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  “Oh my God. Do you think anyone’s hurt?” Janice said.

  I said, “If not, they will be. I’ll crush the son of a bitch. Annie was going to remodel that tobacco shed and turn it into a study.”

  Annie was at the front of the crowd that ran from the house to the car sticking out of the dark shed. Between the patio lights and the moonlight, we could see that the roof of the shed had crumpled the hood of the car. A long beam or log of some sort had pierced the windshield on the passenger’s side, and I started to feel sick and panicky, thinking someone’s head might have been torn off. But only one person, the driver, was in the car. He opened the door, stood weakly beside the car and said, “I think there’s been an accident.”

  Annie stood near the man, waving her arms wildly and saying, “Goddamn you, goddamn you! You destroyed my shed!”

  “He’s drunk,” Janice said to me. “This just makes me sick.”

  A man next to us in the crowd said, “Is he okay? Should we call an ambulance?”

  “Wait till I beat the fuck out of him,” I said, pushing people out of my way as I walked up to Annie, who grabbed my wrist tightly. She looked like she was crying and said, “Kurt! Look what the bastard did!”

  A woman who knew Annie and who apparently was a friend of the man who ruined the shed walked up to the wobbly man and studied his face and chest for signs of injury, saying, “David. Are you hurt?”

  He shook his head. “I think I’m fine,” he said.

  I slugged him once in the face, knocking him into the side of his car, where he fell down.

  “He’s apparently injured,” I said loudly, wishing he’d get up so I could hit him again.

  “You didn’t have to hit him,” the woman said angrily and sadly. “He’s drunk.”

  “Then I’ll wait till he’s sober and kick the fuck out of him,” I said.

  Janice grabbed my arm from behind me. I couldn’t see her, but somehow I knew it was her, like I recognized her grasp. I relaxed a little, and from behind me Janice said quietly, “Don’t hit him again. Let’s just call the police.”

  “Why? The police won’t hit him.”

  “Kurt. Calm down.”

  Annie, who didn’t seem to know the man who smashed her shed, was talking to him informally.

  “Stupid bastard,” she said tiredly as the other woman helped the drunken man stand up. Someone had already called the police and eventually a police car, an ambulance, and a tow truck showed up.

  A lot of the other people at the party who’d been drinking beer and wine and liquor tried to act conspicuously sober, as if to dissociate themselves from the repugnant drunk, which Janice thought was funny.

  “Now we act morally superior to him, even though half of us are drunk, too,” she said. “We’re, I think, simply drunk at a more respectable level. Except you,” she said as we watched the paramedic examine the drunken man on the patio. “I haven’t seen you drink any alcohol all night.”

  “I don’t drink,” I said.

  “Do you do anything at all?” she wondered pleasantly.

  I didn’t want to tell her yet that I’d quit drinking nearly a gallon of dry sherry a day because I thought I was an alcoholic, so I tried to look indifferent and said, “I inhale aviation fuel.”

  The paramedic was saying to the drunken man, “You’re terribly lucky. A building fell on you and all you have is a bruise on your cheek.”

  “As soon as we realized he was okay, Kurt slugged him in the face,” Annie said. “Can someone hit him again before you take him away?”

  The drunken man pointed at me and said, “I want to press charges.”

  “Why don’t I just press your mouth shut?” Annie said.

  “Were there any witnesses?” a police officer said. About seventeen people saw me hit the man.

  “It was dark,” Janice said.

  “It still is,” someone said.

  “It reminds me of night,” a voice said.

  “Me, too.”

  The police had no choice but to take the drunken man away, and after the tow truck pulled the sports car from the vanquished tobacco shed, Annie stood next to her boyfriend, Thomas, and studied the crumbled, dark ruin, the splintered, sad-looking timbers. It was perfectly quiet, now, except for a Rolling Stones album screeching respectfully from the house, and everyone waited to see what Annie would do. Staring at the shed, she spoke mournfully, saying, “I don’t know. Almost everyone told me after I bought this house that the old tobacco shed was just a stupid, worthless, decaying shed, that it had no architectural or historic value. But I always imagined the people who built it, sawing down pine trees, cutting the logs, struggling everywhere to make every piece fit just right, inventing something out of the wilderness more than a full century ago, leaving it standing here as ordinary evidence of vanished lives.”

  As I imagined the vanished lives represented by the destroyed shed, I almost started crying.

  “I guess we could build a bonfire out of it,” Annie said, and that’s what we did. People got fallen limbs and branches for kindling from the woods, the endless, maddening woods, and others of us carried and dragged nineteenth-century timbers from the shed to the gravel driveway where the men, like pioneers, constructed a pyramidal stack of wood that kept falling over.

  “How do you build a bonfire?” Thomas asked whoever was listening.

  “You need some bon,” I said. “Janice? Will you ask Annie to go to the store and get some bon?”

  “Bon my ass,” Annie said with amused impatience.

  “Is that a brand name? I guess you go to the store and ask which aisle the bon my ass is on,” I said as Annie and Janice helped the men build an improved pyramidal stack of wood that kept falling over. We decided to just crisscross the timbers and things and use an engineering technique described by Annie when she said, “Just stack the shit. Don’t make it pretty. We’re going to set it on fire.” Three or four people brought out folding aluminum chairs, although most of us just stood in the driveway around the stack of wood, which was about three feet deep and about five feet in diameter. And then, to make it an authentic nineteenth-century—style bonfire, I poured two gallons of gasoline on the wood and lit the fire with a rolled-up sports section of the New York Times. There was a minor explosion. People screamed unnecessarily loudly as a few streams of burning debris were flung upward several feet in reddish orange chaos, but most of the debris fell back into the fire, and although one woman and one man complained of minor burns on their arms, the bonfire was widely regarded as a success, driving away the great dark night, or maybe just making it more conspicuous as we stared with pointless fascination at the swirling flames.

  4

  It was the first party I’d been to where we set a building on fire. Not that much in life was particularly rational. A repellent drunk had destroyed Annie’s beloved tobacco shed, and after we had him arrested and taken away, people dismembered the shed, set it on fire, and resumed getting appreciably drunk as they chatted and joked and flirted around the burning driveway.

  “Are we civilized?” Annie asked in a quiet, slightly curious voice as she stared at everyone standing and walking and sitting along the perimeter of the fire. She sipped German wine from a Dixie cup as she sat cross-legged on the ground behind Thomas, leaning her chin on his shoulder.

  “Of course we are. We invaded Panama,” I said, drinking a bottle of IBC Root Beer and smoking a Camel Light. “No one is regarded as civilized unless they invade somebody. That’s history.”

  Annie smiled at me. “I didn’t invade Panama,” she said.

  “I didn’t, either. I stayed home that night,” I said.

  Janice, who sat cross-legged beside me with one of her knees almost touching mine, laughed a little and stared at me. I wanted her to like me. I wanted her to take me home. She was one of the nicest strangers I ever didn’t know, and I wished she’d kiss me, was what. How do you find somebody? By accident. You wait for the right accident and someone’s there, starin
g at you.

  “I don’t think invading a tiny Central American country means you’re civilized,” Thomas said as he threw a pinecone into the bonfire.

  “Yeah. Panama is pretty small. We should’ve invaded Canada,” I said.

  “You’re not supposed to invade your allies,” Janice said.

  “When I asked if we were civilized,” Annie said, “I didn’t mean is the United States civilized. I meant are we civilized, here? A man drives a Japanese car into my nineteenth-century tobacco shed because he’s drunk. And do we settle anything, make the world better? No. We rip the shed apart, pour gas on it, and have an explosion and fire in my driveway.”

  Janice leaned her head in front of me to look at Annie and say, “At least we had the guy arrested for destroying your property, so we could set it on fire.”

  I liked her even more. A deep sense of irony in a woman was as important as breasts and a vagina. Again I’d thought of something I couldn’t tell her. I realized you usually can’t talk about sex, even if you’re not having it.

  The fire was burning pretty violently, then, with yellowish orange flames whipping against each other, rising about six feet or higher and shooting unpredictable bursts of embers up into the dark, like thousands of tiny red stars escaping into the night. People were sweating. It was already eighty-seven degrees that night, and the bonfire got it up to maybe a hundred and thirty degrees, we guessed, within six feet of the fire.

  “This is my favorite southern tradition: Sweating,” I said.

  “That’s not a southern tradition,” Annie said.

  “I guess it’s just a southern misfortune, then.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Fuck it’s hot,” Thomas said.

  “I always wished the TV weatherman would say that one day,” I said.

  “I think we should move away from the fire,” Annie said. We all got up, backed away, and started walking to the patio to get something cold to drink. Janice asked me what I’d thought of doing, now that I’d been fired from the paper. I told her I might write a southern novel called As I Lay Sweating. She said, as she playfully rubbed some sweat from my forehead with her finger, that I couldn’t write a southern novel because I wasn’t a southerner.

  “I know. Maybe I’ll write a German novel,” I said as we walked up this big hill behind Annie’s house, just sort of spontaneously deciding to go up on the hill together, with neither of us saying why, like we didn’t know.

  “But you’re not really German, either,” she said.

  “No. I’m not really anything. I guess that makes me American.”

  The light from the bonfire was bright enough for me to see her smiling at me, and I was happy, even though I scarcely knew her and, as far as I knew, this might be the only time I’d ever see her. The world put people together as randomly as it guaranteed that nothing would work and your hopes were stupid. But I kept liking her, in case it would work.

  She carried with her a glass of some blush wine or something, and I had a new bottle of IBC Root Beer. Near the top of the hill was a little spot next to the trail that was cleared and padded with thousands of dry pine needles where we sat together and stared down at those idiots, our peers, who apparently had found a pitchfork and were using it to roast hot dogs over the bonfire.

  “Look at them,” Janice said. “It looks like a cookout in hell.”

  “I’ve never seen a cookout in hell, but maybe you’re right,” I said, watching this tall guy with glasses hold the pitchfork close to the edge of the fire with little dark things impaled on the prongs. We assumed they were hot dogs. Naturally this led to a discussion of theology.

  “Do you get to eat hot dogs in hell?” Janice asked.

  “The Bible doesn’t say. It’s badly underwritten.”

  “Do you believe in hell?”

  “No. I think eternal damnation is too long.”

  “Too long? How long should damnation be?”

  “Maybe a month. I think being in a lake of fire for thirty days is long enough.”

  She looked at me and laughed. “You sound like a heretic,” she said. “You could go to hell for not believing in hell, you know.”

  “I worry about that. Maybe on Judgment Day I’ll bring a lawyer with me. You know, stand around with a few billion sinners from all of history, waiting for your turn to be held accountable for every instant of your life, and while everybody else around you is crying and whimpering, waiting to see if their names are written in the Book of Life or not, I’d say, ‘Look at me. I brought an attorney. Ha, ha.’”

  It made Janice spit wine again and laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “In a way, though, I like watching you spit wine. It’s either sensual or sensuous. I forget which.”

  As people down in the yard and the driveway wandered around the bonfire, moving in and out of the light like ghosts in summer clothes, dancing and, I assumed, preparing in some cases to go copulate, Janice and I talked among the pine needles, beginning to know each other. She said she moved here in 1978 to study archaeology at the University at St. Beaujolais.

  “Bones?” I said.

  “When people die, that’s frequently what they become,” she said. “But you know what you’re more apt to find than bones?”

  Of course I didn’t, but I at least wanted to guess. “Dirt?” I asked.

  “Trash,” she said. “The one thing that all ancient and modern cultures produced with universal proficiency was trash. I went into archaeology, my God, with the usual vague dreams of helping discover profoundly interesting and stunning Indian villages and burial sites filled with relics and artifacts and maybe even world-crushing evidence of esoteric religions or fantastic jewels and things.”

  “Like Raiders of the Lost Ark?” I wondered.

  “I love that movie, but, archaeologically, it sucks,” she said.

  “Sucks. You’re using academic terms.”

  “By the time I got my degree in 1982 and spent time at local Indian digs, I realized that much of what we’d ever find in the search for important knowledge of lost cultures was just real old trash, like burned-up animal bones, charred beans, and the general discarded crud from prehistoric dinners.”

  “Really? And then what did you do? Do you teach?”

  “I used to, for a little while, but the pay is so horrible. I could barely afford to live in squalor.”

  “Ah, squalor. I was probably one of your neighbors.”

  “Have you lived in squalor?”

  “Next door to it. Several times.”

  “Anyway, where was I?” she asked.

  “In squalor. I was your neighbor.”

  “Yes, yes. And when I kept realizing I’d picked a profession where jobs are extremely hard to find, and when you get one you have a master’s degree and the salary of a dishwasher, I finally became something people never heard of. I hate to say it. It sounds so abstract and unreal.” She kind of grinned and grimaced at the same time.

  “Tell me, tell me,” I said, because I didn’t care what she was. I liked her, and I’d like anything she told me.

  “I’m a statistical research assistant in viral epidemiology,” she said.

  It took a while to think about such a long title. I patted her leg and said, “John Keats wrote a poem about that: ‘Ode on a Statistical Research Assistant in Viral Epidemiology.’”

  She thumped my cheek with her finger. “You’re a charming lunatic. Annie told me you were. I see no reason to disagree with her.”

  “That’s almost like being complimented, isn’t it?”

  “Almost.”

  After I walked down the hill to get some more blush wine and root beer and happily walked back up the hill to sit next to Janice and wonder if she’d undress and pin me to the ground where I wouldn’t resist, I looked up at the almost-full moon and kind of contentedly smiled at Janice, saying, “It’s pretty exotic sitting with a woman under the summer moon, talking about bones and viral epidemics.”

  She closed he
r eyes and laughed. I think we got along spontaneously, or accidentally, or one of those qualities you think you’re identifying when really you’re just suddenly happy and you don’t know why, but you hope it doesn’t quit and get replaced with the normal emptiness and sadness of being alive one more day alone.

  For a while she talked about having visited Canyon de Chelly in Arizona and looking at the fantastic Indian ruins fastened so solidly and improbably to the canyon wall that it looked, she said, “like the wall grew a home for the Indians. And then you have to imagine, because there are no records, these primitive people without winches or cranes building these monstrous, thick networks of walled homes along the sheer edges of goddamn cliffs. And all the Indians are gone. Vanished. Inexplicably leaving behind an entire city in a canyon so that, one day, our rowdy European ancestors out conquering the continent and smugly stealing whatever the hell they wanted could come along and discover some ruins.”

  Sipping my root beer in the humid, hot dark, I looked at Janice and said, “My ancestors didn’t look for ruins. They made them.”

  She said, “What?”

  “I’m part German. That means I’m descended from the Vandals and Visigoths and Ostrogoths and the regular Goths.”

  “So? Is that bad?” she said.

  “It was back then. They walked around Europe saying, ‘Look. A nation. Let’s steal it.’ Or if they didn’t want to steal a country or it was too hard to do at the moment, they’d walk through a city and break it. Crack. Ha, ha. There goes your civilization. Do you know what they did one time? While wandering through Europe on a customary rampage, the Vandals sacked Rome. Some people can say of their heritage, and maybe you can, since you’re part Italian, that they’re descended from people who built ancient Rome. All I can say is my ancestors liked Rome so well they robbed it. Jeez.”