May, in Texas.
May in Texas meant trout lilies blooming, robins and purple martins and grackles crowding one another for space on the telephone wires, and more insects than hairs on your head. The air was not yet doing its best impersonation of an oven. It was the respite before summer, when trucks would become murder to ride in and delicate machinery would grow to its most cantankerous.
For one man, May in Texas meant going home to his modest little property in the tiny town of Bee Cave—a much-needed few weeks' break from his job.
Tonight he was camped out in his overstuffed arm chair, enjoying the quiet. Quiet was hard to get at his job. So was quality food; he was no great cook, being a bachelor and all, but fixing his own meals at his own pace had an undeniable pleasure to it. Leftover chicken and baked beans lay on the scratched plate atop the end-table by his chair, and he had settled down to pick through the newspaper and have a nice, solitary evening.
The first interruption came by way of the telephone. The dusty black Crosley, which sat near at hand atop the table, started to ring. Without so much as looking up from his paper he answered it. "Evenin'," he began, tucking it between his ear and shoulder. "Conagher speakin'."
"Evenin', Dell, it's Jackson."
Dell Conagher turned the page, scanning the articles. New hospital, grand opening. Hollywood wedding in an upset. Australia invents first-ever wallaby-powered television, immediately begins research toward weaponizing the same. "How's things, Jackson?"
"Oh, fine, jus' fine. Lissen, I hate to be callin' you up after dinner and all, but somethin's up with that milking contraption y'all put together for me."
"What's it doing?" Black Ice Stadium fire kills twenty-three. New police department, grand opening.
"I can't say I'm exactly sure, but when I went to check on 'em tonight I found Belle doin' the thing with her horns all glowin'-like. Blue. Lit up just like Christmas."
Dell lifted an eyebrow. "Again?" Oil prices up four percent. Fatal crash, two persons dead.
"Yep. She seems fine, ain't no rush, but next you've got a minute…"
"Sure thing, fella. I can make it over tomorrow 'round noon if that'll do."
"That'll do fine. See you."
"See you." Jackson hung up, and the place was quiet again.
The second interruption, the real trouble, well—it came in through the window, in a way. The air was warm and crisp that evening, and he had permitted the breeze to flow in through the mesh screen. It slid around now like a snake, rustling the books and sundries scattered around the living room. It paused to lick at the paintings and photographs and investigated no fewer than eleven framed PhDs that hung on the walls. It wound through a tiny sculpture of an oil well, and rolled around the scraps on his plate; it nudged his paper, investigated his worn-out overalls, and skimmed his bald scalp before dying back down.
The point of the matter, anyway, was that the window was open. There'd been nothing else but the soft sounds of birds and the rustle of the cotton plants coming in through that window all evening; when he heard something else, something like a thump and muted footsteps, he put the paper down. Peering outside showed him nothing, but the sound continued, then stopped, replaced by a soft hiss. Dell rubbed his chin, shut the window, and stepped out to the kitchen. He cricked his neck once, twice, and pulled on his boots. His shotgun was waiting for him in the closet by the door, as it always was. He hefted it up, its weight easy and familiar in his hands, and stepped outside.
The rich colors of a Texan sunset painted the horizon. Around him rolled the unkempt shrubland that defined his property, and beyond that stood his neighbors' endless acres of cotton, rows of tiny clouds bound to earth. Looking around, he found nothing immediately out of the ordinary. The hissing noise had stopped—no—there it was again, louder.
Something moved at the edge of his vision. He turned sharply, lifting the gun, and found it was only the German shepherd rounding the corner of the house. It stopped in its tracks, tail wagging. Dell relaxed again, slung the gun over his shoulder, and whistled to it, short and low. All business, it fell in step at his side as he slowly went the very way it had come. Some thirty yards from the house stood his garage-cum-workshop, locked and dark. His truck sat out in front of it, untouched. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.
He listened. The leaves of the ancient ash tree, standing like a sentinel on the opposite side of the house, rustled gently in the breeze. The hiss had faltered, sputtered out of being again. Somewhere came a faint, metallic thumping, and soon it gave way to more hissing. "Dog," he said softly. The German shepherd looked up at him, ears perked. "Find 'em."
The dog took off at a brisk, stiff-legged trot, spine straight as a board. Dell waited where he stood, waiting to see if the hiss would change. For a long time, there was nothing.
He was about to give up and head back inside when a sharp bark cut through the air. It was followed by a muffled shout, and he was moving. The dog's growls led him to the other side of the house, where the tree stood. He turned the corner, and stopped short.
Just two or three feet away from him was a figure trying to wrench its pant leg away from the dog's jaws, issuing a mumbling trail of what he assumed to be curses. The first thing he noticed was the mask—a black gas mask, eerie and cast with strange shadows in the fading light, scuffed all over and missing one tinted lens. The next was the bizarre, long-necked contraption was clenched tight in its gloved hands, something bright and tiny glowing at one end. Any other detail was consumed by the nearing dark.
The shotgun's safety made a loud click as he disengaged it. The stranger froze. They turned to look at him, and he could just make out one clouded eye through the empty eyepiece. In the same moment, the dog let go of their leg and backed off. It knew that noise.
"Pardner," he said, real gentle, "I would suggest you put that whatever-it-is down."
The stranger just stared at him. Their eye cut from him to the dog and back again. Then, in one jerky motion that reminded him of something more animatronic than human, they had swung the machine upwards. It leveled with Dell's face, and he jerked backwards in alarm. "Hey!" he snapped, his grip tightening on the gun. But the stranger did nothing else.
The tiny glowing thing on the end of the machine pressed heat to his face, more blue than orange. A fire, he realized, steady and intense as a Bunsen burner. Dell took a slow, steady breath. "I'm gonna ask you once more. Put that thing down."
The stranger said something that sounded a lot like "Fuck you," and pulled the trigger.
In a rush of heat and light the machine belched a burst of flame at him, inches from his face. He lurched backwards, and the dog let loose a thundering bark, jumping forward with bared teeth. But then the fire cut short, stopping abruptly with a sad gurgle. The tiny light flickered, then went out. He heard something on the contraption click, then click again, and again, to no avail. The stranger stared at the thing in what he only assumed to be bafflement, their attention all at once completely removed from him. They raised a fist and thumped the machine hard, once, twice. Nothing happened—no, a piece of it swung off, then fell to the ground. The dog barked again.
The stranger sagged visibly, like a deflating balloon. They took an uncertain step backwards, then sank to the ground, wrapping their arms around the machine like one would a beloved pet. Dell was ignored entirely. They curled up around it, hunched and small, and after a few seconds of utter silence he realized their shoulders were shaking. Were they crying? Or laughing?
The dog had come to stand at his side. He glanced down at it for an instant, and when he looked back at the stranger they had lifted their head. The one eye he could see blinked, hard, and then looked him dead in the eye with a crazed, unflinching gaze. The voice that rattled out of the empty eyepiece was so muffled and smoke-damaged that he couldn't even tell if its owner was a man or a woman. "So hurry up and fucking shoot me, then."
"I have no desire to use this unless I've got to," he answered, lowering the barrel.
They stared back at him with that solitary, hollow eye. "Fuck you," they repeated, but the words had no feeling behind them. The stranger shuddered and wrapped themselves around the machine again, all their joints sticking out in harsh angles.
The dog's curiosity had consumed it. It slunk in closer, head down and sniffing. It investigated the machine, and then the gloved fingers that held it. One of the stranger's hands jerked, then settled on the dog's shoulder. They glanced up from the weapon and watched the dog a moment before gingerly pushing it away. A rattling sigh found its way out of the mask. "It's dead."
"Pardon?"
"My flamethrower." They hugged it tighter. "It's dead, it died. I couldn't fix it. I tried. I looked for parts but there aren't any and I don't have any tools and nowhere to work anymore anyway and it's dead and I couldn't do anything about it." As they spoke, they sagged down further and further, until they were slumped against the machine like a dead thing. "Oughta shoot me. I was going to burn your house down. I almost had it but it wouldn't spread right. Then I was gonna go burn all that." They made a wild gesture to the acres of cotton.
After all that, he'd heard enough of the rasping voice to suppose it was a woman's. Dell chewed his lip, glanced at the side of his house. Sure enough, there was a smoldering collection of scorched grass next to the wall. "Now why were you gonna go and do that?"
"It's dead," they said again, in a tiny, shattered voice.
Minutes passed in silence, and after a while Dell slung his gun over his shoulder and made a decision. Gingerly, he reached out and grabbed the machine's nozzle, still warm from the flame, and gave it an experimental tug. Truth be told, he expected the stranger—the arsonist—to spring up when he touched it, like a coyote guarding a meal. But there was nothing. Her arms fell away and he picked it up with ease. Hefting it under one arm, he gave her one last look before turning to leave: she looked like a puppet with its strings cut, a collection of bones in a heap.
The dog followed him as he left her to her sorrows. It trailed him all the way to his garage, and darted into the darkness when he unlocked the door with a key fished from his pocket. Flicking on the light, he set down the gun on a nearby workbench and finally allowed himself to examine the weapon, the way he'd been itching to since he saw it.
He'd never seen anything like it; you certainly couldn't get something like this in a store. Custom-made, then, cobbled together carefully with clear signs of hand-done soldering and appropriated parts. He imagined when it was new it had been quite the specimen, but time had worn away at it. Now it was a tired old thing, a fossil, with tarnished metal and fraying tubing. The propane tank on its side was cratered and scratched, eaten with rust. Its handle, a cleverly repurposed gas pump, had been black at some point; it had seen so much use that much of the paint had worn away, revealing faint blue beneath. But even its skeleton was something of a masterpiece, a relic of clever craftsmanship. He was impressed, and that was rather saying something.
Had she built this?
Shaking his head, he stowed it atop one of the dozens of shelving units that lined the garage. He went to dig out a tarp to cover it, and something in the half-darkness beeped at him. "Just me, darlin'," he said absently. The beep came again, like a quiet hello, and then stopped.
When he returned, herding out the dog and leaving the garage dark and locked behind him, she hadn't moved an inch. He shifted his gun, slung over his shoulder once again, and scratched his head as he watched her. Vagrants weren't something he'd ever had deal much with. "When's the last time you ate, missy?" he said, presently; it seemed like the decent thing to ask.
It took her a while, but she finally moved: jerky, slow, a wind-up toy of a person. She lifted her head. Her one visible eye blinked, slow. A few seconds later, she said, "Is it Sunday?"
"Tuesday."
"Oh. Two… three days, then." She let her head drop back down to her chest.
"Well," he said. The dog was sniffing her again. It garnered no reaction. "Well. I expect you're hungry, then." He hesitated. "Believe I've got some chicken in the fridge, if you'd be interested."
Nothing.
Dell sighed, tapping his fingers against the smooth barrel of the shotgun. "Ought ta turn you in to the sheriff, is what I ought ta do." But he left her again, going inside. He put the shotgun back in its place, pulled the cold chicken on its plate out of the fridge, and went back out to the arsonist. He put it down on the grass beside her, watched her a few seconds longer, and said, "You eat that, then you decide what you feel like doin'. You need a place to sleep tonight, you come talk to me. Hear?" The dog was investigating the chicken, and he caught it by the collar. "But no more of this arson business. Not on my property. Or I will shoot ya."
She didn't respond, and he went back inside, bringing the dog with him. He unlaced his boots, threw the dog one of the fat soup bones Jackson kept giving him, and returned to his chair.
Evening drew on. Dell had flicked on the old lamp and gotten most of the way through the paper when he heard the front door creak open. He stopped halfway through turning the page, listening. When the floorboards groaned under new weight and the dog was looking expectantly around the corner, he said aloud, "More chicken in the fridge."
The door fell shut. A few seconds later, he heard the fridge open up. He nodded to himself, and went back to the paper.
The next sound Dell expected to hear was the door opening up again and the arsonist booking it with as much food as she could carry. It never came. What did come, a few minutes later, was the arsonist herself, standing in the space where the linoleum stopped and the carpet began.
In the light he could finally pick out the finer details of what, exactly, he had invited into his house. She stood in a slouch, head low, and even her smallest movements were lined with tension. Her clothes were huge on her, some of the rattiest things he had ever seen: hole-covered Levi's, shoes that were more duct tape than anything else, a dark hooded sweatshirt torn in a dozen different places. Her hair was a hacked-off nest of knots and burrs, short as a boy's, and a bruise-colored half-moon of sleeplessness was sunk deep beneath her eye. In her hands she held the blackberry pie that Mrs. Kelly over the way had given him a few days ago, a thank-you for fixing her husband's car. A huge chunk of it was missing, and purple smeared her gloves.
He put down his paper, giving her his attention. Nothing was said. Her dead gaze went from the dog, to him, to his couch, and then back to him. Seconds ticked by. Dell looked at the couch for a moment, and eventually he picked the paper back up. "All yours."
He got no acknowledgement. But when he glanced over the top of the paper a few minutes later, he found her curled up on the cushions, shoes, mask and all. She slouched heavily against the armrest, already dead asleep. The pie sat in her lap. The dog was licking the juice from her gloved fingers.
Dell shook his head. He rose, flipped off the light, and went upstairs to bed.
A few seconds later, he came back down, grabbed the shotgun, and took it up with him.