“Goddamn it, Sandy. What the hell you doing?”
“Get out of here,” I yelled. “All you sons a bitches.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Get out of here.”
“We’re coming in.”
“Like hell you are. You miserable—”
They rushed me. I was hitting anything I could, Bob Williams in the throat and Tom Crossland over his eye, somebody at the side of his head, then they had me lifted off my feet and my boots up in the air, kicking somebody in the chest before they slammed me against the wall of the house and then carried me off the porch in a rush with my arms twisted behind my back, and somebody was hitting my ear to stop me kicking anymore, and I was shoved hard into the back seat of the county cop car, where Bud Sealy watched that I didn’t get any other wild notions while I sat there sweating with the doors locked and that protective grille between Bud and me. The weight of that badge of his was tugging at his shirt pocket.
“By God, Roscoe,” Bud said. “You just about done it this time. I ought to take you in for obstruction.”
“Go to hell,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “That’s right.”
He was turned around in the front seat talking to me through all that iron grillwork. His heavy gut was squashed against the steering wheel.
“That’s the ticket,” he said. “But you keep it up and I’m not going to give a good goddamn how long we’ve been knowing one another—I’ll take you in.”
“You can take and fuck yourself too,” I said.
“Just keep it up,” Bud said.
So he went on talking, saying something official to me from the front seat, but I couldn’t hear much of it for the ringing in my ears where somebody had hit me, and any way I was more interested in what they were doing to the oak door with axes, making the oak kindling fly, and now they had it smashed open and the smoke was boiling out, and they went in through the smoke and brought Edith and Lyman out of the house in blankets, carrying them down the steps and across the yard to the ambulance. They were both unconscious, their arms dangling loose like rags. The ambulance roared away towards town.
The rest of us stayed there until the house was gone. They couldn’t save it. In the end they managed to contain the fire by soaking the well house and the outbuildings and the nearby trees with their hoses, but the house burned down to the old square limestone-block foundation. When the roof caved in, the sparks exploded into the sky like fireworks and then were shot away in the updraft into the dark. After that they unlocked the cop car and let me out.
AND SOMETIME that same night Lyman died. He never regained consciousness. After his sister fed him pumpkin pie with a dollop of whipped cream on top and after she laid him down on his bed in the living room for the last time, Lyman went off to sleep and never woke again. The next day, at the hospital, they told me it was due to severe smoke inhalation. They said it was not possible to save him. For my part, I believe there must be worse ways to die.