Hothouse (3 page)

“It's not bad,” Dad says about the airport. Local opinion is well divided on that. “I think it looks good, as part of the landscape. Almost handsome, even. I'm going to fly out of there someday. Did I tell you that, Russ? My plan to learn to fly? After I retire, I think. Or maybe I'll start while I'm still in the service, since I have all those open days and all. Have I told you that, how I plan to fly, after I retire maybe a little early?”

“You have, Dad,” I say, looking over where he is looking now. “But I don't mind if you tell me again.”

I can't believe how nervous I am. When I finally get back, to Monday-night YFF training, I could just about puke with the nerves I'm feeling all up and down my torso. What a baby, huh? I have been doing this for so long, two whole years, and knowing these same people and really completely at home with it all and, what a baby.

Three hours, every Monday night. Medic training, mouth-to-mouth, putting out real fires that we start ourselves, learning how they start and how they finish, what a firefighter can do and cannot. I was already a teammate, with these other youth firefighters, a family. I have blown my breath into everybody in the room, for godsake, and every one of them has done the same to me.

And now I am so nervous, butterfly nervous, I can barely walk through the door to pick up my training, for my life, which had been knocked sideways only a few weeks before. Sideways and legless, much like I feel now.

It takes several minutes of standing like a dope, listening to friendly familiar voices through the door, but finally I turn the knob and push on in.

To something like an ovation.

It doesn't start big. It starts the opposite, in fact. All conversation stops as everybody slowly turns in my direction, a lot like the scenes of the wake and the funeral when I walked in, scenes we all know I never wanted to relive and would surely de-live if I could. I shocked them, even though I think they all knew I was coming back. Now they've shocked me and we've shocked each other into a kind of paralysis and awkward smiling until The Girl takes over.

I don't mean anything by it, calling her The Girl, because that is what we all call her, this tall, slim, square-shouldered only-girl who started training a couple of weeks after me. Week one, there was prejudice, I have to admit. By week two, I knew. I saw it in her, that part of her that was just like me, and the reason she so belonged here. By week three you were just ignorant or hateful if you didn't see it, and whichever it was, you didn't belong here. That was when she became The Girl permanently to everyone in the squad including The Girl herself. I nearly forget now, but I think her name once was Melanie.

The Girl starts clapping, after our squadwide awkward silence. First very gently and slowly, but then more sure, then joined by two and three and ten and two supervisors.

I am becoming the world's foremost authority on the skill of not crying when you feel like crying. Sad things make me want to cry, like watching out my kitchen window one morning and seeing a jackass cat pick off a contented nibbling bird at our feeder. Happy things make me want to cry, like hitting my tenth consecutive free throw at the corner playground for the first time in my life. I never made it past eight before, usually because Dad would start woofing at me and making me furious and distracted. He never saw me hit the ten, and when I did hit the ten I never saw the flood coming because I wasn't counting, wasn't playing that, but just knew when I hit it what had happened and what wasn't right about it.

I miss my dad.

And proud things make me want to cry. Like a roomful of people who know better paying tribute to some combination of me and the old man, blending us into one immortal hero of a timeless firefighter.

Hard as it is to fight the tears, is it weird to say I don't mind this at all?

“Get back to work, ya damn babies,” I say then. They need to get back to work. I need to get back to work. I go across the room, to where The Girl is standing with a dummy at her feet. I don't mean me. Sitting on the floor in front of her is the victim, a hundred-pound floppy doll we use when simulating rescues. He wears a size small priest outfit somebody put on him long before I showed up, and he goes by the name of Monsignor O'Saveme.

“Need some assistance with this one, ma'am?” I ask The Girl in my simulated-hero voice.

“Not at all,” she says with a smile. “But you may borrow him if you are so inclined.”

I take the victim and heave him over my shoulder. I walk him to the corner, where an unnecessarily tight spiral staircase leads up to the second floor. Up we go, for the first steps of the next phase of my firefighting life.

Jesus, the monsignor is heavy. Most people I know weigh more than one hundred pounds, but Lord, this victim always manages to make himself heavier and more awkward than one hundred pounds would ever figure to be. He does it on purpose, I always figured, because he is part of the team. This is his job, and everybody on this team does his job to the max and so he is maximum heavy and maximum awkward.

And now, somehow he is even worse.

“You been putting on weight while I was away, ya fat bastard?” I say as I get halfway up the spiral.

“Maybe you're weaker,” he says.

I drop him. With a fat, thwacking, hundred-pound thud, I drop him right there and down the stairs.

He is very real. His head, his back, his legs, bapping off the stairs, rolling, smacking, bapping again, all of it so sickeningly real in sound and look and feel, I have my hands clapped to my mouth through the whole ordeal until Monsignor O'Saveme finally mercifully collapses there in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

It is a horror movie. I stand there on the stairs, still holding my face, while everybody looks at me, at the victim, at me again. Like I am some old movie queen about to swoop down the stairs for my big entrance, only without a head or something.

“Ah,” I say, “sorry, but that had to happen. The monsignor just let slip that he's a Yankees fan.”

Nervous laughter of relief fills that awful sucking void of silence as I descend the stairs and everybody makes busy again. “Suppose I have to save him anyway, huh?”

I am kind of shaking, though, as I bend down to scoop him back up. “Care to repeat that?” I say, tough but not brave. I have him tight by the dog collar in case he doesn't get the message. No response. “Didn't think so,” I say.

And so I rescue him, quickly up the stairs and then back down again, the fat father causing me to sweat like there is a real fire lapping around me.

I don't believe in ghosts. Of any kind. And I don't believe I am any weaker. Even if I have been thinking it, it's not the same as believing it and it's none of the monsignor's damn business anyway.

I am not weaker. And I will be stronger. Than ever.

“You all right?” The Girl asks when I return her victim to her feet where I found him.

“Of course I'm all right,” I say.

“Little out of practice, though,” she says with a shrug.

“Suppose,” I say.

“And a little out of shape.”

“Okay, I get it.”

“It's to be expected,” she says, both giggling wickedly and touching my arm warmly. I get a little buzzy, from the arm part.

“There's a party,” I say without giving myself any warning. “A summer's-over thing. You like beach parties?”

Her name
was
Melanie, it
is
Melanie. We meet at the seawall, at the concrete ramp that leads down directly from the fried dough place to the beach proper.

“You want some fried dough?” I ask.

“You want some barf?” she answers.

If she were any more a natural-born firefighter she'd have a better mustache than mine. I am glad she doesn't.

It is a mostly flat ocean as we walk the half mile of white to the party. We head about halfway down, to where the tide-flattened sand is pavement-walkable but still smells of sand. It is on its way back in, the tide, and this bit will be water again in another hour. The evening is just-so gray, no hint of sun but no hint of rain, so cool enough. Adrian's family has been hosting this end-of-summer splash for the last few years, and this being our senior summer there was no way this show wasn't going to go on no matter what.

“You okay?” Melanie asks, and we know what she is referring to. The
what
of no matter what.

“I'm okay,” I say. “Maybe not life-of-the-party okay, but certainly okay enough to be a part of a party.”

“I'm glad,” she says.

“I'm glad you're glad,” I say.

It is a modest little beach house but that's all it ever really needed to be. Adrian's folks' real house is only a few miles inland and they only ever bought this one because somebody died in it. It involved a leaky gas stove and an old bachelor and his dogs and my father told me about what a god-awful rot the place had become by the time the rescue services showed up. So it was kind of a steal, and the stench of death was less of an issue if all you really needed was to use the shower and the fridge and the private patio on fine days with the windows open and host a lot of kids who smelled like death much of the time anyway.

My dad was everywhere in this town. He touched everything. There is no escaping his reach so it's a good thing I'd never want to.

“You've never been here?” I ask her as we start up the beach, away from the quiet ocean and toward the unquiet house.

“No,” she says. “Been by it, of course, but that's all.”

Melanie doesn't go to the same high school with Adrian and me, so our circles aren't entirely the same. She goes to the same school as DJ.

It isn't a huge party—maybe twenty-five or thirty people—but it fills the house and patio pretty good. Adrian is standing where the seawall butts right up to the property when Melanie and I approach. He has his foot up on the wall, and is looking out into the distance like an old sea captain on the bow of his ship.

“Permission to come aboard, sir?” I say from the bottom of the weathered wooden steps.

He looks down at us. “Permission for the pretty one, aye,” he says.

I start up the stairs. Melanie grabs the back pockets of my jeans and pulls me down off the third step and into the sand. “He did not mean you,” she says.

“You are really strong,” I tell her.

“Do remember that,” she says.

“Strong, and pretty, aye,” Adrian adds.

“Aye,” Melanie agrees.

Physical strength, beauty and self-confidence. Why did I bring her here again?

By the time I make my way up the shivering weatherworn steps, I am already alone. Captain Adrian has piped Melanie aboard his ship and I just mount the wall in time to see him leading her into a crowd, into the house.

I don't mind. My favorite part of this house was always the seawall anyway. As soon as I am over it, I sit back down on it and watch.

The first floor is basically a kitchen back on the road side, with a small bathroom attached, then a decent-sized caramel-paneled living room and then a screened-in porch facing the beach. Another porch is plunked on top of that one, with separate doors leading into two bedrooms. From where I sit it is like a display party, porches full, windows and doors open and likewise peopled by the people I know who are all about to be seniors.

And somewhere too that old guy who died in there, and his dogs, who stunk the joint up. Not that I believe in ghosts, but it is probably only fair to imagine them there too. Party on, ghosts.

I am enjoying myself, doing nothing, small sea breeze at my back and a weird distant social mash-up playing out in front of me but not quite with me. I am enjoying myself enough to not really notice the brown bottle of beer doing its little
drink me
dance in the air in front of my face.

I take the beer.

“DJ?” I say, surprised, and not unhappy, to see my oldest old friend. Like I said, this is not his school crowd.

He sits down next to me. “My dad said he vomited for like twenty minutes straight when they found the old man and his dogs in there. Said it smelled like burning hair and rancid pork boiled in vinegar.”

“I remember. That's exactly what my dad smelled like when he came home. He took a bath for four hours. Every time the water cooled off he just refilled the tub.”

DJ nods. “Canned goods and a kettle.”

That's what they found, basically, of the old guy's life. Of his kitchen life, anyway. That's what he lived on, until he didn't. That's what my dad kept saying and, apparently, DJ's dad too.

“Canned goods and a kettle,” I repeat.

The sea, I can hear, is creeping up closer behind us. The tide is coming in and the flat little waves are making their broad crispy noises by raking back through the line of shells and pebbles not far off. DJ aims his beer bottle at mine without looking at me. We clink as we watch the party.

“Russ and Dave. They are everywhere, aren't they?” he says, then sips.