The Hermit's Story (7 page)

“Maybe they're all going fishing, too,” says Wilson. “Maybe it's like a vacation.”

“Maybe they've chartered our same boat,” says Artie.

And though none of the men really believes this, there is a long, stultifying tension that builds and builds, as ahead of them, the bus takes the same series of left turns and rights that they are taking, as if it is indeed going out on the pier, too, to meet the guide. And it is finally only at the last intersection that the bus turns right, where Artie and Dave and Wilson are supposed to turn left. Without realizing it, the three men relax and uncoil, and breathe out long, quivery breaths of relief, and then chuckle.

Wilson comes to a full stop before turning left, and the three of them watch the bus, the prisoners bathed in that awful yellow light, travel down the road into the darkness—watching the bus until it is completely gone, tiny red taillights fading into nothing.

The men watch the bus disappear in this manner as if to make themselves believe that it has become nothing, never-was; then, with a glow in the east, they turn toward the sunrise and drive down the pier, along the rock jetty, out to the point where they are to meet their guide.

There is a devastating southwest wind kicking up, one that will muddy the water and make the fishing all but impossible—they will not catch a thing all day—but they do not know this yet, and for the moment it doesn't matter. At the moment, they are still uncoiling, still unwinding, and are driving along in a state of nearly utter peace and freedom, a kind of euphoric silver-heartedness: a clean-breathing, gasping kind of feeling, a good one, which might last for hours.

T
HEY BOTH STAND ON
the other side of the miracle. Their marriage was bad, perhaps even rotting, but then it got better. He—the fireman, Kirby—knows what the reason is: that every time they have an argument, the dispatcher's call sounds, and he must run and disappear into the flames—he is the captain—and while he is gone, his wife, Mary Ann, reorders her priorities, thinks of the children, and worries for him. Her blood cools, as does his. It seems that the dispatcher's call is always saving them. Their marriage settles in and strengthens, afterward, like some healthy, living, supple thing.

She meets him at the door when he returns, kisses him. He is grimy-black, salt-stained and smoky-smelling. They can't even remember what the argument was about. It's almost like a joke, the fact that they were upset about such a small thing—any small thing. He sheds his bunker gear in the utility room and goes straight to the shower. Later, they sit in the den by the fireplace and he drinks a few beers and tells her about the fire. He knows he is lucky—he knows they are both lucky. As long as the city keeps burning, they can avoid becoming weary and numb. Each time he leaves, is drawn away, and then returns to a second chance.

The children—a girl, four, and a boy, two—sleep soundly. It is not so much a city that they live in, but a town—a suburb on the perimeter of a city in the center of the southern half of the country—a place where it is warm more often than it is cold, so that the residents are not overly familiar with fires: the way a fire spreads from room to room; the way it takes only one small, errant thing in a house to invalidate and erase the whole structure—to bring it all down to ashes and send the building's former occupants out wandering lost and adrift into the night, poorly dressed and without direction.

They often talk until dawn, if the fire has occurred at night. She is his second wife; he is her first husband. Because they are in an unincorporated suburb, his is a volunteer department. Kirby's crew has a station with new equipment—all they could ask for—but there are no salaries, and he likes it that way; it keeps things purer. He has a day job as a computer programmer for an engineering firm that designs steel girders and columns used in industrial construction: warehouses, mills, and factories. The job means nothing to him—he slips along through the long hours of it with neither excitement nor despair, his pulse never rising, and when it is over each day he says goodbye to his coworkers and leaves the office without even the faintest echo of his work lingering in his blood. He leaves it all the way behind, or lets it pass through him like some harmless silver laxative.

But after a fire—holding a can of cold beer, and sitting there next to the hearth, scrubbed clean, talking to Mary Ann, telling her what it had been like, what the cause had been, and who among his men had performed well and who had not—his eyes water with pleasure at his knowing how lucky he is to be getting a second chance with each and every fire.

He would never say anything bad about his first wife, Rhonda—and indeed, perhaps there is nothing bad to say, no failing in which they were not both complicit. It almost doesn't matter; it's almost water under the bridge.

The two children are asleep in their rooms, the swing set and jungle gym out in the back yard. The security of love and constancy—the
safety.
Mary Ann leads the children's choir in church and is as respected for her work with the children as Kirby is for his work with the fires.

It would seem like a fairy-tale story: a happy marriage, one that turned its deadly familiar course around early on, that day six years ago when he signed up to be a volunteer for the fire department. One of those rare marriages, as rare as a jewel or a forest, that was saved by a combination of inner strength and the grace and luck of fortuitous external circumstances—
the world afire.
Who, given the chance, would not choose to leap across that chasm between a marriage that is heading toward numbness and tiredness and one that is instead strengthened, made more secure daily for its journey into the future?

And yet—even on the other side of the miracle, even on the other side of luck—a thing has been left behind: his oldest daughter, his only child from his first marriage, Jenna. She's ten, almost eleven.

***

There is always excitement and mystery on a fire call. It's as if these things are held in solution just beneath the skin of the earth and are then released by the flames, as if the surface of the world is some errant, artificial crust—almost like a scab—and that there are rivers of blood below, and rivers of fire, rivers of the way things used to be and might some day be again—true but mysterious, and full of power.

It does funny things to people—a fire, that burning away of the thin crust. Kirby tells Mary Ann about two young men in
54 THE HERMIT'S STORY
their thirties—lovers, he thinks—who, bewildered and bereft as their house burned, went out into the front yard and began cooking hamburgers for the firefighters as the building burned down.

He tells her about a house full of antiques that could not be salvaged. The attack crew was fighting the fire hard, deep in the building's interior—the building “fully involved” as they say when the wood becomes flame, air becomes flame, world becomes flame. It is the thing the younger firemen live for—not a smoke alarm, lost kitten, or piddly grass fire, but the real thing, a fully involved structure fire—and even the older firemen's hearts are lifted by the sight of one. Even those who have been thinking of retiring (at thirty-seven, Kirby is the oldest man on the force) are made new again by the sight of it, and by the radiant heat, which curls and browns and sometimes even ignites the oak leaves of trees across the street from the fire. The paint of cars parked too close to the fire sometimes begins to blaze spontaneously, making it look as if the cars are traveling very fast.

Bats, which have been out hunting, begin to return in swarms, dancing above the flames, and begin flying in dark, agitated funnels back down into the chimney of a house that's on fire, if it is not a winter fire—if the chimney has been dormant—trying to rescue their flightless young, which are roosting in the chimney, or sometimes the attic, or beneath the eaves. The bats return to the house as it burns down, but no one ever sees any of them come back out. People stand around on the street—their faces orange in the firelight—and marvel, hypnotized at the sight of it, not understanding what is going on with the bats, or any of it, and drawn, too, like somnambulists, to the scent of those blood-rivers, those vapors of new birth that are beginning already to leak back into the world as that skin, that crust, is burned away.

***

The fires almost always happen at night.

This fire that Kirby is telling Mary Ann about—the one in which the house full of antiques was being lost—was one of the great fires of the year. The men work in teams, as partners—always within sight, or one arm's length contact, of one another, so that one can help the other if trouble is encountered: if the foundation gives way, or a burning beam crashes across the back of one of the two partners, who are not always men; more and more women are volunteering, though none has yet joined Kirby's crew. He welcomes them; of the multiple-alarm fires he's fought with other crews in which there were women firefighters, the women tended to try to out-think rather than out-muscle the fire, which is almost always the best approach.

Kirby's partner now is a young man, Grady, just out of college. Kirby likes to use his intelligence when he fights a fire, rather than just hurling himself at it and risking getting sucked too quickly into its maw and becoming trapped—not just dying himself, but possibly causing harm or death to those members of his crew who might then try to save him—and for this reason Kirby likes to pair himself with the youngest, rawest, most adrenaline-rich trainees entrusted to his care—to act as an anchor of caution upon them, to counsel prudence and moderation even as the world burns down around them.

At the fire in the house of antiques, Kirby and Grady had just come out to rest and to change oxygen tanks. The homeowner had at first been beside himself, shouting and trying to get back into his house, so that the fire marshal had had to restrain him—they had bound him to a tree with a canvas strap—but now the homeowner was watching the flames almost as if hypnotized. Kirby and Grady were so touched by his change in demeanor—the man wasn't struggling any longer, was instead only leaning out slightly away from the tree, like the masthead on a ship's prow, and sagging slightly—that they cut him loose so that he could watch the spectacle in freedom, unencumbered.

He made no more moves to reenter his burning house, only stood there with watery eyes—whether tears of anguish, or irritation from the smoke, they could not tell—and, taking pity, Kirby and Grady put on new oxygen tanks, gulped down some water, and, although they were supposed to rest, went back into the burning building and began carrying out those pieces of furniture that had not yet ignited, and sometimes even those that had—burning breakfronts, flaming rolltop desks—and dropped them into the man's back yard swimming pool for safekeeping, as the tall trees in the yard crackled and flamed like giant candles, and floating embers drifted down, scorching whatever they touched. Neighbors all around them climbed up onto their cedar-shingled roofs in their pajamas and with garden hoses began wetting down their own roofs, trying to keep the conflagration from spreading.

The business of it has made Kirby neat and precise. He and Grady crouched and lowered the dining room set carefully into the deep end (even as some of the pieces of furniture were still flickering with flame), releasing them to sink slowly, carefully, to the bottom, settling in roughly the same manner and arrangement in which they had been positioned back in the burning house.

There is no room for excess, unpredictability, or recklessness; these extravagances cannot be borne, and Kirby wants Grady to see and understand this, the sooner the better. The fire hoses must always be coiled in the same pattern, so that when unrolled the male nipple is always nearest the truck and the female farthest away. The backup generators must always have fresh oil and gas in them and be kept in working order; the spanner wrenches must always hang in the same place.

The days go by in long stretches, twenty-three and a half hours at a time, but in the last half-hour, in the moment of fire, when all the old rules melt down and the new world becomes flame, the importance of a moment, of a second, is magnified ten-thousand-fold—is magnified to almost an eternity, and there is no room for even a single mistake. Time inflates to a greater density than iron. You've got to be able to go through the last half-hour, that wall of flame, on instinct alone, or by force of habit, by rote, by feel.

An interesting phenomenon happens when time catches on fire like this. It happens even to the veteran firefighters. A form of tunnel vision develops—the heart pounding almost two hundred times a minute and the pupils contracting so tightly that vision almost vanishes. The field of view becomes reduced to an area about the size of another man's helmet, or face: his partner, either in front of or behind him. If the men ever become separated by sight or sound, they are supposed to freeze instantly and then begin swinging their pikestaff, or a free arm, in all directions, and if their partner does the same, is within one or even two arms' lengths, their arms will bump each other and they can continue—they can rejoin the fight, as the walls flame vertically and the ceiling and floors melt and fall away.

The firefighters carry motion sensors on their hips, which send out piercing electronic shrieks if the men stop moving for more than thirty seconds. If one of those goes off, it means that a firefighter is down—that he has fallen and injured himself or has passed out from smoke inhalation—and all the firefighters stop what they are doing and turn and converge on the sound, if possible, centering back to it like the bats pouring back down the chimney.

A person's breathing accelerates inside a burning house, and the blood heats, as if in a purge. The mind fills with a strange music. Sense of feel, and memory of how things
ought
to be, becomes everything; it seems that even through the ponderous, fire-resistant gloves the firefighters could read Braille if they had to. As if the essence of all objects exudes a certain clarity, just before igniting.