To Burn Clean
Johnny idles in his 1975 Ford Pinto, a lit cigarette dangling between his fingers. The car’s rusty bumper rattles in sync with the engine's sick chug. He looks into the vanity mirror and coaxes his thin, dusty hair in a uniform direction. Tiny burn marks like flea burrows speckle his face, maggot shaped sacks hang beneath his tired eyes. Death called him to Saint Thomas Hospital.
His back aches with the dull pain of middle age and Johnny reclines his seat. He peers through the tobacco-stained windshield at the hospital entrance. Sweat drips down his gaunt cheek and runs over a curled lip. The lamp lights loom over the pathway, leading the doomed like mosquitoes to a bonfire. The hospital face is monstrous; the white concrete walls a stomach of churning bodies; the sliding doors a set gnashing teeth. He flicks his cigarette and enters the maw.
Johnny approaches the admittance nurse. The side of her face is scrunched; she’s working out seventeen down on the Daily Star crossword puzzle, her pencil tapping the laminate top in pleasurable confusion. He waits a moment and says hello. The pencil continues to tap. He says hello again. Her eyes grow round to meet him.
“I’m sorry honey! I didn’t see you there. How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Paul Wilson.”
“Sure thing,” She shuffles through thick manilla folders. “Looks like that ward is family-only at this hour.”
“He’s my father.”
“Oh! He didn’t list any next of kin. Room 534, take the elevator down the hall on your right to the fifth floor. Take a left and it’s the third door on your right.”
Johnny navigates his way through the veins of the beast and comes to Paul’s door. He wraps his hand around the brass knob and hesitates. One quarter rotation is all that separates them. A vicious mix of dread and curiosity complete the turn.
Night is thick in the room, a blinds-drawn window on the far side shuns the moonlight, the lines of the heart monitor cover the room in a dull, green film. In the middle sits a hospital bed, beside it a cafeteria chair with rusty legs and a worn, plastic seat. A print of Madonna and Child looms over the bed. Johnny pulls up the chair and looks on at his sleeping father; the wrinkles on his face rising and sinking like waves on a disinterested sea.
"Come on Johnny. Hurry the fuck up. The law will get us if you don’t start moving like you mean it.” The forest is dense with underbrush, Johnny's small legs struggle to traverse the roots. Johnny’s father Paul floats along the forest floor like an angry phantom. His impulsive cussing keeps him from dissipating to the other side. They scramble through the woodland as flickering shades. The light breaks through an opening in the canopy onto Johnny’s face; his face is flush with the heat of fire, his skull pulsing with her pleading screams.
Johnny stops in the sunshine, bends over, and puts his hands on his knees. He chokes up soot-soaked mucus, retching as if his lungs were turning inside out. Tears of strain and shame collect in his eyes. Paul emerges from a bush and crouches down to level his face with Johnny, “Someone has certainly seen the smoke at this point,” Paul points towards the grey column in the sky. “We’re lucky we live out in the boonies and the cops are slow to show. I’m not going to tell you one more goddamn time. Keep up with me or I’ll leave you out here for the coyotes.”
His father’s cheeks are sunken like sand dunes, his face and arms look like bones in vacuum sealed bags. This is not the man Johnny remembers. The brutal ex-sailor with forearms the size of tomato cans has been impersonated by a wasting sack of organs. He once watched his father carry two bundles of shingles up a ladder, this man before him couldn’t make it up a set of stairs. The only connection between these two men was an anchor tattoo with the words “U.S.S Arizona” underneath, framed in a curled ribbon. Johnny made a point never to travel to Arizona.
Johnny is running back from school. His books, wrapped in an old leather belt, bounce off his back with each eager step. Tall pines bend over the path, their needles allowing thin cords of golden light to peek through. Two ancient oaks stand guard at the edge of the wood. As Johnny approaches the opening, the curtain of light dissolves into a sloped pasture lush with the colors of summer, his home resting on the crest.
The house was built by Johnny’s grandfather and carried all the marks of a city dweller turned frontiersmen turned builder. The foundation descended from north to south, its shingles lifted and dipped like a toddler trying to draw a straight line. The sides were a baby blue by his mother’s demand, the red undertones by his father’s reluctance to apply multiple coats.
Johnny hops up the porch steps. They creak underneath his youthful energy. He faces a large oak door with a smiling lion engraved on its center. Its mane bursts out like a star; an iron ring hangs from its mouth. This door was the part of the house his grandfather was most proud of. “Not even a god damn Kodiak could bust that door down!” he’d say.
Johnny opens the door, the scent of cooking meat and baking bread overwhelming his nose. His mother, Rachel, flips over the chicken breast and the pan hisses back. She’s wearing a white blouse with blue birds that look like they’re trying to fly off it; they swoop and soar around the golden curls draped down her back. The melody of “Amazing Grace” floats from her lips.
Johnny’s father, Paul, is sitting on the couch, nursing a warm Budweiser. He’s covered in blood and dirt from emptying another deer of its entrails, his white teeth shining through in a wide grin. Seeing Johnny, he slaps his leg.
“Come on over here boy, how was school?” Johnny walks over and climbs on his lap.
“I learned about bugs! Do you know about bugs?”
Paul chuckles, his hand playfully messing up Johnny’s hair. “Not a thing! Why don’t you tell me?”
“Well…well…we learned about spiders. There are some spiders, called…black widows,” his voice lowers, “where the women eat the men!”
“Good God! You better get strong before you get a girlfriend, else you’ll end up on the menu.” Paul wraps his arms around his son. Johnny squirms and contorts to escape.
“Let me go!” Johnny demands. Paul loosens his grip and Johnny pushes his father’s torso out of the hold, tumbling backwards. He rises defiantly, “Don’t be silly Dad, we men are the bosses around here.”
His mother interjects, “Boss of what? The playground? Fortunately for you, I cooked dinner”, she steps towards Johnny, “but who knows? Maybe I’ll have you for dessert!” she clamps her hands on Johnny’s side like a crab, and he squeals. “Go and eat some dinner, boss.”
Johnny grasps the King James Bible from the night stand next to the hospital bed. He half-heartedly leafs through the gospels for solace - the last shall be first and the meek shall inherit the Earth don’t make it past his retina. The thin, smooth pages slip through fingers until he reaches the Hebrew Bible, its familiar verses lighting up his mind.
His favorite book as long as he could remember was the Old Testament, his role model the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. The respect given to God was mandated, His punishment swift and fickle. Groveling was about the only option to escape His wrath. Whether it be Job the man or Sodom the city, all lived and died by His pleasure.
Johnny reads to himself, "I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
Johnny is peering through the crack in the open door. His stomach crunches and constricts as if a mountain lion were trying to bite it in two. The edge of his brain is burning. Their bodies are partial and kinetic, a spinning kaleidoscope of flesh and fury.
“That goddamn son of mine!” Paul slams his fists down on the table like he’s banging the universe into being, “how did you let him get the fucking keys?”
“I don’t keep track of him all day Paul, it’s not my fault he’s too curious for his own good.” she chokes out.
“I don’t want to hear none of that. You’re his mother, you should have had an eye on him. That was my fucking car he wrecked,” Paul’s grabs a vase and whips it against the wall, ceramic shards fly like sharpnel. A stray piece cuts Rachel on the cheek and she screams.
“You fucking -” her hands catch her mouth, the words too fast to catch. His mother is no bigger than a beetle.
Johnny can hear his heart-beat, its throbs measuring each moment. He can see the back of his father, one hand on the table looking down at the ground. His mother’s breath is accelerated and quiet, her eyes too wide. Paul raises his head and sets his shoulders back. He calmly steps toward Rachel, her body impossibly still. He removes his belt, the buckle jingling like a bell on a trap.
Wheels chirp across the tile floor in the outside hallway, another doomed geriatric on a delayed trip to the morgue. Paul’s wheezing, the click of the clock hands, the whir of the respirator, the sharp beep of the heart monitor, all harmonize into a disappointing symphony. Motes of dust sway to the dull melody.
Johnny’s gaze is pulled towards the print of Madonna and Child above the hospital bed. He can’t tell whether the sun is rising or setting; tan, clay structures line the desert hills behind the mother and Son. She is looking upon the young Savior with delicate love. Johnny’s gut fills with rocks. The blue cloak draped over her shoulders floods his mind with vases, dresses, tables, and window frames. The Son is stretching his fat arm towards her face. Johnny sees Rachel’s smiling face receding farther and farther back, disappearing into the deep like a pebble tossed into a pond.
What do I say? What do I feel? Johnny thinks to himself.
The morning prophesied another hot day. Parched trees sway and groan in the light breeze and flakey browns smother the life in the grass. Johnny listens to Paul chastise Rachel from the dirt path leading up to the porch, his father’s yells like muffled gunshots. Paul bursts out the door.
“That god damn woman,” he mutters. Paul grabs his rifle and heads into the forest to exact revenge on small game. Johnny hears the soft creaks of his frazzled mother climbing the stairs to the bedroom, her slight snores drift out a crack in the window. Johnny sits with an ant hill between his legs ready to enjoy his favorite game.
Johnny learned young how to measure himself against the world. Bears, fathers, and tall mountains were best avoided, insects were easily dominated. He spent many hours with a magnifying glass frying anything that crawled or wiggled - ants, beetles, worms, spiders. Smiles became rare as Johnny got older, but the satisfying ooze of a caterpillar being pumped by his light ray never failed to shove a smirk onto his face.
The black ants sizzle under his laser. Imitating a saw he cuts one in half, the two ends of its body jerk comically. Another cooks more evenly, turns over on its back, and encloses its legs like the petals of a wilting flower. In his murderous delight, the sun sails across the sky turning morning into mid-afternoon. Sliced, boiled, and dissected ants lie strewn before him, his sadistic creativity waning with the day.
Johnny gathers a handful of old pine needles, placing them one by one into the entrance of the ant hill. The needles form a loose bushel blocking the way out. He focuses his magnifying glass on the tinder and smoke begins to rise, the needles rustle under the hopeless struggle of the ants beneath. The flame grasps towards Johnny’s face, he feels warm.
He feeds the fire, adding fistfulls of debris to the crying, infant flame. Each charred needle sends out a burst of sweet sap. The fire’s limbs grow longer, whipping and thrashing like a giant squid. It becomes ravenous - sticks become branches, branches become stray stumps. With every meal the fire grows wider, brighter, hotter.
It crawls towards the house, nibbling at the porch. A canister of old gasoline rests on the landing, releasing tiny vapors of succulent fumes. The fire roars in delight; edging closer, aching with anticipation. It leaps upon its prize, swallowing the canister whole. The fire bursts with satisfaction; wrapping its tentacles around the house. Johnny’s head hypnotically bounces with the light, entranced with his creation.
The muffled yelps of his mother crawl into his ears. Her stumbles down the stairs can be heard between the inferno’s crackled burps. Smoke plumes from the windows. Rachel throws her body against the front door; the lion on its face standing steadfast against the fire and figure at war on either side. Thump, shriek, thump. Thump, shriek, thump. Thump, shriek, thump. Thump. “Mom,” the word a white dandelion taken by the wind. His limbs slacken, he falls backwards.
When he comes to the fire is still raging, a thick pillar of smoke rising from the moaning carcass of the house. Paul is standing over him. “Jesus Christ, Johnny,” he grabs Johnny by the arm and pulls him up. Half dazed, Paul drags Johnny down the hill, and they enter the woods. Through his Johnny turns his head to look back; the fire waves. He waves back.
They plunge into the forest, the foliage swallowing them whole. Paul throws Johnny’s arm away. “Come on Johnny. Hurry the fuck up. The law will get us if you don’t start moving like you mean it.”
Dampened pinks and magentas come along with the rising sun. Johnny has been looking on at Paul for hours, now awash in the morning glow. The stale air is interrupted by the ding of the heart monitor, its beep begins to pick up pace. Paul coughs up viscous globs of phlegm, his breathing becomes labored. Energy returns to his body and his arms thrash like the fins of a beached fish.
A doctor and two nurses rush in a blur of white and blue. They inject Paul with a sedative, but it’s of limited use; he wobbles as if his joints are disconnected. Paul takes a desperate breath and rises, the medical staff gasp. His back is stiff as an iron rod, he opens his eyes and they lock on Johnny.
Johnny freezes, trapped in a psychic embrace. The room grows dark; only the whites of Paul’s eyes pierce through. A single tear becomes a stream that drips off Johnny’s chin. Paul’s voice cuts through Johnny’s head, “What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck are you doing here?”
Johnny feels every hug on his shoulders, every sting from a belt on the back of his legs. The sum of all the “You fucking failure”s and “Nice work, Johnny!”s blast through his ears. The lead of a thousand pieces of stray buckshot saturates his tongue, the rancid odor of a mound of deer guts wrinkles his nose. But in Paul’s two dark pupils, Johnny can only see the flames of anger, the ashes of disappointment. The fire rolls back inside Paul’s head and the light returns.
Paul lays lifeless, his jaw falls open. The younger nurse begins pressing down on his chest. She counts desperately under her breath, “1, 2, 3…” On twenty she breathes into Paul’s lungs, his chest rising feebly.
“Lean into it, press harder!” commands the doctor. He pushes her aside into the cafeteria chair. It crashes into the wall. The doctor’s determined hands keep up the fight. He leans into his compressions and Paul’s ribs let out a wimpy crunch. The doctor repeats, Paul’s innards sound like popcorn. The front of the doctor’s coat moistens with sweat, his arms droop in fatigue. He wipes his forehead with his sleeve.
“Time of death, 7:45am,” He looks defeated, but in a familiar way. After a few moments, he wills on to his face an expression of contrived, politeness and walks over to Johnny.. “I’m sorry, son. We did everything we could do.” Johnny nods.
The doctor and nurses exit the room in respectful silence, leaving Johnny with the corpse of his father. Johnny looks out the window at the oak tree on the other side. A nest of blue jays rests on one of its branches, full of squawking children clamouring for breakfast. As if on cue, the mother swoops in with an unfortunate worm in her mouth. She stretches the worm’s gummy body like a rubber band with a determined pull. As her beak points towards the sky its middle gives out under the tension, and Johnny can see the worm’s fibers separate into two.
What I wouldn’t give to be that worm, he thinks.