The Broken Places

by Susan Perabo

  His father had once told him something he now could only imagine must have been a lie, a mistake, at least an exaggeration. The story was that after they were first married, Sonny would get reports from neighbors that Laura had been seen walking their dogs around town at all hours of the night and early morning while he was on duty. According to Sonny, it was the appearance of Paul in the world that had allowed Laura to finally sleep nights while he was at the station. Now Paul doubted this information. It was the neighbors who had said it, after all. Neighbors were always saying something.

  In the Neidermeyer pasture, Frisbee golf turned to Frisbee football, then — with all the girls finally bullied out of the game — to kill-the-man-with-the-Frisbee. Every so often, when he wasn’t being pursued by a pack of tacklers, Paul would steal a look at his father. While the other firemen paced the lawn impatiently, looking at their watches, frowning at the tedious work of the construction crew, Sonny stood alone off to the side of the house, his arms crossed loosely across his chest, his eyes closed as often as open, his breaths measured and calm. Paul thought he could even detect a faint smile on his father’s lips — not exactly a happy smile, but a contented smile, the smile of a man who was finally standing on the very spot he’d been heading toward his whole life.

  Following the death of Gramaw Tucker, from a cancer that spread and ravaged with mind-numbing speed, four-year-old Sonny had taken up permanent residence in Casey Station #1 with Captain Sam and the other firemen. He had his own cot in the sleeping quarters, ate and eventually cooked in the common kitchen, played Ping-Pong with the other firemen on the scarred and rickety table that still stood — barely — in the back room of the station house. In addition to Captain Sam, the county had employed seven other career firemen and Casey alone had a crew of nearly thirty volunteers. Before long Sonny had belonged to all of them and thus lost the name given to him by Gramaw Tucker — a name Paul had once seen on his father’s driver’s license and not recognized — and came to be known only as Sonny. Each man in the station played one part of the whole known as father: Black Phil taught him to make double-decker grilled cheese, Chris Elscot threw the football with him, Fred Randolph cut his hair, Jay Nichols helped him with his homework. And Captain Sam did what he had always done best: he oversaw.

  It was usually Chris Elscot or Black Phil who roused young Sonny from sleep, hurried him from his squeaky cot as the alarm screamed bloody murder in the middle of the night. Sometimes weeks would go by without a night call, then there’d be a stretch of three or four in a row (full moon, the guys would say) when Sonny’s dreams would be shattered first by the blast of sound ricocheting off the walls and then — before he was truly awake — thick fingers around his bicep, tugging him from under the covers.

  “Up and at ’em, kid . . .”

  On his feet, in his shoes, down the pole, blinking drowsy eyes in the glare of harsh light off chrome. As the men stepped into their turnout gear, he’d fumble his black jacket from its hook (Sonny, on a piece of duct tape, slapped to the wall beside the others’ names) and climb on board. And then the best part, the part that always woke him more completely than any sunrise: engines roaring, sirens wailing, they’d sail out of the station and into the night.

  But mostly, Paul knew, his father and the men who raised him had spent the majority of their time doing all the things normal families did. They ate big meals, played hearts and checkers, shot baskets in the drive, argued about whose turn it was to do the dishes. The TV was on twenty-four hours a day; Chris Elscot knew the twisted history of every character on Days of Our Lives, Black Phil was a Wheel of Fortune genius, and Fred Randolph howled at every episode of Gomer Pyle, no matter how many times he’d seen it before. Most of the time Captain Sam sat in his office filling out incident reports, a Marlboro burned to its quick pinched in the web between his index and middle finger. Sometimes Sonny would pull up a chair beside him, lay out his homework next to the incident reports, and set silently to his studies. Captain Sam would briefly look over, smile approvingly, and return to his work.

  According to Black Phil, by the time Sonny was in his early teens he was living the life of a fireman. Though he had gone through no formal training, he was second only to his father as the most trusted man on the force. He never entered a burning building (Captain Sam’s orders) but he did everything else expected of a seasoned volunteer — checked and cleaned equipment, laid lines from hydrant to pumper, sprayed debris from the scene of highway accidents. In his other world, away from the firehouse, he was an outsider. He lettered in football and track at Casey High, but had few close friends. His life, his home, his world, was the station.

  His father didn’t talk of these years much, but he didn’t need to. Everyone else in town knew the story, and Paul had pieced together the history of his father detail by detail, one scene — sometimes one frame — at a time. Bits of the story came from the parents and grandparents of his friends, but the bulk of it came from the firemen themselves, men who liked nothing better on a rainy afternoon than to sit around the station house one-upping each other with their dueling memories. For a time Paul had been fascinated by the tale, had gathered all the information he could, had even written an essay in fourth grade about his father’s unique upbringing that won honorable mention in a state contest. But in the last couple years he’d begun to lose interest in exploring the past, grown more concerned with the future — his own future, specifically — which seemed with each step toward manhood increasingly unrelated to his father’s past.

  By the time the shoring was complete, the Neidermeyer house resembled something a monkey would make if forced to take shop class, a motley mess of planks, steel bars, chains, and cables that lacked any aesthetic value but which, apparently, would keep the house from continuing its collapse. A 10 x 10 chain-link dog kennel (brought to the site by Cole Colson, owner of the local pet and livestock supply) was placed over the spot where Sonny and Ben had first heard the banging from the basement. Then the initial dig team — Ben, Sonny, and two other Casey firemen — began their work.

  Bored with Frisbee and antsy for a better view than his five feet afforded him, Paul discovered what he thought was the ideal vantage point, a limb of one of the oak trees that the police tape was wound around. He could see the beginnings of the hole clearly from his perch. At first his father and the others dug — or flung, more accurately — with their hands; the first foot or two of rubble was relatively simple, consisted mostly of small pieces of plaster, planks of wood, bits of the roof, items from the upstairs rooms that could be pitched out the swinging kennel door. Once they got past the first layer, the task became more difficult. Each man took a saw or pick and began to grind and chip away at the debris. The plan was to make a shaft large enough to slip in a makeshift tunnel of wooden barrels, to secure a safe passage, guard against the tunnel caving in on itself once it was complete.

  Darkness fell a little after five o’clock; floodlights borrowed from a nearby turnpike construction project were rigged up around the dog kennel. Powered by giant droning generators, the lights were powerful enough to cast the equivalent of sunlight over the dig spot plus a dim hint of dusk across the lawn and into the pasture. Sonny, straining to keep balance on the rubble despite the vibrations from the air chisel in his hands, called repeatedly for the Finch kid, but — from what Paul could see from the look on his father’s face, ghostly in the glare — he seemed to be getting no answer. Paul recalled his confident words from earlier — we’ll have him out by nightfall — and wondered if those words were ringing now in his father’s ears as well, drowning out the buzz of the chisel and the shrill scrape of the saw. But surely, just a few more minutes, a few more inches . . .

  “He’s toast,” the kid on the branch below Paul said. It was Alex Luckett, the son of one of the volunteer firemen. He was in eighth grade and stout as an ox; the branch dipped under his weight. “I’ll bet ya anything.”

  “Maybe he’s just passed out,” Paul said. But looking
at the house, he had to admit it was hard to imagine the Nazi as being anything but dead. He tried to get a picture of the goners in his mind, hoping to see the face that belonged to “the Finch kid,” but he found he could only picture them as a group, lurking behind the Hess Station, as indistinguishable from one another as a pack of wolves. So he gave this Finch a face, a sketch of a convenience store thief he’d seen on the news a few nights before, a black-and-white line drawing of a man whose features were so ordinary he could have been just about anybody. He put the face in the basement, imagined the penciled face in agony, the penciled mouth shouting for help, the penciled eyes wild with fear. And then the penciled face dead, almost peaceful, his lines thickening and blurring until the face was only a scribble.

  At six the second shift of diggers came on, and Sonny took a break, hobbled stiff-kneed to the water table and peeled apart an orange, stuffed it in his mouth. Paul scampered down from his perch on the tree and joined him.

  “Everybody thinks he’s dead,” Paul said.

  “He’s not,” Sonny said. He wet his hands under the watercooler and rubbed them gently together; even with his thick cowhide gloves, blisters puckered his palms — they were bright red and puffy, and Paul imagined late tonight, after all this was over, his mother would rub lotion into them and his father would smile through his wincing.

  “You heard anything?”

  “He’s just takin’ a rest,” Sonny said. “That’s all. You’d be taking a rest too if you’d been kickin’ for eight hours.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Paul said.

  His father nodded, wiped juice from his chin with the heel of his hand. “Then you’re thinking like a fireman.” He tossed his orange peel on the ground. “Once you start believin’ a guy’s dead you don’t work quite so fast, lose a little bit of that urgency. That’s when you get into trouble.”

  As his father had predicted, the second dig team hit a void at six feet, a space of about thirty inches in what had once been the Neidermeyer kitchen. Two men carried a large wooden barrel — the ends cut off to form a tube — into the cage and twisted it into the hole, and then the digging became the task of one man at a time, a tedious operation of small picks and saws, all of it done upside down, blood rushing to the temples, dust in the eyes and mouth. An hour passed, then another. Crickets chirped, kids hollered. Paul sat in the tree, his lower back cramping, his eyelids heavy; the unrelenting dusk made him sleepy.

  “Tucker!”

  Paul could hear Black Phil’s voice even from his perch in the tree, and he slid clumsily down the trunk, ducked under the yellow tape and walked at a rapid clip toward the dog kennel, hoping to render himself more or less invisible by gliding across the lawn in the fluid and unself-conscious manner of a quarterback sneak. The crowd in the pasture had not dwindled; if anything, it had grown as expectation of a dramatic rescue — or the discovery of a mangled body — increased. A small group from the Baptist church had gathered in a circle and were reading Bible verses in grave tones, but most everyone else seemed more comfortable as onlookers than intercessors; instead of praying, they scrambled for a better view.

  Ben and Phil were fitting Sonny into his nylon harness. Paul stood on his tiptoes, his nose poking through the kennel fencing, and peered down the black hole. His father, he knew, was accustomed to tight spaces. He had heard the drill many times: as a fireman, you had to be prepared for any size and variety of traps, because you never knew when you might find yourself in one; at any moment during a rescue a roof could collapse, a floor give way, leaving you blind and disoriented, wedged under, inside, between. And then, despite the darkness and the heat and the walls crushing you, you had to be calm. And calm, Paul knew, was his father’s strong suit. It was not only his size that made him the best man for the job.

  Ben and Phil hooked metal clips on the harness at both the chest and thighs. Sonny jerked on the clips, did a couple deep knee bends, rolled his neck around for a few good cracks. He took a long, deep breath, then stood perfectly still for about ten seconds under the blinding lights, as if he were waiting for someone to snap his picture. It was then that he noticed Paul.

  “You’re like a bad penny,” he said.

  Ben socked him on the shoulder. “Talk like that’ll win you father-of-the-year for sure,” he said. “Kid just wants to wish you well.”

  “Yeah, good luck,” Paul said. Then, after brief consideration, he added the advice his father always added right before kickoff: “Don’t forget to have fun.”

  Sonny grinned. “Go sit in the truck or something, willya?”

  “I will,” Paul said.

  “Gotta pee before you go?” Ben asked. “It’s a long ride.”

  “Shut up and let’s do it,” Sonny said.

  Phil touched Sonny’s sleeve. “Your daddy’d be proud of you. He’ll be down there with you, you know.”

  “Hope not,” Ben said. “Ain’t room for both of ’em.”

  In the dark, in the wide and chilly cab of Engine 14, Paul thought of his grandfather. He’d heard the story of Captain Sam’s death so many times that he felt he’d been there himself. A quiet February night in Casey. A foot of snow on the ground. His father and mother — though they weren’t yet a father and mother, weren’t even a husband and wife — two hundred miles away in the safety of a warm dorm room. Maybe they were studying when the call came in to the station, lying on his mother’s bed with their elbows touching. Maybe, by the time Engine 14 arrived at the house on Dogwood Avenue, they had closed their books and put on some music — his mother’s REM, or his father’s Rolling Stones. Maybe they were making out as Sam stormed into the house to rescue a young boy whose parents believed was trapped upstairs, a boy who, as it happened, was already safe in a neighbor’s kitchen down the street.

  An hour later, after the blaze had been extinguished, Black Phil and Fred Randolph found their captain inside a closet in the master bedroom. He was sitting in a black puddle of his own skin, surrounded by dozens of melted shoes — their laces unlaced, their tongues pulled back. Apparently, Sam had been looking for the boy in the toes of his parents’ shoes while sucking his last poisoned breaths.

  Though he’d never known his grandfather, Paul had often imagined those final moments in the life of Captain Sam, this giant of a man prying apart shoe after shoe, disoriented in the thick black smoke, his tank of air depleted, half crazy, half dead, looking for a little boy he had to know, by that time, he was never going to find.

  Chapter Two Paul spat out the open window of the fire truck, kneaded the chill that crept over his kneecaps. His father had been in the hole for twenty minutes. Probably the leather straps of the harness were beginning to chafe the backs of his thighs, despite his heavy bunker pants. Probably his fingers were blistered, bent stiff in the shape of the narrow handle of the pry ax. Probably his feet were numb, his eyes beating from the blood settling in his head. Paul thought of Harry Houdini — same numb feet, same aching fingers, same clouded head — hanging bound ten stories above a crowd of skeptics, somehow having the wits and will to free himself from shackles designed to restrain the fiercest of men. Still, when you thought about it, Houdini had had it pretty easy; it was only himself he’d needed to free.

  “Paul?”

  He looked up, startled. His mother was standing outside the fire truck, a black sweater in her hand. She held it out to him sheepishly.

  “I thought you might need this.”

  He might have been fooled had she not looked so completely guilt-ridden, so riddled with shame. She had cracked, he thought. She had sat at home all day, telling herself as the afternoon wore on that everything was fine, busied herself with mundane tasks as the dinner hour passed, maybe — around nine o’clock — even prepared for bed. But then (unnerved by the quiet house? the rising winds?) her iron defense system had finally overloaded — perhaps for the first time ever, he thought — and she’d come out here with some lame-ass justification, this black turtleneck sweater, to check on he
r husband.

  “Thanks,” he said. He hopped out of the truck and slipped on the sweater.

  “Is that enough?” she asked. “I’ve got a coat in the car.”

  “This’ll do,” he said. “Kinda late to be out on a school night, isn’t it?”

  She adjusted his collar; rare was the day that she did not adjust some piece of clothing on him. “I was just going to say the same thing to you.”

  “I know,” he said. “I was trying to beat you to it.”

  She smiled. She was the prettiest teacher at Casey High, Paul knew, pretty not in the way of moms but in the way of models and cheerleaders, long blond hair that she always wore in a tight braid, narrow nose and lips, pale blue eyes that sparkled when she laughed — not the teacher laugh (too high, too forced, too jolly to be genuine) but the real laugh she saved for his father, and sometimes for him. Later, in high school, Paul would learn that his mother — that hair and that chin and those blue blue eyes — was the first full-blown sex fantasy of nearly every boy in Casey. Who could say how many of them might have become brilliant mathematicians had they only been able to snap out of their daze long enough to master elementary algebra in the ninth grade?