by Sarah Vowell
“Son,” he said. The kid stopped. Thumbed his pockets. Henry dropped the truck into park and left the engine running. “You from around here?”
A tall, handsome kid. Vivid blue eyes, hair black and shiny as a beetle shell.
“Nope. My aunt has a place somewheres.”
“You don’t know where?”
“Nope.”
“You mind I ask her name?”
“Nope,” the boy said.
Then the boy didn’t say who his aunt was.
“You wanna give me that name?”
“My aunt?”
In the shaded dusk, Henry could not tell if the boy was a smart-ass or just profoundly stupid.
“Yes.”
A streetlamp winked twice and came full on.
“It’s Brenda Parks,” he said, straightening up into the light. “I don’t figure you know where her place is,” he said.
“There’s only six thousand people live in Tenmile, son. Get in.”
The kid smirked and looked away. Like a plan had come off or was set in motion. He dashed around the truck and got in. Said his name was Keith. He’d been praying for a ride since Forsyth, where he’d been looking for his uncle. He said he was eighteen, but Henry didn’t believe it. The scar on his arm was from a fight in Seattle. So was the tattoo. Seattle had marked him up good. But then he found Jesus, the Lord’s forgiveness. He wasn’t gonna lie about nothing no more. He had stuck needles in his arm and had been on the wrong path. He wasn’t gonna lie about it. He was saved and had decided to find his aunt, see if he could get a clean start. His uncle—the one in Forsyth—said she was in Tenmile, so that’s how Keith come to be here. All of this was the truth.
“I see,” Henry said at the conclusion of this biography. They went past the bars, the barbershop, and Dairy Queen, then out on the county road.
“This some kind of fire truck?” the kid asked.
Henry said it was. The first water tender he owned, in fact. A twelve-hundred-gallon tank bolted and welded to a Ford F-150. Did the boy have a driver’s license? Would he be looking for work? Could he study up for the kind of test you need to take to drive an even bigger truck and operate a pump and enter into the profession of wildfire fighting and dust suppression? Henry smiled at the boy over the last part as if to say it really wasn’t a profession at all, that the boy’d almost be doing him a favor to take the job.
“Holy shit.” The kid fairly vibrated at his good fortune. “Pardon me.”
Henry plucked a business card off the dash.
“Keith, you come out to this address tomorrow morning at eight. Ask for my mother, Kelly, to get you started on the paperwork.”
“Holy cow.”
Henry pulled into the drive. A grave unsmiling old woman hefted herself out of a wicker chair on the porch and tilted her head back to look at them stopping.
“One favor. You tell your aunt who gave you a job.”
“I sure will.” He scanned the card for Henry’s name. “Thanks, Mr. McGinnis.”
“Folks call me Daddy. Tell your aunt that Daddy brought you home. Daddy got you a job already.”
Henry went to the Sunrise Café. The old boys down there, the farmers, loggers, and the cripples and layabouts drawing social security. He used to bring his daughter Jill when she was little, pigtailed or tutued, and she’d carry on daddydaddydaddydaddy Daddayyy until he stopped whatever he was doing and gave her a quarter for the gumball machine or sent her around the corner to the tobacco shop to get him a cigarillo and a candy cane, don’t tell your mother, wink. Spoiled her mostly. So the old boys got to calling him Daddy. And over the years it spread to his crew, his clients, his suppliers, the parts guys, and the rest of the town. Now everybody called him that.
The old boys all said Hey Daddy when he came in. They were fingering their change, braiding rope, and watching out the window for something to occur. All cowboy hats and cigarettes and coughing and taking medications. Pearl-snap buttons like a line of aspirin clinging to the rondure of their guts.
Old Burt waved Henry over with a big red arm tufted white with hair that gave him the pink aspect of a prize pig. Burt had suggested the previous autumn that maybe Henry should run for mayor, said that a picture of Henry—thick-necked and flannelled and smiling—would look just about boss with two words right under him: Vote Daddy. Everybody knowing Henry McGinnis. Everybody liking Henry McGinnis.
Henry had said he’d think on it.
He sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee. Burt read aloud the rodeo results from the paper. He turned and folded the paper and glanced at Henry and spoke to the room in general.
“Says here a kid was attacked by an owl,” Burt said. “Cross-country skiing up in the high country with his family it says.”
“A goddamned owl?” old Rosignol asked. “Let me see that.”
Burt handed the paper to Rosignol and went over to where Henry sat. They shook and greeted one another.
“Take a walk?”
“Make that a to-go Marcie.”
Henry expected another entreaty but not the whole gang filing out after them. Burt took his arm, the rest of the old boys trailing behind. They talked about the owl and Rosignol and Rosignol’s new F-150 pickup and arrived at the end of the square, where beyond was a squat row of bars and after that nothing but an empty field and then the timber. Henry stopped. At a gesture from Burt, the others crossed the street and went to the courthouse in the middle of the square. Burt cleared his throat, the effort showing in the quilting of his throat.
“Have you all decided?” he asked.
Henry said he was thinking about it.
“You’d make a helluva mayor Henry. You pay well. You bring business. Hell, you are the Tenmile Chamber of Commerce. Running for office? Shit. Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing. Imagine what you could do, all the business connections you got in Polson. And Kalispell?”
Burt had Henry’s shoulder pinched ever so lightly in his fingers and thumb. Henry waited until it was uncomfortable for Burt to leave it there, then he spoke.
“Let me get this straight. You’d have me employ the town. You’d have me bring business here. And now you’d have me run for mayor and govern.” Burt grinned at his boots. “Is there anything else can I do for you, Burt?”
He looked up at Henry under his flaring white brows, palmed his nape, and said, “Well, I got this crick in my neck.”
Henry just sucked his teeth at the joke. The old boys milled around the courthouse lawn, looking for some sign of what was decided.
“All kidding aside,” Henry said. “You know what seventy percent of my business is? Dust. I piss on dirt for a living.”
Burt narrowed his expression, rubbed his jaw. Said, “And you feel like what you got already is just about your fair portion.”
“Something like that.”
Burt nodded, thought better of what he was about to say, and punched Henry soft in the arm.
“We’ll line up behind you. All I can say is, you’d make a fine mayor, Daddy.”
What Henry believed in was family and that all the blessings in his life proceeded from this belief. He was the richest man in Tenmile—even if that wasn’t saying much—and he put close to seventy grand in wages in the town’s pockets the year prior. Martha Baumgartner even thanked him for hiring her boy in a rambling four-page letter, the upshot of which was that her son Ben had been about to join the Marines or go to college, and Henry had saved the boy from both of those evils. He wrote her back saying the kid was a natural grease monkey and born water tender driver, even though neither was true. Henry hired young and he hired dumb. It was that simple.
The kid who’d walked into town, Keith, was no different. Worse, if possible. Poor in the uptake of new information and skills. Little inherent work ethic or simple sticktoitiveness. It took the better part of April to get him certified. On a practice run up to Tub Gulch, Henry followed in another truck as the boy pissed 3,000 gallons of potable on the road. Henry tried th
e CB. The logging road was too narrow to pass, so he honked and flashed his lights. Nothing.
When they got to the site, Henry asked was his damn radio broke.
The kid flipped it on. Said that it didn’t look like it was.
Henry took off his cap and worked his temples. The kid watched him closely, like Henry was at charades. Henry beckoned him to the back of the truck and showed him where the valve dripped the last drops of the water. The kid asked him what happened.
“You didn’t close the cam lock is what happened.”
“Shit.”
“Imagine there’s a dirty, hungry, thirsty fire crew up here. Needing to cook and shower. I want you to imagine them looking at you right now.”
The boy peopled the meadow with sincere concentration.
“Man,” he said with considerable awe. “I bet they’d be fuckin’ pissed.”
Henry’s daughter Jill was something Henry liked to show off when she was younger, somewhere between the MEC 650 shotgun-shell reloader in his den and the pressure washers and concrete drains he had installed out in the truck bay. At parties and barbecues, he used tell her to come on over and do that dance she learned in that dance class down in Polson. She’d ask which one suspiciously, and he’d say the one that was costing him an arm and a leg, to his guests’ laughter, her embarrassment. He’d soothe her on his knee. Times he could coax a warbled tune out of her. But as she grew taller and plumper and her talents more vague, he quit asking her to do anything for company. She would just stand there looking at her phone or pluck some invisible sweater pill or dandelion seed from her new bosom, and ignore whoever her father wanted her to meet, men who now seemed content to just look at her and did not laugh. Not at all.
The case with Keith was likewise. She came around the house as Henry was explaining to the nigh-idiot why you don’t simply pour the old engine oil into the ditch. Henry called her over to meet the kid, but she didn’t hear or didn’t care and went out on the dirt road. She crossed it kicking white dust up to the hem of her dress with her cowboy boots, and dipped into the ditch opposite looking for something, pointing it out to herself, ducking down to get it. She mounted the road grunting and came back. Along her thigh she swung a dead chicken by the neck. Henry called her again, and she came over with the bird.
With her other hand she typed something on her phone, who knew what. “Another’n got out and got hit,” she said. A pickup full of boys barreled up the road as if to prove her point. She raised a chin at them and grinned vaguely in the direction they were headed.
Henry pecked her on the cheek, put an arm around her, which she seemed mainly to tolerate. “This is Jill,” he said.
Keith’s mouth slowly opened but he didn’t say anything with it.
Henry told Keith she was homeschooled and raised animals in 4-H and had already taken practice tests of the SAT and wanted to be a veterinarian or maybe even a pilot, and though it would kill him, she would probably go to college in Washington or at least the University of Montana. He pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“Daddy,” she said. “Don’t.”
Keith watched him kiss her cheek. She had a toothpick in her mouth and moving it around in there made a powerful impression. The chicken bled. Spots of blood on her dress, her boot.
“Keith wants to go into the ministry,” Henry announced.
Jill squinted up at the late morning sun, yawned, and fluffed the dead bird’s white feathers.
“You got a little blood on you,” Keith said, pointing at her foot.
“I better clean up,” she said, ducking out from under her father’s arm.
“I’ll see you at church then?” Keith said to her.
She backed away, dead chicken, sundress, toothpick, smile.
“If you sit by the window you will.”
As the weeks went on, Henry’s mother Kelly came to adore Keith. Mornings Henry’d come into the dispatch office where she kept the books and find the boy leaning over the desk showing her a thing he’d drawn and wanted to tattoo on his shoulder. Things he said were straight out of Revelations, dragons and horsemen. Visions more commonly airbrushed on vans.
“You don’t got nothing to do?” Henry would say to him.
“Sure thing, Daddy.”
His mother smiled and shook her head as the boy departed.
“I thought you hated tattoos,” he said to his mother. He dropped into the office chair on clicking casters and groaned with the springs.
“I do. He’s just something else to listen to.”
“Listen to?”
“To look at then.” She fluttered her eyelashes, making fun of herself.
“Mother.”
She shrugged.
Now in his fifties, Henry had come to look like her in the mouth and jowl, and it bothered him, though he never thought so in actual words. Just a feeling he had, passing a mirror. His resemblance to her had nearly startled him when Burt brought over that Vote Daddy poster he’d done up. Now he saw her mouth in the mirror every time he shaved. How we are each a late version of someone preceding us.
“He’s got Jill in a lather,” she said.
Maybe he’d grow a mustache or beard. He wondered how that would look on a Vote Daddy poster.
“Asking if she can bring me my lunch and every other thing just to get a look at him,” she said.
“What?”
“Jill.”
“Jill what?”
“And Keith.”
Henry scoffed.
“He’s an idiot.”
“Why’d you hire him then?”
Henry leaned forward and scanned the large calendar on the desk for upcoming jobs. She watched him a minute and then got up and went to the file cabinet, stopped, turned around, and sat again. He glanced up.
“What?” he said.
“Because of Brenda Parks.”
“How’s that now?”
“Brenda’s popular with them in the church, and he’s her nephew. So if you were to run for mayor—”
“Mama, I ain’t running for mayor. We need a lot more jobs or a big fire season to cover our nut.” He tapped the blank week on the calendar. “You don’t know how dry it’s gonna be this summer.”
“Maybe the mayor’s allowed to start forest fires,” she said wryly.
She looked at him with a face that was his face, and it embarrassed him. The thought of all those posters going up all over.
The fires up past Deerwater, deep in the Purcell Range, issued from a spectacle of heat lightning that lit the night sky an awful purple like some kind of novel ordnance. The dawn met grim pennants of smoke, and by then the fires had scorched several thousand acres. Tenmile smelled of smoke and then a nicotine halo shrouded the sun and to go outside was to come back in smelling like a campfire.
The wildfire was big and close. By noon Henry and his crew had already been up to the fire camp at Fourth of July Creek three times, filling the huge bladders of potable and the remote dip tanks for the helicopters, and pumping straight from the Kootenai River and racing up the mountain to douse the fire line directly. Sweltering smokejumpers manifested at the roadside in small bands, coated in soot. Henry stopped and sprayed the men down. A crew of trench diggers and chainsaw men marching up the road stopped when Henry honked and they too stood in the spray and trudged Indian-file dripping back into the lodgepoles to help set backfires.
Henry was heading back to camp in the late afternoon when his mother radioed. Keith. The kid had attached a potable bladder to the water truck, opened the valve, and wandered off for a cigarette. When he came back the mess chief was screaming murder about the pond under his kitchen. A number of the firefighters’ individual tents were flooded, their clothes and belongings sopping wet. Keith had banjaxed half the camp.
“Fire him.”
“Henry—”
He cut her off but knew she couldn’t hear him until she quit speaking into the CB, so he repeated himself: “Fire him. Fire him. Fire him.”
“He’s just a kid—”
Henry flipped off the CB.
Reputation was everything, mayoral candidate or not. Henry went straight to the campsite and helped the mess crew tote the propane tanks and kitchen burners to dry ground, strung up lines by himself, hung clothes and sleeping bags, and met the truckloads of sooted firefighters coming off the mountain in the dark, explaining and apologizing. Most of them were too bushed to do any worse than brush by him, drop their pulaskis, and curl up on the ground like dogs.
It rained, first in timid drops that impinged Henry’s dusty lot in polka dots and then in great waving drapes across the meadow in back of his property. A full day of small drizzle under gray shapeless scud and witchy cold. Henry cooked a can of chili on his dash heater as he sat on standby at the fire camp. At least everything was wet now. Maybe they’d forget. He realized, with relief, that none of these firefighters were from Tenmile, that none would vote here. Then this relief embarrassed him.
He finally got the all-clear to go home in the dark downpour, ate mutely with his wife, and fell asleep to the purl of gutter water by the window. He woke before dawn, before the rooster cockadoodle, with it still raining or raining again. He fixed his coffee and eggs. The day lit. The rain eased.
Going out to drop a bag of garbage in the dumpster, he discovered Brenda Parks’s Buick behind the outbuilding. For a moment he wondered what her car was doing there. Where it could not be seen from the house. He pitched his coffee into the wet grass and jogged back the inside.
He flung open Jill’s bedroom door. Her head thrown back, clutching her robe closed over her chest, her own hand over her mouth. The boy’s legs such that it only slowly dawned on Henry she was astraddle him backwards. He watched the boy’s toes curl. Jill didn’t even notice him.
When Keith slunk out to the car, Henry stepped from behind the dumpster and crowned him with shovel handle. Henry slipped and nearly fell in the mud.
