further. His tongue snaked out and touched the bottom of the ridiculous mustache.
“The head’s only part of it,” Annabelle said mercilessly, recovering her power of speech. She drew a gray silk arm across her face. So much for that suit. “Tell him about his lungs.”
The doctor looked down at his feet. One shoe went back and forth, grinding out the cigarette he probably wanted. I wanted one, too.
“He inhaled fire,” the doctor said. “He got up before the old woman threw the blanket over him. Perfectly natural reflex, of course. Anybody who’d been set on fire would get up. Try to run away from the fire. Try to find water, maybe. I’d do it, too. Even though it’s the worst possible thing to do.” He exhaled a quart of pent-up air. “But there wasn’t any water around. So he breathed fire.”
“So he can’t talk?” I asked.
“Nothing anybody could understand,” said the doctor.
Bobby Grant put an arm around Annabelle’s shoulders, and she shrugged it off like an unwanted fall of snow. Her eyes were on her father.
“Isn’t there someplace else you can take him?” I asked. “And what old woman?”
“The old woman who kept him from burning to death there and then, may her soul rot in hell,” Annabelle Winston said. She was finished with crying; she’d put it behind her as though it had been a social gaffe. “At least then it would have been over quickly. Instead of this. And, no, you can’t move him. Even if there were anywhere better, which there isn’t. We already moved him once, from County USC to here. They didn’t even want us to do that.”
“Burn victims just get worse,” the doctor said apologetically. “Infection. Every burn is infected. The skin, the hair follicles, are teeming with bacteria. Move them and they die. Excuse me, Miss Winston.”
“I’ve heard it before,” Annabelle Winston said. “Take a look at Santa Claus, Simeon. Take a good look, and then tell me you’re quitting.”
Bobby Grant put in his two hundred dollars’ worth. “I don’t know how you could,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “you’re not me.” I turned to go.
There was a sound behind me, like the rasping of a file over iron, and I turned back. The human parody on the metal bed lifted a greasy, ointment-covered arm.
“He should be out,” the doctor said worriedly. “A normal human being would be out cold.”
“He’s not a normal human being,” Annabelle said, crossing to the bed. “He’s Abraham Winston.”
“Schossshuaaa?” said the thing on the metal frame.
“Yes, Daddy,” Annabelle Winston said. “I’m here. It’s Joshua.”
“Surrammatagga,” said the thing on the metal frame, its open eyes locked on Annabelle’s. “Dhooo shomeshing.” With supernatural force, it lifted its shoulders and turned its head. “Dhooo shomeshing,” it repeated.
“We’re going to do something,” Annabelle said in a businesslike tone. She turned and pointed a gray silk arm at me. “We’re going to get him. This is the man who’s going to do it.”
The pumpkin head turned to me. Its red, tiny, swollen eyes bore in on mine and found me lacking. Then, with a clogged cough, Abraham Winston passed out.
“Everybody,” the doctor said in a stricken voice. “Everybody out of the room. Now.” We all went. Even Bobby Grant had nothing to say.
In the corridor, Annabelle Winston clutched my hand in hers. All the control was gone, washed away by tears and terror. “Say you’ll stay with it,” she pleaded. She’d gotten a case of hiccups. They made her sound twelve years old.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” Bobby Grant was smart enough to shut up and stay shut up.
“You have to,” she said. “You’ve seen him.”
“Maybe,” I said again. I shook the two of them loose and headed for the parking lot. Alice started with ironic ease, and I drove home, full of righteous determination to quit once and for all the next morning. When I got home, I opened a Singha beer and congratulated myself on a narrow escape. Resolving myself that I’d quit for good over the phone in the morning, I drank until dark. Then I went to bed and tried not to dream. I almost succeeded. I only had to get up twice for water.
While I slept, Abraham Winston died, and the Crisper set fire to another bum. When I woke up and went down the driveway on my way to Eleanor, there was a new letter in my mailbox.
PART TWO
6
This is what it said: You didn’t answer my letter. Is that polite? I want very much to be polite. Etiquette is one of the few things left to us in these times. I’m joking, of course. You couldn’t have answered my letter no matter how polite you are.
The people I burn, they have no notion of what it is to be polite.
Who are they, anyway? Biological misfires. Good for fuel but for nothing else.
All right, perhaps the next-to-the-last one, the Winston man, was a mistake. Even if he was past it when we met. Past knowing, past doing. Can’t I make the occasional mistake? God knows, whichever god we mean, everyone else makes mistakes. Ahriman has his way more often than we would like to admit. Last night’s fire, however, was no mistake.
You and I, though, perhaps you and I are brothers. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps you also are fuel. You would know more about that than I. Surely you can also smell the corruption. If you cannot, if you are also fuel, I will know it before you do. I will know it long before you do.
There was a double space, a breathing space, exactly ruled out on the brown paper of the shopping bag, an ironic choice of stationery given the possession of Abraham Winston, possessions that included a skinless-wiener factory, a forest, and the paper mill that turned the forest into the paper bags that happy housewives carried home from his supermarkets. After the double space, the gold-lettered, precisely formed message continued. Still as long as we’re chatting, I am not the Crisper, of all the ridiculous names. It sounds like the place where you keep the lettuce. I am, respectfully yours, the
— Incinerator
“He’s in his forties,” Hammond said to the very full room. “No one younger than that remembers incinerators. The law against burning trash passed in 1957.”
The comment fell flat. It lay in the center of the big conference table and writhed a while, waiting for someone to come to its assistance.
“Hey,” said the cop who was working the slide projector. “We through with this thing or not?”
“Not,” said the ranking cop in the room, a white-haired man with a flat stomach, high, narrow shoulders, and an alcoholic’s map of veins on his cheeks. “Just leave it on the screen.” He also had small, deeply set eyes and a mean pug nose that brought to mind the old joke about Polish bulldogs getting flat noses from chasing parked cars. The magnified version of the Incinerator’s letter, illuminated with metallic flames and floating spirits, remained on the wall. As before, the first capital initial was larger than the others, a carefully drawn Y arising from a bed of coals. Various people either looked at it or ignored it. There were a lot of people.
“I remember incinerators, too,” Annabelle Winston said. “We had them in Chicago.” Next to her, nodding agreement, sat Bobby Grant, wearing yet another safari shirt. This one had enough pockets to outfit the expedition
