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It’s
that moment of the fire’s spreading, the sheer speed of it
that I remember most clearly, watching from the crest of a hill
that stretched up from the drive where the fire struck, and I was
able to do nothing. It moved so eerily along a straight line, not
just along the ground but forming a plane upward, a sheet of it
raging through the air, dwarfing the boys in its path as they
leaned over the engine of a battered mustang, the car resting on
the dirt gravel drive of an old country farmhouse, the sheet of
fire rushing toward them in its perfectly straight path like some
divine judgment on their having stolen those sheets from the
clothesline of a neighbor to rip up and use as rags for cleaning
the engine, an old wreck that someone had given them to fix up,
if they could. The boys were cleaning blackened grease baked onto
the car’s ancient engine, dipping the rags first into a can
of gasoline they’d found somewhere on this abandoned farm,
its fields sprouting masses of golden-flowered dandelions, the
grass of its yard grown knee-deep and seeded at the tips, the
yard sloping up the knob of earth to the place where I sat,
watching. I wasn’t there for a reason, just nothing to do
on a hot summer day but tag along with these boys I knew, sit
outside in the scorching heat of a place different from my own
oppressive back yard, reading a book or, tiring of that as I had,
just watching the boys as they scrubbed down the engine, watching
as from time to time they carried handfuls of the blackened rags
across the field below to add them to an already smoldering pile.
The fire moved in the manner of its following a long fuse
toward a detonator like I’d seen on TV, but faster, taller,
the wall of it beginning at the edge of the field where the boys
had lit the used rags on fire so that they wouldn’t be
caught for having stolen the sheets they’d torn up. It
wasn’t like an explosion altogether but an event that
happened within a moment, slowed down just enough to see where it
began and ended, from the burning rags, across the otherwise
verdant open field, toward the car where the boys worked, their
heads lowered over the engine beneath the rusted upraised hood.
It was a wall of orange flame slicing through the air in its
perfect plane toward the car, and there was a sound it made, a
low whooshing, like a quick exhalation, as though it were the
voice of something trying to speak.
I screamed when I saw
it happening, but the scream, too, must have taken time to reach
them, some portion of a second from where I was. I saw them jerk
backward away from the engine, which must not have been from the
scream but from the force of the fire erupting before them. That
explosion must have made a sound, something loud and horrible,
but I can’t remember, can see only the boys’ heads
flaming, hear them screaming as they ran, flinging their arms and
their hands at the torches of their heads to beat out the flames,
but of course their limbs were coated in gasoline atop the thick
greasy sludge of the car’s engine and they too ignited, and
then the boys dove into the grass, rolling.
By the time I
could run to them, they’d extinguished their own flames,
and the three of them lay on the ground, forming pockets in the
overgrown grass, two of them moaning, the other silent. Squatting
beside the motionless one, I placed my palms down onto sheaves of
the tall grass, leaning forward as I shook all over, listening
for the sound of his breathing, which was hard to hear over the
sound of my own heart, huge and violent inside me, pounding as
though it were trying to get out of me.
I remember the
smell of seared flesh and hair, running for help and then
returning, sitting amid their bodies in the grass, hugging my
arms around my knees and talking to them without knowing if they
could hear me.
I shivered
within my sweat-dampened clothing despite the waning heat of the
afternoon. Watching the final weak flames lapping at the
blackened carcass of the old car, looking back and forth from the
car to the place where the boys had lit the rags on fire, the
grass barely singed in the space between them, I pictured again
that sheet of flames surging through the air, thinking how much
more formidable it must have seemed from below.
But the
worst part of all is in the way I remember those boys from the
fire. In the end they recovered quickly—the scarring
minimal and their hair grown back by the next time I saw them—and
when we spoke, it seemed that the boys had nearly forgotten the
event. It was only me who didn’t, me who still remembers
the way I found them, blackened and sounding barely alive, me
remembering the fire with horror and fascination.
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