On Fire Read online

  I took the deer home and we took pictures of him. There is one that remains, me in my cowboy boots holding the deer’s head up by the horns, two little puppies that later died of parvo prancing around him, my hair down in my face, a much younger guy than I am now. That’s been ten or eleven years ago. And I haven’t killed another deer since then. Some people probably wouldn’t think of these things as nearly a religious experience. But I felt God in my trigger finger that day, in the way he lifted his horns and tested the wind, trying to smell and see me, where I was sitting so still and small against that little tree, smoking a cigarette, almost ready to go home.

  I see these people going through the dumpsters. I can see their heads sticking out of the dumpsters long before I get there with my bags of trash. Usually when I see people with their heads sticking out of the dumpsters, I just keep on driving by, come back later. If you stop, they’ll be hungry for your Coke and beer cans, and will want to know if you have any, and if you do, they’ll request that you deposit them in the back end of their pickups instead of inside the dumpster.

  Item: A man and his wife who live down on old Highway 7 can be seen regularly in the afternoons trudging up the hill to the dumpsters above their house, him with his plastic sack over his shoulder, her in shorts, always looking either a little lost or a little ready to be insulted that you know what she’s doing. They have a medium-nice brick home. Neither of them seems to be disabled. She stands outside the dumpster patiently while he paws through it, patiently pawing through the shit. They seem to go there every day, like milkmen, maybe mailmen.

  Item: I go over to the dumpsters one evening with some trash and a bicycle that one of my children has discarded. Some black people are over there, fishing in the river, hanging around the dumpsters. Some small children are with them, beautiful little children in torn shorts and dirty T-shirts. Many little tiny pigtails tied with white yarn in the little girls’ hair. I lift the old bicycle over my head when I bring it out of the truck. There’s not much wrong with it. The chain is rusted solid and it has a flat tire. Other than that it’s probably rideable. I start to throw it into the dumpster and one of the ladies says, Mister? Mister. I stop. You going to throw that bike away? she says. Yeah, I say. I look at her. I’m still holding it over my head. They look fearful, shy. You want it? I say. You don’t want it? she says. I set it on the ground. The children are all looking at it. They are staring hard, but making no sound. The bike is small, a child’s model, and it was blue once but is now rusted and blue. Maybe it was LeAnne’s. Maybe it was Shane’s. The mother comes up and I offer the bicycle out to her and lean it over to her and she takes it and looks it over. There really ain’t much wrong with it, I say. It needs that flat fixed. Needs a little oil on that chain. You could spray you a little WD-40 on it and it’d probably break right loose. Yessir, she says. We’ll sure take it. The children come up then, oohing and aahing. They retreat in a small group with their mother, touching the bike, talking to each other in soft voices, nodding, approving, starting to smile.

  We are trained to save lives, and we try to. We take a CPR course once a year, every year. An officer from the Oxford Police Department comes over to teach us and we get down on the floor with a dummy from Sweden or somewhere named Resuci-Annie and practice on her, clear her airway, practice one-man and two-man CPR, do it on a baby dummy, too, except it doesn’t have a name, we just call it Baby Dummy.

  We learn the Heimlich Maneuver, which makes folks blow their steak out, and we make jokes about it. We go to the First Responder course at the State Fire Academy and learn everything from extrication to checking blood pressure to delivering babies. You never know if you’ll ever need any of this stuff or not.

  Item: Shane Brown, about four years old, swallows a piece of steak at Dino’s Pizza Parlor and stops talking and claws at his throat. I jerk him out of his seat and turn him upside down over my arm, hitting him hard between the shoulder blades, trying to dislodge the meat. It won’t come out. I have him hanging there, shaking him, gawkers in the restaurant be damned. I keep whacking him between the shoulder blades and finally he spits the piece of meat out. Small disturbance, and we sit back down to our meal.

  Item: LeAnne Brown, about five years old, swallows a big grape at my mother’s kitchen table, stops talking, and begins clawing at her throat. I snatch her up, turn her upside down, and start hitting her between the shoulder blades. She coughs and gags but it won’t come out. Drool spins from her mouth. I keep hitting her and it won’t come out. She starts to go limp in my arms and still it won’t come out. I run my finger into her throat to try and sweep her airway but it’s lodged in her throat. I don’t want to kill her hitting her, trying to save her life. I hang her back upside down and keep hitting her between the shoulder blades, and everybody’s starting to scream. I don’t know what I’m saying, but I’m saying something, maybe praying out loud, maybe not. She coughs and the grape drops to the floor and rolls. In a minute she’s all right. Eat more careful, baby, I say.

  Item: Mary Annie Brown, about thirty years old, eating steak in the kitchen at Mamaw’s house, stops talking and starts clawing at her throat, then suddenly leaps up and runs out on the back porch, me right behind her. She stops beside a post and puts one hand on it, bent over from the waist, waving her arms and hands, saying nothing. I come up behind her and make a fist with my right hand and put it against her stomach just below her ribs and close my other hand over it and give her a hard sharp squeeze. The chunk of steak blows out of her mouth and lands in the darkness of the yard. She turns around and we lean on each other for a moment. She waves her hand in front of her face again.

  Eat more careful, baby.

  Item: One of our captains is in a Sizzlin’ Steakhouse in Tupelo and a lady’s baby starts choking on something. The lady stands up and starts screaming, shaking the baby, going hysterical because the baby has stopped breathing. The captain gets up from his meal and crosses the room and takes the baby away from her, hanging it over his arm, whacking it gently between the shoulder blades. Whatever is in the baby’s throat comes out, and the woman snatches the baby back and runs out of the restaurant without a word.

  Item: Some of the boys on another shift, just playing around out of boredom and in good-natured fun, tie one of the nozzlemen into a rolling chair with lots of rope and push him off down Price Hill into traffic. They say his screams are something to behold.

  Item: We get a call to a house down on the south end of town, evidently on fire, but when we arrive, lay out hose, hook to the hydrant, and force the door, the house is not burning. The house has been burning, as evidenced by the traces of black smoke that have stained the soffit boards and cornices. Inside, the house is cold. The owners are gone and a chair backed with thick upholstery has been left in front of an electric heater that kicked on and ignited the chair, which eventually smoldered out.

  A fire must have three things: heat, fuel, and oxygen. Remove any one of these things and the fire will go out. The house was tight, and once the fire got underway and started burning, it consumed and depleted the available oxygen and smothered itself out. Not much damage, but there have been casualties. Inside the tub in the bathroom, just behind the shower curtain, Johnny and I find two dead cats.

  Them sumbitches deadern hell, Cap’n Brown, Johnny says. I agree. We smoke a cigarette and look around. Just like we’ve been taught, the principles of fire science do work, as evidenced by this fire going from the incipient, or beginning stage, then to the free-burning stage, and then to the smoldering stage and then going out when no fresh supply of oxygen was introduced.

  Unfortunately, the owners soon arrive, sometime after we’ve checked the whole house to make sure there are no pockets of fire hiding anywhere. It’s very simple how it happened as we recreate it: the heater kicked on, the chair caught fire and filled the house with smoke, the cats sought escape in the bathtub as they always do, and were killed by smoke inhalation before the fire could smother itself out. Open and shut case.
We feel a little like detectives. The only thing now is having to go out in the front yard and tell the owners that their pets didn’t make it.

  The lady is already weeping in the yard. She can see that her house hasn’t burned down. But she keeps hollering about her babies, wanting to know if her babies are okay. We’re going to have to be tactful, we’re going to have to let this woman down as gently as we can, try to break it to her kindly. The woman is wringing her hands as Johnny and I come out. I think Johnny has his sunglasses on.

  Oh, the lady says. Oh, what about my babies?

  Sorry, lady, Johnny says. They dead.

  I used to work with a great firefighter named Ted. We worked for about three years out of Station No. 3, and he was about as good as they come. But he had actually begun service with the city as an ambulance attendant. Years before we were firefighters together, Ted and his crew had been called one day to a farm outside of town to free a man whose private parts had been entangled in a gasoline-engine post-hole digger. When Ted got back, he said that the man had been in terrible shape, his clothes caught and twisted by the auger that drills the holes. I don’t remember how they got him loose, probably cut most of his clothes off or something, but at any rate they rescued his equipment and the man was extremely relieved and grateful.

  When they got back to the main station, somebody from The Oxford Eagle, our local paper, called to get the daily run report, and Ted was trying to explain the nature of the run they’d just returned from. I was sitting there listening to him.

  Ted was and is a very polite man. Rarely cusses. He was also the middleweight boxing champion of the Third Fleet when he was a corporal in the Marine Corps. And he was trying to get across to this reporter in a tactful way what had happened out there.

  Well, Ted said, his, uh, his … uh, scrotum was caught in this post-hole digger.

  Evidently the person on the phone didn’t understand and asked again.

  Well, Ted said, his, uh, his … uh, testicles was caught in this post-hole digger.

  And still the person on the phone didn’t get it.

  His balls! Ted said.

  My kitty died. I reckon it got up under Billy Ray’s truck and sat on the spare tire and then jumped off at some point during the time I backed out of the drive and drove 2.1 miles down the road and turned left and then went 3.4 miles and turned left again, and then went about a mile and a half and stopped.

  Coming back I saw a little yellow kitty in the road dead with a bloody head and I said, Shit, surely that ain’t it. Got back over to the house and there wasn’t a kitty around. Not a little yellow one that size and color, nor any other color. So I drove back over there. It was him. Or her. I never had determined his/her sex. It was all my fault and I felt pretty bad about it, since I’d hated and loved cats all my life and always thought that one day I’d find the one that was right for me.

  I stopped in the road and took a good look at it. It was it, all right. Head all bloody. Over the course of the past several hours the cars going up and down the road had shifted its little body back and forth across the centerline and by late evening it was only a little scrap of orange fur, like it had never had any bones or anything. I started to stop and scoop it up but I didn’t. Not since the damage was already done. I’d been afraid something like this was going to happen, but I didn’t know what to do about it. It was already to the point where I had taken to leaning out the door of the truck and working the clutch and brake with my head below the frame, looking to make sure none of them were under there, and they usually were. I’d had to coax several of them out from under the truck a few times before I could back out of the carport. Now it had happened to one and could happen again and there didn’t seem to be any remedy to it. Just raise cats up and murder them by accident. The thing about it was that puppies would never get in that kind of shape. That may be why I’ve always preferred dogs whenever I’ve had a choice.

  I took off there and made a little round through the country. I felt pretty dismayed about the whole thing but I also felt that if they just wouldn’t get up under the truck and sit on the spare tire, they wouldn’t have to make the choice of whether or not to jump out from under it while it was going sixty mph.

  I figured what happened was that it was a matter of attrition. He sat up under there while I cranked the truck up and maybe got a little nervous, thought maybe well something’s happening here but I don’t know if it’s bad enough to jump out from under it right now or not, then I backed out of the carport and started down the driveway and dust started whirling up under the truck and gravel flying and he said maybe well this thing’s picking up speed and it looks like maybe I ought to jump, but then sometimes cars are not coming from either direction and I just swing out into the road and pick up a little more speed and he thinks maybe well you done messed up now, it’s going faster all the time and now there’s some black stuff going by underneath with yellow stripes and it’s too late to jump so let’s just hang on and see if it ever slows down and then maybe I’ll jump, but then I start shifting up into third and fourth and am usually drinking a beer by then or trying to find something decent on the radio or tapes in the glove box and I’m not thinking about a cat hitching a ride with me on a Michelin radial. The cat’s thinking oh shit by then or this damn thing ain’t slowing down so maybe I just better hang on for dear life, and that goes on for three or four miles. If I stop at the dump he’s got a chance to get off then, if he just would; if he’d let me know he’s under there I’d pick him up and put him in the cab with me and let him walk over my shoulders and across the back of the seats, but he’s probably dizzy and disoriented and by the time he’s had time to think about it I’ve slung the garbage over my shoulder and thrown it into the dumpster and we’re rolling again, highballing it up the Hartsfield Hill, running in fifth gear, picking up speed for the ridges. He doesn’t want to get off then for sure but about another mile is the place he evidently picks, and I don’t even notice him, rolling across the pavement, through my rearview mirror. I’m listening to Clint Black or somebody, trying to light a cigarette. I’m trying to get over here and pump some water out of my pond at Tula, man, I’m busy. I’ve got to get some dozer work done if the water ever goes down. I don’t have time to ponder a bunch of kitty cats.

  But I get over to Tula and everything is peaceful and placid. When I get there I know why Thoreau went where he did. I think someday I might write a book called On Miss Lutee’s Pond. It would be about the peace and tranquillity that’s available at the little house I own over there and it would be about the mangy hairless hound dog with half a tail that I found sleeping on one of my beds in that house after I left a window up and it would be about my neighbor coming over there one deadly hot August afternoon while I was up on the roof trying to put some paint on it and him telling a long and awful story about this terrible car wreck he saw one time. It would be about how nice it is to sit out on the front porch when the sun is going down and drink a glass of whiskey. It would be about owning a piece of land where the pines are tall and the cedars are thick and the ticks are thick. It would be about petting a giant black bull that lives in my pasture and not shooting the turtles because they want to live, too, and the eight-and-a-half-pound catfish I caught back in March while my brother was telling me a story about two guys going fishing, Frank and Kenny, about how Kenny hurried home from work and his wife had a big supper laid out for him but he didn’t have time to eat, told his wife, Honey I just got time for a bite, I mean she had fried green tomatoes and pork chops and boiled okra in the peas, he just leaned over and got a bite here and there, telling her he had to get his fishing pole and meet Frank right away. They were supposed to meet at the store in fifteen minutes. He loaded up all his stuff, his wife mad at him because he didn’t eat all the good supper she’d fixed for him, and got down to the store, no Frank. Where in the hell’s Frank? Sat around there ten or fifteen minutes, no Frank, where in the hell’s Frank? Waited and waited and finally decided to drive b
ack to his house and call Frank, Frank, where in the hell you at? Kenny, I’m just now getting my stuff together, I had to eat supper, I’ll be down there in five minutes, take it easy, calm down. Kenny rushes back to the store, no Frank, where in the hell’s Frank. Sits around, no Frank. Frank drives up. Frank, where in the hell you been? Kenny’s mad already. Kenny can’t position his fishing pole in the window so Frank has to do it for him. Kenny has to sit in the back seat because his pole’s in the front seat. They drive on over to the lake and the sun’s going down, they don’t have much time to fish, don’t catch anything, Kenny gets in a real bad mood. Here he’s done waited on Frank all evening and missed his good supper and ain’t caught shit. Sun goes down and it’s time to go home. Frank done screwed up Kenny’s whole evening. They start walking out and Kenny gets madder and madder, thinking about how Frank’s done messed up his whole day. They’re walking over a bunch of big rocks, and Kenny decides he’ll pick up a big rock and just kill Frank, just crush his damn head. He picks up a big stone with both hands and staggers up behind Frank, holding it up over his head, just waiting for Frank to turn around so he can drop it on his head. Frank turns around and sticks a cocked .38 pistol up Kenny’s left nostril and says, What you gonna do now, Kenny? Kenny drops the rock and says, I don’t know, Frank, something came over me, I just lost my head. Frank takes the .38 out of Kenny’s nostril and they ride back on home together, and about that time that big catfish comes up and swallows my minnow and the pole bends double and my brother yells, You gonna lose him! and I yell, Hell I can’t hold him! and mud splashes everywhere and I drag him up close to the bank and the hook comes out of his mouth and I leap in the water and grab him behind the gills and duckwalk him up the bank and my brother says, Boy, I thought you’s gonna lose him.