Small Town

And the Draft Riots. Spontaneous combustion, erupting naturally and inevitably out of social and political and economic realities? Or did circumstances merely provide a framework of logs and sticks and kindling, waiting for a knowing hand to strike the spark and fan the blaze? The history books spoke of neighborhood agitators who’d urged on the mob, only to lose control of it. But what if they’d never intended to control it? What if their sole purpose had been to unleash the whirlwind?

He saw them now, a long chain of men (and women, too, for who was to say it was an exclusively male calling?), not selling their souls but giving them up, sentencing them to perdition, committing unpardonable sins for the good of generations yet unborn.

Did many of them see the greater purpose? Probably not, but surely some did. Surely he was not the first to be consciously aware of what he had to do, no matter how great the cost to himself.

Walking home, he picked up a discarded newspaper. A man in a stolen car had gone berserk at the wheel, driving down Seventh Avenue at top speed, running red lights, caroming off other cars, and taking deliberate aim at pedestrians, trying to run down as many of them as he possibly could. He eluded police pursuit, then repeated the stunt on Eighth Avenue, hitting a few more pedestrians before he was finally taken into custody. He was perfectly calm, and told police he was angry, though he seemed unable to say what it was he’d been angry about.

He remembered how he’d taken the sleeping pills and lain down beside his wife. He had been ready to join her sacrifice, and his disappointment at surviving had been softened slightly by the thought that there must be something for him to do.

And now he knew what it was.

Dulce et decorum est... pro urbe mori.

See? It had come back to him.

In late March, a little more than six months after he’d scattered his wife’s ashes to the winds of Lower Manhattan, he took the number 3 subway to the Bronx. He got off at the East 160th Street stop and walked north and west to an abandoned building on Cauldwell Avenue. He’d discovered it a week ago, and had visited it daily for the past several days. The windows were boarded up, but the piece of sheet metal nailed over the doorway had been pried up at the lower left corner to give access to the squatters — drug addicts, homeless people — who found the place an acceptable alternative to sleeping in the street.

He’d purchased half a dozen quart cans of charcoal lighter fluid, buying them one at a time in different shops in Manhattan to avoid arousing suspicion, and he carried them with him in a canvas tote bag that had belonged to his wife. It had been a gift from one of the children, a cloth sack with GOOCHEE stenciled on the sides, and the giver — it was his son, he remembered now, and he couldn’t have been more than twelve at the time — had told her that he knew what she really wanted was a Gucci bag.

How they’d laughed, and how she’d loved that bag. She’d used it for years.

He fully expected someone, a cop or a local resident, to challenge him, to demand to know what he was doing where he so clearly did not belong. He was oddly calm, quite unconcerned about what might happen to him, but in fact nothing happened, and no one seemed to notice him.

Maybe he was dead, he thought. Maybe he was a ghost, and that was why people paid no attention to him. They couldn’t see him.

But no, he’d bought the charcoal lighter fluid. He’d handed over his money, been given his purchases and his change.

He raised the sheet metal, crawled under it, and went into every ground-floor room he came to, squirting the lighter fluid where he thought it would be most effective. He emptied all six cans, lit a match, set a fire, and walked away from the building.

Steps away from it, he remembered the GOOCHEE bag. He’d put it down and neglected to pick it up. Well, the fire would consume it, and it would be untraceable anyway. He kept walking.

In movies there would be a great whoosh, an explosion, flames shooting into the night sky, shock waves knocking him to the ground as he ran off down the street. But there was nothing of the sort. He walked a block, looked back, and saw a building that looked no different from the way it had looked when he approached it. His attempt at sacrifice-by-arson would seem to have been a failure.

He turned at the corner, walked a block, turned again. He kept walking until he came to a small storefront restaurant with signs in Spanish. There were no tables, just a worn Formica counter with eight backless stools.

He took a stool. The menu hung on the wall, chalk on slate, with several of the dishes rubbed out. Even if he read Spanish, it would have been hard to make out. The woman behind the counter, assuming he didn’t speak Spanish, addressed him in strongly accented English, asking him what he wanted. He pointed to the plate of the man two stools away on his right.