The Broken Places

by Susan Perabo

  “Think it’ll be on TV?” Paul asked.

  “Hell, yeah,” Ben said. “Phil’s been talking to cameras all morning, probably already called home to set the VCR.”

  “You should go now, quarterback,” Sonny said. He touched the seat of Paul’s bike. “Before your mom starts —”

  Then the booming voice —

  “Tucker! Griffin!”

  — came from across the lawn. Black Phil was standing beside Casey Engine 14 with two grungy teenage boys. Paul recognized them from downtown, where they and their grungy friends — a handful of creepy teenagers who wore trench coats and heavy black boots — hung out in the abandoned lot behind the Hess gas station. They were the closest thing Casey had to a gang; mostly they just smoked cigarettes and leveled malevolent glares at passersby, but occasionally they’d knock a kid off his bike, shout lewdly at women, pick fights with jocks or black kids. One day, when Paul was six or seven, he and his mother were driving past the abandoned lot and his mother had shaken her head in disgust and said, “See those boys over there? They’re goners, every one of them.” From that point on Paul had always thought of them by that name: The Goners. It wasn’t until a couple years later that he discovered the title was his mother’s own, apparently drawn from a dozen years of teaching ninth-grade algebra at Casey High, and that not everyone referred to them that way. But the name had stuck in his mind.

  “What rock they crawl out from under?” Ben asked.

  Sonny shrugged. “Let’s go find out.”

  They walked off without saying goodbye. Paul threw a leg over his bike and turned it around, started toward the driveway. He reached the crest and was about to begin his coast toward the road below when he heard voices behind him rise in expectation. He turned back and saw that the small group beside the fire truck had dispersed, that his father and Ben had put on their helmets and were walking across the lawn toward the house. They didn’t look in any particular hurry, but even so all the gawkers were struggling for a better view, cameras at the ready. Paul considered — stay or go? His mother would be starting to wonder, perhaps even to suspect that he’d come out here to join in the unseemly gawking, would be all frowns and furrows when he arrived home. But so what? No, really . . . so what? He wasn’t smoking dope, for Christsakes. He wasn’t busting windows or stealing lawn ornaments or harassing girls.

  He turned his bike around.

  “What’s up?” a newsman yelled at Sonny and Ben, as Paul squeezed in through the crowd to the line of reporters who were pressed against the tape. Sonny turned and waved, smiled the broad, toothy smile that Paul knew was usually saved for kindergarten classes who toured the station. Clearly, something was wrong. To the untrained eye his father’s gait might have looked casual, but Paul noticed tension in the backs of the thighs, a stiffness in the upper back; this was the way his father walked when someone was in trouble, when one of the dogs had chewed up the mail, when a fire hose was stowed carelessly. Both Sonny and Ben had their chins tucked toward their chests; they were talking, intently, but they didn’t want anyone to know this. Paul felt his heart quicken; the goners had told them something that had sparked renewed interest in the house.

  “You getting all this?” a lady reporter beside Paul said to her cameraman. He was standing directly behind her, the lens of the camera bobbing above her shoulder like a giant horsefly. Paul recognized the woman — she was tiny, no bigger than the girls in his class — from the eleven o’clock news, one of the Harrisburg stations. “This might be something.”

  “Maybe there’s gas after all,” the cameraman said. “Maybe they’re smellin’.”

  And they did look like they were smelling. At the edge of what had once been the front porch and was now the edge of the pile of debris, Sonny and Ben got down on their hands and knees. Paul could feel the heat of bodies pressing in behind him.

  “What’re they doing?”

  “Looking for something, I guess.”

  “They’re smellin’,” the cameraman said knowingly. “They’re smellin’, all right.”

  Paul rolled his eyes: another know-it-all. That was about the last thing Casey needed, another guy with his head up his butt thinking he knew all about somebody else’s business. Paul watched his father remove his helmet, then bend down and lay the side of his head against a slab of concrete at the foot of the rubble. Ben followed suit. Neither man moved a muscle, and the crowd fell suddenly still, hundreds of breaths held in, the only sound the whir of video rolling.

  “They’re listening,” someone whispered.

  “What for?”

  “Maybe there’s somebody down there.”

  “Under that?”

  “No way. Be dead by now even if there was.”

  Then Sonny and Ben abruptly stood up. They exchanged a few words, stole a brief glance at the curious crowd, then started back down the lawn toward Black Phil, strolling casually, as if nothing but the weather occupied their minds.

  “False alarm,” someone said.

  “They’re bored,” someone else added. “Just lookin’ for something to look for, I bet.”

  Paul knew better. Before he could talk himself out of it, he laid his bike on the ground and ducked under the yellow tape, then crept around the back of Engine 14, out of sight from his father and Ben and Phil. He gently eased himself down on the wide silver bumper, his hands under his thighs to block the chill, and listened to the conversation.

  “ . . . a loser,” Ben was saying. “All the cops know him. Said he’s some kind of Nazi or something.”

  Paul recognized his father’s scoff. “Cops think every weird kid’s a Nazi these days.”

  “Maybe,” Ben said. “But not every weird kid has a swastika on his back.”

  “You kiddin’ me?”

  “I heard it too,” Phil said. “Sixteen years old and he’s got a damn swastika tattoo. All these little boys playin’ at Nazi.”

  Nazi? The image in Paul’s mind was from a video they’d seen at school the year before, black-and-white footage of tall men in steel helmets pulling dazed old women from sooty train cars, nudging them into long lines with the butts of machine guns, spitting into dirty snow.

  “He’s trouble,” Ben said. “Building pipe bombs down there, I bet. Or mixing drugs. Like that guy, that comedian, blew himself up. You guys remember that?”

  “His friends said they were just hanging out,” Phil said. “Drinking beer, listening to music.”

  Paul peered around the corner of the truck to get a good look at the crowd, see if he could catch sight of those boys, the two goners, but they had vanished. They were always doing that, disappearing and then reappearing — like shadows or ghosts — in store aisles and school halls and darkened alleyways.

  “You buying that?” Ben asked. “You think they’re gonna tell you they got a friggin’ bomb factory in the basement? I’ll bet the wad that asshole brought the house down on himself.”

  “He’d be dead,” Sonny said, “if a bomb blew in his face. He wouldn’t be making all that racket. I’m telling you, Phil, he’s banging like crazy on something down there. We’re lookin’ at a big dig.”

  “Backhoe?” Ben’s voice had gone up half an octave. Paul smiled; he knew the truth about Ben, about his dad, about all the firemen in Casey, maybe all the firemen in the world: most of them sat around day in and day out just hoping something like this would happen.

  “No way,” Sonny said. “No bulldozer, no backhoe, no heavy equipment, unless we want the rest of the house coming down on our heads. We get a construction crew out here ASAP to shore the standing walls, then we go at it with our hands. Saws, axes, air chisels. We set up a cage over the dig spot to protect our guys in case anything comes loose upstairs.”

  “You did the training course,” Phil said. “Last year?”

  “Two years ago,” Sonny said. “I know the drill. All we need is a passage big enough to fit one man through.”

  “I’m guessing that would be you,” Ben said.
/>   Paul leaned forward, peered at them around the corner of the truck. Ben and his father had their backs to him, and Phil wasn’t taking any notice, his eyes narrowed with plans and expectation.

  “I’m guessin’ it would,” Sonny answered humorlessly. “Since I took the course. Plus I’m the smallest. Listen, we know he’s alive, and he’s got enough strength to be making all that noise. No gas, no live wires, no water, probably plenty of air. We take our time and do it right, by the book, and then we go in and get him. Once we start digging we’ll find some voids along the way, I guarantee it. The kid’ll be out by nightfall.”

  Paul grinned. He remembered when his father had come to his fourth-grade class for a fire safety lecture, how he’d held all the kids spellbound, read them the riot act about lighter fluid, paint thinner, and aerosol cans so that even the most ill-mannered boys listened intently, mouths agape. These were the times he admired his father most — no hesitation, no doubt, and only a single viable option: his, the right one. At home, his mother always made the calls, overrode his father’s decisions about sleepovers and vacations and meals and bedtime, often with no more than a word or a single well-placed expression. But out here, out in the real world, his father was boss.

  “Sounds good, Sonny,” Ben said. “I can only think of eight or nine hundred ways that plan could fuck up.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Yeah — call in some guys who know what they’re doing. No offense, but this ain’t a job for the Kittatinny County boys.”

  “I took the course,” Sonny said.

  “In a conference room, right?” Ben asked, smirking. “Watched a slide show or something while you’re drinking coffee and eating jelly doughnuts? I say we call the rescue response team in Pittsburgh, tell them —”

  “They’re two hours away!” Sonny interrupted. “And that’s if they leave right now, which they won’t. You want us to just sit around all afternoon waiting on ’em, looking like a bunch of assholes?”

  Ben shook his head. “This isn’t about how we look, Sonny. Those guys in Pittsburgh are experts. They do this stuff all the time.” He turned to Phil. “Think about it,” he said. Then he added, pointedly: “It’s your call, Phil.”

  But it wasn’t. Paul knew it wasn’t, and he knew damn well the three of them knew it too, though they stood there in the dusty drive pretending otherwise. Phil may have been the chief on paper, but when something this momentous lay in the balance it was going to be Sonny — the blood of Captain Sam coursing through his veins, thirty years at the station imprinted on his face and hands — who’d have the final say.

  Phil scratched his head and frowned thoughtfully. For a moment it looked to Paul like old Phil might actually make the decision on his own, might suck it up and pull rank. Then his eyes darted quickly to Sonny. “Wha’dya think?”

  “You know what I think,” Sonny said firmly. “I think we can do it ourselves. I know we can do it ourselves.”

  Phil nodded. “Then we do it ourselves. I’ll call the construction guys. We can have a crew here in fifteen, twenty at —” A broad grin spread across his face; his eyes had locked with Paul’s. Paul jerked his head back, but he knew he was too late.

  “Just like your daddy,” Phil shouted. “Come on out from there, pal.”

  Paul hopped down and sauntered around the corner of the truck, hands in his pockets. They were all staring at him. Phil and Ben were grinning, but his father looked mystified, as if Paul were a character in a movie he’d seen once, a long time ago, that had now inexplicably materialized in the real world.

  “Time was,” Phil said, “I’d be standing here talking to Captain Sam and your daddy’d be lurking around in the shadows just like you are now.” He and Ben laughed lightly, and Paul laughed too.

  “I thought I told you to go home,” Sonny said. He wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t, Paul recognized, anywhere in the vicinity of a laugh.

  “I’m not in the way.”

  “You are right now. ’Cause we’re standing here talking to you, wasting valuable time.”

  “Let him be, Sonny,” Phil said gently. “ ’Bout time he starts learning a few things. He’s just like you was at —”

  “He’s not like me,” Sonny snapped, his face and shoulders stiffening at once. “He’s got a mother at home.”

  Ben cleared his throat and looked away. Phil was silent for a moment, then shrugged. “No time for this talk,” he said. “I gotta get on the phone, then go face the newshounds. They’ll be shitting bricks when they hear about the Finch kid.”

  “Who’s the Finch kid?” Paul asked.

  “I’ll fill in the others,” Ben said, heading off to the congregation of firemen from neighboring towns.

  “Home,” Sonny told Paul when the other two were gone, a finger that might as well have belonged to the grim reaper pointing in the general direction of their house. “Right now.”

  Paul took a deep breath, didn’t move. He knew he was on shaky ground, but what Phil had said stirred him. He was like his father, deep down — Phil had said it, had seen something in him that wasn’t a coward. And right now, today, this very minute, with the sun high in the sky and the crisp fall air slipping up his shirtsleeves, he had his chance to prove it.

  “Paul . . .”

  “You really going down there, under the house?”

  Sonny put his hands on his hips, the last gesture before real trouble. “It’s gonna be a while before anybody goes down there. Right now you need to get your butt home. I don’t wanna have to deal with your mother getting —”

  “I wanna stay,” Paul said. “Phil’s right . . . it’s time I start learning. I’ll keep out of the way. I just want to see what you do.”

  “Paul, I said —” But then Sonny stopped, mid-demand. He was taken aback by the words; it was splashed all over his face, clear as bliss or sickness. Paul had never seen this particular expression before, and he wasn’t sure what it meant. Perhaps his father had seen himself in him, just for a moment, and then, too, seen Captain Sam in himself, in an even briefer moment. A breeze kicked up and ruffled his father’s blond hair, blew dust at their ankles. Still his father was silent.

  “Dad . . .”

  “All right already,” Sonny said irritably. “You can stay. But you’re not hanging around up here. I want you behind the tape with everybody else. I was gonna call your mom from the truck anyway; I’ll tell her you met up with some kids and came out here and you guys are throwing the football around. Now you keep out of the way, I mean it.”

  “I will,” Paul said, trying to muster a serious expression, trying desperately not to grin as he headed back toward the crowd. Thing was, when his mother said she meant it, he knew she meant it. But with his father it was different — everything was open to interpretation, open just wide enough to squeeze through. Somewhere beyond what his father said he wanted lay the things he really wanted. And those things, Paul knew, were out here, where the action was, among the cameras and the crowd and the crumbling house. So it was only right that he be here too.

  It took most of the afternoon to shore the standing walls to the rescue workers’ satisfaction. Paul spent the majority of that time playing Frisbee golf with several dozen of his schoolmates in the Neidermeyer pasture. His best friends Carson Diehl and Joe Bower were there, and Paul was able to restrain himself for only a few minutes before dropping the first hint (you guys ever seen a real rescue before?) that the day was about to take an exciting turn. When Carson and Joe badgered him for details he clammed up. Confidential information, he told them, and he could see the envy in their faces. He’d always gotten a lot of mileage from his father; he knew, and didn’t mind, that some of his popularity had to do with his heritage. Carson’s dad was a loan officer; Joe’s dad owned the shoe store. A lot of kids in his class had dads who worked in factories or on farms. Some of them didn’t even have dads. He knew how lucky he was: not just a dad, but a dad who kicked ass.

  His father replaced the cool that
his mother depleted. She was a worry-mom of the highest order, and this was the primary reason he had to lie to her so often, to protect them both from embarrassing overreactions, especially in public. He lied to her more about football than anything else, because he knew the rules: let on he might be hurt, and he could kiss his football career (Casey High, Penn State, Pittsburgh Steelers) goodbye. His mother could spot a scratch from fifty feet, saw a limp in every misstep. From August to November he wore clothes that hid bruises, tended his wounds carefully in the privacy of the shower. Stiffness was the only acceptable injury. Sometimes when he was sacked and went down hard he’d see her rise to her feet in the bleachers; once or twice she’d even made it down a few rows toward the field before he hurriedly got up, signaling to the sidelines (to her, really) that he was fine. The possibility that someday she might actually make it onto the field before he staggered to his feet was too horrifying to even consider.

  It was funny, though: for all her suffocating concern over the innumerable risks of Pony football, she had never shown a moment of trepidation at the thought of her husband charging into a burning building. “Sweetie, he’ll be fine,” she’d always told Paul when he was naive enough to actually share his fears with her. When other firemen’s wives voiced their apprehensions, Laura would wave her hand dismissively. “They spend half the day playing cards,” she’d say. Or: “What’s so scary about telling kindergartners to stop, drop, and roll?”

  What was her secret? Paul didn’t know, but he admired it, harbored great envy for this remarkable talent. Even before the factory fire, the swell of sirens had the power to turn his knees to ice, to fill his mind, if only for a moment, with the certainty that his father was speeding toward a fiery death. Usually — usually — he could quell the panic in a moment or two with deep breaths and practiced reason. But his mother, it seemed, didn’t even need a moment. “Kiss the kitty for me,” she would often say when Sonny was called away on an emergency (the old joke — the cat up a tree) but this old joke never brought a smile to his father’s lips. His sense of humor did not seem to extend to what he obviously saw as mockery; every time Laura shot one of her little arrows, made a lightly cutting remark about the lack of legitimate danger in the day-to-day affairs of a fireman, Paul noticed his father’s eyes drop to the floor, his jaw stiffen. Out of embarrassment? Or anger? Paul wasn’t sure — it was part of a language he didn’t understand.