The Hermit's Story

by Rick Bass

  Fishing trips, such as this one, with his brother, help.

  ***

  Even though it is still an hour before daylight, the pager’s going off about every ten minutes. If the pager gets too full—it will hold only a certain number of messages, depending on their length—Wilson can stop and get out and make a few calls from a pay phone, but he hopes that doesn’t happen today.

  As they drive, all Artie talks about—sitting in the back seat and watching the digital glow of the pager, waiting for its red light to blink in the dark, waiting for the beeping to go off again—is his and Dave’s work. Even though they saw each other on Friday, they go over it again, shooting the shit about each employee in the office—talking about their work in the familiar but also exploratory manner of raccoons crouched by the side of a creek, fishing for mussels in the night: turning them over with their paws, feeling every ridge, every bump. There is the one who is getting fired, and the one who does not get her reports in on time. There is the good-looking one and the plain one. There is the asshole and the brown-noser, and they laugh and talk about the brown-noser for a while.

  Then they talk about the handsome one, whom they dislike intensely because he is arrogant, and finally, after several miles, they settle on the scapegoat, the gullible one, Clifford.

  They savage Clifford; it is as if he is meat and they are eating him. It is as if they are cutting him up and swallowing him. Every week there is something new that Clifford’s done, or which they’ve done to Clifford, some small thing to share and to revel over. This morning Artie is telling Dave about how he bad-mouthed Clifford’s new truck, a Chevy, as not being nearly as strong as Artie’s old truck, a Dodge.

  “Oh, he was hot!” Artie hoots. “He started stuttering and saying that all his friends who had horses and who trailered them out to the country each weekend used Chevys, and I interrupted him and said, ‘Well, yeah, they’re okay trucks for little weekend pullers.’” Artie imitates the brush-away hand-waving motion he’d given Clifford—and Dave laughs, too.

  “Weekend pullers,” Dave says. “That’s a good one. Him and those damn horses.”

  Clifford, who is slightly ahead of them in hierarchy, though not a real boss, has been going out to the new racetrack by the airport and has been buying the bargain horses, the ones that are not quite fast enough.

  “It’s like a compulsion,” Artie says. “He’s bought about fifty of them so far, and he doesn’t show any fucking sign of stopping.”

  “I could kill him,” Dave says, from out of the blue.

  Wilson looks at his brother in surprise. Artie laughs a mean laugh.

  “I had to go over to his house for a barbecue once, while you were out of town,” Dave tells Artie. “Some bullshit office party. He had just been out to the racetrack that day and had brought home two more horses. He had them in his back yard and was feeding them apples and hay and making everyone touch them,” Dave says. “He kept making everyone pat their flanks, their rumps. ‘Feel that,’ he’d say, ‘Feel how hard that is.’ I’d never seen such sad pieces of shit in all my life. He says he’s going to sell them as polo ponies. He thinks that because they almost ran races, they’re some kind of super-horses, and always will be. He thinks almost is real close, instead of real far.

  “When he comes in my office to ask me something,” Dave goes on, “the first thing I ask him, right away, before he can say anything, is ‘How long are you going to be in here?’”

  “You tell him that?” Artie says.

  “Hell yes,” says Dave. “He doesn’t like it, but there’s nothing he can do. Just because he’s above me doesn’t mean he can fire me. Besides, he doesn’t know shit. He’s always asking people to help him fill out his reports. He’ll ask the same question five days in a row.”

  “He does that, doesn’t he?” Artie says. “Asks the same question twice.” Artie’s speaking slowly now, and where before he had a kind of cocksure glittering anger in his dark eyes, doubt is now starting to seep in, and it comes into his voice, too, a change that is so noticeable that Wilson, driving, looks in the rearview mirror to see what’s going on.

  “Hey, Dave,” Artie says—and Wilson recognizes the change-in-voice immediately, recognizes it from his customers: the bargaining mode, the favor-asking mode. “How do you get all those apartment jobs, now? Apartments are easy. I always get the warehouses,” he says.

  Dave shrugs. What can he tell Artie? That Artie is raw meat, chum for the company? That his sole purpose for the company, and therefore perhaps in life, is to pull his suit on each morning and hurl his body at the stacks of dull paper, earning his 3 percent, passing on the rest of the bloated profit to the absentee, do-nothing owner of the company, until Artie’s body is gray and bent and lifeless and all joy and spontaneity has been sucked from his brain?

  Dave shrugs again, looks in the mirror at Artie. Dave heard the waver in Artie’s voice, too.

  “I just ask for ’em,” Dave says, and that is as close to the truth as he wants to come—that he, Dave, gets them, and that Artie does not.

  “Warehouses are big,” Artie complains. “So fucking big and empty. Nothing in them. A hell of a lot of work,” he says. “Shit. Apartments are easy. I could knock out apartments in no time.”

  “Look,” Dave says. He points up the road to a dingy white bus that’s traveling the same direction as they are. It’s a prison bus from Huntsville: an aging school bus. It’s lit up inside with a yellow glow like the light that comes from old bug lamps. Riding through the night like that, it looks as if the prisoners are up on some kind of stage for exhibit, or are floating in light.

  The prisoners are jammed shoulder to shoulder, three to a seat, and they are staring straight ahead. Perhaps a hundred of them are packed in there. They are so motionless, so locked into their straight-ahead stares, that it seems certain they must be handcuffed.

  There is wire mesh, like a cage, all around the bus’s windows, and the bus is moving slowly.

  Wilson pulls closer to the bus, on its left, and begins passing it; as he does, the three men are struck by a horrible, giddy kind of silliness. They begin making faces at the prisoners, first Artie and then Dave and then Wilson. They leer and hold their hands up to their ears and pantomime and grin, making taunting gestures of nonsense to the prisoners, and then pass on.

  But almost immediately, as if some shell or husk has come back over them, or has instead been peeled back again to reveal who they really are, the three men are a bit remorseful, and embarrassed—a bit shocked—by what they have done. They ride on in silence.

  Wilson has switched on the mute button on his pager, but in the darkness, it blinks red again, and Artie utters a quiet “Whoop!”

  “Which exit is it?” Wilson asks. “Texas City, or League City?”

  “Texas City,” Dave says. “I told you that. You’d better slow down and get over. You’re going to miss it.” Already, there’s a lot of traffic, men going to work in the refineries at Baytown, Texas City, and Galveston. The oil comes straight in to the Gulf from the Middle East, from Africa and Russia, from the North Sea, China, and South America, and is refined there on the shore. Refineries and smokestacks line the beach like skyscrapers. The orange and yellow plumes of flare-gas flutter raggedly in the night, but the sight is strangely pretty, oddly comforting. Wilson pulls into the right lane and slows down, watching for the exit. Dave looks back to see where the prison bus is, and he is alarmed to see that it’s gaining on them.

  “If you speed up and get a ticket,” he tells Wilson, “I’ll pay for it, as long as you don’t let them catch up with us.”

  Wilson cackles and slows down further.

  “I’ll get you for this, Wilson,” Dave says to his younger brother, and slumps down in his seat. He averts his face as the prison bus passes them once more; but still he cannot help but look.

  The driver is giving them a malevolent stare. He’s a big man in a uniform, with a crewcut, and for a moment, with his eyes alone, he drills
holes in their truck. He’s gripping the steering wheel so tightly with his big fists that it seems he will break it off.

  “Oh, lovely,” Dave says. And is it his imagination, or as the bus passes are all the prisoners on that side of the bus watching out of the corners of their eyes? They are still staring lock-solid straight ahead, as they must have been told to do, but doesn’t it seem, too, that there is some hint of peripheral vision, that the prisoners are casting sidelong corner-eyed glances of rage down at them? Memorizing their faces, perhaps, their license plate, their existence, for the prisoners to hold clenched in their hearts for all the rest of their days—gripping that knowledge so tightly until it seems it will crack, and waiting for the day they get out, then, to go looking for them?

  And if they do, will they find them? Would they know where to look? Might it be an easy thing for the prisoners to hold on to even a tiny rage for a very long time, given their predicament?

  The three men feel strongly that they have made a mistake, in their one errant moment of lightheartedness: some crooked, mistaken flight of frivolousness.

  The prison bus gets off ahead of them, at the same exit they’re taking.

  “Maybe they’re all going fishing, too,” says Wilson. “Maybe it’s like a vacation.”

  “Maybe they’ve chartered our same boat,” says Artie.

  And though none of the men really believes this, there is a long, stultifying tension that builds and builds, as ahead of them, the bus takes the same series of left turns and rights that they are taking, as if it is indeed going out on the pier, too, to meet the guide. And it is finally only at the last intersection that the bus turns right, where Artie and Dave and Wilson are supposed to turn left. Without realizing it, the three men relax and uncoil, and breathe out long, quivery breaths of relief, and then chuckle.

  Wilson comes to a full stop before turning left, and the three of them watch the bus, the prisoners bathed in that awful yellow light, travel down the road into the darkness—watching the bus until it is completely gone, tiny red taillights fading into nothing.

  The men watch the bus disappear in this manner as if to make themselves believe that it has become nothing, never-was; then, with a glow in the east, they turn toward the sunrise and drive down the pier, along the rock jetty, out to the point where they are to meet their guide.

  There is a devastating southwest wind kicking up, one that will muddy the water and make the fishing all but impossible—they will not catch a thing all day—but they do not know this yet, and for the moment it doesn’t matter. At the moment, they are still uncoiling, still unwinding, and are driving along in a state of nearly utter peace and freedom, a kind of euphoric silver-heartedness: a clean-breathing, gasping kind of feeling, a good one, which might last for hours.

  The Fireman

  THEY BOTH STAND ON the other side of the miracle. Their marriage was bad, perhaps even rotting, but then it got better. He—the fireman, Kirby—knows what the reason is: that every time they have an argument, the dispatcher’s call sounds, and he must run and disappear into the flames—he is the captain—and while he is gone, his wife, Mary Ann, reorders her priorities, thinks of the children, and worries for him. Her blood cools, as does his. It seems that the dispatcher’s call is always saving them. Their marriage settles in and strengthens, afterward, like some healthy, living, supple thing.

  She meets him at the door when he returns, kisses him. He is grimy-black, salt-stained and smoky-smelling. They can’t even remember what the argument was about. It’s almost like a joke, the fact that they were upset about such a small thing—any small thing. He sheds his bunker gear in the utility room and goes straight to the shower. Later, they sit in the den by the fireplace and he drinks a few beers and tells her about the fire. He knows he is lucky—he knows they are both lucky. As long as the city keeps burning, they can avoid becoming weary and numb. Each time he leaves, is drawn away, and then returns to a second chance.

  The children—a girl, four, and a boy, two—sleep soundly. It is not so much a city that they live in, but a town—a suburb on the perimeter of a city in the center of the southern half of the country—a place where it is warm more often than it is cold, so that the residents are not overly familiar with fires: the way a fire spreads from room to room; the way it takes only one small, errant thing in a house to invalidate and erase the whole structure—to bring it all down to ashes and send the building’s former occupants out wandering lost and adrift into the night, poorly dressed and without direction.

  They often talk until dawn, if the fire has occurred at night. She is his second wife; he is her first husband. Because they are in an unincorporated suburb, his is a volunteer department. Kirby’s crew has a station with new equipment—all they could ask for—but there are no salaries, and he likes it that way; it keeps things purer. He has a day job as a computer programmer for an engineering firm that designs steel girders and columns used in industrial construction: warehouses, mills, and factories. The job means nothing to him—he slips along through the long hours of it with neither excitement nor despair, his pulse never rising, and when it is over each day he says goodbye to his coworkers and leaves the office without even the faintest echo of his work lingering in his blood. He leaves it all the way behind, or lets it pass through him like some harmless silver laxative.

  But after a fire—holding a can of cold beer, and sitting there next to the hearth, scrubbed clean, talking to Mary Ann, telling her what it had been like, what the cause had been, and who among his men had performed well and who had not—his eyes water with pleasure at his knowing how lucky he is to be getting a second chance with each and every fire.

  He would never say anything bad about his first wife, Rhonda—and indeed, perhaps there is nothing bad to say, no failing in which they were not both complicit. It almost doesn’t matter; it’s almost water under the bridge.

  The two children are asleep in their rooms, the swing set and jungle gym out in the back yard. The security of love and constancy—the safety. Mary Ann leads the children’s choir in church and is as respected for her work with the children as Kirby is for his work with the fires.

  It would seem like a fairy-tale story: a happy marriage, one that turned its deadly familiar course around early on, that day six years ago when he signed up to be a volunteer for the fire department. One of those rare marriages, as rare as a jewel or a forest, that was saved by a combination of inner strength and the grace and luck of fortuitous external circumstances—the world afire. Who, given the chance, would not choose to leap across that chasm between a marriage that is heading toward numbness and tiredness and one that is instead strengthened, made more secure daily for its journey into the future?

  And yet—even on the other side of the miracle, even on the other side of luck—a thing has been left behind: his oldest daughter, his only child from his first marriage, Jenna. She’s ten, almost eleven.

  ***

  There is always excitement and mystery on a fire call. It’s as if these things are held in solution just beneath the skin of the earth and are then released by the flames, as if the surface of the world is some errant, artificial crust—almost like a scab—and that there are rivers of blood below, and rivers of fire, rivers of the way things used to be and might some day be again—true but mysterious, and full of power.

  It does funny things to people—a fire, that burning away of the thin crust. Kirby tells Mary Ann about two young men in 54 THE HERMIT’S STORY their thirties—lovers, he thinks—who, bewildered and bereft as their house burned, went out into the front yard and began cooking hamburgers for the firefighters as the building burned down.

  He tells her about a house full of antiques that could not be salvaged. The attack crew was fighting the fire hard, deep in the building’s interior—the building “fully involved” as they say when the wood becomes flame, air becomes flame, world becomes flame. It is the thing the younger firemen live for—not a smoke alarm, lost kitten, or piddly gras
s fire, but the real thing, a fully involved structure fire—and even the older firemen’s hearts are lifted by the sight of one. Even those who have been thinking of retiring (at thirty-seven, Kirby is the oldest man on the force) are made new again by the sight of it, and by the radiant heat, which curls and browns and sometimes even ignites the oak leaves of trees across the street from the fire. The paint of cars parked too close to the fire sometimes begins to blaze spontaneously, making it look as if the cars are traveling very fast.

  Bats, which have been out hunting, begin to return in swarms, dancing above the flames, and begin flying in dark, agitated funnels back down into the chimney of a house that’s on fire, if it is not a winter fire—if the chimney has been dormant—trying to rescue their flightless young, which are roosting in the chimney, or sometimes the attic, or beneath the eaves. The bats return to the house as it burns down, but no one ever sees any of them come back out. People stand around on the street—their faces orange in the firelight—and marvel, hypnotized at the sight of it, not understanding what is going on with the bats, or any of it, and drawn, too, like somnambulists, to the scent of those blood-rivers, those vapors of new birth that are beginning already to leak back into the world as that skin, that crust, is burned away.

  ***

  The fires almost always happen at night.

  This fire that Kirby is telling Mary Ann about—the one in which the house full of antiques was being lost—was one of the great fires of the year. The men work in teams, as partners—always within sight, or one arm’s length contact, of one another, so that one can help the other if trouble is encountered: if the foundation gives way, or a burning beam crashes across the back of one of the two partners, who are not always men; more and more women are volunteering, though none has yet joined Kirby’s crew. He welcomes them; of the multiple-alarm fires he’s fought with other crews in which there were women firefighters, the women tended to try to out-think rather than out-muscle the fire, which is almost always the best approach.