All the supply closets in the school were locked, as was the principal’s office, which was too bad because they would have liked to rifle through the desk drawers. They talked about taking everything out of one classroom and switching it with another, or maybe just moving a few things around to make people wonder if they were losing their minds, but in the end they decided not to touch anything. It felt too good to be in school on Saturday, and if they wanted to come again they were better off leaving everything the way it was.
So it was senseless that Albie dropped his matches in the art room trash can just when they were getting ready to leave. He kept books of matches in his pocket all the time now, to practice opening them up and striking a match with one hand. Then he would give the matchbook a hard shake and put the fire out. Except this time when he lit the match he dropped the whole book in the trash can in the far corner of the room near the window where they had come in, much the same way Raul had flipped the lock open on the window. There wasn’t any reason, no reason for lighting the match or dropping it. It wasn’t to impress the other boys, who were themselves always dropping lit matches everywhere these days. There was no reason that it was in the art room, except that the art room was the room where they happened to be, and really no reason they were in the school on a Saturday in the first place. It was a big metal trash can that took the match, waist high, ten times the size of anything they had in the regular classrooms where all a kid would throw away was a pop quiz he got a lousy grade on. The trash can in the art room should have been empty, everything in the school was empty and clean, but down in the bottom of the green plastic trash liner there were still some crumpled-up pieces of newsprint and a couple of oily rags that had been used to wipe down the paintbrushes after they had soaked in the turpentine, and so the trash can lit up like the very mouth of hell, shooting a flame that made Albie jump back as if on springs and made the other boys turn. The flame caught the nubby green polyester draperies that were double-lined to make the room dark for that point in the semester when Miss Del Torre made a slide-show presentation on the highlights of art history. The draperies were the age of their parents and burned faster than the dry grass in the field, the flames tearing straight up to the acoustical tiles in the ceiling and spreading over the boys’ heads to the other side of the room where the paints and brushes and pastels and papers and jars of solvents waited like Molotov cocktails to explode. The smoke was nothing like the smoke they loved outside. This smoke was somewhere between ink and tar, oily and viscous and black. It came for them, sucking up the air while the clear orange flame sucked up the drapes. The whole room was coming for them now with the fire in every corner. They had entered the room through the window but when they checked the window they found it was no longer an available exit.
They had never set a fire inside before, had never seen one, and so they wrongly used the skills they had developed by setting fires outside: they stood perfectly still and watched, the theory being that they had made the fire and so the fire was bound to respect them. Then the school’s fire alarm went off. They knew that bell, so loud it seemed to be going off inside their brains. They loved fire drills, everything dropped, the girls always so upset because they weren’t allowed to take their purses with them, everyone lined up and rushed outside in an orderly manner. The bell brought them back to their senses. The bell saved them. They had practiced and practiced so that in this moment the boys did what they had been drilled to do: duck low, stay together, run for the door. A flame reached out and caught hold of Albie’s Red Baron T-shirt, burning his back. In the hallway Edison pulled it off him and burned his hand. As they ran for the door, the sprinklers they had never noticed doused the long, empty hallway, dissolving the entries for the art contest. They pushed out the side door, ran into the sunlight, and fell on the grass by the parking lot, gasping and coughing, panting and singed, the smell of smoke ground into their skin. Albie thought for an instant of his brother. He wondered if dying had been anything like this for Cal. The four boys lay there in the grass, tears streaming over their blackened cheeks, so exhilarated by the force of their own lives they were unable to move. That was where they were when, a scant minute later, the firemen found them.
It had been a nearly impossible decision for Teresa to send Albie to Virginia to live with Beverly and Bert. Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable. Beverly and Bert had not killed Cal. Teresa knew this very quietly inside herself. They had been negligent in the details of supervision but as Albie’s most recent catastrophe confirmed, so had she. Still, it felt better to blame them. It felt almost good, although good probably wasn’t the word. She could call Bert up on the phone and ask him, “Does it feel good to blame me for Albie? Is ‘good’ the word?”
What Teresa knew for certain was that she couldn’t keep her second son, and since there was no one else volunteering to take him, she didn’t see what else she could do. In the end, Albie went to Arlington, and when he failed in the private school there he was sent to a boarding school in North Carolina, and then military school in Delaware. He was eighteen the summer he came back to Torrance, a junior in high school given the fact that the boarding school had held him back. Holly and Jeanette were both home from college and tried to take him to the beach, to parties with their friends he might remember, but Albie was lodged like an anvil on the couch, watching game shows and eating bowls of cornflakes covered over with a thick sludge of sugar. He kept his collective communication to twenty words a day. He counted them. He worked his way through the liquor cabinet from left to right, though the cabinet itself had no organizing principle. He never started in on any bottle until he’d finished the one preceding it.
Then one day he claimed to have gotten a call from Edison. His old friend had a job setting up bands in a club in San Francisco, and he said that all Albie had to do was carry the amplifiers off the buses and plug them in. Edison had an apartment with some other guys and Albie could throw a mattress on the floor. Albie seemed to be almost excited about this, as excited as Jeanette and Holly and their mother could remember him being about anything. Lifting things, plugging things in, sounded like a job he was qualified to do, so Teresa bought him a bus ticket to San Francisco and made him a stack of peanut butter sandwiches. Holly and Jeanette each gave him a hundred dollars out of their savings. He loaded his bike underneath the bus with his duffel bag, and Jeanette and her sister and their mother waited until he took his seat by the window so that he could see them wave goodbye. He was going away again. He would be someone else’s impossible problem to solve. They were each privately giddy in their relief.
Fodé came into the bathroom that night while Albie was brushing his teeth, one tap and he let himself in, shutting the door behind him. The bathroom was a good place to talk, even if there really wasn’t the space for two adult men to stand comfortably together. Albie was pressed up against the sink, and Fodé, wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt, moved around the stacked plastic milk crates full of folded towels and bath toys and Pampers. “My brother,” he said, “listen to me, I want to tell you, you will stay here with us. A week, a year, the rest of your life, as long as you need to be here, we welcome you.”
Albie had the toothbrush in his mouth, minty foam trailing from his lower lip, when his sister’s husband put a hand around the back of his neck and touched their foreheads together. A tribal custom? A sign of earnestness? A pass? All he knew about his sister was what he dimly remembered from when they were teenagers, and about her crazy African husband he knew nothing at all. Forehead to forehead, Albie nodded. He still needed a place to sleep tonight.
Fodé smiled. “Good, good, good. Your sister needs her family. Calvin needs his uncle. And I could use a brother. I am very far away from home.”