Mister B. Gone

Quitoon smiled his wicked, shiny smile. 'You're right.' He shrugged. 'It doesn't.' He took his malice-gazed eyes off the pieman and turned them on me.

'What made you follow me?' he wanted to know. 'I thought we'd parted on the road and that was the end of things between us.'

'So did I.'

'So what happened?'

'I was wrong.'

'About what?'

'About going on without you. There… there didn't seem… any purpose.'

'I'm moved.'

'You don't sound it.'

'Now I disappoint you. Poor Jakabok. Were you hoping for some great moment of reconciliation? Were you hoping perhaps that we'd fall weeping into one another's arms? And that I'd tell you all the tender things I tell you in your dreams?'

'What do you know about my dreams?'

'Oh, a lot more than you imagine,' he said to me.

He's been in my dreams, I thought. He's read the book of my sleeping thoughts. He had even written himself into them if it amused him to do so. Perhaps Quitoon was the reason I'd dreamt of that strange wedding. Perhaps it wasn't my unnatural desire surfacing, but his.

There was a curious comfort in this knowledge. If the idyll of our wedding had been Quitoon's invention than I was perhaps safer from his harm than I'd imagined. Only a mind that was infatuated with another could conceive of a joy such as I had dreamt: the trees that lined the path to the wedding place in full blossom, the breeze shaking their perfumed branches so that the air was filled with petals like one-winged butterflies, spiraling earthward.

Well, I would remind Quitoon of this vision when we were alone. I would drag him cursing and screeching out of that room he had somewhere, filled with costumes and disguises: the place where he worked to have power over me.

But for now the only urgent business I had was to keep my sometime friend from setting me on fire where I stood. I could not help but remember him staring at me as I lay in the dirt of the ditch. There had been no smile on his lips then. Just four loveless words:

Worm, he'd said, prepare to burn. Was that what he was thinking now? Was there a murderous fire being stoked in the furnace of his stomach, ready to be spewed out at me when he deemed the moment appropriate?

'You look nervous, Mister B.'

'Not nervous, just surprised.'

'At what?'

'You. Here. I didn't expect to see you again so soon.'

'Then, again I ask you why did you follow me?'

'I didn't.'

'You're a liar. A bad liar. A terrible liar.' He shook his head. 'I despair of you, truly I do. Have you learned nothing over the years? If you can't tell a decent lie, then tell me the truth.' He glanced over at the pieman. 'Or are you attempting to preserve some fragment of dignity for this imbecile's sake?'

'He's not an imbecile. He makes pies.'

'Oh, well.' Quitoon laughed, genuinely amused at this. 'If he makes pies, no wonder you don't want him knowing your secrets.'

'They're good pies,' I said.

'Apparently so. As he has sold them all. He's going to need to bake some more.'

At this point, the pieman spoke up, which unfortunately won him Quitoon's gaze.

'I'll cook some for you,' he said to Quitoon. 'Meat pies I can do you, but it's my sweet pies that I'm known for. Honey and apricots, that's a favorite amongst my customers.'

'But however do you cook them?' Quitoon said. I'd heard that sing-song tone of mock-fascination in his voice before, and it wasn't a good sign.

'Leave him alone,' I said to Quitoon.

'No,' he said, keeping his gaze fixed on the man. 'I don't think I will. In fact, I'm certain of it. You were saying,' he said to the man, 'about your pies.'

'Just that I cook the sweet ones best.'

'But you can't cook them here, can you?'

The pieman looked a little puzzled by the obviousness of this remark. I silently willed him to let puzzlement silence his tongue so that the little death game Quitoon was playing could be brought to a harmless conclusion.

But no. Quitoon had begun the game and would not be content until he was ready to be done.

'What I mean to say is, you don't make cold pies, do you?'

'God in Heaven, no!' The pieman laughed. 'I need an oven.'

If he'd stopped there, even, the worst might still have been avoided. But he wasn't quite done. He needed an oven, yes…

'And a good fire,' he added.

'A fire, you say?'

'Quitoon, please,' I begged. 'Let him be.'

'But you heard what the man wanted,' Quitoon replied. 'You heard it from his own lips.'

I ceased my entreaties. They were purposeless, I knew. The peculiar motion, like a subtle shudder that preceded the spewing forth of fire, had already passed through Quitoon's body.

'He wanted a fire,' he said to me, 'and a fire he shall have.'

At that moment, as the fire broke from Quitoon's lips, I did something sudden and stupid. I threw myself between the fire and its target.

I had burned before. I knew that even on a day such as today, which was full of little apocalypses, that fire couldn't do much damage. But Quitoon's flames had an intelligence entirely their own, and they instantly went where they could do me most harm, which was of course to those parts of my body where the first fire had failed to touch me. I turned my back to him yelling for the pieman to go, go, and went behind the counter where the pool of the butcher's blood was now three times as big as it had been when I'd first laid eyes on him. I threw myself down into the blood as though it were a pool of spring water, rolling around in it. The smell was disgusting, of course. But I didn't care. I could hear the satisfying sizzle of my burning flesh being put out by the good butcher's offering, and a few seconds later I rose, smoking and dripping from behind the counter.

I was too late to intervene again on behalf of the pieman. Quitoon had caught him at the door. He was entirely engulfed in flames, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open, but robbed of sound by his first and last inhalation of fire. As for Quitoon, he was nonchalantly walking around the burning man, plucking an ambitious flame from the conflagration and letting it dance between his fingers a while before extinguishing it in his fist. And while he played, and the pieman blazed, Quitoon asked him questions, dangling as a reward for the man's replies (one nod for yes, two for no) the prospect of a quick end to his suffering. He wanted first to know whether the pieman had ever burned any of his pies.

One nod for that.

'Burned black, were they?'

Another nod.

'But they didn't suffer. That's what you hoped, I'm sure, being a good Christian.'

Again, the affirmative nod, though the fire was rapidly consuming the pieman's power of self control.

'You were wrong, though,' Quitoon went on. 'There's nothing that does not know suffering. Nothing in all the world. So you be happy in your fire, pieman, because — ' He stopped, and a puzzled expression came onto his face. He cocked his head, as if listening to something that was hard for him to hear over the noise of burning. But even if the message was incomplete he had caught the general sense of it and he was appalled.

'Damn them,' he growled, and, casually pushing the burning man aside, he went to the door.