In the room where Gage had hidden, he stripped the sheet from the bed and took it out into the hail. He wrapped his wife's body in it, gently, with love. He was humming but did not realize it.
He found gasoline in Jud's garage. Five gallons of it in a red can next to the Lawnboy. More than enough. He began in the kitchen where Jud still lay under the Thanksgiving tablecloth. He drenched that, then moved into the living room with the can still upended, spraying amber gas over the rug, the sofa, the magazine rack, the chairs, and so out into the downstairs hail and toward the back bedroom. The smell of gas was strong and rich.
Jud's matches were by the chair where he had kept his fruitless watch, on top of his cigarettes. Louis took them. At the front door he tossed a lighted match back over his shoulder and stepped out. The blast of the heat was immediate and savage, making the skin on his neck feel too small. He shut the door neatly and only stood on the porch for a moment, watching the orange flickers behind Norma's curtains. Then he crossed the porch, pausing for a moment, remembering the beers he and Jud had drunk here a million years ago, listening to the soft, gathering roar of fire within the house.
Then he stepped out.
62
Steve Masterton came around the curve just before Louis's house and saw the smoke immediately-not from Louis's place, but from the house that belonged to the old duck across the street.
He had come out this morning because he had been worried about Louis-deeply worried. Chariton had told him about Rachel's call of the day before, and that had set him to wondering just where Louis was... and what he was up to.
His worry was vague, but it itched at his mind-he wasn't going to feel right until he had gone out there and checked to see if things were okay... or as okay as they could be under the circumstances.
The spring weather had emptied the infirmary like white magic, and Surrendra had told him to go ahead; he could handle whatever came up. So Steve had jumped onto his Honda, which he had liberated from the garage only last weekend, and headed out for Ludlow. Maybe he pushed the cycle a little faster than was strictly necessary, but the worry was there; it gnawed. And with it came the absurd feeling that he was already too late. Stupid, of course, but in the pit of his stomach there was a feeling similar to the one he'd had there last fall when that Pascow thing cropped up-a feeling of miserable surprise and almost leaden disillusion. He was by no means a religious man (in college Steve had been a member of the Atheist's Society for two semesters and had dropped out only when his advisor had told him-privately and very much off the record-that it might hurt his chances to obtain a med school scholarship later on), but he supposed he fell as much heir to whatever biological or biorhythmic conditions passed for premonitions as any other human being, and the death of Pascow had seemed to set a tone for the year which followed, somehow. Not a good year by any means. Two of Surrendra's relatives had been clapped in jail back home, some political thing, and Surrendra had told him that he believed one of them-an uncle he cared for very much-might well now be dead. Surrendra had wept, and the tears from the usually benign Indian had frightened Steve. And Charlton's mother had had a radical mastectomy. The tough nurse was not very optimistic about her mother's chances for joining the Five-Year Club. Steve himself had attended four funerals since the death of Victor Pascow-his wife's sister, killed in a car crash; a cousin, killed in a freak accident as the result of a barroom bet (he had been electrocuted while proving he could shinny all the way to the top of a power pole); a grandparent; and of course Louis's little boy.
He liked Louis enormously, and he wanted to make sure Louis was all right. Louis had been through hell lately.
When he saw the billows of smoke, his first thought was that this was something else to lay at the door of Victor Pascow, who seemed, in his dying, to have removed some sort of crash barrier between these ordinary people and an extraordinary run of bad luck. But that was stupid, and Louis's house was the proof. It stood calm and white, a little piece of clean-limbed New England architecture in the midmorning sun.