Hothouse (5 page)

“Fine,” I say. “I'll take all the help I can get. With you all marrying up at a worrying rate, I'm going to wind up having to take my mother to the prom.”

“Too late,” Adrian says. “Your mom already asked me to take her. Don't wait up.”

It is perhaps possible to have too good a friend. I drop Adrian facedown in the sand.

“You could go with Cameron,” Adrian says into the sand. “Nobody's buying what he's selling, either.”

Cameron silently walks on top of Adrian's prone body, including his fat head.

“Well done,” I say.

“Thanks,” he says. “Doesn't mean I'm not interested, though.”

“I'll get back to you,” I say.

It goes on like this while it lasts, and in its quiet uneventful way this is the finest time I've had since my dad died. Quiet and uneventful were underrated in my head before. Friends, even, were underrated. They all seem like more now.

We lose Jane and Philby at the foot of the lifeguard stand. Burgess and Lexa make it as far as the ramp by the fried dough place where Melanie and I first hit the beach preparty and all. They are suddenly quite tired and need a short sandy rest.

Lexa kisses me on the cheek. “You're a brave guy,” she says, mistylike like girls can get by the water, late at night, so I've heard.

“For what?” I ask. “For living?”

She kisses me again, this time right near my mouth, which feels right and wrong and wonderful. “Maybe for that, yeah,” she says, backing away toward her man.

“Okay,” I say, a grateful smile stretching my face. “I'll take it.”

Cameron is now standing right in front of me.

“What?” I ask.

“Have you decided yet?”

“Ah, no, Cam, I'm still working on it.”

“Okay,” he says, “then I'm going to walk the beach some more, as long as we're still free agents.”

“Good luck,” I say, and Adrian blurts, “Safe sex … or the other kind,” as Cameron heads across the sands.

Adrian and I walk on in the direction of the neighborhood proper, which is two or three miles interior. All the small beachy businesses are closed as we pass through that unrealness into the substance of grub town life.

“I like that,” he says, maybe ten minutes beyond the beach.

“You like what?”

“I like what you said to Lexa, ‘Okay, I'll take it.' It's a good attitude, in light of all.”

“Hey,” I say, shrugging, “I'll take anything. I'm not proud.”

He gives me a backhand knuckle slap in the ribs.

“Like hell you're not,” he says firmly.

I laugh. It can be nice to be caught out. It can be joy to be known.

“Like hell I'm not, true,” I say. “Adrian, I gotta tell you, I know it's not mine, exactly, I know I haven't earned anything, but I am so insanely proud, of everything remotely connected to my father. I want to scream with it, I'm so goddamn proud, of
myself
somehow. Am I mental? Am I shitty?”

He grabs my shirt at the shoulder, walking along at the same time, shaking me all over while he talks. “No, no, no, no, hell, no Russell. Jesus, I hope you don't smack me for this, but I feel the same, exact way. Just knowing you, knowing your dad, just touching it like, that much … Jesus, I'm getting goose damn bumps and choking up over it just trying to tell you.”

He lets go of my shirt, holds out his arm in the warm late air, and I can easily make out a full range of tiny flesh mountains.

“And I can promise you,” he adds, “that everybody feels the same. Even if most of 'em probably can't say it to you, they're feeling it.”

I hold out my arm, to compare my own childish, awkward bumpiness.

“I'm glad you can say it, anyway,” I say.

“I can. You're a hero, just go ahead and take it, take it all.”

I walk on a bit like that, holding out my arm and looking at it. “Okay,” I say. “I will.”

Lots of the time, it's more like a great friend has up and moved away on me. Without telling me he was going. Without calling or writing after he left.

I wake up at night pretty often. I always woke up at night pretty often but that made sense because I would get up to meet my dad and we would eat.

Firefighter's shifts are weird things anyway, but my dad put some effort into making them even weirder. His shifts would be twenty-four hours some days, ten hours other days, fourteen hours over nights. Then he'd be home for four days straight. But what I loved was when he would come in at the odd hours—six in the morning or twelve at night. He was always volunteering to do extra this and that at the station because, he said, “I got the next four days off to rest up.” But really, because he loved that fire station, and he loved those guys. “Hunker in the Bunker” was what he called hanging out at the station. “Firefighting is a team sport,” he told me over and over. We both looked forward to the day when I would join the team and we could fight together.

Not that he didn't love coming home to us, too, because he did. We had the best of times when he would come home, and the best of those best times were when he came home at those odd hours. Because then it felt like there was nobody else on the whole ball of earth but me and the old man.

And we would cook and eat together. Just like him and his pals at the station. Always, it was breakfast when he came home. Scrambled eggs and fried tomatoes and bagels and sausages and pancakes from a special batter that he taught me only after I promised never to reveal it to anyone who was not a member of the firefighters' fraternity. My mother steamed when I wouldn't tell, even though her pancakes are nearly as good.

And here's something that happened. I developed a sense of when he was coming home. I knew when his shift would end, but that wasn't hugely helpful since he could come home one or two or five hours after that. But whenever he was finally on his way, I would pop up, right out of my bed like somebody was cranking the crank and I was jacking out of the box. For real. I was always up just when he got there.

He loved that, I think. You should have seen his moods when he would come home and I would be there waiting. Usually I'd have all the gear for breakfast all lined up and ready to roll. Should have seen how he loved it.

But now, sometimes, I wake up like he's coming, and I completely forget that he isn't. Like this morning, at five thirty, I am standing at the stove scrambling eggs and I don't even remember getting here. I am staring at the eggs as they start to burn just a bit, and the burning shakes me, the smell and the crust developing on my usually perfect scramble.

When I finally fully realize what I am doing, what a stupid thing I am doing … I continue doing it.

I leave the gas on high, and I stand there, staring at the eggs as they crust up, as they curl and harden and blacken, as the smoke goes thick and comes up to me and I breathe it in as deep as I can, and I'm choking and blinded with it.

“Russell!” my mother says, rushing into the kitchen and bumping me away from the stove. I reel, stagger back, coughing and hacking and rubbing madly at my eyes. She takes the disaster of a frying pan and shoves it out the back door onto the porch.

“Oh, Russ,” she says, rushing back to me, “are you all right?”

“I burnt the eggs, Ma,” I say to her.

“So I smelled,” she says, inching closer with her arms wide.

I don't let her get at me, holding out a stiff arm like I am a running back trying to evade tackling. With the other hand I rub busily at my smoke-wicked eyes. I am so stuck right now, so hopelessly stuck between I don't want to be babied and Christ I am such a baby.

“Can I not even cook eggs now without him?” I ask. “I thought I was doing all right. I thought …”

“You're doing all right, Russell. You are doing much more all right than anybody could ask.”

I am embarrassed. Needing this, I am embarrassed. My mother doesn't need this. She needs a man around here and I am supposed to be that man.

“I'm sorry, Ma. Go to bed. I'm just being dramatic. Jesus. I'll clean up. I'll take care of everything. Just, go on now.”

She stands at her short distance, the smoke smell filling the air between us along with everything else. She doesn't say another thing, doesn't try to touch me again.

But thank Christ she doesn't leave either.

Ma goes to the refrigerator and takes out the carton of grapefruit juice, collects two glasses on her way, and sits at the table with them.

It takes us about a silent half hour to get through that carton of juice. She's good company, and helps me a lot just by being there, and she of course knows that.

But it isn't anything at all like sitting down to very early or very late breakfast with my dad, and she of course knows that as well. Dad's mood across this particular table was something so sky-high in the morning, I sometimes found myself wondering how to re-create it during the normal daytime hours when he would sometimes go all quiet and unexplained dark at mealtimes. I tried, a couple of times, to surprise him with breakfast in the middle of the daytime, hoping to make our special thing happen, but it never quite worked. I guess that's what makes special times special, the fact that you can't just whip them up.

“It's at night mostly,” I say.

She reaches across the table and puts her hand around my hand around the empty juice glass.

“I am mostly okay in the daytime now,” I tell her. “Mostly.”

“I know. I do. Nights, I'm afraid, may be tough for a while yet, Russ. But I'll be here, so I'll hold you up, and you hold me up, and maybe we'll agree that neither of us will burn the house down in the meantime. It's a modest plan, but a good place to start, huh?”

It's a very good thing she didn't go to bed when I told her to.

I nod. “Now, lady, you can go to bed. I'll clean that pan.”

“You, your father, and God together couldn't clean that pan,” she says, getting up and patting my head on her way by. “But good luck.”

I'm in the gym. We have a deal, a sponsorship really, with the local Ramada. The Young Firefighters have free membership. It's not state-of-the-art, but it's got enough, though the pool takes about a hundred and fifty laps to make a mile. You get dizzy before you get winded.

I have just finished working out for a solid two hours. I would still be going if I could. My head likes the workout at least as much as my body does, but there is a limit. So now I'm steaming. I go back and forth among the steam and sauna and whirlpool after a good workout, and the well-cooked-pasta sensation I get, barely able to crawl out of the building by the end, well lately it suits me just fine. It's almost peaceful.

I always think straight thoughts in the sauna especially. The sauna seems to do to my head what a hot iron does to a wrinkled shirt.

High school diploma or GED, minimum. Must be at least eighteen years of age. Volunteer work helpful. Firefighting and EMS training highly desirable but not required. Military service preferable but not necessary.

A life. A firefighting life, you would think they would mention. I have a lot of qualifications to gain and a lot of time to get there, but I am already part of the service in profound ways that cannot be measured. They should know this, and should be able to factor it into my case. But I am no kid, certainly in this world at this stage, I am no kid. I realize they have to have their requirements and I have to put in the time and effort to reach those requirements because they cannot have just any old scrubs signing on to the service. You have got to be special. You have got to be special, and I have got to be patient.

But I am growing the mustache. It might sound stupid, but it feels important. I am building the body and the mind as hard as they can be, and I am growing the mustache. Nobody is going to confuse me for an 1890s baseball player yet, but getting started on this is my quiet, for-myself way of feeling that little bit closer to the service, to the guys, to the team. That much closer to the man.

I am staring at my shadowy reflection in the smoky glass door, opposite my high bench seat in the sauna. I can almost see the man.

“Somebody's getting ripped,” The Girl says, slipping in through that same door.

“Hi,” I say.

She climbs up to the top bench next to me, sits right close. She is wearing an electric blue bathing suit, Olympic swimmer type. Her figure is Olympic swimmer type. I was not previously aware.

“You been doing triple sessions at this place, or what?” she says, lightly squeezing my biceps.

We are the only two people here, but it's still extremely embarrassing.

“A little more than usual, maybe,” I say, and politely pull from her grip.

“'Roids? I'm betting 'roids.”

I feel far too weak for this. I start to stand.

“Jeez, it's getting awfully hot in here,” I say, and lean to leave.