Shelburne

The ripples on the lake moved towards my charred feet resting on the edge of the tide, offering relief from the biting sting of the flames. As each concurrent ripple smoothed out onto the stone beach, my mind slowly began to process the night’s events. My shaking hand reached into the contents of my shirt pocket, pulling out a loose Pall Mall. My finger stuttering, I attempted to light the long tobacco stick as a single drop of rain fell and extinguished the flame. I dropped it to the ground. My gaze rose upwards as I saw a single drop multiply into infinity as the lake erupted with a symphony of drips and drops.

I lean back carefully, my body aching, until my seated position on the rocks turns fully horizontal. The long blonde locks of my hair instantly grew gritty from the mixture of sand and pebble on the beach as I let calm overtake me. Each drop enacted a sobering effect on my head as the dreamy events of the night transitioned from a dreamlike fog into crisp memory. My eyelids grew heavy, my feet going numb in the wet cold breeze, before shooting up into an erect position as I remembered Nathan.

***

“Pass me that socket wrench,” I yelled over to Nathan over the blast of scream-o music currently playing in the garage. I couldn’t stand that shit but it was Tuesday, and that meant Nathan had control over the music for today. Without getting up from hit position on the dolly under the F-150 he was working on, Nathan grabbed a socket wrench from his station and slid it across the dirty floor of our two-man auto body shop, the wrench catching a weird angle and tumbling over itself on its journey to my station.

“Could you just fucking be careful with my shit?” I shot at him. Careless little shit treated this place like it was his.

“Next time it’s going through your temple,” Nathan replied with a smirk. My little brother never took much seriously. It drove me crazy that he had such laissez-faire attitude about literally everything, but it was also something I was envious of, and secretly admired. We had been working together in my shop since last summer, it was September now. Nathan moved up to Shelburne with me last year after he got into some trouble back home in Bear, DE. I don’t really want to talk about that right now. He’s a good kid, a really good kid, but has the habit of hooking up with some real scum as friends.

Anyway, it worked out great for me because I needed an extra hand around the shop and it got lonely up in this slow town where I had only lived for the past 5 years. The people are what drew me here. A “hello” every morning from the mailman, a “how’s your day” at Stargate Diner for each order of biscuits and gravy I housed for breakfast. I know it seems funny to be lonely in an area where you relocated for the people, but I never quite found my place in the community. They’re nice and all, but it never quite seemed like home until Nathan moved up.

I continued cranking away on this Chevrolet Trailblazer until I heard the deafening music come to a sudden halt. I slid out from the vehicle on my dolly and gave Nathan a look to say “what gives?” All he did was crack his famous cheesy smile and point to the clock. It was quarter past six. “Jesus Christ,” I muttered to myself. I wiped my oil-stricken hands on my plain white t-shirt and rotated off the dolly. I get lost in my head sometimes and completely lost track of time. We close at 5 on Tuesdays. Usually, Nathan is the one to ring the bell at 5 on-the-dot, but he must’ve let it go on a bit longer today. What a blessing.

We initiated our close-up routine and by the end of cleaning up Nathan already had his brown leather jacket hoisted up over his shoulders as he tossed me my corresponding black one and we made our way to the parking lot. “I gotta run a couple of errands,” said Nathan. “But I’ll meet you back at the house around 9, want me to pick up something to eat?”

I paused and looked at Nathan for a second while I fished out a loosey from my front shirt pocket. He was damn near just as good of a mechanic as me, as we both grew up with the same father, but at age 19 he still was such a kid in my eyes. I could barely believe he was capable of doing those things back in Delaware.

“I’m good for dinner. Just text me when you’re on your way home alright?” He flashed me a smile and jumped into his old blue Jeep Wrangler and made his way down the road. I lit my cigarette and looked up into the dark, cloudy sky. Something was off. Nathan never let us go over time, but then he was in such a rush to leave. I hoisted myself into my pickup and made my way back to my small home on the bay of Lake Champlain.

My uneasy feeling didn’t leave me the whole drive back to my place. My nicotine craving intensified as I pulled loose cigarette after loose cigarette from various pockets on my person. I’m only 25, 6 years Nathan’s senior, but for the past year and change I’ve shifted from somewhat of a bully big-brother to more of a father figure. I guess I should tell you about this now… 3 years ago, 2 after I moved up north, our father passed away. When I tell people this they often give me their condolences and then pause, as if waiting for me to chime in “yeah, he had a rough battle with cancer,” or “a heart attack took my dad too young.” But the truth is, our family was completely split when my dad’s auto body shop was set ablaze with him inside of it. They never caught the fucker that roasted my dad inside the garage. The place went up with a BOOM due to all of the combustible liquids and materials that constitute a garage… let’s just say it was a closed casket funeral.

I extinguished the butt of my current dart in the lid of a mason jar. After my father’s death, Nathan had completely gone off the rails. He was never a goodie-too-shoes by any means, always getting picked up by the cops for graffiti, underage drinking, hooligan shit that one might expect from a teenager in a depressed area, but according to my mom he was now a loose cannon. She packed up her things and moved out to the Midwest to be with her sister and told me Nathan was my problem now. I never admitted it to her, but I was relieved to have family come stay with me, even if it was my shithead brother. Plus, I believe the change in location did wonders for him. We spent the summer nights drinking Switchback on my screened-in porch by the lake and hit the slopes in the winter time. Things weren’t so bad.

I twisted off the lid of a Switchback and finally began to relax when my phone started vibrating on the glass coffee table in front of me. I didn’t recognize the number but the local 802 area code caught my attention, and instead of ignoring it as it was probably another spam call, I decided to pick up.

“Hi, this is Captain Briggs with Shelburne Fire and Rescue, you’re going to want to come to your garage immediately.”

I flew down the backroads as fast as my pickup could handle, fishtailing through the familiar curves of the transit I took daily to my shop. I couldn’t believe the words I had just heard. There was no way this could be happening to me. My headlights cut through the evening fog like a knife and I slammed on the breaks enacting my truck’s ABS as my chest smacked the steering wheel and I fell just short of the object standing in the middle of the road. Dazed, I squinted to see the figure still standing there, apparently unmoved by my effort to avoid killing it.

“Nathan?!” I cried out as I saw my brother, dirty work clothes and all, standing in the middle of the street. “Nathan get in the fucking truck!” Before I could even get out my words, Nathan disappeared into the brush on the side of the road. “What the flying fuck? Nathan?!” I caught my breath and opened my truck door to chase after him, when I remember what I was doing out in the dark in the first place. Conflicted, confused, and angry, I shouted expletives as I hauled myself back in the truck and made my way to the end of the street where my shop sat. “What the fuck…” I muttered to myself as the blood drained out of my face and I saw the horrid scene in front of my eyes.

Billows of dark smoke danced through the foggy night above my shop, a product of the raging flames engulfing everything that I worked for. Everything that I had, that we have, is in that shop. Sirens deafened my ears as I clawed at my door handle and jumped down from my truck, weaving past the men in heavy black and yellow coats shooting piercing streams of water at my garage attempting to subdue the wreckage. I ignored shouts from the men to stop as I blindly fought through the red glow of the sirens cemented in the fog and felt my boots hit the parking lot. Just then, the growing blaze caught some of the loose gasoline on the driveway and ignited in a flash. Then, for just a brief moment, everything went black as I felt my weight lifted off the ground and a heavy force land on top of my sternum.

“I got ‘em, I got ‘em,” I heard a heavily accented fireman yell to his colleagues.

I caught my wits and observed my surroundings, adrenaline coursing through my veins. I looked down to see my charred boots, melted soles and all, almost glued to the bottom of my legs. “Can we get a medic over here?” the fireman screamed as his fellow men in uniform moved back the perimeter and continued to fight the flames. Feeling no pain, I rose to my feet and hobbled away from the scene. “The fuck you doin’? Sit the fuck down, man!” the fireman hollered at me. Devastated, bewildered, and blind with energy, I stormed back to my truck, the small crew of men too busy with the fire to handle me at the same time. I don’t know why I left, but I couldn’t be there anymore. I couldn’t witness my work and my life combust away into the night sky. Hobbling, I loaded myself in the truck and drove back the way I came, this time slowly and deliberately, not stopping until I sat myself on the shore of Lake Champlain just outside of my home.

***

Nathan. Where is Nathan.

I looked down at my crispy feet, still somehow not realizing the pain. Adrenaline re-entered my body as I remembered almost running over my little brother moments before I reached the shop ablaze. Where the fuck was he? I needed him to be with me now. Surely he saw the fire, surely he…

I froze. Synapses started firing off in my brain as I hurried towards a grave conclusion I could not bare to accept. I pivoted slowly and started towards my truck when I saw him not 30 yards away from me. He just looked at me, grinning. “Nathan…” I stared. “Nathan… what…”

I observed the scene behind me. How long had I been away from the house? 15 minutes? An hour? 2 hours? Time was a twisted pretzel in my head as I saw the barrel of kerosene sitting in plain view in the back of Nathan’s doorless Jeep Wrangler. The barrel had been about 1/3 full at the shop, probably just light enough for my built little brother to load it up into his Jeep when I wasn’t around. When I was caught up in my thoughts. When I let us go over time.

The pitter-patter of increasing rain picked up around us as Nathan’s grin vanished from his face and he pulled out his Zippo lighter that had ignited so many cigarettes before. So many buildings before. So many homes before.

He flicked on the lighter and with one movement threw it at the ground outside of my front step. A small wave of flames danced upon the gravel and evolved into a tidal wave that ripped through the rain drops like confetti. Our eyes met and I saw a stranger, my brother was no longer in front of me. Had I ever known him at all?

I was a ghost, standing outside of reality like a child with his eyes glued to the television set in front of him. Nathan was lucid and agile, quickly hopping back into his Jeep and speeding down the drive away from his latest blaze. The rain picked up and my hair fell straight down over the sides of my face, my work, my life, all in smoke. I turned and faced the lake, the dancing beads of water creating a fuzzy illusion on its surface. My hands shook as I checked every pocket for a cigarette to no avail. I felt the heat from the flames slowly grow on the back of my neck and I looked down the coast at the red lights from my shop illuminated in the smoke. The tide rose and my feet slowly submerged into the rocky shore, the rain being my only company in Shelburne.