just as Smoke came tearing to a stop in his jet black GMC pickup, it’s engine rumbling and the growing pillar of flames from town reflected in his windshield.
I ran around front and climbed into the cab beside him. We were doing thirty before I had my door shut. To our right, a stream of headlights bounced and weaved and dipped from sight to reappear as every pickup and every water truck from the farms raced in to help fight the blaze.
I glanced at Smoke who hadn’t said a word. His face was grim and set hard. He had been an Air Force colonel in Nam, an ace fighter pilot, and what he was seeing ahead of us went further than I could know.
We slid to a halt in a jam of trucks between the elevators and what we could now see was the towering column of fire that was MacAvity’s Pub. The brick walls still stood, and the window frames of blown-out glass were filled with living sheets of smokeless flame licking the darkness.
The sirens suddenly went silent, and the night, void of their sobbings, became a hollow of light and yelling--and something else unearthly and astounding--MacAvity’s was roaring like an enormous jet engine that thrust fire over a hundred feet into the mushroom of night black smoke. And the whistling. The intensity of the inferno was streaking past the window openings as giant steam engine whistles.
Smoke and I ran up the adjacent alley and out onto Main in time to see the fire hoses spring to life and gush columns of water futilely through the window openings.
It was then that a gun shot roared and Smoke grabbed my elbow and pointed at the gathering crowd of town people struggling with the hoses. Standing off to one side, was Shiela, dressed only in Butte MacAvity’s pajama top, and MacAvity, in the bottoms held up by a John Wayne holster. He was waving a .45 Ruger Blackhawk revolver.
The gunshot, over the roar of the inferno, got every-one’s attention.
“Forget the fucking fire!” Butte shouted. “Save the town, you morons!”
He waved his arm at the adjacent buildings that were steaming ominously--something no one had noticed. With effort the hoses were swung around and redirected at them, yet Roy Black and Pappy Boyd inadvertently swung theirs over the surface of the street, and swept Leaps and Shay who were manning the central hydrant off their feet.
They clambered back up hatless, and Leaps pointed at the fire and shouted.
We turned in time to see the back brick two story wall of the pub teeter and then, with a rippling bulge, fall forward into the throat of the flames. A geyser of sparks and burning chunks of wood lifted into the sky.
“Holy shit,” Smoke mumbled.
He leaned closer.
“If there was any wind we could kiss Ryback goodbye, Paul”
I nodded.
Even as still as the air was, people were dodging the falling coals. A curtain of smaller sparks rained down but were pulled back into the flames by the strong updraft. The heat against my face was growing intense, and my jeans were hot against my legs.
Smoke leaned over again.
“You should see what a circle of incendiaries will do to a village,” he said. “Ugly.”
I nodded again.
He began to work his way over to Sheila and Butte, threading his way over the fire hoses and chaos. I fell in behind him.
Butte had taken Shiela by the elbow, backed away from the inferno, and had found relief under City Hall’s sheet metal awning directly across the wide main street. Shiela had tears streaming down her cheeks, but her mouth was tight with anger and her eyes moved back and forth over the crowd like gun sights.
Butte holstered the .45 as we came up. His chest was pure white, and under the loose skin his eighty-two year old muscles were lean and hard, and his stomach was flat and smattered with silver hairs. A nasty scar ran from his left shoulder down to the middle portion of his ribs, bouncing over them like a bad road. I had never seen Butte with his shirt off, and I doubted if the sun or any of his friends had either. I made a mental note to ask him how he’d been cut. I suspected it was when he had been training Special Forces before Nam. But who could guess what the old warrior had been doing when it happened.
They made room for us. The four of us stood in silence, fire debris pinging off the tin overhead, and watched the tragedy...the crime unfold. We stood like that until dawn when all that remained standing were the front and side street walls, and a pile of smoking brick, timbers and bent pipes heaped up where MacAvity’s had once marked the rolling farmland’s center...its home and its heart.
Smoke had retrieved an army blanket from the firehouse behind us when the diminishing fire had let the morning cold come back in, and had draped it over Butte and Sheila’s shoulders.
As if awakened from a deep hypnotic state, Butte nodded to us and steered Sheila through the door marked City Hall, and shut it behind them against the night’s events and the terror he knew he would soon unleash against his attackers.
For what seemed a long time Smoke continued to look at the closed door. Then he turned and said, more to himself than to me, “There’s going to be hell to pay, Pardner. Whoever is responsible for this is going to be the center of a shit storm the likes of which will bring more flaming agony on them than Hell’s Teeth itself.”
He turned and headed back to his truck.
“You can bank on it,” he added over his shoulder.
When I caught up to him he was staring at the hood of his pickup.
I followed his stare.
Smoke growled, “We’re going to get those fuckers and feed them their own fucking bodies a bite at a time.”
He slammed a fist down on the fender.
The heat and falling embers from the fire had bubbled and scorched the truck’s hood and roof like a slab of bacon dropped into hot grease.
I backed off to gain safety up on the sidewalk as he pushed by me, jerked open the truck door and slid into the cab. The engine roared to life. Smoke jammed the steering to hard left, and roared around in a half donut of shrieking tires. Even the firefighters stopped their mop-up among the coals at the sound and looked our way.
Smoke accelerated down the street past the Lutheran church, past the park, and vanished as he hit third gear and flew over the ridge out of town. I could hear him gain rpms until I was certain he was making well over a hundred miles an hour as he headed home.
Chapter Two
From somewhere far off, namely my night stand, the nasty sound of my alarm was ringing me into the brilliant noon sunshine that was pressing on my eyelids.
I opened one eye cautiously to glare with annoyance at the bedroom window. When my other eye joined the party, I swung my legs onto the floor only to be overcome by a wave of sickening awareness of what had just happened that very night. It felt as if my brain had jumped naked into a blender and someone had turned it on mince. It seemed impossible that Ryback had just had its heart cut out in a puff of smoke. And staggering to the bathroom and glancing at Lana’s closed empty bedroom door, I nearly upped from mince to liquify.
Oddly, my reflection in
