The Fires by Rene Steinke Read Free Book Online

was a moment before I knew what he was doing and thought to myself, Sit up, but didn’t. The room was cool and dark, except for the quivering pink light of his tongue.
    He flipped back my skirt and rubbed the sides of my legs. I was woozy but opened my eyes just slightly, and then a car’s headlights passed through the window and lit the red, withered skin on my thighs. He must have seen it too, felt something feathered, coarser. I drew back and pulled down my skirt.
    “What’s the matter?” I pulled on my stockings and shoes but didn’t bother to find my underwear in the dark. Hanna was far away now, tapping perfume behind her ear or riding in a taxi, having not thought about either of us for some time. I got up, steadied myself on the arm of the couch. “I shouldn’t have stayed so long.”
    He turned on the lamp, looked up at me, surprised, still smiling from one corner of his mouth. “But you did.”
    “I have to leave.” I didn’t look at him again but found my purse and ran down the crooked stairs, grabbing the banister at the two crazy turns. I was glad he didn’t follow me or call out.
    As I drove down the highway in the dark, each set of passing headlights was a pair of eyes widening, lingering on my face, the stare momentarily blinding me until they passed. For a while I’d believed it was Hanna drawing me to him, but now I knew it was just the bourbon. I was ashamed of myself for using it that way again. It never worked unless the person was a stranger, a total stranger.
    When I stopped on the side of the road near Gary, the air smelled like synthetic manure, and a few red dots of water-tower lights were stacked beneath the stars. I took a blanket from the backseat, flung it out the window, and lit a match to the pink satin edging. The flame extinguished, so I got out, went to the 36 / RENÉ STEINKE
    trunk, and found the gasoline. A semi trundled by. I hurried back into the car and, sitting in the front seat with the door open, soaked one ragged corner in gasoline, lit it up again, and threw it on the gravel beneath me. The pale blanket jumped up like the back of a horse, then crumpled and slithered under the flames. I drove away with the fire seething behind me.
    Watching it shrink in my rearview mirror, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. I was speeding past the cornfields, worrying what Cornell must have thought of me: A few drinks and she’d let you do anything. She pretended to be looking for Hanna, but really she was desperate for something else.
    I stopped again on a dirt road between two fields, the breeze in the corn leaves like a faraway tide. I got out and doused some old newspapers with gasoline before I lit them on the ground, but there weren’t enough to keep a fire going for very long. Under the cover of the corn, I didn’t worry anymore about being seen.
    I searched my trunk for more flammables and found some cans of spray paint I’d used to touch up the paint job on the car doors.
    I walked a little way down the road, ignited the tip of each one, and threw it up over the corn tassels, which lit up like tiny crowns, until the cans exploded and the dark sucked in the flare.
    The third time I stopped near the Porter exit sign, I didn’t even get out of the car. The darkness squeezed at my shoulders. I lit a match to the delicate leg of the wooden deer from Hanna’s box.
    “Damn it, Hanna,” I said. “Where are you?” I lay the deer on the seat beside me, looking at its pathetic wide-eyed face and puckered lips like a surprised girl’s. I was coughing from the smoke as the seat’s white vinyl melted, but it calmed me down to watch the little deer burn out until I snapped on the light to see what was left among the feathery ashes: the blue beads that had been its eyes.

    III
    T hen I was back in Porter. The town lay on shifting, stolen ground, somehow dragged to Indiana during the Ice Age, and even if they didn’t know why, people were afraid the land their houses stood on would