by Jay Varner
“Teena and I started one for him when he was born,” my dad said.
Brad pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. My heart thumped — I only saw that kind of money at Christmastime.
“I’m going to give this to your father,” Brad said. “And he’s going to put it into your savings account for you. One day, you’ll use that money for college. It’ll mean more to you then than it will now.”
“Thanks, Brad,” I said. I appreciated what he had done, though the twenty dollars would have been nice to have right then. I could have bought a new tape player to listen to my music on.
My father smiled and patted Brad’s arm. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Anything for your boy.”
My father’s friends always went out of their way to say hello to me. At school, a few of the firemen visited classrooms each fall and handed out smoke alarms. They stood in front of the class, dressed in their bunker boots, and talked about fire safety.
“Make sure your family has an escape plan,” one of the firemen, Burt Drusky, said. “And as you leave, make sure you feel every door. See if it’s hot. What’s it mean if the door is hot?”
I raised my hand.
Burt smiled and his cheeks reddened, matching his hair and beard. My father and I had just seen him at the store in McVeytown.
I waved my hand in the air, impatient.
“Okay, Jay, you might be cheating here, but what’s it mean?”
“That there’s a fire behind the door,” I said. “If you open it, the flames could explode because of the fresh oxygen.”
Some of the other kids raised their eyebrows, impressed — the fireman had not only known my name, but I had answered the question correctly. I knew that for the rest of the day my classmates would ask me about this. Times like that made me the most popular kid in school. No one ever picked on me. I wondered if that was because everyone knew who my father was.
On the bus rides to school, I pretended that I was the fire chief while my friend Michael was an EMT. We talked into our fists as though they were radios. I drove the fire truck over roads that had been washed out by floods, maneuvered around cattle that wandered into our path, and passed cars on the highway. At the end, whenever Michael had to get off the bus, we always managed to put out our imaginary fire or rescue someone trapped in a crashed car.
Once, after lunch, my class watched a convoy of screaming fire trucks and ambulances speed past the school. Everyone ran to the window to marvel at the scene — maybe we could see smoke.
“What’s going on?” a friend asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Must not be too bad. They only dispatched one company. I’ll ask my dad tonight. He’ll know.”
If something happened in Mifflin County, my dad always found out about it. That meant I could tell my friends and even teachers about what happened at car accidents or how a fire started. I could let them believe that my father and I were just like any other father and son — we talked, we spent time together, he took me fishing. I don’t think my father had been aware of how I parroted everything he told me. However, he found out once after I repeated something I shouldn’t have.
In first grade, another classmate’s uncle drove into the back of a garbage truck while drunk. I heard my father talking about the accident on the telephone.
“One of the worst I’ve seen,” my father said. “He hit so hard that when we finally pulled him out, we saw that it’d knocked his shoes off. Killed him lickity-split.”
And this is what I told my classmate during recess. That evening his mother called my house. Afterward, my parents sat me down in the kitchen and asked if I had said those things. I explained that I heard my father say all of this, that I didn’t realize it was such a big deal.
“You can’t just tell someone that,” my mother said. “That was his uncle who died. They’re very upset right now.”
My father had been quiet during most of the talk. His deep green eyes focused on me. “Don’t ever tell people what you hear in this house,” he finally said. He then stood and left the room. But I still reported what I’d heard. If someone had been killed, I just made sure that any of the friends I told weren’t related to the dead.
“Your dad sounds so cool,” my friends at school would say. “It must be so exciting to have a dad that’s the fire chief.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. I tried to adopt a voice of confidence, as if I knew all about car accidents and fires, which my friends thought sounded exciting. In fact, my dad seemed a fleeting image of the seemingly ideal fathers my friends talked about. But that was something I never told anyone.
One summer we drove past the home of one of my friends from school. He was playing catch with his father in the front yard.
“There’s Ben Oswald,” I said. “We should get gloves like Ben and his dad have. We could play catch sometimes.” Once or twice a year my dad and I played Wiffle ball together, a thrill in itself, but I wanted the real thing — leather glove, hardball, wooden bat.
“That sounds like fun,” he said. “We should do that.” He never spoke of it again.
The next summer, he bought himself a new Rawlings glove for the fire company’s twilight softball team. On Sundays, he left for an afternoon of practice and then a game against one of the other fire departments from Mifflin County. After their first game, he returned home sore and smiling, telling us how he had hit a double down the first-base line.
“You could practice with me in the evenings,” I told him. “We could play catch or I could hit balls to you.”
“We could,” he said. “But you know, I’m usually pretty tired after work, kiddo.”
“But you’re not too tired to go to the firehouse.”
He laughed, as if what I just said was ridiculous. “I have to stop at the firehouse. It’s my job.”
Ten
As my school bus crowned the hill before our house one afternoon, plumes of white smoke lifted into the crisp mid-September sky. My heart thumped in fear — Lucky is back, I thought, burning more mattresses or trash. But then I saw fire trucks parked on our neighbor’s lawn, their strobe lights rolling. Flames tongued through a hole in the roof and licked the tops of window frames. When the school bus hissed to a stop, I ran across the road and toward our trailer. My mother waited on the tiny front porch.
“What happened?” I asked. “Is Dad there?”
“Not yet,” my mother said. “The fire company just got there a few minutes ago. I bet your dad left work early to come to this.”
We walked across the small field of alfalfa separating our trailer from Bill and Megan Grassmeyer’s house. Firemen sprayed water on the upstairs corner of the house where flames had burned just a few minutes before. A small crowd of neighbors, including Alma Peicht, stood about twenty yards from the house and watched.
“Teena, can you believe this?” Alma asked. “I looked out the window and saw the smoke.”
“Thank goodness nobody was home,” my mother said.
McVeytown’s tanker and engine truck idled in the driveway. An ambulance with two EMTs sat in the yard next to the trucks. Firemen rushed past us carrying a ladder, running faster than any of the ones I had watched on television. Tires squealed behind us and it seemed the whole crowd turned in unison. My dad jumped out of his pickup, leaving the door wide open. He yanked his spare turn-out coat from the box on the bed of his truck.
“There’s Dad,” I said. “He’ll get this under control.” Under control — that’s how I had heard him talk about fires to his friends.
He already wore the spare set of bunker pants and boots. He threaded his arms through the red suspenders on his pants, shrugged on the heavy black coat, and then tucked his white helmet under his arm. As he walked toward the tanker truck, he snagged the coat’s hooks through the D rings across his chest and then patted down the overlapping Velcro. While he talked with two other firemen, another vehicle screeched to a halt.
“Megan’s father is here,
” Alma said. “Must have heard about it.”
Rich Baumgardner owned Rich’s Cars, a used-car dealership a half mile outside of McVeytown. Throughout the year, the same dozen or so trucks and sedans sat in his lot, their windows painted with prices everyone knew were too expensive. Rich ran from his car, his short legs pumping hard.
“Are they in there?” he yelled. He scratched at his short white hair and pointed at the house. “Are those kids in there?”
“Nobody was home,” Alma said.
Another fireman helped my dad shrug on a heavy air tank. He had explained to me how it worked, and I loved that the acronym for self-contained breathing apparatus was SCBA, or scuba, just like the divers in the ocean. He buckled a strap for the unit around his waist and walked toward the house. The mask dangled over his chest.
Rich unbuttoned his polo shirt and breathed as though he were about to hyperventilate. He looked up at the burning roof and walked toward the house. Someone in the crowd asked what he thought that he was doing.
“There’s Christmas presents up there,” Rich said. His face looked red and the veins on his forehead bulged. He pointed at the house again. “Bill and Megan bought them kids Christmas presents already.” He turned and almost walked into my father.
My dad pressed an open hand against Rich’s chest. “Where are the presents?”
“Upstairs,” Rich said. “The big bedroom. Just get out of my way, I’ll get them.”
“You go in there and you’ll be arrested,” my dad said.
“It’s my daughter’s house, Denton,” Rich screamed. He stood on his toes and leaned into my father’s face. “I want those kids’ presents and they can’t arrest me for that.”
“Interfering with an emergency call, keeping us from doing our job, putting yourself and maybe firemen at risk.” My dad cocked his head and leaned forward. “You better believe you can get arrested for that.”
My father pulled a hood from a pocket on his jacket and cloaked his head. He slid the air mask over his face. He then capped his head with his white helmet and buckled the chin-strap. He pointed at Rich and said, “Stay here.”
My dad turned and jogged toward the burning home. He disappeared through the smoke that rolled out the front door, toward the pops and cracks of flames from inside. The crowd hushed. More sirens wailed in the distance, probably on their way from other fire companies in Mount Union or Strodes Mills.
I looked up at my mother; she held a hand over her mouth, eyes closed, praying. My heart felt like it rattled against my ribs and then slid down into my stomach. For me, it wasn’t fear but pride — I’d never seen my father in action. A few minutes later, his white helmet emerged through the blackness as he ran with his head down as though rushing for a touchdown. Instead of a football, he cradled boxes covered in shiny, festive wrapping paper. The small crowd applauded. Alma patted my shoulder.
“That’s just like your dad,” she said. “Always putting others first.”
Alma smiled down at me — she had meant it as a compliment to my father’s devotion to helping the town. But my mother thought that this was exactly my dad’s problem.
He didn’t come home until well after dark that night. I lay awake in bed, listening for his rumbling engine, the screeching brakes, the slam of his truck door, and then his stomping boots on the porch steps. He stepped into the hallway, softly latched the door, and crept past my closed bedroom door.
“Where were you?” my mother asked. She sounded panicked, speaking quickly, but the words came out with force. The walls of the trailer were thin and made of heavy-duty cardboard. When they fought, I usually heard everything. “It’s past eleven.”
“Well, we were up at Bill and Megan’s for a while,” he said. I heard him ease onto one of the small, vinyl-covered chairs at the kitchen table. “I went to the station to clean up. Had to type up the report too. Figured I’d just do it there. Looks like Megan left the stove on by accident. ’Course we won’t know for sure until the fire marshal looks at it tomorrow.”
No one said anything for a few moments. I imagined that my mother stood against the kitchen counter, her arms folded over her chest, staring at my father. He probably fingered through the mail on the table.
“Jay in bed?” he asked. “I’m starving. What’d you guys eat? Save me anything?” He sounded as if this were just like any other night.
“What kind of example do you think you set for your son today?” my mother asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You pull in to that fire like some idiot,” she said. Though the walls muffled the sound, I heard the anger in her voice. “Squealing your tires, jumping out of your truck.”
“Well, I hate to tell you, but that’s what you do at a fire,” he said flatly. “And it was Bill and Megan. Did you expect me to just mosey on over to the fire truck?”
“No one was home,” she said. “You knew that. The other firemen must’ve told you that. But you just had to put on a show.”
“A show?” His voice rose. He probably sat at the table, staring at the tablecloth like the night he told us about the doublewide trailer.
“You put on a show for the crowd,” she continued. “You wanted to look good.”
I heard a thump — his hand slamming the table. “I didn’t want Rich Baumgardner running in there, if that’s what you mean. You know, we had to take him to the hospital after you and Jay left. He couldn’t breathe. He thought he was having a heart attack. He was really sick.”
“It’s no wonder,” she said. “You both acted like a bunch of nuts. You ran into a house to rescue presents?”
“To help our neighbors. Wouldn’t you want them to do that for us?”
“If we were trapped and burning alive, I hope they’d save us. But do you honestly think that they would? Half the time Megan doesn’t even look at me when I drive past. And when she does talk to me, it’s to remind me how much better they have it.”
“Well, our house didn’t burn today,” my father said. “I’d say we have it better right now. Besides, do unto others as you wish for them to do unto you, right? That means something around here. They still have at least part of a house rather than nothing at all.”
After a few moments of silence, my mother softly said, “Denton, you ran into a house to save Christmas presents. Not people. Gifts.”
“And those kids will have some presents at Christmas now,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like to lose all your toys when you’re a kid? I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”
“All you think about is other people.”
“What about the new house? I did that for us, for you and Jay.”
“And you’re going to drive us into the hole to do it,” she said. “We’re going to be paying off the bank loan for years. I didn’t even want it.”
“What’d I tell you?” The chair creaked when he stood. “We’re getting that house. That’s all there is to it.” He walked past my door and to the bathroom for a shower. Neither of them spoke the rest of the night.
It hadn’t always been like this. When either of them told me stories of when they first met and began dating, I sensed that my mother’s resistance to the fire company had not been there initially but had grown over the years. He told her on their first date that he was a fireman and she had assumed that it was a hobby, not a love she would have to compete against.
When they met, after high school, my dad worked at a milk-bottling plant. He lived in an apartment in Lewistown with his parents then, but made the twenty-minute drive to McVeytown at least once a day to visit the firehouse. One of the dispatchers at the firehouse told my father about a young woman named Teena Mattern who lived outside of McVeytown. Her mother cared for a few elderly folks — no one too old or sick, just people who wanted home-cooked meals and freshly washed clothes. My dad showed up at the Mattern’s house one Saturday afternoon in his old blue Buick. He knew the area well — Little Brick Road: my father had grown up in a house just one hundred yards away. And
my dad immediately recognized the Mattern’s home — Lucky had built it in the mid-1960s.
My father knocked on the door that day and presented my grandmother with window decals.
“Just passing through here and I heard that you took care of a few older folks,” he said. “Figured I’d drop off these stickers. They’re fluorescent orange. If you place them on the outside of bedroom windows, I can direct firefighters to search for occupants.”
My grandmother invited him inside for some sweet tea and that’s when he first saw my mother. She was young, just a few years out of high school, and working at a factory assembling airplane parts. Brown hair fell past her narrow shoulders.
“I never forgot her hair that day,” he told me once. “Or her smile. The three of us talked for a while, then your mother walked me outside to my car. That’s when I asked her out on a date.”
“What’d you say to her?” I asked.
“Well, I just asked her. Nothing fancy about it. ’Course I was nervous she’d say no.”
My parents went on their first date in September of 1978 — a meal at the firehouse. Since the company was made up of volunteers, the women’s auxiliary — firemen’s wives, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers — often cooked dinners and sold tickets to the public. The chicken and waffles brunch, buffet breakfasts, and holiday roasts raised money for equipment at the firehouse.
“It was a little strange for a first date,” my mother once said. “But when I got to know your father, I couldn’t think of anywhere else he’d have taken me.”
She said my dad was funny and handsome. A few boys had taken her out on dates during high school, but my father was the first man she had ever loved. They continued dating, and by February, they were engaged. That spring, they eloped to Winchester, Virginia, and were married by the justice of the peace. After returning home, they moved into the trailer together. A few days later, my dad drove to Harrisburg — the city still in a panic after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant — and bought a Dalmatian puppy. He always joked that it was their first child.