A Lesson in Combustion

Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash

The accident could have been avoided if Bill Hinkey hadn’t tried to fry a frozen turkey on the Fourth of July.

“Why don’t you barbecue some hot dogs?” My ex-husband Jerry asked Bill.

“Arlene wants me to get this bird out of the freezer. She bought ten of them on sale at Walmart last November, this is the last of them.”

Folks at the lake love the Fourth. Any excuse to drink beer and blow stuff up — that’s the American Way. I arrived at the block party at noon, after my morning shift at the Shop ‘N Drop. The Drop does a great amount of business on the holiday. We sell beer and cold watermelons and Arnie Little sets up his firework stand right across the street. A guaranteed draw for both businesses.

“How long you got to cook that turkey?” Little Debbie unwrapped a snack cake and bit into it. She chewed with the half of her mouth that still had teeth.

Bill stared at the large steel pot suspended over a burner spitting blue flame. “Long enough, I guess,” he said.

When I lived in the mobile home with Jerry, Debbie and her boyfriend Ed had been our neighbors. I no longer lived there, but I still counted Debbie as a friend. She got her nickname, Little Debbie, from the sweets she loved. Despite all the sugar, her collarbones stuck out like branches on a tree, her arms and legs twig thin. She kept her ghoulish figure thanks to a steady diet of methamphetamine.

“Hey May,” Bill’s wife Arlene greeted me. She held out a pitcher of frozen margaritas and a red plastic cup. “You want a drink?” She frowned at Little Debbie and turned her back so my friend was behind her.

Arlene and Debbie hadn’t gotten along since Bill caught Debbie and Ed huffing paint in the Hinkey’s storage shed. Ed had pointed out they were just trying to help Bill clear out some older stuff, it being an environmental hazard and all that.

Bill defended his right to hoard whatever he wanted on his own land.

“You’re sniffing up my inventory!” he said.

Bill made a living as a handyman. He bought the paint on clearance, hoping someone might need a porch railing painted fluorescent orange.

Debbie and Ed mostly stuck to crystal meth, but they’d been in between jobs and Ed’s disability check hadn’t come in yet. When they were desperate, they’d help themselves to Bill’s supply of spray paint. I remember one Christmas Debbie wandered into the Shop ‘N Drop with a circle of gold and green glittered paint dotted over her mouth and nose. Like she’d decorated her face for the holiday.

“Is that thing even thawed?” I asked, pointing at the turkey. Bill had stripped off the plastic wrapping. The bird, plucked and naked, hung from a metal crossbar, ready to be dipped in boiling hot oil.

“Had it out on the back porch all day,” Bill said. He lifted the beer he’d been drinking and drained the bottle in a long swallow, then tossed the empty into a pile behind him. It landed in a clink of broken glass.

“Better get to it then.” Jerry strolled over to join us.

By this time, it was just past dusk. We’d been outside all day, drinking, shooting off firecrackers, chasing stray dogs and feral cats off Bill’s back porch. The guys had already started firing off the roman candles and bottle rockets.

I’d strung out a garden hose from Jerry’s mobile home and soaked the ground in our lot. I might not live there anymore, but my name was on the insurance and I’d just as soon not watch the place burn down. We’d had a dry spell, and the county lifted the burn ban just the week before.

Bill and some others had mowed the tall grass, and now dry slips like hay littered the neighborhood. The neighborhood kids ran around, sticky with watermelon and brown blades of grass stuck to their legs.

“Dunk ‘er in!” Ed threw his arm around Debbie and waved at Bill.

“Don’t ya’ll have some fireworks to shoot off?” Bill asked.

“Naw, we done fired them all off,” Ed said. “Somebody ought to swing by Arnie’s. We’re down to the last six-pack too.” Ed glanced at Jerry, then me.

“No more fireworks? But I didn’t even see the last bunch.” Debbie sighed and dropped her head. She pulled one of the last beers from the cooler by the turkey fryer and opened another snack cake. “Don’t seem like the Fourth without fireworks,” she said.

Bill lifted the turkey and a chunk of pink-tinged ice fell from the turkey’s innards. I grabbed Debbie’s arm and tugged her back. “I think we better watch from across the street,” I said. I’d seen more than one You Tube video of turkey frying gone wrong, so I pulled out my mobile phone and got ready to dial 9–1–1.

We’d settled into lawn chairs in my old front yard when Bill lowered the bird into the oil. At first it looked like things would be fine, and then the ice began to thaw. The oil bubbled up over the top of the pot like a witch’s cauldron brewing up something nasty. When the hot oil hit the flame, it shot up in an orange tower like a West Texas oil well disaster.

“Fire!” Bill yelled and kicked over the pot.

Things got exciting real fast after that. While I told the volunteer fire department where the action was, Jerry tugged the garden hose into the middle of the street and aimed a feeble stream of water toward the grass fire. Arlene hurled the pitcher of margaritas at Bill. I don’t think he was on fire.

Ed raced over to the Hinkey’s and hooked up a hose to their spigot. The flames, fed on the tinder of dry grass and cooking oil, raced along the rotten board fence at the back of Bill and Arlene’s place.

“My house!” Arlene shouted as Ed sprayed the roof and gutters.

“The shed!” Debbie cried. She had a look on her face like a kid watching his Christmas tree burn with all the presents underneath.

The fire department rolled up as the last post fell on the fence and the flames started chewing through Bill’s storage shed. They hooked up to the fire hydrant at the corner of our street and puzzled over it for a few minutes before the captain figured out the hydrant was out of order. “We need a tanker,” he spoke into a walkie-talkie. I didn’t hear the reply, but I figured it wasn’t good news as the crew sort of gathered in a half-circle in front of the burning shed.

Debbie brought over a hose from her place and after we screwed it onto the end of the hose Jerry held, it reached far enough to soak the foundation of Bill and Arlene’s house. The storage shed was a goner, though. Fed on the dried wood of the shed and the assortment of paint rags and papers Bill had stashed inside, the blaze lit up like a bonfire. Then the paint cans exploded.

We’d damped down the soil enough they contained the fire to the shed. With every pow and boom from the storage building, the volunteer firefighters inched backwards. Sparks shot up into the night sky — flashes of orange, red, and yellow with an occasional burst of bright blue and green.

“Pretty,” Debbie said. The light from the fire reflected in her eyes. She placed her hand over her heart and sang. “Oh say can you see,” she warbled in a boozy off-key voice. But by the second line, the fire department joined in.

“By the dawn’s early light!”

“What so proudly we hailed…” A final barrage of exploding paint cans echoed and the shed collapsed.

The tanker truck pulled up as we finished the last verse to the song.

If you liked this story, here’s another one with May and the folks at the lake.

[embed]What Comes Out in the Wash A Short Storytheweeklyknob.com