Free One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist by Dustin M. Hoffman

announcing shutdown, despite the layoffs and thinning number of men who entered the cyclone fence at punch in. He lit his cigar. He stayed still while the big lilac bush bent toward him in the summer breeze, the small petals teasing the burning ember in his mouth. It was a good thing to stand still and let the world sway around him, especially after a long shift climbing tanks and towers, tugging the men’s lanyards, checking for gloves, making sure they weren’t smoking.
    He puffed hard, made the cherry glow bright orange under a pinecone of gray ash. His little fire at home. At work everything could burn. All the petroleum would burn eventually. From his house, he could see the whip of flame spouting from the burn-off tower at the refinery, waving to him, saying, Goodbye. See you tomorrow. You’ll be back.
    His twelve-year-old son, Jackson, scraped a jackknife through the bark of their maple tree. The boy’s long hair hid his face, so Randall couldn’t tell if he was scraping with anger or boredom or what. Maybe Jackson was carving a heart, his initials over some young girl’s. Maybe Jackson’s initials grooved dark and jagged above some boy’s.
    Sirens blared down the street, and Jackson’s skinny arms froze. His knife dropped to the dirt. Randall’s house squatted only a few blocks from the station, and he’d grown used to the trucks’ constant whines that summer. It sounded like two trucks, maybe three. A good-sized fire. Three trucks were plenty for the few thousand homes in their small Michigan town. Homes built around the refinery, Dow Chemical, Alma Bolt, the sugar beet factory. Randall’s refinery had its own trucks, better, newer, had its own hoses and gallons of foam and shiny red extinguishers placed every few yards along the catwalks, had its own coal-filter respirators and heavy yellow jackets hung like deflated men in the break-room closet.
    The fire truck lights sparked red through the fat plumage of his maple tree. Randall’s chest was bare, but he didn’t have time to go inside and get a T-shirt. He bit into the butt of his cigar and jogged to his van. He turned the key twice before the engine gurgled to life. Outside the passenger’s window, his son stared. He could see Jackson’s face now, pale with a slightly sunken chin, small nose, all framed with that long dirty-blond hair.
    Randall leaned over the seat and cranked down the window. “If you wanna see this fire, you better get moving.”
    Jackson lowered his head and trudged toward the van. Randall drummed the steering wheel with his fingertips as the trucks surged down their road. Finally the passenger door creaked open, and Jackson climbed onto the seat.
    Randall caught up to the trucks after a few blocks. He matched their speed, slicing through red-light intersections. He smiled over at Jackson, who was looking out the window instead of watching the lights, the chrome fenders, the beast of a truck ahead of them.
    “You’re going to miss all the best stuff.” Randall elbowed his son.
    His boy turned toward the fire trucks but didn’t smile back, didn’t look his father in the eye. Randall had only had one kid with Celia. Jackson cost enough, they’d both agreed years ago. And Randall had worried about every outlet in the house, every stair step, every sharp corner. He hadn’t wanted to go through that terror again. But now he thought about another son, or a daughter. His promotion confirmed he could protect them, even in the dry summers like this one, where roofs spurted flames almost every night. But he worried about Jackson, how to save him from the whitewashes and swirlies and black eyes he got at school. He imagined outfitting him in a suit of muscles and calluses, like slipping a wool safety jacket onto the men at work.
    “How fast do you think they can go?” Jackson pointed ahead of them. His fingernails were painted black. A mood ring strangled the knuckle of his middle finger. A row of wire twist ties adorned his