Free The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass Page A

that was a long time ago and she has her own life, needs no one to carry her in or out of anywhere. All that has gone away, vanished; her views of fire are not a child’s but an adult’s. Mary Ann’s fire story is tame, it seems, compared to the rest of the world’s.
    She counts the slick small oval scars on his back: twenty-two of them, like a pox. She knows he is needed. He seems to thrive on it. She remembers both the terror and the euphoria after her father whisked her out of the bathroom, as she looked back at it—at the dancing flames she had birthed. Is there greater power in lighting a fire or in putting one out?
    He sleeps contentedly there on the couch. She will not ask him—not yet. She will hold it in for as long as she can, and watch—some part of her desirous of his stopping, but another part not.
    She feels as she imagines the street-side spectators must, or even the victims of the fires themselves, the homeowners and renters: a little hypnotized, a little transfixed, and there is a confusion, as if she could not tell you nor her children—could not be sure—whether she was watching him burn down to the ground or watching him being born and built up, standing among the flames like iron being cast from the earth.
    She sleeps, her fingers light across his back. She dreams the twenty-two scars are a constellation in the night. She dreams that the more fires he fights, the safer and stronger their life becomes.
    She wants him to stop. She wants him to go on.
    They awaken on the couch at dawn to the baby’s murmurings from the other room and the four-year-old’s—the girl’s—soft sleep-breathings. The sun, orange already, rising above the city. Kirby gets up and dresses for work. He could do it in his sleep. It means nothing to him. It is its own form of sleep, and these moments on the couch, and in the shells of the flaming buildings, are their own form of wakefulness.
    ***
    Some nights, he goes over to Jenna’s house—to the house of his ex-wife. No one knows he does this: not Mary Ann, and not his ex-wife, Rhonda, and certainly not Jenna—not unless she knows it in her sleep and in her dreams, which he hopes she does.
    He wants to breathe her air; he wants her to breathe his. It is a biological need. He climbs up on the roof and leans over the chimney, and listens—
silence
—and inhales, and exhales.
    ***
    The fires usually come about once a week. The time between them is peaceful at first but then increasingly restless, until finally the dispatcher’s radio sounds in the night and Kirby is re-leased. He leaps out of bed—he lives four blocks from the station—kisses Mary Ann, kisses his daughter and son sleeping in their beds, and then is out into the night, hurrying but not running across the lawn. He will be the first one there, or among the first—other than the young firemen who may already be hanging out at the station, watching movies and playing cards, just waiting.
    Kirby gets in his car—the chief’s car—and cruises the neighborhood slowly, savoring his approach. There’s no need to rush and get to the station five or ten seconds sooner, when he’ll have to wait another minute or two anyway for the other firemen to arrive.
    It takes him only five seconds to slip on his bunker gear, ten seconds to start the truck and get it out of the driveway.
    There used to be such anxiety, getting to a fire: the tunnel vision beginning to constrict from the very moment he heard the dispatcher’s voice. But now he knows how to save it, how to hold it at bay—that powerhousing of the heart, which now does not kick into life, does not come into being, until the moment Kirby comes around the corner and first sees the flames.
    In her bed—in their bed—Mary Ann hears and feels the rumble of the big trucks leaving the station; hears and feels in her bones the belch of the air horns, and then the