On the first Tuesday in October, the day before the World Series began, my father came back to the house after dark. It was chill and dry outside, and when he came in the back door his eyes were bright and his face was flushed and he seemed as if he had been running.
‘Look who’s here now,’ my mother said, though in a nice way. She was cutting tomatoes at the sink board and looked around at him and smiled.
‘I’ve got to pack a bag,’ my father said. ‘I won’t have dinner here tonight, Jean.’ He went straight back to their room. I was sitting beside the radio waiting to turn on some baseball news, and I could hear him opening a closet door and shoving coat hangers.
My mother looked at me, then she spoke toward the hallway in a calm voice. ‘Where are you going, Jerry?’ She was holding a paring knife in her hand.
‘I’m going to that fire,’ my father said loudly from the bedroom. He was excited. ‘I’ve been waiting for my chance. I just heard thirty minutes ago that there’s a place. I know it’s unexpected.’
‘Do you know anything about fires?’ My mother kept watching the empty doorway as if my father was standing in it. ‘I know about them,’ she said. ‘My father was an estimator. Do you remember that?’
‘I had to make some contacts in town,’ my father said. I knew he was sitting on the bed putting on different shoes. The overhead light was on and his bag was out. ‘It’s not easy to get this job.’
‘Did you hear me?’ my mother said. She had an impatient look on her face. ‘I said you don’t know anything about fires. You’ll get burned up.’ She looked at the back door, which he’d left partway open, but she didn’t go to close it.
‘I’ve been reading about fires in the library,’ my father said. He came down the hall and went into the bathroom, where he turned on the light and opened the medicine cabinet. ‘I think I know enough not to get killed.’
‘Could you have said something to me about this?’ my mother said.
I heard the medicine cabinet close and my father stepped into the kitchen doorway. He looked different. He looked like he was sure that he was right.
‘I should’ve done that,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t.’ He had his shaving bag in his hand.
‘You’re not going out there.’ My mother looked at my father across the kitchen, across over my head in fact, and seemed to smile. ‘This is a stupid idea,’ she said, and shook her head.
‘No it’s not,’ my father said.
‘It isn’t your business,’ my mother said, and pulled up the front of her blue apron and wiped her hands on it, though I don’t think her hands were wet. She was nervous. ‘You don’t have to do this. I’m working now.’
‘I know you are,’ my father said. He turned and went back into the bedroom. I wanted to move from where I was but I didn’t know where a better place was to be, because I wanted to hear what they would say. ‘We’re going to dig firebreaks up there,’ he said from the bedroom. I heard the locks on his bag snap closed. He appeared again in the doorway, holding a gladstone bag, a bag his father had given him when he had gone away to college. ‘You’re not in any danger,’ he said.
‘I might die while you’re gone,’ my mother said. She sat down at the metal table and stared at him. She was angry. Her mouth looked hardened. ‘You have a son here,’ she said.
‘This won’t be for very long,’ my father said. ‘It’ll snow pretty soon, and that’ll be that.’ He looked at me. ‘What do you think, Joe? Is this a bad idea?’
‘No,’ I said. And I said it too fast, without thinking what it meant to my mother.
‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you?’ my father said.
‘Will you like it if your father gets burned up out there, and you never see him again?’ my mother said to me. ‘Then you and I go straight to hell together. How will that be?’
‘Don’t say that, Jean,’ my father said. He put his bag on the kitchen table and came and knelt beside my mother and tried to put his arms around her. But she got up from her chair and walked back to where she had been cutting tomatoes and picked up the knife and pointed it at him, where he was still kneeling beside the empty chair.
‘I’m a grown woman,’ she said, and she was very angry now. ‘Why don’t you act like a grown man, Jerry?’
‘You can’t explain everything,’ my father said.
‘I can explain everything,’ my mother said. She put the knife down and walked out the kitchen door and into the bedroom, the one she had not been sleeping in with my father, and closed the door behind her.
My father looked at me from where he was, still beside her chair. ‘I guess my judgment’s no good now,’ he said. ‘Is that what you think, Joe?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it is.’
And I thought his judgment was good, and that going to fight the fire was a good idea even though he might go and get killed because he knew nothing about it. But I did not want to say all of that to him because of how it would make him feel.
My father and I walked from home in the dark down to the Masonic Temple on Central. A yellow Cascade County school bus was parked at the corner of Ninth, and men were standing in groups waiting to go. Some of the men were bums. I could tell by their shoes and their coats. Though some were just regular men who were out of work, I thought, from other jobs. Three women who were going waited together under the streetlight. And inside the bus, in the dark, I could see Indians were in some of the seats. I could see their round faces, their slick hair, the tint of light off their eyeglasses in the darkness. No one would get in with them, and some men were drinking. I could smell whiskey in the night air.
My father put his bag on a stack of bags beside the bus, then came and stood next to me. Inside the Masonic Temple — which had high steps up to a glass center door — all the lights were on. Several men inside were looking out. One, who was the man I had seen with my father in the Jack ’n Jill, held a clipboard and was talking to an Indian man beside him. My father gestured to him.
‘People categorize other people,’ my father said. ‘But you shouldn’t do that. They should teach you that in school.’
I looked at the men around me. Most of them were not dressed warmly enough and were shifting from foot to foot. They looked like men used to work, though they did not seem glad to be going to fight a fire at night. None of them looked like my father, who seemed eager.
‘What will you do out there?’ I said.
‘Work on a fire line,’ my father said. ‘They dig trenches the fire won’t cross. I don’t know much more, to tell you the truth.’ He put his hands in his jacket pockets and blew down into his shirt. ‘I’ve got this hum in my head now. I need to do something about it.’
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘Tell your mother I didn’t mean to make her mad.’
‘I will,’ I said.
‘We don’t want to wake up in our coffins, though, do we? That’d be a rude surprise.’ He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me close to him and squeezed me and laughed an odd little laugh, as if the idea had actually given him a scare. He looked across Central Avenue at the Pheasant Lounge, the place I had seen him go into the week before. On the red neon sign over the door a big cock pheasant was busting up into the night air, its wings stretched into the darkness — escaping. Some men waiting at the Masonic Temple had begun to go across the street into the bar. ‘I’m only thinking about right this minute now,’ he said. He squeezed my shoulder again, then put his hands back into his jacket pockets. ‘Aren’t you cold?’