by Jay Varner
Lucky’s pickup crowned the hill, and as he slowed, I saw that the bed was piled with mattresses. The trailer hitched to the back of his truck was also filled with them. Another truck followed behind. I instantly recognized the driver, who had a scraggly brown beard and a hollow face, as Ricky Trutt. His truck was also piled high with mattresses.
“Go inside,” my mother told me. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
I ran across the yard and up the porch steps. I turned and saw the trucks drive over the lawn, past my jungle gym and the tool shed, and then stop. They had parked next to the cement floor left over from where the workshop had once stood.
When my mother came inside, she locked the door behind her. We huddled around the kitchen window and watched.
My dad climbed onto the back of the truck and grabbed one end of a mattress, Lucky grabbed the other. Together, they swung the thing back and forth and finally tossed it onto the ground. They continued until both trucks and trailers were empty. My father talked with Lucky and Ricky for a few moments. Then he walked across the yard, unlocked the door, and came inside. My mother sat on a chair at the kitchen table. When my dad crossed his arms, leaned against the wall, and looked toward her, she continued to stare out the window.
“What?” he asked.
“What are they doing?” she asked. “It’s almost dark.”
“He’s just burning some old mattresses from the hotel.”
“I thought you told him not to bring Ricky Trutt here anymore.” Her words came slow yet forceful, as if holding back a scream.
My father shrugged and said, “Dad needed the help.”
“He needs help,” my mother said. She turned from the window and looked at my father. “He’s sick. They’re both sick. And did you have to help them? They shouldn’t let that man have matches. It’s illegal for murderers to have guns.”
“What do you mean?” He laughed and shook his head. I could tell that he wanted her to drop the issue.
“You threw those mattresses off the truck with them.”
“My father can’t do things like that anymore,” he said. “Do you want him to have a heart attack?”
“How dare he keep coming here with that creep, in front of his grandson no less.” She stood, pressed a hand against her cheek, and said, “You know why Lucky comes here, Denton?”
My father pointed at her. “Don’t you say it.”
“Why? You don’t want your son to hear it?”
“Hear what?” I asked.
My dad squinted at my mother and clenched his jaw. He marched toward the door again, stomping his feet so hard that I thought they were going to pound right through the floor of the kitchen. He slammed the door and then walked back across the yard toward my grandfather. My mother and I continued watching out the kitchen window.
Lucky and Trutt circled the mattresses and splashed them with gasoline. Then, just as he had done for those Saturday morning blazes, Lucky poured a small trail through the grass and away from the mattresses. He struck a match and dropped it onto the ground. He and Trutt hustled backward and watched the flames erupt. Air hissed and the crackling roar sounded like a jet engine. A ginger-colored lambency spread in ripples across the yard and leaked through the windows of our trailer. That glow from the flames swirled on the ceiling, bounced off the walls, and the trailer felt submerged in some kind of intangible hell.
My mother and I stepped onto the porch and watched the roaring fire. I felt the warmth of the flames press against my face. Heat devils shimmered in the air and smoke clouded up into the blackening evening sky. The inferno was perhaps thirty yards away from us, and my grandfather and his friend stood beside it, their postures relaxed as though watching a fireworks display. The smell of smoke thickened the air. I had never seen anything like it, and my heart beat hard inside my chest in fear. My grandfather had done this, I thought.
My dad walked onto the porch and stood next to my mother and me. Sweat beads sparkled on his forehead.
“Can’t you make them put it out, Dad?” I looked up at my father but his eyes were fixed on the fire. I tugged at his jeans and asked again.
“It’s his land,” he said. He shook his head and looked to the ground. “I can’t stop him.”
“But you’re the fire chief,” I said. “What if it spreads into the fields? What if it comes toward the house?” Vast fields of fire spread through my imagination — helicopters hovered in the sky, dropping bursts of water onto the scene, and men with axes raced toward the flames. My father commanded all of them like a general in battle.
“I don’t know,” my dad finally said. “I don’t know.”
In the end, he did nothing. When the fire finally dwindled, Lucky and Ricky climbed into their pickups and drove off into the night. Later, before I went to bed, I looked out the window once more. The glowing embers looked like a thousand wicked eyes peering through the darkness.
Part Two
Eight
I grab a pen and a notebook off my desk as elongated beeps from the scanner alarm pierce the newsroom’s mid-evening silence. I turn up the volume and listen. It is early October, and though I have worked at the Sentinel for more than a month, I have yet to go out on a fire call. The beeps stop and I wait for the dispatcher to break the brief fuzz of silence.
“Structure fire,” the voice says. His voice sounds calm and routine. “Four twenty-one Back Mountain Road, Allensville. Neighbor reports flames in the upstairs with possible entrapment.”
Entrapment is all I need to hear — that means reporters go no matter what.
“Lorrie, get the camera,” I yell. “We got a fire.”
The alarm codes blast again. I grab my laminated press pass and head out. Lorrie already leans against a cubicle at the end of the newsroom, camera bags slung over each shoulder. She adjusts her glasses and raises her eyebrows. “So where we going?”
Lorrie is in her midfifties and previously worked as a paramedic in inner-city Pittsburgh, then as a paralegal, but when she throws her camera bags onto the floor of my car and tells me to hurry up, I wonder how she could have ever been anything other than a newspaper photographer.
We speed through the darkness and toward the fire. I stomp the gas pedal and my Ford Tempo bucks over potholed dips and veers tightly around sharp, sudden bends. We double the posted speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour on the narrow, backcountry road. Black and white spots of Holstein cattle blur in the periphery of my high-beamed lights. The lit windows of old stone farmhouses glow like smudges of yellow on night’s dark canvas. I speed past signs for dairy farms and churches, and I drive over clumps of manure from horses that pulled Amish buggies.
Anxiety flutters my brain and cramps my stomach. My fingers grip the steering wheel tightly and my knuckles ache. This is my initiation, my entry into the ring of fire that has held my family in thrall for years. I have dreaded my first fire for more than the simple threat of unburied memories; it is the rush that I fear too. I squeeze the steering wheel harder and stare at the road ahead.
One month earlier, on a Saturday in early September, I walked toward Jimmy’s Pizza, a two-story house converted into a restaurant located on McVeytown’s tiny square, a place I went most Saturdays for lunch with my three cousins.
In McVeytown, everyone already knew me because of my father, but my byline in the local newspaper turned me into a small-town celebrity. A man I didn’t even know walked past me on the street and said, “Nice work.” The driver of a passing car waved and beeped his horn. I thought back to those evenings when I rode into McVeytown with my father, how everyone had either waved or said hello to him. It seemed kind of like the same thing, except I know that I’m not like my dad — I’m supposed to write about men like him.
Though my first few stories were routine — a DNA kit used to identify kidnapped children, Lewistown borough council meetings, Mifflin County school board meetings — many people read them. Anytime I deposited my paycheck at the bank or used my debit card, the perso
n behind the counter glanced at my name and smiled.
“Are you the same Jay Varner who writes for the newspaper?”
That Saturday, I walked into Jimmy’s and smelled the spaghetti sauce. The Penn State football pregame show blasted on the radio, the announcers running down the list of Nittany Lions.
“There’s Walter Winchell,” my cousin Trevor said when I sat down in the corner booth next to my other cousins, Paul and David. “Watch out, he might write a story about us.”
I told them the rumors and gossip we couldn’t print: which local officials are jerks or drunks, how bad the local heroin problem really is. I found out quickly that this is one of the greatest perks of a newsroom, what every reporter thrives on — access to the behind-the-scenes details, glimpses of true personalities, knowing everything before others read it in the newspaper.
“So what else they got you writing?” Paul asked.
“We’re doing a weekly feature on small towns,” I said.
“Think McVeytown will be in there?” Trevor asked. His question came out more as a statement than as a question thanks to his Pennsylvania accent.
“I’m the one writing it.” I smiled and looked toward the front of the restaurant. “And I can tell you the first place I’m going to start — right there with that man at the counter.”
Jimmy Cooper, the owner of the restaurant and perhaps the most famous man in McVeytown, stood behind the register and handed cash back to a customer. He wore a maroon polo shirt embroidered with his restaurant’s logo — a smiling, mustached man flipping a pizza. He chatted with the customer for a few moments and laughed.
“Don’t tell Jimmy about it,” I said. “It’s still a month off and I want it to be a surprise. You know he’ll get a kick out of it.”
When we finished eating, I excused myself and stepped outside for a cigarette.
“Stick that cigarette up your ass,” Jimmy said as he walked out of the restaurant’s back door. “It’ll do you more good.”
“It’s my job,” I said. “Stresses me out.”
“It’s Saturday and I’m the one who’s working. Besides, what the hell do you do that’s so important?”
“I’m writing for the paper now.”
He lowered his palm to his crotch and jerked his hand as though masturbating. He smiled, patted my shoulder, and walked toward his new Lexus parked on the street.
Jimmy Cooper reminded me of my father in a lot of ways. Everyone loved talking to him because he always had a joke or a smile. If someone in McVeytown dealt with a tragedy, like losing their house in a fire or struggling to pay medical bills for their sick child, Jimmy always sat a jar on the counter next to the cash register for donations. He had a way of making his customers and friends feel good about life. None of us knew it was all an act.
“You have any advice for me?” I ask Lorrie, an attempt to keep my mind off of what is coming. “I haven’t been to one of these yet.”
The most important thing, Lorrie says, is to stay out of the way of the fire crews. The last thing they want to deal with is a nosy reporter who could slow them down. Never park near fire hydrants, never drive over hoses, and never ask questions until they have started to put away their gear. Ask for the chief in command, she says, because most of the other guys will have simply done what they were ordered. And write down the names of all fire companies involved — it’s important to make sure all the crews are credited in the article.
Sweat beads down my forehead. My arms tremble. On the last straight stretch into Allensville, where cornfields and pastures flank the road, my speedometer creeps toward eighty. After we crest a hill outside town, red and blue strobe lights flash in quick bursts at the end of town. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers clog the road. I slow the car, pull into the parking lot of a Mennonite church, and grab my notepad off the floor. Lorrie is out of the car before I even kill the engine, the camera bags slung over her shoulders.
“Come on,” she says. She stops and waits for me, her hands on her waist. “Remember what I told you.”
“I can’t find my press pass.”
She laughs and holds up her black camera bags. “You think they’re going to ask any questions when they see these puppies? Besides, they all know me.”
I close the door and jog to catch up with her. The chilly breeze stings my face. Smoke, or rather its stale and blistered scent, wafts in the night air. We walk past hissing pink flares that burn bright as a welder’s torch. The churn of generators and the growl of idling fire engines fill what would otherwise be a quiet night in Allensville. The townspeople line their front yards, cross their arms, and watch the scene as if it were the annual Independence Day parade.
Lorrie and I walk toward the smoke. Hoses protrude from fire engines like tentacles; fine jets of mist spew from metal adapters that connect them. Water puddles on the narrow street and in the grass of front yards. We trail the fire hose along a broken sidewalk that takes us past more fire engines and ambulances that line a side street. Footsteps clump behind me. I turn just in time to sidestep a rushing fireman — his helmet on, face shield down — holding a chain saw. I stand transfixed by the constant twinkles of strobe lights and then the rush of still more firemen and a few paramedics. I fumble with my notebook, flip open to a clean page, and scribble the names of companies I see on the sides of the fire trucks: Belleville, Allensville, Fame, Brooklyn, Burnham, and the McVeytown Volunteer Fire Company. If I get their names wrong, I know that the prideful firefighters won’t soon forgive me.
The Monday after I ate at Jimmy’s Pizza with my cousins, I typed an obituary at my desk in the newsroom and monitored the police and fire calls that crackled from the scanner. Eight out of ten were advanced life-support calls for ambulances — chest pains, shortness of breath, or dizziness. In the three weeks since I started working for the paper, I had written maybe a half-dozen obits for suicides. Suicide seemed just as common as cancer in the area. Most were middle-aged men who had recently lost their jobs.
At around four in the afternoon I heard the dispatch for a gunshot victim. I turned up the volume to listen — guns usually meant violence, crime, front-page news. Instead, the dispatcher informed the ambulance crew en route to the scene that the victim, who had been found in the basement by his father, was clutching a shotgun and not breathing. The dispatchers never gave out names, only addresses, and the one I heard meant nothing to me.
“What’s going on?” a reporter sitting next to me asked.
“Suicide,” I said. “Another one.”
I turned down the volume and continued to write an obituary for someone who had overdosed on heroin.
It was late when I returned home that night, and I crept into my bedroom, careful not to wake my mother.
“Are you just now getting back?” she asked from across the hall. Her voice was sharp and clear. I could tell that she hadn’t been asleep.
“Yeah,” I said.
She was quiet for a moment. “Did you hear what happened?”
“What?” I stood in her doorway while a dozen awful things raced through my mind. My heart felt like it might crack through my ribs.
“You didn’t hear?” she asked. Her voice sounded mournful, as though she pitied me for what I was about to hear. “Jimmy Cooper shot himself. I thought you’d have heard it at work.”
Jimmy was the gunshot victim, the one in the basement, clutching a shotgun. I shuddered, hoping the dispatcher’s voice would get out of my head.
“I did hear it,” I said. “It was on the scanner. Is he okay?”
She waited and finally said, “Jay, he died.”
I remembered joking with Jimmy just a few days earlier. He had seemed like his usual self. An image flashed through my head — Jimmy hugging a shotgun, his toe on the trigger. For a moment, I think that none of this could have possibly happened — it didn’t make sense. Everyone loved Jimmy.
I called my cousin Trevor, but neither of us could really talk — the conversation was more
silence and sighs than anything else. When I hung up the phone, I felt as if the blood had been drained from my body.
That night, the darkness seemed to drag on forever — I snapped awake, lunging upright and gasping, as though a gunshot shattered the early morning silence. By the time the bruised light of dawn leaked through my curtains, I dreamed that Jimmy’s ghost stood in my bedroom. He wore a Pittsburgh Pirates T-shirt and gray gym shorts. He scratched at his brown mustache and laughed. When I woke the final time, full-blown daylight seeped into my bedroom. I lay still for a moment and decided that I couldn’t write this obit; I couldn’t write any story about Jimmy, not the one I’d planned and certainly not this one.
The once-white borders of two windows on the top floor of the house are now soot-black from the smoke. A roof juts over the front porch. Floodlights blast a hyperbright glow over the scene. It feels like something from a movie set. Firefighters climb a ladder onto the porch roof and spray bursts of water through two windows and onto whatever smolders inside. A hole about the size of a bathtub has burned through the roof and a weak swell of smoke escapes.
The family clusters under a looming oak tree ten yards from their damaged home. The father crosses his arms defiantly, as though already mapping a plan to repair the house; the mother holds a crying baby. They speak with a fireman who gestures with his hands and points at the house. A white helmet, just like the one my father wore, caps the man’s head, and I think immediately of my father’s old helmet that sits in a box in our basement. Every now and then I pull it out and trace my fingers over the reflective trim that reads CHIEF 80, and then I crown my head with the heavy helmet. I feel my father’s presence. It doesn’t matter that I can’t see the chief’s face — his tall, steady frame is enough to remind me of my father, and I wonder how many times he stood in that same position.
Lorrie weaves between firemen and steps over the now deflated hoses. When she snaps pictures of the cleanup operation, the bulb flashes a second of white light on the backs of firemen.