Hothouse (16 page)

She sees fit to slap me once more, though this time it is lighter, weaker, less sure but more sad.

“That is for you and your father. It is from all the people here who have to change dressings three times a day. Who have to pull away skin when they pull away bandages. Who have to look into eyes blinded white. Who have to listen to breathing so compromised it sounds like we've got snakes loose in the ward. Who have to teach people how to bend arms and legs all over again because they don't have the flexible skin that God gave them as infants. Who have to sit by the bed while patients weep for hours at their own reflection in a hand mirror after their hair and lashes have gone for good. So thanks for coming by, and making yourself feel better, but do us all a favor now and go home because it's not changing anything for anybody else.”

She spins and pulls herself away with such force I am sure it is to stop herself from beating me senseless.

And at this moment, I wish she would.

I stand with my back to the door of the radio station, my face blistered in the heat of the rage I found just outside. The height of that fall is so great I'm still falling, and sick with it all.

Monday night is Young Firefighters. Has been for a long time, which is why I am so well trained already, why I am ready to go already but I will keep training until I am beyond training and when they are ready for me I will be beyond ready for the job. Monday night is Young Firefighters, because it is.

If I was nervous that first time back after the long layoff, after the events of the summer, then what to call this? The nerves slashing around my stomach are so wild and violent they are nearly audible. Maybe they are audible, but I cannot hear them and they will only be heard when I cross through this door and my comrades are there to make the sound real.

I make a low intense growl as I force myself to push open the door, the kind of noise warriors in movies make to buck themselves into battle.

But there is no sound. There is no sound, because there are no comrades.

I walk in, move farther in, to the middle of the very empty room. It's not quite gym size, but it is maybe ballroom size, and the emptiness is making it huge. There are piles of equipment, helmets and coats and breathing apparatus lined up on long tables along one wall. That's a drill, getting the gear on as quickly as possible. There are various climbing structures and obstacle-course items arranged all through the place. On the far wall, about twenty feet up, is a window frame. There's nothing but wall behind it, but it's a convincing-enough frame, stuck there to the wall. You have to ignore the ceiling that is only another four feet above the window. Hard Sky, is what we always call it in Young Firefighters.

There is a ladder at the base of the wall, and I go to the ladder. It's a tall two-piece reinforced aluminum job with a rope pulley to raise the second bit. It's heavier than the kind you'd have at home.

There is an exercise. To practice getting to that window to save upstairs lives. It's a two-person exercise.

But nobody's here. There's never been nobody here.

“Whatcha say, Monsignor?” I say to the slumping figure of the victim. He's half curled over like a drunk in the gutter. I nudge him with my foot. “You want to help? Your chance to be a hero.”

I am not surprised at Monsignor O'Saveme's failure to respond. I don't think I would have been surprised if he did respond either. I'm surprised lately at my ability to be surprised by things that shouldn't surprise me, and to be unsurprised by things that should.

I kick him really hard. His humanlike head feels like a semideflated soccer ball as it leaves my foot, smacks off the wall behind him, and smacks again, facedown to the floor.

“I'll do it myself, then,” I say. I take the ladder from the floor. I hoist it, drop one end so the feet plant somewhat stably, and I quickly begin to wrestle the bulk of it toward Hard Sky before gravity and momentum catch on and it fights me back down.

It's a two-person job. It really is, but there are no two people here. I'm fighting it from the go.

It's not a long fight. As if there is a team of little gnomish but fat firemen climbing the ladder as I raise it, the whole thing leans against me, twists and fights and goes all awkward and right off my shoulder to the floor.

Crash almighty. The sound of heavy aluminum alloy, clattering to the floor in a big empty ballroom of a hard sound-bouncing place is something beyond what ears and nerves should have to take. It's a smash-up that lasts maybe three seconds but appears to happen over and over in some kind of replay, or bounce, or echo or all of them, but it is hellish is what it is.

You know how sound can make you angry? How really bad cymbal sound in really bad conditions can penetrate your skull and drive you right out of it?

I begin kicking Monsignor O'Saveme. I kick him and I kick him. I kick him in the ribs and I kick him in the stomach and I kick him in the balls, and again, and I kick his head so hard and so many times and I chase him and do it more until the force of it and the swing-and-miss and weakness make me spin awkwardly, lose my footing and bang to the floor in a lump right alongside him.

I am face-to-face with where the monsignor's face would be if he had one.

“I'm sorry,” I say, through really breathy, really halting, hiccuppy panting.

“Have you got something to confess, my son?” The Girl's voice asks from across the room.

“No,” I say, staying right where I am.

“Did you just beat up the monsignor?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel better?”

“I don't feel anything.”

Like a sprite she appears in front of me, just beyond the monsignor. She crosses her legs at the ankles and smoothly allows herself to sink, to sit, cross-legged on the floor.

“Where is everybody?” she says in an incurious way.

Now I sit up. I cross my legs too. It doesn't work. I pull up my knees and rest my chin on them instead.

“Where is everybody?” I repeat back at her.

“I asked you that,” she says.

“And I asked you that, Melanie. Just the truth, is all you have to give me. Just as long as you keep it true, we'll be all right. I'll be all right.”

We have a stare-down. But it's not that, is it? It's not that, it's a stare-
up
because she is here to help me, to lift me up if lifting is possible or to catch me if it's not. She is, obviously. Look at her face.

“Melanie?”

“It's not on this week, Russell. That's all. They decided to give it a week. Two, maybe.”

“Give it a week, for what?”

She shrugs. It is a shrug that does not mean
I don't know.

“For me to go away? For me to come to my senses. Melanie, is that it? For me to realize it's not worth it and then just quietly melt away … hey, like my dad did. Did you get that? Melt away, just like my father did. That's pretty funny.”

I've done it now, of course. I've brought the details back now, haven't I? I am seeing it, I am seeing my dad's big beautiful face, his majestic mustache, and I am seeing the flames coming up, teasing, teasing, licking, lapping, peeling it all back, from the lip on up and right back up over....

“I'm here,” Melanie says, leaning forward and insisting her face into my face. “I'm here, Russ. I hope that's something. Lots of people will be here, in time, if you just hold on. They'll be back.”

“I won't be here,” I say, and shock myself with the words, true as they feel.

“What?” she says, as if I had just declared my intention to commit hari-kari.

“I don't think I can do this now, Melanie. I don't know if I belong with these people anymore … or maybe if they don't belong with me. Everybody is so wrong. They're all wrong, I'm all wrong....” I shake my head all around, like a wet dog, to get her face out of my face, to get the visions out of my head, to just shake, for godsake.

I grab the monsignor in a choke hold, and I begin pounding his head off the floor. I see my hands turning white with the effort, and for a moment I feel like I am accomplishing something right and important.

Melanie says nothing, does not intervene. Until I am exhausted, and Monsignor O'Saveme is seven times dead.

“I hope you feel better,” she says, “but we both know you will be back. We both know it's not even a decision.”

Her face is so close now, again, it is so there, I want to touch it. I do, very lightly, with two fingers of my right hand lightly brushing the sharp bone along her left eye. Then I go back to my hands holding my shins, and my knees supporting my chin.

“He was
Dad
,” I just about whisper as she sits back on her side of the monsignor.

She just watches me.

“He was so …
else
from what you're hearing. I wish you could have met him.”

“I almost feel like I have,” she says. “DJ, that night, all night. That's all he did, was talk nonstop about your dads.”

I'm staring now, and raise my head up. “That's all he did, all night?”

She smiles. “Pretty much.”

That'll do for me.

“Would you like to?” I ask hopefully.

She draws back a bit. “Excuse me?”

“Meet him? My father?”

She puts her hand out to me. “It would be a privilege,” she says as I extend my hand, we clasp, and pull each other up.

It's a beautiful location, on a rise amid the rolling hills, in the new part of the newer cemetery. You can see the Teahouse from where Dad lies. And you have a clear view of the part of the airfield where the small private planes take off and land.

I am leading Melanie by the hand and the evening is warm and clear, lapis star-fleck blue, the grass smells new-mint, and I can just this minute feel the feeling that life is supposed to be and that Melanie is promising it can be. After this, I think I will take her over to see that very Teahouse and tell her a story. And if I'm really feeling it, I will even show her a real death-defying climb.

Only we don't even make it as far as Dad. We stop about ten feet short when Melanie pulls me to a halt. I wasn't even looking, staring up and around, at the lights of the runways, the sky, the Teahouse.

It was a fairly simple headstone. Tallish, four feet off the ground, highly polished black granite. The usual name-date stuff. Tasteful.

Now it's all that, and more. A message, painted diagonally across in tasteful fire-engine red, says BYE-BYE.

“Come on,” she says, tugging me gently away from the stone, down the hill, then not so gently.

“It could mean a lot of things, though, couldn't it,” I say flatly, not even attempting to convince myself let alone Melanie.

“That's right,” she says sweetly. “It could be read a number of ways. But right now, let's just not, huh? Bring me back another day. Walk me home now, okay?” She is tugging me down the hill.

But I am tugging her up the hill. And I am winning.

We are here now, back, the three of us.

“What do you think?” I ask her.

“I think … you folks have good taste.”

That is no small thing. I remember thinking that, thinking about just that, when Ma asked me for my input. It was just the two of us, at the place that sells the stones. We considered everything, from all over the range, from like a pauper mini obelisk thing to a bigger-than-me angel who was actually managing to be in flight in spite of her weight. But I remember clearly thinking—possibly my only really truly clear thought from those days and nights—that people would look at this and comment on its tastefulness. I heard the words, in my head.

“Thanks,” I say. “It could be a nice
bye-bye
, right? A warm sorry-to-see-ya-go kind of a so-long, couldn't it?”

“It absolutely could, Russell.”

“Truth is important, though, Melanie. As long as it's the truth, right …”

“It absolutely could,” she says firmly.

I stare at the stone for ages and ages. Silently Melanie holds my hand the entire time.

“Once they start taking it away from you,” I say, “they don't stop until they leave nothing on the bones.”

She walks around and stands in front of me, up close, between me and Dad.

“It's time to go home now. We'll come back again.”

“Will we?” I ask, looking at her hard to see what I can see.

“We certainly will,” she says, and blows a kiss Dad's way before pulling me back down the hill.

“He liked that,” I tell her, and I'm happy for him.

This cannot go on. He is right there—
right there
. I go to my bedroom window and stare across to his bedroom window, and I know he is
right there.
This is insane. This is wrong.

“Did you hear?”

I am startled to hear my mother's voice behind me. She is standing in the open doorway, arms folded.