Wilson comes to a full stop before turning left, and the three of them watch the bus, the prisoners bathed in that awful yellow light, travel down the road into the darkness—watching the bus until it is completely gone, tiny red taillights fading into nothing.
The men watch the bus disappear in this manner as if to make themselves believe that it has become nothing, never-was; then, with a glow in the east, they turn toward the sunrise and drive down the pier, along the rock jetty, out to the point where they are to meet their guide.
There is a devastating southwest wind kicking up, one that will muddy the water and make the fishing all but impossible—they will not catch a thing all day—but they do not know this yet, and for the moment it doesn’t matter. At the moment, they are still uncoiling, still unwinding, and are driving along in a state of nearly utter peace and freedom, a kind of euphoric silver-heartedness: a clean-breathing, gasping kind of feeling, a good one, which might last for hours.
The Fireman
THEY BOTH STAND ON the other side of the miracle. Their marriage was bad, perhaps even rotting, but then it got better. He—the fireman, Kirby—knows what the reason is: that every time they have an argument, the dispatcher’s call sounds, and he must run and disappear into the flames—he is the captain—and while he is gone, his wife, Mary Ann, reorders her priorities, thinks of the children, and worries for him. Her blood cools, as does his. It seems that the dispatcher’s call is always saving them. Their marriage settles in and strengthens, afterward, like some healthy, living, supple thing.
She meets him at the door when he returns, kisses him. He is grimy-black, salt-stained and smoky-smelling. They can’t even remember what the argument was about. It’s almost like a joke, the fact that they were upset about such a small thing—any small thing. He sheds his bunker gear in the utility room and goes straight to the shower. Later, they sit in the den by the fireplace and he drinks a few beers and tells her about the fire. He knows he is lucky—he knows they are both lucky. As long as the city keeps burning, they can avoid becoming weary and numb. Each time he leaves, is drawn away, and then returns to a second chance.
The children—a girl, four, and a boy, two—sleep soundly. It is not so much a city that they live in, but a town—a suburb on the perimeter of a city in the center of the southern half of the country—a place where it is warm more often than it is cold, so that the residents are not overly familiar with fires: the way a fire spreads from room to room; the way it takes only one small, errant thing in a house to invalidate and erase the whole structure—to bring it all down to ashes and send the building’s former occupants out wandering lost and adrift into the night, poorly dressed and without direction.
They often talk until dawn, if the fire has occurred at night. She is his second wife; he is her first husband. Because they are in an unincorporated suburb, his is a volunteer department. Kirby’s crew has a station with new equipment—all they could ask for—but there are no salaries, and he likes it that way; it keeps things purer. He has a day job as a computer programmer for an engineering firm that designs steel girders and columns used in industrial construction: warehouses, mills, and factories. The job means nothing to him—he slips along through the long hours of it with neither excitement nor despair, his pulse never rising, and when it is over each day he says goodbye to his coworkers and leaves the office without even the faintest echo of his work lingering in his blood. He leaves it all the way behind, or lets it pass through him like some harmless silver laxative.
But after a fire—holding a can of cold beer, and sitting there next to the hearth, scrubbed clean, talking to Mary Ann, telling her what it had been like, what the cause had been, and who among his men had performed well and who had not—his eyes water with pleasure at his knowing how lucky he is to be getting a second chance with each and every fire.
He would never say anything bad about his first wife, Rhonda—and indeed, perhaps there is nothing bad to say, no failing in which they were not both complicit. It almost doesn’t matter; it’s almost water under the bridge.
The two children are asleep in their rooms, the swing set and jungle gym out in the back yard. The security of love and constancy—the safety. Mary Ann leads the children’s choir in church and is as respected for her work with the children as Kirby is for his work with the fires.
It would seem like a fairy-tale story: a happy marriage, one that turned its deadly familiar course around early on, that day six years ago when he signed up to be a volunteer for the fire department. One of those rare marriages, as rare as a jewel or a forest, that was saved by a combination of inner strength and the grace and luck of fortuitous external circumstances—the world afire. Who, given the chance, would not choose to leap across that chasm between a marriage that is heading toward numbness and tiredness and one that is instead strengthened, made more secure daily for its journey into the future?
And yet—even on the other side of the miracle, even on the other side of luck—a thing has been left behind: his oldest daughter, his only child from his first marriage, Jenna. She’s ten, almost eleven.
…
There
