The car door was still warm and the seats sticky. The heat would keep pouring on as she drove home, she knew, driving itself up from the ground, and it would do so until 5:30 or so in the morning, when finally having exhausted itself, heat would finally give way to cool—just in time to greet the sun.
Verna Brody drove out of the Town Square past the closed cafes and the limestone bank building. Bonnie and Clyde had rousted the place when she was a little girl, and she smiled at the idea though she had no memory of it. She drove past live oaks that gave shade but no respite, singing the last song, a Johnny Cash number about fire.
The fire itself started like a mouse at home, tiny and snuggled, a beating heart of life that breathed shallow and grew slow for many hours. It began deep within the wall behind the consignment shop. By 11:30 on May 1, 1958, Verna was two hours gone from the place, and it was hidden but well underway.
The Book Man knew the fire was coming so clearly that he might as well have set it himself.
He knew it was coming because his whole body—this strange body, really just a skin he had acquired and was now only somewhat used to—prickled with the anticipation of what food would fuel it.
The Town Square Market Building boasted plaster floral arrangements in an arch around the entrance and a central court where one could enter and choose a store or take an elevator or flight of stairs up to even more. The fire started on the second-floor northeast corner with an electrical short in the walls.
At 11:30, three men—the brothers Dave and Dicky Lome, plus their high school soccer coach, Tom Hoag, were entering the Tri-Arms Sporting Goods store on the first floor, northwest corner, putting them a story down and a floor across from a fire they did not know was there.
As the Book Man smelt the fire on the wind, the ridges of his fingers sharpened and vibrated. His nostrils flared. He turned the wheel of the grey, stolen Morris Minor pickup, with its pinched nose and wide-mouthed, hungry face, and pulled over on the shoulder, considering it, the fire and what the fire would be. He was twenty miles away.
He whipped the pickup around and sat for a moment at the intersection, the red light above him swinging in the wind like a condemned man. Condemned. The building would be condemned, the Book Man realized, as he held his hand out the window, his flesh rippling with the wind. He could taste the fire and more. He waited until the light turned green and began to roll.
The three men entered the sporting goods store through a metal door and stood nervously in the golfing section. “We should get golf clubs,” Tom said, because he was ten years older than the other two and had a notion of the value of golf clubs.
“Basketballs,” the wiry younger Lome brother Dick said. He ran now, giddy with risk, and grabbed a basketball off a big red-and-yellow Wilson rack and began to dribble the ball on the linoleum.
“Cut that out,” Tom hissed.
“There ain’t no guards,” the other brother David said. “Mister Whit had his stroke and they ain't replaced him.”
Tom took David’s arm and Dick stopped dribbling this to listen. “I don’t care if they vowed it in the paper never to have a guard again. Breaking into a place and making a bunch of fool noise is stupid.” He changed his tone, softening—a coaching technique, and one the boys responded to. Snap, and then smooth. “Now, get two shopping carts from the front and let’s start filling them. The most expensive stuff first, golf clubs, equipment, anything metal.”
“Yes, coach,” the boys said.
A loud creak—the opening of a door, for sure—emanated from the back of the building and all three of them froze and looked up like startled deer. Tom grabbed a golf club—a putter—and motioned the other two to follow him.
They had come in through the employee break room in the back using a stolen key. Dick worked at a hardware store, and he’d lifted it when the manager of the whole building had come in to have some new keys cut. Tom had that key out in his hand now.
They walked back into the break room and saw beyond the card table and punch clock that the door was hanging open. They could see the parking lot beyond where their pickup waited next to a concrete flight of stairs.
“I thought we closed that,” Tom said. He pulled the door closed and heard it latch. “Let’s get what we can.” It bothered him that the door had popped open like that. He set to stealing things.
Above them, the fire that had begun in the walls of the consignment shop had crept through, born and breathing but still silent, and had emerged in the Western Section of the Tattered Wisdom Bookshop.
Only the Book Man, now ten miles away, would know that the first volume to feel the lick of fire would be The Light of Western Stars by Zane Grey, the flames cutting the edges of the paperback and curling as the book fluttered from the shelf, and the fire hissed and shot glue-and-paper-fed plumes in all directions.
The Book Man’s nostrils flared as he drove, the asphalt a blank screen in his vision against which he watched the eating and hissing of Ligeia and Rebecca and Peyton Place, shelves and pages and wallpaper licking with flame that spread across the floor and began to pry itself into the boards beneath the stories. He stepped on the gas.
On the first floor, Tom looked up as a glass upstairs broke while he and Dick were maneuvering a basketball goal into a cart. It sounded to Tom like a full pitcher and he exchanged glances with the two boys. “That was upstairs,” the coach said.
“But what if it’s someone coming?” Dick asked, and Tom made a gesture that said just get going.
“If it is, they’re awful clumsy,” Tom said.
“But if they’re coming…”
“Then we need to hurry,” hissed Tom.
The Book Man, rolling inexorably towards his meal, could tell anyone listening (if he chose to speak to mere mortals) that the glass breaking was in fact a kerosene lamp, more ornamental than useful, that sat that evening next to a rocking chair where just the week before Truman Capote himself had sat next to the lamp and read from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
By that time, the fire had spread across a fifteen-foot area of the second floor, and now the papers and rugs mixed with kerosene widened and deepened the fire.
Smoke finally made its way downstairs and Tom felt an animal urge to run. But he held it together and looked at the two high school boys he was escorting through a burglary and told them they should finish up and leave. They started making their way across the store back towards the rear entrance with their carts, though Tom had a time trying to maneuver his, weighed down as he was with 300 pounds of golf materiel. David’s was less unwieldy but nearly as heavy, loaded with free weights he had stolen from below the beaming visage of Charles Atlas, the fitness guru. They were now making their way past just such a black-and-white standee scarecrow of Mister Atlas when the roof of the store caved in.
Tom watched Charles Atlas disappear in a falling avalanche of wood and paper, Shakespeare and Homer felling Atlas as one, The Sands of Iwo Jima landing in Atlas’ face where the cardboard fell.
Tom gasped and Dick shrieked like a child as it began to rain fire. Dave was in front of them and turned around and his face was streaming with blood, and he staggered and fell, and a flaming rocking chair came down and stove in his face. Just visible for a moment, though. All was on fire.
Dick and Tom were screaming, still alive, running, abandoning all and every man for himself, and they made it to the break room and stopped.