Portrait of a young con artist
Chapter five:
School house fire
They told Kenny not to go near Dave's house after what happened at school
Uncle Ed, a man who had fought bullies in high school over his weaker brother, looked scared, and Kenny, who looked to his uncle for strength, caught the bad feelings.
Just the same, he was curious.
People had seen the smoke for miles, a thick black hang hanging over the ruins of school, sirens blaring beneath it, with tough men in yellow slickers fighting hoses -- their high arches of water unable to even dent the flames.
If Kenny had lived a block closer, he could have watched it all from his third floor window, watching the licking flames beat back the water, seen the men with red faces cursing as they inched back away from the heat.
"Why can't I go over to see Dave?" Kenny asked. "He's my best friend."
"I don't have to give you no reasons," Uncle Ed boomed, standing in the kitchen door, bit black fire boots still dripping ash-colored water. The smell of smoke danced around him like sour cologne. "Just do what you're told, and forget all that stuff about his being your friend. He's nobody's friend now."
Kenny's aunt moaned as fiddled with her sewing at the table.
"If this had happened an hour earlier God only knows how many children would have died," she said.
"Don't talk like that, Jane," Ed said. "No point of making this worse than it is. Just be thankful we nabbed the boy before he go do any more harm."
"But the school, Ed," the woman said. "What will the children do now for their education."
"They'll head off for public school," Ed said.
The fact that the fire hadn't occurred during school hours was a great disappointment to Kenny and the other kids who had pressed near the police barriers for a glimpse of the flames. But then, the idea of public school -- which after any other incident might have seemed terrribly important to Kenny -- intrigued him less than the cause of the fire.
Within an hour of the fire, people whispered about the police finding Dave there, and whether or not he had set the thing.
"Do you really think Dave did it?" Billy Brett asked Kenny earlier.
"I don't know," Kenny said, wondering if his friend Dave had the kind of courage to do what he sometimes mumbled about doing. Most people thought he was all talk. But something inside Kenny had always made him wonder.
And the timing was another matter.
If Dave had done it, why had he waited until the very last day of school to set the fire? Why couldn't he have done it sooner so as to provide Kenny and the others with some added summer vacation?
But if Dave did it, no one could prove it for a fact, and Kenny knew the kids would talk about the fire for the rest of the summer, trying to sort out the details just as the adults would.
Ralph, of course, was convinced of Dave's guilt.
"He set the fire because the school left him back again," he said. "You know what he said he'd do if they did that."
"He's always saying those kinds of things," Kenny said. "He said he would blow up the ice cream truck once, too, if the man gave one more melting bar, and he didn't."
"This is different," Ralph said. "This wasn't no matter of melting ice cream."
That much was true. Kenny remember the nun pressing Dave even to the last day about religious matters, as if she might pass the boy after all if he answered his religious questions right.
"Who is God the Father, David?" the nun asked.
And all Dave would do was shake his head, as Kenny did to Ralph's accusations.
"He didn't admit nothing," Kenny said. "You think he'd go through all that trouble to set the fire, and then not take credit for it?"
"Maybe he got scared after he saw the whole place go up like it did, and saw the Police chief and the fire chief all crowding around?"
"He didn't look scared when he came passed here," Kenny said, turning towards where the police car had waited into which they had dumped the boy, still seeing the boy's smug face as he looked back at Ralph, Billy, Kenny and the others.
"Then what was he doing in there if he didn't set the fire?" Billy asked.
"I don't know," Kenny said. "But I didn't see his sister around, and you know as well as I do that he doesn't go anywhere without her."
Ralph, Billy and some of the others looked a little startled at this fact, as if they were ashamed to have not thought of it themselves. Where was Dave's sister? Everybody knew how Dave spent more time escorting her back and forth from school than he did studying, that the only reason he probably came to school at all was on account of her, even the fear of his father's belt couldn't have made him crack a book unless he wanted to first.
"You hear me, boy?" Uncle Ed said, bringing Kenny's mind back to his own kitchen, and the smell of smoke the encircled his uncle. "I want you to stay away from that house."
"But Uncle Ed...."
"I mean it! You go near that house and I'll call the cops and have them haul you away. Leave the boy be. He's in enough trouble, and I don't want none of it spreading to you."
"Spread? How?"
"Never you mind," Uncle Ed said. "Just obey me. That boy's evil, and evil has a way of spreading."
Ralph had said as much, when -- after the fire was over, he and Kenny and Billy and Bob, slipped under the fire tape when the police officer turned away, and ran through the street, over the slick pavement to where the old school smoldered. A few blackened cross arms marked where the school's upper floors had been. The steeple to the attached church had crumbled in on itself, so that the cross rose from a slag heap in the middle. Someone would have to knock down the building in a day or two before it fell down of its own accord. As their arrival proved, the police would not be able to keep the kids out for long.
"I swear the devil came into that boy," Ralph said, looking at the ruins. He shook his head slowly, and sighed.
"And if he didn't do it?"
"He did it," Billy said. "We all know he did."
"Maybe one of us should go ask him," Bob suggested, drawing mocking looks from everybody.
"How we going to do that?" Ralph asked. "With him locked up in jail."
"He's not in jail," Bob retorted. "They took him to his house."
"To his house?" Billy said, in disbelief. "How do you know?"
"I heard the cop say that when he drove the car away. The chief said: `You take the boy home, but make sure he stays there. I'm going to want to talk to him later on.'"
"So even if he is home, who says he'll tell us anything?" Ralph asked.
"Maybe he'll tell Kenny," Bob said. "He and Kenny were pretty close."
"I wasn't close with him," Kenny said.
"You're his best friend," Billy said.
"I'm his only friend," Kenny admitted. "But that doesn't mean I knew him better than anybody else. The only person who knew him at all was his sister, and she was as closed-mouthed as he was. She didn't even look at me, even when I walked them both to school."
"Stay away from that house, boy," Uncle Ed said, reading Kenny's intentions from his expression.
"Ah, Uncle Ed, I wasn't going to go over there. I was going to go for a soda."
"Drink water."
"But I'd only be going to the corner."
"Let him go, Ed," Aunt Jane said. "No one's going to get near that house with the way things are."
So Ed threw up his hands and Kenny slipped out the door, down the back porch, but instead of turning right and heading around the side of the house to the front steps, he crossed the back yard, climbed the fense and ran along Mr. Gunya's flower beds until he reached the other fense. He hopped this fense, too, and rushed down First Street, towards the house where Dave lived with his mother, father, sister, and younger brother.
If Kenny had expected police cars, he was disappointed. But he saw no signs of other life either, not a light lit in any of the windows, and when he circled around the house to where Dave's window looked down on the alley from the second floor, Kenny found that window unlighted as well. He picked up a pebble and tossed it at the glass, missing his first shot, and his second, scoring with the third.
The curtains moved; Dave's sister's face appeared, frowned, the head shaking from side to side. Kenny picked up another stone when she vanished and hit the glass again. This time when the face appeared, the window opened.
"Let me talk to Dave," Kenny whispered.
"He doesn't want to talk," the girl said. "Go away."
"But I want to find out what happened."
"Nothing happened," the girl said and slammed the window.
Kenny wanted to hit the glass again with another stone, but didn't. He just walked away, glancing up at the window again and again until it faded behind him.
Somehow he knew Dave would not be accompanying them to public school next year.
But Kenny would see Dave again, if only for the memory of that smug face, passing him and the others, eyes glinting with an odd pride.