Holy City

Fire was the dream that broke him.

He sat stiff as a dead cat, felt for the handle of his pistol under the seat, relaxed. The sad night came back to him, one of many like it, riding indefinitely, listening to the angry word of God through a thin static distance, the voice somehow both austere and intimate, seeming to speak directly to him with piercing certainty. He listened because there was nothing else out here - no other radio station - between hamlets or villages or four-way intersections, some of which at one point probably had been towns, nothing to see between them but a country undulating in pursuit of some sort of equilibrium, a pulse one could assess only by covering its distances, surprising because the countryside felt dead otherwise. It was not the soft, green, junglelike vegetation of so much of Virginia, but a hard, coarse, spiky land. The lonely roads wended like snakes through close forest or open fields or woods felled entirely for their lumber, leaving the ground as naked and weird as a skinned bear. And as he passed the fading houses like craters, kudzu-covered or through-grown with wild privet and poison ivy and chipping of paint, out of a wood-paneled darkness came the dark, paternal, familiar voice, companionate and suggestive of violence, of guile, the voice clean-shaven, austere, piercing, and expectant, some local celebrity preacher in a countryside rife with bewildering crime.

Will Seems had returned from a decade in Richmond - the 'Holy City' - to a land he had called home each year of that decade, a country he now saw was peopled by a kind of disparate lost congregation. Last year, a man had cut his wife's throat with a Buck lock-blade, shooting himself after with a Walther PPK, failing on both counts. His wife was able to stop the bleeding from her neck with a pillow before calling 911, and the man woke up in a hospital room missing most of his jaw and wearing handcuffs to boot. Then, a few months ago now, a man in Halifax County who had been stopped for a burnt-out taillight had shot the policeman dead and driven away without contest. Even now, no leads. But one of the strangest incidents had occurred only recently. A complaint had been submitted in town because of an odor emanating from a particular home. The middle-aged unmarried resident had wrapped her dead mother - deceased by natural causes - in winter blankets, leaving the body in the house for over two months. Will remembered the investigation they'd conducted, wearing masks that did little to mitigate the stench, counting out with watering eyes 116 air fresheners sprinkled over the quilts. The sheriff was glad enough to let Troy St Pierre, the medical examiner, remove the corpse, but he and Will were stuck with the daughter of the deceased. When questioned, the woman could not explain why she hadn't reported her own mother's death, the only reason they had cause to arrest her. Will saw in her a sad and childish desperation that was not necessarily unique; he'd seen it in the faces of the county, a puckered, hopeless, dopey defeat. Will guessed she was so afraid of being alone in this world that she had considered the dead welcome company.

Will got out of his truck and stretched and made use of a tree, looking down at the flat water of the creek, the dream still nagging him, the taste of smoke refusing to fade. He couldn't keep doing this, riding late-night to wear himself out, ending up back at the creek to sleep and leaving early, before the fishermen came with their buckets and their lines. He'd smoked too much last night, tasted the cotton mouth now, remembered an acute craving for a Coke with vanilla, the way it was served at the nearest Waffle House up in Petersburg. He reached in the pickup and took a sip now of leftover coffee in an open Styrofoam cup he'd picked up yesterday evening from the Get 'N' Go, some cooked-down tired version of what it had been when brewed that morning, and now it was twenty-four hours old, and it seemed nothing had happened in twenty-four hours, but that everything and everyone had moved and breathed just that much forward.

He tossed the dregs at the ground and turned to see, beyond the plain white Baptist church, a pillar of black smoke coming from the direction of the Hathom house or, beyond it, the Janders place. He grabbed his cell from the cup holder, called it in, climbing in and starting the pickup and pulling onto the road as the phone rang.

'This is Deputy Seems reporting a fire in Turkey Creek.' He rounded a bend. 'It's the Janders house.'

'Copy,' Tania said. She'd worked for the sheriff's department longer than Will and had never seen a day in the field. 'Fire truck is on its way. Wait for it, you hear me?'

Will slapped his phone closed.

Tom's truck sat in the yard, the tractor by the shed; the smell of old lumber and paint burning filled the air. Will slid through a dirt turn, pulling a parachute of dust into the yard, and saw now the side of Tom's mother's house (he still thought of it as hers) on fire, melting inward like blossom-end rot on some strange fruit.

Will pocketed the phone. The fire had already consumed the right side of the house but had not reached the front door.

'Tom!' Will could feel the heat baking into his cheeks. 'Day! Tom!'

It was too soon to hear a siren. The fire truck was twenty-five minutes out from the time he called if he was lucky. He breathed deep, kicked open the front door, a plume of hot black smoke rolling into his face. He crouched, moving through the house, unable to hear anything but fire. The flames roared over him, and pieces of ceiling fell nearby. He groped along the kitchen floor, the vinyl curling like antique documents, holding his breath as long as he could, until he stumbled into something. A boot, steel toe, hot to the touch. He found the other foot and pulled them both, making it to the side door, tugging at what must have been Tom's body. He was crying with smoke, coughed when he tried to breathe, found himself on his knees in the yard, trying to stand, trying to breathe, smoke in the bridge of his nose. Tears and smoke, tears and smoke. Finally, he returned to the threshold, pulled the body free, dragged it ungracefully down the three steps and into the yard, and fell beside it in the grass, coughing.

When Will came to, Sheriff Mills was breathing heavily down at him, patting Will's face with his rough hand to wake him, and an EMT had a stethoscope on his chest. A bandage had been placed on his arm, and he felt the burn. Will could smell the spearmint from the gum Mills chewed compulsively, a habit he'd formed years ago in an effort to quit tobacco. Will sat up to see the fire truck hosing down the house in splintering rainbows beyond which, in the distance, he could see a bald eagle perched at the top of a pine tree.

'You all right, son?' Mills said. 'You got some kind of death wish I need to know about?'

The sheriff helped Will to his feet, and they looked at Tom in the grass, his clothes blackened, face covered in soot. A look of eternal blankness, until Will realized why.

'Shit,' Mills said, sounding it as shiat. 'Eyes gone, melted.'

Mills turned the powerful body over with catlike, delicate care and inspected Tom's corpse, looked at the steps smudged with dark matter and again at the body.

'Hold on, now,' Sheriff Mills said to himself.

Mills took out a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, pinched Tom's shirt just under the left shoulder blade, so that it lifted like a tent, revealing a rift in the fabric and a dark wet stain, darker and more consistent than the soot. He spread the rift with two fingers and inspected the skin, finding soot-caked gash marks, maybe two, maybe three. Will put his hands on his knees in an athlete's resting position and looked down as Sheriff Mills let the soaked hot shirt fall back onto the soaked hot skin.

'Homicide,' Will said, the word echoing, almost a question. This wasn't picking up drunks or issuing speeding tickets or nailing vagrants for trespassing on abandoned properties. 'Who'd. ?'

Will watched the sheriff: quiet, thoughtful, composed. The man seemed to sharpen, brighten into a quiet efficiency, fully alive.

Mills said, 'It's a miracle he didn't burn worse than this. You neither. Check his pockets.'

No wallet, no phone. Nothing.

Will felt light-headed, empty. He began coughing again. The sheriff said, 'Tape this off while I call Sheriff Edgars and Troy over here. Keep everyone out unless it's them. When they get here, I'll need you to take pictures. Camera's in my truck.'

Will was heading for the tape when he detected movement behind the house, wishing he hadn't, but Mills saw it too.

'Head up the trees,' Mills said. 'I'll swing around from the field. Watch yourself now.'

Will ran, his body a confusion of sweat and smoke and speed against the slow, muddled summer-morning heat and sudden, incredibly parching thirst that made it difficult to breathe. He ran like a setter on the scent, one thing on his mind, his legs blurring like water beneath him.

He tracked the runner to the edge of a tobacco field where it abutted the low muddy creek lined in thick trees and poison ivy. He stopped to listen...