She Done Gone Off by Jay Lee Ellis

Something this stupid you only need to do once to be no better than that brother. Crimes of neglect burn as hot as those of attention to the one inside the fire.

Wade stood looking at the flames rising through the rain. Beside the burning house, snakes of fire ran up two trees along English Ivy that had strangled them for years. East Texas had enough species of threat and destruction without all else of darkness moving in. An old story, but always a new chapter. The fire rose through the falling water and it had been so dry that soon the dead tree tops caught. The explosion made them all jump like it was the house again and everybody stepped back into the roads, fire hissing away the rain.

The house sat alone on this corner vulnerable to anything from any direction. I wouldn’t want a house at a crossroads like that. Wade had his hat but no coat and all but the shoulders of his uniform had soaked through.

Of course the Camaro was gone, and there was no way to tell just when she had taken it except it had been well before this. A busted bike with a sledge next to it. Rather obvious and a shame, wasting a good Shovelhead like that. He didn’t figure her for swinging a sledge. Or stealing the car, he hoped. And she could not have been involved in this. He hoped.

The rookie’s cruiser sat black and empty and smoking in the rain, the gas tank gone off. You don’t park that close when you’re the first one in. All in training.

Wade ducked into the minnow shed and saw the first blast had knocked a heartbreaking number of shiners dead to the water’s edge. Somehow the aerator bubbled on. He looked at the car battery still running it and then back out at the conflagration. What did it take to blow one refrigerator like a doomed monster after that rookie, and blow yet another frig into the first one. Domino refrigerators. It took more than a small operation.

It felt wrong standing out of the rain with those old boys working in it, and Wade stepped back out and down the road. The Tyler firemen had convinced the Lindale VFD’s to ease off against something else going off in the flames. He watched as the fire won against the water coming down now in sheets.

# # #

He knew her brother was mixed up deep in some shit but he had not guessed at this. When the LoJack had set off Wade’s alarm he himself had pulled her over, bought the story about the kid selling her the car, and gotten down on his hands and knees and pulled the red wire. Even told her not to plug it back in—just get clear of the county and don’t come back, he’d said. Thinking to himself how bad her brother was, most and worst of all, to her. A county constable had to see the overall, protect and serve more than those poor bastards hanging out near the entrance ramps looking to make a quota. Taxes by another name. It was why they elected you. To keep people safe. And one thing that she was not was safe behind this pine curtain.

So it could not have been her of course. The timing just didn’t work out.

But still. You don’t want an arson on a country house with the car reported stolen, and you pulled the fucking wire and set her free behind its wheel. Even if it was the right thing to do.

# # #

After the transponder had stopped they sent somebody to confirm the theft report and found the house alight at all four corners, not a subtle assault. Must have been more like an initiation. Ready, set, light her up. He pictured the big bikes lined up safely away down both roads, lookouts and torch bearers, all in their jackets and patches.

The old guys used to talk about makin’ ’em go around. They’d o’ beat the hell out of the first kid they took off a bike like that with a jacket like that and then send him off to spread the word. It wasn’t right, but it worked. A while, at least. But highways changed everything. And the old ways didn’t really keep old Jimmy-Bob from running his still. They just kept him quiet about it.

This thing was eating up the country, though. That fucking brother’s first-in bag had more than a law-abiding EMT ought to carry in to help these people, so ignorant they couldn’t tell one TV show from another. Or recognize another human being they didn’t know by blood or dark debts. The welfare might of made some a bit lazy, but what do you expect when the coal company takes the place your daddy cut and cleared and built on fifty years ago and strips it back like a piece of deer skin to take the coal out from under it. The pines they put back on the so-called restoration looked like a child’s diorama of what was there before. And no home.

Now half his charges were on disability. Bad backs most of all. You get a bad back not so much from cutting pulp wood and chopping cotton, as from sitting in front of a TV all day. Or sitting in a truck for an hour each way to sit in the cab of a coal train. No wonder they needed something to stay awake and get up and move.

The rookie who got there first, stopped at the smell behind the smoke but then went in opening doors for rescue until he came upon the improvised lab full of beakers and hoses, and ran. He was just the other side of his cruiser when the first blast set that off as well and they found him in the bar ditch with his hatless hair in a reverse tonsure, cradle capped, nothing but singed scalp to the top of his head and his shirt gone at the back, otherwise alive and well.

Thank god the VFD had cut the gas first thing down the road. Wade stood closer than the ditch nevertheless, waiting at the chance that another explosion would remove him from this pile of shit into which he had so heroically stepped.

The body they would find mere blackened form. Small as it was his heart stuttered at the idea it could be the girl but then he knew it was not. That girl was long gone.

# # #

Jessie aimed the flooded hood of the Camaro through the ramp curving under Dallas skyline.

“Every one of you fucking thinks you get to decide things,” she said to the empty car. She’d told that cop the old lady gave it to her. Why would she know where that boy went and never came back? Trying to scare me when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that cop.

Waves fell through the LBJ stack. Two cars sat under the next overpass, emergency lights blinking. The Camaro slowed in this world of water in what she took to be the right lane. A dark shape ahead and she corrected the car beside a tractor trailer rig, and found the exit.

The rain stopped. Brown water rolled over a lake’s dam, trees and paths and benches regaining the bank. She read the street signs for this lost sister’s house.

Why only run now? Why wasn’t it easier to leave what’s already done left you behind?

# # #

Jay Lee Ellis has degrees in music from Berklee College, and in writing and literature from UT Dallas and New York University. He has three nonfiction books in print and has most recently published poetry in HOBART, and stories in JUKED and RAZOR LIT MAG. He has performed on drums from NY’s Knitting Factory to Red Rocks Amphitheatre–closer to home in Boulder, where he teaches writing at the University of Colorado. Read more here: https://www.jayleeellis.com/

Photo: Christian Wiediger

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