The World Is on Fire Read online

  Brad said, “It’s always the end of something.”

  Call me Fence-Jumper, Sneaky Snake, Dr. Scrutiny. David is Cake. Brad is The Instigator. Afterward we sat at a table in a Chinese restaurant and I took notes on the back of a paper place mat printed with the zodiac, clothes from three different countries covering my body. The place mat said I’m Dragon but I know from other investigations that I’m Wood Rabbit: ambitious, a collector, lover of peace. These mills—built from our clay, trussed and floored with our trees, still shedding our rain—spun our cotton bolls into cloth that would wrap you in life and shroud you in death. That’s done now. All I have left is a coffee-cup handle still seamed from the glass factory’s mold and a story about the time we stood inside the smokestack, just after picking enough wild blackberries for a cobbler. Blackberries thrive along roadsides and waste places. This time of year, if you know where to look, you’ll find them everywhere.

  It is written, The Lord can raise up these stones to give praise. So these tree boles, too, clay poured into forms; iron cut into nails, now rusted? In my mind’s eye I see the mills packed with all the people who worked there over the decades. Windows open wide and yellow Carolina morning sun pouring in. A boy walks down the aisle with the dope cart, its can of iced tea so big that when he stirs in the sugar, he has to use a boat oar. When the whistle blows and his workday ends, he’s free.

  Brain Sweat and Blueprints

  Before you drop that quarter . . .

  Play a song for me.

  —Alan Jackson, “Don’t Rock the Jukebox,” 1991

  When I fell for jukeboxes, they were already sliding toward oblivion. At an icehouse in Houston, someone played an old Marty Robbins song, “El Paso,” but what I remember is a guy in tight Levi’s teaching women, other women, to two-step. I took a shot or two at the pool table and pretended I hadn’t had to scrounge to buy my single Shiner. Set it down too hard and the foam burbles out the neck—so embarrassing, but nobody notices, nor pays any mind when you get up to leave.

  Like calling a radio station to dedicate a song—an act that feels very old-fashioned now—choosing a number on a jukebox gives you a brief share in the tune’s ownership. You didn’t write the music or record the words, but you selected it over the others, changing the evening from what it would have been into what it became by giving it a sound track. Exercising your authority over song and community takes only a quarter.

  But the Plexiglas-and-pot-metal consoles I knew were just pale descendants of machines that had been, once, both beautiful pieces of furniture and marvels of engineering. In the 1950s, Wurlitzer was a leading manufacturer of jukeboxes, and a factory film from the era—A Visit to Wurlitzer—shows what the process was like. An unseen narrator intones, “A quality product, did you say? Well, you can say that again—and still again! For that’s the way Wurlitzer builds them,” as the camera hovers outside the factory, lingering on beds of vegetables and zinnias, a holdover from the Victory Gardens of the then-recent past. “Pretty hard to imagine anything but a quality product coming out of a plant like this,” the narrator says, and after a stop at Research and Development—“brain sweat and blueprints”—it’s on to the woodworking department, annual consumer of 10 million feet of veneers and hardwoods. Even in black and white, the shapely cabinets gleam with wax. A slow pan shows the vast hangar of the work floor, man after man paired with his juke and rubbing hard with white flannel, putting his back into it, slow-stepping in a tight circle.

  In the decades that followed, jukebox sales declined, squeezed out by television and other distractions; I was late to the party by about fifty years. During the long solo road trips I used to make, I remember diners snug as ships afloat, their windows streaked with rain. Inside the diners looked warm and dry, people bent over cups of coffee appearing happier than they ever actually were. Walk inside and shake the rain from your jacket, glasses steaming up from the griddle’s heat; the waitress greets you without looking up, and you take a seat at the counter. RESERVE BOOTHS FOR TWO OR MORE, reads the sign. Once I eavesdropped on two men talking about work; the clean-shaven one was the local undertaker, and young for it, I thought. Just not for me, he said, eyes fixed on some point on the floor. The skinny cook dipped raw egg onto the griddle and dealt out slices of sausage that spat when they hit the heat. Try and stick it out awhile longer, his friend said, later you can take stock. The cook grabbed weights and pressed them onto the sausage to keep down the fat. Someone had picked the bouncy “Mambo No. 5” on the jukebox, its brassy riffs and catalog of conquest pouring out of tinny speakers. You can’t run, you can’t hide. Outside, cold rain poured down, and the sound of a big rig’s Jake Brakes came squealing up from the off-ramp. You and me gonna touch the sky.

  That night it was Georgia, but I remember scenes just like it from Jacksonville to Tucson, tired faces and sighs, the awkward combination of babies and cigarette smoke. And the jukebox against the wall had a presence like a sleeping animal, promising to help the night along if only you’d let it, pressing those satisfying square buttons, the albums in their sleeves slapping against each other as you flip from beginning to end, telling these strangers and yourself Here’s who I am. The night outside so dark, but you go back into it, filling up with gas at the station next door and pushing on toward the next big town. A stretch of interstate in southern Mississippi so empty I had the high beams on for miles, asphalt stretching away into shadowy stands of pines. Part of I-10 just outside Pensacola, where the road dove down under the bay and the tunnel’s cold lights made the roof tiles gleam. Somewhere outside Nacogdoches, where I was so tired I thought I saw a faded barn uproot itself and slide across the road in front of me. Now there are times I crave those drives like some women crave earth, with a dark and secret want. Of all the faces I saw there were none I wanted to know. But for his, existing for me then only as a dim hope. I miss not solitude but this: I had been a good girl and am now a safe woman but there was a time between when no one knew my name. Cutting it close with not a dime to spare. Looking back I claim every mile I drove alone, keeping afloat with the frail stays of ignition spark, old song lyrics, reflections in finger-marked chrome. Gritted my teeth and accelerated onto the freeway.

  Time passes, and we select the selves we become. Now I go with him to the diner down the road; it’s rainy and cold, but we don’t have far to drive. Six plays for a dollar, and lots of Johnny Cash to choose from: “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord),” June Carter singing the eerie counterpoint; “Folsom Prison Blues,” live, inmates cheering when Johnny sings the line about shooting a man in Reno. Shared things, communal as a train whistle. A woman at the booth behind us closes her eyes and sings along. Drunk? We can’t tell. Then a kid with choppy hair slumps over and picks Stevie Ray Vaughan. We nod. Good choice, respectable choice.

  What now of the Wurlitzer plant? The men worked there for years, and always together, tending machines in the metal shop, poring over plans that unspooled for miles. Complicated pin mechanisms, coin drops, selectors. Five years after the war ended, and what had they seen before? Better not to say; better to punch in, take your smoke break, lunch outside with your pals when the weather’s fine. Spend your day assembling parts that mate exactly with their partners, or clamping layers of veneer and pushing them through the quick-baking kiln. As somewhere in the Adirondacks an oak grows a little taller, and someone hones a blade. “Wurlitzer knows its woodworking all the way from the forest primeval to the finished phonograph,” says the narrator. The North Tonawanda plant stopped making jukeboxes in 1974. Gone the arguments of nickel versus dime play, gone the bill proposing Congress split the difference by minting seven-and-a-half-cent coins. One of the most popular selections was the blank record, a long-lasting 45; your coin bought you three minutes of quiet. But not silence. That hiss so like the sound of tires on a road, a pop as you drift over into the rumble strip, muted but not empty, full of what could be, precious and fading. Over before you know it, without you even listening.

>   Coathook in an Empty Schoolhouse

  We stepped across the railroad tracks, over two long-dead deer lying on the gravel, their ribcages bleached white. Behind us, men fussed over big machines, shiny yellow Cats unspecked by bird or mud. They must have seen us walking toward the old town, but they paid us no heed; they had work to do.

  I’d come to North Dakota with my friends to look for abandoned towns, but the line between living and ghost wasn’t always obvious. One town categorized as a Class D—semi-ghost town with small population and many empty buildings—still had the doing-a-good-business Rusty’s Bar, and in another place, tidy prefabs sat chockablock with collapsing houses, busted windows, lilacs crowding the porches.

  And all day long I felt watched, unable to hide on the wide prairie. White pillows of stone in pastureland. On the roadside, a crumpled pair of jeans, raveled skeins of hay. A billboard picturing an empty highway between cornfields read NORTH DAKOTA RUSH-HOUR COMMUTE. Rifle shot dimpled the road markers. BUY A PRINTER, GET A FREE WATERMELON, said a sign in Mandan. Sunflowers and yellow clover, emerald fields, glittering cottonwoods along streamlines. It started to rain. We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the middle of a dirt road in Lark. Someone long ago had planted that poplar at the bend in the road.

  We drove on, stopping in front of a green-shingled schoolhouse on a hill. Through the storm door, you could see the cellar flooded with dark water. Desks were heaped in the classroom, and a slate chalkboard lay in pieces by the front door. The beadboard walls looked to be oil-rubbed walnut; the foundation was fieldstone chinked with mud and cement. A desk outside had a circular depression for an inkpot, and black-seed rodent droppings where children had once kept their books.

  In another town, beside the railroad siding with the deer bones, we stepped over a wire fence, through tall grass, and under the low-branched Russian olive to the schoolhouse. Up the warped steps and into the cloakroom, where hooks waited on the walls. Most of the windows were gone, their fragments crunching under our feet. I stepped carefully. Part of the ceiling had fallen down, and the hole in the plaster revealed ship-lathe and a dark attic. A new aluminum ladder stood in a corner. The desktops were gone but their wrought-iron frames remained, curlicues of black metal stamped with MPLS. On the floor, a piece of swallow’s nest, mud and straw. The blackboard still had multiplication problems on it.

  Like a good student I daydreamed, standing there on the threshold. School would have started in another month. New coat of plaster on the ceiling, pale-green paint on the walls. The jackets just light ones or sweaters, hanging easily on the hooks. The barn coats of November far off as a dream of snow.

  The barrel stove was a neat cylinder covered in basketwork. White flames would have been visible in the seam where the door fit, streams of heat pouring out through the gap. Did everyone feel the urge to touch that bright line, or to slip in a scrap of paper? Pencil lead softening in the heat, blistering yellow paint.

  The press had stamped out one desk leg at a time, baroque curl of iron, the metal gleaming orange, darker around the edges. He was the artist, he who carved the mold out of plaster, his the well into which wax and then hot metal would be poured time and again, the seam a little lip where the halves of the mold had fitted together. And in the schoolroom a boy thought of that, maybe, tracing the iron with his finger and feeling the little pits in the metal, listening to the wind push the alfalfa outside the window and jumping when the teacher said, Ray, give the correct sum.

  And what of the teacher? What furnished her workdays? Smell of rain on the field grass. Chalk dust, smoke from the stove, hot metal. As even now the wind shakes the wheat and lightning arcs in the gray sky, south of here. And after she’d set the students moving along their paths, stoked the stove, marked the spelling tests and poetry themes, what did she think of then, in the early-falling December darkness, while in the woodbox an earwig crawled in the splinters and dust, woken by the heat, a shiny soldier left from summertime and doomed to burn? Before she left, she’d pulled the shades to hold the heat, the canvas unrolling with a shriek. The thermometer at the door registered sixty below.

  School seems as though it will go on forever, some afternoons in particular. And then one day it ends, and what do we leave behind? To visit an abandoned school is to visit the past, to know that someone hauled beams from the railroad to the cleared place, that someone made a foundation from stones the earth gave forth in rounded biscuits and loaves, mortared between with clay and broad thumb. Someone folded the glowing wire back on itself and nailed it to the wall. They’re all gone now, but this place remains, saying, We worked here together.

  We spent the night in Bowman, a county seat in the state’s southwestern corner. SMALL TOWN HOSPITALITY WITH BIG-TIME STYLE, its billboard said. We ate in a supper club and emerged after good bison burgers to a bright afternoon and the feeling we had slept through the night—or twenty years—and walked out into the past. A loudspeaker relayed the day’s stock report to the empty streets. Rubbery red worms curled on the sidewalk. Kids brought books back to the library in grocery bags from a store whose name I didn’t recognize. Sometimes you find yourself in a place that is not your home, try to imagine living there, and can’t do it. OUR CHOCOLATE DIED AND WENT TO HEAVEN, said a note taped to the window of the ice-cream shop. COME BACK NEXT YEAR.

  The no vacancy sign at our motel was SORRY spelled out in neon. Good thing we’d called ahead. “I got a crew,” the manager said; they worked in the hydrofracturing fields two hours north of town. In the Gideon Bible in our room, someone had dog-eared the page with Luke 15, the parable of the prodigal son. What it really means is My child, come home to me; I miss you. The students these schoolhouses wait for will never show. By the time we woke next morning, the workers’ mud-streaked trucks were long since gone.

  The Scissorman

  He comes around like the change of season, once every three months. It’s May now, rainy and cool, and this morning he’s working his way through Greer, South Carolina, a foothills town known once for its peach orchards and now for a car factory. At the day’s first stop, a beauty shop wedged between a grocery store and a Chinese place, there’s just one stylist working, finishing a man’s cut while the man talks about baseball. Empty chairs, neat rows of bottles, a meager pile of gray hair on the floor. The Scissorman takes the stylist’s scissors and tests them, leaning down and pinching a twist of fallen hair between the blades. “You’re really having to work with these,” he says, and she allows as they need it bad, her eyes on the reflection in the mirror, her fingers drawing the customer’s locks into points. “Go ahead and take them,” she says, and he walks out the door, leaving her to finish up with her spare pair.

  He covers all of South Carolina, from the upstate’s skinny back roads to the barbecue joints and slow rivers of the Midlands, to the cotton fields and pouchy swamps and saw grass of the Lowcountry, past junkyards and elementary schools, farm stands and warehouses. Every year, he puts twenty-five thousand miles on the white van with the SCISSORMAN tag on its bumper. He’s converted the interior into a workshop. A curved plywood tabletop holds sharpening wheels and task lamps; jeweler’s pliers and screwdrivers nest in tidy racks. A ragbag swings from a hook, and an old wet-wipes box holds spare hair for testing the blades. Everything’s in place, all of it tied down with bungee cords, a stay against sudden stops. His little Chihuahua/Yorkie dog, Dixie, rides shotgun, listening along to WESC, Big Country.

  I’m following the Scissorman today, trying to keep up with his van in my aging Crown Victoria. The last time I got a haircut, I asked my hairdresser who sharpened her shears. “Call the Scissorman,” she said, handing me his card, which was a Band-Aid stamped with his phone number. “He’s a character.” When I called him up, he was soft-spoken and gracious, and we made a plan to meet for breakfast at a local diner. He pulled into the parking lot right on time, and ducked into the diner out of the rain. He wore his hair in a long gray ponytail, neatly tied, and he was tall and rangy, fol
ding himself into the booth across from me. But it was his eyes that struck me, gold and hazel and keen enough to spot a nick and chase it clean off a blade. By the end of breakfast, trust established, we set off down the road, toward the morning’s work.

  Maybe I’m interested in his job because it feels like a throwback. Like the journeying tinsmith or ragman, he’s someone who travels from town to town, whose arrival bestows an almost holiday flavor to the workday. And like those earlier travelers, he’s someone who helps a community make the best use of what they have, instead of teaching them to pitch something as soon as it shows wear. The Scissorman’s van moves down the highway, defying our built world, passing signs for Bank of America, Jiffy Lube, and Pizza Hut.

  “Scissors are like men,” he tells me. “The steel is hard, like our heads, but the edges are fragile, like our egos.” The scissors he sees are meant solely for cutting hair; what’s worse is putting them to uses they weren’t meant for, like snipping a price tag. His sharp eyes find the snick. It takes 150 strokes to raise a new edge, then ten licks on the ceramic waterstone to whet the blade. He counts in his head; consistency is the key. “You can always take off more,” he says, “but you can’t put it back once it’s gone.” He takes the scissors apart and sharpens each blade, replaces the pin that holds the shears together, limns each edge with oil from a needle-pointed bottle, and tests the balance. A sharp edge reflects no light, I’ve read, and as he turns the blade in his hands, hunting the gleam, he confirms it’s true.