Call If You Need Me by Raymond Carver Page B

didn’t hear anything.”
    “We’d better go down and see about the girls, Robert,” Carol said. “They might get in the way somehow. They might get too close or something. Anything could happen.”
    The four of them started down the sidewalk. They fell in with some other people who were walking at an unhurried pace. They walked along with these other people. Nick had the feeling that they could have been on an outing. But all the while, as they kept their eyes on the burning house, they saw firemen pouring water onto the roof of the house, where flames kept breaking through. Some other firemen were holding a hose and aiming a stream of water through a front window. A fireman wearing a helmet with straps, a long black coat, and black knee-high bootswas carrying an ax and moving around toward the back of the house.
    They came up to where the crowd of people stood watching. The police car had parked sideways in the middle of the road, and they could hear the radio crackling inside the car, over the sound of the fire as it ripped through the walls of the house. Then Nick spotted the two girls, standing near the front of the crowd, holding their skateboards. “There they are,” he said to Robert. “Over there. See them?”
    They made their way through the crowd, excusing themselves, and came up beside the girls.
    “We told you,” Jenny said. “See?” Megan stood holding her skateboard in one hand and had the thumb of her other hand planted in her mouth.
    “Do you know what happened?” Nick said to the woman beside him. She was wearing a sun hat and smoking a cigarette.
    “Vandals,” she said. “That’s what somebody told me, anyway.”
    “If they can catch them, they ought to kill them, if you ask me,” said the man standing next to the woman. “Or else lock them up and throw away the key. These people are traveling in Mexico and don’t even know they won’t have a house to live in when they come back. They haven’t been able to get in touch with them. Those poor people. Can you imagine? They’re going to come home and find out they don’t have a house to live in any longer.”
    “It’s going!” the fireman with the ax shouted. “Stand back!”
    Nobody was close to him or to the house. But the people in the crowd moved their feet, and Nick could feel himself grow tense. Someone in the crowd said, “Oh my God. My God.”
    “Look at it,” someone else said.
    Nick edged closer to Joanne, who was staring intently at the fire. The hair on her forehead appeared damp. He put his arm around her. He realized, as he did it, that he’d touched her this way at least three times that morning.
    Nick turned his head slightly in Robert’s direction and wassurprised to see Robert staring at him instead of the house. Robert’s face was flushed, his expression stern, as if everything that had happened—arson, jail, betrayal, and adultery, the overturning of the established order—was Nick’s fault and could be laid on his doorstep. Nick stared back, his arm around Joanne, until the flush left Robert’s face and he lowered his eyes. When he raised them again, he didn’t look at Nick. He moved closer to his wife, as if to protect her.
    Nick and Joanne were still holding each other as they watched, but there was that familiar feeling Nick would have from time to time, as she absently patted his shoulder, that he didn’t know what she was thinking.
    “What are you thinking?” he asked her.
    “I was thinking about Bill,” she said.
    He went on holding her. She didn’t say any more for a minute, and then she said, “I think about him every now and then, you know. After all, he was the first man I ever loved.”
    He kept holding her. She let her head rest on his shoulder and went on staring at the burning house.

Call If You Need Me
    We had both been involved with other people that spring, but when June came and school was out we decided to let our house for the summer and move from Palo Alto to the north