Women in distant neighborhoods raked burnt shingles like fallen leaves from their front yards. Occasionally, a woman would find a beautiful relic, some piece of painted mural that had traveled on the wind to the houses, a singed mermaid, the green tail of pinkish scales studded with glass shards as bright as crushed diamonds, a charred ballerina with no legs, night sky spattered with white, glittering stars that shed paint flecks like rust when touched by even the gentlest hand.
A few people began collecting remnants, paying a small price for each fragment large enough to be framed under glass. I grew to know these collectors as well as my mother, who was one of them. Searching for fragments pertaining to old movie stars of the forties and fifties, she and I walked the vacant lots littered with the cinema’s fragile remains.
I was embarrassed when Mother hired the few teenagers who were still my friends to scavenge the surrounding areas with her. In my high school years, I was constantly hiding from kids my age, comfortable only when watching them from a safe distance. Kristen Rue tolerated me because she said I was so quiet that sometimes she felt like being with me was like being alone. Zach Corson, the college boy who drove his Mustang across fields the way my grandfather used to ride horses, had mercy on me and gave me a lot of advice back then. He said if I dyed my hair red and spoke a different language some of the weird kids would start to notice me and take pity on me. Until then, he would teach me the ways of the world, including how small and smelly the world was when he put his arm around me and my nose was crushed against his armpit.
That day when the teenagers were searching without me and Zach was hugging me too hard, I wanted him to drive off the field and put Kristen and the fire behind us, but Mother’s hobby was bringing us together and making too many people remember.
While Zach held me tight inside his car, Mother occasionally beckoned to us. I can still see her ironic smile as she approached the Mustang from time to time and asked me to join the search. I watched the boys’ quick, awkward hands as they combed the fields while racing against the coming rain. Kristen dove down into the brush with my mother, delicate shreds of vintage posters scattered through the high, dry grasses.
While I tried to make conversation with Zach, to get him to talk about anything but the fire, I realized he wasn’t listening to me. He was watching Kristen. He had eyes for only her. His head bobbed up and down every time she bobbed at the field’s edge, reaching through the low branches above her head and then to the fallen branches at her feet to remove fragments caught in the leaves. While she filled her satchel with scorched prints, I turned up the radio and whispered. The station was playing The Beach Boys “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” For some reason, that song always made me sad. I guess even then I had this feeling that “it” wouldn’t be nice, whatever it was. So, I turned up the radio to maximum volume and whispered again, “Please, Zach, no.” For some reason, I didn’t want to hear my own voice when I spoke to him.
That evening when the old cinema burnt down on Green Street, I had seen the smoke rising and thought of theater screens smoldering to black ash. The sky disappeared past Duck Street, near Charlotte Avenue where sparks rose on wind, drifting over rooftops. Ash fell like snow in the northeast, dusting the hair of every head in the crowd that had begun to circle the ambulance where Christopher, Libby Sortie’s child, was being tended to behind closed doors.
As the ashes drifted away, I tried not to think of winter in upstate New York. I had spent my early childhood there before my family moved to Oklahoma. After that move, my father gave us new names again and we tried to escape the collection agencies. That year he chose our names from a small book about songbirds of the western trailside. Mother was Catbird Bushtit, which Father shortened to Cat. Father chose the name Wilson Warbler.
For reasons that are now beyond my comprehension, I begged to be called Loggerhead Shrike, but Father said, “No, absolutely not. And, if you don’t shut up about it, you’ll be known as Williamson’s Sapsucker until you’re old enough to vote.”
Maybe I thought Loggerhead was the name of a girl who no one would ever want to rub the wrong way. I just couldn’t imagine any neighborhood bully calling out, “Hey, Loggerhead, come here and get your head handed to you.” That name “Loggerhead” was too damn fearsome. No one would dare think of handing Loggerhead’s head to her on a silver platter. Her name was the calling card of a girl the other kids wouldn’t want to piss off. Loggerhead Shrike meant business. Even her last name had a nice ring to it. I could hear the new principal taking stock of my name, getting a good first impression and knowing I couldn’t be intimidated. If I arrived late to school and he caught me sneaking in, he would have to say, “Well, well, Miss Shrike, what do you have to say for yourself?” Or, Mother, upon getting the detention slip would say, “God damn it, Loggerhead!”
Despite my schemes, none of that ever happened because, eventually, Father and I compromised on my new name, Veery Thrush. But Mother ran the household and had the final say when it came to every decision, even names. Laughing at us, she threw the bird book into the wastebasket and chose names from the air: Peter, Jane, and Sara Smith.
“All right, Cat, if that’s the way you want it,” Father said. “But Veery and I are a little disappointed by your selections. Aren’t we, Veery?”
Neither of them gave me a chance to answer. I kept my mouth shut when they argued.
“Who ever heard of a woman named Catbird Bushtit?” Mother asked, lighting another cigarette. “Catbird Bullshit is more like it. You think any of the new neighbors would want to invite me over for coffee with a name like that? And why wouldn’t the three of us have the same last name?”
“Lots of reasons,” Father said, plunking a few ice cubes into his cranberry juice and vodka.
“For God’s sakes, Darrel. What would a Wilson Warbler be doing living with a Catbird Bushtit and raising a child named Veery Thrush? Did you ever think of that?”
“Your mother has a point there, Sara,” Father said, taking the bird book out of the wastebasket and brushing it off on his sleeve.
“Thank you, Peter,” Mother said, pulling down the blinds.
Even the cinema fire reminded me of that other life and the lost names that slipped away from us like the people we abandoned without warning—something long ago, my mother crying into a red-silk pillow as Father’s hands moved softly against the blond-brick walls of the house he had built, the house we had to leave behind.
Maybe because southern Oklahoma hadn’t had a decent snowfall in years, the children laughed with their hands held high as the dark smoke choked the blue out of the sky. Even the grass and the leaves were dusted with whitish-gray flakes. Children ran around the adults. Men’s legs opened like doors for toddlers to swagger through. Small, smudged hands scissored across the wind before the children came together in secretive pairs to compare the ash on one palm to the ash on another.
Everyone except me seemed to ignore the children. The mothers trusted me too much. The fathers smiled and looked away, as if they assumed their children were safe because I wasn’t ashamed to be near them and because I didn’t cry out whenever one of them bit me. The children screamed for joy as the wind rose, lifting fragments of the cinema’s roof into the air. I held the smaller children from time to time, spinning them, lifting them over my shoulders. Thin, wispy shreds of the burnt cinema soared beyond the treetops, curtain threads tangling, speeding up and slowing down, zigzagging on air like feathers across the surface of a stormy pond.
Since the local reporters were already on scene, interviewing the fire chief in front of the truck, I was worried Kristen would be filmed while standing in the background. I wanted to hide behind the pecan trees, but I knew that hiding would only attract more attention. Caught between my desire to hear what the men were saying and my desire to remain out of view, I tried to listen just out of camera range, my back to the reporters. As I looked casually behind me, I shifted position ever so slightly whenever I saw a camera moving.
Chief Williams seemed to be looking in my direction, but I was sure it was just my imagination. I had always trusted him, believing he was a dependable, intelligent man, but he knew too much. He wasn’t looking at the reporters, but farther away in Kristen’s direction while he spoke. He claimed it was a difficult decision, but a necessary one—to let the cinema burn to the ground rather than risk the lives of firefighters to save the old building that was already halfway gone with no one now left inside. Apparently, because there was so little rain that August when Christopher Sortie was burned, the firemen’s priority was to make sure the fire died where it started so that none of the nearby buildings would catch. Firemen were standing outside the cinema, aiming their hoses at the high broken windows and into holes in the open roof.
People in the crowd were still gathering, shouting Christopher’s name before they followed him and his mother and the paramedics to the ambulance.
Kristen remained silent.
Zach rushed from behind the liquor store with a garden hose in hand, aiming the water at the roof of his grandfather’s hardware store. If a single spark drifted on the wind to the old wooden shingles, the roof would go up in an instant. Kristen looked away as he caught her eye, and I realized how quickly his family business could be lost. Suddenly, I wanted to see him seeing it burn.
My father was telling my mother that Christopher would probably be fire chief one day. I couldn’t bear to hear it, even though I knew the boy would be pleased with what had happened. He was a hero already, and not just in his own mind. Even though he was only eleven years old, he had risked his life to save another, having gone into the flames before the firemen arrived to rescue an alley cat and returning with a little girl in his arms.
The girl, Tina Borne, was unscathed. She danced to music that played on her wind-up lullaby glow-worm doll, the tips of her slippers just singed where the blackened ribbon touched asphalt.
Christopher was not so fortunate. His hair and eyelashes had been burnt away. His eyebrows were gone, and even when he was out of the building he inhaled like a boy who had been holding his breath too long while swimming underwater. He had descended the steps of the cinema with Tina’s face covered by his shirt, and my mother began to scream. Just as Christopher set Tina down under the shade of the oak trees, Tina uncovered her face, tossed the shirt to the ground, and held her doll up in the air. The lullaby began to play, the delicate tinkling song like rain on antique glass. Kristen ran to him. Christopher staggered to her like a drunken man before he fell face first into the grass, his face at her boots. He made no attempt to rise.
As I approached him, I was surprised scorched skin glistened angrily where his soft curls had once fallen into his eyes. I held him in a wooden way, careful not to let anything touch his head where the hair and skin had been replaced by blisters and red wounds.
“Mommy,” he whispered, the silver lighter falling out of his hand.
“I’m not your mother,” I whispered back, slipping the lighter into his jacket pocket when I was sure no one else was looking.
Kristen was crying then.
Steadying Christopher while we waited for the paramedics, I knew Kristen blamed herself. Libby had asked her to watch him, to keep him clear of disaster. But disaster came to him more often than it came to other little boys she had babysat over the years.
“The flames are alive,” Christopher had once told me when he found Kristen and me sitting alone at the diner where his mother worked. I’m sure he thought no one else could hear him. “They know me. I’m the one who feeds them after they’re born.”
Kristen just looked at me and wiped her mouth with a paper napkin.
For some reason, Christopher knew he could trust me, perhaps because I was the only adult who wouldn’t try to reform him. I thought of him as more of an artist than an arsonist and more of a gardener, really, than a fire starter. The fire was his creation, each one a unique event, each burning a little different from the last depending on how and where he had chosen to grow the flames. Oxygen, fuel, and heat were his fertilizer, rain, and sunlight. His gardens bloomed in the instant it took for the sparks he scattered like seeds to take root in junkyards, empty houses, and old buildings.
“Why?” I had asked him, brushing a biscuit crumb off my faded jeans.
Kristen stared out the window at the parking lot where Zach waited for me, leaning against his Mustang, the top down as he lit a cigarette.
“I don’t want to let them die,” Christopher said, his hand on the ashtray I had been using while smoking the few cigarettes I had borrowed from Mother’s purse. “I’m the one who made them, and they’re mine. I have to save them. No one else will.”
He was glaring at my silver lighter. Sighing, I picked up the lighter and put it in my pocket before taking a long drag and crushing my cigarette against the glass. He seemed disappointed, so I let my lighter fall from my pocket as I got up from the table. Without a word, he scooted the lighter slyly, holding it between his shoes. While I took the bills from my wallet, he bent down as if to tie his shoes, but his shoes were already tied.
As I took a last swig of bitter coffee, Libby nodded to me and a chill ran down my back. I realized I might have known her son better than she ever would. He was a creator like I was. He made bad things happen, but they were his disasters and he loved them in a different way than he loved the disasters that were not his own.
I left a big tip on the table for his mother that day. Christopher hugged her hard before walking out the back door. Kristen followed him.
Outside the diner, Zach opened the passenger-side door of his Mustang for me, and I climbed in, looking back at Christopher and Kristen as they walked toward the cinema, which was only a short distance from the diner, just two blocks away. He held her hand and flicked my lighter every time she turned away to look at the Mustang. Zach and I waved as we passed them by.
Outside of the burning cinema, lights flashed and sirens blared while Libby got into the ambulance behind Christopher. She went with him without a word, and I felt more worried for her than I did for the boy. Somehow I knew he would be all right, but I wasn’t so certain about her.
Maybe because Kristen needed something to hold onto after Christopher had been taken away, she caught a large piece of ash drifting like an autumn leaf through the sultry air and crushed the ash in her hand before licking up the gray powder. The children followed her example, making strange faces as they licked the ash from their palms.
That day I was surprised by what the children did because I was no longer a child and my teenage years were spent forgetting the things children do. But now that I have children of my own, I’m not surprised by anything. Children will put anything except for food in their mouths as long as they see someone else taste it first. Foil or paper would have worked for the children just as well as ashes, but ashes were what we had that day.
The children seemed to grow hungrier by the minute and kept catching the ash like precious manna and licking each other’s palms as if the ash were nourishing and somewhat delicious, a miracle and a delicacy that took on an acquired taste.
“No,” Kristen said, even though she was still picking her teeth.
Ash caught on the cottonwood seeds, and the sight of the seeds drifting made me short of breath.
“You’ll make yourselves sick,” I scolded the children.
“Why?” Tina Borne asked, dropping her doll on the pavement.
“Because you’re eating that awful stuff.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?” she asked again.
“How about this,” I said, my heart beating fast, “I’ll ask you why in about ten or fifteen years and if you still remember then you can tell me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll be a big girl then.”
“How come?”
Because you’re going to eat and eat and just keep eating like everyone else in your goddamned family and you won’t know how to stop and you’ll get big and fat like your mother and her sisters. But I didn’t say anything to her. I knew when I was beaten. Since there was no kind way to answer her, I just picked up her doll and handed it to her before walking away.
I realized that perhaps it was a good thing that the children were devouring the ashes of the old cinema because it was burning to the ground and would probably never be rebuilt. The smoky taste alone would make them remember what was lost, even when they were elderly and I was dead or going by another name in another place and the rest of the town had forgotten the cinema. As Kristen crushed more ash to gray powder, I wondered what it tasted like to her and the children. To me, the powder tasted like Zach Corson’s old cigarettes littering the floor of his Mustang, but I didn’t want to think of Zach at a time like that. He had refinished his car and painted it a startling green, the color of the oak leaves at dawn.
“For some reason,” he had once told me in the evening while he was playing with Kristen’s hair, “this color of green makes me think of you.”
It was my eyes, I realized, but never told him.
“Not now,” I whispered so softly I thought no one else could hear. “Don’t think of his hands.”
Kristen looked at me.
It was too late. I could hear him saying her name, could feel his voice vibrating against my ear, and could feel the tug of his lips catching on strands of her long hair, even though he was nowhere in sight. In moments like these, pulling nervously on her shell barrettes, I hated myself, and yet I realized how lucky she was.
No one knew what to make of us because I was better at keeping her secrets than I was at keeping my own. I was no angel on those nights I tried to kiss her full on the mouth right after kissing him. She didn’t like my mouth open on hers, so I slipped my tongue into her ear, and she slapped me while Zach laughed. On those nights, he parked his Mustang beside deserted country roads, the radio blaring southern rock as the headlights went dark. The tires rolled softly through the leaves before stopping in the moonlit field.
While I sat in the front seat, watching them, I started a hundred fires that never burned anywhere except in my heart. There were ashes all around me long before Christopher’s fires destroyed buildings all over town. I set myself apart from others, who would judge me or forgive me or envy me, depending on who they were and who they assumed I was. Even before I dyed my hair candy-apple red and learned to speak the lost language of silence, I assumed that nothing I did would ever really matter, but Christopher proved me wrong.
As I walked away from Zach and Kristen, alone in the darkness as I would one day walk away from that town and toward another, it seemed to me that my mistakes were what made their luck. He loved her more each night because of what I did, and I knew I would love him for the rest of my days even though he would forget my name the moment I was gone.