After my house burned down with my mother inside of it and my dad almost died, he decided to become a fireman. Dad had always been a crappy father and a piece of shit generally so when he signed up I wondered, maybe, if it was the first noble thing he had ever done. Mom’s body wasn’t even recoverable or certainly recognizable after that blaze so at the memorial there were just some pictures and some speeches and my dad crying and saying things like if only the stairs hadn’t fallen out I would have ran directly into hell. I don’t have any doubts dad tried to love me even if he had trouble showing it but after that fire he seemed more alive, more like he could feel, and after we moved into the new house and it was just the two of us, he seemed like a different person. Someone who realized, maybe, how fleeting life is, or that at any moment everything could just go up in flames.
According to him and according to the newspaper clippings he would paw through when he was sauced up and nostalgic, dad was a good football player. All district and all state and all of that shit. He raised me in the same town he grew up in where sports meant something and when you’re a hero like that, at least here, it follows you around. People still nodded at him with some reverence at gas stations and I think he liked that even though the field they played on was torn up 20 years ago and whatever trophies his team had won were some spider’s house in my high school basement.
When he joined the fire department, he stuck all the decals on his truck and hooked up fancy lights and he’d zoom around whenever the station siren beckoned and by all accounts he was good at it. Just a month into signing up he’d pulled some little girl out of an inferno and even when some veterans had told him to stand down, he’d recovered bodies from an elderly home, so at the very least, the families would have something to bury.
Years passed, and whatever stardom my dad had had from football was dwarfed by his new found calling. Neighboring towns would bring him in for instructional sessions with their company and in that underworld of firefighter lifers he’d become a star. Whatever the situation, whatever the style of construction or design, dad just had a fucking nose for finding people and his backstory with how he’d lost my mother had made the whole thing more sensational, I guess. Soon local news was calling and then outlets from states over and even some cable show about everyday heroes that ran on TLC. He’d smile and nod through those interviews like a Kennedy or something and I’d watch from my dorm and I was proud of him, truly, for finally getting his shit together.
When the captain stepped down at the station, he was the obvious choice. Over 25 lifesaving rescues and maybe three times that where he had at least got the bodies. When he wore that big ornamental hat at the spaghetti dinner commemorating his promotion, the people slammed their hands together and whistled like he might as well been Babe Ruth.
……..
More years pass and coming back to this town has never been easy. I’m about to graduate and have plans to move to Chicago but on the holidays, with him alone in the house, I figure visiting dad, although he’s only visited once, is something a decent kid should do.
It’s the first fall he’s Captain and I’m home for Thanksgiving and he’s a few beers deep when the siren starts howling at the station. Quick as a cat he’s up and his chair flies back and before he grabs his jacket he turns around and looks at me, eyes trying to focus through the blur. Before I can tell him he’s in no state he’s gone and his truck peels out and the engine revs and burns until the siren swallows all of it and it just keeps wailing and wailing into the dark.
Beside the basement door is a picture of my mother and I don’t know what else to do so I go over and look at it. I lean against the wall and squint at her face and the heat of that fire starts rushing back and I can hear her screaming. Maybe it’s something about it being a holiday or being alone now in what used to be my house but I figure I’ll go down the steps and go through the boxes and see whatever else of her, however painful, I can dredge up.
It doesn’t take me long to find her box and as I’m rifling through the trinkets, I’m 11 again and memories, long dead, come bolting back. That day she picked me up two hours late from the waterpark and ticket person waited with me at the gate. Her weird nail polish that smelled like cranberries. I’m holding her car keys when I see another box behind hers that reads DRAGONS. Sliding it towards me, a little GoPro, singed and melted at the edges falls out to the floor. I jab the power button and press play and there’s only sound but there’s the hum and crackle of a building burning and a woman screaming and begging, What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? I pick up another camera. This one flickers on and there are other firefighters in a burning kitchen all seated at a table and it looks like they’re playing cards. I pick up another one. Play. More fire. A bedroom. There’s a woman asphyxiating on a bed with her husband and they’re writhing on the sheets. One of the firefighters lays down beside them and clasps his hands behind his head like he’s on the beach. It must be my father but whoever is wearing the camera fluffs the couple’s pillows and tucks the blanket around them and lays down as well. His head pans to the base of the bed and standing there are two other firefighters flapping their arms like birds… or dragons.
Inside that box are twenty more cameras, and beneath them are little bags each with a different newspaper clipping from a different fire. Inside those bags, blackened, are buttons, earrings, rings. There are pictures, polaroids. I almost vomit when I find in an Altoids tin something charred and flaking with a knuckle and nail.
I try to stand but my head is too light. I stagger and crumple.
I am paralyzed in that basement when I see the C4, isopropyl, coiled wicks and jerrycans of gas. I haven’t moved when the truck pulls back in and the door slams and I wonder if anyone will ever know my dad isn’t a hero. If anyone will know what he’s done to this company. If anyone will ever know… it’s him.