by Chris Lynch
I don’t like to be reminded about their faces but this is how it is. Lord do I not like to be reminded about their faces. Details. I can’t swerve the details when I think about it and I always think first about slow motion, the heat, the force, the flame, the smoke, curling back over my dad’s face, over Russ’s face and the first thing I see—because my rotten mind never lets me not see it—is the way the heat melts, curls then melts, those two magnificent thick mustaches, and that starts it and then like pulling a shade back from that lip up over … his face, all his face, his cheeks, Russ’s eyes … my father’s eyes, drying …
“People are just trying to be nice, Russell,” Adrian says calmly so that I don’t scream. “They’re just trying to be in there with you. And don’t get angry at me but, you know, I’m proud of your dad too. I can’t help it, I’m just like everybody else. That’s a good thing, I think.”
The part of me that has been playing the scene of my dad’s melting face, the scene nobody else has to live with, wants to scream right in Adrian’s face and remind him that he gets to share this great community pride with his own father who works, who’s alive, cozy at home two days every week so they have lots of time to chat about stuff.
Good thing the better part of me gets the better of that part of me.
“That is a good thing,” I say. I nod a bunch of times. “It is a good thing, Adrian.” I brush past him on the way to the lane, bumping into him a little on purpose.
It is, it is a good thing. It’s just a good thing with bad moments.
When I think of Mrs. Kotsopolis, that’s one of the bad moments. She has lived in this neighborhood since the beginning of time but will not be at the Outrageous Courageous barbecue to commemorate the heroes of the tragic fire. Because Mrs. Kotsopolis was in the tragic fire. Right now she is very much in the hospital.
I knew that Mrs. Kotsopolis used to be a teacher, because she came to my school, something like fourth grade, to talk about how it was, that long ago, being a teacher. Sounded like a great time to be a teacher. Less of a great time to be a kid. She left us old-time teacher gear to keep on display, as a reminder, so somebody would remember, she said. She left us a big brass bell with a wooden handle she used to call the kids inside with. I don’t remember any of the other stuff, but the bell really looked like something from another world. Memorable, you know? For sure she would have had a number of other old teacher-life mementos around her house to remind her own self of the days, and for sure those details would have gripped at my dad something fierce. I know I know and I know we would have been talking about the old handwriting chart, or classroom flagpole or ancient leather-bound class register book or pull-down map of an unrecognizable world, for days, after he got home from saving Mrs. Kotsopolis and her house and her life from that fire.
Details kill me. If I could erase the small details of everything, like chalk wiped from a blackboard, I might do better with that smudginess. It might go smoother.
I also remember that cat of hers. Hasn’t been seen since the fire. It was a smoky gray, almost blue, and it followed her to my school and sat on the outside windowsill the whole time she spoke to us. Old Mr. Kotsopolis had died not too long before and I feel sorry now for thinking then that the lady and the cat seemed to need something to do with themselves. I thought they didn’t appear to know what to do with themselves when actually they were doing it. I do feel sorry now. I feel really, really sorry.
He’s a very old cat now. I hope he found someplace.
Everybody from the Hothouse is here. Everybody who knows anybody from the Hothouse is here. And everybody those people know is also here.
The Hothouse is what the guys stationed at my father’s fire station call the place. It’s something said with great pride, something that when you hear it, it makes you say, Jeez, I wish I was part of that, part of that Hothouse thing.
And today, everybody is. I mean, everybody.
The fair-size paved lot surrounding the Hothouse on three sides resembles a fairground but with better people and better smells. The charcoal and beef and pork is thick in the air, as are balloons in bunches tied up and bouncing against a streaky whitey-blue sky. I can see a stage set up around the back, and the huge half-barrel barbecue puffing smoke, and quite a few dogs stiffing and straining toward the food but generally behaving themselves like creatures who do not want to be banished. Local radio is playing geezer-rock out of big speakers and if every person who lived within a two-mile radius of the Hothouse came out today this is exactly what the crowd would look like so I’m guessing that’s pretty much what we’ve got.
“I’m outta here,” I say as we approach the throng.
The crowd is overwhelming, but I’m just being dramatic.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Adrian says, putting a friendly aggressive arm around my shoulders.
My mother has drifted about twenty feet ahead of us, as Adrian and I have been walking progressively slower the closer we got to the sounds. He starts tugging me along a little faster. There is a murmur, then a rustle, then almost a commotion, as our arrival gets noticed and the crowd turns on.
“Wow,” Adrian says, “you guys are stars.”
Even Adrian’s firm helpfulness isn’t firm enough to move me now. I stop short. As I stand like a dummy on the sidewalk, I watch my mother stride purposefully in, into the embrace of a loving crowd and the beginnings of actual applause. She’s come around pretty well to the idea, I’d say. As she gets folded into the love and adulation, she encounters DJ’s mother, and they hug each other warmly, and long. DJ stands there, looking immensely uncomfortable.
Even from my distance, applause feels nice, awkward nice. Even though it is applause that doesn’t technically belong to me, it feels like it is for me and it’s an amazing sensation because how many times do you get applauded in your life? I think in most lives, the answer is none. Or pretty close to it.
“Go on,” Adrian says, giving me a little shove, “give the people what they want.”
I put my nose to the air. “It does smell good,” I say.
As soon as we hit the grounds, Adrian peels away and I am totally swamped by people who I assume mean me no harm but look very much like the horde that tracked down poor Frankenstein’s monster. Only they are waving burgers and Cokes instead of flaming torches. I know they mean well, but it feels like a lot when you are surrounded, and it’s hot, and everybody is talking and a lot of them you’ve never even seen and they are pressing close like they are your best friends.
My old best friend is pressed in exactly the same sandwich. DJ is a few feet away, dealing with a dozen people at once just like I am, looking as sweaty and confused as I feel. He inches a bit in my direction, manages to extend a high flat palm, and I manage to slap it.
I feel just that little bit of a bit less anxious.
Jim Clerk makes it all better. Jim Clerk is the commander of the Hothouse, and the master of ceremonies for the t’do. He is six foot three, with brilliant white hair and white teeth and a speckled gray mustache. He looks like Teddy Roosevelt’s kinder older brother and has a voice like fog blowing through an oboe and he was my dad’s boss.
“Okay, folks,” says Jim the fog. “Okay, folks, a little space here, spread things out just a little bit now.”
Kind Jim Clerk, which he pronounces Clark for some reason but his reasons must be good ones if he states them in that voice, has experience calming crowds and taming unruly situations. In seconds he’s got one big paw on my shoulder and another on DJ’s shoulder, and he is leading us through a clear path where hyperventilation is no longer necessary. In what must be against his every impulse, he is leading two scared guys toward the smoke.
And if I tell you it is glorious smoke, I am coming nowhere near to doing the scent justice.
You could fit me and DJ onto the grill entirely and still have room for, maybe, a whole pig. There are burgers and giant sausages dripping fat onto the coals, and hot dogs and quarter pieces of chicken, potato
es in foil, corn on cobs, buns. Off to the side is a great vat of barbecue baked beans with fat chunks of pork suspended like tiny bobbing heads of flabby seals. There is a table with brownies and homemade flapjacks and nearby is a retirement-ready firefighter named Danny Mullins with a serious frown, churning his own fresh ice cream. The first time Danny handed me one of his homemades—mint chocolate chip—he had to give me a second one ten seconds later. The third one my dad had to hold for me while I licked because my hands were not up to the job. They were only three-year-old hands, after all. I am sure I recall Danny smiling more broadly every time I messed it up that day.
This day he looks a hundred and seventy years old, and smiling seems to be not in the cards.
“Is it all a bit much for you men?” Jim Clerk asks DJ and me. Then he answers reassuringly, “It is all a bit much, isn’t it. Yes, it is. Well you just stick by me as long as you feel uneasy and I’ll take care of you. Starting with, I’m going to feed you. Everything is better and manageable when you are being fed. Am I not right about that?”
It does help, I think. My dad was almost always eating, or cooking, or preparing, or plotting, foodstuffs. He wasn’t fat—though he wasn’t thin, either—but his relationship with food was a passionate one, and he was famous for it.
“You’re not not right about it,” I say.
Jim Clerk laughs his laugh like warm honey. “As your father would have said,” he says. “And he just may have cleared this whole grill on his own, if he was of a mind to.”
I am still not sure what this feeling is I feel, when people who knew my dad say things about when he was here. I am proud and sad and I want to applaud and cry at the same time and I want to tell them to please stop and I am afraid that they will stop. But the one thing I am certain of is that I demand when somebody says something about my father, my Outrageous Courageous, Hothouse Hero of a dad, that particular something had better be true.
“This is true,” I say, and enjoy saying.
I inch up to the grill and start pointing at things, like a hungry animal with fingers but no power of speech.
DJ, I notice, is likewise speechless, but he is holding back, looking off away, squirmy.
“Your father was a great man,” Jim Clerk tells DJ as I offer him a cheeseburger and take a bite of my own.
“I know, thanks,” he says. He takes the burger but shows no sign of an intention to eat it.
Martin Rowe walks up to us. A stocky, smiley guy, Martin is also in the band. He has a mustache. “I’m boycotting the food today,” Martin says, patting his belly with both hands, indicating that this does not happen often. “Because if Russell’s thirteen-alarm chili couldn’t be here, my stomach is taking the day off out of respect.” He gestures toward a big empty stewpot propped on a chair. Tied around the pot is the apron DJ’s dad wore when it was his turn to cook at the Hothouse. In bright flamy red letters, it says, Russell’s Cooking—You’ve Been Warned.
DJ smiles a fractured smile at Martin and nods a thank-you. He pulls the burger up near his face, moves his lips a bit. But it’s more like he’s holding a stuffed animal rather than something to eat.
The food is every bit first-rate. The local dj on the booming radio is making everything sound like a real party, and calls out to us personally so many times I’m starting to feel like he’s here, doing the play-by-play. He’s not, but he has certainly been filled in.
I keep hearing my father’s name, and DJ’s father’s name. On the radio, very loud. In my ear, in my face, so very loud. One woman says she came from an hour away and her brother is a firefighter wherever she lives but he couldn’t come because he is on duty protecting everybody just exactly the way my father would have done. She is sweet and kind and talking a little too close to my face and she holds an adorable three-legged puppy up to me, it’s a little Jack Russell and she tells me how he lost his leg in some fire-related way that I simply cannot understand but I do understand when she tells me the dog’s new name is Dave Russell after her two heroes.
DJ does an about-face at this, keeping his back to the woman while he looks everywhere else.
She gets all weepy and kisses me on the cheek before backing away with all red and dripping eyes and I wonder how she is going to drive all that way back home like this. She may need firefighters yet, today, is the joke I tell myself to try and hold it together.
“Hang in there, pal,” says another firefighter I have known since before I knew. His name is John DeVellis, and though he has no mustache his face plays like it does so it’s okay. If John were not a firefighter he could be employed as a fireplug, such is his build. Five six, barrel chest, shaded specs, brilliant white teeth always shown off with a smile, and salty-pepper hair that splays out in rays exactly like how I used to draw the sun over this firehouse in school as a little kid. I might have been drawing John all along.
“I’m hanging, pal,” I say to John.
He hands me a plate with strawberry-rhubarb pie, warmed and melting its ice-cream helmet. He puts his helmet on me, too. Much as I love John, I wish he wouldn’t. I’m not a kid anymore. I’m really not. I can’t be.
I cannot find my mother. I wonder if she’s all right at the same time as knowing that she is. Part of me feels like wondering and worrying about her is supposed to be my thing now.
DJ is better because truly food does make you better if you let it, and because DJ is a strong person in spite of Melanie’s warning. Stronger than me, I always thought, and I have no reason to stop thinking that now.
We talk to a lot, a lot of people, which is to say we mostly listen to a lot of people come up and tell us how unbelievably great our dads were, and our mothers are, and we ourselves will be over time. It’s very much like a dream, where the people are people you know, but at the same time they’re not.
“You’ll be great,” says a woman who is crying, quietly but steadily enough that rivulets of tear water are carving canyons down her face. She is my parents’ generation, and I know I should know her. I know I do know her. It would be a good time for my mother to be handy. “You come from greatness. And you’ll be great.”
“Thank you,” I say in a way I hope is familiar enough. “I’m going to try.”
We say thank you a lot, me and DJ. Then it is time.
“It’s time!” booms a voice even louder than the radio guy’s voice, cutting him right off as we go live and everybody migrates toward the big stage and the beginning of the big show, the highlight centerpiece of the whole day. The performance of the Hothouse Heroes, with the unveiling of the tributes.
“Folks, what can I say?” Jim Clerk says when the mad cheering has calmed a bit and he certainly knows what he can say. “Russell and Dave were the best of us. They were”—and here he chokes, not for the last time—“the best we can do. They dedicated every bit of themselves to the job, to the ideal, that we all strive for. To do whatever it takes, to be the fire wall between all harm and the people of our community who we hold so precious....” He trails off under the thunder of love and crowd madness that rolls right up over us from the back of the crowd, and over our heads. Fifty different hands slap my back, and I feel DJ beside me being bounced forward and forward with the same thing. I notice for the first time, as Jim dabs at his eyes and wipes his flushed face like he’s battling a real fire right now, the buckets. Along the front lip of the stage, a row of old-timey tin fire-brigade buckets stands guard. Rather, they stand for collection.
People are walking up, like some kind of revival meeting, and howling things as they stuff money into those buckets. Dollars, coins. Some drop gently, some jam. Some sharpshooters even throw from a few rows back, but it is accumulating rapidly.
We’re even getting paid for this.
I look at DJ, and he looks down at the ground.
“And what these two kings did, giving their lives, is what every single one of us, each and every member of this service would gladly do. But the difference, my friends, the difference is, they did it. And there
isn’t a person in this crowd who is surprised that Dave and Russell were the two men who gave their lives that day because they were Outrageous Courageous …”
The crowd goes beyond mental here, in a way that makes me every bit as proud as I am frightened of the power of it.
“… and they were the Hothouse Heroes, our heroes, your heroes, and we are here to testify and to celebrate today …”
I cannot hear what he is saying anymore. DJ has his hands covering his ears. I see my mother walking onto the stage, arm in arm with DJ’s mother.
It feels almost like we are being physically crushed from behind by the crowd even though, in reality, they are more like protecting and cocooning us. Then, holding us. Then, lifting us.
Oh God, they want us onstage. They are motioning DJ and me up onto the stage, as the band, the Hothouse Heroes minus two, settle into position with their instruments.
“No,” DJ says, though I am the only person in this world who can actually hear him. “No, thank you anyway, but I’m good right here.” His actions—as much as you could call them actions—don’t really back up his words. He falls into the crowd’s embrace like he is a stuffed DJ effigy.
It must give him some comfort that I am on the same crowd-surf to the stage, and we are never separated for a second. We remain so close, in fact, that I am able to crane my neck a little, and take a good healthy bite right out of that burger. I smile with accomplishment as I chew, and if I have helped loosen him up at all, his wince is nevertheless not a celebration of comfort. He shoves the burger at me, like you do when somebody has polluted your food so you don’t want it anymore.
“Quite a t’do, after all, isn’t it?” my mother shouts into my ear as I am delivered and the crowd somehow manages a higher gear of delirium.
“It’s a t’do and a half,” I shout as I lean back into her and weakly wave out at the fans. Beside me, DJ’s mother has her arm tightly around her son’s shoulders. DJ is peering one by one into the brigade buckets of money, which are still filling up.
