Hothouse (17 page)

I sigh. I have not heard, but since everything that starts that way lately ends badly, I am not hopeful.

“She died,” Ma says.

That's the entire conversation, but it is more than enough. She never had another home, after that one burnt up. Never had another cat. It was so many endings, that day.

My mother walks in from the doorway, sits on the edge of my bed, and sobs like a child, her head hung, her shoulders hunched and shaking. I walk in from the window, sit next to her with my arm around her, and join her.

Eventually, exhausted, my mother runs out of everything, tears, energy, consciousness. She tips over sideways, curls up, and falls asleep on my bed. I pull a blanket up over her.

I leave her there and head straight over to DJ's.

I am banging on the door, and nobody is answering. The house is locked, DJ's window is closed, there is no sign of life, but
I
know that he is here. I just know it.

“DJ!” I'm shouting up at the house. “DJ, it's me. Let me in.”

I hear not a thing. But I smell smoke. It's coming from the backyard.

“What are you
doing
?” I yell when I find him sitting cross-legged in the grass. He is staring, entranced by his work. His work is a very robust fire, burning on the patio just below the deck. The fire is his fort, the one his dad made him all those years ago. Then broke. Then made again. The old unmistakable odor of melting plastic army men is toxic thick in the air.

He is also stinking drunk, a half-empty bottle of vodka in his lap.

“I'm moving on, Russ. I am getting on with my life.”

“Don't do that!” I say, running up to the fire but running right back again when the big heat blows me away.

“Poor old Helen, she just wasn't a survivor, was she? Not like us.”

Not for the first time lately, I am blasted by very different, conflicting feelings as I stand between DJ and the fire. Uppermost at the moment is, I want to smack the hell out of him.

“Now is not the best time to be feeling sorry for yourself,” I say.

“You're wrong. It's the best time. It's one of the few deep satisfactions in life, I have found, feeling sorry for yourself. And who's got a better claim now than
our
selves? Well, there was old Helen—and her cat—but now …?”

I keep checking the fire. It's his fort. He can burn it if he wants to. And if it somehow makes him feel better, if we somehow do move on to a better something because of this, then I am actually all in favor.

But we know fire. And this fire looks a bit close to the house. I'm not moving yet. Not yet. I'm watching.

“Hey,” DJ calls from his spot in the grass. I look over and he is offering me the vodka. I go to him and take the bottle, take a sip, stand over him as we watch the flames together.

“What are
you
doing here anyway, hero? Hero, junior? Must feel pretty good to be reinstated into heroland, huh? Land of the heroes? Bet you're happy with the way things turned out.”

“What are you talking about, DJ? Is that what you saw? In the report? In the papers? That my dad wound up a hero and yours didn't?”

“Yeah, that's what I saw.” He grabs the bottle roughly out of my hand. “I saw that my dad was made into some kind of fiend, while yours got off as the courageous walking wounded, fighting the good fight against the odds. I think there was even a picture in the paper of your dad with a bloody bandage around his head and a fife and drum behind him. What did you see?”

“This is nuts, DJ, there is no difference—”

“No, it's all out now. They are implying that my dad was doing party drugs while your dad was taking hero drugs so he could work through the hero pain and keep up all the heroing. That's how it's playing.”

“I didn't see that at all. All I saw … I saw … a community that needed heroes, was happy to build them up, and then got a shock when they were taken away again. They got angry. First they needed champions, then they needed blood.”

“Well,” he says, hushed, “they got that.”

He leans over on his elbow in the grass, takes a swig, passes the bottle up to me again.

“Where's your mother, DJ? We have to put this out. This is dangerous. It's too big, and it's too close to the house. You know that. Is she in the house?”

“Coincidentally, my mother is at the Hothouse. With all the exciting new developments, she thought it was a good idea to go and have a chat with Jim Clerk and, I don't know, negotiate to get my father out of eternal damnation. I think she's wasting her time, myself.”

“Come on,” I say, “this is serious now. We have to try and put this out.”

I throw the bottle on the ground and take steps toward the fire. Just like that, he is behind me, and pulling on my shirt.

“No,” he says.

“Come on,” I say. “You have done enough.”

“No, actually, I haven't. My father's ashes are in there, and the fire needs to burn itself out.”

He had just received the ashes this week. Almost redundant, really, so a third burning seems viciously unnecessary.

“Listen, man, I hear you, and I appreciate that. But you've done enough. You are drunk, okay? And this is too dangerous.”

“More perfect, still. Drunk men and fire—my dad would be so proud.”

I smack his hand away and head for the fire, but now it really is too late. Much as we know about fires, it is already beyond us even if I had DJ's cooperation, which I don't. The big fort, stuffed with kindling and tiny furniture, oily rags and newspapers—we are also naturally gifted fire starters—in addition to the brave little soldiers, has lit the pressure-treated wood of the decking, and the fire is climbing the deck as quickly as DJ and I did the day our dads finished building it together.

Seeing it is beyond me, he has sat back in the grass with his bottle. I have no choice. I very roughly drag DJ out of the yard. He lets me drag him like a dead body, and he makes himself weigh a million pounds. I haul him over to my house and call the fire department. I can barely get the words out over the phone.

“Yeah,” DJ spits in the background, “let the bastards handle it. That's what they do, right?”

This is the second worst day of all time.

How could I not know? After all. I. How? Could I not know?

“Dad?”

He is supposed to be home now. That's why I woke up. Because that's what I do. I know, and I do, because we are tuned like that, me and my dad.

He is supposed to be home, and that is why I got up, and that is why I have been in the kitchen laying out all the tools and treats for one of our legendary two-man breakfasts.

In the middle of preparations I hear a car pulling up, a sound which at this early hour still, still gives my stomach a Christmas butterflies feeling, and I expect him and I continue going on about my business.

And then, he doesn't arrive. Ten minutes pass and he isn't in.

I go to the window, and I see his fat brown Buick there, hard against the curb. The door is open. He is not there.

When I get to the car, he is not in it. He is not around it or under it or anywhere to be seen. Back in the house I throw on some shoes and a jacket and I go walking.

I only need to go to the end of our street, to the playground where our basketball court is. I stand on my side of the street, look across the basketball court, across the Little League baseball diamond where I starred for his eyes, across to the kiddie playground where I can see him, my father looking from here as small as I did on that pitcher's mound way back when. He is sitting on a bench.

Since I see him, I feel less of the rush, less of the anxiety that pulled me here like a tether attached to my chest. I can even enjoy it a bit, watching him grow slowly larger as I approach, through the pleasing quiet of what is already promising to be a nice Saturday later, with the kids this place was built for swarming all over it. There is dew still on the grass, I can see it beginning to burn misty upward, and I have the feeling of walking through time itself.

He is asleep. I stop abruptly as I reach the climbing structure, the hand-over-hand bars by the rope ladder, the fire pole leading to the slide. I feel my fingertips searching my palms for the blisters and calluses I earned right here a long time ago. I stare at him for a few seconds before I walk up to the bench where the parents sat to watch their monkeys climb and fall and crash and lose and win.

“Dad?” I say, standing over him. He is slumped, that kind of asleep where if you didn't know better you'd think he lived right here in this spot. “Dad?”

His head lifts when I sit down next to him. Slowly he looks sideways to find me.

“Hello, boy,” he says with a glazy, utterly warm smile shaped somehow like a W.

“What are you doing here, Dad?”

“Needed a little air. Just needed to get out, walk a little. I'm really tired, though. Really tired. I just came for a little air, 'cause I wasn't quite ready to come in, and I sat down. I just got so tired. I'm sorry. I just wound up here. I'm sorry. Breakfast, right?”

“Yes,” I say, standing over him again. “Breakfast, right.”

“I'm just … really tired, Russ.”

“I know you are, Dad.”

He looks very much like a man with no plan to move. Then he puts out his hand.

I reach out my hand and pull him up. I feel the weight of him, and the tiredness that transmits itself all the way up my arm. So I keep hold of his hand, tugging him along, through the playground, the baseball field, toward home.

“I'm sorry,” he says, as we walk. “Sorry you have to do this.”

I laugh, just a little. “Well, you did this for me enough times, didn't you?”

He squeezes my hand. When I was little, that was the sign that it was okay for us to cross the street.

“I did,” he says, tired but bright. “I did, didn't I?”

“You surely did,” I say, squeezing his hand.

How?

How did I not know? How? Did I not know?

He didn't fail me. He didn't fail me, or anybody else.

I'm so sorry, Dad.

I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry.

The damage to the house was not tremendous, but enough to force DJ and his mother to vacate for a while.

Not so bad, though, since it means they are bunking with us for the duration.

Turns out it is kind of handy to have a connection to the fire department, when they have to make a judgment call on whether a blaze was arson or an unfortunate accident. Truth be told, I'd say it was a blend, an unfortunate arson, but sometimes truth be better not told.

They did a good job. I watched. We watched. They were all business when the job needed doing, the men of the Hothouse. But when it was under control, when there was no doubt, no danger left surrounding the fire at DJ's, I saw the way they looked at the place, the way they hung together and hung close. It was like a funeral, again. Again, again. But more, it was their way of love.

“It must have been, ah, surprising,” my mother says to DJ's mother, “to be at the fire station when they received a call to your very house.”

DJ's mom takes a long and casual sip at her tea.

“Quite,” she says.

We are in the living room. This is where DJ will be sleeping, because he didn't want to share a room with me, which is fine. It makes sense. It's not just the huge five-foot-by-five-foot memorial dominating one of my walls, though that didn't help. We have ground to make up and all, and really I feel a lot better just having him this close again even if he had to practically burn his house down to make it happen. So his mom has the guest room and instead of sharing with me he is on the couch here. Comfortable enough.

The phone rings and I hop up to get it. Not that there will be any great race to get there first, as I am the only person who answers at all these days. The frequency and creativity of the hate calls we have been receiving suggest a good few people have quit their jobs to devote themselves to the task. I had a ten-minute screech the other day from “Mrs. Kotsopolis's cat,” who has not got the manners I would have expected. I have chosen to meet it all, to listen, to not shy away, to exhaust and absorb their powers for myself. It's working, as the hate rate has gone from two out of three calls to about one in three. And I feel increasingly unbeatable, like the mighty cockroach.

This one's not hate at all.

“Yo, Adrian,” I say.

“Do you think if Stallone knew all the pain he has caused me over the years he might withdraw all the Rocky movies?”

Ma is staring at me. She has developed the heartbreaking habit of staring at me with complete fear and apprehension whenever I pick up the phone now. I'm trying to break her of it. I whip up my sleeve and flash my tattoo at her.