“What are you doing?” I asked as he opened a third bag of beans and dropped them one at a time into the trough. He didn’t answer. “Planting?”
As soon as the beans were gone, he hauled over two large bags of charcoal briquettes and started laying the charcoal out over the beans.
“It looks like something out of Gourmet magazine,” I said. “A new kind of barbecue recipe.”
When he finished laying out all the charcoal, he sat down on a deck chair, took off his shoes and socks, pulled his shirt over his head, wiped his face and chest, dropped it down in a ball, and sighed a big one.
“They’re not home yet?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said.
Mr. got up off the deck chair, picked up a can of starter fluid and went down the length of the trough, holding the can at crotch level, squeezing it so the fluid arced up like piss then softly splashed down onto the coals. In seconds the coals went from matte black to shiny wet and then back to matte black, as the stuff soaked in. He put down the can and picked up a box of those long fireplace matches.
“What’s this supposed to be?” I asked. I thought it was probably another one of those things some people did that I just didn’t know anything about.
Mr. Henry stood at the end of his trough, his runway of coal, lit three matches at once, held them in a tight fist, bowed his head, then dropped them in one by one. A line of flame spread the length of the ditch, sometimes golden, sometimes blue, sometimes spitting on itself. The coals shifted. Mr. stood at the end of the line looking down at his feet. He stepped out off the grass into the fire. In a split second he had both feet in the fire and was doing his best not to run. You could see it in his legs, in the muscles twitching.
“Don’t,” I shouted, going toward him.
He put both arms up in front of him, like someone sleepwalking, and the fluid that had splashed back on his hands ignited and his hands turned into ten fingers of flame, like a special effect, like something that would happen to a cartoon character. I stepped back and watched the flames jump three feet high, the hair on his arms and legs melt away, the edges of his shorts turn black, the flames at first just kissing him then starting to eat him alive. Mr. was silent until halfway down when he began to howl, to cry, and wail.
Mrs. came flying out the kitchen door, her purse over her arm, bag of groceries still in hand, screaming, “Don’t just stand there, do something.” She dropped the groceries and charged toward Mr. I ran into the Henrys’ house and called the fire department. From the kitchen window, I could see Mrs. chasing Mr. around the yard, tackling him at the edge of the woods. The fire had reached out of the trough, chewed through the empty briquette bags, and was gnawing on the porch. I saw Henry and baby June standing off to the side, watching their mother in her Bermuda shorts lying on top of their father.
I went to the front door and waited for help.
Two days later, while Mr., all red and black, charred, swollen, bandaged, blotchy, with his arms and legs tied down, was still in intensive care, two men came and took away the remains of the new deck.
“He wants to be punished,” Mrs. told the men. “Even though this was an accident, he’s convinced it was his fault.”
When they were gone Mrs. took the garden hose, a ladder, her trusty Playtex gloves and scrub brush, and with an industrial-sized bottle of lemon-lime Palmolive she washed the side of the house, the patio, and even the grass. “Go on down to the basement and bring up the beach things,” she told Henry and me when she finished. “We’re taking a few days off.”
Henry and I plunged into the clammy cool of the basement, into the history packed away on deep wooden shelves Mr. had put up a few summers before. We took out all of Henry’s old toys, played with them again, and lived our lives over. We did the memory quiz—do you remember when?—testing to see if we agreed on history, making sure we’d gotten everything right. We pulled out the beach chairs, inflatable rafts, and the Styrofoam cooler, and loaded them all into the back of Mrs.’s station wagon.
While Mrs. and baby June stayed at the foamy edge of the ocean, Henry and I danced in the waves, hurling ourselves toward them, daring the ocean to knock us out, to carry us away.
Despite our being coated with layers and layers of thick white sunblock, by the time the lifeguard pulled his station far back on the sand and walked off with the life preserver, we were red-hot like steamed lobsters.
We walked back to the motel dragging the beach chairs, the Styrofoam cooler, and all the extra sand our bathing suits would hold. To save time and hot water, Henry and I showered together and then turned the bathroom over to Mrs. and baby June. On our way out of the bathroom, Mrs. grabbed Henry by the head and recombed his hair the normal Henry way. He didn’t stop her. He didn’t rearrange it Stanton style.