Sin With Me

by JA Huss

  I glance at myself in the rearview as I’m pulling up to the station house. I look like shit. My eyes are bloodshot and my dark hair is all over the place. I try to keep it pushed back, but lately it’s so gotten so unruly that this one wavy tress (lock? Ringlet? I dunno) keeps falling right in front of my damn eyes. I should probably get a haircut. I should also probably think about shaving again someday. I haven’t shaved since I moved back to Vegas. I’m starting to look like a lumberjack. Or homeless. Or like a hipster douchebag who’s trying to cultivate the appearance of being a homeless lumberjack. But it doesn’t seem to have affected my social (aka sex) life so really, who gives a shit? (In fact, this one chick told me I look like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, and even though she said it’s her least favorite Brad Pitt movie, I’m taking it as a compliment.) And besides, getting a haircut would mean finding a barber, and shaving would mean buying a razor and shaving soap and… yeah.

  Effort.

  Evan strolls out to meet me as I’m parking. There’s another guy with him that I’ve met a couple of times. Young guy. Baby-faced. Evan is kind of like his mentor at the station. Jim, I think his name is. Evan whistles as he approaches the car.

  “Ho-ly shit. It came.”

  “Yup,” I say, drawing myself out of the cab.

  “Is it all you dreamed it would be?”

  “I don’t dream about cars, dude.” That’s for damn sure.

  Evan gestures to Jim. “You remember Jeff, right?”

  OK. Jeff. Fine.

  I reach out for his hand. “Yeah. Of course. Jeff. What’s good, man?”

  We shake. He’s definitely young. Guy has weirdly soft hands for a firefighter. Just one of those things I notice. “Nice ride,” he says. Which is unoriginal, but one hundred percent right.

  “Thanks. It’s got a roll cage with sixteen hundred kilowatts of flux capacity.”

  Evan laughs. I do too. I’m super fucking witty. Everybody says so.

  Jeff sort of smiles. He’s either too young or too stupid to get that I’m making a joke. Probably too young. I can usually spot stupid from a ways off, and Evan would never mentor some fucknut. But I do the worst thing you can do to a joke. I try to explain.

  “See, the guy at the dealership, he—Um. I saw this poster and—” I sigh. “What are you guys having for lunch?”

  Evan and Baby-Face Jeff lead me into the station house and, just like every time I walk into one, a swell of memory washes over me.

  Evan, our best friend Scotty, and I were six. First grade. Our very first field trip ever was to check out the inside of a real firehouse. It was the coolest thing any of us had ever seen. The firefighter leading the tour started a fire in a trash can and then put it out by dropping a newspaper over the top of it! Yeah, sure, now we know about oxygen and physics and shit, but at six? We thought firemen were fucking magicians.

  After that, we became little goddamn pyromaniacs. But only so we could figure out the best and most effective way to put the fires out. We burned some shit up though.

  Kids.

  As time went on, I became more and more interested in blowing shit up. And then in trying to keep shit from blowing up. Especially after my mom died. Once it was just me and Dad, keeping shit from exploding all over the place seemed like a really fucking important job.

  Evan, good guy that he is, genuinely just wanted to help people. There was a time where he thought he might try to be a doctor, but then he realized that doctors don’t get to run into burning buildings and ride in bigass trucks and climb ladders and shit. They can, I suppose. Nobody’s stopping them. But it ain’t part of the job description.

  And Scotty…

  Yeah. No. Not right now. I’m having an OK day. I don’t feel like I wanna get swept away in those memories right this second.

  Besides Evan and Jeff, there’s five other guys on the crew at the moment.

  Bear (I have no idea what Bear’s real name is. Could be Bear for all I know), who’s over in the gym, currently bench-pressing the equivalent of a Fiat, is the company officer. He supervises the crew and deals with any shit that rolls downhill from battalion or the district. He’s well-suited for it. In my brief encounters with him, he’s the kind of guy who, if he said, “We’re all gonna put our nuts on this anvil and then smash ’em with a mallet!” would somehow inspire you to be like, “YEAH! LET’S DO IT!” Occasionally you find natural leaders in the world.

  He’s being spotted by Rod, who is half a foot shorter than Bear, probably half his weight, and scrappy as hell. Honest-to-gospel third-generation Irish firefighter from Boston who sounds like a comic book version of a Southie come to life and wound up in Vegas because he fell in love with a showgirl. You can’t make this shit up. He’s encouraging Bear to push out his last reps. “Come on, ya fuckin’ pussy! Push that fuckin’ shit out, ya sorry fuck!” You know. Encouraging.

  I clock Dean sitting over by the engine, hanging out with Gladys, his French Bulldog. Gladys is cute as all fuck and represents an evolutionary leap in the traditional perception of firehouse dog stereotypes.

  “’Sup, Dean?” I nod his way.

  “How you living, playboy?” he says as he keeps petting Gladys. Dean’s the coolest guy I’ve ever met. Evan told me they once had to rescue some people from a motel fire. Dean personally carried seven of them to safety, and then when they checked his vitals to make sure he hadn’t inhaled too much smoke or anything, his accelerated heart rate was sixty BPM. Good-looking cat too. A young Denzel Washington with the temperament of Snoop Dogg, if instead of acting or rapping, Denzel and Snoop saved people from burning buildings. Fuck, man. Some people get all the gifts.

  Alex is in the kitchen, making lunch. Been on the job for twenty-eight years. Pushing fifty and can still outrun and outlast any five guys you meet on the street. Normally, the newbie, Baby-Face Jeff, would be the one making lunch, but Alex loves it and nobody’s gonna argue. Guy can cook his ass off. I don’t shout hello to him because the last time I did I got reprimanded. “You wouldn’t talk to Picasso while he’s painting, would you?” That’s what Alex said to me. I laughed. He didn’t. Fine by me. It smells goddamn delicious. There’s curry in whatever he’s making. I didn’t realize I was so hungry. I’m running on Johnny Blue and no toast.

  The last guy, I don’t recognize. Because they’ve been shorthanded due to some shakeups, some guys have been shifted around from different engine companies. But he’s over by himself, headphones on, ignoring everyone in the room.

  “Who’s that?” I ask Evan.

  “Brandon. On loan from Heavy 44.”

  Wow. The Heavy Rescue guys are no joke. The SEAL Team of Vegas Fire and Rescue. They’re essentially the ones who rescue the rescuers.

  “Good guy?” I ask.

  Evan shrugs in that way he does. “No idea, man. Dude’s barely spoken a word to any of us.”

  I lift my left eyebrow. (I can’t lift my right. Don’t know why.) “How’s that working out for crew cohesion?”

  Evan shares a look with Jeff. Jeff answers. “Guess it doesn’t really matter as long as he’s there when we need him to be.”

  I smile at Evan. He smiles back.

  I love that. In my work with the military I was forward-deployed as the bomb tech for a couple of different SEAL Teams, and working with elite soldiers taught me something. There’s a perception in the world that people who work in teams, especially in life-or-death situations, succumb to kind of a hive mind. That’s true and then again, it isn’t. You can train people and prepare them and unify them to a degree, but at the end of the day, they are who they are. There was this one dude on one of the teams I was with in… shit, I have no idea, doesn’t matter… who was a total prick. Absolute fucking narcissistic asshole. One of these clowns who never missed a chance to tell you how awesome he was. One time I asked the team leader if having a dude like that around was hard on morale. He said, “Man, I don’t give a shit what kinda fucking dipshit somebody is as long as they do their job and have my six
when we’re in the suck.”

  The motto for Vegas Heavy 44 is “So that brothers and others may live.” Be whoever you are, just be there for me when I need you. That’s all there is to loyalty.

  “Hey,” says Evan, shifting gears, “Tomorrow’s this little fucker’s birthday.” He tousles Jeff’s hair.

  “Stop, man. Jesus.” Jeff pushes Evan’s hand away and smooths his hair back. “I’m not a kid.”

  “How old you gonna be?” I ask.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “You’re a kid,” I say. “Embrace it. Life doesn’t get any better.” I’m a truth-teller.

  “We’re taking him out,” says Evan. “You should come.”

  “Where you going?” I ask.

  “Strip club,” says Jeff with about ten percent more enthusiasm than is appropriate.

  I scrunch my eyes closed. “No fucking way.”

  Jeff asks, “Why not?”

  “You can’t touch the girls, most of the assholes in there are sad losers, they overcharge for drinks, and you can’t touch the girls.”

  Evan starts, “Man, come on, it’ll be—

  “If I wanted to sit around with a hard-on in my pants pretending that some chick was into me, I’d just stay home and jerk it to Stacy Patono’s Facebook page,” I interrupt.

  Jeff asks the obvious question. “Who?”

  Evan responds. “Girl we went to high school with. Broke his heart.”

  “She didn’t break my heart. She gave me blue balls like five different times. THAT is what broke my heart. I value my balls highly.”

  Evan continues, “Anyway. You should come out. You can’t keep just picking up girls, bringing them up to your ivory tower, fucking them, and then starting over again the next night.”

  “I disagree,” I say. “I really, really believe I can.”

  “You need to develop a healthy social life.”

  “I’m super-social.”

  “You’re super-slutty. It’s not the same thing.” Evan bends his head toward me with a knowing look like he’s my fucking basketball coach or some shit.

  “Is Robert coming?”

  “Dude, have you met my husband? I can’t get the guy to go to see Magic Mike with me. No fucking way I’m getting him to spend the evening in a dark room filled with fake titties and sad erections.”

  “Y’know, you’re not really selling this as a good time,” I note.

  Evan ignores me and continues half-complaining about his husband. “I imagine Robert will just sit around, drinking Merlot, polishing his watch collection, listening to Tosca, waiting for me to come home and blow him.”

  Relationships.

  Jeff kind of looks down at the floor. Which is adorable.

  “Come on, man…” Evan steps in close. Jeff steps back, pretending to look at a piece of paper on the wall. “Bro, I love you. I’m worried about you. You’re spending all this time alone, you’re fucking a different girl every night—”

  “I didn’t fuck one last night. Pretty sure.”

  “You need to find an anchor, man.”

  “And you think I’ll find that in a strip club?”

  “Dude, I just think you’ll have a chance to hang out with some friends, tell some of your dumb jokes—”

  “Fuck you.”

  “—and just like, have some fun. Come on. I’ve known you a long time. Come out with us. We understand, bro. We get it.”

  He takes me by the shoulders and gives me a deep, meaningful look square in my blue eyes that are rimmed with bloodshot red and are now starting to fill with tears. Which is monumentally unexpected.

  “Did you want me to come here to trick me into an intervention?” I joke.

  He grips my shoulders tighter, stares into me harder, and doubles down. “We get it,” he says, gravity dragging down the earnestness of his tone.

  Goddamn it, I don’t wanna cry. Not here. Not in the middle of the fucking firehouse. Not with Jeff, and Bear, and Rod, and Dean, and Alex, and new guy Brandon all here. I choke it down, swallow it back, and nod my head almost imperceptibly. Evan slaps my shoulder.

  “Good deal,” he says. “Let’s eat something.”

  I hang back for a second, trying to not cry, pretending to respond to a text, as Evan moves toward the dining table. Just as Alex starts to bring out what looks like Indian food (I knew I smelled curry), a call comes in. The alarm rings, everyone’s phones start blowing up, and all seven of them jump to get into their gear.

  The whole process is lightning fast and before you know it, they’re onto the engine and pulling out. As he darts past me to jump into the cab, Dean says, “Yo, brother, watch Gladys for me ’til we get back? Thanks, man.”

  And then… they’re gone.

  It’s shockingly quiet after the sudden mayhem, except for the fact that I can still hear the alarm. Even though it’s stopped. I approach Gladys. She backs away. Cowering. I don’t blame her. I sit down in front of steaming plates of food abandoned at the table. I’m hungry. Alex made it. I should try. I take up a fork and attempt to eat a bite.

  My hand is shaking.

  I work to steady it.

  I can’t.

  I put the fork back down and sit alone in the eerie quiet of the empty firehouse, with the faint, tinny squeal of a phantom alarm still vibrating inside my brain.

  I take two deep, shaky breaths.

  And then I go ahead and give up, allowing the tears to fall while Gladys cocks her head and eyes me with a mix of suspicion, curiosity, and what feels like pity.

  Chapter Four - Maddie

  The card throws me right off my game when I come home from meeting with real-estate agents. Of the six I met with today, only one of them had any interest. Most of them already have this service with someone else. Someone more experienced. Someone they trust and probably go out and have drinks with every now and again.

  But I decide to see the positive side of things. I have ten—possibly eleven—people lined up, and that means this aerial photography business might just be the one. In fact, I know it is! I can feel it!

  But that fucking card.

  Annie, Caroline, and Diane are sitting under umbrellas by the pool. That’s pretty much the only thing this house has going for it. It’s got a nice pool. It’s even painted that cool blue color. Tahoe blue, I think it’s called. And it’s got a stone deck and just a touch of custom rock with a trickle of a waterfall out near the deep end.

  Ever since Annie copped to what her real job is, I’ve tried not to think too hard about it, because why should it matter? They were fucking men for money before I found out about the lie, and they’re fucking men for money now too.

  But it bothers me. Something about it bothers me. And the way she acted that night. Telling me about how she wants to leave Vegas.

  It put ideas in my head. Like… maybe I’d want to leave Vegas too. If I had anywhere to go that wouldn’t be a lateral move. If it wouldn’t feel like giving up.

  I grab a Corona from the fridge as I try to put the card out of my mind. I know what it is. A bad omen. A reminder that things might be bad now but they can always get worse. Like buzzards circling over a half-dead man at twilight. Something I do not want to think about right now.

  So I cut a wedge of lime and force it through the bottle of my beer. Enjoy that little spritz of fizz, take a long draw… and yeah. That fucking card is still calling my name.

  It’s from my mother. There’s an anniversary coming up. Not the happy kind. Hence the card.

  Fuck it. I grab the envelope, rip it open, and read.

  Thinking of you, it says on the outside. There’s a pretty pastel picture of flowers and kittens. Kittens? Really? Surely it’s not that bad, right?

  Inside it says, Come visit us soon! We love you, Mom and Dad.

  Which is sweet. They’re in France. Monaco, to be exact. Like, pretty much the best place to be if you have to be in France. My dad used to work for a big casino here in Vegas but six years ago he got this offer and it was t
oo good to pass up, so off they went.

  I had just started my sophomore year in college by that time. And after I managed to make it through freshman year and how awful that all was, I wanted to try to see it through because I didn’t think things could possibly get worse. I was wrong, of course, but at the time… And besides, I’m stubborn. I like to think stubbornness is my great superpower.

  My parents wanted me to come. I think. For them, it was also a chance to get away. Make a fresh start. Put everything that happened behind. That’s kind of who they are. Their way is to sweep the ugliness of life under the rug. But I just couldn’t. It seemed to me like it would be… disrespectful somehow. So I don’t necessarily blame them for going, but I don’t think I took fully into account how hard it would be all on my own. Because, if I’m being truthful, I don’t know that I realized I really would be ALL on my own. But it’s OK. Because things are going well for me! I’m on the right track now. The perfect track. Aerial photography is practically my dream. Or so I tell myself.

  This is Monday, the start of a brand-new week, and there’s nothing I like more than a fresh start. So… I will not read between the lines with this card.

  But then I see what else is inside the envelope. It’s another card. Not the sympathy kind, but the business kind.

  I read the name. God. I know her. Personally. The little note on the back in my mother’s handwriting that says, Just call her. Give it a few weeks. I’ll even pay for it.

  I guzzle down the rest of my beer before throwing it, and the cards, into the trash.

  Fuck Monday.

  I change into my bikini, put the rest of the six-pack into a cooler, and go outside to bake in the sun with the girls.

  Fresh Start Tuesday is my new motto. Mondays are for forgetting.

  Tuesday, I’m cruisin’ down Flamingo going to meet this guy who puts on a drone class for newbies. It’s incredible how people make money in the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, me and my roomies are all engaged in some form of the world’s oldest profession. I’m not sure if that makes us classic or obsolete.