True Fires Read Free

car, gets to run the siren and everything,” DeLuth says smoothly.
    “And?” Miss Burch asks, catching the Sheriff’s drift.
    “And the lucky winner’s in this classroom!” the Sheriff crows with great effect.
    “Isn’t that ex
citing
?” Miss Burch beams to her students, clasping her hands in front of her ample chest.
    “Who is it?” “Who won?” “I want to run the siren!” the other children call.
    “A boy . . .” the Sheriff says, deliberately scanning the room, “. . . name of Dare.”
    “Why, Sammy,” Miss Burch cries, her still-clasped hands cupping his shoulder. “That’s
you
!”
    As the Sheriff turns his steel-eyed gaze to the front, something about the big man makes Daniel uneasy. It’s not his size. The redheaded McKennas up home are bigger, and as good as they come, on weekdays. It’s not even the reaction of the other children—mock-envy masking relief. It’s something about the way the Sheriff’s smile doesn’t rise to his eyes. And the look in those eyes. Like the look Pap and the other men get when the brush of wild wings breaks the silence outside the duck blind.
    When the Sheriff says, “This is your lucky day, boy,” Daniel feels anything but. “Ever ridden in a squad car before?”
    Lottsa times up home,
Daniel thinks, but says nothing.
    “Miss Burch, it’s—what? Twenty till the bell?” Sheriff DeLuth says. “Mind if we leave early so my car doesn’t block the buses?”
    “Course not, Sheriff,” Miss Burch chirps. “Sammy, get your things.”

4
    Betty Clayton Whitworth, proprietress of the Charmwood Guest House on Elm Street, stands on the front porch massaging her right hip. Her hurricane hip, she always calls it, gingerly rounding the inflamed joint with the heel of her right hand, scanning the horizon for storm clouds.
    Betty the Barometer,
Clay’d called her that last December,
should a enlisted, coulda been Ike’s secret weapon,
he’d teased, marching around this very porch, mimicking Eisenhower’s Texas drawl:
“Whus that y’say, Monty? June sixth? Lessee what Betty’s hip has to
say ’bout it.” That Clay, always clownin’.
    The growl and sheen of the Sheriff’s car startles her. Betty’s hands fly out to grasp the white wood railing. For nine years now, the sight of the Sheriff, even the casual mention of his name, conjures up pieces of the worst night of her life: Sheriff DeLuth’s banging knock at the door, his eyes downcast while delivering the news, the horror of standing there in cold cream and curlers, boarders cracking their doors to catch a listen, hearing that Clay, her only son, the town’s most conspicuous war hero, had spent the evening at the V.F.W. drinking toast after toast to the unexpectedly dead General George S. Patton—
Biggest son of a bitch ever lived!
Her Clay, who’d survived North Africa, Sicily, the Battle of the Bulge, for heaven’s sake, and had a shoebox full of medals to prove it, lay dead no more than a mile from home, wrapped around the unloving arms of a Florida jack pine.
    “Why, Sheriff—Sheriff DeLuth!—what brings you to—I mean, what could you possibly—well, really?” Betty calls to the big man making his way up her sidewalk.
    “Now, Miz Betty, nothing to fret over,” the Sheriff says, stopping just short of the bottom step to greet her eye to eye.
    Keepin’ his distance,
Betty thinks. Was he recalling, as she was, the fat smear of cold cream across his chest when she’d collapsed, hysterical, that awful night? She feels her cheeks flush.
    “Got a couple schoolkids, name of Dare?” DeLuth jerks a thumb toward his car. “Claim they live here.”
    “Daniel and Rebecca?” Betty cranes her neck, squinting at the two dark heads in the Sheriff’s backseat. “Yes—poor things—they do. Just a few months—I mean, till the Brysons— they’re regulars from Michigan—arrive for the winter.”
Quit
prattlin’ on, sound like an ol’ loon,
Betty scolds herself. “What’s the