Hothouse (12 page)

She shifts her position on the couch from left-facing to right and back again. She is staring at me with wide and scared eyes. But there is more nervousness to her than shock or even surprise.

She takes a deep inhale that nearly pulls me closer to her.

“Your dad was in a lot of pain, Russell. Pain that was a direct result of how much of himself he put into that
infernal
job.” Her anger is real and intense there and when she hits the word
infernal
it sounds like a car engine idling then suddenly you stomp the gas pedal. “And
this
is what they do to him.”

“What about the pain?” I ask. “What does that mean?”

“He took medication, for the pain, Russ. It's how he got through it.”

My mind is running around the monstrous maze of this situation, trying to find a way through. This, looks like a way through.

“So? What's wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with that. We see it in sports all the time, they give them something for the pain and they are back on the field. That's what tough guys do, right? They can't say, just because he took pain medication....”

“He may have taken a lot, of medication,” she says. “He may have taken too much.”

I hear the sound of every opening in the maze slapping shut. Nothing but walls.

“Are you saying, Ma, that he
did
take too much?”

“Russell, the department says that they are not concluding anything until every scrap of detail has been reexamined....”

“That's good. But are you saying that he
did
take too much? Are you saying, Ma,” I say, and this time it is my turn to take a deep vacuum of an inhale that removes all the air from the room, “that you
know
that he took too much?”

We sit looking at each other for a few long seconds. We are looking at each other in a way we have never quite looked at each other before, and probably that is our life now.

“I do not
know
that, Russell.”

That was not the best answer.

The phone rings and rings until my mother unplugs it. Newspeople want to talk to her, and maybe to me, about my father.

I don't feel like talking to anybody about my father just now.

When I start coming out of the trance-thing that has taken me over, I realize I am sitting in a tub of cold water.

“What did the board say about DJ's father?” I ask. I am standing in the doorway of my mother's bedroom. My parents' bedroom. My mother's bedroom. I am standing in my old slippers, which I found at the back of my closet. I am wearing my pale blue-and-white striped flannel pajamas, which reach just above my ankles and just above my wrists. I'm wearing my thick velour bathrobe that no longer has its sash. I am shaking like a machine gun with bone-cold and everything else.

“They said he was a fine firefighter and a hero,” she says, waving me over to the bed.

I sit on the bed beside her and allow her to wrap me up tight in her arms. Though I keep my own arms down at my sides.

“What else did they say?” I ask.

“They said they will stand behind him completely until all the facts have been double and triple verified and—”

“Ma?”

“Right,” she says. And she tells me.

All firefighters are in pain. Of one kind or another, and usually several kinds at once. They get hurt a lot. The work is dangerous, the training is dangerous, and the exercise they do to keep in shape for all that is tough so even the training for the training is dangerous. They hurt when they don't see their families for days at a time. They hurt when they fight a particularly nasty fire for six hours and what is left at the end of it is an icy smoking stink pile of somebody's home or church or restaurant. Or worse. When that happens, they take the pain with them for days, for months, for ever.

I knew this, a little bit. I would know if he was limping. I would know if he was grouchy or if he seemed to need a little more sleep than usual or if he seemed to get frustrated over not much and my mother would rustle me away to give him space. I didn't like it, but I found it funny when she gave it a name. The Russell Rustle, made it seem more of a game, more about me, since it had my name on it.

But really, there was no one thing in my dad's life that displeased him, specifically. I know he loved me and my mom. I know that. I know it. I know he loved his work and he loved fishless fishing and he loved playing fiddle pretty badly because I have a mental picture album in my head of him smiling broadly at all those things over and over. But I notice, as I flip through that album, a lot of pictures of him not smiling. Just flatline, over nothing anybody seems to know. Only I did know, a little.

I knew that as happy and sweet a man as he was, there was a particle of him that was unreasonable with the rest of him, not in agreement with the bright and shiny rest of him, at the same time.

Ma had a name for that one too because my mom developed a gift for this kind of thing. The Jolly Melancholy, is what she called it.

And just like the Russell Rustle, the Jolly Melancholy was one of her perfect contradiction phrases that made me feel all right about something that I might not otherwise have been all right about. Something that was, it turns out, not at all all right.

Something I will never feel all right about again.

And much as they are the same, much as they are brothers and their own breed, team, planet, whatever they want to call themselves, they all do their own little and big things, by themselves, to deal with the pain and fear and boredom and anger that come with the life.

There is one guy who works at the Hothouse, he uses every single spare moment at the station lifting weights. My dad told me lots of days the guy skipped sleep for working out. He enters bodybuilding contests. He had his shirt off at the cookout. He looks like bookshelves that can walk. Another guy spends hundreds of hours producing a quarterly magazine on beekeeping that he gets printed all nice at a printer's. Dad said the most bee thing about
The Quarterly Bee
was the buzzing sound all over the Hothouse when everybody fell asleep at once reading the thing. Lots of them are boxers or martial arts guys.

The Board of Inquiry says Dad, and Dad's best friend, were a different story.

…
and with all investigations now concluded, the Board has accepted the facts as stated in the original report. The two firefighters who died in the blaze were the first ones into the kitchen on the second floor of the structure. That both went in without either masks or radios. That they were quickly overcome by smoke and heat and became disoriented. They attempted to navigate their way out of the situation by using hose as a guideline as one led the other. But in their disorientation had followed the hose in the wrong direction, farther into the fire. When the explosion occurred they would not have stood any chance of escaping the full force.

While toxicology reports revealed significant levels of prescription drugs in one man and illegal drugs in the other, as well as alcohol in both their systems, the Board could not conclude if this contributed to their deaths.

“We aren't going to just take it, are we?” I ask DJ.

I am standing on his porch with the two fishing rods in my hands. I know that what I look like is the guy in the famous painting standing expressionless with his wife and his pitchfork. But what I feel is defiant.

“I think we are,” he says as flatly as that pitchfork guy would have said it.

“We can do something about this, DJ,” I say. “We have to straighten this out. We can, you and I, as a team. Life is a team sport, right?”

“Nice,” he says. “I mean, definitely corny, but nice.”

“My dad always said that.”

“I remember. Your dad was corny.”

“He was,” I say happily. Sadly. “He was corny. He was true-blue corny. How could people not know that? Only the best people are corny.”

“It would be good if people could just shut up about them now, you know?”

“They should. They should shut up. You know what I loved? I loved when my dad would come home late at night and we would cook stuff. Whatever was there, we would just cook stuff, just to have it, just to do it. People don't know about this kind of stuff. Great things. One of the … last times, y'know, it was really late and there was practically nothing, but he was gonna do it anyway. And he made us nachos. Even though we didn't have nacho chips but we had had Chinese food the day before so he tried to make nachos out of these shrimp chips that were there, and he pours hot cheese over them and they just dissolved and fizzled as if we were melting plastic wrap on the stove. We didn't eat, but we laughed a whole bunch. We laughed a whole bunch, and people don't know anything about that kind of thing.”

DJ laughs too, for a few seconds and then something a little sadder comes over his face and he looks just a bit sorry for me.

“I'm not going fishing, Russell,” he says.

“The Board of Inquiry is wrong, DJ,” I say.

He is not budging from his doorway. And I am not budging with the fishing rods.

“I remember one four-day-off shift,” he says after a while, “when my dad built me an entire fort for my army men because he thought I wanted one, which I didn't. But then on the second day he tripped and fell on it and it was like one of those Midwest tornado-wrecked houses, broken into more pieces than before he built it in the first place. Then, by the time he finally went back to work two days later the whole thing was built again. He had spent his whole four-day shift on dollhouse duty. I loved it, then. Then, it had become something.”

“You still love it now. I bet it's still in your room. You think he did it all on purpose, falling on it and rebuilding it, to get you to love it?”

It was meant as a joke.

“No,” he says, staring at the silvery hook dangling off one fishing line as if he is entranced. “I think he smashed it in a fit when he saw I didn't really want it. Then he rebuilt it because he felt bad.”

“Oh,” I say. “Anyway, it worked, huh?”

“When I saw the furniture and the army guys inside, and all the obvious repairs, how could I not …” His voice trails off, before he pulls it back up again. “But then, later, I figured it was all because he just fell on the damn thing and that's what broke it.”

“But you see, DJ, that's it, that's the thing. Nobody knew them the way we did and that's why you and I are the ones to put this all right. This stuff they are saying about our dads is not true, and we will prove it's not true. We'll—”

“No, we won't,” he says crisply.

“What are you talking about? We certainly will. Why wouldn't we?”

He stares at me, like I'm supposed to work it out for myself. Then he practically spits like he's angry that I can't.

“Because the board is right.”

“They are
not
right,” I snap. “What's gotten into you? Why are you being like this?”

His two hands are pressed against either side of the doorway like he is Samson trying to break the building apart. He lets his head hang down in a way I cannot see his face, a pose I don't like at all.

“DJ?”

He brings his eyes up to face me in a way I don't like any better.

“I have known for some time now what my dad was like, Russell. That's, pretty much, why I couldn't face you anymore. My father was a mess, and I knew it. And it was humiliating, especially because I still thought your dad was a hero.”

“My dad
was
a hero!” I shout. “He still is.”

He remains calm, or something that looks like calm but isn't at all.

“They are right, Russ. Everybody is right. They weren't heroes, they were losers. And the sooner we let it go, the sooner it will just be over with.”

“Go to hell,” I say, just as fake calmly.

“They should have left us alone a long time ago,” he says. “They should have left us alone with what was ours, but they wanted it to be theirs because they all needed big phony heroes for themselves. I bet they leave us alone now.”

“I'll leave you alone now,” I say, throw one fishing rod down on the porch and stomp off.

“That's probably a good idea,” he says.

It feels like a trial. Two defendants sitting at trial except only one of us is here.

Nobody is doing anything wrong. Nobody is even saying anything. Maybe that's a big part of the problem. The atmosphere in the classroom feels cold and stiff even if it is my imagination.

It is not my imagination. But maybe I am partly responsible for the way it feels. I know from my rigidity, my silence, my unrecognizable expression and even more unrecognizable folded hands that I have brought tension and uncertainty to the classroom just by being here.

But what do they want? Would they rather I leave? Or just stay home in the first place until everything blows over? When will that be? Can somebody tell me? Because I would really, really like to know, and I have never been in this situation before. I have never even heard of anybody in this situation before.