The Burn Palace

1

Nurse Spandex was late, and as she broke into a run her rubber-soled clogs went squeak-squeak on the floor of the hallway leading to labor and delivery. It was two-thirty on a Thursday morning, and if Tabby Roberts – Tabitha, she called her to her face, because she’d never liked the head nurse – ever learned she had left those two babies alone, she’d be royally screwed, which made her laugh because that was why she was late, she had been getting royally screwed back in 217, where that poor colored woman had died in the afternoon. That’s where Dr Balfour had pushed her, and that’s where she’d gone – to a bed stripped of sheets and pads – because she’d worked hard to get Dr Balfour motivated and once she got him unzipping his fly, she wasn’t going to complain where he took her; she’d let him screw her in the toilet if that’s what he wanted, like Dr Stone last March, but then Dr Stone took a job at Providence Hospital and so nothing had come of it except a few teary phone calls with her doing the crying, but it didn’t do any good because Dr Stone had stayed where he was.

Nurse Spandex was a full-bodied woman in her mid-thirties, but don’t call her fat, ‘full-bodied’ was how she described herself, big-boned, and her scrubs had spandex at the waist and a spandex-and-polyester V-necked top with a pattern of pink and purple flowers. They weren’t loose like most girls’ scrubs, because she’d had her mother fix them a little on the new Singer she had bought her online for Christmas two years ago, so her scrubs went further in showing off her figure, which was why some girls called her Nurse Spandex, which Alice Alessio (her real name) didn’t like.

The rooms in maternity she hurried past were mostly empty. Only two were occupied with mothers, because October was a slow period and it was still a week till the full moon, which always motivated things and created a fuss. Tonight only two tater-tots were in the nursery, so she didn’t see why Dr Balfour couldn’t have used one of these rooms instead of one in cardiology. But he had said cardiology was where he had to be, because he was the chief resident and didn’t want to get in hot water, which he should have thought about earlier. Anyway, she was the one who’d get in trouble if Tabby Roberts, the bitch, ever heard she’d been getting laid in cardiology. She’d lose her job.

The ceiling lights hummed and an elevator dinged; there were distant bubbling noises and buzzing noises, a few moans, a few night mumbles, and an announcement for Dr Schmitt to come to the ER – linking them all together was the squeak-squeak of Nurse Spandex’s white clogs as she ran toward the nursery. One of the lights had gone out, so she’d have to call maintenance, which always meant calling half a dozen times before they’d do anything – down there smoking weed and listening to rap music, most likely. So the nursery was dim, as if the two babies needed the quiet darkness, which they didn’t, because sleeping was what babies did second best, right after slurping at their mommies’ boobs.

There were eight cribs, bassinets with Plexiglas sides and stainless-steel cabinets beneath, and in Nurse Spandex’s four years in labor and delivery they had been full to capacity only once and that’d been during tourist season, with out-of-towners dropping their tater-tots far from home instead of in Hartford or Springfield. During the year five babies was the most they had had together, because this was a small fifty-bed hospital in a small town and most girls were on the pill, the sluts, and Nurse Spandex – who went to Mass every Sunday, or pretty near – thought if she’d really got knocked up in cardiology, then Dr Balfour was in for a surprise. He’d be putty in her hands, is what she told herself; but then she saw something was wrong, and she stopped as if she’d hit a wall. It wasn’t the Petrocelli kid, he was fine, all wrapped up like an Indian papoose. It was the other baby, the Summers baby, he’d gotten unwrapped somehow, and his little yellow blanket with the ducks and chickens and rabbits had gotten on top of him and he was kicking and squirming, because he must be smothering, maybe even dying, and he was kicking to get free.

Nurse Spandex didn’t have the chance to tell herself she’d never seen anything so strange before, because now she reached the side of the crib and snatched away the blanket, but it wasn’t the Summers baby at all, it wasn’t even a baby. It was a snake, a huge snake with red and yellow stripes, but she hardly saw its colors as it rose up toward her, seemed to want to grab her and squeeze her and have its way with her, which made her fall back, knock aside an empty crib, and then another as she screamed a high, awful noise she’d never made before, like it was somebody else’s scream, somebody else’s mouth, but she kept screaming as the snake twisted and writhed; kept screaming like she meant to shatter glass, as thudding, squeaking footsteps came running down the hall; kept screaming as other nurses and orderlies and doctors and even patients came rushing into the nursery; kept screaming until someone grabbed her arm and slapped her good.

Now, like an airborne camera, we move back from the hospital, which is called Morgan Memorial here in the town of Brewster, Rhode Island. The sky is mostly clear, and the three-quarter moon lets us see the town under a milky light. A stiff wind out of the northwest energizes the few clouds, tugs the fall leaves and sends them swirling. Windows rattle, and bits of paper and dead leaves swirl down the streets. Already the temperature has dropped to freezing, and those folks who haven’t covered their tomatoes are going to lose them. But isn’t that often a relief? With the garden gone, except for the Swiss chard and winter squash, it’s just one less thing to take care of.

Rising above the hospital’s lumpy roof with its compressors, heating and cooling units, its elevator, we see the hospital’s two wings and outbuildings and parking lots, its two-story office building with labs and doctors’ offices. An ambulance sits idling near the emergency entrance, its heater turned up and two men snoozing in the front seats. The driver, Seymour Hodges, turns restlessly. Soon he’ll call out, shouted warnings to ephemera, at which point his tech, Jimmy Mooney, who has heard all this before and hasn’t an ounce of patience left, will strike him sharply across the chest and shout: ‘Cut the shit, Seymour!’ Then, with grunts and protests, Seymour Hodges will settle back into silence.

In the moonlight, the shadows of the maples planted along the driveway to replace the dying elms swing back and forth across the body of the ambulance like predatory cobwebs, while the blowing leaves are like fluttering bats, and dark forms skitter past like goblins, or this is how it seems to Jimmy Mooney, for whom Halloween remains a significant holiday. These ghostly maples line Cottage Street, on which the hospital is situated, not quite at the edge of town, but what was the edge of town seventy years ago.

Rising higher, we see the town spread out along Water Street – technically, Route 1A – forming a bulge on the five miles of road between Route 1 and Hannaquit at the beach, like an anaconda with a pig in its belly. Even higher we see the shadow of Block Island five miles offshore, while to the south there’s the tip of Montauk on Long Island. To the north shine the lights of Providence, but to the northwest toward West Kingston and Hope Valley are great blocks of darkness – Burlingame State Park, Great Swamp, Trustom Pond National Wildlife Refuge, the Narragansett Indian reservation, Watchaug Pond, and others. You could walk through Burlingame or Great Swamp for miles and never see a soul – that is, if you didn’t sink into the muck, until nothing was left but one hand waving good-bye.

On the north side of the swamp, past the railroad tracks, an obelisk commemorates the Great Swamp Fight of December 19, 1675, at the start of King Philip’s War. More than one thousand Narragansetts were killed, mostly women, children, and old people, burned to death in their wigwams – two hundred Colonial troops were also killed – but this finished off the Indians as a power in New England. Most of those captured were sent to Jamaica as slaves, to cut sugarcane.

A few summer camps are scattered around Worden Pond, and for decades counselors have terrified the kids with late-night tales of how the screams of the Indians can still be heard deep in the woods, how boys are lured into the swamp by flickering lights, and how three Boy Scouts wandered off and were never seen again. And sometimes the tales mention a wolf darting among the trees with a severed hand in its mouth, a boy’s hand. Pure silliness, of course.

A bunch of small roads wind back and forth around the edges of Great Swamp, with half coming to a dead end at the railway tracks and then resuming on the other side. At two-thirty in the morning, the houses scattered along those roads are dark, though most have outside lights to scare away predators, both the two-footed and four-footed variety. But just because the house lights are out doesn’t mean everybody’s asleep. Take that farm backed up against the western side of the swamp. Barton Wilcox and his wife, Bernice – everyone calls her Bernie – have thirty merino sheep, as well as a bunch of other animals – geese, chickens, cats, and a couple of Bouviers. In the sixties, Bernie and Barton lived on a commune in Big Sur, but after five years they moved back to Rhode Island, where they were from. Bernie went into nursing, while Barton went to graduate school in English. Then twenty years ago Barton’s parents died in a car accident, and he inherited enough money to quit his teaching job and buy the farm. Bernie now works part-time at Morgan Memorial. Otherwise, they’re weavers, using the wool from their own sheep, and organic farmers. Barton is sixty-four, but he still has a ponytail, gray now and bald on top, while Bernie favors the colorful peasant skirts she makes herself. Bernie’s a few years younger than her husband, tall and heavyset, more muscular than fat. She and Barton sell eggs and produce, while in spring they sell Easter lambs to the Greeks.

With them lives their granddaughter Antigone, who’s ten. No telling where her mother is – maybe Big Sur, maybe Berkeley or Boulder, Madison or Ann Arbor. She calls herself a free spirit; her parents call her irresponsible. Sometimes Bernie thinks if they had named her Joan, instead of Blossom, she might be more levelheaded, capable of being a parent, not just a mother. During the summer months, Blossom sells T-shirts, candles, incense, counterculture buttons, hash pipes, rolling papers, bongs, and such stuff at outdoor rock concerts – still a groupie at thirty-three, calling herself a new-age traveler. So Barton and Bernie have had Antigone in their charge almost since she was born, which they find a delight and a blessing, so it’s hard to be critical about the details of her birth. No telling who the father was. Blossom claims not to know, and maybe that’s the truth, but the girl’s high cheekbones and black hair suggest some Hispanic or Native American blood. She’s tall for her age and as thin as a tenpenny nail. She also has long, thin fingers and can work the loom almost as well as her grandparents. In her fifth-grade class, in Brewster, she’s called Tig, which is all right, and several boys call her the Tigster, which is not all right, but she doesn’t get angry or call them names; she just doesn’t look at them or talk to them, ever, so it’s as if they don’t exist.

It’s Antigone who’s awake at this hour, and she’s listening to the yapping of the coyotes on the far side of the stone wall circling the five-acre pasture. Occasionally the yapping is punctuated by the single bark of one of the hundred-pound Bouviers, either Gray or Rags, dogs she’s known, it seems, for her entire life and that used to pull her on her wagon around the farm when she was smaller. As long as the dogs patrol the walls, no coyote will cross over. Just how many coyotes are out there is what Tig is wondering. Barton has said he recently saw a pack of about ten out on the road at daybreak, and she thinks that’s about how many she hears right now, yapping as if they’re discussing the sheep, how good they taste and what to do about it. Such thoughts normally wouldn’t keep her from sleep, but now Barton’s laid up after knee replacement surgery and she’s sure the coyotes know this, because just this evening she saw two of them streaking across the pasture with Gray in pursuit. The coyotes know Barton is laid up, they know the dogs are getting old, and as Tig listens to the yapping beyond the stone wall she thinks that’s what has the coyotes so excited. Yapping like that, it’s like plans being made.

Actually, the town of Brewster began as Brewster Corners, a post house on the Boston Post Road between Stonington and Providence, built in the 1730s by Wrestling Brewster, great-grandson of Elder William Brewster, the preacher who came over on the Mayflower. Wrestling Brewster was descended from Elder Brewster’s son of the same name, who’d been kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1640 for criticizing the clergy. Pugnacity, perhaps, was an inevitable part of his nature. When Wrestling Brewster opened the post house, Hannaquit was a tiny fishing village seized from the Narragansetts during King Philip’s War. Soon a few houses were built near the post house and blacksmith shop, and then a dry-goods purveyor and church.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there began a drift toward the sea. More houses were built, and Brewster Corners became simply Brewster, where it stayed, overshadowed by Wakefield to the north and Westerly to the south. Then, in 1907, in a burst of ambition, Brewster absorbed the beach town of Hannaquit, while keeping a toehold on the Post Road, now Route 1. From then until 1950, Brewster grew by fits and starts, what with the fishing and farming – mostly potato fields – as well as the quarry, a knitting mill, and a small cannery on the river. By mid-century it had a more or less permanent population of seven thousand, a number that doubles after Memorial Day with the summer people. As the town enters the twenty-first century, only one scallop boat remains to compete with the small fleet from Stonington; the potato farms have become turf farms; the quarry that supplied the granite blocks from which the downtown was built produces only crushed stone; the knitting mill – vacant for fifty years – is at the edge of collapse; and the cannery has been ripped down, forgotten by almost everyone except old Mrs Loy at Ocean Breezes, a home for the elderly on Oak Street, because she lost two fingers at the cannery more than eighty years ago and she’ll wave her mutilated hand at the aides and squawk, ‘See this hand? The fish bit back,’ till everyone is sick to death of her.

We can see Ocean Breezes four blocks east of the hospital as we rise above the town: a nineteenth-century inn and boardinghouse that was tucked, stretched, expanded, and renovated into a residence for seniors, as it’s called today. Most of the lights are out, though twenty elderly insomniacs stare up at their ceilings in wonder or dismay at where they find themselves. That happens when their numbers lessen. Eighty-year-old Florence Pritchard passed on early in the evening, and it made the others morbidly alert, or at least those for whom alertness remains an option.

Margaret Hanna is on duty, but it’s hard to know if she’s awake or asleep as she nods over her computer’s Facebook page on the first floor. Dozing, she relives a summer moment at the beach when, partly covered by a towel, she slipped a hand into Marty McGuire’s shorts. Then, awake again, she tells herself she must check on Herman Flynn, former owner of Flynn’s Furnishings, who might not last the night, poor man. Then it’s back again to Marty’s shorts.

Not much activity at two-thirty in the morning. The twenty-four-hour Citgo station is open, but Shirley O’Rourke is asleep at the cash register. At police headquarters the dispatch officer, Joey Manzetti, nods over his console. But even in daylight Brewster tends to be sleepy, at least during the months when the summerhouses are shut up. Some of the locals commute to jobs in Providence, some to Wakefield, some to the university in Kingston. These days quite a few, relatively speaking, work at home, staying in touch with their jobs by computer. And there are a few small factories. Crenner Millwork Corp. makes high-quality windows, doors, and cabinets, which they ship all over New England and New York. Jack Crenner employs fifty people in good times. Mercurio Inc. makes acoustical materials and also has a contracting side. Duke Power Inc. builds, rebuilds, and repairs electric motors – dynamic balancing, vibration analysis, laser shaft alignment, that sort of thing, as well as having a twenty-four-hour emergency service. Herb Fiore’s on call tonight, but at the moment he’s asleep on a cot in the back room. Donner’s metal fabricators for furnaces and air-conditioning units; Jersey Jackets & Caps specializing in sportswear; Mitchell’s plastic extruders and high-pressure laminates. There’s even a small factory for hot tubs, saunas, and spas. Yes, you’ll find quite a few companies in Brewster, although nothing actually thrives.

Everything downtown is shut tight. The two restaurants stop serving at nine – ten o’clock on the weekends. CVS/pharmacy closes at ten. The bars close at midnight. The only living soul is Ronnie McBride, curled up asleep in the doorway of Crandall Investments, which happens at least five times a week ever since his wife died of cancer two years ago. Often one of the patrolmen wakes him around three-thirty when he drives by on his rounds, and tonight it would be Harry Pasquale, but tonight Harry will be busy elsewhere.

Ever since the larger stores shut up shop – McGafferty’s Department Store, Mills Men’s Shop, and the rest – downtown Brewster has been in a steady decline, as the chains situate themselves in strip malls along Route 1. About every six months a new store starts up, but it usually closes in under a year. Two consignment shops, two beauty parlors, a tanning salon, an art gallery, a coffee shop called the Brewster Brew, a jewelers, the Brewster Times & Advertiser, Betty’s Breakfast, a karate school – I forget what kind – and a fluctuating number of gift and souvenir shops, the library, Rudy’s Pizza, and that about does it. Four churches and, oh, yes, four bars, a bowling alley, and the Brewster Inn, which is a forty-unit motel with half the units closed until May 1. Until five years ago it was called the Brewster Motel, but then the owner, Melody Baker, decided she could raise prices ten percent by changing the name to the Brewster Inn. Now she wants to change it to the Brewster Arms. The downside of a name change is she’ll have to slather the trim with a fresh coat of white paint, which it sorely needs. A fresh bed of geraniums wouldn’t hurt, either.

Tonight she has three guests, though two of the efficiencies are booked through the month. In fact, one of her guests arrived thirty minutes ago, having driven down from Boston. His name’s Ernest Hartmann – he dislikes being called Ernie – and he’s an insurance investigator, though right now, as he told his office, he’s on vacation. In truth, he almost never takes a vacation, which was a contributing factor to his divorce six years ago. But in Boston he recently questioned a fellow who had unsuccessfully torched his own boutique as a way of coping with a small mountain of bad debt. When confronted, the fellow told Hartmann about some folks in Brewster – kidnappers or cultists or neopagans, it was hard to make sense of it, but it was something the fellow’s brother knew about, and the fellow thought if Hartmann was interested, and he should be, he might then agree with the state fire marshal that the fire was accidental. Yesterday he’d given Hartmann a brass coin with a five-pointed star within a circle on one side and a goat standing on its hind legs on the other, as well as some marks like letters, though Hartmann was sure they weren’t from any Western language. But Hartmann felt if he could turn this tip into a profit he might get that transfer to LA, where his two kids, twin nine-year-old girls, lived with his ex-wife. However questionable his current quest might be, it would be worth it if it let him spend more time with his daughters.

Even so, Hartmann had just about decided not to make the trip, when on Wednesday evening he ran into Tommy Meadows, a state health investigator, who told Hartmann he also had a question about Brewster, and if Hartmann could look into a few nooks and crannies, he, Tommy Meadows, would make it worth his while. So Hartmann had agreed. Still, he wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up as a wild-goose chase. As it was, he had only started at midnight and nearly turned around three times on the drive down.

Hartmann put his bag up on the table next to the TV. He is a pudgy man in his late thirties, and he likes to wear a Hawaiian shirt under a blue blazer. What he has a lot of is hair, a thick dark brown mop that he combs back over his head and that gives him another two inches of height, and today it looks as it did when he was sixteen. He’s been lucky in the hair area, as he likes to tell himself.

Hartmann took out his shaving kit and pajamas, then took out a photo of the twins, a pair of pretty blondes who, even in the photograph, looked like they had trouble standing still. Once into puberty they’d be holy terrors, and Hartmann believed if he weren’t living nearby, he could end up as a grandfather by the age of forty-five. Most nights before his wife left, he’d check on them two or three times just for the pleasure of seeing their blond hair tousled on their pillows. These days he was lucky if he got a chance to telephone, luckier still if they answered. No, he had to get to the West Coast, and whatever these cultists or kooks were doing, as long as it was illegal and moderately sensational, it might present him with a ticket to LA.

Reaching again into his bag, Hartmann took out clean underwear and socks for tomorrow, as well as a black nine-millimeter semi-automatic that made a slight clunk as he set it on the night table next to the photograph. It was a thirteen-shot Browning Hi-Power that had belonged to his father, who had died before his daughters were born. Hartmann had fired it only on a practice range, though he’d been lugging it around for fifteen years. He never even needed to show it, but he always thought it might be useful, though he often left it at home. He wasn’t sure why he’d brought it tonight. Just hasty packing, most likely.

Nothing was pretty about the pistol, a solid mass of chipped and scratched black metal, with black plastic grips. It was functional and matter-of-fact, more like a bouncer than a dancer. Glancing at it, Hartmann decided he didn’t want it next to his daughters’ photograph, so he moved it to the night table on the other side of the bed. After all, the pistol didn’t come from a world that Hartmann wished the twins to have any part of.

If you think Hartmann is basically decent you’re right, and it could lead him down paths that others might have avoided. He did too many favors and good turns for people who didn’t deserve it. Looking at the twins’ photo as he pulled up the blankets and prepared to cut the light, he felt himself choking up. They were so goddamn cute!

Most likely you’ve visited a town like Brewster. The town isn’t poor, thanks to the taxes paid by summer people. The schools are good and the new police station on Water Street seems bigger and brighter than necessary, since the cops do little more than keep an eye on the closed-up summerhouses, nab drunk drivers on Route 1, and break up occasional domestic violence. At times one of the bars – Tony’s, in particular – offers a good fight on the weekend. What else? A funeral home is situated in an old mansion on Water Street. There’s the usual handful of doctors, lawyers, and dentists, and then the hospital, which is small but thriving. Oh, yes, downtown, on the top three floors of the four-story Metcalf Building – Brewster’s tallest building – The You Within You, a holistic health alternative, has set up shop in the former showrooms of Bates Home Furniture. Along with yoga classes – Kundalini, Vinyasa, Svaroopa, and Heated Baptiste Power Yoga – are classes in tai chi and meditation, classes in chanting, gong meditation, crystal ball meditation, even belly dancing. Or you might visit the various practitioners in Reiki, reflexology, polarity therapy, magnetic therapy, massage, and so on. Placebo U, it’s called by Dr Balfour at the hospital. You-You, it’s called by everyone else. As an alternative health co-op, it has a warren of large and small rooms where various teachers, adepts, gurus, savants, masseurs, masseuses, and specialists in the aerobic and anaerobic, as well as yoga, can rent space, while all the day and half the night the old showrooms reverberate with people jumping, hopping, stretching, and striking martial attitudes. There’s lots of talk about energy flow, or qi, lots of words like moxibustion, Kampo, bagua, and Zang Fu organs. This isn’t to poke fun. You-You is Brewster’s biggest business and soon it means to open a store to sell lotions, potions, and pills, a whole catalog of items to wear, eat, sniff, or rub on your body.

Two-thirds of the people in Brewster were born here, went to school here, work here, and will most likely die here – lifers, you might call them. They’re not entirely sick to death of one another, but they know one another’s secrets, or imagine they do, and turn gossip into a fine art. If you overheard two of them in the Stop & Shop, it might sound like this. Shopper 1: ‘Sonny’s on a tear again.’ Shopper 2: ‘Tammy in Warwick?’ Shopper 1: ‘Baby’s got a virus.’ Shopper 2: ‘Can you blame him, I mean considering?’ Shopper 1: ‘Pop says the same thing over his eggs.’ Shopper 2: ‘You can cry wolf on remission only just so often.’ Shopper 1: ‘Knocked down his own mailbox.’

Fill in the blanks, you’d have a novel; keep it short and it’s a play by Beckett.

As for the remaining third, some are retired, some work, some commute, some fish, some just like the water, some hide out, some are trying a geographical cure, some are busy discovering themselves – much of which is also true of the lifers. Most might strike you as regular people, just plain folks, but hookers and rent boys regularly drive down from Providence. One of the hookers says, ‘When I was a kid, I’d go up and down streets like these and wonder what went on in the houses. Since I’ve been a working girl, I’ve found out.’

Brewster has half a dozen AA groups. Al-Anon, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous – all have stories. A Gamblers Anonymous group started up after Foxwoods opened. The casino is a thirty-minute drive, and some people in town work there. You look at the social effects within fifty miles of a big casino, the jump in the number of thefts, divorces, suicides, traffic accidents, bankruptcies, you name it. In AA, you see a lot of cooks; in GA, you get a lot of lawyers; in NA, you get doctors and nurses. Each occupation has its own form of self-medicating. R. James Huntington was a lawyer in Brewster who attended Saturday-night GA meetings in the basement of St John’s. He kicked the habit, but it didn’t help. One September night he walked outside and before going ten feet he took a pistol and blew his brains out. Father Pete had to hose down the stained-glass window on the north side of the nave before Sunday Mass and he still missed some sticky bits. Huntington had drained three of his clients’ trust funds. He had kicked the habit but was a million bucks in debt.

These twelve-step meetings can give a taste of what goes on in these ‘hibernating’ New England towns. Sister Chastisement, a dominatrix from Narragansett with a clientele in Brewster, spends two hours with her physical therapist working on her carpal tunnel after a busy night in Brewster. And she won’t even look at a client unless he’s college educated.

But at two-thirty in the morning even Sister Chastisement has gone home to bed. Cats are on the prowl, as well as coyotes and a few fishers. Owls wait among the branches, and some nights you’ll hear a rabbit scream. As we rise above the town, we see street after street of darkened houses. The big Victorians on Oak, Spruce, and Water streets, the smaller houses around where the mill used to stand; then, as we move toward the edges of town, we find ranch houses and Cape Cods. Despite the hour, through some windows you’ll see a flickering TV and, this is strange, someone reading a book by the fireplace. In a town of seven thousand, half are sexually active. So either singly or in pairs, even a threesome, a few are still at it. The couples tend to have schedules, but for single folks, like Nurse Spandex, it’s catch-as-catch-can. As for other late-night diversions – crossword puzzles, card games, jigsaw puzzles, board games, computer solitaire – maybe fifty insomniacs are still busy. Look through the kitchen window of that split-level on Mason Street. Ginger and Howard Phelps are playing their five-thousandth game of gin rummy. Ginger has won 2,600 games to Howard’s 2,400, but Howard thinks he’s catching up. Mugs of warm milk with honey and slices of Ginger’s pecan-cranberry bread – some nights it can take them three hours to get to sleep.

A few are still up because they work late. Larry Rodman got back to his small white clapboard house on Millman Street ten minutes ago, and right now he’s taking cold pizza out of the fridge. Larry’s forty-five and weighs the same as he did when he graduated from Brewster High: 150 pounds. He could eat pizza with double oil and double cheese all day and never gain a pound. He’s lucky that way. He lives in his parents’ house, which he inherited. His father died in 2000, his mother in 2005, and now the house belongs to Larry, though he had to buy out his older brother and sister, who live in southern California. No way were they going to move back to the ‘weather from hell.’

As the pizza heats up – in the oven, not the microwave – Larry takes three stoneware cookie jars down from the shelf and sets them on the kitchen table. Then he digs a ring out of his pocket and holds it up to the light: a woman’s ring, fourteen-carat gold. That means the middle jar. The one on the left is for eighteen-carat, and the one on the right is for twelve-carat. Anything under twelve-carat, he ignores. Before he puts them back, he gives each jar a shake, taking pleasure in their heft. A fourth jar for engagement rings is still on the shelf. None of those tonight. But these jars and the jewelry they contain, they’re one of the perks of working at the Burn Palace.

For others, what keeps them up is what a friend used to call ‘the four a.m. oh-my-Gods.’ There’s Vicki Lefebvre chewing her knuckle at her living room window in a white colonial on Market Street. Nina, her sixteen-year-old, has been gone two nights. She had called earlier to say she was staying with a friend from school, but then the friend herself had called looking for her. A few times recently Nina had been gone all night or come back at three or four. But this is the first time she’s been gone two nights. Vicki’s ex-husband lives in Groton, and Vicki is tempted to call him, get him out of bed to share the pain, though she knows she’d only get his voicemail, just as she only gets her daughter’s voicemail. Where Nina goes on these nights is a mystery, except she comes home with mud on her shoes, and once with burrs stuck to the sleeve of her wool coat. When Vicki asks where she’s been, Nina says ‘nowhere’ or ‘a friend’s house’ or ‘it’s none of your business.’ And when Vicki says, ‘Everything you do is my business,’ Nina says, ‘Whatever.’ This would be a worry in any case, but five days ago Vicki saw Nina with three others in the Brewster Brew, and these others, a man and two women, were in their twenties and thirties. One was positively gray-haired. They were laughing as if they’d known one another all their lives, Nina included. They weren’t teachers; Vicki didn’t know who they were. When she asked her daughter, Nina had said, ‘Nobody. They weren’t anybody.’ So Vicki stands at the window, chewing her knuckle, and watches the branches blow back and forth. She knows she has to do something, but if she tries to ground Nina, Nina will only laugh. Then what will she do?

Surely fear is the oldest emotion. Not love, not pride, not greed. The emotion urging you to run is older than the one telling you to embrace. Take screams, for example: screams of excitement, happiness, sex, laughter, success, terror. When Nurse Spandex screamed in the hospital nursery, those jarred from sleep didn’t wonder, Hmm, what kind of scream is that?’ They knew. And their bodies responded before their minds. We say their blood turned cold, but words can’t do justice to the terror that woke people from sleep. Jamie Shepherd, lying in bed with two broken legs, wanted to jump up and run; Mabel Flynn, ninety-seven years old and nearly flatlined, felt a surge of adrenaline that would send her crawling down the hall if she weren’t hooked to a dozen machines.

As when a stone is dropped in a pond, the ripples activated by those screams spread outward – the terror of those jerked awake in the nearest rooms, terror down the hall, terror upstairs and downstairs. Then, more slowly through the sleeping town, telephones began to ring: first the police, then the hospital chain of command: nurses, nurse supervisors, doctors, department heads, chief of staff, chief of medical affairs, right up to the hospital administrator. From volunteers to members of the board of trustees, telephones jangled, buzzed, or chirped in the night. All had friends, and many felt a need to call them, and soon reporters were called, teachers, psychologists, social workers, and busybodies. Then it moved past Brewster, to the larger world, as people learned a baby had been stolen from the hospital and replaced with a snake.

So there’s a difference between who is awake before two-thirty and who is awake after. But of those awake before two-thirty, let’s look at Carl Krause. Do you see the craftsman bungalow on the corner of Newport and Hope, the one with gray shingles? Do you see those two small lighted windows in the gable above the front porch? That’s where Carl is after a fight with his wife, Harriet; that is, he raged and she stood back. But instead of being asleep, he’s lying on his bed fully dressed; he’s even got his boots on. He’s a big man, with unruly black hair, and he needs a shave. Years ago the whole bedroom was done over in knotty pine paneling by Harriet’s first husband, and Carl’s lying very still, staring at the knotholes. He’s trying to catch them move; he knows they’re doing it. When he turns his head, he can see them shift from the corner of his eye. They don’t move a lot, only enough to be a worry. And they change their shapes. Those two above his head that look like two eyes in the top half of a face, Carl saw them blink. He saw their eyebrows move. Do you believe eyes are the windows to the soul? These souls are dark and nasty. Carl knows they don’t mean him any good. Sure, you could say any knothole looks like an eye, but can you say the knotholes have faces and heads, even ears? And they’re not necessarily human faces, not even animal faces, or not animals Carl has seen. Maybe reptiles or snakes. And some of the eyes look like dead people’s eyes. Even when they move, they look like dead people’s eyes.

You might think Carl’s been drinking; he’s dry as a stone in Death Valley. Not that drinking hasn’t been a problem, just like anger’s now a problem, which is a reason why he’s upstairs and not downstairs. Harriet’s downstairs and his step-brats are downstairs and the dog and cat are downstairs, and he’s upstairs by himself, sober and calm. His only problem is knotholes, the sly ones creeping across the ceiling, gathering news, making plans. And who do they tell his secrets to, that’s what he wants to know, who does he have to watch out for? So Carl isn’t moving even a little finger; he’s making like a dead guy just to trick them, like he’s lying in his coffin, staring up like a corpse might stare up. But lying like that takes effort. It’s hard work and he starts to sweat and the pressure starts to build. He can feel it, like something in his gut trying to break free. Pretty soon it’s going to blow and then people better watch out.

Stephen Dobyns

THE BURN PALACE

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

THE BURN PALACE

THE BEGINNING

1