Authors: Michael Perry
Population 485 (13 page)
These forays into the community are performed to raise safety issues, but they are also intended to inspire a little comfort and confidence in the fire and rescue corps. It doesn’t always turn out that way. I have yet to set myself alight during a fire-safety demonstration, but last year, while driving the rescue van in the homecoming parade, my partner, Dan, had stopped to let the rest of the parade catch up. We threw some candy to the kids, and then the parade started up again. Forgetting that the van was in gear, Dan popped the clutch and killed the engine. There had been a lot of stop-and-go during the parade, and because we hadn’t kept the idle up, the strobe lights had drained the battery. The van wouldn’t start. And so it was that for the last tenth of a mile of the parade route, the citizenry was treated to the sight of their very own rapid-response medical team in action: Dan fighting the dead wheel, me with my back to the rear door, sweating bullets and pushing the van to the school parking lot.
Homo ergaster
decided he’d use fire for his own, and that decision shaped the world to follow. It shapes my life, it shapes my town, it forges my relationship with my brothers. Before the magazine editor pressed me on the issue, I never really thought of what role firefighting played in the context of my relationship with my brothers. I have often thought of it since, and if anything, it creates a situation of privilege. The privilege of standing shoulder to shoulder with the playmates of your childhood, sure, but that applies to more than just my brothers in this situation. Scooter Southern is on the department, and that scar on my brother’s forehead is from the day I knocked him off Scooter’s porch with the screen door. Firefighting isn’t the only interest I share with my brothers: we grew up hunting deer together, for instance, and do to this day—but it is the closest to any shared social activity we might engage in together, say, like being on the same softball team. Our pursuits and avocations have little in common. They drive log trucks, I sit in a chair trying to herd words. Put us in a row and turn our palms up—mine are soft and clean. There’s your story.
We do not, in the parlance of the day, always celebrate our differences. We’re stubborn and strong-willed, and life has taken us down divergent paths of understanding. There are times when we disagree so vehemently that one of us will simply grit his teeth and leave the room. There is never any shouting or arm-waving, that is not our way. An outside observer might miss the whole thing. But disagreements with my brothers often shake me up for days, because they are a reminder of how disagreeing profoundly with someone you love in equal profundity is an intractable dilemma because you don’t have the option of dismissing them out of contempt. I read volumes on the Civil War when I was a child, and was always morbidly fascinated with the idea of brother fighting brother. I could never understand how such a thing could be. Today I do. I would kill—I am not speaking figuratively—for my brothers, but I also know that if the course of civilization boiled down to a few salient points, we would be irretrievably opposed. Such a likelihood is highly fanciful, but the thought is still unsettling. There is a certain paradoxical rage weltering in us that explodes when it is nudged too closely by love. These are threads of love and hate traceable to Cain and Abel.
Fire cuts through all that. Down in the basement of that house, we are on the same side, my brother and I. Doing something we both love, fighting something we both fear, covering for each other. Fire is heat and light, able to cut through the murky complications reserved for souls born of the same womb.
Back to the basement. My low-air alarm is sounding. I still have some time, but I have a ways to backtrack before I can safely remove the SCBA. My brother, smaller and in better shape, has air remaining. He has knocked down all but a few small flames. He waves me back. I crawl back out, then immediately second-guess myself. I hear my instructor’s voice.
Never become separated.
I was wrong to leave, and he was wrong to stay. Out in the driveway, in the glare of the halogen scene lights, I stare at the smoking skeleton of the house, giving no clue that someone is deep in its bowels. The cold is astounding. We are all encased in a shell of ice. Our sleeves won’t bend, our gloves might as well be made of steel. Every once in a while, someone slips and falls, and he paws around on his back, helpless as a turtle, until someone helps him to his feet. I keep staring at the collapsed garage, at the spot where my brother should be reappearing. Why did I leave without him? My guts churn until a few minutes later, he crawls out safely. Anticlimax. As it usually is. What we do rarely ends in heroic conquest or tragedy. It’s dangerous, and not to be taken lightly, but what we’re basically doing out there, when we haul our hoses out to minivans and garages, up silos, over rooftops, and down into basements, is trying to disrupt the geometry of fire. Kick the slats out of the tetrahedron.
After the fire-safety lecture, we sent the kids on their way with a plastic bag full of goodies—pencils, a ruler, a coloring book, brochures for their parents. Thus armed with cultural interdiction, they climbed aboard their yellow buses and left for home. One of the little boys—I remember helping him down the ladder, he had a cast on his arm—went straight to his backyard and lit a fire in the leaves. Then he stomped on the fire, trying to put it out. His socks caught on fire, badly burning his legs. He stopped, dropped, and rolled, until the fire was out. It was what the firefighters had told him to do, he told the adults who came running.
I
ONCE RAN A MILE
in four minutes and forty-eight seconds. I was a high-schooler then, a New Auburn Trojan. My senior year, I was the only boy on the track team. The picture is there in the 1983 yearbook—just me, up against the wall, grinning, over the caption, “Boys Track Team—Mike Perry.” I trained alone, and my coach drove me to meets in his little red car. I enjoyed racing, but dreaded the gut-churning buildup to the starting gun. I spent a lot of time in the Porta-Potty. I ran solitary warm-up laps, and I was always meeting packs of grinning sprinters. I envied them the speed and brevity of their events. Win or lose, they were done in a matter of seconds. Me, on the other hand, I stood there at the start line of the two-mile with quaking bowels and the full knowledge that I was in for a minimum ten minutes of anoxia and rib stitches. The sprinters were brash and cocky. They ran their warm-up laps against the flow. Invariably one of them would leer at the emblem on my singlet: “Woo-hoo! I used
my
Trojan last night!”
I still do a little running. I have this loop, 3.9 miles, a few hills and slow rises, just enough to burn your legs and lug the engine some. I try to run it four or five times a week. The loop is laid out in a rectangle, with a bite out of one corner where Highway Q curves up and over the four-lane. To run the loop is to trace an off-kilter frame around my hometown. I think of myself taking a lap inside a living zoetrope, moving past images presented in collage and linked by constantly shifting associations, overlapping and bleeding through to form a dynamic composition of history, place and event. I run the loop, and I get perspective.
I usually lift weights first. Something to get the blood moving, prepare the lungs. I rank the joys of weight lifting somewhere between dish washing and dentistry. And lifting weights in a town where most men swing hammers or run shovels or wrassle logs feels absurd and ersatz. But a guy will not maintain tone through typing alone. So I strap in and commit myself to the process, which amounts to a series of grunts accreted in tedium. Only my compulsive counting affliction keeps me going. I am always counting: the number of twists it takes to run the can opener around a tuna tin, the number of chops it takes to dice a leek, the number of turns required to retrieve the arrow on my carp-shooting rig. Ticking off each weight-lifting repetition and arranging them in twelve-rep sets (in my head, they accumulate in neat, soothing rows) feeds the compulsion. And music helps. In particular, the group Venison and their 1996 opus
HATE!
Twelve tracks of cando rage and post-industrial stoicism. Diesel-grade rock. Just the sort of propulsion required for pointless hoisting. “
In Wisconsin
,” roars front man Rick Fuller, referencing our state motto, “
we say, ‘Forward!’
”
After the last set of reps, I’m ready to run. At least when you run, you cover some ground. I leave the house and head up Main Street. Up being east. Past Tugg’s Bar, past Snook’s store, past the meat market, up to where Main Street forms a T with East Street, a block and a half from my front door. Fourteen addresses, counting homes and businesses and both sides of the street. Since I joined the department five years ago, I have made calls to half of them. Guy across the street hurt his back. One of the Goshen girls had a seizure in front of the store. Some kids pitched a smoke bomb in the storage shed behind the meat market and it caught fire. I nearly keeled over in the heat of that one. An old man in the little white house next to Ward Southern’s was digging a pit in his yard when he began to have chest pain. When I heard the address, I just grabbed the emergency kit from the trunk of my car and ran up the street. His wife called to me through the screen. The man up at East Street and Main dials 911 when his lungs seize up. We’ve been there four or five times. Tuff at the bar, his heart has been kicking in and out lately, and we’ve given him oxygen in the back room some mornings.
If you go straight at the T, keep running east, you’ll wind up in Herbie Gravunder’s barn. His farm sits right off the end of Main Street. Herbie’s gone now, and the real estate agents are beginning to chunk up his land, divvy it out in lots. He died a year ago, at the age of eighty-seven, after a nasty fall led to a terminal stretch in the nursing home. Herbie cussed the nursing home. Toward the end, he used to phone his cousin Delmar, try to get sprung. Delmar is seventy-nine years old now. He and Herbie used to run together. Tooled around the Mud Brook back roads on motorcycles. Delmar had a Honda 350, Herbie had a Harley Davidson Sprint. Delmar says you had to pay attention, you’d hit a patch of gravel and pack sand up your snoot. Herbie came up on a herd of cows once and had to lay the Harley down. Delmar says he shot right under a Holstein.
Herbie was stone deaf. A result, ironically or not, of the years he spent running a rock crusher for the county. And Delmar says in the old days they always pulled the mufflers off their tractors, figuring the louder the engine the more power it had. Herbie always had little tufts of cotton sticking out his ears, but then so did most of the old farmers I remember from my childhood. Anyway, what with the deafness, and the cotton, and the flannel earflapper cap he wore most of the time, Herbie lived in a muffled world. He drove this little red pickup, and sometimes he’d have his foot on the accelerator when he started it, and it would just roar. Oblivious, he’d hit the starter again, and the sound was like a sidewinder grinder chewing through sheet metal. My brother John worked behind the parts counter at the implement store for a while, and Herbie used to come in regular. He’d wander into the shop area and cuss in disbelief at the size of tractors these days. Herbie was one of your heartfelt cussers. Every other word, pretty much. He left this little trail of blue smoke, my brother used to say. Once I told Delmar, “Ol’ Herbie had quite a vocabulary!” Delmar crinkled his eyes. “Yeah? Well it ain’t in the dictionary.”
Herbie was a worker. He’d get up at four
A.M
. to milk his cows, then run a school bus route, return home for chores, and reverse the process after lunch. He drove milk truck back when you slung the milk aboard in 100-pound steel cans and when there were so many farms in the country that the milk truck doubled as the snow plow. He drove the truck that oiled the country roads, and he put up light poles for the Rural Electrification Administration. In 1934, Herbie bought the local blacksmith shop. He did general repairs and welding, and sold gas until the new highway drained the traffic out of town. He went to the blacksmith shop most every morning, right up to the last. I’d see him putt down Main Street, never much over fifteen miles an hour. Herbie couldn’t be rushed. I went for a bicycle ride on Highway M one afternoon, caught him on the double yellow with traffic coming, and had to dawdle behind him for a quarter mile until he turned off at Delmar’s farm. Delmar says Herbie always arrived with a line of cars behind him.
Herbie wasn’t always averse to speed. There were the motorcycles, and sometime in the ’70s he bought a used hovercraft. He tricked it out with running lights, a sonorous Model T horn, and—in a reversal of the
noise equals power
theory—a pair of chromed motorcycle tailpipes. He replaced the steering mechanism with an airplane yoke. Delmar says the hovercraft never quite worked right because the skirt was torn and Herbie removed it, not understanding that you can’t get any lift without the skirt. Herbie called Delmar one night after chores and they took the hovercraft out to Loon Lake for a test run. Without the skirt, it wouldn’t do much. Delmar says they sat side by side out in the water—neither one could swim—and Herbie ginned the engine up. The hovercraft began to rise, and they had their hopes up there for a little bit, but then a giant air bubble rolled out from beneath the craft and they plopped back down. Delmar says that was about it. They just sat there and blew big ploppy bubbles. Come winter, Herbie had a brainstorm. He bolted a steel frame to the bottom of the hovercraft and welded three snowmobile skis to it. Then he called Delmar. (Delmar is spare and soft-spoken. Farmed all his life. You get the image of him as the loyal, if sometimes terrified, sidekick. He used to grumble about Herbie calling him all the time, interrupting his chores, but now he says he sure misses him.) This time Herbie and Delmar went out to Long Lake, which was a lot
longer
than Loon Lake, and took a test run. The steel skis and frame were awful heavy, and Delmar says Herbie had to flat pour the cobs to’er before they started to inch forward. Tailpipes or not, the noise was astounding. Carfuls of spectators began to accumulate on the road at the far end of the lake. Herbie kept his foot in it, and pretty soon they were shooting over the ice. The fixed skis made it almost impossible to steer, and Delmar’s crow’s feet wrinkle when he tells about how they fought to turn the thing as the shore approached. They had a good day, though, Delmar says, rocketing back and forth across the lake with all those people watching.
