Population 485 (30 page)

The chief asks the members of the fire board to stand, so we firefighters are reminded of the citizen volunteers who oversee the details of jurisdiction and finance, the necessary drudge so far removed from the excitement of the front lines. He also thanks a number of non-members who pitched in during the year when we were shorthanded. Then he hands me the mic, Lieutenant Pam hauls out a box of gag awards, and the fun part starts.

The gag awards are the culmination of a year’s worth of payback. If you bent a mirror, backed the pumper into a popple tree, or killed the tanker at a stop sign, you can bet someone took note, and that at some point in the weeks leading up to the banquet, the list was reviewed by an ad hoc committee of conspirators, who then fanned out and cobbled up a boxful of commemorative mementos. The guy who backed over his $300 pager with a tractor gets a dime-store pager filled with bubble gum. Tee Norman, who looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s backwoods stepchild, receives a bottle of Gatorade in commemoration of the day he sprinted all the way from North Star Implement to the fire hall—nearly three-quarters of a mile—in his cowboy boots, only to find he had responded to a test page. Tony Barker is one of the calmest and most reliable members of the department, and we couldn’t get any better loyalty out of him unless we mounted a hose and pump on his beloved Polaris, and so he gets the next-best thing—a toy snowmobile with a fire nozzle attached. At a factory fire last winter, Matt Jeffski and I accidentally sprayed Lieutenant Pam full in the face with the two-and-a-half when she came out of the smoke. It messed up her eyes for a while, and it wasn’t funny then, but tonight she gets a pair of swimmer’s goggles. When the chief ran out of gas on the way to a two
A.M
. medical call a couple of months ago, he just disappeared from the radio and never did show up. He was found out, of course, and is presented with a survival kit including a gas can, a chocolate bar, and a pair of running shoes. It goes on this way for the entire department, no deed unpunished. Backing the big pumper into a trailer fire, a new guy missed the driveway and found himself stuck in the ditch at a forty-degree angle, contemplating the stars—he gets a miniature pumper and a promise from the rest of us to lobby the village board for an ordinance widening all driveways. At a highline fire, I happened to be watching when Rusty, a seasoned truck driver, missed a gear and killed the engine on Tanker 3. He has been known to wince visibly when I crash second gear in search of fourth, but tonight he has to stand there, red and grinning, as I hand him a certificate redeemable for six hours of driving and shifting instructions from the Mike Perry School of Truck Driving. Looking for a brush fire in the dark, Lisa turned north instead of south and not only got lost but kept going—we give her a compass and announce that the department has entered into an agreement with the six counties to the north to post signs along all northbound roadways: Lisa—Turn Back! The reddest face of the night is that of Brianna, who, at a monthly meeting several months ago let slip that she once dropped her pager in the toilet. She gets an aquarium net.

When the awards are all done, and we’ve drawn for all the door prizes, everyone moves to the bar. Jed and Sarah and I lag behind in the dining room and talk for a while, catching up. Jed’s been on the road pretty much nonstop lately, running logs, stopping home just long enough to do his chores. We’re joined by Jed’s friend Max. Max started showing up at our farm when he was a youngster, and just sort of never left. Today he’s married and milks cows up the road, and he and Jed share equipment and labor regular. Jed was the best man at his wedding. After we visit a little while, Jed and Sarah slip out the door. I move across the hall to the bar area. Everyone wants to know about this Sarah. I don’t have much to tell, because I don’t know much.

We share it with frogs and geese and water buffalo, the desire to pair off. We are responding to the usual animal juices, but we also crave a companion, a witness to our living. Someone with whom to accrete an intimate history. Comes a time when you hope to look back, and when you do, you’d like someone to share the sight line.

I have been single for thirty-seven years now. It feels good, like an old shirt. I come and go as I wish, I disappear for as long as I want to, go for days without speaking to anyone. I do the dishes when I need them, peel me some Ho-Hos for breakfast if that’s what I want. If I like something and want to look at it, I nail it to the wall. I first began living alone when I was sixteen. Over two decades, I have become absurdly selfish of time and space, and I know it. I cannot pretend otherwise. And in fairness, I cannot imagine anyone who would put up with such self-indulgence. And so I have never married.

I think it is fair to say Jed is the best firefighter on our department. He has the build, for one thing. He stands about five feet five, carries less fat than a celery stick, and his back and arms pop and roll with muscle. He loves to tear into a fire. He is not fearless, because he is not a fool, but the place he goes to, you can see fearless from there. We use him a lot, call him a fire rat, because his strength and size can put him places the rest of us cannot go.

It’s fun to see his eyes on the fire scene, see that demented grin and know he’s ready to charge in as tight as he can get, because for years and years, he was my silent brother, mostly playing alone and not saying much. I used to build him scale-model sawmills and miniature hay hoists, but his age put him a stage or two behind my brother John and me, and so we never really hung out together. It is a long-standing family joke that none of us remember Jed speaking until he was fourteen years old.

He’s still quiet and still mostly a loner. No bowling league, no softball or favorite tavern. As far as I know, joining the fire department is the closest he’s ever come to being part of any group outside the family. He wanted to farm from the time he could walk, and he’s been working at it since grade school. It was all my folks could do to get him through high school. He graduated, but only through a combination of home-schooling and a work-study arrangement with the local feed mill. He’s thirty-one years old now, and into his second decade of fieldwork. He runs his machinery hard and he runs himself hard, going from dawn to dark and beyond. When he’s not farming, he’s logging, and through the worst stretches of winter he hires out as a log truck driver. He is a silent grinder, and if you try to keep up with him, he will quietly work you into the dirt.

I have never married, and my brothers have never married. We have noticed that to certain people, a single person represents a project. They can’t rest until they tuck you in place, like you’re a tag hanging out of a collar. We hear it a lot: “When are we going to get one of you Perry boys married?” We just grin. You’re missing out, they say, but whenever someone really pushes the point, I become suspicious. Seems like they’re determined I wind up in a fix identical to their own.

Of the three of us, Jed has most wanted a wife. We’ve talked about it now and then, leaning against the tailgate of his pickup, or in the barn at night, waiting for a pig to farrow. He’s happy living alone, he says. The bachelor life suits him as well as it suits me. But then he allows that the big old farmhouse gets lonely, and what he really wants is a farm girl, someone who loves the land and animals the way he does. A woman who doesn’t mind a little mud on the porch.

I usually needle him a little bit. “Well, at some point, you’re gonna have to climb down off that tractor. Ain’t no girls on the back forty.” I was wrong, as it turns out. Sarah Ann Posey grew up right around the corner. When she first started coming around, she was sixteen. Jed sent her away. Too young, he told her. She was persistent, though, and when she turned eighteen, he was ready to take her seriously. They began to talk about what they hoped for in life, and a lot of it matched up. The night he brought her to the banquet, he was thirty, and she was still in high school. Legal and all, but you can imagine the buzz.

Back in 1978, Waylon Jennings recorded “A Long Time Ago,” a song containing the lyric, “Women been my trouble since I found out they weren’t men.” Note the onus here is not necessarily on the women. I’ve done the calculations, and in my case, the ratio of meat-fault to her-at-fault comes in at roughly 14:1. It’s an oxygen thing. It seems the day always comes when the Significant Sweet Other says something, or casts a certain gaze, and as if someone bumped a toggle switch in the bathyscaph, all the oxygen shoots from the room. Perry’s Law: Once the oxygen leaves, it never returns. And so time after time, I find myself short of breath, and time after time, I hit the road. Anoxia is the bane of bliss.

I try to convince myself to hang in there, to try harder. Sometimes people tell me I will die lonely, and I think they might be right. But the most earnest pro-matrimony chatter cannot overcome this image: I am on a road trip, stopping for gas at a station somewhere in South Dakota. Just me, running solo. It’s a hot day. I’m filling the tank when a minivan pulls up on the other side of the fuel island. As the doors pop open, I catch a last-gasp feral snap between the husband and wife. The kids are belted in and sullen beneath their headphones. Mom steams away to the rest room, and Pop pumps the gas with a twitch in his jaw. I may be a stocky guy in steel-toed boots, but I feel so free I could spin pirouettes all the way back to the Wisconsin state line.

In the Sundial bar, the pool balls click and the pinball machines ring. The karaoke list is booked solid. The men stand wide-legged, bellies out and relaxed, yukking and blustering and drinking beer. The women are mostly arranged along the barstools, laughing and confiding and blowing smoke at the ceiling. Several card games are going, and at one table, Cubby Rimes and Chief Ernie are taunting each other over hands of euchre. Six years ago the two men knelt together over Cubby’s daughter, thrown from her tumbling car on Jabowski’s Corner. After the chopper whisked the girl away, Ernie put Cubby in his truck and sped to the hospital. Tracy Rimes died that night, and I wonder, what is the distance between that black hour and all these bad jokes and happy cussing? You cannot see one spot from the other, and yet somehow you find the way. Time is both the traverse and the means of traverse. Cubby laughs, and those of us surrounding him hear his laughter in the context of that journey. The simple history of a small community’s fire and trouble leads to a shifting nexus of shared experience that, for this night, pulses in the bar of the Sundial Supper Club. There are husbands and wives and lovers and cheaters and friends and kin in this place tonight, but most of our lives intersect only at the fire whistle. History alone accounts for our being here. In this room tonight are marriages that won’t last the year, lovers bound to stray, and friends destined to run afoul, but for these hours we are knit tight in the name of something as fundamental as a volunteer fire department. Laughing and drinking and singing, we are flush with the camaraderie of people who stand the same ground. “The world is filled with hidden running water,” wrote poet Kenneth Rexroth, and the ground we stand is cut with subterranean currents that modulate every belly laugh, provide the punch line to some jokes, warn us away from others. But tonight, flush with beer and reflection, we tip our heads back and let loose, and the ground feels solid.

Bob the One-Eyed Beagle has had a few beers, and he’s ready to karaoke. He grabs the microphone like a cleaver, squints up his one good eye, hones in on the pixelated lyrics. He has selected George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” and he lights into it with the emotive delicacy of a drunken cape buffalo. Even the card players stop to watch. When he hits the chorus, he brings the house down with a ham-fisted improvisation. “
All my ex’s,
” he bellows, “
work at the Gas-N-Go
!” Exactly true. It’s a public-domain inside joke. He gallumphs through the chorus one more time, and we cheer and hoot and holler.

I have no ex-wives, but I’m at the tail end of yet another relationship. This one is winding down strangely, a long platonic slide sustained by the fact that the woman in question is strong and good and kind and worthy and nearly breaking under the strain of a custody battle. Seven years ago, when her ex-husband shoved her backward over a chair, she took the two babies and got clear. Put herself through school, kept her position as a nurse, constantly juggled her schedule to avoid putting the children in day care, and just when she was getting her feet under her, and was only months from finishing school, the ex-husband hired a lawyer and came after her. It’s been nearly two years now, and the court dates are drawing near. In the meantime, through a series of legal maneuvers, he has wangled enough temporary custody to stick the kids in day care for the first time in their young lives. Every other week they live with Daddy, and he hires a driver to run them to school—an hour’s commute each way—and because of the driver’s schedule, they sit in day care before and after class, ten minutes from their mother’s house. This woman and I are no longer lovers, but I admire her, and her children are a bright spot in my life, so I have hung around, running errands, going to school plays, helping make connections and hand-offs. I’ve had a front-row seat on how the fruits of human attraction can be strung up on the rack of bastardized legalities. I am in up to my neck, having given depositions, faced his blistering vituperations, and now am waiting to testify in the court case. Every day begins with a sinking feeling. Every phone call trips the heart. For months, my guts have felt like steel wool soaked in acid, and if this is how I feel through observation and empathy, how must it feel to be her? And so tonight, when I hit the subzero air of the parking lot at one
A.M
., the cold jolts me into remembering my friend’s ongoing battle, and I wonder if she’s sleeping, and I realize that the last six hours have been an oasis, a break from the constant low-level gut burn one feels as a helpless witness to evil. Fire department to the rescue, again.

My friend Frank is getting married. We began our friendship a decade ago. He had just gotten divorced and stopped drinking. Not necessarily in that order. We met when I sold an article to a regional magazine he edited. One night I stopped to drop some work off at his apartment. We got into a discussion about poetry and were reading James Wright when the sun came up. Frank led me through my early writing days patiently, feeding me a steady dose of poets, reading my stuff, and rapping my knuckles as needed. Today he simply points to weak passages and says, “You know better.” He is a renaissance man. I have known him, in the space of a day, to declaim a Sharon Olds poem, install a toilet, edit an essay on the cultural implications of the Star Wars trilogy, perform at a poetry reading, and hand-milk a small herd of goats. Once he was very sick and broke, and in desperate need of an expensive antibiotic. After a little research, he deduced that the veterinary equivalent was much cheaper. He went to Farm & Fleet and bought a bottle of calf medicine. Referring to the weight chart on the label, he calculated his dose, and was shortly recovered.