City Kid. Mary MacCracken

to think. How was I going to help Luke? I climbed up to the platform, searching for clues, but the enormity of the problem was even greater there. Down in Falls City, in its schools, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of children like Luke and behind them was a society of poverty, ignorance, and neglect spawning new Lukes nightly.

      I climbed back down and was glad to see that Luke had come out from under the tower and was sitting on a ledge of rock to one side of it. I sat beside him, feeling the warmth the rock had accumulated from the sun, remembering the fire at the factory. This is what we had come to talk about. I couldn’t think of a subtle way to begin, but I knew I had to ask.

      “Did you start the fire at the factory, Luke?”

      He shook his head. I waited, but that was all.

      “Were you there?” I was insisting. I knew it. I also knew it was a risk, but I had to do it.

      This time Luke nodded.

      “Why? What were you doing in a shed behind the lipstick factory?”

      “I wasn’t in it. I was just by it.”

      “All right. Beside it. Why, Luke? What happened?”

      “I don’t know.” Luke scratched at the flat rock where we were sitting with a smaller stone. He hunched his shoulders. “I didn’t feel like goin’ back to school. You didn’t even come like you said and anyway, ’member I told you I had a secret place?”

      “Yes,” I nodded. “You told me that when you gave me the lipstick tube. I was sick, Luke. I’m sorry.” I took the tube out of my pocket and held it in my hand. Maybe it would bring us luck.

      “That was the place. I had a little dugout place beside that shed and I kept things there. Some of the tubes I found, a ring my dad gave me … special things.”

      I nodded. There was probably no place in the project apartment that was safe from the explorations of his small brother and sister. I remembered a little cedar chest complete with brass hinges, a lock, and key that my grandmother had given me, a place for secret things.

      “Now they’re all gone,” Luke said. “I sent Wendell back to look, but he says they musta gotten burned up.”

      “What’s Wendell got to do with this?”

      “He came there while I was looking at my things. Wendell’s always following everybody. Then he –”

      Luke stopped abruptly.

      “Luke,” I said. “It’s important that you tell me what really happened. Wendell told the police you set the fire.”

      Luke looked at me, his face still without expression.

      “I never did. Wendell done it his own self. I just went there ’cause I wanted to look at my things. The men all started work again at one o’clock, so no one was out by the shed. But then Wendell came and said he had something to show me, something that would make me feel real good. And he got out matches and a spoon and then he made a fire …” Luke’s voice cracked, but he kept on, “and then he got out a needle, sorta like the one my dad used to have, and I yelled at him.

      “I couldn’t help it and then I ran and I guess I made too much noise ’cause Wendell ran, too. And then the fire kept burning – and it got bigger and it got up into that ole wood and next thing I knew, the whole shed was burning.”

      I nodded silently, seeing it clearly – the small fire feeding on the grass, licking the dry wood of the shed.

      Luke chattered on. “We got out of there fast. Me and Wendell. I just kept runnin’ till I got here. Nobody ever caught my dad here and I knew they wouldn’t catch me. I lost ole Wendell on the way, but it doesn’t matter. Wendell’s not scared of nuthin’!”

      “Luke,” I said, “there are papers in your file at school that say you’ve set a lot of fires. Is that true?”

      Luke scratched with the stone. “Maybe some little ones. Leaves in the street.”

      “Why?” I asked, still pushing, still risking, needing to know.

      Luke tossed the stone over toward the water tower and it clanked against one of the metal legs. “Don’t know. I just like to watch ’em. They’re pretty, all red and blue and orange, dancin’ around.”

      “How about the big fire on the mountain last fall? Did you set that?”

      Luke smiled – and I hated the smile.

      “That one was real pretty. Red, yellow, orange, lickin’ away, eating up the ole grass, runnin’ all by its own self.”

      Luke paused. There was no guilt or repentance in his voice, only admiration for the fire. “It kept on gettin’ bigger and bigger and then began going down into town and the pines all started too – and it was taller than me.”

      Luke stopped and laughed out loud.

      He had forgotten about me in his excitement of remembering the fire and was just talking out loud, not to anyone in particular.

      “Then the cops began to come, blowin’ their sirens and then the fire truck, but they couldn’t put it out – they couldn’t catch that ole fire, it just kept goin’.”

      His voice sounded hard and cruel, not like Luke’s at all.

      “Were you alone?” I asked.

      “Why?” Instantly alert. “Why do you want to know?” Luke was aware of me again. The outsider.

      “Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.” Why had I thought that I could reach through seven years of fires and drugs and neglect and touch a child? But Luke wasn’t done.

      “I got away,” he said with pride. “The cops were all stretched out and lined up searching for us – me,” he corrected himself. “But I just started running and took an ole belly whopper right through the middle and came out on the other side. My shirt was burning like anything and I knew I couldn’t get those little buttons undone. So know what I did? I just lay down in the dirt and rolled and rolled and it went out.”

      I put Luke’s lipstick tube back in my pocket. Now it was my turn to sit staring out at the sky without talking. I could see why there were waiting lists at schools, why clinics couldn’t get through, why teachers gave up. It was too much. These delinquents, or whatever label you used, weren’t born out of an acute crisis, but out of a chronic, unending sickness in cities.

      Urgency departed, replaced by sorrow. I decided to attribute the churning in my stomach to hunger. Neither Luke nor I had eaten for a long while.

      “Listen, Luke,” I said. “I’m going to go get us something to eat. Want to come?”

      He shook his head as I had known he would. He had already made the trip off the mountain once today.

      “Okay. I won’t be long,” I promised.

      Down the hill, back to my car, but not back to Falls City. If Luke was watching from his water tower, as I was sure he was, I didn’t want him worrying about what I was doing in Falls City. Instead, I drove on toward the college and stopped at a roadside stand and bought sandwiches and soda.

      On the drive back, textbook phrases echoed in my head. “Socially maladjusted … character disorder … sociopathic behavior; destructive, immature, impulsive, manipulative – with a disregard for the needs and feelings of others. A deficit of conscience and judgment; inability to feel guilt and shame.” I knew the words; I’d read all the descriptive phrases at night school years before.

      Luke would be considered a classic case, who, as he grew older, would continue to steal, destroy and even perhaps sometime to kill. He was a product of his society, and even I knew I couldn’t change a society.

      I forced my thoughts away from Luke, back to the road.

      Where was the place I’d parked? Everything looked different from this direction. There was the