American Outlaw - Jesse James [17]
Maybe it would have been an okay family to ride out my high school years with. Nina could never have been a mom to me, but on the plus side, I probably wasn’t going to happen upon a box of nudie pictures of her. No magazine in the world would publish one of those.
But it all turned out to be moot, when the house burned down.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was down the street at a neighbor’s house, drinking beer with Bobby.
Bobby was getting a pretty good buzz on. He could always drink, and when he was in the company of a woman, as he was now, with my neighbor Kelly, he tipped them back at double speed.
“We’re about to be the kings of the school,” he babbled. “State champs, probably, and then of course, the NFL is my personal plan . . .”
Suddenly I smelled something.
“What is that?”
“What are you babbling about, Jesse?”
“Yeah,” Kelly said, giggling. “Are you getting weird, Jesse?”
“Jesse’s always weird,” Bobby announced. “Ain’t you,” he said, slurping.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, helping myself to another drink. It wasn’t exactly my style to drink in the middle of the afternoon, but hell, it was Sunday. My dad and Nina and her kids were up in the Bay Area, attending one of his auctions; I had the town all to myself. Something felt pretty good about the way these cold, watery beers were going down, too. “I just thought something smelled off.”
“Pardon him, please, he’s retarded,” Bobby apologized for me. He tried to slip an arm around Kelly’s shoulders. She slipped out from underneath his grasp, giggling. “I’ll be happy to ask him to leave, if you like.”
We continued partying, working on a collective buzz, listening to music.
“You guys like Bon Jovi?” Kelly asked. “Their lead singer is such a doll.”
Bobby laughed. “I dig their bass player.” He screwed up his face, then belched violently. “Giant teenage crush.”
I laughed, not really listening. “Seriously, you guys don’t smell that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bobby said.
“Hold on,” Kelly said, seriously. “I smell something, too. Doesn’t it smell like something’s—”
“Burning,” I finished for her, my insides flushing with ice water, and we jumped to our feet and ran out the door.
Outside, half a block down, my house was ablaze.
As I watched, shocked, the house started igniting seemingly of its own accord. Loud, crazy explosions rocked the frame.
“What is that?” Bobby asked, awed for maybe the first time in his life.
“It’s my fireworks,” I said. A sinking, helpless feeling was building in the pit of my stomach.
I’d been storing fireworks—black powder, bottle rockets, and bricks of M-15s—in the garage for years, for so long I’d forgotten they were even there. In terrible bursts, they began exploding violently. I had ammo in there, too, bullets and shells. It sounded like a war. Flames began to lick at the windows, at the walls, at the roof.
Soon a siren’s wail could be heard. The fire engines were coming.
Scared out of our minds, Bobby, Kelly, and I watched from the sidelines as a team of firefighters jumped down from the truck. They chopped down my door with axes and began to douse my whole house in water and chemicals.
“This your house, son?” a fireman asked me gruffly.
I nodded.
“Where are your folks?”
“They’re not here,” I said, watching over his shoulder as more and more water streamed into my garage. Everything in there that wasn’t melted in the fire would be ruined by water damage. “My dad and his wife are up in San Francisco.”
“You better notify him,” the fireman said. “He’ll want to know.”
So I walked back to Kelly’s and called him. I was half-drunk and totally in shock. He told me he would leave his auction immediately and come down to assess the damage. I sat down on the stoop to wait.
All night, I waited for him to arrive. The firefighters kept working at the