Harl Evans grinned as he looked at the bay stretching before him. It was a pretty scene on this warm October Tuesday—tall grasses rising from the islands on which the Ninth Street Causeway rested, the water reflecting the deep blue of the sky. A few motorboats made foamy wakes as they sped past, and a couple of catamarans with colorfully striped sails heeled in the soft breeze. He inhaled the scent of the marshes, a singular smell that was strangely pleasing to a man raised in backwoods Maine. The sun poured down on him, making him feel toasty and warm. He loved warm. It filled him with something approaching happiness. He loved hot even better—which was why he’d ended up in southern Arizona, as far from his home as possible.
Those cold Maine nights when he’d been a kid had been agony.
“Can’t we put more wood in the stove, Pop?” he’d asked as a young boy.
“What’s your problem?” Pop would retort. “Can’t you deal with a little chill? Put on another layer.”
Somehow “a little chill” seemed a gross understatement when there was rime forming on the inside of the windows across the room.
“That wood supply’s got to last the entire winter, Harl. I ain’t cutting any more, not in snow like we got.”
“We could buy a couple of cords,” he suggested once when he was about seven. He’d heard one of the kids at school talk about buying wood, and he’d been amazed that people did something so sensible.
“We ain’t spending what little we got on what’s out there for the taking,” Pop snarled. Trouble was, Pop wasn’t taking, so Harl dragged fallen logs home through the thigh-deep snow and did his best to split them.
“Watchin’ you with that ax is better’n watching TV,” Pop said. “Ain’t laughed so hard in years.”
Harl bit his tongue to keep from suggesting yet again that Pop apply for a job at the lumbermill in town. Pop’s anger and the sharp blows he rained on Harl for what he called disrespect were powerful deterrents. It wasn’t until Harl was an adult that he understood that Pop couldn’t handle a time clock and a regular job. He just wasn’t smart enough, and his heavy drinking didn’t help. Doing summer maintenance at the Happy Days Campground was all he could manage, and that was done on his own unpredictable schedule.
Pop kept him home from school when the snow got deep, and Harl didn’t even have those few hours of warmth provided by the old hissing and groaning radiators in Moosehead Elementary.
“This room is always so hot,” his teacher complained.
Harl smiled and slid his desk closer to the radiator.
“You are a waster of resources, Harl,” Pop constantly growled at him when he returned from foraging in the woods with a fresh supply of downed limbs and rotting logs. “You are a weakling, a wimp, and no son of mine. For generations we Evanses have been strong, men of character. What’s a little chill to us? You make me ashamed.”
Then they were even. Pop’s laziness and inability to cope with life shamed Harl.
“I don’t want to freeze to death in my own house,” Harl said. “Talk about stupid.”
“Don’t you call me stupid!” Pop’s fist came up.
“I’m not! I’m saying freezing is stupid.”
“You just don’t unnerstand your heritage and the ways we Evanses become men.”
For once Pop was right. Harl couldn’t equate chilblains with manliness, so he kept chopping wood and building roaring fires.
Early in the winter of his sophomore year, he cut a hole in the upstairs hall and installed a grate to let the heat rise. Pop nearly had a cardiac when he found what Harl had done.
“You put that floor back,” he ordered.
Harl had expected this reaction. “Can’t. I burned it.”
Blind with rage, Pop swung.
The old man had been using the same move for years, and Harl dodged it with ease. He grabbed his father by the shirt front.
“Swing at me again,” Harl said in a low, tight voice, “and I’ll hit back.”
Pop’s face turned red and his teeth drew back in a snarl, but he didn’t strike out again. Instead he left the house and didn’t return that night.
The next day when Harl came home from school, a piece of plywood was nailed over the grate. Since Pop had already left for the taproom, Harl ripped it free, chopped it up, and fed it to the wood stove, stoking the fire hotter and hotter.
Pop came home late and, groggy with drink, had fallen asleep. There would never be a better time.
Harl fed the fire until it was a small inferno. He stepped back, leaving the door of the stove open as someone might if they wanted extra heat, watching, waiting. One coal leaped out, then two, then more and more, all pulsing a fierce red and fiery gold, sizzling, smoldering on the wood floor. When the floor exploded in flames, he smiled. He took his father’s bank card and all the money the old man had in his wallet. He then stood in the frigid air and watched the house and Pop go up in the crackling, soaring flames, for once not feeling the bite of the cold due to the warm satisfaction flooding him at the success of his vengeance.
When he was certain nothing would save the old place or the old man, he drove Pop’s car to the nearest ATM and took out as much money as possible. He tossed the card in a nearby Dumpster so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it again and give the police something to trace. He headed south, toward warmth even in January, and never looked back.
He smiled now as he watched the bay. He liked this little town. It wasn’t as warm as southern Arizona, but he did like the wildness of the oceans’ waves and the peace of the bay’s calm, neither a feature that Arizona could offer.
He looked over his shoulder. Mike was fussing with one of his fishing reels. What was it with the man and fishing? Harl didn’t see the attraction. He also didn’t understand why a man who liked deep-sea fishing would settle in Arizona.
In the background the television droned on about the discovery of the body of the missing local guy in the bay. Not that such a grizzly find dimmed the scene’s beauty in Harl’s eyes. Nothing could do that. Nor did the retrieval of the body concern Harl. In fact he felt quite complacent. As far as anyone knew, he was at the compound keeping silence with Mike at the retreat house as they sought God’s leading for The Pathway.
Right.
Retreating to pray was Mike’s customary cover for his fishing trips. It wouldn’t do for his followers who lived in austerity to know of his excursions aboard rented luxury yachts. Oh, they weren’t big yachts, just small, well-appointed ones. Mike didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention when he anchored in some marina.
Nor would it do for his followers to know what some of their donations were funding—and fishing trips were the least of it. Harl grinned what he liked to think of as his shark’s grin.
Was there time to sneak away for a walk on the beach, another feature Arizona lacked? But then Seaside didn’t have looming saguaro cacti, arms outstretched, thorns ready to impale you.
He thought for a moment about how different the two locales were, then smiled as he thought of the one feature they shared. Gullible people.