Prairie Fire

by Kayt C Peck

  Judy tried to struggle to her feet, relieved to realize that neither leg nor hip appeared broken, but Brad dragged her so quickly that she only flailed helplessly. Only when they were past the barn and several yards into the yard did he stop, and Judy was able to pull herself to an upright position, standing unsteadily. She removed the regulator from her mask, punching the button that stopped the airflow as she did so.

  “You okay?” Brad’s muffled voice yelled through his still operational air mask.

  “I’m bruised and shaky but okay. Go back in and help Joe Bob,” Judy said.

  “Where’s Guy?” Brad yelled.

  “Hell if I know. He just disappeared right before the shelves fell,” Judy answered.

  “Hope he’s not still in there,” Brad yelled then ran back into the barn.

  Judy felt a strong arm go around her waist, supporting her. She looked up to see Sally Lyne, the EMT from the Dulson Fire Department, beside her. Ted Rome and Pookie stood close as well, desperate concern on their faces.

  “You need to sit down and let me assess you,” Sally said.

  “Sounds good to me.” Judy licked parched lips. “I could really use a bottle of water.” One appeared in her hand, and she wasn’t even sure who handed it to her. Judy limped as Sally led her away from the barn and toward the brush truck where Coldwater Fire Department kept the EMS equipment. “Where’s Kathleen?”

  “I sent her back to your station in the water tender with one of my firefighters so she could show him where to refill with water,” Ted answered.

  Judy felt intense relief that her lover had not been there to witness how close she’d come to disaster.

  “You okay, Aunt Judy?” Pookie asked. There were tears in the girl’s eyes.

  Judy patted Pookie on the cheek. “Little bruised and maybe scorched a tad, but I’ll be fine. Go take care of your truck, Miss Engineer,” Judy said.

  Pookie turned and ran back to the truck. Judy glanced to see that Pookie had already arranged placement of the folding drop tank to hold water from the tender and had started putting a suction line in place to refill the pumper from the water the tender had dumped in the tank.

  “That little girl is hell on wheels,” Ted observed.

  “No shit,” Judy responded.

  Ted scowled toward her. “Brad said Guy went in with you. Where is he?”

  “Hell if I know. He just disappeared,” Judy said.

  “When that shelf fell?”

  “No, before.”

  “I’m right here,” Guy said from behind Ted. They both turned to face him, seeing clearly that he stood unscathed, barely any soot on his new bunker gear.

  “Where were you? I could have been killed,” Judy said.

  Guy more smirked than smiled. “There’s always more of a risk for inexperienced rookies.”

  “I’m not a rookie,” Ted said. “From where I stand, Judy did just fine. I want to know why you, an experienced firefighter, deserted your team member during an interior attack.”

  A glint of hate flashed across Guy’s face. “I’m the chief here, and I’m not accountable to you.”

  “The Hell you’re not! The Commissioners designated me as County Fire Marshall. All the departments are accountable to me,” Ted said.

  Guy paused, his mouth open. “When did this happen?”

  “Commission meeting last month.” Ted’s eyes narrowed and he glared at Guy. “Seems they were a little concerned how some of the local chiefs were handling things.”

  Something caught Guy’s attention and he looked toward the pumper. Ted and Judy followed his gaze and watched as Pookie directed two of the young firefighters in setting up a two-and-a-half-inch line with a gated “Y” so that they could divide that into two more one-and-a-half-inch attack lines.

  “What’s that girl think she’s doing telling my boys what to do?” Guy demanded.

  “She’s following the instructions of the Incident Commander,” Ted said.

  “I am the Incident Commander,” Guy said.

  “The Hell you are,” Ted responded. “You turned it over to Joe Bob, and he assigned it to me as soon as I got here.”

  “Well, I’m taking it back!”

  “No, you’re not. Damned if I’ll turn IC over to an experienced firefighter who abandons his partner in a burning structure,” Ted said.

  “I…I just went to assess the situation.”

  “What were you assessing when I was pinned under those shelves?” Judy demanded.

  Guy’s initial answer was a silent stare of hate. “I found another door; we can do interior attack from that side as well.”

  “You should have done that as IC before you went in on an attack team,” Ted said.

  Guy hawked and spat, the wad of spittle landing between Ted’s boots. “Well then, I guess you don’t need me here, do you?”

  “Neither need nor want,” Ted answered.

  Guy turned to walk toward his truck.

  “Leave the SCBA,” Ted called.

  Guy didn’t stop walking as he released the buckle on the belt, shrugged out of the harness, and dropped the whole rig on the ground, obviously not caring if he damaged the unit.

  “Bastard,” Ted mumbled.

  “Chief, I want to go back in,” Judy said.

  “Not until I check you over,” Sally said.

  Ted laughed. “You heard her. Even the Incident Commander has to do what the EMS folks say.”

  Judy was bruised and would be limping for a few days, but she was lucky. In many ways, the look on Kathleen’s face when she heard of Judy’s close call hurt Judy more than the bruises. Still, she would fight fire again that night, even going back into the smoldering interior. After all, her daddy taught her to always get back on the horse.

  Chapter Eighteen

  About Guy

  Guy Guyette stank of smoke. He didn’t notice the smell as he hung his bunker coat on the peg by the back door. He pulled wide, red suspenders from his shoulders so he could drop his bunker pants, still tucked around bunker boots. He stepped free of the boots and pushed the ensemble of boots and pants against the wall below the coat, all ready for him to step into at the next fire call. Last but not least, he hung his helmet on the peg over the coat. Guy paused briefly, taking time to notice the acrid and distinctive smell of house fire still emanating from his bunker gear. He breathed deeply, feeling comfort in the familiar scent. Being a firefighter was his world, all he had known for thirty years, ever since he became a junior firefighter through the Boy Scouts Explorer program at the age of sixteen, a beneficiary of a local program for disadvantaged teens. It saved him…almost. At least it had for twenty-five years. Then…then his department opened to women.

  Fucking bitches, Guy thought as he slipped on the loafers he kept by the back door and headed for the kitchen in the dilapidated farmhouse that was his temporary home. He ran water into the sink, waiting a few minutes for the tinge of red from rusty pipes to clear. Then he filled a teakettle and placed it on the stove. It was an old habit. No matter how late the fire call nor what time of day or night he finally made it back to the station, Guy always made a cup of instant coffee. Oddly, it relaxed him more than anything else he’d found, giving the crisis induced adrenaline time to dissipate from his system so he could sleep.

  As he waited for the water to boil, the itching on his back became unbearable. He stripped off his t-shirt, exposing a back covered in scars, over fifty little puckered circles. One in particular pained him the most, no matter how many years passed. It had been the first, and in so many ways, the most painful. He backed up to an exterior wall corner and scratched mightily, trying to ease the itch of fifty scars, including the one that was his greatest torment, one on his upper back, near his right shoulder. As happened so often, for an instant, the itch and pain of that one scar took him back, made him a time traveler, making him a five-year-old once again. It was the first burn…the first of many.

  aaAA

  The boy sat on the back steps
like he did so often...alone. He longed to play with the kids he could hear yelling in a happy cacophony during their sandlot ball game in the empty lot near the rental house that had been his home for over a year, the longest he and his parents had been in one place. He wanted friends, the company of other children, but his mother forbade it.

  “Stay away from them kids,” she’d demanded. “None of their nosey folks’ business what happens in this house. I see you playing with any of that lot, and I’ll hide you within an inch of your life.”

  That was one of the dark times, the ones he dreaded the most, the moments when it was so hard to remember that his mother could smile and laugh. He preferred the light times, those moments when she might even treat him to a batch of the refrigerator cookies she bought on sale at the Piggly Wiggly. Those times were almost always when his daddy was home, a break between making a living on one of the off shore oil rigs in the Gulf. His father was a mysterious presence in his life. Although his father was a silent and taciturn man, Guy never doubted his father’s love, but he never understood how to reach him, this mysterious presence so often absent from his life. The most affection he remembered from his father was an occasional pat on the head and a soft expression on the man’s face as he watched his son play. Guy couldn’t know for sure, but he always suspected that a smile was hidden below his father’s ample mustache, a smile to match the twinkle in his eyes.

  Guy wanted to know his father, but during those times when he was home—between the big jobs on oil rigs—Guy’s mother was so possessive of his father’s time and attention. Even as a toddler, Guy felt moments with this man, almost a stranger, were stolen seconds while his mother napped or went to the store. Guy missed also the meager attention from his mother. His father’s presence seemed to exacerbate the relatively benign neglect that substituted for maternal love. It worsened when they moved from the small town where his parents had grown up to Houston. At five, Guy vaguely remembered the added care provided by grandparents, even his mother’s high school friends. Now, he was alone, but then, so was his mother. Once, she had spent hours on the phone with friends or reading different fashion and women’s magazines while Guy played on the floor of the living room, enjoying the toys his father always brought when he returned from the oil fields.

  In the city, the magazines and phone calls lessened, then disappeared. In their place, a bottle of clear liquid now resided permanently on the end table beside the couch, an overly full ashtray as its companion. Guy’s new job was to constantly monitor the state of ice in his mother’s glass, gently taking it away to replace melted ice with fresh from the automatic dispenser on the refrigerator. Once, curious at his mother’s fascination with the clear liquid from the elegant bottle, Guy had snuck a sip, choking on the fiery contents.

  “Now don’t you spill my drink,” his mother called as she heard him cough.

  “I won’t, Mother,” Guy responded, rushing to get ice, hoping she wouldn’t discern his transgression in drinking the forbidden liquid. He would never repeat this mistake.

  Guy still enjoyed the toys, his secret world of imagination on the living-room carpet, surrounded by plastic people and animals, cowboys and Indians, spacemen, farmers, policemen, soldiers. He especially loved the tube of exotic animals his father bought on the best day of his life, the day the three of them had gone to the zoo.

  Sometimes Guy would interrupt his play and stare at the strange woman sitting in his father’s recliner. He wondered where his beautiful mother had gone and how this disheveled individual in a pink housecoat, with stringy, dirty hair had taken her place. He lived for those moments when he could glimpse his old mother, hear her laughter, and enjoy those seconds when she focused her full attention on her only child.

  As Guy sat on the back steps that day, he remembered that mother, and he longed for her. His father was gone again and had been for a long time. The last parting had been different. Guy had hidden in his room, frightened by the angry words he heard between his parents. Finally, after days of tension, his father mysteriously appeared in the middle of the night, sitting on the edge of his bed. Guy blinked sleepily, confused at this unexpected intrusion. His father was silent for a long time.

  “Do you…do you know I love you, little man?” his father asked.

  It was the first time Guy had heard those three magic words from his father. It would be the last.

  “Yes,” Guy lisped through sleep-deadened lips.

  It wasn’t his customary pat on the head. Guy’s father gathered the boy into his arms and held him close for a very, very long time. For the rest of his life, as he drifted to sleep, Guy would remember that moment, perhaps his most precious.

  Then his father was gone. Guy would be fourteen before he learned of his father’s death a few months after that sad farewell, the victim of one of the all-too-frequent fatal accidents of work at sea on the offshore platforms. Then it made sense to Guy, the life insurance and Social Security payments that sustained his mother’s indolent lifestyle.

  That day, that fateful day when Guy sat on the back steps, he wanted magic. He wanted his old mother and his missing father. He wanted to play with other children. He just wanted. It had seemed like a miracle when he spotted the purple flowers growing along the fence, an unexpected gift from a prior tenant who had planted bulbs. Guy jumped to his feet. Excited, he gathered two of the purple crocus and carried them hastily to where his mother sat in her chair, some soap opera playing on the television.

  “Look, Mother, look. We have flowers,” the boy said, holding his treasured flowers toward his mother, offering a gift of magic.

  She turned bloodshot eyes toward the boy. “Don’t you bother me during my shows! What do I have to do to get your attention?”

  She grasped his shoulder painfully with one hand, a lit cigarette smoldering in the other. Maybe it was an accident that first time. Maybe it wasn’t. Guy never knew. As she reached for his other shoulder with the hand holding the cigarette, the glowing tip dipped, burning through his thin shirt and into the flesh below. Guy screamed and fell to the floor. He looked, stunned at his mother, stunned at the hate he saw in her eyes.

  “That’ll teach you. That’ll get your attention,” she said.

  At the age of five, Guy lost his belief in magic, vanished with the crocus crushed under his mother’s pink slippers. As the boy looked at his mother, a word came to mind. One he couldn’t remember how or where he learned it.

  Bitch, he thought. The love for her evaporated that day, and he never again fully regained the skill needed to love, to feel tenderness.

  And so it began, years of discipline via cigarette burn. In time, it would be his salvation from the hell that life with his mother would become. A third grade teacher saw him flinch as she gently touched his back when she leaned over his desk, checking his work. A trip to the nurse’s office revealed his painful secret, the old scars and the fresh burns. Foster care proved cold and indifferent, but it was better…better than the increasingly incoherent and cruel mother and the mysteriously absent father.

  aaAA

  As Guy finished his long back scratch, he opened his eyes and his thoughts returned to the present.

  “Women always fuck things up,” he mumbled to himself, remembering how he had been fired from his job as a captain in a company where he’d worked for nine years, all because of his hazing of the newly integrated women firefighters. They never should have been there, he thought.

  The kettle whistled and he shut off the gas burner, retrieving from the cupboard an old coffee cup, one with a Maltese Cross emblazoned on the side along with the name of his very first fire station. He spooned instant coffee into the cup, making it strong, finally adding the water to the dark mixture. The coffee did little to ease his mind. The bitches won tonight, and he knew it. He wanted to pack his meager belongs and go, but he needed to hang on a few more weeks, just a few more weeks. He sipped his coffee as he walked to the living room, and pulled three darts from a wooden board, a
dartboard of his own making. Photocopies of three faces were stapled side-by-side on the board, ones taken from Coldwater Volunteer Fire Department personnel files. Kathleen Romero’s face was on one side and Pookie Thompson’s on the other. It was impossible to recognize the face in the middle it was so riddled with the holes inflicted by hundreds of accurately thrown darts.

  “Bitch,” Guy hissed as he threw a dart, placing it in the center of a ragged remnant of a photocopy of Judy Proctor’s right eye.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Out-of-Town

  Judy stretched, languid and naked across the unfamiliar bed, a towel spread beneath her to protect the decorative cover. The occasional cry of “ouch” when Kathleen hit a particularly tender spot accented her moans of pleasure. Kathleen’s gentle touch spread tincture of arnica followed by oil infused with St. John’s Wart on the bruises along Judy’s left thigh and hip. It was very apparent where each shelf from the heavy storage case had slammed into her body. Judy’s heavy bunker gear had helped but could not fully protect her from the falling fixture. Kathleen paused in her healing administrations to kiss Judy softly on the biggest bruise, the one on her hip. It was so deep that the center was yellow instead of blue or black. Kathleen sat up abruptly, making soft spitting noises and retrieving a tissue from the night stand to wipe at her lips.