Hothouse (8 page)

The crowd goes beyond mental here, in a way that makes me every bit as proud as I am frightened of the power of it.

“… and they
were
the Hothouse Heroes,
our
heroes,
your
heroes, and we are here to testify and to celebrate today …”

I cannot hear what he is saying anymore. DJ has his hands covering his ears. I see my mother walking onto the stage, arm in arm with DJ's mother.

It feels almost like we are being physically crushed from behind by the crowd even though, in reality, they are more like protecting and cocooning us. Then, holding us. Then, lifting us.

Oh God, they want us onstage. They are motioning DJ and me up onto the stage, as the band, the Hothouse Heroes minus two, settle into position with their instruments.

“No,” DJ says, though I am the only person in this world who can actually hear him. “No, thank you anyway, but I'm good right here.” His actions—as much as you could call them actions—don't really back up his words. He falls into the crowd's embrace like he is a stuffed DJ effigy.

It must give him some comfort that I am on the same crowd-surf to the stage, and we are never separated for a second. We remain so close, in fact, that I am able to crane my neck a little, and take a good healthy bite right out of that burger. I smile with accomplishment as I chew, and if I have helped loosen him up at all, his wince is nevertheless not a celebration of comfort. He shoves the burger at me, like you do when somebody has polluted your food so you don't want it anymore.

“Quite a t'do, after all, isn't it?” my mother shouts into my ear as I am delivered and the crowd somehow manages a higher gear of delirium.

“It's a t'do and a half,” I shout as I lean back into her and weakly wave out at the fans. Beside me, DJ's mother has her arm tightly around her son's shoulders. DJ is peering one by one into the brigade buckets of money, which are still filling up.

“We might never have to work, our whole lives,” he says joylessly into my ear.

“I'll work anyway, just to be near the common folks,” I say truthlessly into his.

“Now you all know,” big Jim says, reclaiming control of the proceedings, “what dedicated and gifted musicians have always wound up at this very firehouse....”

Behind him, the individual band members start cracking up.

“Don't be modest, men. And, it's no secret that Russ and Dave were as talented as anyone in the industry … Russell on the banjo and Dave on mean fiddle....”

There. There is where it can't go. As I said, I can listen to a lot of uncomfortably wonderful things being said about my father, can even listen to a superhuman barrage of them to make a guy's knees go weak like today. But the rule's the rule—it's got to be true.

I turn right around to catch Jim Clerk's eye. He looks down at me.

“What?” he asks, bagged.

“Come on,” I say.

He's stifling a laugh now. “He was a great fiddler.”

There are a fair few murmurs, in the band and out beyond, but nobody's going to step into this one but me.

“He was awful,” I say.

My mother gives me a playful shake of the shoulders, and parts of the crowd boo me in defense of my old man. And I get a shiver like I haven't had since. Since, the night I shivered myself to sleep.

It is the best Dad moment I have had, since I haven't had the dad.

It's got it all. It's real, and it's fun. It's got loyal and it's got great and it's got true.

Just like the man.

This is so hard. Beautiful, but so mind-splitting hard.

“He was not awful,” Jim plays along.

I nod defiantly, because words aren't coming now. He had only played the thing for a year and a half; he was self-taught. He had no musical anything in him but he learned just so he could be in this band right here, because he wanted to belong to everything, anything that was happening here, with these guys.

But really, when he practiced, cats came to the house in gangs to free their tortured comrade.

“He did not stink,” Jim finally says. “Dave was … earnest, on the fiddle.”

The crowd roars approval, and finally, DJ jumps in. “But my dad was a
great banjo player
!” And this statement seems to please him more than anything else so far.

He was great, too. Russell was great at whatever he did. Russell was a star.

The band starts a slow, gentle plucked rhythm, swampy, pale-blue bluegrass and Jim shouts out, “Friends, the Hothouse Heroes!” and backs away, pulling back a curtain at the rear of the stage.

Sitting together on adjacent chairs, necks crossed like old friends, my dad's fiddle and Russ's banjo.

Hanging up on the wall behind them, is the memorial.

It is big, five feet by five feet, mixed-media. There are two oversized brass replicas of the city FD badges, but with the names
Russ
and
Dave
engraved. The badges lean on each other at an angle, like the comedy/drama faces at a playhouse. An eagle spreads its wings behind the badges, and in front of him a ribbonlike banner flutters above and below carrying the words
OUTRAGEOUS
and
COURAGEOUS
.

Hundreds of people gasp at once, but they all sound like my mother to me. I turn back and look at her. She has her hand covering her mouth, and her eyes are blinking three times the speed of the three-beat pattern as the band plays “Waltzing Matilda” right at us.

“You all right?” I ask her as she squeezes my shoulder hard enough to get juice out of it.

“It's all right to cry,” is what she says.

“Go ahead,” I say, being, you know, the man round here now.

“I meant you,” she says.

“Me? I'm not crying.”

“If you say so,” she says with a smile and another mighty squeeze. There's the juice again. “If you're not, you're the only one.”

I turn back to the stage and watch the goings-on from head-bow angle now. See, don't be seen.

Beside me, DJ's got the same idea, different approach. He has plunked right down to the ground, sitting cross-legged, staring up, and out, at nothing in particular. He is moving just slightly with the music, though, so something okay is going on, too. I give him a little wave, like we are in sight but far apart. He gives me a small nod. Just.

The band—four floating mustaches behind guitar, accordion, drums and upright bass—plays on for an hour of Cajun, country toe-tap, hillbilly ballroom niceness that makes the people sway, and sing, and even swing some. Even the upbeat numbers are tearjerkers, but it all still manages to be more or less encouraging, even when God noses his way in with the spirituals near the end. Their big finish is when they get almost hopping on a bluesish dad-rock thing called “Time Loves a Hero.” Going by the title, and the band's relative mastery of the song, I'm guessing it is their signature tune.

Time loves a hero

but only time will tell …

Signature or not, the song is the perfect storm that sends the gathering into a kind of madness, brutal sing-alonging, passionate shouting of more mostly true testaments to my dad and DJ's, and an emptying of pockets into those tin buckets.

Exhaustion.

“Everyone loves your dads.”

The man who says that to us, as DJ and I sit on those empty chairs in the middle of the empty stage at the head of the emptying grounds, is pushing a gigantic broom. The broom is just about the width of an average car, and I think if the guy could just attach it to one he could clean up this mess in about two days. He doesn't seem to mind, though.

He is a firefighter. All that's left is us and firefighters. You could tell, even if you didn't know them, which of the people here today were in the service because they all made a point to wear something from the gear. Famous fire helmets, many of them. The big black boots and suspenders. The badge. One guy even marched around all afternoon shirtless, but with his badge somehow secured to an inhumanly hairy chest. Velcro is possibly the answer there. This firefighter here, though, never seemed like he loved my dad, and my dad felt much the same. His face and eyes are now the same strawberry color with crying, though.

“Thank you,” DJ says wearily to the guy. He plucks at my father's fiddle strings. Now my fiddle strings.

“Ya,” I add, “we kind of got that impression.” I plink at the banjo.

I'm gladdened a little by the way he mentioned our dads in the present. That they are still loved right here now by other people as well as us.

Gladdened
is not the word to use for DJ.

“They don't know anything about it, do they?” he asks the only person who probably exactly does. “They say all these things and remember so much, and put up empty chairs for show....”

“You're hurting that,” I say carefully as I ease the fiddle out of DJ's harsh fingers. I give him the banjo. “They don't know. They can't know, exactly—”

“No, they can't,” he snaps, “so they should probably stop
commemorating
and
sharing
now, and get on with their own little lives.”

I feel myself physically pulling back from the force of him.

“I'm sorry, guys.”

As soon as I hear the kind velvet voice behind us I want to slither right inside the curly carved holes in the fiddle's body. I can't manage it so I panic and scrape the bow all over the strings instead.

“Come on now,” Jim Clerk says, “your father played better than
that
.”

I am thrilled to hear the joke at this moment. “I am sorry, Mr. Clerk—”

DJ is on his feet. He's hopped up and lurched in Jim's direction like to babble apologies and hug and beg....

But actually, he doesn't do anything.

“We tried our best,” Jim says. “We didn't mean to upset anybody or to intrude. Maybe it was too much. But please understand, what you saw today was love. It was real. And believe it or not, all those people here today needed this. People need their heroes, DJ. They need their legends and their greats. And that was your dads.”

DJ does not look like he is about to say something this time. But he doesn't look like he's going to burst into flames, either. Which is encouraging.

“But we're done now,” Jim says, and suddenly his big smooth smiling face pulls in on itself like closing curtains. He reaches out and plucks awkwardly at the strings of Russell's banjo. “And so now, you take this, you take it all, you take your feelings for your dads and your memories, take them home and keep them nice. Do that for yourselves, okay?”

He doesn't get an answer. He does, but it's not loud. DJ clutches that banjo and I clutch this fiddle and we stare at big Jim and Jim stares back. He puts that great smile back on, and it is still a great thing but it is great and beautiful the way a three-legged dog is even though it's not what it could be, not what it's supposed to be, not what it was before.

“Are ya winnin'?”

“Jeez, Dad,” I say, springing up in the bed so fast that our foreheads clunk like coconuts and I fall right back again.

He laughs, rubbing his head. He laughs.

I squint at my clock in the darkness. It is neither late enough nor early enough to be seeing him.

“Is it breakfast time? How did I not wake up if you were coming home? How did I not know—”

“Shush,” he says, reaching out and patting me on the chest. His big paw is radiating heat. “Shush, shush. You're all right. I'm home early. Boss sent me home early. You want a baklava?”

“No. Why did he send you home? Are you all right?”

“Oh, I'm fine. It's just this knee of mine. You know how I hurt it. It's fine. It's just acting up a little, swelling up a little. Big Jim thought I should take it home to rest. That's all.”

That's a relief to me. Relief that I have not lost my sense of when Dad's shift is ending and breakfast time is coming. And in the firefighter game, a gimpy knee is a pretty benign thing to get you sent home.

“Oh,” I say. “That's good. But … he sent you home with a bad knee? You worked a whole four-day shift one time with a broken wrist before going to the hospital. Why would he send you home for this? And why would you go?”

He's still got his hand on my chest. Reminds me of the hot water bottle my folks would always put on me for colds. It is heating up, like a fever, as he speaks.

“Guess I'm getting too old to act like that anymore. Guess the boss knows when I should be home. Nothing to worry about, though.”

“Oh,” I say, though I had stopped worrying there until he told me not to.

“The important thing,” he says, “is, are ya winnin', son?”

“I am, Dad. I'm winnin'. Are you winnin'?”