Family Flame

Family Flame

    Mitch slumped in the parked truck’s driver seat and stared through the old chain-link fence at the hotel. Last summer his brother-in-law Barry kicked down the door of one of the rooms and killed both his uncle and his uncle’s lover. Shot them both four times, the papers said.
    They also said Barry had known his uncle would be there—premeditated, they called it. Because he’d tailed him to the hotel, hidden in the lobby as he checked in, and followed him right to his room where he met his lover. The whole time with his dad’s .22 pistol cradled in the front pocket of his jacket. At least that’s what the papers said. This was just a small town in the northeastern hunk of Colorado, after all, so when the big media got involved, everyone did.
    Mitch’s cell phone rumbled in his jeans. He set it on the passenger’s seat when he saw it was his wife Karen calling. When it stopped vibrating, he listened to the voice mail: she had decided to come home from her mother’s that night after all.
    He thought of college when she moved in with him. They’d talk about their lives before and she’d told him what it was like growing up with Barry. Both she and her big red-haired brother would be alone in the farmhouse from the time they got home from school to the time their dad came in muddy from the fields. She’d get home and run straight into her bedroom after she got off the bus and then lock the door behind her. And when her brother traipsed in, he’d bang on the door of her room until the china cabinet in the dining room rattled. He’d scream in a fake language and slide knives back and forth under the door, aching to slash her feet. She told Mitch that’s when she knew he’d be a murderer.
    But he never got in, she said, not once. She was proud of that. But she still cried when she talked about the day their dad caught him. He had come slumping home early one day and Karen had seen him and pounded on the window until he’d looked up to see her tear-streaked red face. It was all still so vivid, she said. Seeing her dad run inside and then hearing Barry shout as the door shook in concussive thrusts while his dad hit him from behind. Then hearing the knife clatter to the floor and knowing where those receding footsteps were headed, not needing to hear the screen door to know where they were going.
    She spoke of looking out the window, seeing her dad dragging Barry by his shirt collar until they both disappeared into the yawning blackness of the barn. Her dad walked alone back across the yard a few minutes later, rubbing his knuckles. Barry didn’t emerge from the barn until a couple of hours after dark, and his eyes were puffed and tired when he came inside and said he couldn’t hear a goddamn thing. His dad sipped at a beer and told him it would come back eventually.
Sitting in his truck next to the hotel, Mitch heard his father-in-law’s truck before he saw it. Dan pulled up next to Mitch. Mitch waved but Dan didn’t. Instead he just got out of the truck and looked at the hotel and waited for Mitch to do the same. Mitch stepped out onto the icy parking lot.
    “Last summer,” Dan said. “Seems longer than that. Don’t know when three months has gone by so slowly.” He turned and looked at Mitch for the first time. “But I’d like to meet anyone who says three months just jumps by when your son’s on trial for murdering your own brother.”
    Mitch walked over toward him and tried not to slip. “Well, at least he’s not on trial anymore, Dan. At least it’s over.”
    Dan turned back to the hotel and took his hat off. His carrot-colored hair had thinned and yellowed since the last time Mitch had seen him. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. I guess I knew how it’d end all along.” He put his hat back on and stood with his hands on his hips, still not looking at Mitch. “You’ve known him for years. Know he’s a little crazy.” He walked along the fence but kept his eyes on the hotel. “But I guess he kills with a purpose. You’d never know that if you read the papers. Reporters just want sensation.” He waved a hand toward the fence as if dismissing not only the media but the hotel and the incident that had happened there only last summer. Just three months ago. “They don’t care that there’s real people involved. Don’t realize it can still be the Wild West out here. That martial law can still apply.”
    Mitch still stood far away from Dan. “Some people just kill. There’s not always a clear cut reason for it.”
    “Oh, this had a clear cut reason. I tell you, that son of a bitch brother of mine deserved it.”  He shifted his weight to his left foot off the curb by the fence and the sun glinted off his glasses and glanced into Mitch’s eyes.
    Dan belched and Mitch knew he’d been drinking. “How can you say that about your own brother?” Mitch asked, knowing the answer didn’t matter.
    Dan reached into his back pocket and pulled out a can of chew. He turned to Mitch with a puffed bottom lip and said, “You said it yourself. Some people just kill.” He put the can back in his pocket and wiped his hands together. “Well, you could look at it the other way and say with just as much certainty that some people should be killed.” He walked toward the fence and this time he laced the fingers of both hands through its links. He spat and said, “And when the past catches up with certain people that’s generally what happens.”
    Dan stood quietly as his brown tobacco juice dripped and clung its way down the fence. Then, in a spasm of energy surprising for a man of his weight, he pushed himself away from the fence and as it rattled in the morning air he motioned for Mitch to follow him and they both walked along the fence line and crossed the parking lot and went into the hotel through the automatic door. The lobby was spacious and painted in the same light blue as the hotel’s siding. Mitch and Dan stood by the fireplace, looking at the empty couches in the room.
    “Why are we in here, Dan?” Mitch asked. Dan marched up and down and ignored all the people behind the counter who asked him what he needed, what they could do for him. He just walked along the edge of the lobby and looked around as the cowshit from his boots sprinkled the tiled floor.
    “This is where he hid while my brother checked in, before he went upstairs to meet his lover.” He swallowed and grimaced, gutting his chew. “Don’t need to watch channel four to know that this is where Barry came and hid.” He continued to ignore the entreaties of the people behind the counter. “Wonder where though?” he said more to himself than to Mitch. “He’s a big fella to be hiding. Don’t know how Jack didn’t see him.”
    “Maybe your brother was distracted.”
    Dan chuckled. “Yeah, I guess he was. He had someone else to see to.”
    Mitch was starting to feel awkward at ignoring the hotel workers. His polite smiles and dismissals no longer seemed to be enough; the woman behind the computer with her hair in a bun had started to look a little worried. Mitch recognized her from the trial, and he wondered if she thought Dan was a repeat killer, a copycat, because she had begun to stare at him with widened eyes that shifted back and forth between the door to her right and the telephone on the desk in front of her. “Dan,” Mitch said, noting the woman’s nervous shuffle of her fingers against the top of her computer, “this can’t be doing you any good. We could have talked about this at your house.”
    Dan turned and shuffled toward the front desk, and the lady behind it smiled at finally being acknowledged. Maybe he wasn’t crazy after all. “We’re here because I need your help with something, Mitch,” he said over his shoulder, beckoning Mitch forward with his hand. When they both stood in front of the desk, Dan said, “I need you to point out which of these hotel workers testified against my son. I read the manager did, but I’m not sure who that is.”
    The lady’s tenuous smile finally slipped from her face as Dan started pointing at the rooms behind the desk, screaming to see the manager.

    A few days later, Mitch’s truck screamed along the highway and then he slowed down to turn onto County Road 5. He crunched along gravel driveway that led to Dan’s old farmhouse, which was unchanged from the last time he’d been there. Plows still stood jagged in the yard and old trucks still sat on cinderblocks, their broken windshields glinting in the shallow sun and trailing tailpipes touching the tall grass.
Go see him, Karen had said when he came home from the hotel. Tell him it’s all right, he wasn’t in his right mind. He had said, easy for you to say, but then he went anyway.
    And now he was standing in the frosted, brittle grass, staring out over the barren land toward the lake beyond Dan’s field and the snowy buttes that he knew sat beyond that. He walked to Dan’s shed, where Dan himself stood straddling its threshold. Mitch waved but Dan didn’t. Dan said, “Heard your truck, Mitch. Didn’t expect to see you anytime soon.” He turned around and went back into the shed.
    Mitch crossed the grooved pavement of the shed’s driveway and was inside, but it was no warmer. “Look,” he said, “don’t worry about what happened in the hotel. It wasn’t that bad.” He paused. “You weren’t in your right mind.”
    Dan was fiddling with the hammers on his tool table. “Well, I suppose you could say I overreacted.”
    Mitch slipped his hands into his coat pockets and walked toward the window opposite Dan. He remembered Dan demanding to see the person who testified that his son was spied lurking in the lobby. Dan started screaming and even though Mitch was trying to hold him back, the police were still called and the hotel workers locked all the doors of their offices. Dan pounding on the door and crying and asking why they didn’t stop him, why they didn’t stop his son when they saw him waiting. Why they didn’t quit this whole thing before it ever started. Mitch thought of it all and sighed, “I guess I’m surprised there aren’t any reporters out here. I figured they’d be swarming.”
    “Oh, they tried,” Dan said. “Just like they have been for months, during the whole goddamn trial. That’s what that’s for,” he said, pointing to a big double-barrel standing in the corner between a hacksaw and a crate. “That scares people off real quick if they get to coming around here being nosy.”
    Mitch nodded and then paced back and forth, glancing at his footprints in the shallow dust that coated the floor. “Karen’s pretty torn up about it all,” he said.
    Dan sighed. “She would be. She always was.” He put the hammer down and blew out through his circled lips. “Likely always will be. Losing a brother is hard.” He looked out the cracked window at the big empty farmhouse.
    Mitch was quiet for a while. Dan tinkered with his tools but glanced out the window toward the farmhouse every once in a while and Mitch wondered if he knew he was still there, standing behind him and wondering what to say while he tinkered and glanced. “Strange things happen to people in situations like these,” Mitch finally said. He crossed the shed and put his hand on Dan’s broad shoulder.
    Dan shrugged off Mitch’s hand. “I don’t need any sympathy,” he said. “A man gets used to losing his family.” He walked over to the corner and kicked some pieces of browning metal around with his foot, pretending to look for something. “Nephew, brother, wife, son.” He paused and kicked around some old papers. “Daughter’s coming soon I guess. Haven’t talked to her since I don’t know when. Probably since this whole business started.”
    “Well, you can talk to me about it,” Mitch said.
    “You aren’t Karen.”
    They were both quiet again and Dan had even quit shuffling through the metal. “Look, Dan. I don’t know what to say. These things are hard.”
    Dan turned and looked Mitch straight in the face for the first time that day. “How the hell do you know what’s hard and what’s not? I’m not looking for sympathy. Things either happen or they don’t and you gotta treat each case the same.” He went back to his hammer and picked it up again. “It all carries equal weight in the end.”
He looked out the window in front of him and suddenly flicked the hammer above his hand and caught it by its metal head. He plunged the wooden handle into the untouched corner of the window and its shattering filled the shed. He shot the handle to the top right corner and slid it over to the left and then cleared out the glass from the whole frame. He heaved for a few seconds and set the hammer down, looking out the glassless window at his old farmhouse. “I’ve been meaning to replace these windows for a long time,” he said. “Having them sit here just half-broke isn’t gonna be enough to get me to replace them.”
    The wind howled in colder than ever and as they stood silent Mitch had to wipe his nose. “Dan, you’d feel better if you just let things go. These things are over. No one deserves to be murdered, no matter what you said at the hotel.”
Dan snorted. “Well, my brother Jack, he deserved it, that’s all I know.”
He wiped flecks of moisture and dirt from one eye and then looked at Mitch and refused to do the same to the other. He started shuffling through the dust and for a moment Mitch thought he was going to hit him, just rear back his big meaty fist and let him have it. But Dan turned and left the shed, shouting over his shoulder, “Come on out here for a second. Got something to show you.”
    Mitch followed Dan as he took a left from the shed and walked past the rusty farm equipment and old frozen tires. They passed the large cottonwood and Mitch saw the wooden swing where he had first kissed Karen on a night so cold that he told her it was the only way they could keep warm. As he and Dan walked by it now he could see that the left side of the swing sat fully on the ground now, its rope long since snapped and trailing behind it. Its wood had rotted away and as they passed it Mitch couldn’t even see some of the boards that had once made it whole because they’d probably been used for fire wood.
    They came to the bunkhouse, with its wooden door and fire pit right out in front. Mitch had only been inside here once before, and he’d run into Barry just as he was practicing throwing knives against the false-wood side of the wall. Using family pictures as targets. Mitch stayed away after that.
    “You ever been in here?” Dan asked as he heaved the door open.
    “No,” Mitch said, stepping inside.
    It was darker than it had been in the shed. The only light came in filtered through thin red curtains that were stapled or nailed down around the windows. Mitch immediately looked at the holed wall that Barry had thrown knives at from a few feet away. The pictures had been taken down, but the wall was gaping with a startling blackness in parts. Mitch followed Dan back through the carpeted hallway, past a coal-caked stove and into a room with a torn, stuffing-covered twin-sized bed. Pictures of naked women lined the walls in no particular pattern, and the magazines they’d been torn from sat stacked in the corner, cut apart and useless.
Dan stood with his hands on his hips and looked everywhere, as if he were like Mitch and taking in the room for the first time.

    He blew air from his mouth and walked over to the bed, turning around to face Mitch with his arms crossed. “My brother Jack stepped in here one day and caught his son Nate with his pants down and his son’s friend pulling his own shirt back on over his head and it doesn’t take a smart man to know what they were doing, and Jack was not a smart man. Nate’s friend scrambled out the window there but Jack sure as hell caught hold of his son. He turned Nate onto his back and pounded his boot into his mouth and knocked out a few of his teeth before he finally scrambled away down that hallway we just came through, disowned and kicked out of his house for good.”
    Mitch grimaced. “Don’t need to tell me this, Dan. I don’t want to know.”
    Dan slid his hands back and forth on the thighs of his jeans. “Well you came out here and started aggravating me, so you’ll either listen or get the hell out of here.” Mitch hesitated, then he turned and started to head back down the hallway. Dan followed him and acted as if he’d been planning to do the same thing all along. They stepped out into the still morning and Dan left the door to the bunkhouse opened because nothing in there mattered anymore.
    They crossed the snowy grass back to the shed, far away from the tracks they’d made on their way to the bunkhouse, as if they were different people now that Mitch heard the story of Dan’s nephew Nate. Karen’s cousin. They couldn’t follow the same tracks back.
    “You can’t leave yet, Mitch,” Dan said when they had reached the shed. Mitch had been continuing on toward his truck over in the driveway when Dan’s voice reached him from behind. “I’m not done with you yet.” Mitch stopped walking and turned around. Dan jerked his head toward his truck parked next to the makeshift basketball court that Barry was never going to use again. “We’re going to take a drive.” He crunched across the snow as if it was a given that Mitch would follow him. Mitch stood in the cold and thought about disobeying Dan for the first time in his life. He no longer had reason to follow his orders—he’d married his only daughter long ago. The time for sucking up had come to an end. But as Dan started his truck and Mitch saw the warm exhaust spout from the tailpipe, he decided to try his luck and follow Dan one last time.

    Dan’s truck had four-wheel drive so it was easy to get offroad and head up behind old Burnitz’s place to the rear side of Jackson Lake. No one came back this way unless you knew Burnitz. Dan hummed a tuneless song as his truck trundled up and over fallen logs and into crisp, snowy dips where the cows would hide from the wind. They scattered in front of the truck as they pulled into a clearing next to a wash from the lake and some old barbed wire fence that laced itself crosswise between the Burnitz field and a few different others. They stopped in the middle of the clearing, right where Mitch and Karen had pitched a tent one hot July and made love in a rainstorm. When they woke the next morning they’d seen Burnitz’s horse’s shadow against the tent—just standing so still, so curious—and when they moved it galloped away and they laughed and laughed and then went swimming in the morning sun.
Dan scowled as he stepped out of the truck. Mitch followed him up the rocky slope to the top of the ridged bank that overlooked the private side of Jackson Lake, far from the beaches. The shallower parts were frozen and snow-covered and now the wind was picking up and Mitch could see far out into the middle of the lake where the birds wheeled wildly.
    Dan squinted into the wind, looking out over the lake. “This is where Nate came to drown himself,” he said. “Took one of the cinderblocks from the yard and tied it to his ankle with a length of tractor chain.” He pointed to the water, and then flicked his hand toward the lake in a flurry of flapping fingers. “Just jumped right in.”
    “Goddammit, Dan,” Mitch started, as he turned away.
    Dan whirled. “Goddammit nothin. This is real life. No one cared if he was missing. No one but Barry, who’d been his friend before either of them could rightly stand. We all just said he’d run off to somewhere—California or Philadelphia—no one cared to go looking.” He stomped forward and Mitch was forced to retreat a little back down the slope. “But when you’re not looking you find things. And that’s what happened to Jim Burnitz, Jr. Out here swimming one day on his old man’s property and grazing the top of Nate’s head with his hand. Nightmares for the rest of his life.”
Mitch said nothing as he stepped down the slope. When he reached the bottom he walked back toward Dan’s truck.
    But he could not escape Dan’s voice. He followed Mitch like one of the water birds the swooped and dived along the lakeshore. “But Barry has a long memory. So it doesn’t surprise me that he tracked Jack to the hotel where he’d been meeting up with some young man he was screwing. Barry was never one to stand a hypocrite.”
Mitch opened up the passenger door and sat inside. “Take me to my truck,” he said through the glass, but he wasn’t sure if Dan heard him because he was still dancing around the truck, talking to himself and waving his arms. He reminded Mitch of the hornet he and Karen had scared up when they took down their tent that summer. Somehow they had disturbed its nest, and when they escaped to the safety of his car the insect just circled it at full speed and tried smashing through the windows until finally it gave up and quit.
    At last Dan stood still and looked into the sky. He rubbed snot away from his nose and got in the truck. He didn’t look at Mitch when he sparked the ignition and said,            “And you know what happened to old Burnitz’s son, Jim Jr.?”
    “No,” Mitch whispered.
    “Shot himself.”
    He turned to Mitch for some sort of reaction but got none. He snarled and flipped around in the clearing, and they did not talk to each other the whole way back to the farmhouse.

    When Dan pulled into his usual parking spot next to the makeshift basketball court he shut the car off and both of them sat without talking. Finally Mitch opened the door and got out and started walking toward his own truck. It took a while for him to hear Dan open his door, but when he did he heard him say, “Thanks for stopping by, Mitch.”
    Mitch waved behind him. “I’ll tell Karen to come out and see you.”
    “What’s the point?” Dan asked Mitch’s back. Mitch stopped and sighed. Drawn into another conversation. He turned around and saw that Dan was coming forward. “What’s the goddamn point?” Dan continued, walking with his arms spread wide. “I haven’t talked to her since I don’t know when.” He came to within a few feet of Mitch and finally stopped. “I’ve already lost so much family, why not add a daughter into the mix? If a man keeps losing his family, what else does he have but that old double barrel shotgun in his shed?” He took his glasses off and wiped his eyes, huge belly heaving. “Sometimes I think Nate and Jim Jr. had the right idea. I surely do.”
    “Dan—”
    “Nothing, Mitch. Don’t worry about it. Get on out of here. I gotta go inside and have a drink, maybe take a nap in the basement. Can’t sleep upstairs anymore since Betty left.”
    Mitch wanted to say something more, wanted to reach out and touch him, but Dan was already gone, walking around the empty farmhouse and in through the back door, the basement entrance where the fridge sat that kept all his beer cold.
Mitch stood silently in the snow until he heard the door slam. He looked out over Dan’s field, frozen and useless. He headed back to his truck, but then saw the shed they’d been in earlier and flitted over to it and stepped inside.
    He had to act fast. Dan would be expecting to hear his truck start up any second. He walked over to the bench where Dan had set the hammer down after he’d broken the window. He picked it up and walked toward the corner, where the double barrel still stood between a hacksaw and a crate. He leaned down and picked up the gun in his left hand. It was cold, so he set it on the tool table fast just to get it out of his hands. He turned the gun so that the muzzle pointed to the wall and the stock stuck straight over the edge. He raised the hammer in his right hand and struck the trigger and its guard until the trigger broke off like a spent shell and tinked across the floor. He hammered the trigger guard a few more times but only succeeded in bending it. Enough. He set the hammer down where he’d picked it up and replaced the mangled gun back in the corner. Then he stood silently in the middle of the shed. He looked to his left, where the bunkhouse sat empty. Then he looked to his right where the farmhouse stood drafty and nearly void of life. He stooped and picked up the gunless trigger and tossed it into the air. It was an easy catch, and he left the shed, crossed the yard, and walked toward his truck.
    Before he opened the door and got inside, he threw the trigger as far as he could across the old dirt road and into the old dirt field beyond. He tried to watch where it landed but lost it in the iron-gray sky. He wondered how long it would be there. Triggers in the west had a long history. He decided it’d be best to keep it out there with all the others. He lit a cigarette and climbed into his truck.
    As he drove down the five-mile old dirt road toward the stop sign and the highway, he sucked most of his cigarette into his lungs. At the stop sign he took it from his mouth and looked at the ember that was glowing on its end. It was the color of Dan’s hair, Barry’s hair, Karen’s hair. A car streaked in front of him, zooming from right to left, and once it passed he finally turned. But before he did, he pitched the cigarette butt out the window. The ember bounced once on the road’s shoulder and then slowly burned down to nothing.