14 - School House Fire

I can smell the smoke days after it happened.

I didn’t see the fire; I wish I had.

I always miss the good things when they happen even thought Uncle Harry says it isn’t good.

He also tells me to stay away from Dave; he just won’t tell me why.

Someone says Dave down by the school when the fire started, is all Harry says.

Nobody sets fire to school on the last day, not even Dave, bitter as he is at being left back in the sixth grade again.

The fire didn’t gut the school the way neighbors say but could have it the janitor hadn’t seen smoke and called the police.

Newspapers are always betting stuff like that wrong; it’s why I read them; it’s why Harry always curses when he first gets up; he believes what he reads, and it pisses him off.

Kids in the neighborhood think Dave did it, too.

What was he doing there if he didn’t start it, my other friend, Ralph asks, then asks me what I think, since I’m Dave’s best friend?

I’m Dave’s only friend. But that doesn’t mean I know what makes him tick; I don’t.

I don’t think he set the fire; that’s something I might do.

Still, I think back to that time on the Parkway bridge when I thought I light the match and sent it down onto the top of the cars driving below.

Now I wonder.

Maybe he ticks like a time bomb.

Maybe getting left back set him off; his younger brother, Dennis, egging him on, since Harry says someone said they saw Dennis down there, too.

My other friends, Ralph and Bill, Bob and Louie, all want me to go ask Dave: “He’ll talk to you,” they say.

“How can I talk to him when he’s in jail?” I say.

They say he’s not. The police took him home

I think if they think he did it why did they take him home.

“Stay away from him,” Harry tells me.

So I have to sneak out of the house when I decide to go, easing out the kitchen door while my uncles are watching V in the living room, out onto the porch and across the yard, knowing I can’t go across the boatyard or down the front stairs without risk that one uncle or another might look out the window and see me.

They’re in a mood; they might call the police.

I climb the rear fence into Mrs. Gunya’s garden and cross the manicured lawn to the flower bed near the First Street fence and climb over that one, too. She used to have a dog that kept people like me from doing this like this. But now she doesn’t. Someone poisoned the dog. I swear it wasn’t me.

I don’t go to Dave’s house first; I go down the hill to where the school is; the fire trucks are gone; so are all the police cars, except one with a bored maybe sleepy cop behind the wheel.

They left plenty of yellow tape for me to look at, duck under, get closer to the part where the fire happened.

To me, fire smells sweet, just the way blood does.

This isn’t sweet; it’s sour like melted plastic or burnt rubber.

I don’t gag; I just hold my breath until I stop feeling like I want to puke.

The fire didn’t burn down the school; it painted some of the windows black, and some of the bricks, and melted the banner that floated between the two wings that celebrates the city’s 50th anniversary.

This is all wrong.

Nobody burns down a school on the last day, even I know better – you wait until school is ready to open that way it stays closed longer. Burn it now, people will spend all summer getting it read and the fire stops meaning anything.

The newspaper made a big deal about it; how kids could have gotten hurt, how the dastardly act might have killed someone if not for the heroic efforts of the janitor who called the cops in time.

The papers get everything wrong; the only one in the school at the time was the janitor; and even he shouldn’t have been there.

The Dave I know I don’t know wouldn’t hurt anybody, no matter how many times they left him back.

Blaming me makes more sense. I don’t think. I do things then regret them, then still do them again like the old lady near the factory lot that called the cops when she saw me cutting through her yard like I did in Mrs. Gunya’s.

I cut through everybody’s yard. It’s no big deal. It’s no reason to call the cops on me. She did; it made me angry. I made Dave come with me when I decided to get even with her, one more mission for the Dynamic Duo, only this time it’s not imaginary, I told him, as we rolled out bicycles out his downstairs doorway to the street, peddling as fast as we could to get to her house where I lit the fuses to the ash cans I set by her door.

It didn’t go off for so long Dave didn’t think it would go off just the way he thought the rocket wouldn’t go off on the Fourth of July, when it did, and he wanted me to go check to see what went wrong, and I told him I had no intention of having the ash cans blow up in my face.

Maybe that’s what Dave wanted; he hated the ash can idea, scared that the old lady might keel over and die from the shock. I told him old ladies like that don’t die like that, someone poisons them like someone did Mrs. Gunya’s dog or runs them over in a car.

She’s so tough the mailman’s more scared of her than he is her dog.

Some people are born like that, too tough for anything to phase them.

All I wanted was to scare her enough for her to know not everybody is scared of her.

So, we put the ahs cans inside her front door; she leaves it open, so the paper boy won’t leave the paper on the stop where it always gets wet.

Then we ran, hid behind a parked car on the street and waited.

Then we waited some more.

And when we couldn’t wait after that, I refused to go back.

Then I did get scared. I thought she’d call the cops again and the cops would find us and know we were the ones who put it there and think like Dave thinks that I tried to kill her.

So, we jumped on our bikes again and peddled as fast as we could to get as far from that house as we could, so if the cops caught us, they couldn’t prove we’d come anywhere near the place.

We peddled so hard I thought if anyone died of a heart attack that night, it would be me.

When the bang came, it sounded big – bigger even than when we threw ash cans in Emerald’s Cave to scare the gang there, bigger even than when the rocket demolished the old tree trunk in my back yard on the Fourth of July.

And me being me, I insisted we go back and look, even thought I thought the cops might see us and add two with two and come up with us at the culprits

I just can’t help wanting to see my own handiwork.

And so, I dragged Dave back on the street full of cops and fire engineers and someone who must have been the fire chief scratching his head, mumbling about the old lady being right about there being a gas leak, and how lucky she was she wasn’t at home.

And Dave and me, we just stared at the flames consumed the house.

That smoke hadn’t smelled sweet either.

So, when I get sick of stair at the blackened windows of the school, I head up to Dave’s house to ask him what’s what.

Since his mother already thinks I get Dave into too much trouble, I know better than to ring the bell. I pick up stones and throw them at the third-floor window where I know he and Dennis share a room. I miss twice before I hit glass.

Nobody answers, so I do it again, and again, until somebody does, and this turns out to be Dennis.

“I need to talk to Dave,” I say, trying to sound loud enough without sounding too loud to alert Dave’s mom who is watching TV on the second floor.

“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” Dennis says.

“Why not?”

“Go Away.”

“Nor until I get an answer,” I say, staring at Dennis’s round face in the dim light. He looks a lot like a Jack-o-lantern.

“Go away.”

“I’ll right the bell,” I say, “and ask your mother.”

“Don’t do that!” Dennis squeals “You’ll get him in even more trouble.”

“What do you mean – more trouble?”

“Dave thinks you set the fire at school.”

“Me? Why would I do that?”

“Why do you do anything?” Dennis asks. “Just go away.”

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