Chapter 39 Ninety Seconds Too Late
WES had never told anyone the whole of the Delsuomi Street fire, and I told Birdie Vance in her kitchen the following Thursday, because she’d handed me the middle of herself and left it on the table between us, and a thing like that you don’t leave sitting there alone.
I’d rehearsed it, a little, in the truck on the way over, which I don’t do, I’m not a man who rehearses conversations, I’m a man who says one true thing and stops.
But this one I’d carried nine years and I didn’t want to hand it to her wrong, like I’d handed the almost-nothing versions to the couple of people over the years who’d asked and gotten the two-sentence answer that closes the subject.
I wanted to give her the real length of it, because she’d given me hers full-length and unhidden, and a man ought to match what he’s given.
“You told me about your clock,” I said. “I’ve got one too. Seems only fair.”
She got very still, the good still, the listening still, and she didn’t reach for a joke, which for her is a form of respect I’d learned to read.
“Before Halford I was a firefighter,” I said.
“Ten years, in a city I don’t name because naming it makes me talk faster and I want to get this right.
I was good. Not the kind of good that gets written up.
The kind that shows up on time and does the boring parts right.
I liked the boring parts. Ladders checked, lines flaked out clean, everybody accounted for before we roll.
I was the guy who counted heads twice.” I stopped.
“I didn’t know until later that you and I have the same job, deep down.
The counting. The bringing everybody home. ”
“Mother,” she said softly.
“Something like it,” I said. “We didn’t have a name that nice.”
I told her about the night. I’ll set it down here as I set it down for her, plain, because plain is the only way I can carry it.
A row house. A call that came in a little late because a neighbor argued with herself about whether it was really smoke or just the Petersens burning dinner again.
Traffic. A hydrant two men had to work because the cap was seized.
Ninety seconds. I have done the arithmetic more times than a sane person should.
If the call comes when the smoke starts.
If the cap turns easy. If I take the corner I didn’t take.
Ninety seconds, spread across four or five small ordinary failures, none of them mine, all of them mine, and we came up the stairs into a back room ninety seconds after the ninety seconds stopped mattering.
I told her the part I’ve never said to anybody, which is that for about a year afterward I could not hear the word “almost.” People say it constantly.
Almost made it, almost had it, we almost won.
It would come out of a coworker’s mouth about a ballgame and I’d have to leave the room.
Almost was the whole size of my life for a while.
I got to that back room almost in time. I have been almost in time in my dreams a thousand nights since, and in the dreams the hydrant cap always turns easy, and it never once changes the ending, and I wake up and lie there and understand that some part of me has decided the ending was mine to change and I failed to, and no report and no therapist and no amount of being early in a small town has ever fully talked that part of me out of it.
“Somebody didn’t come home,” Birdie said. Not a question. She knew the shape.
“Somebody didn’t come home,” I said. “And here’s the part that made me a fire marshal instead of a drunk.
Six weeks later the investigator’s report came back and the fire was set.
Somebody set it. For money, it turned out, the dull reason it’s almost always for.
And I sat with that report and I understood that I’d spent six weeks blaming a hydrant cap and my own driving, and the real answer was a man in an office who did arithmetic like Holloway does, property and payouts, and decided the risk to a sleeping family was acceptable, and was, statistically, correct, right up until he wasn’t.
” I turned my cup a quarter, watched it.
“I couldn’t be ninety seconds early on the truck anymore.
I couldn’t stand it. But I found out I could be six months early.
I could be the guy who understands the man in the office before he ever calls the torch.
So I stopped pulling people out too late and started trying to make sure the fire never got set.
That’s the whole reason I’m in your town.
That’s my penance, if you want to use your word.
I’m trying to be early for the rest of my life. ”