at Harper and the two of them erupted into laughter. Harper quaked, surprised at the force of her own jollity; she felt unaccountably close to tears. Nick watched them with bewilderment.

She had a swallow from her mug to calm herself down, then felt a bubble of hilarity rising in her again, and almost coughed coffee back up her nostrils. Renée pounded her on the back until her choking fit had passed.

Don read what Nick had written and one corner of his mouth lifted in a wry smile. “Funny, that. I never smelt evil on him. But I smelt somethin’
else
on him, once . . . and in a way, that was the first domino in the chain that led to him gettin’ kilt. Harold took a job workin’ under my direction, diggin’ up bloodworms for bait. It was funny, him volunteerin’ for a physical job. Kinda like the queen offerin’ to scrub out toilets. No one else wanted him, though, so I took him on my crew. He tolt me he knew a spot south of camp, a marshy flat where the bloodworms were easy to find. He knowed what he was talking about, too. Lots of days he’d come back with more bait than any of the other boys I sent out diggin’. But then other days he’d show up with maybe two worms in his bucket and just shrug and say his luck was bad. Well, I figured on those days he was goin’ off to nap somewheres, and didn’t worry myself too much about it. Till one day, middle a August, he shows up with nothin’, and as he’s puttin’ down his empty pail, he lets a burp slip, and goddamn if I don’t smell pizza on his fackin’ breath. That didn’t sit easy with me. You may have noticed, pizza ain’t on the menu here in Camp Wyndham. I slept an uneasy sleep, and the next day, I decided I had to pass a word along to Ben Patchett. Ben wasn’t no more happy about it than I was. He got real stiff and pale and sat rubbin’ his mouth a while, and finally said he was glad I spoke up. Then he asked me if I’d mind making Michael a part of my bait team for a week. I knew what Mikey was goin’ to be diggin’ for, and it wasn’t worms, but we had to find out what Cross was up to, so I said ayuh. Well, Mikey took to trailin’ him at a distance. The first few days, the worst thing he seen Harold do was take a dump and use the pages from one of the camp library books for toilet paper.”

Renée winced. “It turned out to be
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
. Our only copy. If I had known what he was going to do with it, I would’ve given him a copy of
Atlas Shrugged
.”

“On the fourth day, though, our boy Mike followed Harold to an abandoned summer cottage a half mile away, place with a generator and Internet. The boy is in there on a laptop, typin’ e-mails with one hand and crammin’ down a pepperoni Hot Pocket with the other. Not only was Harold right back to the same tricks, spillin’ our secrets to the same people, but he had a whole deep freezer full a chow he was keepin’ to his own self.”

Don passed the job of telling the story to Allie with a sidelong look. She nodded and went on, “I was there when Mike showed up. This was over at the House of the Black Star, where my aunt lives with Granddad. This wasn’t so long after my mom passed away.” Allie spoke quietly, neither hiding her pain nor making a display of it. “Aunt Carol had some of Mom’s things and she asked me to look through them and see if there was anything I wanted for Nick and myself. There wasn’t anything, really, except this.” She touched a finger to the book-shaped gold locket at her throat. “When Mike came in and said what he had seen, we stopped what we were doing, and Granddad sent me to find Mr. Patchett. By the time I got back with Ben, Aunt Carol was sitting in a chair with her face in her hands and she had gray threads of smoke coming off her. She was
so
stressed.

“She said we needed to force Harold out of camp. But Mr. Patchett said that would be the worst thing we could do. If we sent Harold away and he got picked up by a Quarantine Patrol, they’d make him tell everything he knew about us. Mr. Patchett wanted to lock Harold up somewhere, but Granddad said it would be enough to make Harold promise to remain on camp grounds and stop contacting outsiders. Carol and Mr. Patchett gave each other this look, like: Which of us is going to tell him that’s the most senile thing he’s ever said? But the thing about my granddad is . . . it’s kind of hard to convince him people won’t just do the right thing. You hate to say anything that sounds hostile or untrusting or small-hearted around him. You feel like he’d be disappointed in you. Mr. Patchett gave in. He got Granddad to agree to keep Harold under close watch and that was it.”