FELICIA HAD NO INTENTION OF LETTING THEM THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR.
“Come on. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t an emergency,” Emmanuel said through the chain-locked door. Harrison could see no more of her than a single glaring eye.
“Emmanuel, you have got to be crazy turning up on my doorstep in the middle of the damn night with a crazy-looking cut-up white boy with you!”
“Look, honey, look. There is too much for me to explain this to you, standing out here. Just let me in and I can set it all out for you.”
“Don’t you honey me.”
Despite her refusal, she paused, took a breath.
“If I let you two motherfuckers in this house you better not wake up my kids. I swear to God I’ll cut you both down to the spine if you do. And you, white boy, don’t bleed on anything.”
“Yes ma’am.”
The door swung shut as she shot the chain free to let them in.
There were admitted to a small front room with a closed-off fireplace and a big gilded mirror hanging above a yellow couch. Seeing himself reflected there, Harrison could understand her hesitancy to welcome him.
“I know there’s got to be a reason you’re not wearing a shirt, Emmanuel, but I’m not even about to get into all that. And White Boy here looks like he should be in a hospital.”
“His name is Jay.”
“I don’t give a goddamn what his name is.”
She shook her head, closed her eyes and asked her god for long-suffering patience.
“We need to clean up.”
She waved her hand in the air.
“You know where the bathroom is. I’m going to need some damn wine.”
She left them for the kitchen. Emmanuel told Harrison to follow and showed him back through the short hall, switched on the bathroom light and closed the door behind them.
Harrison held his arm over the sink so that he could carefully remove the bloody shirt from his wrist.
“She’s right, you know,” Emmanuel said. “We do need to take you to a hospital.”
“Which is the first place he’d check.”
When the cloth separated from the injury, the smell of dry blood was so sharp it made him gag. Emmanuel ran a trickle of warm water from the tap and helped him clean and dry the cut. He opened three large padded bandages and overlaid them. Harrison circled adhesive tape around the wrist until the material was secure.
“You need the doctor as bad as anyone,” Harrison said, softly grazing the bicep of Emmanuel’s hurt arm and kissing his shoulder. “But not tonight. I need you to stay here tonight.”
“You need me to stay here? You told me we both were staying. What the hell are you up to now, Jay?”
“I’ve got to get back there to where Gavin’s got that money. We’re going to need it if we have a chance of getting clear of everything. We already agreed I was going to do it.”
“My God, that was before everything that’s happened tonight. Stealing from that man was always going to be dangerous, but now you’re going to try and do it while you’re walking around three pints light of blood? That’s crazy, even for you.”
“I don’t have time for this argument right now.”
He went back out to the front room where Felicia was sitting with her coffee cup of merlot.
“Do you have duct tape?”
“Duct tape? You want to start up home repairs to pay me for my kindness?”
He held up his bandaged arm.
“I might need something sturdier than this.”
She pinched her eyes closed with her fingertips.
“First drawer to the left of the dishwasher.”
He went in and wrapped the tape several times around until his wrist was stiffly encased. He tore the tape with his teeth and smoothed over the end. Emmanuel had come out from the bathroom and was wearing a large yellow towel around his shoulders.
“Don’t leave the house until I get back,” Harrison told him as he swiped the keys from where Emmanuel had dropped them on the coffee table.
“If you get back, you mean.” Emmanuel said.
Harrison hugged him, said, “No, that’s not what I mean at all.”
HE DROVE the interstate with the speedometer notched on eighty. Any faster and he would have drawn the attention of state troopers, but this time of night they would let just about anything fly through east Tennessee. The mountains were dark for a while but there was some kind of strange light just beyond them. Harrison had no idea of what to make of it until he smelled the smoke. He angled his foot down and the road fled behind him.
He first caught direct sight of the fires as soon as he exited for Elizabethton. The roads were a confusion of people driving away from town and several volunteer firefighters hurrying toward the blaze. There seemed to be no official coordination, only this general apocalypse.
Once he was through town the highway out to Warlick had been blocked by deputies. He was stopped by one of them.
“It’s all shut down through this way. It’s burnt clear up to Roan Mountain.”
“I’ve got to get through. I’ve got to get to some people.”
“I’m sorry, sir. All the people that are still up there are coming out on their own. Letting you through would just give us somebody else to worry about. I’m going to need you to turn around, please.”
He rolled the window up, sat there a minute before he jerked the wheel hard and stomped the gas, bounded across the grass median until he was running up the incoming lanes that had been left open for evacuees. He heard shouts but no gunshots, so he drove on, moved to the emergency lane when he saw vehicles coming toward him. In this way, he slalomed back toward the cove and turned into the heart of the fire.
The road was surrounded by the cracked red embers of what had already burned, everything blackened and baked by the violence that had run its course. He could feel the heat inside the car, heard something pop a second before the headlights flickered and died. He banged the dash to get them going, but it did nothing. He had to slow to little more than a walking pace, guided by the strangely mystic confusion of the firelight.
When he finally reached Little Europe, he was amazed to see that it still stood. Everything around it was burned, devastated. But the old asylum remained there on the brow of the hill as if it were constructed and affirmed by the same force as the fire itself. It glowed with an odd but presiding beauty. He parked and went in to see who was still there.
He moved through the foyer and noiselessly up the stairs. Along the hall on the second floor, several of the rooms had been left open and there was no one inside. They must have had ample time to get clear. They must have known. He paused at the room he had shared with Delilah, pressed the door open on a hinge that moaned. There were some things of hers there. A blouse and a box of pictures of her with her brother. It was almost like there had been a soul in her body. He got the rest of the cash and his extra revolver from the closet. He stuck it in the back of his waistline next to the other one, the one Delilah had meant to kill him with, then he went on toward Gavin’s room.
He opened the door and saw Gavin sitting at the window looking out at the fires. He was in his office chair, one leg cocked casually across the other, as if he were viewing a scene of outdoor theater instead the loss of everything he’d tried to build. A few feet across from him sat the idiot boy Connor Polk slumped in an oak stiff-backed chair, his forehead punched with a bullet hole. The ostensible source, a Smith and Wesson automatic, lay just within Gavin’s reach on the windowsill.
“I wondered if you would come back,” Gavin said. “I hoped you would.”
Harrison circled around and rested his weight against the edge of the heavy desk.
“What happened?” Harrison asked.
“I lost my temper, I’m afraid. He was the one responsible for the fire. At first he wouldn’t admit it, but I could tell he wanted to lay claim to something of import. It wasn’t just that, though. He threatened me. Told me he was going to take the money he knew I had hidden here, and that if I didn’t give it to me he would throw me out into the wildfire. I believed him. It looked as though the house was going to burn. So, I told him I would give him what he wanted. I opened the safe and he wasn’t worried about what I might do. He thought I was weak. In his mind there was no reason for concern. I simply pulled the gun out and pulled the trigger. I was going to do the same to myself. I have no desire to burn alive, but as I sat here, trying to come to terms with things, the wind changed. It carried the fire away from here. There was no reason for it, only chance. So I’ve been sitting here thinking about that and then you walked in the door and I wonder if that’s maybe the reason all of this has happened. Just so we can have a conversation.”
Harrison could see the safe remained open and that the stacks of cash were still there.
“What kind of conversation would that be?”
“One where we tell the truth. I think that’s something we owe one another at this point.”
“From where I stand, it seems like each man has his own idea about what that means.”
“Doubtless that’s the case. But there are certain shared entanglements that can’t be ignored. We were part of something here. You and I, even this poor dead fool. We ventured something.”
“I was just trying to find a way to make a little money, get back on my feet.”
Gavin shook his head, smiled.
“No, that’s too easy. It’s understandable to hear you say that, though. I think it’s common for us to deny what we did and why we did it, especially here among the ruins. I will tell you what I think. I think you liked discovering your strength. You liked that you could build a reputation for yourself. You were valuable in a way that even I couldn’t see at first. But you held the secret of your own value and that made you see that we were able to give something back to you that held meaning. It must have confused your cynicism. You understand violence in this way,” he said, motioned toward Polk’s body, “but I understand it too, though in a different key. I understand what it accomplishes in the mind, when it degrades and renders men worthless. Because I have fought against that kind of violence my entire life.”
Harrison watched the fire heave in the distance.
“You think you’ve made a difference,” Harrison said. “But I don’t see that anything has changed. People die, but there’s nothing new in that. There’s nothing that won’t keep them from doing the same tomorrow and the day after that. They die because that’s what happens when there’s no way around the suffering. Everyone knows that, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. You can say it’s because of the Blacks and Jews and Mexicans, but you might as well blame it on the weather. We all just want to find a way to ease the everyday hurt. So, yeah, maybe there’s a part of what you said that’s true about me. It helped to have a place here, but this isn’t where I want to be anymore, and it sure as hell isn’t who I want to be anymore.”
Gavin reached for the handgun, though he did so without intent. He merely held it between flattened palms, as though it obstructed a properly composed prayer.
“I know you came for the money. You should take it. We couldn’t have gotten it without you. The idiot here had no right to it. None of the others did.”
Harrison eased from the desk, advanced without reaching for a weapon. He shifted the cash into the gym bag he’d brought from his room. When the bag was full he had to pinch the top together so that he could zip it shut. He walked toward the door without a glance in Gavin’s direction.
“Harrison?”
“What, Gavin?”
“I hope you know I only wanted to make our world better.”
Harrison shut the door and walked down the hall. A second later the handgun fired. Harrison heard Gavin’s body strike the floor.
He grabbed a backpack from his room and filled a bottle with water from a bathroom tap, drank it to the bottom then filled it again and put it with the rest of his things. He hurried out to the car and tossed the money and other effects in the passenger’s seat, cranked the engine and swung back for the dirt road that led out of the cove.
He turned to take one last look at Little Europe, impress it on his memory so that he could recall with clarity what he had escaped. Perhaps on any other night he could have seen what approached. But amid the flame he had missed the disturbance, the oncoming rush, as the white van slammed broadside into the car and smashed him into a wall of scorched earth.