Alligator - Lisa Moore [98]
When he and Frank wandered the rolling lawns they left two green trails of footprints in the fogged-over grass. From the garden they could see the patio window behind which Mrs. Hallett was ironing blouses, or one of her pale uniforms.
Because they knew she was just beyond the dark glass, they could forget her and be absorbed by a trail of ants sometimes carrying a dead ant out of the path of the others. They watched the sun light up beads of dew on a spider’s web that jiggled violently with a breeze. They watched wasps crawl from their papery nests and hover and pitch and crawl back in. These miniature garden dramas absorbed the boys so thoroughly they became, for that brief time in their childhood, almost as one.
It was a wordless union based entirely on mutual wonder in a big garden. Frank took the money off the table and put it in his breast pocket and buttoned the flap.
Good luck with the small machine repair, Kevin, he said. He was ready to leave and Kevin wanted him to go now, but he stood still.
FRANK
DID FRANK THINK? Yes, he did. He was exceptionally lucid. He was in the centre of a ball of fire. The air was jellied. He couldn’t get air into his lungs. He had been locked in a house and the house had exploded into flame and his clothes were on fire and his hair and his face. He had woken up in a blazing room with no memory of passing out.
His windpipe was scorched and his lungs were scorched and the blood that rushed through his veins and capillaries toward his lungs, desperate for oxygen, was hot. His arms were bubbling; he saw rather than felt the blisters coming up. But all he knew was he could not breathe.
He thought of the door and where it was in relation to the centre of the room. Glass crashed; the mirror over the fireplace splintered and then fell from the wall in jagged pieces. The flames were swaying around his knees like a field of long grass and the heat climbed each piece of furniture and gave the piano a liquid glaze. The piano top was a rippling lake and the heat twisted around Frank like bedsheets, and he kicked out of the sheets of flame and got to the door and when he touched the doorknob it was already too hot to touch. He lifted his shirt over his mouth and nose. Time was not behaving, he knew. He was in the room for no more than a minute. Five minutes? But the minutes had melted and warped. Time, without oxygen, collapsed. It couldn’t have been more than a minute.
He threw his shoulder against the door but the door didn’t budge. There was one way out and it was this door and the door was not opening. A massive blast of tumbling heat tore through the living room to funnel up the staircase and on the way it smacked against Frank nearly knocking him down and it transformed upon touch into more flame and it licked him all over his back and ran up his spine and shoulders, and it had grabbed his scalp, tugging viciously at his hair. He could feel a blister form on one eyelid. His eye was closing over. He couldn’t keep it open. He wiped at the blister with his finger-nails and it broke and the water ran into his eye. He was gasping, there was nothing in his lungs.
He stumbled back into the centre of the room and he saw the goldfish in the bowl flicking madly back and forth. He understood perfectly that Valentin had jammed something against the door.
He’d had a shot of vodka in Valentin’s apartment but what followed was out of all proportion to a shot of vodka. What followed was a weak-limbed euphoria, an easing up of gravity and everything grave. Frank hadn’t had a good rest since his mother died. Whatever had been in the vodka, it was odourless and colourless and extremely potent. It made him feel rested.
He knew Valentin had dropped a match; that much he knew. Everything that had come before, his mother’s death, the evenings at the hot-dog stand, the way Colleen had clamped her body against