Page 150 - What They Did to the Kid

138 Jack Fritscher

“Throw dirt on it.” Lock beat at the burning grass with his shirt.
“Get that side of the clearing.”
“Break up that crate box, Ry. Hurry.” Mike stamped around on
the burning grass, flames licking at his shoes.
We beat at it, clawing handfuls of smothering dirt. “Piss on it,”
I kept yelling at the visions of the goddam woods burning down,
flames licking up Misery’s bricks, burning the wood floors and desks
and papers and books and chapel pews, melting the gold chalices
and the gold tabernacle, fireballs shooting up the bell tower, flames
roaring out the top, setting the bells ringing madly, like the fall of
Troy, fire itself the flaming Trojan Horse, burning down the school
house, sacking the seminary, like all the war stories in our Latin and
Greek lessons, and Gunn shipping us out.
The wind funneled the main fire hot up through the frame of
the couch that was blazing alone in the center of the garden while
wider and wider a ring of fire spread out through the dry grass.
“Piss on it, goddammit.” I really had never said anything like
that before except once or twice to show off. Now the words seemed
commanding. My heart pounded in my chest. We were choking on
the smoke. But finally we beat the fire out. At the edge of the burned
circle, grass smoked and died. The couch collapsed and crumbled all
over itself on top of the scorched garden patch.
Lock and I laid down inside the warm circle of ash-white black,
exhausted.
“Oh God,” was all I said. “Oh God, Gunn would have killed us.”
Mike was laughing, dancing, mimicking how I had kept scream-
ing, “Goddammit! Piss on it!”
“This sure ought to fix Hank’s buns,” Mike said.
Lock, for the first time in his straight-A life, looked happily
ridiculous, sitting with part of his burnt shirt in his blackened hand.
Dust stuck all over him stripped to the waist. He looked like a wild
blond Indian. I pulled off my sweatshirt to my teeshirt and tossed
it to him.
We threw more dirt on the couch, and on each other, in a sud-
den wild dirt fight of dust and ash, jumping, wrestling, tossing each
other to the ground, constantly changing two against one, every-
one for himself in a free-for-all, until Mike stopped, leaving Lock

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