Hothouse

by Chris Lynch

  “We might never have to work, our whole lives,” he says joylessly into my ear.

  “I’ll work anyway, just to be near the common folks,” I say truthlessly into his.

  “Now you all know,” big Jim says, reclaiming control of the proceedings, “what dedicated and gifted musicians have always wound up at this very firehouse....”

  Behind him, the individual band members start cracking up.

  “Don’t be modest, men. And, it’s no secret that Russ and Dave were as talented as anyone in the industry … Russell on the banjo and Dave on mean fiddle....”

  There. There is where it can’t go. As I said, I can listen to a lot of uncomfortably wonderful things being said about my father, can even listen to a superhuman barrage of them to make a guy’s knees go weak like today. But the rule’s the rule—it’s got to be true.

  I turn right around to catch Jim Clerk’s eye. He looks down at me.

  “What?” he asks, bagged.

  “Come on,” I say.

  He’s stifling a laugh now. “He was a great fiddler.”

  There are a fair few murmurs, in the band and out beyond, but nobody’s going to step into this one but me.

  “He was awful,” I say.

  My mother gives me a playful shake of the shoulders, and parts of the crowd boo me in defense of my old man. And I get a shiver like I haven’t had since. Since, the night I shivered myself to sleep.

  It is the best Dad moment I have had, since I haven’t had the dad.

  It’s got it all. It’s real, and it’s fun. It’s got loyal and it’s got great and it’s got true.

  Just like the man.

  This is so hard. Beautiful, but so mind-splitting hard.

  “He was not awful,” Jim plays along.

  I nod defiantly, because words aren’t coming now. He had only played the thing for a year and a half; he was self-taught. He had no musical anything in him but he learned just so he could be in this band right here, because he wanted to belong to everything, anything that was happening here, with these guys.

  But really, when he practiced, cats came to the house in gangs to free their tortured comrade.

  “He did not stink,” Jim finally says. “Dave was … earnest, on the fiddle.”

  The crowd roars approval, and finally, DJ jumps in. “But my dad was a great banjo player!” And this statement seems to please him more than anything else so far.

  He was great, too. Russell was great at whatever he did. Russell was a star.

  The band starts a slow, gentle plucked rhythm, swampy, pale-blue bluegrass and Jim shouts out, “Friends, the Hothouse Heroes!” and backs away, pulling back a curtain at the rear of the stage.

  Sitting together on adjacent chairs, necks crossed like old friends, my dad’s fiddle and Russ’s banjo.

  Hanging up on the wall behind them, is the memorial.

  It is big, five feet by five feet, mixed-media. There are two oversized brass replicas of the city FD badges, but with the names Russ and Dave engraved. The badges lean on each other at an angle, like the comedy/drama faces at a playhouse. An eagle spreads its wings behind the badges, and in front of him a ribbonlike banner flutters above and below carrying the words OUTRAGEOUS and COURAGEOUS.

  Hundreds of people gasp at once, but they all sound like my mother to me. I turn back and look at her. She has her hand covering her mouth, and her eyes are blinking three times the speed of the three-beat pattern as the band plays “Waltzing Matilda” right at us.

  “You all right?” I ask her as she squeezes my shoulder hard enough to get juice out of it.

  “It’s all right to cry,” is what she says.

  “Go ahead,” I say, being, you know, the man round here now.

  “I meant you,” she says.

  “Me? I’m not crying.”

  “If you say so,” she says with a smile and another mighty squeeze. There’s the juice again. “If you’re not, you’re the only one.”

  I turn back to the stage and watch the goings-on from head-bow angle now. See, don’t be seen.

  Beside me, DJ’s got the same idea, different approach. He has plunked right down to the ground, sitting cross-legged, staring up, and out, at nothing in particular. He is moving just slightly with the music, though, so something okay is going on, too. I give him a little wave, like we are in sight but far apart. He gives me a small nod. Just.

  The band—four floating mustaches behind guitar, accordion, drums and upright bass—plays on for an hour of Cajun, country toe-tap, hillbilly ballroom niceness that makes the people sway, and sing, and even swing some. Even the upbeat numbers are tearjerkers, but it all still manages to be more or less encouraging, even when God noses his way in with the spirituals near the end. Their big finish is when they get almost hopping on a bluesish dad-rock thing called “Time Loves a Hero.” Going by the title, and the band’s relative mastery of the song, I’m guessing it is their signature tune.

  Time loves a hero

  but only time will tell …

  Signature or not, the song is the perfect storm that sends the gathering into a kind of madness, brutal sing-alonging, passionate shouting of more mostly true testaments to my dad and DJ’s, and an emptying of pockets into those tin buckets.

  Exhaustion.

  “Everyone loves your dads.”

  The man who says that to us, as DJ and I sit on those empty chairs in the middle of the empty stage at the head of the emptying grounds, is pushing a gigantic broom. The broom is just about the width of an average car, and I think if the guy could just attach it to one he could clean up this mess in about two days. He doesn’t seem to mind, though.

  He is a firefighter. All that’s left is us and firefighters. You could tell, even if you didn’t know them, which of the people here today were in the service because they all made a point to wear something from the gear. Famous fire helmets, many of them. The big black boots and suspenders. The badge. One guy even marched around all afternoon shirtless, but with his badge somehow secured to an inhumanly hairy chest. Velcro is possibly the answer there. This firefighter here, though, never seemed like he loved my dad, and my dad felt much the same. His face and eyes are now the same strawberry color with crying, though.

  “Thank you,” DJ says wearily to the guy. He plucks at my father’s fiddle strings. Now my fiddle strings.

  “Ya,” I add, “we kind of got that impression.” I plink at the banjo.

  I’m gladdened a little by the way he mentioned our dads in the present. That they are still loved right here now by other people as well as us.

  Gladdened is not the word to use for DJ.

  “They don’t know anything about it, do they?” he asks the only person who probably exactly does. “They say all these things and remember so much, and put up empty chairs for show....”

  “You’re hurting that,” I say carefully as I ease the fiddle out of DJ’s harsh fingers. I give him the banjo. “They don’t know. They can’t know, exactly—”

  “No, they can’t,” he snaps, “so they should probably stop commemorating and sharing now, and get on with their own little lives.”

  I feel myself physically pulling back from the force of him.

  “I’m sorry, guys.”

  As soon as I hear the kind velvet voice behind us I want to slither right inside the curly carved holes in the fiddle’s body. I can’t manage it so I panic and scrape the bow all over the strings instead.

  “Come on now,” Jim Clerk says, “your father played better than that.”

  I am thrilled to hear the joke at this moment. “I am sorry, Mr. Clerk—”

  DJ is on his feet. He’s hopped up and lurched in Jim’s direction like to babble apologies and hug and beg....

  But actually, he doesn’t do anything.

  “We tried our best,” Jim says. “We didn’t mean to upset anybody or to intrude. Maybe it was too much. But please understand, what you saw today was love. It was real. And believe it or not, all those people her
e today needed this. People need their heroes, DJ. They need their legends and their greats. And that was your dads.”

  DJ does not look like he is about to say something this time. But he doesn’t look like he’s going to burst into flames, either. Which is encouraging.

  “But we’re done now,” Jim says, and suddenly his big smooth smiling face pulls in on itself like closing curtains. He reaches out and plucks awkwardly at the strings of Russell’s banjo. “And so now, you take this, you take it all, you take your feelings for your dads and your memories, take them home and keep them nice. Do that for yourselves, okay?”

  He doesn’t get an answer. He does, but it’s not loud. DJ clutches that banjo and I clutch this fiddle and we stare at big Jim and Jim stares back. He puts that great smile back on, and it is still a great thing but it is great and beautiful the way a three-legged dog is even though it’s not what it could be, not what it’s supposed to be, not what it was before.

  UNDER THE BRIDGE

  “Are ya winnin’?”

  “Jeez, Dad,” I say, springing up in the bed so fast that our foreheads clunk like coconuts and I fall right back again.

  He laughs, rubbing his head. He laughs.

  I squint at my clock in the darkness. It is neither late enough nor early enough to be seeing him.

  “Is it breakfast time? How did I not wake up if you were coming home? How did I not know—”

  “Shush,” he says, reaching out and patting me on the chest. His big paw is radiating heat. “Shush, shush. You’re all right. I’m home early. Boss sent me home early. You want a baklava?”

  “No. Why did he send you home? Are you all right?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. It’s just this knee of mine. You know how I hurt it. It’s fine. It’s just acting up a little, swelling up a little. Big Jim thought I should take it home to rest. That’s all.”

  That’s a relief to me. Relief that I have not lost my sense of when Dad’s shift is ending and breakfast time is coming. And in the firefighter game, a gimpy knee is a pretty benign thing to get you sent home.

  “Oh,” I say. “That’s good. But … he sent you home with a bad knee? You worked a whole four-day shift one time with a broken wrist before going to the hospital. Why would he send you home for this? And why would you go?”

  He’s still got his hand on my chest. Reminds me of the hot water bottle my folks would always put on me for colds. It is heating up, like a fever, as he speaks.

  “Guess I’m getting too old to act like that anymore. Guess the boss knows when I should be home. Nothing to worry about, though.”

  “Oh,” I say, though I had stopped worrying there until he told me not to.

  “The important thing,” he says, “is, are ya winnin’, son?”

  “I am, Dad. I’m winnin’. Are you winnin’?”

  He takes a long time to answer. The heat off his hand increases more in the time.

  “I am, son,” he says. “Of course I’m winnin’. Listen, you go to sleep now. I shouldn’t have gotten you up.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I only have the crap classes in the morning. I can catch up then.”

  “Ah,” he says, laughing. He pushes down on my chest, sinking me back into the mattress and back in the direction of sleepland.

  He closes my bedroom door very gently, like trying not to wake the baby.

  A minute further into sleep, I believe I hear him go back out into the night.

  Old Mr. Kotsopolis had run a Greek coffee shop in the neighborhood forever. He ran it in the days when his wife was teaching and ringing that brass bell, and he ran it for years after she retired. Sometimes she would be behind the counter, but mostly he ran it on his own. My dad told me the primary business of the place was all the older Greek guys playing cards for money at the back, but he personally spent so much of his own cash gathering up dewy fresh baklava and powerful coffee for the Hothouse that no other business would ever be necessary.

  It was a great location, that shop, with big front windows facing onto two big streets because it sat on a prominent corner, an arrowhead of a building shooting right through the heart of the intersection. Now it’s a cell phone shop.

  My mother went to see Mrs. Kotsopolis at the hospital, asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t. She brought a lemon cake she made from scratch, but they wouldn’t let her in.

  Every Labor Day I would go fishing with my father, if he were not on duty, and he was rarely on duty because that was our day. It was the one date he actually turned the world over to get away from the job because we decided that was our day—more than Christmas or my birthday—that was not to be broken. Labor Day meant summer was over and I was about to go back to school and so in a meaningful way the calendar was turning over and we were both noticing that. The one Labor Day I remember he did have to work, he wound up saving a kid’s life, pulling him out of our very river and squeezing the water right up out of his lungs. It was on the news and everything. Christ, I hated that kid.

  It was, and it is, the intake of breath before going back up into the outside world for another year.

  “Another year,” he said to me, last year, the last year, as he cast his line way out over the churning river, in the shadow of Ozzie’s Bridge.

  “Another year, Dad,” I said, doing the same.

  “Another step, further out there,” he said.

  “Out where?”

  “Out there,” he repeated, without any other signal.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Soon enough, Russ, you’re probably not going to want to do this anymore.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I snapped.

  I was really angry, that he said that. But he just laughed at me for being angry, for being a kid.

  This year, the first year of out there, I wake up to a Labor Day I just want to skip. I feel like while I was sleeping somebody crept in and pressed a bazooka flush against my chest and just blew me out. I feel it, it is nothing there and it is also huge and it is a nothing that hurts brilliant and new like hurt was just concocted.

  There is a knock at my door. I can’t even recall the last time there was a knock at my door.

  It sounds so strange, so foreign and out of place here, and now I sit up, stupid, staring, working out just exactly what a knock at a door is.

  There is another knock, because I am taking too long working it out, so I haul myself over there and open the door with great effort.

  DJ is standing there. With a fishing rod.

  I should be ecstatic. Any normal person would be ecstatic.

  I lose it instead. I am a seventeen-year-old male, a man, a fireman for christsake, and I cannot stop doing what I do not want to do. I want to say hello old friend. I want to say, what a pleasant surprise. I want to slap DJ on the shoulder and talk about stupid frigging fish. I try, actually, to do each of those things, but words don’t come out of me and tears do, and I actually cover my mouth and stare at him for a while, silent and mental until it seems like half a day’s good fishing has been lost.

  DJ is patient. He has always been that.

  “Got it together now?” he says as I dig in the back of the closet for my gear.

  “Yeah,” I say, gesturing for him to lead the way out.

  “Good, ’cause if you keep that shit up I’m not going fishing with you.”

  “Why are you going fishing with me?”

  “Somebody’s got to go with you, right? It’s the day. Labor Day, right? Can’t have you sitting around crying all Labor Day can we?”

  “No. We can’t have that.”

  And so we don’t. DJ, who never went on these fishing dates with me and my dad, who never went fishing at all, as far as I know, who never even ate fish in my company, turns out to be about the second best fishing companion you could have. As we sit in the shadow of the amazing Ozzie’s Bridge, it’s obvious that he has no more interest in landing a fish than my dad ever did.

  And like with my dad, it is about other stuff.

&n
bsp; “Nice spot,” he says, casting out into the middle of the chopping, chipping water.

  “Oh, you know this spot,” I say, because everyone knows this spot. We are at the bottom of the stone forty-foot rise of Ozzie’s Bridge, which has stood over this river for a hundred and fifty years. The strong sunlight cuts this way and that, through the trees lining the river for miles. The water moves fast, and there could be fish splashing everywhere, or none at all.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know this spot,” he says to clarify. “This, right here, is a fine spot.”

  I cast my line out, further, but the same. We’re not even using bait, or flies.

  He means this spot. My Dad spot. We are settled on a big mossy rock the size of a rowboat that extends right out into the river. Just about enough to fit two guys comfortably, close enough, not overclose, fishable, talkable and still just alone enough.

  Being alone together. That was how Dad looked at fishing. Organized aloneness. Being in the same place at the same time doing the same thing and doing it alone together. That was us. That is us.

  “What happened to us, DJ?” I ask him as the fish practically mock us, jumping and splashing upriver, or not.

  The bridge, four big arches in all, insists that you look up at it. I don’t fight it.

  “A lot of stuff happened to us, Russ.”

  “Okay, right, but I mean, why did we just—”

  “It was probably a lot better fishing with your dad, huh? Probably you’d have pulled in a bunch of fish by now.”

  I suppose if he doesn’t want to talk about himself, or us, he’s entitled. I suppose talking about our fathers today is not such a bad thing.

  “Sort of. He loved to be here. We loved to both be here, if the weather was nice, together whatever. He was lousy at the actual fishing of fish, however, and that last time, last year, I figured out that he was probably lousy on purpose.”

  “How did you work that out?”

  “Because he caught a fish.”

  We listen to the rush of the water. The water is really persistent today.

  “Finish the story, Russell.”