Burned
I was ten and visiting my father in Connecticut when we got the news that the gas tank had dropped out of George’s truck as he drove home over the Plum Island Bridge. We’d known George—as my mother’s best friend’s boyfriend—for years, and we all agreed he was a jerk: the kind of guy who expected his woman to bring him a beer with his hoagie and keep the kids in another room. For this, she might get a slap on the ass.
But then his gas tank dropped, and by the time my brother and I got home to the island in September, my mother was in love with George. I’m sure I rolled my eyes when my mother told me, especially if she added her stock line, which she seemed to believe every time in the glassy-eyed scrim of fresh love: I think this is it, Jill.
My warm and sexy mother was a man-magnet. The first boyfriend came on the scene when I was four or five. He was a tuna fisherman with wild red hair and sparkling blue eyes who rescued animals and brought them home in cardboard boxes: rabbits, ducks, sea gulls, even a puppy he found in a paper bag on the turnpike. This was the boyfriend we wanted to stay, but one summer he took too much peyote, saw some kind of vision in the Black Hills, sold his boat, bought a school bus with a wood stove, and—here’s the part that hurts—married my mother’s best friend (yep, the one who’d been living with pre-burn George) and drove off into the sunset to spread the word of God as Nature. Or something like that.
My poor mother. I should have been more sympathetic when she told me how George’s gas tank had dragged along the pavement, metal on rock, until the truck became a kind of two-ton flint stone and hot sparks ignited the tank. Boom.
The bridge spans the Plum Island River, and the view from the side, the green bridge arching over the salt marshes, sea birds sailing across the gray sky, is the stuff of postcards. Put a burning man in the middle of that picture. I see George walking down the bridge, arms stretched out like Frankenstein’s monster, but flaming—hair on fire, shirt on fire, pants on fire, a rigid, burning monster. Traffic stopped. No one came up the bridge to help him.
* * *
I’d never liked George and I didn’t like him more after he was burned, but my mother sure did. My mother loved him, and I’ll tell you why. George was burned on July 22nd, the day after my father’s birthday, and the same day—here’s my mother’s miracle, the amazing thing—the very same day that my older brother, at thirteen-months old, had turned on a scalding shower and burned almost to death. But not to death. The burn doctors gave my brother a ten percent chance of survival and he took that chance. He survived, and he was a teenager with thick scars by the time George’s gas tank ignited on the Plum Island Bridge. George’s miracle was our miracle, our miracle was George’s.
“He’s a changed man,” my mother said when she told us George and his big-balled tomcat, Fritz, would be moving in. She believed, literally, that George had seen the light and because of the trick with the dates—July 22nd! Can you believe it? July 22nd!—the light must have something to do with us. My mother moved George in with us in order that we all might live just that much closer to the flame.
* * *
There are some flames that do not go out, right? The Olympic torch, for one. And, of course, the many so-called eternal flames, right? Except nothing of this world is eternal. Even with the constantly zapping nozzle spark, Catholic schoolkids managed to douse JFK’s flame on his Arlington Cemetery grave with holy water, of all things, and the Arc De Triomphe flame in Paris (set burning for fallen soldiers in 1921) was extinguished in 1998 by a drunken soccer fan. He pissed on the flame.
* * *
Thirty years after George’s burning, my mother lives alone. Some miracles, apparently, cannot be shared.
(Appeared in Conclave Issue 1: 2008)