The Fireman
23rd Annual Tamarack Award winner
(page 2 of 2)
The women coaxed him with murmurs and tugs on his arm. Jeffrey loomed there, not budging until Tom lowered himself to the couch beside Ellen. Margaret sat across from them. Jeffrey plopped his overweight frame on a chair set at a right angle. Tom watched Jeffrey out of the corner of his eye while Margaret explained the situation.
Trent’s class had gone to the river on a science expedition. On the way back, Manson walked ahead. The second graders were at recess, and Alex had bent down to pick up a leaf when his jacket caught on the fence. Manson bent over to help him, and that’s when Trent entered the school yard. Trent yelled at Manson to leave his brother alone, and when Manson didn’t move away, Trent hit him with a rock.
“A rock?” Tom’s voice rose with relief. “That’s what all this is about? A kid throwing a rock? Jeffrey, how many times did I heave a rock at you? It was a freak thing, right? He couldn’t have known.”
“He didn’t throw it,” Margaret said. “He’d collected it from the walk. It was big. And he brought it down on Manson’s head.”
“Oh, my God,” Ellen said.
“Trent hasn’t said a word.” Margaret talking again. Tom forced himself to concentrate. “There was a lot of confusion, panic. Manson fell over. He just lay there in a pool of blood.”
“Head wounds bleed,” Ellen said. She sounded desperate. “Even when they aren’t serious.”
Without speaking, Tom tried to send his wife a message. Shut up, Ellen. Don’t say anything incriminating. Don’t apologize. Don’t admit.
“Can I see my boys?” Ellen asked.
My boys. Already, he was a ghost.
HE FOLLOWED HER, of course. He went with his wife to see their children. The minute Ellen stepped through the door Alex threw his arms around her legs, sobbed into her thighs. She patted him on the back and murmured mother things. Tom stood watching, his hands twitchy and heavy on the ends of his arms. “Hey, buddy,” he managed to say when Alex glanced up at him.
“You go with Daddy,” Ellen said to Alex. He didn’t want to, but in the end he relented. Tom walked with him out the door and home. Alex wouldn’t hold his hand. It took them half an hour. When they got there they made hot chocolate, neither speaking, and then the chocolate got cold sitting on the table, and Tom asked Alex if he’d like to take a nap. Alex said he would. He lay down on the bottom bunk, and when Tom looked in on him fifteen minutes later, he was asleep with his thumb in his mouth. Tom watched him for a while from the doorway, then edged the door closed and stood with his forehead leaned against it.
That was nothing, though, compared to Trent. He walked in with his mother. She had her hand on his shoulder, all Big Nurse, guiding him. His lights were out, a zombie-child who moved like a nursing-home patient. Tom tried to pull his son into his arms, but Trent stood stiff as a stop sign, his head thrown aside. Tom rubbed his open hand over his mouth. Ellen walked Trent to their bed, laid him down, and covered him with a blanket. His eyes were open and staring when she closed the door.
“What’s the matter with him?” he asked.
Ellen leaned back against the wall, her body sucked in and arched away from him. “Shock, partly. He’ll be worse when it wears off.”
“Worse?” he asked.
THEY SAT UP through the night, he in the den, she in the living room. He waited for Ellen to accuse him, but she didn’t. She said nothing, nothing at all. They were polite when they passed each other on the way to the phone. Without talking about it, one or the other called the hospital every hour.
Late in the night, while Ellen was in the bathroom, Tom crept into the bedroom. Trent hadn’t moved, his slim body stretched out like a sheeted corpse. He’d fallen asleep, his mouth slack and hanging, his breath foul. Tom sat on the opposite side of the bed, afraid to touch him, afraid he’d waken.
He wished Trent had been the one who’d gotten hurt. No, no, not his head bashed in, not that, but the usual boyhood hurts, something of the body only, something that could heal into a scar and be shown off later in life to a girl who would laugh with him about narrow escapes and the stupidity of youth and trace the scar with her tongue, her teasing touch awakening him to hunger and love. He realized too late that he was making noise, sucking in big gasps of air. Trent rolled over and looked into his face.
“Dad?” Trent said. His voice high and young.
Tom tried to smile. “I’m here, son.”
“Is Alex all right?”
Tom swallowed. “He’s fine. He’s sleeping in his bed.”
“I tried to be a fireman.”
Tom nodded, but his lips would not shape consonants. He was afraid that if he opened his mouth, he would start to howl. He muttered something like a groan, but it seemed to quiet Trent. The boy closed his eyes, turned on his side and fell like a weighted anchor back into sleep.
STILL LATER, after Ellen had fallen into a fitful sleep on the couch, Tom walked over to the hospital. He didn’t know what he would do once he got there. He saw only one couple in the waiting room. They looked beat down, the woman frowsy and glassy-eyed, her hair thin, dry and spiked like a cactus. She wore a short-sleeved shirt, her elbows sharpened to knobby points.
A man sat beside her on a chair tipped back against the wall. His belly hung over a silver belt buckle of Mount Rushmore. He wore jeans and a collared plaid shirt, wire-rimmed glasses. He looked bookish and tough and like he could beat the crap out of Tom.
Tom peered up and down the halls but saw only a metal cart missing one caster and listed sideways. Looking for punishment, he sat down on a molded plastic chair and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You Manson’s folks?”
Expecting anger, reproof, he was unprepared for the way the woman brightened. “D’you know Manson?”
Tom shook his head. He couldn’t give Trent up to these people. “No, no. I heard . . . how’s he doing?”
“Twenty-seven stitches. And a concussion.” The woman’s voice swam in horrified awe.
“A kid did this to him,” the man said. He fisted his hands on his thighs. Big hands and hard, like knots of wood.
“But he’ll be all right?” Tom said.
“Doc’s checking on him,” the woman said.
Tom raised one trembling hand and stroked his jaw. “Helluva deal,” he managed to say.
“Another boy . . . he used a rock. Why would he do that?” The woman’s eyes, red-rimmed, bore into him. Tom inspected his shoes, fixed his attention on a jagged tear in the carpet.
The man dropped the chair legs to the floor. Tom winced, but the guy with big fists only leaned into Tom’s face and spoke, man to man. “You know how it is. New kid in town. He’s always the target.”
“Hold on,” Tom said. He straightened his back along the wall, the desire to confess urgent.
“I told Manson, he’s got to protect himself.” The man’s voice rose in a whine, a tornado gathering momentum.
“He’s not that kind of boy,” the woman said. She lifted one side of her mouth, a twisted tooth gleaming. Tom could see the image she held of her son, doe-eyed, feeding bits of bread to ducks. Climbing into bed between cowboy sheets.
“You got kids, mister?” the man asked.
“Yeah. Two.”
“Boys?”
Tom squirmed. “Yeah.”
The man opened and closed his hands, his fingers red and battered and mottled like sausages. “How do you stand it?”
“What do you mean?”
“People aren’t nice. You have to teach your kids not to be nice. If you don’t, they get hurt.” He stopped and gestured down the hall, too choked up to go on. While Tom tried to think of something to say, the man stood abruptly, walked down the hall and out of the hospital.
“He’s gone,” the woman said.
“No. He, uh, he just stepped out. He needs some air.”
She smiled that crooked smile again. “He goes. He’ll be gone a month, maybe two.”
“A month?”
“Last time it was six.”
Tom looked down the hall, anything to get away from this woman’s sad eyes. “Do you want me to get him back?”
She shook her head. “Won’t be no use.”
The doctor beckoned from the doorway, and the woman stood and stepped into her son’s room. Tom sat and stared down the empty hallway, seeing the listing cart leaned into a wall, the tear in the carpet under his shoe, everything broken, and then that stringy red-haired kid who flailed a bat at a car.
TOM LEFT the hospital and walked a few blocks in the night to clear his head. He wandered into the city park and sat down on a rubber swing. The metal S-hooks cut into his thighs. He rocked himself back and forth and thought of Manson’s father and the open road. He pictured himself alone in a bar, in a dingy motel room, in his car on a highway in Montana, driving 110 miles an hour into a flat horizon with nothing more weighing on him than where he might stop to refuel. Just get in his car and go. He could. He closed his eyes and tasted freedom like acid in his mouth. Eventually, he wore himself out, and he turned his face toward the house where his wife and sons lay sleeping, warm and vulnerable. He remembered to breathe, in and then out, not so hard, and he stilled to the rhythm. Morning light began to break, and then there was nothing left but to let his feet lead him home.
2008 Tamarack Award
The Story
“The Fireman”
The Winner
Pamela Carter Joern’s first novel, The Floor of the Sky, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and won the Nebraska Book Award for fiction. Her newest novel, The Plain Sense of Things, was published in September and is set in western Nebraska. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband Brad and teaches at the Loft Literary Center and at Hamline University.
* Listen to author Pamela Carter Joern read her winning story. (23:13 min)
