Three-Oh-Seven

The alarm went off under my pillow at 3:07, and for once I was already awake.

I had not slept. I had lain on the cot for six hours in my sneakers and my coat, on top of the covers, with my eyes open, listening to the house. I knew its sounds by now. The tick of the tin roof cooling. The hum of the refrigerator, a note below the bass. The soft double bump of Biscuit turning over in the hall, and the long-drawn sigh he gave when he settled. My mother lay on the camp mattress on the floor beside me, because she had stopped asking to go back to the couch. She was asleep, finally, on her side with her knees drawn up and one hand under her cheek, and the sight of her was the loneliest thing I have ever looked at.

I had put the chair under the knob at nine. I had checked the window latch at ten and again at midnight. I had gone through the house in my socks, trying the doors, touching each lock the way a priest touches a rail. I had been so careful.

The phone buzzed against my ear. A small hard insect shiver. The cracked screen glowed blue-green in my fist: 3:07 — Word of the night.

And the house went dark.

It was not a flicker. It was not the slow dying of a bulb. It was the sound of a hand closing. The refrigerator quit mid-note, the swamp cooler on the roof gave a clank and a long exhausted wheeze, and the little red light on the smoke detector over the door, which I had been watching for six hours, went out. All at once the house was entirely, enormously quiet. Through the thin walls I heard the street fall silent, too. No hum from the power line. No buzz from the lamp at the corner. The whole neighborhood, ten blocks of low houses and gravel yards, had stopped like a heart.

I sat up. I was shaking, and my voice, when I found it, came out as a whisper.

"Mom."

She was up before I finished the word. That's something I will always remember. She came up out of sleep as if she had been pulled on a string, her eyes open and her hand already reaching for me, and in the black I heard her breathe in, once, and hold it. She did not ask. She did not say what.

"It's now," I said. "It's tonight."

"Okay."

"Don't use the door."

"Okay."

"Don't use your phone. Don't turn on a light. Don't—"

"June." Her fingers closed around my wrist. "I know."

I sat there with my heart going, and the knowledge came down on me like cold water, because this was not like the building. In the building there were stairs and fire doors. Here there were three rooms, a hall, and two doors. I had a plan for stairs. I had worked out the building to the second.

I had not planned for a house.

Then I smelled it.

…

It was coming under the door.

It was a thick, flat, sweetish, clinging smell, the smell of the red can my father kept beside the lawn mower in the garage of the house where I was six. It crept through the crack at the bottom of the door in a low invisible tide, and I felt it on my ankles before I understood it. My eyes began to water.

"Gas," whispered my mother. "June, that's—"

"Don't touch the light switch."

"I won't."

"Don't anything."

I had her by the hand now, and I was dragging her to the window. It was a high one, as I've said, set up near the ceiling, two feet by three, with a bamboo shade and a plain latch. I dragged the cot beneath it and climbed. I tore the shade down. Behind it, the glass was a dull square of starlight, and I wrestled the latch open and shoved the sash up, and the cold night air poured in over my face, carrying with it the same stink, thicker.

They were all around the house.

I knew it with every cell in my body. The fumes were not coming from a single place. They were coming from everywhere. Someone had walked the whole house in the dark, calmly, patiently, like a man watering a lawn.

"Boost me," I said.

"Go through, I'll—"

"Boost me!"

She did. She made a step with her laced hands, and I went up and through, headfirst, scraping my ribs on the sill, and dropped onto the gravel on my palms. I turned. My mother's face hung in the window like a pale moon. She was reaching down for the bag, the green folder, her purse. I said, "Leave it." She hesitated, and then she came, climbing out with her knees on the sill, and I caught her by the arms and pulled until she fell on top of me in the dirt.

We lay there for a moment, tangled, in the cold, under stars sharp as pinholes in black paper. There was no light anywhere, not on the street, not in any window.

And then, from inside the house, I heard the dog begin to bark.

…

I should have known. I should have counted.

There were five of us in that house, and I had counted only two.

"Corinne," my mother said. I felt her go still. "Gary."

"They're in the front bedroom."

"They would have woken up."

"They didn't," I said.

I knew it before I said it. I had been in the kitchen at dinner. A pot of stew, a loaf of bread, a bowl of salad. Corinne had come home with a bag from the market and a bottle of wine, a gift from a neighbor, a woman we'd never met, who had left it on the porch with a note. Welcome to the neighborhood. We had all had a glass. I had put two fingers of it in my mouth, one sip, a sour mouthful, and spat it in the sink when no one was looking. And I had looked at Gary's face, and the heavy blink of his lids, and Corinne's lazy smile, an hour after dinner, as they went off to bed like children, laughing at nothing. I had thought: it's just the wine.

I had thought it was wine.

"Stay here," said my mother.

"No."

"June, stay here—"

"I'm coming."

It was the only argument we had. It took half a second. She saw my face in the starlight, and what she saw in it made her stop, and she nodded once, hard. We ran around the side of the house, hunched and fast, over the cold crunch of gravel, to the bedroom window at the front. It was open a few inches. The curtain stirred in the draft. The smell was so thick there that I could taste it, an oily film on the back of my tongue.

I heard a hiss, then a pop, like a log in a stove.

In the dark behind the bedroom wall, something caught.

…

I have tried since to remember the next four minutes in order, and I cannot. It comes back as flashes, like a film cut with the wrong scissors. The window going up with a shriek of old paint. My mother's voice, hoarse and desperate, hissing Corinne, Corinne, wake up. A light blossoming in the hall, orange, low, running along the baseboard in a thin bright thread, with a sound like someone turning the pages of an enormous book.

Corinne's body, a dead weight, limp as a sack of flour, her head lolling, the pillow slipping from her hair. She was breathing. I saw her chest. It rose and fell, slow and even, while the room filled with light. We got her under the arms. My mother took her shoulders and I took her legs and we hauled her over the sill, and she came out all at once and landed on the gravel on her side, snoring.

"Gary," my mother panted. "Gary—"

He was too heavy. He was a big man, six feet and two-forty, a long-haul trucker who had taken the week off, and he lay on the far side of the bed with his mouth open and one arm flung over the edge. We pulled until my shoulder wrenched and my vision went white. The ceiling was a roaring red tent. I saw the flames lift off the carpet and walk up the wall and lick at the curtains, and the heat hit my face like an open oven.

"We have to go!" I screamed.

"Not without him!"

"Mom—"

Biscuit did it.

I will always say so. He leapt onto the bed. He did not bark. He took Gary's sleeve in his teeth, the way he took the rope toy in the yard, and threw himself backward with all his weight, and the big man slid six inches. My mother seized his belt. I seized his collar. The three of us heaved, and Gary's body came off the mattress with a wet tearing sound, and fell, and we dragged him the last yards to the window in a wild stumble of limbs and fur and smoke, and rolled him over the sill and into the cold night, and dropped after.

Behind us the ceiling of the front bedroom came down.

…

We carried them to the gully behind the lot.

I don't know how. It was perhaps two hundred yards, past the dead lemon tree in its pot, through a gap in the barbed wire, down a short sandy slope into the dry wash behind the property. It was a bed of pale sand and loose rocks, six feet deep, with a concrete culvert at its head big enough to crawl into. We put Corinne in it. We put Gary beside her. My mother crouched at the mouth with her hands on her knees, coughing, and the dog pressed against her legs and shivered.

Behind us the house burned.

It burned the way a lit match burns. In thirty seconds it was a blazing box, with the flames pouring out of every window. The tin sheets screamed as they warped. Glass burst, one pane after another, and the sparks went up in a great slow spiral, whirling and dying against the dark. I had never seen anything so beautiful, and I hated it with my whole heart.

The sky was orange. It lit the entire desert, and every spiny arm of every saguaro stood out in black against the glow, like the hands of the drowned.

I heard a sound on the road.

It was far off, and small, and it came on the wind between the roaring of the fire: a dry, wet, ragged cough. A man's cough. It rattled in his chest like a pebble in a can. It went on and on, a series of hacking barks, then a long rasp and a spit. I knew it the way you know your own name. I had heard it in the stairwell of a building two thousand miles away.

At the far end of our street, where the gravel gave out and the paved road began, a figure stood in the glow. It was tall and loose and thin, with its hands in the pockets of a long coat. It stood quite still. It was watching the house burn.

I smelled it then, riding on the smoke, faint but unmistakable, sweet and sour, overripe, like the rind of an orange left in a coat pocket all winter.

"Mom," I said.

"I see him."

"Don't move."

"I'm not."

Lyle Cobb coughed again. He took a hand out of his pocket and wiped his mouth. He looked for a long time at the burning house, with his head cocked, like a man listening to music. And then, slowly, he turned, and I saw his face lift and move along the line of the wash, and I pressed myself flat to the sand beside my mother, and we lay in the dark with our faces in the cold dirt and did not breathe.

He looked toward us for the space of three heartbeats.

Then someone, far up the street, began to scream.

…

When he was gone, I crawled to the culvert.

It was the only thing that I could do. I crawled to the mouth, where my mother had laid Corinne, and checked that she was breathing, and checked Gary, and sat back on my heels in the sand. My hands had stopped shaking. They had gone cold and numb. Somewhere in the distance, a long way off, I could hear a siren winding up.

I took off my right shoe.

I don't know why. I think I wanted to see. I unlaced it by feel and pulled it off and turned it over in my hand, and slid my fingers under the edge of the insole. There was a damp spot. A broken irrigation line upstream had been seeping into the wash for days, and there was an inch of cold water standing in the bottom of the culvert, which I had knelt in without noticing. My shoe was soaked through.

I found the paper.

It came out in a gray wad, soft and cold, like something that had been chewed. I unrolled it on my knee. The pencil had run. It had smeared into a loose bluish cloud, a Rorschach blot of smudged lead, and as I held it up to the faint orange light of the fire, I saw the first digit and the second and the third dissolve into one another. There was an area code. I could still read that. There was the first group of numbers, three of them, maybe four.

The rest was a gray stain.

I had meant to memorize it. I had read it once, in the basement, in the strange yellow light, and put it in my shoe, and told myself for four weeks that I knew it. You remember that number. I sat in the sand with the soaked scrap in my hand and the roar of the fire in my ears, and I tried, and I could not.

The sirens came closer. Red lights were wheeling over the hill.

"June?" said my mother. "Baby, they're here. They've come."

I looked up.

An engine pulled into the drive, a big red truck with a ladder, its lights splashing the burning house with crimson. Men in yellow coats jumped from the cab. A hose unreeled. A man shouted. Behind the engine, a second truck, and then an ambulance, and then a patrol car with its blue lights revolving. People had come out of the dark houses along the road, in robes and pajamas, and were standing in clumps with their hands over their mouths.

Everything we owned was in that house. The papers. The money. The green folder. The phone. The laptop with four hundred pages of other people's sentences. The note from Dunleavy that I had never burned. My mother's wallet, my notebook, the little blue-handled scissors with my name scratched in the handle, the calendar on the wall with its rows of red X's. It was all up there, in the roaring light, going to gray.

And along the road, past the end of our street, from the direction of the highway, a car was coming.

It was not an emergency vehicle. It had no lights. It moved very slowly, at a walking pace, with its headlamps dark. It was long and dark and low, and it passed the burning house on the far side of the road, at the exact speed of a man who is looking at something he made. I saw the shape of the roof. I saw the light of the flames slide over its windows, one after another, orange, orange, orange.

It did not stop.