A pyromaniac does not light just one fire, like an experimental fire setter; a true pyromaniac will light several. He does not do them because he is drunk or psychotic or because he believes he is being instructed to light fires by a voice or a god or devil or monster, like a thought-disordered fire setter. He does not do them because he wants to be a hero, like some firefighter arsonists, nor for the practical reason of gaining insurance money, or covering up the evidence of a different crime.
For a true pyromaniac, the fire itself is the motive. An act that becomes its own purifying absolution, its own reason for being. He lights fires because something about lighting fires gives him a sense of release. A pyromaniac is like Thomas Sweatt, a Washington, D.C., fast-food manager and arsonist. His first fire, in 1985, had a perverse logic to it: he wanted so badly to again see a man he had found attractive that he decided the best way to do it was to burn down the man’s house, which he did by following him home one night and pouring two liters of gasoline underneath the front door. The man’s wife died and his two daughters were injured. But Sweatt, as he watched the scene from a distance, was pleased to see the object of his affection appear on the street wearing only his underwear. He discovered such a feeling of pleasure and release from the experience that he went on to light an approximated three hundred more fires, several of them fatal. When he was eventually caught in 2005, he received a life sentence.
To talk about arson is to talk about buildings burning down. To talk about the term “pyromania” is really to talk about the unfathomable mysteries of the human brain and the human heart: Why do we do things? Why do we want things? What moves us, and stirs us, and why are some people moved by the things that the rest of us find inexplicable or abhorrent?
Some arsonists go into treatment and are cured, though those are often the arsonists whose fire setting was a by-product of another mental illness. Some arsonists take well to the therapy, pronounce themselves cured, and then leave treatment and immediately burn down another house. No one really knows why. Because, despite all of the research and studying that scientists have put into understanding arsonists over the years, there’s a piece of the puzzle that remains inexplicable:
Some people light things on fire because they feel like they have to.
CHAPTER 6
TONYA
EVE WITH THE APPLE, IN THE GARDEN. Hester Prynne with a scarlet A.
Later, after all this, people would have stories about Tonya Bundick. They would conflate vague memories with speculations and folklore, and they would decide Tonya had been a bad girl. Or a sociopath, not deliberately bad but lacking the moral compass most people had. Or that she had sorceresslike powers over men. They would make her into what they each needed her to be in order to make sense of everything that happened, and they would peel and peel away at her, never knowing if they were to the center.
People who didn’t know Tonya at all knew her family name. Bundick was a Born Here name, a good one, with roots tracing back to Richard Bundick, a colonist who had arrived in 1647, farmed hundreds of acres, and died with enough land and tobacco to make his wife and children comfortable for the rest of their lives. Now, Bundicks were everywhere; the name appeared on law offices, HVAC companies, government IDs.
People who knew her in person knew her mostly from school functions—she was a single mom with two sons—or from the bar Shuckers. Tonya, forty, was very pretty, with a fine-boned face and big blue eyes that had the flat, bored look of an Egyptian statue. She tanned all the time. She was so tan she was orange, and people would see her at multiple tanning salons in a single day, switching locations when she hit the maximum allowed time. Her legs were shapely, and at the bar she wore clothes to show them off. On at least one night (As a joke? A costume?) she went to the bar wearing a magenta lingerie set—bra, panties, garter belt—and nothing else.
In the context of Shuckers, which in 2012 was at the height of its popularity, this was less of a shocking sartorial choice than it might have been elsewhere. One of the bar’s frequent attendees, a woman named Terri, described the place as “sort of like Studio 54,” if the famous New York nightclub was located in rural Virginia, with a parking lot full of pickup trucks and a clientele that occasionally broke out in brawls. (Another Shucker’s patron noted that he mostly tried to stay away because of the fights. But that if he was in the mood to see a fight, as one was from time to time, then Shuckers was the perfect place to go.)
Anyway, the Studio 54 comparison was really about social hierarchy: a place with a definitive sense of who was in and who was out. There were some female customers who danced on the bar or on the stage at Shuckers to show off, and some women who watched them. Terri had been one of the watchers until one day she was told by one of the dancers that she should come dance on the stage, too. The woman who told her that was Tonya Bundick.
To Terri, who was a little older than a lot of the twenty-and thirtysomething clientele, and who hadn’t been out of the house much recently due to a chronic illness, Tonya telling her to get on the stage to dance made her feel as though she’d been embraced by the cool kids at the lunch table.
Tonya was fun, and always seemed to have a lot of people paying attention to her. If the clothes she wore were provocative, no one could deny she had the body for them. She’d even inspired her own fashion following. One Accomack resident remembered seeing Tonya “peacocking” around the bar in a tube top befitting, in size and design, a Barbie doll. Trailing behind her was a cluster of other women, similarly tube-topped, but none of them with quite the figure or presence to pull off the ensemble. The parade reminded the onlooker of the movie Multiplicity, where the main character makes a series of clones, which become more defective with every copy. Tonya wasn’t ever catty about it, though. She was the type of person to seem genuinely happy when she received compliments from other women, and happy to return them as well, offering fashion or makeup advice. She made an impact. A former Shucker’s employee remembered Tonya as the kind of woman who “never bought her own drinks or had to bring her own money.” Another Shucker’s regular was a bit more circumspect. “One of those girls who if you just look at her, you assume she’s trashy,” the regular said. “But she actually seemed shy. People were just quick to judge her.”