He drives her home cheerfully, steadfastly, refusing to let her see or even sense his despair. He walks her up the sidewalk to Rhonda’s like a guest. He does not go inside.
By Saturday—if it is the off-weekend in which he does not have her—he is up on the roof again, trying to catch the scent of her from the chimney; sometimes he falls asleep up there, in a brief catnap, as if watching over her and standing guard.
A million times he plays it over in his mind. Could I have saved the marriage? Did I give it absolutely every last ounce of effort? Could I have saved it?
No. Maybe. No.
…
It takes a long time to get used to the fires; it takes the young firemen, the beginners, a long time to understand what is required: that they must suit up and walk right into a burning house.
They make mistakes. They panic, breathe too fast, and use up their oxygen. It takes a long time. It takes a long time before they calm down and meet the fires on their own terms, and the fires’.
In the beginning, they all want to be heroes. Even before they enter their first fire, they will have secretly placed their helmets in the ovens at home to soften them up a bit—to dull and char and melt them slightly, so anxious are they for combat and its validations: its contract with their spirit. Kirby remembers the first house fire he entered—his initial reaction was “You mean I’m going in that”—but enter it he did, fighting it from the inside out with huge volumes of water—the water sometimes doing as much damage as the fire—his new shiny suit yellow and clean amongst the work-darkened suits of the veterans.
Kirby tells Mary Ann that after that fire he drove out into the country and set a little grass fire, a little pissant one that was in no danger of spreading, then put on his bunker gear and spent all afternoon walking around in it, dirtying his suit to just the right color of anonymity.
You always make mistakes, in the beginning. You can only hope that they are small or insignificant enough to carry little if any price: that they harm no one. Kirby tells Mary Ann that on one of his earliest house fires, he was riding in one of the back seats of the fire engine facing backwards. He was already packed up—bunker gear, air mask, and scuba tank—so that he couldn’t hear or see well, and he was nervous as hell. When they got to the house that was on fire—a fully involved, “working” fire—the truck screeched to a stop across the street from it. The captain leapt out and yelled to Kirby that the house across the street was on fire.
Kirby could see the flames coming out of the first house, but he took the captain’s orders to mean that it was the house across the street from the house on fire that he wanted Kirby to attack—that it too must be burning—and so while the main crew thrust itself into the first burning house, laying out attack lines and hoses and running up the hook-and-ladder, Kirby fastened his own hose to the other side of the truck and went storming across the yard and into the house across the street.
He assumed there was no one in it, but as he turned the knob on the front door and shoved his weight against it, the two women who lived inside opened it so that he fell inside, knocking one of them over and landing on her.
Kirby tells Mary Ann that it was the worst he ever got the tunnel vision, that it was like running along a tightrope—that it was almost like being blind. They are on the couch again, in the hours before dawn; she’s laughing. Kirby couldn’t see flames anywhere, he tells her—his vision reduced to a space about the size of a pinhead—so he assumed the fire was up in the attic. He was confused as to why his partner was not yet there to help him haul his hose up the stairs. Kirby says that the women were protesting, asking why he was bringing the hose into their house. He did not want to have to take the time to explain to them that the most efficient way to fight a fire is from the inside out. He told them to just be quiet and help him pull. This made them so angry that they pulled extra hard—so hard that Kirby, straining at the top of the stairs now, was bowled over again.
When he opened the attic door, he saw that there were no flames. There was a dusty window in the attic, and out it he could see the flames of the house across the street, really rocking now, going under. Kirby says that he stared at it a moment and then asked the ladies if there was a fire anywhere in their house. They replied angrily that there was not.
He had to roll the hose back up—he left sooty hose marks and footprints all over the carpet—and by this time the house across the street was so engulfed and Kirby was in so great a hurry to reach it that he began to hyperventilate, and he blacked out, there in the living room of the nonburning house.
He got better, of course—learned his craft better—learned it well, in time. No one was hurt. But there is still a clumsiness in his heart, in all of their hearts—the echo and memory of it—that is not that distant. They’re all just fuckups, like
