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“But so are you,” Paul replied.
“Yeah, but you know I have a rep. No one is going to go on a date,quote unquote, with me.”
Slapping his thigh, Paul laughed loud and hard at that one.
“Have fun! Don’tnotgo for coffee.”
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “It seems like a waste of time. I’m not really into anyone. My folks just told me they’re getting a divorce. That seems about my speed. I don’t want any part of marriage and all that crap. Bethany did me a favor by leaving. I can tell you this because you’re my friend, but I never missed her, even for a day.”
“Buddy, watching your parents suffer isn’t easy at any age. My folks waited until I finished high school to separate. When I asked my mother why she couldn’t try to accept my dad for who he is, she said she had finally realized his love language wasn’t one that she wanted to hear.”
“She didn’t say that to you!”
“She did. My mom’s nuts.”
They finished their rounds and headed back to Fire Station #20; then the alarm sounded.
Over the intercom, a disembodied female voice called out, “Attention, engine 5, rescue 1, squad 1, squad 4, duty chief C-3, fire chief C-1, fire investigator unit 90, fire mechanic, this is an MVA, three-thousand block of Jones Road. Grass fire in progress. Possible casualty.”
“Wonder why so much machinery,” someone said.
“I see a lotta smoke to the south,” Pete Acker said, pointing out the window as he pulled his turnout gear on over his clothes.
In less than a minute, they were headed out the door. With his adrenalin pumping, this was the kind of fire Paul had trained to fight. He was sorry there was a casualty. After witnessing such things, he always suffered, taking days, sometimes weeks to resume his normal sleep patterns, his regular disposition.
In the best of times, Paul’s personality bordered on the morose. He fought it by mind over matter.I will respond positively. I will look at the bright side. I will be grateful.Since he’d realized he could change, taking control had worked. Bethany’s departure hadn’t affected him at all; if anything, it had freed him to move to the cabin.
Only horrible things, like death and his parents’ divorce, were next to impossible to gloss over with mind control.
Since Clare’s exposé on Saturday, as busy as he tried to keep himself, one thing stuck in his mind. He’d always known his parents were unhappy. His poor father could never do anything right, and his mother was chronically miserable. Something he’d never told a soul, not even his baby brother, Oliver, he often heard his mother pleading for attention in the middle of the night.
“What’s wrong, Charlie? Do you have someone else? Why don’t you want me? If I lost weight, would it help? How about breast implants? I’d do that for you.”
His father never answered in a voice loud enough for Paul to hear, but the day after one of the incriminations, he acted embarrassed, always reaching out for his sons to hug and comfort.
The smoke was visible now, the fire spreading through the canyon, up the other side to a row of homes. They’d have to call a second alarm.
Forcing himself back to reality, the engine pulled off the road, and the men got out to attend to the victims first. The police cruiser that had been first on the scene had tried to extricate them from the vehicle, cutting their seatbelts off and getting them comfortable. As the call said, there was a casualty, one victim thrown from the vehicle, probably because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
With a crew of men hiking single file down into the canyon with shovels and pickaxes, Paul sensed they were about to experience a firefighter’s worst nightmare, a brush fire out of control, surrounding the houses in a rural neighborhood.
They began digging trenches to the northwest of the fire. Sounds of additional engines, their sirens and horns blasting, signaled more men were arriving. The crew chief shouted orders, and they followed them. It didn’t make much difference where they dug; it was all the same backbreaking work. Hours ticked by into the dusk, finally after sunset, and the hillside was dotted with burning embers.
Aircraft tankers utilized water drops instead of fire retardant because the terrain was too close to houses. Handheld extinguishers and fifty-foot-long water hoses with fifty-foot streams of water were used as long as the water lasted and until another tanker arrived and helped gain some control. By midnight, the men were just getting their second wind.
“Paul Saint!”
He looked around, his ax over his shoulder, and then he saw his dad. “Pop! You guys are here, too?”
“We’ve been here for a while. I just took a break to look for you.” He hugged his son with a bulky turnout-gear-covered arm.
“If I’m tired, I bet you’re whooped.”
“I’m pretty tired,” Charlie said. “I’ll see you later. Be careful.”
“You too, Pop,” he said, smiling as he returned to trenching.
“That’s really great that you get to see your dad,” Danny said. “I’m sick to death of this shit, and seeing someone who gives a crap about me would be helpful right about now.”
