Hothouse (6 page)

She grabs the seat of my shorts and pulls me back down with alarming ease. I am weak.

“Don't be antisocial,” she says.

I lean back against the scalding wooden slats of the bench. Remarkable, how if you move off them after getting accustomed to them, they instantly become foreign and searing again. It's not the worst feeling.

“So, you enjoyed the party,” I say.

“I did. Thank you very much for inviting me. What a great group all around.”

I suppose I do expect her to go somewhere with that. She doesn't. We sit and become one with the heat. It's almost like a sound, it's so baking. The Girl leans back alongside me, feels the same hot slats across her back.

She makes the sizzle sound, “Tssssz …” but she doesn't flinch.

I am no good at this. “So, DJ …” I say.

“DJ,” she says.

We sit and listen to the heat some more. That's it.

I stand for real now, and The Girl is happy enough to let me. “I'm completely noodled,” I say, stepping down to more breathable air. I see my ghosty reflection again as I approach the door.

“Look out for him,” she says as my hand rests on the door handle. I turn. “Just keep an eye. He's not as strong as you are, I don't think.”

I shake my head, and head out of the heat. “Don't be fooled. I'm not as strong as I am either.”

Firefighters insist on doing stuff. Everything they do seems to require bigger motion, more action than the regular one-foot-in-front-of-the-other routine of most people's days. And since these days are anything but routine, they are now insisting on doing something big.

They are being honored, DJ's dad and mine. By the Hothouse, at the Hothouse, with a big public show-off of a permanent memorial.

There is to be a big department-sponsored t'do for the two Outrageous Courageous heroes of the community.
T'do
is my mother's term for any organized gathering we are required to attend, especially if she would really prefer not to attend.

“Sheesh,” she says after getting off the phone. “This is one t'do I could really do without.” She plunks herself onto the couch. I plunk beside her.

“Well you can't just t'do without it, Ma,” I say.

“I know that, Russ. I understand there are a lot of situations where you have to do things you don't want to do, because people feel they are doing those things for you.”

“Well they are doing it for us.”

“Yes. Yes, of course they are. And because people do something nice for you, you do something nice, for them, by attending. Everybody thinks they are doing the nice thing for somebody else, while all parties would probably rather stay home and watch TV, but in the end something nice has probably been achieved even if it might be hard to identify what that was.”

It's a different sound coming out of my mother now. Weary. Burnt.

“It will be great,” I say, slowly rising from the couch. “I know there has been a lot of
stuff
we have had to do, but this one feels different. This one's going to be about the good stuff. I don't think people would rather be at home watching TV than doing this, and I know I wouldn't. I'm going to let myself get a little excited about this one.”

She smiles. “Okay. I'm just glad I don't have to go.”

“Like hell you don't have to go.”

“Of course I'm going to go,” she says, still weary, but a little less weary. “I wouldn't want to miss your happy, beaming little proud face.”

“Okay, lady, if you need to mock me to feel better, that's fine with me.” It's a price I'm willing to pay.

She slowly tips over sideways on the couch, tucks her legs up, and settles way deep in. Sweet and innocent is how she looks as her smile turns vertical on me.

“I wasn't mocking. I do see your happy, beaming little proud face. And it is making me want to go now.”

I make a point of beaming just a bit more as her eyes close and I leave her, surely with the both of us thinking about the fine Outrageous Courageous t'do to come.
Outrageous Courageous
was also not my phrase. It is common speech now, in the newspapers, shouted at us from cars, even spray-painted huge on a wall of the fire station, erased, and painted right back again. It is the shorthand for my dad and DJ's, used as often as people speak their names. I love to hear my dad's actual name, and don't want it ever to fade away.

But I
love
Outrageous Courageous.

“How come you're not a better bowler, Dad?”

“I am a better bowler.”

He gets in moods like this, where he doesn't make any kind of sense at all. It tends to be a funny nonsense, but I can never tell where it comes from or where it goes to again, so the erratic part I don't care for. Sometimes it makes me a little angry.

“Better than what?” I ask, deliberately interfering with his release.

His fourteen-pound ball squibs off right and just barely clips one pin before toddling off into the gutter.

“Better than that,” he says, staring for a long time at the lane and the confident pins and what went wrong.

“If you're better than that,” I insist, “then bowl better than that.”

His ball rolls back up the feeder. He collects it and turns to me.

“Are you angry with me?” he asks, holding his ball up high like a big fat second head.

“I just want you to be better,” I snap, gesturing for him to address the lane instead of me.

I see sad disappointment flicker across his face, then he turns toward the pins again and I feel like crap.

“I'm sorry,” I call out, again just in time to wobble his release, only this time unintentionally.

He knocks down three more.

I have no idea. I have no idea why I need him to be better at this. I have no idea why his weird slanted smile at knocking down only four pins in a frame of tenpin bothers me so much.

“Relax,” he says, taking the seat next to me at the scoring desk. “That's why they call it bowling.”

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. I have no idea why it makes me so angry to hear it that I want to just walk right out and leave him there.

But I don't. I do the better thing, and I bowl. I knock down eight pins with my next ball and my dad is clapping enthusiastically for me. I know he means it, but I don't even look around at him.

“What is wrong with you?” I snap, waiting for my ball to return.

“There is nothing wrong with me,” he says, the cheeriness of only a few seconds ago vanished. Killed, actually, by me.

My ball returns and I use it to pound down the last two pins. He doesn't clap. We don't talk. The mood remains grim for the rest of the game, and the inappropriateness of it bothers me every bit as much as the inexplicable cheer that came before.

Adrian and I have finally gotten back to something like our regular bowling rotation. We normally go at least once a week and often twice but with the things that have happened, bowling slid down the list of priorities, even though with the things that have happened bowling would have been as welcome an event as any I could think of. One of the beautiful things about the nature of bowling is that when I am at it, I can almost leave all the rest of the stuff behind. And that happens to be one of the beautiful things about Adrian's company, too—that he can make me feel like I am somebody other than that guy who lost his father. So the combination of Adrian and bowling is like some great sensory deprivation tank in my life, only with scorekeeping.

Unless something unusual gets in the way.

First, we go to pay for our two strings and our joker shoes, and the guy behind the counter, a guy I have seen hundreds of times over the years, with his timeless ageless sad acned face, just shakes his head grimly and backs away from the counter. He looks almost spooked, treating the money like it's a live grenade or some voodoo thing that will haunt him forever if he touches it.

“Thank you,” I say, but he just shakes his head again and waves me off like I shouldn't even be doing that much.

“I could get used to that,” Adrian says.

“You probably shouldn't,” I say.

We walk up to lane eight, toting the goofy shoes. “Check it out,” says Adrian, pointing.

It is a poster, and it is posted here in our private getaway from everything. It's on red paper with black lettering and looks like a seven-year-old did it with a marker and made photocopies. It's taped to the ball polisher, with several others distributed around the place:

OUTRAGEOUS COURAGEOUS BARBECUE

MEMORIAL DEDICATION

SATURDAY NOON TILL AFTERNOON

MUSIC BY THE LEGENDARY

HOTHOUSE HEROES

BRING EVERYONE, COME OUT AND PAY

TRIBUTE TO TWO OF OUR OWN

“What's with firefighters and barbecuing all the time?” Adrian asks. “Whenever they get together they're firing it up. You would think hot coals and flammable liquids would be the last things they'd want to see on the day off.”

“
One of ours
,” I say out loud, staring at the cheap poster.

“Nice of you to share,” Adrian says.

“Well … you're welcome,” I say. “And really, I'm happy to share, and I love the fact that everybody wants to share my dad....”

“Right,” he says, “it's like, a community thing. Like they are part of this community and this community is proud—”

“And that's really great. But I have to say, seeing it here, right here”—I tap the words on the poster—“I just get this little jolt, this shock of, selfishness is maybe what it is, but part of me thinks, well the
community's
dads didn't have their faces burnt off, did they?” The way I fire-breathe the word
community
, I could be aiming to burn unfortunate Adrian's face off. “The
community
goes home at night and eats supper with dad, and dad is there and so is his face. So the ‘our own' thing … it's great, but it's … no, it's great.”

I don't like to be reminded about their faces but this is how it is. Lord do I not like to be reminded about their faces. Details. I can't swerve the details when I think about it and I always think first about slow motion, the heat, the force, the flame, the smoke, curling back over my dad's face, over Russ's face and the first thing I see—because my rotten mind never lets me not see it—is the way the heat melts, curls then melts, those two magnificent thick mustaches, and that starts it and then like pulling a shade back from that lip up over … his face, all his face, his cheeks, Russ's eyes … my father's eyes, drying …

“People are just trying to be nice, Russell,” Adrian says calmly so that I don't scream. “They're just trying to be in there with you. And don't get angry at me but, you know, I'm proud of your dad too. I can't help it, I'm just like everybody else. That's a good thing, I think.”

The part of me that has been playing the scene of my dad's melting face, the scene nobody else has to live with, wants to scream right in Adrian's face and remind him that he gets to share this great community pride with his own
father
who works, who's alive, cozy at home two days every week so they have lots of time to chat about stuff.

Good thing the better part of me gets the better of that part of me.

“That is a good thing,” I say. I nod a bunch of times. “It is a good thing, Adrian.” I brush past him on the way to the lane, bumping into him a little on purpose.

It is, it is a good thing. It's just a good thing with bad moments.

When I think of Mrs. Kotsopolis, that's one of the bad moments. She has lived in this neighborhood since the beginning of time but will not be at the Outrageous Courageous barbecue to commemorate the heroes of the tragic fire. Because Mrs. Kotsopolis was in the tragic fire. Right now she is very much in the hospital.

I knew that Mrs. Kotsopolis used to be a teacher, because she came to my school, something like fourth grade, to talk about how it was, that long ago, being a teacher. Sounded like a great time to be a teacher. Less of a great time to be a kid. She left us old-time teacher gear to keep on display, as a reminder, so somebody would remember, she said. She left us a big brass bell with a wooden handle she used to call the kids inside with. I don't remember any of the other stuff, but the bell really looked like something from another world. Memorable, you know? For sure she would have had a number of other old teacher-life mementos around her house to remind her own self of the days, and for sure those details would have gripped at my dad something fierce. I know I know and I know we would have been talking about the old handwriting chart, or classroom flagpole or ancient leather-bound class register book or pull-down map of an unrecognizable world, for days, after he got home from saving Mrs. Kotsopolis and her house and her life from that fire.