by Jay Varner
For the past several years, my dream has been to escape all of this, yet I accepted a job at the Sentinel because Elizabeth offered to hire me, because I was too scared to turn it down, because I don’t know what else to do with my life. When I graduated college, I believed that I had overcome the negative pull of my past and that my family’s history of fascination with fire no longer haunted me. But now I think I am wrong about that. I know that working the police and fire beat will unearth memories I buried long ago, and that I will ultimately have to face the unsettling memory of my father.
After work that first night, I drive on the narrow back roads between Lewistown and McVeytown, headed home where I know my mother will still be awake. I pull into our driveway and watch as a half-dozen cats scatter in my headlights. My mom has opened all the windows to our home, a doublewide trailer, which feels like the inside of a kiln at the height of summer. Most of my college friends know only that I live in a small house — I was usually too embarrassed to admit the truth and tip off people about my social class. Even a girlfriend in college believed it for two years before she finally visited for a week one summer.
“How’d it go?” my mother asks. She stands at the kitchen sink and dries her hands on a dish towel. Her face looks flushed and hot.
“Fine,” I say. “They want me to work the police and fire beat.”
“That’s not so bad, is it?” She smiles and I notice how few wrinkles she has. She thinks forty-six is old, though I tell her that most of my friends have parents who are already sixty.
I sit at the dining room table and shake my head. “I have to go out on calls. I have to go to the fires and talk with victims. Would you want to do that?”
She doesn’t say anything for a while. She finishes her work at the sink and then sits on the love seat in the dining room. Her fingers pick at frays of itchy upholstering.
“It won’t be that bad, will it?” she asks.
“It’s a job,” I say.
“Around here, you’re lucky to get one of those,” she says. “Going out on fire calls. Well, I’m sure you dad would find that interesting.”
Two
On some evenings, I rode into McVeytown with my father, usually to buy milk or bread. My dad’s heavy steel-toed boots pounded up the rickety wooden steps outside Kline’s Market. He pulled open the heavy glass door and I followed him inside. These trips should have taken ten minutes, but for my dad they lasted an hour. Usually, we saw some of his friends: firemen, police officers, reporters, or co-workers. They always smiled when they saw him. They were tall, thick men, not unlike my dad, who wore hats and mustaches like him. They even dressed the same: scuffed steel-toed boots, grease-stained and faded blue jeans, and solid-color T-shirts. All of them wanted to talk with my father.
One night, my father’s best friend, Art Kenmore, was in the store. The two worked together at a factory called Overhead Door, and both volunteered with the fire company. Art stood in line at the meat counter at the back of the store and stared at cuts of chipped ham, Lebanon bologna, and farmer’s cheese, as if studying them for a test.
My father looked down at me and pressed a finger against his lips. He slowly walked up behind Art and stuck a finger into Art’s shoulder blade.
“Give me your wallet,” my dad said softly.
Art, his eyes wide and scared, snapped his head around. When he saw my father, he smiled, exposing the gap between his two front teeth. He shook his head.
“You almost scared me half to death,” Art said.
“What happens if you scare someone half to death twice?” my father asked. “Ever think about that?”
Art rolled his eyes and pointed at the meat counter. “I’m trying to decide what I want for lunch tomorrow. Sally forgot to buy meat when she went grocery shopping.”
“Teena wanted me to come down for some milk,” my dad said. He yanked at the bill of his hat and wiggled it back and forth on his head.
Art rested his hands on his knees and leaned forward, peering down at me. “How’s first grade?”
“It’s still there,” I said, remembering one of my father’s oft-recited answers.
Art slapped his thigh and stood straight. “Smart aleck. Wonder where he gets that?”
“Hey, what do you call cows with a sense of humor?” my father asked. “Laughing stock.”
Art and I both laughed. My dad loved jokes. Every night, he told my mother and me jokes that he had heard during lunch at work. And each time he saw one of his friends, they traded jokes for a few minutes. Sometimes it seemed like a kind of secret language to me because I didn’t understand them, even though I still laughed. But when I did get his jokes, I felt part of the separate world he shared with his friends.
“You know what would happen if you lined up all the cars in the world end to end?” Art asked. “Someone would be stupid enough to try to pass them.”
My dad softly laughed and thought for a moment. “Hey, you hear about the Energizer Bunny?”
“Yeah, he was arrested for battery.”
My dad raised his eyebrows and cocked his head back. “Did I tell you that already?”
“At work the other day,” Art said. “Your mind must be slipping in old age.”
“Hey now,” my dad said. He pointed a finger at Art. “Growing old is mandatory. Growing up isn’t.”
At the checkout counter, my dad talked with the cashier for a few minutes about the new house she and her husband were building. Like the jokes that made little sense to me, I didn’t understand talk of framing walls, underlayment, and foam channel insulation. But I nodded as my father talked, as if I agreed with all that he said.
“Remember to remind him to bury that drainage pipe away from any disturbed earth. Now that might be five or six feet from the foundation.” He said it with such force and passion that anyone who disagreed would have seemed ignorant.
“And that’s better?” the cashier asked. She furrowed her brow as if she was trying to understand the terms as well.
“Oh, you better believe it,” my dad said. “If you install that pipe on uncompacted ground, it’ll get a negative pitch and then the runoff water will flow the wrong way. It might be a little harder for him to lay the pipe in fresh ground, but it’ll give both of you piece of mind knowing that it’s going to work.”
The cashier stared at my father a moment and then smiled. “How do you know all this, Denton?”
He shrugged. “I just know a little something about everything. But I’ll tell you this: if he doesn’t do the pipe that way, I can guarantee you the fire company will be out there next time it rains and we’ll have to pump that basement. You tell him to call me if he has any questions.”
“I’ll let him know, Denton. Thanks.”
In the parking lot, he lifted me into the passenger side of his truck and made sure I buckled my seat belt before he started the engine. A pickup passed on the street. The driver tooted the horn and waved at my father.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“I don’t even know,” my dad said. “Guess they like me, though, huh?”
My dad seemed like the most famous man in town. People recognized his beat-up Ford F-150 and the knobby red strobe light that clung to the roof. Rusted running boards hung along the sides of the truck. A toolbox, painted a muddy brown primer that matched the body of the truck, spanned the bed at the end closest to the cab and held his mismatched screwdrivers, battered hammers, a nicked crowbar, spare gloves, a first-aid kit, flares, and an ax. Most importantly, the box stored his fire gear — a helmet and his canvaslike jacket so heavy that it nearly pulled me to the ground when I tried it on.
“That’s what I wear every time I go to a fire,” he said as he buckled the rings of the coat around me. It felt like he was sealing me inside. “These are called D rings. If you don’t hook these in a fire, the heat is so intense, it’ll burn your skin right off.”
“Could that happen to you?” I asked.
He smiled. “Me? No, I’m
a pro. I’m the chief. Been wearing turn-out gear for years now. And pretty soon you’ll be strong enough to wear it too.”
In a way, I understood what he meant. When I was strong enough to wear that gear, then I would be a man like my father, and then maybe all of the people in town would want to talk to me just like they wanted to talk to him. I would enter that other world my father lived in, that place where he spent so much of his time away from home.
For all the talents that my father had — telling jokes, giving advice on everything from repairing engines to building a house, and fighting fires — he was best at leaving. By kindergarten, I could recite his schedule as well as the alphabet: ambulance meetings on Monday nights, work detail Tuesday nights, company meetings on Wednesdays, and in between all of that, emergency management meetings throughout the county. His pager sounded at all hours, summoning him from work, dinner, or sleep.
During the days, my dad cut glass at Overhead Door. When he stopped at the firehouse every afternoon on his way home from work, he parked along the highway so everyone in town could see that he was on call. The building that housed the McVeytown Volunteer Fire Company had two garage doors and a sheet metal exterior that was painted an off-green. The building looked flimsy, nothing like the massive stone firehouses that I had seen on television. The small banquet hall — where my parents had their wedding reception — flanked one side of the building. In the back of the building was a large gravel-covered parking lot.
When my father parked in front of the firehouse, he said that it was a reminder of his dedication. His priorities had always been clear: the fire department came first; everything else was second. This was how most people of McVeytown thought of him; Denton Varner was a husband and father, a loyal friend, a good driver, and a fan of trivia, but most of all he was their fire chief.
Sometimes my dad drove my mother and me to McDonald’s where he ordered me a Happy Meal. McDonald’s is the only place other than home I remember us ever eating at. When a Pizza Hut opened in Lewistown, some of my friends at school talked about going there with their parents. The next time we went to McDonald’s, I decided to suggest something different.
“Dad, can we go to Pizza Hut instead?” I asked. “My friends said it’s really cool.”
“Mmm, it’d probably take too long,” he said.
“Too long for what?”
“To get our food,” he said. “If there’s a call, I have to be able to jump up and just go. Pizza Hut’s one of those places where you have to pay at the end of your meal.”
“Oh. Okay.” If my father needed to leave at a moment’s notice, then he must be important. I thought of Batman and how Commissioner Gordon flashed the bat signal in the sky — my father’s pager was his signal.
When my father was at home, he spent much of his time outdoors working or mowing the lawn. The orange and red Case riding lawn mower was too small for my father — his knees stuck out, and he looked like a man riding a child’s toy. He wore blue jeans, a pocketed T-shirt, and one of his trucker’s hats with the bulldog of the Mack truck logo on the front. Large ear protectors clung to his head as though he were about to go skeet shooting. “Always shield your ears,” he once told me after I asked why he wore the clunky things. My mother then told me the real reason: an earpiece was plugged into his pager to feed him the emergency codes if a call came.
One evening, I watched my father mow the lawn from my perch atop the metal slide he had assembled for me. The onion-sweet smell of freshly cut grass hung thick in the humid air. As he steered the mower, he smiled under his mustache and waved. But then the smile faded. He shut the mower off, held his hands to his ear protectors, and I knew that he was listening to a dispatcher report a fire. He jumped up, threw the ear protectors onto the mower seat, and ran across the yard.
I plunged down the slide. When my feet hit the ground, I ran toward his pickup but he had already climbed inside.
“Can I go with you?” I asked.
He turned on the engine and gunned the gas.
“Dad, please, can I go? Please.”
He didn’t even look down at me. “No,” he said, hard and loud.
The truck bounced and shook as my father drove over our cracked macadam driveway and then sped out of sight.
Lots of times when he left like that I waited atop that slide and watched for his headlights to surface on the slight hill above our house. My skin got clammy in the soupy and still air. Far off in the distance a freight train beat over the tracks and echoed against the ridges. I waited there for him until long after lightning bugs first pinholed the darkness of night.
“Jay,” my mother called from the porch. “It’s time for bed.”
I sank down the slide and walked across the yard. I changed into my pajamas and climbed into bed. My mother tucked the sheets under my arms.
“Why does Dad always have to leave?”
“What?” She sat on the edge of the bed.
“Why can’t he just stay home with us?”
My mother stared at the floor, silent for a moment. “He’s the chief,” she said.
“Why does he have to be the fire chief?”
“Because he likes to help people,” she said. She looked at the floor and smiled. “And people like him. The fire company elected him.”
“Couldn’t they have elected someone else?” I asked. “Don’t you miss him?”
“Sure I do,” she said. “I wish that he was here more too. But he’s not. He’s got his job to do at the firehouse. And you know your father. He’ll want to make sure it gets done right.”
Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. She patted my head.
“He’ll be back soon,” she said. And then, as if to convince herself, she said it again: “He’ll be back soon. You go to sleep.”
She stood, kissed my head, and closed the door behind her. But I lay awake every night he wasn’t home, sometimes until the bruised light of dawn washed over the room. I lay there and waited for the roar of his truck to pull into the driveway and his boots to stomp up the wooden porch steps.
I had seen him return home in the daylight and knew what to expect: the collars of his shirts were grimy with salt from his sweat. Soot smeared his face and hands. The stale smell of smoke clung to his clothes. During those long night waits, I sometimes imagined that he would open my bedroom door, sit on the bed next to me, turn on my dresser lamp, and talk to me.
But this never happened — not this night or the hundreds of others like it. Instead, he showered and then climbed in bed next to my mother to sleep before waking at 6:00 a.m. to head to work at Overhead Door. And I lay there in the dark.
My dad first volunteered for the junior fireman program when he was in high school. His classmates mentioned it in his senior yearbook — some thanked him for his work; others warned him not to get too involved. Some thirty years after he graduated, I read through some letters and cards classmates had sent my father. A friend named Rick wrote my dad a postcard in 1972. Rick had traveled to Disney World, and he told my father he had looked for the Disney World fire company — he wanted a picture to send to my dad. Rick also signed the back of his senior photo for my father, writing, “Don’t forget all the good times we had at the fire hall and other places (hint, hint). Keep the town from burning down.” Another friend named Jan wrote a similar note on his class picture: “Have fun in the future, but you shouldn’t get so carried away with fires (how many days has it been since a fire?).”
His might have been the most recognizable face in town, even back then. When he earned his Eagle Scout badge in the Boy Scouts, the Sentinel printed a snapshot from the ceremony — appearing in the Sentinel was the true testament of fame in any of the surrounding small towns. My dad had yet to grow his mustache in that grainy sepia photo. He wore wire-rimmed, round-lensed eyeglasses and had his hair fashioned in a bowl cut. Something about that look always reminded me of a folk singer — maybe because he had played guitar in a band with his older brothers, Curt and Russ, and
a few of their friends, performing at churches and parties around town.
By the time my dad graduated high school, his brothers had already moved away — Curt to Ohio, Russ to Delaware. My father, however, was not tempted to leave. He immersed himself deeper in the life of a fireman. He dispatched emergency calls, spending long hours alone at the station house and waiting for the phone to ring. He enrolled in classes and earned his emergency medical technician certification.
In 1979, my dad moved back to the same acre or so of land outside McVeytown where he had grown up. He had married my mother by then and they wanted to start a family. Though my father had bought the single-wide trailer he lived in with my mother and me, the land that it sat upon was still owned by Lucky, who had refused to lend my father money to buy property, and instead let my father use the former plot of his childhood home. Unable to afford anything else, my father accepted the offer but made a deal with himself: one day, he would build a proper house for his family, not some “rinky-dink trailer,” and he would do it on his own piece of land.
Three piles of rubble scarred that ground we lived upon. If I stepped onto the front porch of the trailer, I saw the hole, that sunken pit where my grandfather burned his trash on Saturday mornings. When I stepped onto the trailer’s back porch and looked east, I saw the foundation of Lucky’s old workshop some twenty yards away — the building was gone now, and a few saplings knifed through the broken concrete floor. Five yards north of our trailer, the remnants of the other house still stood; the cold cinder-block walls that housed Lucky’s pigeons. These three foundations formed the end points of a triangle — our trailer sat in the center.