by Larry Brown
You learn the major arteries of the body and the names of the bones and how to splint a leg or an arm, how to tie off and cut an umbilical cord. You learn to read blood pressure, administer oxygen. You see amounts of blood that are unbelievable, not realizing until it’s actually spilled how much the human body holds. You crawl up under taxpayers’ houses for their dogs, go inside culverts where snakes may be hiding for their cats. You learn to do whatever is called for.
No two days are ever the same and you’re thankful for that. You dread the winter and the advent of ice. On an August day you pray that the city will behave and let you lie under the air conditioner and read a good book, draw easy money.
You learn that your muscles and bones and tendons get older and that you cannot remain forever young. You test the pump on the truck every day when you come on duty, make sure it’s full of fuel, clean, full of water, that the extinguishers are up. You check that your turnouts are all together, hanging on the hook that has your name written above it, and that both your gloves are in your coat pocket. You make sure your flashlight works. You test the siren and the lights because everything has to be in readiness. You shut it all down and stand back and look at the deep red Imron paint, the gold leafing and lettering, the chrome valves and caps, the shiny chains and levers, the fluid-filled pressure gauges, the beds filled with woven nylon, the nozzles folded back into layers of hose, the hydrant wrenches snug in their holders, everything on this magnificent machine. You learn every inch of your truck and you know which compartments hold the forcible entry tools, the exhaust fans for removing smoke from a house, the power saws, the portable generator, the pike poles, the scoops, the salvage covers, the boltcutters, the axes, the ropes, the rappelling gear. You look at all of it over and over again and then you go inside the fire station and get a cup of coffee, sit down with a magazine or a newspaper, and once more, you wait for whatever comes your way.
The house called Rowan Oak is the home of William Faulkner and it has a very sophisticated fire alarm system. It is sensitive enough that a bug can walk inside it and set it off, but still the trucks have to roll. Rowan Oak is a landmark and thousands of visitors come to Oxford every year to walk the grounds, peer into the rooms inside the house, look at a pair of his shoes still sitting beside a bed on the second floor.
I had never gone there until sometime in the late seventies when a film crew from New York was shooting something, probably a documentary, in the yard and wanted some rain, only there was no rain that day. Ted and I were called out to improvise for these people. Rowan Oak has its very own fire plug sitting there in the yard.
If two houses are sitting close together and one of them catches on fire, it can generate enough heat to catch the neighboring house on fire. You combat that with a stream of water on the other house to keep it cool while you’re putting the first house out, or by setting up something called a water curtain. It’s basically a hose cap with a narrow slot cut into it. You lay out a line and put the water curtain on the end of it instead of a nozzle, and charge the line, and it throws up a wall of water to protect the exposed house.
Ted and I went over to Rowan Oak, hooked a line to the plug, put a water curtain on the end of it, and the New Yorkers had their rain. While we were waiting on them to get through, I took a good first look at Rowan Oak.
It’s a big house, two full stories, wide and deep and white. Large columns on the front run all the way up to the second-story gallery. All the windows have green shutters, and it’s in pretty good shape for a house that’s a hundred and fifty years old.
It’s easy to forget that you’re inside a city when you’re standing in Mr. Faulkner’s yard. The noise of traffic is muted, and the big cedars that line the drive leading to the house tower up and form a cool shade. Most of what you can see from the yard is woods. You can’t see University Avenue, with all its gas stations and fast-food joints, and you can’t see South Lamar, with all its wonderful old homes and huge trees, but you can see Mr. Faulkner’s barn where he kept the horses, and the pasture fence that penned them in, and the old cookhouse out back where rabbits sit in the grass.
I like to walk around the old wooden fence, and look at the trees, and think about what he did with his life. I figure he didn’t pay much attention to what the world thought. He just went on and wrote his novels and stories and eventually won the Nobel Prize. I was born in this town, still live here, but it’s something to stand in that yard, maybe a block from where I’m sitting now, and think about that, about all those novels and stories that came from inside that house. I know a guy who used to caddy for him and his brother, John. He said John always tipped and William never would. Mrs. Faye Bland told me he used to come in The Mansion, a restaurant where she was a waitress, and drink a cup of coffee every night, leave a dime tip. Said he wore an old shabby coat with patches on the elbows; said, Larry, to look at him you’d think he didn’t have nothing.
But he had something.
This is New York City, fall, 1989. Coming in on the plane I looked out the window and saw the harbor and the Statue of Liberty and the hundreds of tiny white dots in the water that were sailboats tacking in the wind and beyond all that the great gray city, too big to believe, filled with life on streets I would soon have to walk.
All my hours have paid off now, all my little meaningless rejection slips mean something now, my first novel, Dirty Work, is out and I’m going on The Today Show to talk about it. All the boys at the fire station will be watching, all my relatives, anybody from home who knows me and knows this is happening.
I don’t want to be here. I resisted it for a long time. I thought they wouldn’t be able to understand my accent, and I was afraid I would make a mistake on live television.
To me this place is vastly fascinating and fearsome. You read about all the killings, all the drugs and guns and meanness. You read books like Report From Engine Co. 82 by Dennis Smith and then when you get on these streets you see those men come down them in their pumpers, trying to get through the incredible network of traffic, and it looks like they’ll never make it to wherever they’re going.
New York is alien to me, a visual experience so far removed from what I’m used to that it’s hard to adjust. You have a nice meal in a restaurant with a white linen tablecloth and good silver, and a wino presses his nose and his bottle to the window and looks in at you, all his belongings in a plastic garbage bag he carries with him. People cuss and scream at each other from their cars, and nobody gives an inch. People sleep on the sidewalk, on benches, in doorways. Pedestrians step over them.
The people in this city don’t seem to see things like that. They advise you to look the other way, to make no direct eye contact with anybody.
There are humans of every size and description and age and color walking the streets, an endless parade in a place that never sleeps, a place that holds many surprises. A crowd of people is gathered on a sidewalk watching a tall handsome young man with long flowing hair and no arms drawing a bright angel on the sidewalk with colored chalk he holds between his toes. The car horns blare, the traffic lights change, the finely dressed walk beside those whose clothes are shabby.
Out walking around and looking at the city, I’m coming close to a decision, one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s not an easy thing to decide, and there won’t be any turning back. It will be like leaving a family I’ve had for nearly sixteen years. We work together and we play together, hunt, fish, go to the bars, hang out at the lake cooking fish and drinking beer from a keg. We help each other help people.
All that seems so far from here, but I know that in a few days I’ll be back in the station, back on my streets, back behind the wheel of Engine 4 and Engine 10. This is only temporary, this will not last. But writing will last for the rest of my life.
I stand in my hotel room that evening before bed, looking out over Central Park. The sound of the traffic and the horns is always constant. I don’t go to sleep easily once I lie down. There are to
o many things running through my mind.
I sit in the green room at NBC the next morning, having coffee. They’ve already had me in make-up, doing whatever they’ve done to me. I want a cigarette but I’m not allowed to smoke in here. I say hi to Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, but he only frowns when he sees the Marlboros in my pocket. Later, on the monitor, we watch him being interviewed. Then it’s my turn.
Two nights later I’m tearing down a ceiling in Murphy’s Marine, a bait shop/grocery store/gas station in Oxford, looking for pockets of fire. Our crew has knocked the fire down quickly but we’re looking for embers, something still smoldering behind a wall or up in the ceiling. It’s a rainy night and we have to climb up on the roof and lay out some vinyl salvage covers to keep the rain out until the morning, when repairs can begin.
The main thing everybody wants to know is if Jane Pauley is as good-looking in person as she is on television.
Yeah, she’s a fox, I tell them. What I can’t tell them is that appearing on that television show has changed something, the shape and order and regularity my world once had. People know where I am now, and they can call me when I’m on duty at the station. A man calls me up and tells me a long and awful story about being driven out of the U.S. Army, and wants me to write a movie or a book about it. A man calls me up and tells me a long and awful story about a land dispute he’s involved in, which has caused the suicide of his sister. He wants me to write a book or a movie about it. A lawyer calls me up and tells me he has the most interesting case in the world, which would make a great movie or book. A woman calls me up and tells me that her life is a combination of Silkwood and one other movie, and wants, naturally, a book or a movie. Cranks, creeps, preachers, the desperately-wanting-to-publish. I can’t hide from them anymore. If Dirty Work does even moderately well it will get worse instead of better.
There’s enough money in my retirement fund to live on for a couple of years, probably. Even if I fail, even if I can’t make a living from my books, even if I have to go back to driving a forklift or painting houses or sacking groceries in some store, at least I’ll have those two years to try, to give it everything I’ve got, to take my chance at it.
It’s a spring night in 1990, and my friend and I are driving leisurely down Old Highway 6, drinking a beer, heading out to my house for supper. We’re talking, laughing, listening to music. The city gave me a nice retirement ceremony, took my badge and brass and one shoulder patch and mounted it all in a good glass case and handed me a special proclamation from the Mayor’s office. They wanted me to say a few words, but I couldn’t think of many to say. How do you say goodbye to a family?
The red lights come up behind us quickly, and I pull over to the side of the road. The red pickup shoots by, the crash truck right behind it, OFD written on their doors. I know there’s a wreck they’re going to, and I want to see where it is, see who’s working it.
We pull out and follow them down the road, although they quickly run off and leave us, but I figure we can find the wreck if we just keep going on Old 6.
It’s miles and miles before we run up on it, probably six or seven miles past my house, but once we get near it and see all the cars parked up and down both sides of the road, there’s no doubt that we’ve found it.
We park the car and get out and walk up to the scene of the wreck. The powerful halogen lights are set up, illuminating the car run head-on into a tree, the front end smashed and crumpled. The firefighters are down in the ditch with the car, the hum of the Hurst Tool running high in the night. The ambulance crew waits while the state troopers direct traffic. Probably a hundred people are watching the firefighters work. I think I recognize some of them under their turnouts and helmets: Johnny, Tony, Bill, Ed, Michael, Vern. They are concentrating on what they’re doing, the luminous stripes on their turnouts glowing in the light. They are working together, freeing the person in the car. This brotherhood of men: this is what I gave up. This is what I left behind.
We’re standing in a small group of spectators who are watching the rescue continue, but we must be too close. A highway cop comes up and impatiently orders all of us to move back, out of the way, and let the firefighters do their work.
I see how things are now. I step to the other side of the road.
I have left all that now forever, even though in my heart I am still one of them. The boys are still there in the station, their shining trucks parked at the ready, and when trouble comes they roll to meet it, screaming beneath the leaves of the big oaks that line and shade North Lamar.
We hope you enjoy this special preview of Larry Brown’s Joe, now a motion picture starring Nicholas Cage, available in print and e-book formats wherever books are sold.
THE ROAD LAY LONG and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance. They trudged on beneath the burning sun, but anyone watching could have seen that they were almost beaten. They passed over a bridge spanning a creek that held no water as their feet sounded weak drumbeats, erratic and small in the silence that surrounded them. No cars passed these potential hitchhikers. The few rotting houses perched on the hillsides of snarled vegetation were broken-backed and listing, discarded dwellings where dwelled only field mice and owls. It was as if no one lived in this land or ever would again, but they could see a red tractor toiling in a field far off, silently, a small dust cloud following.
The two girls and the woman had weakened in the heat. Sweat beaded the black down on their upper lips. They each carried paper sacks containing their possessions, all except the old man, who was known as Wade, and who carried nothing but the ragged red bandanna that he mopped against his neck and head to staunch the flow of sweat that had turned his light blue shirt a darker hue. Half of his right shoe sole was off, and it flopped and folded beneath his foot so that he managed a sliding, shuffling movement with that leg, picking it up high in a queer manner before the sole flopped again.
The boy’s name was Gary. He was small but he carried the most. His arms were laden with shapeless clothes, rusted cooking utensils, mildewed quilts and blankets. He had to look over the top of them as he walked, just to be able to see where he was going.
The old man faltered momentarily, did a drunken two-step, and collapsed slowly on the melted tar with a small grunt, easing down so as not to hurt himself. He lay with one forearm shielding his face from the eye of the sun. His family went on without him. He watched them growing smaller in the distance, advancing through the mirrored heat waves that shimmied in the road, unfocused wavering shapes with long legs and little heads.
“Hold up,” he called. Silence answered. “Boy,” he said. No head turned to hear him. If his cries fell on their ears they seemed not to care. Their heads were bent with purpose and their steps grew softer as they went on down the road.
He cursed them all viciously for a few moments and then he pushed himself up off the road and went after them, his shoe sole keeping a weird time. He hurried enough to catch up with them and they marched on through the stifling afternoon without speaking, as if they all knew where they were heading, as if there was no need for conversation. The road before them wound up into dark green hills. Maybe some hope of deep shade and cool water beckoned. They passed through a crossroads with fields and woods and cattle and a swamp, and they eyed the countryside with expressions bleak and harried. The sun had started its slow burning run down the sky.
The old man could see beer cans lying in the ditches, where a thin green scum nourished the tan sagegrass that grew there. He was very thirsty, but there was no prospect of any kind of drink within sight. He who rarely drank water was almost ready to cry out for some now.
He had his head down, plodding along like a mule in harness, and he walked very slowly into the back of his wife where she had stopped in the middle of the road.
“Why, yonder’s some beer,” she said, pointing.
He started to raise some curse against her without even looking, but then he looked. She was still pointing.
“Where?” he said. His eyes moved wildly in his head.
“Right yonder.”
He looked where she was pointing and saw three or four bright red-and-white cans nestled among the grasses like Easter eggs. He stepped carefully down into the ditch, watchful for snakes. He stepped closer and stopped.
“Why, good God,” he said. He bent and picked up a full can of Budweiser that was slathered with mud and slightly dented, unopened and still drinkable. A little joyous smile briefly creased his face. He put the beer in a pocket of his overalls and turned slowly in the weeds. He picked up two more, both full, and stood there for a while, searching for more, but three were all this wonderful ditch would yield. He climbed back out and put one of the beers in another pocket.
“Somebody done throwed this beer away,” he said, looking at it. His family watched him.
“I guess you going to drink it,” the woman said.
“Finders keepers. They ain’t a fuckin thing wrong with it.”
“How come em to throw it away then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” she said. “Just don’t you give him none of it.”
“I ain’t about to give him none of it.”
The woman turned and started walking away. The boy waited. He stood mute and patient with his armload of things. His father opened the can and foam exploded from it. It ran down over the sides and over his hand and he sucked at the thick white suds with a delicate slobbering noise and trembling pursed lips. He tilted the can and poured the hot beer down his throat, leaning his head back with his eyes closed and one rough red hand hanging loose by his side. A lump of gristle in his neck pumped up and down until he trailed the can away from his mouth with his face still turned up, one drop of beer falling away from the can before it was flung, spinning, backward into the ditch. He started walking again.
