An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [48]
"Hey," I said, "there it is." And in my excitement, I pulled Mr. Frazier to his feet. It wasn't difficult: there wasn't much weight to him beyond his clothes. I pulled him up and dragged him across the sidewalk and to the house. I don't know how I missed it in the first place. Next to Mr. Frazier it was the best-looking thing in the neighborhood, even though someone had tried to torch it: it was gray with green trim and a neatly mowed lawn and electric candles glowing in the windows and a picket fence outside and even an antique black iron boot scraper next to the front door. It was pretty. It was very, very pretty. You wouldn't have noticed anything was wrong with it except that it was ringed by yellow police tape, and there were some faint black singe marks near the foundation. It was like looking at a beautiful woman who'd just gotten a bad haircut. After all the ugliness we'd seen in the neighborhood, its beauty was a fresh, cool breeze on a hot day, and I still couldn't figure out why Mr. Frazier would want to burn it down. Why not burn the boys' house down if they were bugging him so? To burn this handsome old house was screwy and made no sense.
"Why?" I asked him. "Why would you want to burn that beautiful house down?" As I asked the question, I realized the answer was right in his letter, which I'd skimmed, but only far enough to know what Mr. Frazier wanted me to burn and not why. So I pulled the letter out of my jacket pocket. But before it was all the way out, Mr. Frazier snatched it away from me. I didn't even see his hand come between mine and the letter. His reflexes were that incredible. He was quite an old guy.
But he wasn't much of a reader, at least not without his glasses. It must have taken him half an hour to get through that letter, which he held right up to his face.
"Mr. Frazier," I said, "why don't you let me read that for you? It'll go faster."
He ignored me and was right to do so. Because I was wrong about his eyesight; or maybe I was right, but it had nothing to do with the glacial pace of his reading. It was obvious that Mr. Frazier simply loved what he was doing. He was like my mother in this respect. He really knew how to read and get something out of it, too, and while he was reading, his face started going through phases, like the moon. He made reading seem like something noble and worth doing ― life-altering, even. I again cursed myself for giving up reading so many years ago and vowed to continue reading Morgan Taylor's fraudulent memoir just as soon as Mr. Frazier finished with the letter.
Finally he did. I knew this because even though it appeared he was still reading ― his face was still very close to the letter ― I heard this sound, this familiar, repetitive, guttural sound, and when I looked closely I saw that Mr. Frazier was crying, and his tears were getting all over the letter.
"Please, Mr. Frazier," I said, "don't do that, don't ― hey, why are you crying?"
"I miss you," he said in between heaving sobs.
And oh, that was terrible, much worse than the crying! Except that I couldn't figure out whom he was missing. It wasn't me, I knew that. For one, I was right there, next to him; for another, he wasn't looking at me. First Mr. Frazier stared at the letter; then he raised his head and seemed to look at an American flag sticking out of the porch flagpole stand. "I miss you," he said again, in the direction of the flag this time. So I walked over, yanked the flag out of its stand, and handed it to Mr. Frazier. But that flag didn't seem to be the thing he was missing: he immediately dropped it on the sidewalk and started crying again, really crying. I thought for sure his heart