I believed Teddy when she said she’d kill me. Up until then we’d maintained an uneasy truce, but with my father out of the picture, all bets were off. I didn’t leave the property, though. I had no place to go. Instead I snuck around behind the trailer and peeked in through the louvers in time to see Teddy, now wearing a T-shirt and shorts, backing out of the bedroom dragging Big Luke’s old green steamer trunk.
When she kept going, dragging the trunk out the door and down the cinder-block doorstep (which Big Luke had been meaning to replace with something permanent at least as long as I’d been there), I assumed she was going to haul ass like he’d told me to do. I peeked around the side of the trailer to see if she was gone yet, but she’d only dragged the trunk as far as the fire pit, a scooped-out circle of blackened ground with split logs around it to sit on. We hadn’t used it all summer, because the surrounding woods were too dry for open fires.
Teddy knelt and opened the trunk with a key, then trotted into the shed at the end of the driveway and came out with a big red gasoline can. She didn’t bother with the spout, just unscrewed the top and sloshed gas all over the trunk. She patted through her pockets looking for a lighter, but for once in her life (Big Luke and Teddy both smoked like chimneys) she didn’t have one.
She started back for the trailer. I ducked out of sight again, but as soon as she went inside, I raced straight across the clearing for the fire pit. I had to know what was in that trunk, I just had to. And to be honest, what I thought I was going to find was dope. (Big Luke and Teddy were small-time dealers, weed and meth, mostly.) Instead the whole trunk was stuffed full of videocassettes. What the fuck? I reached down, picked up one that the gasoline had somehow missed, and was turning it around to read the label when I heard a popping sound. Simultaneously, the dirt kicked up a couple feet to my left. I looked up, saw Teddy standing in the doorway of the trailer holding her dainty little pearl-handled.22 pistol. She fired again, from the hip. The trunk took a little hop, then there was a whomp and a whoosh, and the next thing I knew I was flying backward through the air.
I landed about ten feet away, barefoot: the explosion had blown me right out of my sandals. Through the flames and the oily black smoke and the rippling heat waves, I saw Teddy walking slowly across the yard toward me, aiming the gun two-handed. Every couple of steps the gun jerked, but I must have been deaf from the explosion because I didn’t hear any shots. It was like I was watching a movie, only somebody had turned off the sound.
But my nose still worked. I smelled the stench of gasoline and melting plastic and something even worse, that took me a second to identify. It was burning hair: I realized suddenly that my Mohawk was smoking. And Teddy was still coming. So now I was scrambling to my feet and slapping at my hair, while all around me bullets I couldn’t hear were smacking into the dirt, kicking up silent puffs of dust.
Then a miracle happened. When she reached the burning trunk, Teddy stopped, raised the gun, put the barrel in her mouth, looked me right in the eye, smoke billowing around her, and pulled the trigger.
Another miracle: I could hear again. Not the shot, but the soft crackling of the flames and the bubbling of the melting plastic, and finally, after what seemed like an impossibly long time, a two-part thud as Teddy dropped to her knees, then pitched face forward into the trunk.
It was over then, except for one last spooky sound, a high-pitched, drawn-out eeeeeeeeeeee, like steam whistling through a teakettle. I don’t know what it was exactly, whether it was Teddy screaming, which would have meant she was still alive somehow, or just something that happens when a body burns in that position, superheated air being forced through the vocal cords or something like that. But even after all these years, sometimes at night, when it’s very quiet, I still hear it: eeeeeeeeeeee…