Town Burning by Thomas Williams Page A

How the hell did we ever get such a dumb bunch down there? Cotter’s playground for the mentally handicapped. We ought to get assistance from the state.”
    Bruce reached for a cigarette, but his mother found one first, put. it in his mouth and lit it. She held the match up and he blew it out; then she smilled happily, turning around to John and William Cotter as if to say, “See? Did you see that?”
    John shut his eyes. Baby tricks! When he was a child he thought that if he put his hands over his eyes his whole body was invisible. And now Bruce, blowing out the held match. See? Baby blew out the match! It was too goddam perplexing to figure Bruce; and then he had the horrible thought that if Bruce really let himself go to his mother, all the way, he would end up a plump, unshaven babe-in-arms, sucking a bottle or his thumb. And his mother would look around just as fondly and proudly as she cuddled him. Perhaps he and Bruce both knew that their mother had no limits, at least that they had never seen her stop, and that such needful love must be brutally curbed.
    Gladys Cotter sat at her son’s bedside staring across the bed at the wall. Bruce smoked a cigarette and looked at the window. John smoked a cigarette that had no flavor, but a dry mechanical usefulness. His throat seemed like a flue and his teeth tasted like dry bones. His mother moved her hands, smoothing the sheet, and his father looked at a magazine with too much concentration, never looking up, never turning a page. The white window was hard to look at from the cool depths of the room.
    Time moved, John knew, but he couldn’t look at his watch. Bruce might see that. He let himself fall into a dry, almost rigid position of waiting, thinking that he would not move at all until the afternoon was over and he could leave. He tried to hypnotize himself by staring at the light switch on the wall, but nothing worked for him. Time moved, he knew, and at least he had to do nothing to make it move. He was not responsible for that.
    “More words,” Bruce said suddenly, “will be spoken at the funeral.”
    “What? Why, Bruce!” his mother said.
    “I mean everybody is pretty quiet,” Bruce said in an even voice. “But I can hear—well, look at him suffer!” He pointed at John. Gladys Cotter put a shy hand on Bruce’s arm and he quickly pulled away from her. Her hand went back with the other, to smooth the sheet by his pillow. “But I can hear,” he went on, “Reverend Bledsoe—the Reverend Mr. Bloody Bledsoe, the Reverend Mr. Bloody Bedsore—harping upon my wonderful qualities such as working my ass off and wondering how much the traffic can stand even at a funeral when he tries to say what a fine loving character I was. I can hear the old hypocrite now. I bet he’s got the speech all written already.”
    “Oh, Bruce!”
    “Bruce!” William Cotter said. He stood at the foot of the bed. “I’d think you’d have more…I’d think you’d not be so mean to your mother! What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re damn’ mean and nasty. You act like they were going to kill you, when all they’re trying to do is help you and cure you!”
    The big man stood tall and angry at the foot of the bed, and his smaller son stared back at him, half smiling. John had seen this happen before. In a second the fire went out of William Cotter, but it remained burning in Bruce’s eyes, his face thrust forward out of his weakness, vicious and conquering. He stared his father down and broke him back into his chair and into his magazine.
    The silence came on again, and John knew that they would not look to him for any help or strength. He was even weaker than his father. Hollow and weak and good only for running. His father had never run away so far: his father had to come back day after day.
    The afternoon went on in small noises and the long tired moans of the old man down the hall, bedspring creaks and sharp heel clicks. The wind flicked an aerial wire against the