Hothouse Read online

  Dedication

  To Elise Howard,

  for tirelessly battling my attempts

  to muck it all up.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Are Ya Winnin’?

  Time Loves a Hero

  Under the Bridge

  Us and Them

  Burnt Offerings

  Hard Sky

  Courageous Stays

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ARE YA WINNIN’?

  “Are ya winnin’?”

  That’s my dad, wanting to know if I’m winning. He always wants to know if I’m winning.

  There is no competition. No game, no contest, no prize as much as anybody can tell. It’s just what he says, his way. His way of asking. How everything is, if everything is all right. It’s his how ya doing, and how’s life treating ya, I love you and how ya doing.

  “I am, Dad,” I say. “I’m winnin’.”

  And I am.

  It is a few minutes past six a.m. and we have just finished breakfast because he got home around five and I was already up waiting for him, the eggs and sausages and the yogurt and berries all lined up and ready to roll because I knew he was coming because I always know when he’s coming and it’s time to roll with the breakfast. He texted me when he was leaving the station, like he always does, and I was already ready, like I always am. Like it has been since I was just a kid and before that even. Sub-kid, even. Now I’m post-kid and it’s as good as ever. Didn’t matter what shift he was on, what hour he was coming home, if it wasn’t a school night, we were cooking and eating together when he came through that door.

  We are done eating now. And having done, having stuffed up pretty good and patted puffed bellies and cleaned up and gotten the kitchen back to mother-approval-level tidy, this is when we would always stagger toward our beds to fall in and enjoy several of the most satisfying sleep hours you could ever know.

  Except sometimes. Except like times like this, when breakfast is through but the old man somehow isn’t, work and the long night not being quite enough to push him over into exhaustion. Almost like he’s gaining energy instead of running out.

  Dad wants to go for a walk, just the two of us, to walk off breakfast, before pretty much everybody else has even had theirs.

  “Are ya winnin’, Russ?”

  “I’m winnin’, Dad.”

  “But are ya really winnin’?”

  “I really am, Dad.”

  He loves trees. We’re headed for the trees. The sort of arboretum on the hill about a half mile from the house, part of the aggie college over the river. We always head for the trees.

  “We should get a dog,” Dad says.

  “Should we? Why should we do that?”

  “What, you don’t like dogs? Who doesn’t like dogs? What kind of a person doesn’t like dogs? I didn’t raise no dog-hating kind of a kid.”

  He likes to pretend to get outraged at things he knows damn well are not even true.

  “I like dogs as much as the next guy,” I say.

  “Not if the next guy is me, you don’t. And if you look, I think you will notice that the next guy, right here next to you, is in fact me.”

  “Then why don’t we have a dog, dog-daddy?”

  “That’s what I was just asking you about, kid, before you started giving me all this lip about not wanting a dog.”

  “I never said anyth—”

  “Well, we can’t be strolling around the neighborhood like this at the break of dawn, prowling-like. Neighbors’ll talk. Think we’re out looking for hookers or drugs or something.”

  “Or, they’ll maybe think you are a firefighter, which they all actually know and have known forever.”

  “Well that’s me. I was more thinking about you. I’m covered, but you’re a teenager, so naturally they’ll be thinking along the hookers-drugs line of thinking. Then I get tarred by association.”

  He can go on like this for a very long time if you encourage him.

  “I see your point there, Dad. I guess a dog’s the only solution.”

  “The only one. Nobody brings a dog along drugs-and-hookers scouting. Yup, a noble dog makes everything okay.”

  “Well, okay then.”

  “Well okay,” he says, spinning around, “let’s go get us a noble shelter dog. We’ll call him Sheltie.”

  I grab his shoulder, direct him back toward the nearby trees of the hill.

  “Yeah,” I say, “maybe in a few hours after the shelter actually opens. And after you’ve been to bed for a while.”

  “Maybe that, then,” he says, laughing, putting his big arm over my shoulders and pulling me nicely, painfully tight.

  It is not the first time we have discussed the dog thing around daybreak.

  “Are ya winnin’?” he asks.

  “I’m winnin’, Dad.”

  He’s yanked a bit of whiplash into my neck, and I am due a few more hours sleep, but I am most definitely winnin’ all the same.

  TIME LOVES A HERO

  My father didn’t have any really close friends who didn’t have mustaches. It wasn’t a rule, it wasn’t by design, it just was.

  My father was a firefighter, the kind who have mustaches like 1890s baseball players, and all his good friends were that kind of firefighter too. I never quite figured out what the connection was between the look and the man, but the look meant something.

  My father helped people a lot, because he was great at so many things—fixing the car, putting up Sheetrock, wiring a ceiling fan, transplanting a rosebush. He liked helping people, helping people was his thing, his profession at work and his hobby at home. People like being helped, I have noticed, and so my dad had a lot of admirers of one kind or another.

  Admirers, as opposed to up-close-and-personals. The guys at the Hothouse—which is what they called their fire station—were a pure team. They were a team, my dad and his comrades with their uniform mustaches. What these guys had was a whole nother thing, inside itself, outside everything else.

  DJ was my friend before I even knew what to do with him. I have no pre-DJ memories. I am five months older than he is but nothing ever happened to me before I became aware of him right there beside me, and so in a reality more real than real reality DJ and I came into existence at the same exact time. He lives directly across the street from me. His father was a firefighter just like my father, with a mustache just like my father’s. The first time we drew thick Magic Marker mustaches on ourselves that I can remember was when we were about three, though there may well have been incidents even before that one. I can tell you that we did it quite a few times over the years, and while our mothers were not that keen about it, our fathers could not have been prouder.

  Here’s how deep it went. I am named Russell, after DJ’s father. DJ is named David James, after my father, though you’d only ever call him DJ.

  If you called him anything which, mostly, I haven’t for a couple of years now. It was no big thing. In truth, it wasn’t even a little thing, as far as I can recall. We just drifted apart. That’s what people say, isn’t it, when they don’t know what the hell went wrong? We just drifted apart, even though I can go right to my bedroom window and if I squint hard enough I can still see right into his front window so really we haven’t drifted anywhere.

  We chose different high schools. I don’t know why we did that. Maybe we got tired of living in each other’s pocket all the time. Maybe we got tired of firefighter dads who were best friends and moms who were best friends and friends who were neighbors who were classmates who were best friends.

  Maybe. I don’t remember feeling that way, but, ma
ybe. We never talked about it.

  If I see DJ, I always say hi, so it isn’t like that.

  We are still right here.

  Except we are not.

  But then, just like that, we are, again. In that very unfunny funny way of things, DJ and I have drifted back together, on one level that we never would have wished on anybody, not even each other. Nobody wants to drift this way.

  It has been three weeks. I have never eaten so well in my life. Ham used to be my favorite food but I believe if I see another baked ham now I’ll throw it right out the window into the street and let the dogs all get it. I had my picture taken with the mayor. Nice man, smelled kind of sour. I didn’t smile. The house has been full of people all this time, family, neighbors, politicians, sports guys, policemen, firemen, firemen, firemen, total strangers, all kinds of religious types. They come and visit, “pay respects,” drop off food, nod a lot, hug my mother, a lot of them wind up crying. Then they sweep, in bunches, across the street over to DJ’s house and do a lot more of it all over again, sometimes passing identical groups of folks coming back the other way like an exchange of war prisoners across a border nobody recognizes.

  “Pay respects.” That’s a phrase I am having to get myself acquainted with.

  My dad and the rest of them seemed to be always fighting with the city for a better deal and the city seemed to be always fighting back and one time I remember the firefighters’ chant was “Pay Is Respect.” And this mayor, the one right here with the sour smell like he just climbed out of a pickle barrel to pay his respects to my mother and me is the very guy I watched on the news saying “We cannot afford any more respect for this firefighters’ union.”

  “I wanted to be sure to come by,” he says, solemn as Sunday, “to tell you how much I respected your husband, and what he did for this city.”

  Right? And I am watching this man, this mayor, give my mother this big bear hug, and I am thinking, How does this happen? How do we get here? How is it that this big fat phony is draped squeezing all over my mother whose husband protector isn’t here to keep it from happening?

  Until he turns to me. He extends his big meaty paw, which turns out to be also clammy and further evidence of my pickle-barrel theory, and he forces one of those mayor-shakes, a hard and grippy thing that hurts because it caught me off guard. When he’s got me, shaking-shaking, he uses it to yank me close, to give me handshake–hug–backslap–smell-my-neck so that all my senses are woozing at once and I am right on the verge of breaking away aggressively except he’s in my ear too, isn’t he?

  “Your father was one tough sonofabitch, Russell. He was Beast.”

  And like that, he pushes me away again, still shaking my hand, looking hard at me.

  I shake him back, only harder, and I look into him, only softer because I am welling up because of course I am but that doesn’t mean all the right things aren’t also going on inside of me because they are. I feel like a shit for thinking the mayor a phony but it almost doesn’t matter because I almost don’t remember feeling that way already.

  My father got more pay from this very mayor in the end and everybody seemed to respect him and they are coming from everywhere to pay even more respect now because pay may be respect but there is a lot more to it than that. Respect is respect.

  And my father was Beast.

  The two funerals DJ and I have been to recently are the two funerals DJ and I have been to. We have seen more firefighters wearing white gloves than most people have seen birds. I cried at DJ’s dad’s funeral even harder than I cried at my dad’s. Because of seeing DJ. Because I was seeing him and feeling him and crying for him because he was there, I could see him right there. At my dad’s funeral I cried less because I couldn’t see DJ, because I couldn’t see one single thing because I was there only for myself. I couldn’t feel anything out there at the end of my reach, not even my old friend who is probably the only person on earth who knew exactly precisely what it was like to be me. I can only guess what DJ’s reaction was at my dad’s funeral. But I can guess.

  I cannot stand bagpipes. If I ever encounter bagpipes again, there may be violence. If I crossed the street and played bagpipes under DJ’s window, I’m sure he’d throw a chair out the window at me. I know this because I know DJ and I know what we have shared, even if we cannot speak about it.

  “So, how you been?” I say when I see him the first time after the funerals are over and the strangle of the bagpipes is still torturing my ear bones.

  “I’ve been … probably exactly how you think I’ve been,” he says with a slant smile that seems to take some effort.

  He has just stepped out of his front door, headed west toward where the bus collects for his school. I came out mine, headed east to catch my own bus. We’re not going to school, which doesn’t even start again for over a week, but we are dry-running it because here we are. I crossed the street, which I would not normally do. If he appreciates it, it’s hard to tell.

  “Lots of ham, huh?” I say.

  The other half of his smile shows up, which is great. “Ham and bagpipes. Cripes …”

  I laugh. I don’t find it funny, exactly, because nothing is funny now, not yet. But the laugh is real, at the same time. I want to laugh, I’m glad to laugh. “Cripes, is right.”

  He thumbs west. “I have to get moving, man … so do you, right?”

  “Right,” I say, helpfully thumbing back the other way.

  He sticks out his hand.

  I shake his hand.

  It might not seem like much, not for two guys who have known each other so long. Certainly not for two guys who know so much about each other now. But it is something. It is a long and strong and warm handshake that feels like a pretty decent something as we head off on our east-west ways.

  It’s the best we can manage anyway. Maybe now, this is the best we will ever be able to manage. You should always do the best you can manage, my dad would say.

  “What do you want to do?” Adrian asks me. We are riding the bus to nowhere, and thinking beyond this very bus ride feels beyond me right now. If this were the school run, Adrian and I would have to change once, take two buses from our neighborhood to our school. That feels like work at the moment, and today I probably wouldn’t even get there.

  “Whatever you want to do.”

  “Russell, don’t start this. Not right now.”

  According to Adrian, I have a history of doing this but in reality I am the one who has all of the ideas. But he is right that we have to do something. We have not been doing things since everything changed, and it is starting to hurt, the motionlessness of life. Thinking about my dad, thinking about him whenever it gets quiet, aching for him when it’s bad. Adrian wants to jump-start life again, and he is right.

  “What do you want to do?” I ask.

  “Right now, I want to knock you on the head because it’s twice already you’re telling me to decide.”

  Despite how it might look, this is progress. People have been too gentle with me, for obvious reasons, and a bit of a head-knock would not be altogether awful. What friends are for, so they say.

  We are on the bus. We are sitting at the back like we usually do, and there are a few other people sprinkled here and there, older folks mostly, sad-looking drudge-job commuters, one lady with a little kid about three years old sitting on the seat next to her and trying every few seconds to escape before she grabs him again. The bus driver keeps staring back and I am certain he is staring at Adrian and me in that way that bus drivers have of singling you out from far away, making their eyes look huge at the same time they make them squinty and piercing.

  “We could go to the mall,” I say kind of lamely, while the driver continues to hypnotize me. I don’t even like the mall.

  “Russ, you’re not even trying. The mall?”

  “I think that bus driver thinks we did something,” I say. “He’s kind of worrying me.”

  Adrian looks now at the driver eyeing us. “How’s he even managin
g to drive the thing?” he asks. “He’s not looking at the road in front of him at all, that’s what’s worrying. How’s he do that?”

  Adrian finds things fascinating, mostly, or at least interesting. He can forget sometimes to take a situation personally, just because it’s intriguing.

  And good for Adrian, because right now things get extremely intriguing. The bus driver leans hard on the brakes, and jerks the bus sharply to the curb, and parks spontaneously. It makes that big shooching sound as he jams on the parking break. Hopping right up out of his seat, he spins and thumps with great purpose down the narrow aisle, past the quiet old folks, past the kid who behaves really well now, right back and up to us, close enough he must be able to hear my heart punching me quadruple time in my chest.

  He reaches into his baggy blue pocket and hands me a little more money than I paid to get on his bus.

  “Sons of heroes don’t ever pay no money to ride on my bus,” he says, and his hard eyes are very wet. “Ever.” He holds out his hairy meaty hand, like he’s asking permission to shake. I give him permission, which is only the right thing to do.

  “How ’bout friends of sons of heroes?” Adrian asks with outstretched hand.

  The driver turns such a look of puzzled disgust on Adrian, it’s a wonder he doesn’t put him off the bus. He marches back up front. The rest of the passengers are now looking at us. In a few seconds we are in traffic again, on the road to we don’t know where. People continue to look at us while they pretend to be looking at other things.

  “People know me?” I say low, my turn to be fascinated.

  “I guess they do,” Adrian says. “You stopped a whole bus.”

  Adrian waves—at the little boy who hasn’t got a clue, to an elderly lady who probably has. She waves back.

  “So,” he says, “you’re some sort of public figure now.”

  I get a chill, instantly. I don’t know this feeling. I don’t know that I don’t like it either. I just don’t know.