by Susan Perabo
“So where’s your father?” she asked casually, although Paul figured she had to know, what with Ben and Phil up in the cage hovering over the hole, him here at the truck, and his father nowhere in sight.
“He’s rescuing,” Paul said. He looked for a flicker in her eyes, and when there was none, he added, “In the basement.”
She looked up toward the decrepit house and he followed her gaze. It was then that he saw Ben sauntering down the lawn toward them, clearly struggling not to grin as he approached.
“Evenin’, Laura,” he said as he reached them. “Out for a walk, are you?”
“I brought Paul a sweater,” she said. She hugged herself for dramatic effect. “It’s getting chilly.”
“Ah . . .” He nodded. “That’s mighty thoughtful of you, coming all this way.” He patted the hood of the engine. “This, by the way, is a fire truck. It’s what Sonny drives when he’s working. You may not be familiar with —”
“You’re so funny,” she said. “Isn’t he a riot, Paul? Isn’t he the funniest man you’ve ever known?”
“He’s pretty funny,” Paul admitted. He liked it when Ben chided his mother; he was about the only one who could get away with it on a regular basis.
“I come with a message from the chief,” Ben said. “He told me to tell you he doesn’t want any nervous wives hanging around. He wants all nervous wives to go home.”
“You can tell the chief I’m not a nervous wife.”
“Hey, I told him that. I said, ‘You know our gal Laura, she never gets nervous. She’s a rock.’ But he said you’ll need to get along even so. You and the nervous kid too.”
“I’m not nervous,” Paul protested.
“Do me a favor,” Ben said to Laura. “You don’t have to go home, just don’t hang around the truck. You’re a little too close here. Fact is, I think you’re making Phil nervous.”
“Fine,” she said. “We’ll stand with the rest of . . . them. Will that work?”
“Laura Tucker, common gawker,” Ben said happily. “Yeah, that’ll work.”
The crowd parted for them as they ducked under the police tape. They were celebrities by association now, temporarily off-limits for polite conversation as long as Sonny remained underground, in potential danger; poignant glances of concern were as much as the onlookers were willing to chance. Laura shook her head in amazement as she looked at the house.
“How long has he been down there?”
“Not long. Half hour maybe.”
“Half an hour?” Her forehead wrinkled. What was this? A hint of concern? Paul realized he would have to remember these moments carefully, report them to his father later. Surely he would get a kick out of it, maybe even rub it in a bit the next time she breezily made her little cat joke as he dashed out the front door.
“He had some digging left to do,” Paul said. “To break through to where the kid is. Then he’s gotta make sure he’s okay and everything, then get a harness around him. Operation like that takes a while.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “How do you know all this? I thought you were just playing with your friends.”
“I did,” he said. “I was. I —”
There was a sudden flurry of activity in the cage. Ben and Phil must have felt a tug from inside, the signal, because they started hauling in the cable. After a moment Sonny’s heavy boots appeared above the top barrel, then his soiled knees, then his waist. Paul fully expected he’d be carrying the Finch kid, his strong arms wrapped around the goner’s chest, but then he saw his father’s arms were empty. Everyone in the crowd muttered, taking note of this unexpected development. Paul started forward, crouched to duck under the tape once more, but his mother put a firm grip on his shoulder. Sonny, squinting in the glare of the construction lights, had a few words with Phil and Ben while he was unharnessing himself, then left the cage and bolted for the drink table, where he slugged down a cup of water and poured another. Then he looked up, scanned the crowd; there were hundreds of bodies lined along the yellow tape, but his eyes moved directly to Laura and Paul as if they alone were real and everyone else were made of stone or smoke. Paul waved and Laura gave a slight nod. Sonny quickly walked over to where they stood.
“What’re you doing here?” He didn’t smile when he said it. His jacket was caked with dirt, his hair muddied and soaked with sweat.
“I brought Paul a sweater,” she said. “It was getting cold and —”
He waved away the rest of her answer. “Forget it. Just go on home. I won’t be long.”
“Is he dead?” Paul asked.
Sonny shook his head. “Just a little . . . a little stuck. I gotta grab a few things and then I’m gonna go back in and bring him on up.”
“You’re going back?” Paul asked. He felt the first real flutterings of fear in his heart, and blamed them on his mother. Before, without her, he’d been fine. Her presence here had somehow shifted the balance, turned his clock back a couple years.
Laura took the cup of water from Sonny’s hand, passed it to Paul. “Go get your father some water.”
Paul looked in the cup. It was then that he saw the rain, for the first time. Not rain, no. Just a delicate mist, almost imperceptible, barely upsetting the surface of his father’s water.
“It’s full,” he said.
“Paul,” she said sternly. “Go get your father some water.”
Still he hesitated. He felt he owed it to his father to stay. He knew that once they were alone she’d really let him have it. Never mind that it wasn’t any of her business. Never mind she didn’t know a hole in the ground from a hole in her head. She’d done the thing Paul had always feared, made it down those slippery bleachers and onto the field of play — but instead of doing it to her son she’d done it to her husband.
Then Ben was at his side, breathing heavy. He held a flat black pillow with a thick cord attached.
“Got the inflatable,” he said, handing it to Sonny. “If you’re gonna go you gotta go now. Starting to sprinkle. We don’t —”
“Listen, Ben,” Laura said. “Why doesn’t somebody else go? He already did his turn. It can’t be that difficult, right? Just tell him to let somebody else go.”
“I tried . . .” Ben said, and Sonny shot him a killer look. “And besides,” Ben added quickly, “the old boy’s gonna be fine. Piece of cake, picking cherries, a regular walk in the park. Just in and out, lickety-splickety.”
Laura shook her head. “Everybody wants to be a hero now that the cameras are on.” She turned to Sonny. “That’s it, isn’t it? If you let someone else go, you might not get your picture in the paper?”
“Jesus,” Sonny said. “Come on, honey . . .” He reached for her hand but she snatched it back, turned half away from him.
Sonny looked helplessly at Ben. Ben shrugged.
“Who is it?” Laura asked.
“Who’s what?”
“Who’s in there, in the basement? What’s his name?”
“Finch,” Sonny said. He spit a wad of gray mucus at his feet. “Ian Finch.”
Laura’s jaw dropped. “Ian Finch? You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re going through all this for Ian Finch?”
“You know him?” Ben asked.
She snorted. “Oh, I know him all right. He terrorized the ninth grade two years ago, on the rare occasions he wasn’t suspended. I can’t believe this is all about Ian Finch.”
“Maybe you’re right, babe,” Sonny snapped. “Maybe we should just leave him there, huh? Seeing as he’s such a lowlife.”
Paul clenched his toes inside his shoes. It was all downhill from here; his father didn’t get angry often, but once he’d passed that point, once he’d taken the big step down to her level of discourse, the bickering could go on for hours. Another minute and they’d be fighting about stuff that had happened ten years ago.
“Okay, kids,” Ben said, stepping between them. “Somebody’s going down to get this creep, and somebody’s going right now. You guys want to have a spa
t, why don’t you save it for later?”
“Ian Finch,” Laura said, apparently still unable to process this bit of news. “You’re sure? Ian Finch? Tall? Weasel-faced?”
“Can’t speak to his looks, sweetie,” Ben said. “Seeing he’s got half a house on top of him.”
Paul laughed. It was the wrong move; everyone, even Ben, looked at him like he’d just run off a string of the most vile obscenities.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Listen,” Sonny said to Laura. “I’m going now, no matter what you say. But I’d be happier about it if you’d say something nice to me. Could you do that? Could you say just one nice thing?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, still not meeting his gaze. The rain — and it was real rain now, Paul realized, not just mist — splashed against her shoulders. “I think you’ll just have to wait.”
Ben took hold of her forearm. “Laura,” he said flatly. “Say something nice to Sonny.”
She looked hard at Ben for several seconds, stared him down until she could stand it no longer. It was rare for Ben to put more than three serious words together, and she knew the reason for it. Paul knew she must, because even he knew. Ben would do anything for Sonny, lie for him, lay down his life for him. He’d even ask his wife to say something nice if he thought it might be the last words Sonny would ever hear from her.
She turned to Sonny. “You have great feet,” she said.
He smiled. “Thanks. You too.” He reached for her hand and this time she let him have it. He gave it a quick squeeze, tossed her a little wink as if they were in on some secret together. Then he and Ben walked back toward the house.
The rain was heavy now, blown diagonally by the rising winds. The onlookers, fair-weather voyeurs, piled into their cars but didn’t leave, and Paul had a spooky notion in the warm glare of the headlights that his father and Ben and the whole rescue effort were now a drive-in movie.
“He did it before,” Paul said, more to reassure himself than anyone else. “I saw him. It was easy.”
Back in his harness, the inflatable pillow and a small pry ax secured in his belt, Sonny got down on his belly and shimmied into the hole. Ben looked down at Laura and Paul and gave the thumbs-up, smiled. The rain fell harder; the wind spun oak leaves around the yard.
“He’ll be fine,” Laura murmured.
“Lickety-splickety,” Paul said, with renewed certainty. His father was, after all, his father, a man who always got what he wanted, a man whom fortune had smiled upon again and again. Bread cast upon the waters and all that; Sonny Tucker put out goodness and goodness came rolling back to him in every imaginable way. Even when plans went seemingly awry — the death of Captain Sam, for instance — his father always wound up on top. He had wanted to be a fireman, hadn’t he? And Captain Sam’s death, as grim as it might have been, had removed the obstacle, had handed Sonny the life he wanted: the dream job, the dream girl, a town that worshiped him . . .
The sound Paul heard then was the sound of a creaky stair. A big stair, to be sure, but otherwise a familiar sound, a safe sound, the sound of his mother descending the basement stairs with a basket of laundry. But the sound didn’t stop. It got louder, more emphatic, rose to a screech. Instinctively, Paul pressed an ear to his shoulder. Then a cable snapped with a wicked crack, slapped the sky like a giant bullwhip, and the east wall of the house buckled inward. Ben and Phil leapt out of the cage, stumbled across the pile of debris and onto the lawn just as the east wall came down and flattened the dog kennel as if it were made of paper clips.
“Wait,” Laura said softly. “Wait . . .” She took one step forward, then stopped as the west wall crumpled in on itself, sending a huge plume of concrete and roof shingle dust billowing into the air. Then everything was very still, the only sound the splatter of rain on the cars behind them. The dust settled in the silence. The hole Sonny had just gone down had disappeared under the house.
Stupid, what he thought of. Stupid, Paul told himself when that first long moment had passed. How stupid to think suddenly of last summer, the sparkle of Beaver Pond in the afternoon sun, the dogs paddling madly in pursuit of frantic ducks, he and his father and mother standing on the shore, all of them sharing fat red grapes from a baggie and skimming smooth stones across the surface of the water, the water shimmering like a blade, the suck of the mud under his shoes, the burst of sweet juice in his mouth, the day so clear his father said if you looked west and squinted that maybe, just maybe, you could see all the way to —
Car doors slammed. Flashbulbs popped. Radios crackled. Little kids squealed. Everyone was shouting at once. Firefighters descended onto the rubble like an army of ants.
Laura sat down on the ground with a dull squish, then reached up for Paul’s hand, gently pulled him down on the wet grass beside her.
“Are you tired, honey?” she asked softly. It was a bizarre question, and he could think of no suitable answer. “You want to lie down?” she asked. “You want to put your head in my lap and close your eyes for a little while?”
“He’s probably okay,” Paul said. He didn’t know where this came from, didn’t remember even thinking the words before he heard them come from his lips. Looking at the scene that lay before him, he knew this simple word okay was probably the biggest lie he’d ever told, ever would tell. His mother said nothing. Her hand in his was cool and wet and limp. Rain dripped from the ends of his hair and under his collar and trickled down his bare back like tiny, cold bugs.
Mrs. Vegley, who taught eighth-grade English at Casey Junior, approached them cautiously and offered Laura an umbrella.
“Want to sit in our car?” She forced a tight-lipped smile.
“No,” Laura said. “We’ll stay here.” She set the umbrella in her lap.
His father was dead. Paul licked the rain from his lips. Well, then: his father. His father. His father was dead. His father. Was dead. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around this, not enough to feel any of the things he suspected he should be feeling at such a moment. All he could see was this: hundreds of firemen in uniform standing along the sidewalk outside the Presbyterian church, standing like statues in two long solemn lines as his father’s casket is carried between them. Six men carry the coffin. Six men, including Ben Griffin (he does not look sad, only furious) and Black Phil, whose face betrays the memory of another funeral, cruelly similar to this one, fourteen years before. And there he is himself, following the coffin, strangled by his poorly knotted tie. His mother is beside him, wearing a navy blue dress because she does not own a black one and she refuses to buy a new outfit to wear to her husband’s funeral as if it were an occasion worth shopping for. Then they are in an impossibly long car with darkened windows. The trip to the cemetery seems to take forever, because his mother is a wall of terrible, impenetrable silence. She has shed no tears but speaks only in whispers if she speaks at all. At Pine Grove Cemetery, his father is lowered into the ground, beside Captain Sam and Gramaw Tucker. Someone behind him is weeping — the wife of another fireman? a friend from childhood? — but Paul will not turn to look, to acknowledge.
This was as far as he could get. After this, there was home, and he could not go there yet, not even in his mind.
He sensed movement and looked up. Ben was marching down the lawn. He was carrying his helmet and averting his eyes so as to focus at a spot over their shoulders, looked for all the world like a military officer sent to deliver the terrible but expected news. When he reached the spot where they sat he slowly crouched down in the grass in front of them, took Laura’s hand in both of his.
“We’re bringing in heavy equipment,” he said. “Gonna start digging again. We’re going to find him, Laura.”
“Of course,” she said, nodding.
“And he’s gonna be fine.”
“Ben,” she said gently, as if he were the widow, “he’s dead.”
Ben shook his head vehemently. “Uh-uh. Don’t do that. You think that’s what he’d want right now? The two of you up
here giving up on him? You think that’s what he’d —”
“He doesn’t want anything anymore,” Laura said quietly.
Paul started shaking. Part of it was the cold and the wet, but part of it was that, no matter how he tried, he just couldn’t be like his mother. He was not yet old enough to have developed such brilliant defense mechanisms. She could shut out the pain by being blunt, by tossing out news of his father’s death with the clarity and certainty of a seasoned anchorwoman. But Paul was starting to feel it — he doesn’t want anything anymore . . . the long lines of firemen, like statues — and he shuddered in the downpour.
Ben took off his black jacket and set it around Paul’s shoulders. “I wanna get you two someplace dry,” he said. “I’ll take you up to sit in the ambulance. It’s warm in the back there. I’ll bring you some coffee and —”
“I’m going to stay here,” Laura announced. She did, indeed, look rooted to the lawn, and Paul imagined she could sit in this very spot through a thousand sunsets, that he might have to travel in the long black car alone.
“Laura,” Ben said carefully, as if he were talking to a child. “Think about Paul now. Paul’s cold. Paul doesn’t need to be sitting out in this rain. But you and Paul should be together, so I want the two of you to come with me and sit in the ambulance. It’s warm there. And it’s dry, at least.”
He took Laura’s arm firmly, pulled her to her feet. As Paul stood he turned back to the pasture behind them. It was a haunted place now, a graveyard, headstone cars and trucks with headlights burning, hundreds of silent and still figures with long coats and tall umbrellas, standing in the rain.
“Come on,” Ben said.
They sloshed up the lawn toward the ambulance.
• • •
In years that followed, Paul would have dreams of that night that were more vivid than the reality. Beginning the moment the house shuddered and fell, the world seemed covered in a murky film. In part it was the strange combination of bad weather and artificial light; the glare from the headlights and construction lights and TV cameras gave a surreal sparkle to the rain; it was like glitter falling, some grotesque celebration. But more than that it was the sense of it being over without it being over. Surely his father was dead. Surely he had died instantly, been crushed, flattened, shattered. But what if he hadn’t?