Free The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass Page B

going-away sirens. She listens to the dispatcher’s radio—hoping it will remain silent after the first call, will not crackle again, calling more and more stations to the blaze. Hoping it will be a small fire, and containable.
    She lies there, warm and in love with her life—with the blessing of her two children asleep there in her own house, in the other room, safe and asleep—and she tries to imagine the future, tries to picture being sixty years old, seventy, and then eighty. How long—and of that space or distance ahead, what lies within it?
    ***
    Kirby gets her—Jenna—on Wednesday nights and on every other weekend. On the weekends, if the weather is good, he sometimes takes her camping and lets the assistant chief cover for him. Kirby and Jenna cook over an open fire; they roast marshmallows. They sleep in sleeping bags in a meadow beneath stars. When he was a child Kirby used to camp in this meadow with his father and grandfather, and there would be lightning bugs at night, but those are gone now.
    On Wednesday nights—Kirby has to have her back at Rhonda’s by ten—they cook hamburgers, Jenna’s favorite food, on the grill in the back yard. This one constancy—this one small sacrament. The diminishment of their lives shames him—especially for her, she for whom the whole world should be widening and opening, rather than constricting already.
    She plays with the other children, the little children, afterward, all of them keeping one eye on the clock. She is quiet, inordinately so—thrilled just to be in the presence of her father, beneath his huge shadow; she smiles shyly whenever she notices that he is watching her. And how can she not be wondering why it is, when it’s time to leave, that the other two children get to stay?
    He drives her home cheerfully, steadfastly, refusing to let her see or even sense his despair. He walks her up the sidewalk to Rhonda’s like a guest. He does not go inside.
    By Saturday—if it is the off-weekend in which he does not have her—he is up on the roof again, trying to catch the scent of her from the chimney; sometimes he falls asleep up there, in a brief catnap, as if watching over her and standing guard.
    A million times he plays it over in his mind. Could I have saved the marriage? Did I give it absolutely every last ounce of effort? Could I have saved it?
    No. Maybe.
No.
    ***
    It takes a long time to get used to the fires; it takes the young firemen, the beginners, a long time to understand what is required: that they must suit up and walk right into a burning house.
    They make mistakes. They panic, breathe too fast, and use up their oxygen. It takes a long time. It takes a long time before they calm down and meet the fires on their own terms, and the fires’.
    In the beginning, they all want to be heroes. Even before they enter their first fire, they will have secretly placed their helmets in the ovens at home to soften them up a bit—to dull and char and melt them slightly, so anxious are they for combat and its validations: its contract with their spirit. Kirby remembers the first house fire he entered—his initial reaction was “You mean I’m going in
that
”—but enter it he did, fighting it from the inside out with huge volumes of water—the water sometimes doing as much damage as the fire—his new shiny suit yellow and clean amongst the work-darkened suits of the veterans.
    Kirby tells Mary Ann that after that fire he drove out into the country and set a little grass fire, a little pissant one that was in no danger of spreading, then put on his bunker gear and spent all afternoon walking around in it, dirtying his suit to just the right color of anonymity.
    You always make mistakes, in the beginning. You can only hope that they are small or insignificant enough to carry little if any price: that they harm no one. Kirby tells Mary Ann that on one of his earliest house