• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"Yes," he said, his voice rough but a little higher than I expected, like a rugged Tweety Bird. "I am Peter Le Clair."

Well, now we were having a regular conversation ― we both sat down, as if settling into something ― and I certainly didn't want to lose its thread. So I kept the questions simple so that we could both follow them.

"Do you know why I'm here?"

"Yes," Peter replied, and then, before I could respond, he said, "I want you to burn down that house. But I can't pay you anything." When he said this, his eyes dropped to his boots and then rose up to my eyes, as if his shame were having an internal struggle with his pride. I felt for Peter and wanted to tell him that the struggle wasn't just part of his personal condition; it was the human condition, and it was my condition, too. Maybe that's why my face was so red. I wanted to tell him all this, but I also didn't want to get off the topic, which is my weakness, the way not speaking was his.

"Can't pay me anything," I said, just to buy myself some time to think and catch up. "Did you get a phone call saying something about burning down the Robert Frost Place?" I was also thinking about the phone call I'd gotten back in Amherst. It wasn't Peter's voice, I knew that now, but maybe Peter had received a phone call, too.

Except he hadn't. "No phone call," he said. "No phone." Then he shrugged again. It was a definitive shrug, one that told me there wasn't anything else to say about the phone call. So I didn't say anything and instead silently took stock of what I now knew or thought I knew. Peter hadn't gotten a phone call; I had, but the caller hadn't asked anyone for money to burn down the Robert Frost Place, assuming that's what he planned on doing. The person who'd tried to burn down the Mark Twain House had asked for money but had done so in a letter, not over the phone, and most likely wasn't a man and so most likely had nothing to do with whomever I was supposed to meet at midnight at the Robert Frost Place. And none of these people seemed to have anything, necessarily, to do with whoever had tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House. I felt panicked, taking account of all the things I didn't know, the same kind of panic a schoolchild feels when picking up a pencil to take a test for which he is unprepared. And as every schoolchild knows, panic is to the bladder what love or hate or exercise is to the heart.

"I'll be right back," I told Peter, and then wandered to the left, down the trailer's only visible hall. The bathroom was the first door to the left and was interesting. There were appliances and fixtures everywhere ― pipes and tubes of joint compound and fractured tile and shower rods and curtains and a medicine cabinet with no door. And as on Noah's boat, there were two of each of the most necessary items: two sinks (one fixed into the wall and one on the floor) and two ashtrays and two towels and two towel racks and two toilets, a blue one and a yellow one. Now Peter's plunger made a little more sense. But in my hurry I couldn't stop to tell which toilet I was supposed to use, so I used the blue one in honor of the boy I'd once been and still was, essentially. When I was done, I left the bathroom in a hurry and without checking to see whether it was the right, working toilet. Because if it was, great, and if it wasn't, well, I didn't really want to know.

"Can't pay you," Peter repeated as soon as I returned to the living room. I empathized: his lack of money weighed heavily on him and he needed relief from it, his poverty being to his vessel what my pee had just been to mine.

"Don't worry about the money," I said. "What do you say we drive over to the Robert Frost Place and see what we're dealing with."

"The truck's busted," he said.

"Which one?"

"All of them," he said. "We'll take your van. Let's go."

With that, he started shoving clothes at me ― a once-white thermal shirt, now dirty to the point of being yellow; a lined flannel shirt; a big, bulging, blue parka that might have looked good on the