On Fire Read online

  It’s later still and we’re drunker still, riding back up through the Delta, and the lights are on outside the prison camps, and they look smoky, and scary, and our driver gets on the car’s PA system, which is hooked into the fire department radio, and announces through the outside speakers that WE WILL NOT PISS AT THIS TIME, 10-4, over and over, very loudly, loud enough to nearly wake the dead, in fact, and I hope nobody comes after us, that they won’t lock us into the penitentiary for disturbing the peace.

  We ride back up into North Mississippi and we’re not so chipper now, some of us having sinking spells, some of us asleep. When we finally get back to Oxford, the fire station is dark and quiet, the men on duty asleep. I get in my car and go home, not to my home in my house trailer but to Preston’s, my father-in-law’s home, where MA is sleeping because I’ve been gone and she is pregnant with Billy Ray. I crawl into bed with her and she sleepily asks me how it was. I say it was okay, thinking about how I tried to dance with a go-goer, and I hold onto the round ball of her stomach, where Billy Ray sleeps and grows, and I wonder what he is, what he will be.

  I’ve been sitting out in the woods trying to shoot a deer. I haven’t shot one in about ten years. I’m a real lousy hunter. Like if I’m still-hunting, where you’re supposed to be sitting there as still as the tree you’re sitting against, not moving a muscle, planted there like a statue chipped out of marble, I’ll be opening my Thermos and pouring more coffee, smoking cigarettes, thumping ashes all over myself. The deer are probably relieved when they smell me and know it’s me.

  Billy Ray was going to shoot one the other day. It ran up and stuck its head out from behind a tree, and he shot the damn tree. That’s from not having much of a coach.

  I used to be slapdab teetotally crazy about it. I lived in a tent for three weeks one time. Couldn’t get enough of the woods. But I’m not like that now. Something came over me. Maybe I got too much of it when I was a kid. I still like to walk in a forest, but I’m not so crazy about killing anymore. The killing never was the thing for me, anyway. It was mainly just being out in all that beauty. There are few things prettier to me than an old hardwood forest. We just don’t have them around here much anymore. They’ve all been cut down. Faulkner was right. He said the land would accomplish its own revenge on the people. I just wish it hadn’t happened in my time. I saw what those woods were like. I walked in them, along their creeks, among the giant beeches riddled with squirrel dens. That’s what this whole country used to be, what wasn’t farmed. Big woods. Now the whole state’s a pine tree. And the bugs are eating them.

  It’s bad to hate something like that and not be able to do anything about it except recycle your paper.

  I really went hunting this morning just to take Shane. Today’s Thanksgiving. Everybody’s sacked out in there in the living room, ate too much turkey. I got the boys up early, way before daylight, and we went to Thacker Mountain. I don’t mind Billy Ray going by himself. He’s fifteen, has used guns plenty. Shane’s only eleven and hasn’t had very much experience, but he wanted to go bad, and since that’s my job I took him to a good deer stand built in a tree and put him up in it and then climbed up and handed him the gun, and went off and left him. I rode the four-wheeler to another spot about ten minutes away and sat on the ground, drinking coffee, smoking, not really seriously hunting.

  Rain dropped out of the sky all of a sudden about nine o’clock. I got up right away and got on the Honda to go after Shane, but I was soaked before I got there. I was thinking I’d have to walk back out in the woods to the stand and get him, but he’d already unloaded his gun and come down and was walking up the trail to meet me, dripping wet, grinning with his braces. The other day, my two boys and one of my fire-department partners rode on the four-wheeler, all at the same time, and tore off the right rear fender, so now the wheel slung mud all over us and our guns. We went home. After I got the guns cleaned I made a pot of coffee and put on clean dry clothes down to my skin and got the paper and stretched out on the couch where it was warm, MA working in the kitchen, just contented as a wet beaver that we were all home together on Thanksgiving, football on, the nest complete. She’s big on nesting.

  At one time she thought I was a smartass, though. That’s because way back before I even knew her, my cousin and I were riding to work in my mother’s car, and went around this sharp curve in the rain, me driving too fast, not knowing how to drive too good yet, but eighteen, first real job, night shift at Chamber’s, a stove factory, and the wheels skidded and I hollered, Hold on!, and wound up in his lap. We spun and ended up in the ditch on the other side of the road, pointed back the way we’d come, Mama’s car slightly dented, two tires blown out. So I called a wrecker.

  Before the wrecker got there, MA and her daddy and mother came along in a black 1953 Chevrolet pickup in near-mint condition, and her daddy offered to pull me out, but I’d already called the wrecker and it was on its way. He offered several times and I said no thanks. I couldn’t drive it anyway with those tires blown out.

  She was about fourteen then. It was in 1969, one year before I joined the Marine Corps. When I saw her again she was eighteen and had great legs. That was the day I got discharged, in 1972. That day I was in the ditch, though, she thought I was a smartass. She claims I got smart with her daddy. I never did it. My mama didn’t raise me to get smart with grownups. MA doesn’t think I’m a smartass now, but for several years, apparently, she went around with the idea that I was a real asshole.

  The day is hot and our turnouts are made of black canvas that draws the heat of the sun into us. We are all encased in black, our helmets black, our gloves, and the house before us is beginning to burn nicely. We stand in the overgrown yard with our hoses primed and ready, cigarettes in our fingers and the pumper throbbing at the curb. Our face shields are up. We’re waiting for the fire to reach a stage of near-total involvement, where it’s so bad we’ll really be doing something when we go in and put it out.

  Old houses, a whole street full of them, and the city of Oxford has made plans to burn them all down and renovate this section of the city, build new houses. We are the instrument by which this plan will be implemented.

  Rob stands beside me with a charged hose, smiling his little smile in the heat at me.

  You ready? he says.

  I reckon, I say.

  We button our collars tight and throw the cigarettes down and go across the yard, dragging the hose with us. You can’t be a pussy now. The whole back side of the house is on fire and smoke is pouring from every window and every crack in the boards. It’s pumping like smoke under pressure. We’re not wearing our tanks. This is only a training exercise. We’ll lie on the floor or go forward on our knees.

  We go across the rotten porch as the smoke blocks out the sunlight, and the first sharp edge of it burns in our noses. As we clap our face shields down and go inside the house, the fire is running across the ceiling. It’s almost like water the way it flows, every board and nailhead in the room consumed and living in bright orange fire. We get on our knees and the heat comes down to welcome us into its inner reaches. The house begins to roar and we open the nozzle and spray the burning overhead, and the fire banks down and we push forward to another room. The smoke makes our eyes tear and people are shouting outside. This is the real thing, as real as training can get, and our rubber boots slide in the water as we whip the fire back. The kitchen is consumed in flame, great walls of it, but the Elkhart Brass nozzle has the power to control it. We go from room to room, knocking it down, dealing with it, until the whole house smolders sullenly and goes out. We back out, our face shields covered with droplets of water, men helping each other, glad of what we’re doing and glad we can do it.

  We pull back into the yard to let the fire build up again. Other teams will go in after us and they’ll fight the fire again and again until we all have a turn at it and then we’ll let it burn the house down to the ground, create its own wind, howl and pop and have its way with the wood. Later we’ll
find ancient bricks from the chimney that were made in Oxford and have OXFORD cast into them.

  I’m sitting in the yard having a cigarette, watching the house catch up again.

  Rob says, Brown.

  I look around. He opens up a charged two-and-a-half-inch handline and knocks my helmet off my head. I’m engulfed in a wall of water. He actually rolls me across the yard with it. It’s hitting my ass like somebody’s big fist. He rolls me over and over with it. The whole company stands and laughs and hoots. All I can do is roll up in a ball and wait for them to get tired of it. That nozzle is flowing 250 gallons a minute. And every one of them would save my ass should my ass need saving.

  Somebody, some asshole jogging down the street one night, jogs into the fire station and swipes a walkie-talkie valued at eight hundred dollars. Then, over the scanner a few days later, somebody hears him trying to talk on it, but we never catch him. He probably throws the eight-hundred-dollar Motorola away. He probably thinks it’s a CB radio or something. Thieving dumbass joggers loose on the streets of Oxford and inside our fire station while we’re asleep.

  Somebody, some asshole, picks up a captain’s helmet at a fire we’re working one day and then comes riding by the station a few days later on a motorcycle, wearing it. Another dumb asshole. Wally gets in the van and chases him down, makes him hand over the helmet. The guy is not charged for his crime. The helmet’s worth about two hundred dollars.

  A white raccoon gets into our dumpster one night and we see him making off with some of our garbage. We don’t say anything, just let him go.

  Somebody, maybe some asshole, maybe a friend of mine, dresses a bunch of fish and throws all the heads and guts into the dumpster and it’s in the summertime and it stinks enough to make you want to puke. One of the captains chalks a note on the blackboard: If you dress fish at the fire station, please have the decency to put the “stinking remains” in a garbage bag so the rest of us won’t have to smell it.

  I hire a bunch of guys from the fire department, and we all build a house for my family and me in early 1986. We start in March and have it framed up, the roof on and the windows and doors in, in a few weeks. One cold afternoon when we’ve been putting tarpaper down on the roof, we knock off and Tex and I decide to ride around and drink some beer and peppermint schnapps. We get into my little pickup and ride around for a while and get a little high and then come around a curve in the road where the air is filled with white hair, simultaneously meeting a stopped car. We halt. The car has two girls in it. In the road in front of us is a doe deer, not dead, still kicking. We tell the girls, who are pretty horrified, that we’ll take care of it. They drive off and we get out. Tex and I both have on insulated coveralls. A roadkill of this dimension is not to be ignored. Tex unfolds his pocketknife, pulls the deer’s head over his knee, starts stabbing the hell out of the deer’s throat and the deer dies. We’ve got fresh meat. We stand in the road in front of my headlights. A large brown stain starts growing on Tex’s leg. It gets bigger and bigger. Cut yourself, Tex? I say. Nah, he says. It gets bigger and bigger. Believe you did, Tex, I say. Tex shucks down nearly naked in front of my headlights, and sure enough, he’s stabbed himself in the leg. It’s a pretty deep puncture wound. We just laugh in each other’s faces and throw the deer into the back end of my pickup and haul ass uptown to the fire station.

  We hang the deer on a ladder between two fire trucks. The guys on duty come out to the truck bay to laugh at us. The game wardens often come into the fire station for coffee and the newspapers and fried catfish, and it’s risky business what we’re doing. We skin the deer and quarter it and put it in the freezer, then go to Ireland’s. I park my pickup right in front of the building, right next to the front door. I have a brand-new forty-eight-quart Igloo cooler with three six-packs of Budweiser in it. The cooler is worth about forty dollars, the beer about twelve dollars.

  While Tex and I are inside wearing our bloody coveralls, drinking beer and trying to dance, somebody, some asshole, steals it.

  We get several good meals out of the deer meat. We cook steaks one night, a roast another night, tenderloin with biscuits and gravy one morning. Then the ice machine messes up and somebody unplugs the wrong plug-in, and the deer meat thaws out and sits in the freezer for about two weeks, and when a couple of guys open the lid, they almost puke in the truck bay, and all our good deer meat is not something you’d even want to think about smelling.

  Tex’s leg heals nicely.

  Hillbilly and I go out in his boat and run his trotlines. We have to go in folks’ yards and promise them catfish in order to procure their catalpa worms. We go up to some old lady’s house pretty often. She’s real nice. We’re the only ones she’ll let get her catalpa worms. I climb the tree and knock the worms down by shaking the limbs hard, and Hillbilly grins because of all the abundance of catalpa worms here. It’s coveted fishbait; unless you own your own trees you have to depend on the kindness of others, especially when you’re running three hundred hooks. This sounds simplistic, I know, but we need three hundred worms for one baiting, and we’re probably going to run the lines three or four times in the next few days. We need twelve hundred worms. This is serious fishing.

  Hillbilly gets me out on the lake and has to test my woodcraft. I have to identify every little post and stump where we’ve got the lines tied. I have to lower or raise them to hide them from other people or let us be sure where they are, and I have to take off all the fish and bait up every hook while he sits in the back and runs the motor and drinks the beer I have furnished him, and he even wants to run the lines when the lake is choppy with wind and lightning and the water is coming in over the front in waves, so that I’m scared of dying a watery death although he does make me wear a life jacket.

  Late one afternoon we have a fish on our line that we can’t raise. We can feel him pulling, but we can’t raise him. Hillbilly says Shit and I say Shit! We spend some time with him, pulling the line between our fingers, raising him up slowly, feeling him fight, and gradually we bring him to the surface and a carp that must be five feet long breaks water. He tears the hook out of his mouth and we sit back stunned.

  We are at peace and at one with the wind and the water and the lake. We dress our catfish in the lake with filet knives and pack the filets into the shaved ice in the cooler. We’re pretty damn happy. The sun is going down. All the hooks are baited. The lake is slick as glass and the beer is cold. We’re not even thinking about a fire right now. Right now, we’re not even firefighters. Right now we’re fishermen and have the world by the ass. All these catfish are swimming under our hooks, and we’ll be able to come back in the morning and take some more of them off and bait the lines up again. I’ll have a case of trotline back before it’s over. Hillbilly won’t do anything but run the motor and tell me what to do. I have to do this because he knows where all the good spots are. He’s only spent about forty years fishing on this lake. Plus he can kill big bucks every year. He’s the greatest hunter and fisherman I’ve ever met. It’s why I put up with him making me show him my woodcraft. Plus, he’s got the boat.

  We go to a house in Oxford down on North Seventh Street, the same neighborhood where we burned down all the old decrepit houses years ago to clear the way for improvement and progress. FHA has built low-cost housing, small brick homes, tiny yards, an improvement over the past in some ways. This house is full of a number of drunk or doped-up folks, and there is a fire behind the stove, and it’s Saturday night. There is a leak in the pipe that feeds the appliance, and we pull the stove away from the wall and shut off the valve. The fire goes out. Some of the paneling is scorched, but the fire hasn’t spread. We look around. Holes are poked in many of the walls, sheetrock and paneling alike. There is ruined food on plates on the counters. Cabinet doors are torn off. I go outside with a spanner wrench to shut off the main valve to the house and a drunk guy approaches me, calling me a white something or other. I hold up the wrench and show it to him. He backs off and leaves me alone, goes of
f somewhere into the darkness of the yard. I shut off the valve and go back into the house. The lady of the house, knit slacks, a saggy sweater, a filthy knit toboggan on her head, is drunk and cussing, Who this muddafucka what muddafucka muddamuddafucka. The smoke alarm has been sounding the whole time and it won’t quit. I go outside to the utility room where she says the breaker box is and push the door open maybe ten inches, and then it stops, jammed tight with ironing boards and boxes of empty bottles, trash, clothes, beer cans, lawn chairs, junk and more junk. I step back out into the carport and look down to see bloody footprints all over the concrete, the footprints of a child, all red and perfectly outlined with the grain of the toes like fingerprints. The smoke alarm is still going off. Some child somewhere in this house or neighborhood has cut a foot badly and is walking around with it bleeding. I go back into the house. The smoke alarm is a piercing, pulsating series of short shrieks that hurt the eardrums. A bunch of drunks are still in the living room arguing hotly. My partners look nervous. They think knives may be pulled, guns fired, rightly so. Cap’n Brown, let’s get the fuck out of here, they say. The smoke alarm is still going off and it won’t shut up. I walk back into the hall where it’s mounted and yank the wires loose. The son of a bitch shuts up then. We go back through the living room and there are plenty of young punks who smirk in our direction. The storm door doesn’t have any screen or any glass. We tell them to call the gas company Monday. I don’t know how they’ll cook until then. We go out across the yard and Engine 10 sits throbbing at the curb, the side mirrors on the cab vibrating in their rubber mounts. I swing up into the driver’s seat, take the pump out of gear, let off the airbrake. My partners climb into the front seat and the jumpseats mounted behind the cab. We’re glad to be getting the hell away from here, but I can’t help but worry about the child with the bleeding foot.