Firestarter

telephone if it rang and to go down the cellar if someone drove in while they were gone. Hofferitz’s words, like a parrot in a cage, haunted Irv. He bought a pile of schoolbooks-in Albanyand-took up teaching Charlie himself. Although she was quick, he was not particularly good at it. Norma was a little better. But sometimes the two of them would be sitting at the kitchen table, bent over a history or geography book, and Norma would look up at him with a question in her eyes… a question for which Irv had no answer.

The New Year came; February; March. Charlie’s birthday. Presents bought in Albany. Like a parrot in a cage. Charlie did not seem entirely to mind, and in some ways, Irv reasoned to himself on nights when he couldn’t sleep, perhaps it had been the best thing in the world for her, this period of slow healing, of each day taken in its slow winter course. But what came next? He didn’t know.

There was the day in early April after a drenching two-day rain when the damned kindling was so damp he couldn’t get the kitchen stove lit.

“Stand back a second,” Charlie said, and he did, automatically, thinking she wanted to look at something in there. He felt something pass him in midair, something tight and hot, and a moment later the kindling was blazing nicely.

Irv stared around at her, wide-eyed, and saw Charlie looking back at him with a kind of nervous, guilty hope on her face. “I helped you, didn’t I?” she said in a voice that was not quite steady. “It wasn’t really bad, was it?”

“No,” he said. “Not if you can control it, Charlie.”

“I can control the little ones.”

“Just don’t do it around Norma, girl. She’d drop her teddies.”

Charlie smiled a little.

Irv hesitated and then said, “For myself, anytime you want to give me a hand and save me messing around with that damned kindling, you go right ahead. I’ve never been any good at it.”

“I will,” she said, smiling more now. “And I’ll be careful.” “Sure. Sure you will,” he said, and for just a moment he saw those men on the porch again, beating at their flaming hair, trying to put it out. Charlie’s healing quickened, but still there were bad dreams and her appetite remained poor. She was what Norma Manders called “peckish.”

Sometimes she would wake up from these nightmares with shuddering suddenness, not so much pulled from sleep as ejected from it, like a fighter pilot from his plane. This happened to her one night during the second week of April; at one moment she was asleep, and at the next she was wide awake in her narrow bed in the back room, her body coated with sweat. For a moment the nightmare remained with her, vivid and terrible (the sap was running freely in the maples now, and Irv had taken her with him that afternoon to change the buckets; in her dream they had been sapping again, and she had heard something behind and had looked back to see John Rainbird creeping up on them, flitting from tree to tree, barely visible; his one eye glittered with a baleful lack of mercy, and his gun, the one he had shot her daddy with, was in one hand, and he was gaining). And then it slipped away. Mercifully, she could remember none of the bad dreams for long, and she rarely screamed anymore upon awakening from them, frightening Irv and Norma into her room to see what was wrong.

Charlie heard them talking in the kitchen. She fumbled for the Big Ben on her dresser and brought it close to her face. It was ten o'clock. She had been asleep only an hour and a half.

“-going to do?” Norma asked.

It was wrong to eavesdrop, but how could she help it? And they were talking about her; she knew it.

“I don’t know,” Irv said.

“Have you thought anymore about the paper?”

Papers, Charlie thought. Daddy wanted to talk to the papers. Daddy said it would be all right then. “Which one?” Irv asked. “The Hastings Bugle? They can put it right next to the A amp;P ad and this week’s shows at the Bijou.” “It was what her father was planning to do.” “Norma,” he said. “I could take her to New York City. I could take her to the Times. And what would happen if four guys pulled guns and started shooting in the lobby?” Charlie was all ears now. Norma’s footfalls crossed the kitchen; there was the rattle of the teapot’s lid, and what she said in reply was mostly lost under running water.

Irv said, “Yeah, I think it might happen. And I tell you what might be even worse, as much as I love her. She might get the drop on them. And if it got out of control, like it did at that place where they kept her… well, there’s pretty nearly eight million people in New York City, Norma. I just feel like I’m too old to take a risk like that.”

Norma’s footfalls crossed back to the table again, the old flooring of the farmhouse creaking comfortably beneath them. “But, Irv, listen to me now,” she said. Norma spoke carefully and slowly, as if she had been thinking this out carefully over a long period of time. “Even a little paper, even a little weekly like the Bugle, they’re hooked into those AP tickers. News comes from everyplace these days. Why, just two years ago a little paper in Southern California won the Pulitzer Prize for some news story, and they had a circulation of under fifteen hundred!”

He laughed, and Charlie suddenly knew he had taken her hand across the table. “You’ve been studying on this, haven’t you?”

“Yes I have, and there’s no reason to laugh at me for it, Irv Manders! This is serious, a serious business! We’re in a box! How long can we keep her here before somebody finds out? You took her sapping out in the woods just this afternoon-”

“Norma, I wasn’t laughin at you, and the child has got to get out sometime-”

“Don’t you think I know that? I didn’t say no, did I? That’s just it! A growing child needs fresh air, exercise. Got to have those things if you’re going to have any appetite, and she’s-”

“Peckish, I know.”

“Pale and peckish, that’s right. So I didn’t say no. I was glad to see you take her. But, Irv, what if Johnny Gordon or Ray Parks had been out today and had just happened to drift over to see what you were doing, like they sometimes do?”

“Honey, they didn’t.” But Irv sounded uneasy. “Not this time! Not the time before! But Irv, it can’t go on! We been lucky already, and you know it” Her footsteps crossed the kitchen again, and then there was the sound of tea being poured. “Yeah,” Irv said. “Yeah, I know we have. But… thanks, darlin.”

“Welcome,” she said, sitting down again. “And never mind the buts, either. You know it only takes one person, or maybe two. It’ll spread. It’ll get out, Irv, that we got a little girl up here. Never mind what it’s doing to her; what happens if it gets back to them?”

In the darkness of the back room, Charlie’s arms rashed out in goosebumps.

Slowly, Irv answered her. “I know what you’re saying, Norma. We got to do something, and I keep going over and over it in my head. A little paper… well, it’s not just sure enough. You know we’ve got to get this story out right if we’re going to make that girl safe for the rest of her life. If she’s going to be safe, a lot of people have got to know she exists and what she can do-isn’t that right? A lot of people.”

Norma Manders stirred restlessly but said nothing.

Irv pressed on. “We got to do it right for her, and we got to do it right for us. Because it could be our lives at stake, too. Me, I’ve already been shot once. I believe that. I love her like my own, and I know you do, too, but we got to be realists about it, Norma. She could get us killed.”

Charlie felt her face grow hot with shame… and with terror. Not for herself but for them. What had she brought on their house? “And it’s not just us or her. You remember what that man Tarkington said. The files he showed us. “It’s your brother and my nephew Fred and Shelley, and-““-and all those people back in Poland,” Norma said. “Well, maybe he was only bluffing about that. I pray to God he was. It’s hard for me to believe anyone could get that low.” Norma said grimly, “They’ve been pretty low already.”

“Anyway,” Irv said, “we know they’ll follow through on as much as they can, the dirty bastards. The shit is going to fly. All I’m saying, Norma, is I don’t want the shit to fly to no good purpose. If we’re going to make a move, I want it to be a good one. I don’t want to go to some country weekly and then have them get wind of it and squash it. They could do it. They could do it.”

“But what does that leave?”

“That,” Irv said heavily, “is what I keep tryin to figure out. A paper or a magazine, but one they won’t think of. It’s got to be honest, and it ought to be nationwide. But most of all, it can’t have any ties to the government or to the government’s ideas.”

“You mean to the Shop,” she said flatly. “Yeah. That’s what I mean.” There was the soft sound of Irv sipping his tea. Charlie lay in her bed, listening, waiting.

… it could be our lives at stake, too… I’ve already been shot once… I love her like my own, and I know you do, too, but we got to be realists about it, Norma… she could get us killed.

(no please I)

(she could get us killed like she got her mother killed)

(no please please don’t don’t say that)

(like she got her daddy killed)

(please stop)

Tears rolled across her side-turned face, catching in her ears, wetting the pillowcase. “Well, we’ll think on it some more,” Norma said finally. “There’s an answer to this, Irv. Somewhere.” “Yeah. I hope so.” “And in the meantime,” she said, “we just got to hope no one knows she’s here.” Her voice suddenly kindled with excitement. “Irv, maybe if we got a lawyer-”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m done in, Norma. And no one knows she’s here yet.”

But someone did. And the news had already begun to spread.

10

Until he was in his late sixties, Dr. Hofferitz, an inveterate bachelor, had slept with his longtime housekeeper, Shirley McKenzie. The sex part of it had slowly dried up: the last time, as well as Hofferitz could recall, had been about fourteen years before, and that had been something of an anomaly. But the two of them had remained close; in fact, with the sex gone, the friendship had deepened and had lost some of that tense prickliness that seems to be at the center of most sexual relationships. Their friendship had become of that platonic variety that seems to genuinely obtain only in the very young and in the very old of the opposite sex.

Still, Hofferitz held onto his knowledge of the Manderses” “boarder” for better than three months. Then, one night in February, after three glasses of wine while he and Shirley (who had just that January turned seventy-five) were watching television, he told her the whole story, after swearing her to complete secrecy.

Secrets, as Cap could have told Dr. Hofferitz, are even more unstable than U-235, and stability lessens proportionately as the secret is told. Shirley McKenzie kept the secret for almost a month before telling her best girlfriend, Hortense Barclay. Hortense kept the secret for about ten days before telling her best girlfriend, Christine Traegger. Christine told her husband and her best friends (all three of them) almost immediately.

This is how the truth spreads in small towns; and by the night in April when Irv and Norma had their overheard conversation, a good deal of Hastings Glen knew that they had taken in a mysterious girl. Curiosity ran high. Tongues wagged.