Assorted Fire Events by David Means

Author:David Means
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

The din in the room hissed with the dull undercurrents of a second marriage; the dark ceiling hung with long strands of crimped silver foil. Below the silver strands were twenty round tables. At one of them Mr. Standard worked on his third scotch, barely able to hold the plastic cup in his large hands. He wanted to crush the cup, to watch it explode. The reception—after about an hour of bad toasts—had become as flat and dull as a bad ball game; nothing was moving, just a shimmer of heat over a blank field. On the dais along with the rest of the wedding party sat Melville, Mel Horton, the groom, with his frank, round face that seemed—at least to Standard—to need breaking in, like a new baseball glove. Someone should pour neat’s-foot oil onto it and mash a fist around, grind it right in—get that rich freshness, that silver-spoon suck, out of those cheeks, he thought. But then he looked over at his wife, at her narrow cheekbones and the fine shape of her wrists. She certainly wouldn’t approve of such a thought one bit. She was best friends with the bride, Susan Porter, who was up there now, shifting around in her wedding gown with that sad complacency Standard had seen a hundred times in other second-timers. He was a firm believer in the downfall of man. His company, Standard Pipe, was going through harder times, having traveled through hard times. It was rusting out, literally: long bleeding smears of rust drew tongues along the patched corrugated steel sides of the main works. Windows were broken and he was barely able to mill his orders anymore. As he sucked his scotch he kept thinking about Melville Horton’s last visit to the office. The bastard stood there in that fine suit of his with his hands dug deep into his pockets. Standard’s office was a little backroom deal, with yellowed blinds and overstuffed filing cabinets and no pretensions of grandeur. On the wall to the left were his old Rotary Club plaques, a few golf trophies blued by dust. One drawer of the file cabinet was open, off the track, and had been that way for ten years. Strangely, this office didn’t in any way really reveal the true nature of Standard, who, by most measures, was fastidious and careful in both his personal matters and his business matters. His cuticles were groomed, his nails perfectly clipped. The office just didn’t matter to him much, not the way the actual metalworks did. And so when Melville Horton sniffed and ran a thumb over his Rotary Man of the Year 1968 plaque, he felt the kind of deep sense of imbalance that just about sent him into a sputtering rage; if there was anything he hated more in the world, it was being snubbed by a kid who wasn’t even a sperm cell when he was wading ashore at Normandy.

“I can’t do this kind of business,” Horton was saying,

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