On Fire Read online

  Late that night I get back home and not just one kitty is gone but all three kitties are gone and the mama cat is walking around in the carport looking anxious. Where are they? I look up under the truck but they’re not up under there. LeAnne’s going to have a fit when she finds out they’re gone because she spends a lot of time playing with them on the couch and holding them up to her face and hugging them and all.

  I get back in the truck even though it’s three a.m. and I ride back over that way, the road deserted, decent people in bed asleep everywhere. I get back to within a quarter mile of where the flattened kitty is and there are two kitties huddled on the side of the road. I slam on the brakes and get out and they come to me when I squat down beside the ditch saying, Kitty kitty kitty, and I scoop them up and get back in the truck and put them on the seat and go on down the road. They’re crying loud, scared to death, walking around on the tops of the seats and behind my neck and over my shoulders as I turn around at the Rock Ridge Colored Church and then drive back by the flattened kitty, their brother maybe, or maybe their sister, and go home with them. Their mama meets them when I let them out of the truck.

  Later Shane wants to know where the yellow kitty is and I say I don’t know. He says, You sure, Dad? and I say, Sure I’m sure, and he says, You sure, Dad? and looks at me and I see that I’m not fooling him, because he’s a kid you can’t kid much, but I’m backing out of the driveway going somewhere and I just keep on backing and go on down the drive.

  Back in the old days, when we’re still furnishing fire protection for the county, we get a call one afternoon that a house is on fire near Taylor, a little community about ten miles south of town. The bad thing about running fire service for the county out of the city is the time involved in traveling to a structure that’s on fire. Time is of essence in stopping a fire, and that’s why we always try to get there as fast as we can, within the margins of safety. Driving to anything in the county is hazardous because you’re traveling at a higher rate of speed, often on two-lane blacktop roads, sometimes dirt roads, sometimes mud roads. Sometimes you have to take your pumper across wooden bridges that don’t look strong enough to hold it up.

  This house is up some pig trail, and once we leave the blacktop, the way is directed by people standing along the little drive pointing their fingers. It’s early in my career and I don’t know much, but I know when we roll up that there’s no saving this house. The entire structure is blazing from top to bottom, and it has started falling in. We pull the hoses off anyway, and start pumping out of our 750-gallon booster tank. Hot isn’t the word for it. This thing will burn your ass off even through your turnouts. We go up to it and start putting water on it, but this doesn’t even faze the flames. Nearly instantly, we notice a pretty bad thing: the 250 -gallon LP-gas tank that furnishes heat for the house has heated cherry red. It’s sitting less than twenty feet from the house, and if it blows we’ll all be burnt to death, blown to Kingdom Come, to Jesus or whoever’s waiting for us. There’s only one thing to do: put a stream of water on it. I get that job, and I kneel and turn to it, open the nozzle, and the water sizzles with a terrible ferocity when it hits it. But I’m being burned by the heat from the house at my back. I’ve never been hotter in my life. My hands are burning, my neck, my head, my back and legs and arms. Somebody shouts something, and suddenly a hose is turned on me. I’m putting a stream on the tank and they’re putting a stream on me. I stay where I am even though I don’t want to. I’m cooling the tank if the fire from the house doesn’t get me first. I’m drowning in the water and burning at the same time. I have to close my eyes and just endure it. It’s bad, but this is my job, and I can’t run from it, much as I’d like to. The only thing that consoles me is knowing that we’ll eventually run out of water and be forced to retreat.

  I don’t know how long it lasts. The red cherry glow on the tank starts to vanish. The house caves in with a great roar of flames. My partners put more water on that side of the house and finally they tell me I can move. I stand up and everybody looks at me and asks me if I’m all right. They can see what I can’t. They lead me away from the tank and they tell me to get that stuff off. They start unbuckling my coat fast and they pull it off me. They hold it up in front of me so that I can see what I’m wearing. The whole back of the coat is gone, nothing left but two hanging wings of charred black canvas with pockets. They tell me to take my helmet off and look at it. I do that and hold it in my hands. The top of it is bubbled up and blistered, melted.

  They just grin and shake their heads. I’m not grinning a whole lot.

  Cookout. The whole department. Fishing, drinking beer, water skiing, or boatriding anyway since it’s only March, out at Sardis Lake north of town. We’re going to cook a pig but first we have to kill the pig. Captain Louie and I, a lowly nozzleman, arrive at the pigpen for the execution at the designated time and look at the pig, who is pink and grunting in curiosity with his nose lifted as we stand outside the pen and study him. We’ve all been laying these plans for weeks. We’re going to haul our boats and our campers and our camping equipment and tents and Coleman stoves and barbecue grills out to the lake along with our sleeping bags and spend the whole damn weekend out there, sleeping under the stars, having a good time. The people who are on duty today will come out as soon as their shifts are over. It’s going to be really fine. But first we have to shoot this pig.

  Louie hands me a loaded Ruger .22, a nice little semiautomatic pistol. It’s heavy in my hand. The pig grunts and walks up to the wire of the pen. He seems friendly. If he were a dog he’d be wagging his tail.

  This pig’s not that big. He’s probably what’s commonly known as a shoat hog, a young boar that hasn’t had his nuts cut out with a sharp knife yet.

  All right, Brown, Louie says. Shoot the sumbitch right between the eyes. He’s standing there drawing hard on a cigarette, one hand on his hip, ready to get this over with so we can dress the pig. We’re in charge of getting the pig.

  I point the pistol at the pig. He’s looking all around, sniffing at the air. He thinks we’ve come to feed him something, maybe. I hold the sights right between his eyes—what if I shoot him in the eye?—but he weaves his head around and the gun waves around in my hand as I follow his head.

  He’s looking right at me, I say.

  Hold your head still, you son of a bitch, Louie says. But the pig keeps moving around, grunting, oinking, making the noises pigs do.

  I can’t do it, man, I say, and I lower the pistol.

  Gimme that damn gun, he says, and snatches the pistol away from me. In a blinding movement that doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility of aiming, he slips the safety and pops the pig dead square between the eyes. The pig screams and keels over, all four legs stiff, quivering on the ground, dead as a hammer.

  Captain Louie unloads the pistol and sticks it in his pocket and bends the wire of the pen down and straddles it, telling me to come on and help him, a little disgusted with me, I can tell.

  You ever steam-cleaned a hog? Louie says, as he cranks up the steam cleaner at his father-in-law’s combination wrecker yard/auto repair/used furniture store. You can buy fireworks here, too. The pig is lying across the tailgate of Louie’s GMC pickup, a little blood running down his nose. Louie explains that it ought to work, hell, all you do when you scald one at home is pour scalding water on him and scrape the hair off with a knife. You know this steam is as hot as scalding water, he says. It makes sense to me.

  Louie puts the steam to the hog and I pick up a knife and start scraping the hog, and sure enough, the hair starts coming off, softened by the steam. We’ll have this sumbitch slick as a baby’s ass in no time, he says. People stand watching us at our work.

  We pull into the back parking lot of the main fire station with the pig and everybody who’s on duty is out there waiting for us. The campout is going to start this afternoon but first we’ve got to gut the pig, clean the pig, get him ready for the fire we’re going to build under him. Everybody’s all
excited and wishing they weren’t on duty. It’s like a fever that’s consumed everybody. Springtime is coming and we want to be out with Nature. They’ll come out in the morning after they get off. The ones who are camping out tonight and are due on duty in the morning will come back in. It’s a campout in shifts, B-C, C-A, A-B, but everybody is included, wives, kids, everybody.

  We let the tailgate down and willing hands reach in for the pig as we start telling them how we steam-cleaned him. The pig is indeed pink and smooth as a baby’s butt. We carry the pig over to the back door of the fire station and lay him down as knives are pulled out of pockets.

  Rob is on duty and running the shift and everybody’s offering advice as to the gutting of the pig. Damn, I wish I wasn’t on duty, Rob says. He squats down beside the pig and pinches up one of the nipples on its belly.

  You’ve heard the expression, Useless as tits on a boar hog? he says.

  By the time we get the pig gutted and loaded back into the pickup, he’s told us about fifty times that he wishes he wasn’t on duty.

  Here we are. Out at the lake. Some people have already arrived. Barbecue grills have already been set up and fired up. Hillbilly is on the way with a couple of gallons of barbecue sauce that a friend of his who works for the food services department at Ole Miss has mixed up. There are plenty of shade trees, no leaves yet, true, but we’re camping right beside the lake.

  Damn, ain’t this fine? we all say. We have to have a conference about how to cook the pig. Some say bury it in coals. Some say cut it up and cook it on a grill. What we finally decide to do is dig a hole and fill it with burning wood, and build a spit to put the pig on, and turn him slowly over the fire while slathering him with barbecue sauce all night. It sounds like a good idea and we get to work, gathering wood, digging the hole, finding two forked trees to cut down to hold the spit. Some of us are already drinking beer. A lot of us, actually.

  I have to leave sometime to go get MA, who is pretty pregnant but still up for a good camping trip like this, and besides, all the other wives are coming, too.

  We dig, cut, pile wood, and Hillbilly arrives with the barbecue sauce. By now it’s afternoon and more people are coming in. It’s beginning to look like a parking lot, with all the vehicles and boats and campers. It’s going to be so damn fine.

  Late in the afternoon I get back with MA and we all put the pig on the spit, wire him to it with coat hangers, and we light the fire. Everybody agrees to take turns turning the pig all night and putting the sauce on him.

  Before long it starts getting dark. We’re having a hell of a good time. We cook hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken, even some rabbit. Captain Louie has a large rabbit-raising operation. This is several months before I get into the rabbit-raising business myself, from which I never fully recover, because you have to kill the rabbits just like you do pigs, but I won’t get into that yet.

  Word comes that Rob has called everybody in the department who’s off duty and has finally found somebody who’s agreed to work his shift for him tonight, and he’ll be out here shortly.

  Even Uncle Bunky has showed up. He has a snort behind his car once in a while, comes back to the fire.

  We’re squatting around the fire, talking, laughing. It’s wonderful. The pig looks great, dead and barbecue sauce all over his head. We’re using a little mop to slap the sauce on him and we’re turning him every once in a while. We know it’s going to take all night, but everybody’s willing to help. Everybody’s willing to give up some sleep for the common good, for the common barbecue.

  Rob arrives pretty soon with a case of Miller Lite. We squat around the fire talking. It’s colder than we expected. It’s pretty damned frigid as a matter of fact, and people are gathered around their campfires. I don’t spend much time with MA. I’m pretty much staying with this pig.

  Later in the night, lots of people have gone to sleep. MA is asleep. Most of the wives are asleep. Actually there are very few people up. Rob gets up once in a while to get another Lite.

  Hillbilly and I squat beside the fire, looking at each other and looking at the pig.

  Later, much later, maybe around two or three in the morning, Rob and Hillbilly and I are the only ones still up. Everybody else has crawled into their nice warm vans and campers and cars and trucks and gone to sleep. Rob stands up, drains his last Lite, and says, Throw the sumbitch in the lake or burn him up, I’m going to sleep. He disappears into the night and Hillbilly and I look at each other.

  For the rest of the night, freezing on one side and burning on the other, Hillbilly and I turn the pig and put the sauce on him, not saying much, just waiting for dawn, which rises about a week later, pale and cold across the lake. Captain Louie’s wife gets up, comes to the fire, yawns, puts coffee on for us. A blessed soul if there ever was one. She gives us a cup and we’re glad to have it.

  When daylight comes, Hillbilly hands me a knife and I slice into the meat and remove a small piece and chew it. That piece is good, done. But then I slice deeper and it’s raw, soured, and we look at each other. The whole pig has ruined. We should have used charcoal instead of wood. We really messed up. We stagger to our beds and sleep a little. Later we throw the pig into the woods. Rob gets his Jeep mired in mud trying to launch my ski boat, and the lake is muddy, choppy with big waves. People get seasick. People start leaving early. A cold wind comes up and it’s not a nice day. Before long almost everybody is gone. MA and I go back to our home, a house trailer in a pasture, and go to sleep, glad that it’s over.

  Item: It is a cold January day, and we stand at dawn on a barren hill in Calhoun County and hold our dibbles over the fire, warming the handles, until David tells us to go ahead and hit it. We load the bags with baby pines and strap them around our waists and we move off in a group, the sky gray like steel and one solid color. A snow sky. The iron dibble has a blade four inches wide, a foot long, with a little step built into it that you kick with your heel to drive it into the ground. The men to my left and right are eight feet away. We dig the hole with the dibble, bend and put the pine tree in it, stick the dibble in the ground behind it, push it forward to close the hole around it, twist it, pull out the dibble, kick the hole with the heel, move forward six feet, bend again.

  The wind is blowing and it freezes our hands through our gloves. We don’t speak. We are on something like a plateau and the hills for many miles away are open to us. It is cold and sad. Our day has just begun.

  After a while it starts snowing, big wet flakes that fall soundlessly on our shoulders and melt. It falls thicker and faster and the landscape starts turning white. The hills in the distance are removed and we keep moving forward. We are far from the truck. The black men around me are dark ghosts moving through the snow. Then we hear the faint sound of the horn on David’s truck. He is calling. Calling us back.

  Later in the morning, I sit on the couch in David’s trailer, drinking straight vodka from the bottle and chasing it with a canned Coke. He doesn’t have any orange juice or tomato juice or grapefruit juice to mix it with, so we just do it this way. Pat Coleman is here with us. He works with us sometimes.

  Outside it’s still snowing. We go to the door once in a while and look out to a familiar land now white and strange.

  Pat and David caution me to go easy on the vodka. They don’t care for me drinking their booze, they just think it might make me drunk. When I don’t pay any attention to them, they just grin.

  By ten o’clock, I’ve had about as much as I can stand. I stop drinking, stand up, tell them I need to go home. They ask me if I’ll be all right. I tell them I will. I thank them for the drinks and go outside.

  The black truck is a 1953 Chevrolet with no heater, no radio, one taillight, and it came from the factory like that. MA’s grandfather bought it when it was brand new. It has a straight six with a shift on the column, a high-speeded rear end, and sixteen-inch tires.

  I don’t slide off the road in the snow. I go home, to Mamaw’s house. We live in the house with her now, and
I move from room to room looking for a place to write. At this point I’ve written a couple of novels and close to a hundred short stories in this house and not much of all that is any good. I am wondering if it ever will be, if the rejection slips will ever stop coming, how much longer it will take to learn what I want to learn. The most frightening thing to think is that it might never come, but I never allow myself to think about that very much. I just tell myself that I have to keep trying, that what I want is worth the price I’m paying.

  But I don’t write anything today. I go inside and lie down on the floor with all my clothes on, a pillow under my head, my cap over my face, and I stay there, sleeping off the vodka for the rest of the day.

  Item: Winter, cold, dark. Bringing wood in from the stacked lengths in the yard, red oak, mostly, some pin oak and white oak mixed in, but the red splits easiest. I buy a full load off a pulpwood truck from Harris Talley, a gigantic gentle black man, whose little children get up on the truck with him, his wife, too, and unload it in the yard. I saw it up with my Stihl 041 and split it.

  The house is filled with the smell of woodsmoke. A good smell, a solid heat. Shane is around eighteen months old, Billy Ray about five, LeAnne not born or even conceived yet.

  I work at a place called Comanche Pottery on my days off from the fire department. It’s a few miles out from the north end of town. I go in at eight and get off at five, one hour for lunch, which I spend listening to music in my car, and eating the lunch MA has packed for me.

  We pour liquid plaster into molds of different shapes, flower pots, Indian heads, leopards, elephants. We dip them in a wax solution to seal them from the weather and the elements. We package them with a machine that wraps hot plastic around them, then we load them into trucks.

  Some of the people who work at this place are from Haven House, a home out near Old Sardis Road for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, people who have come to the end of their road and are trying to get a new start. None of them stay long. They drift on out into their lives, maybe even back into their drugs and alcohol.