Population 485 (31 page)

But now, suddenly, after a decade of bachelor friendship, Frank is getting married again. To a woman he met when he and I were delivering a joint creative writing lecture at the local university. I am happy if he is happy, but I keep thinking of the invariable changes to come, and this jealous little voice emanating from somewhere near my spleen keeps asking, “What’s in it for me?”

Clear back in 1989, the litany of failure that is my romantic history reached such proportions that my friend Gene chef’d me up a mix tape he titled,
Easy Listening for the Lonely Guy
. It was a ninety-minute tape. He squeezed twenty-nine songs on there. “Lonely Love,” by the Harmonicats. “By Myself,” Johnny Mathis. “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles. “Lonely Street,” Boots Randolph. “Lonely Room,” from
Oklahoma!
“Don’t Want to Know if You Are Lonely,” Hüsker Dü. From the
Against All Odds
soundtrack, “El Solitario.” And so on. Gene gauges the state of my love life by how often he finds me sleeping on his couch. Every time I find a new girl, my visits tail off. Once I had begun dating a woman in Minneapolis, and I apologized to Gene for not being around as much as usual. He drew himself up like a long-suffering cuckold. “Oh,” he sighed, “you’ll come crawling back…” (Earlier this year, with me adrift yet again, Gene presented me with a new mix tape:
The Lonely Guy Box Set
.)

Gene is the dearest sort of friend. Kind, brainy, easygoing, a dead-lock match to my sense of humor. A gentle and erudite physical therapist, he can recite your cranial nerves, and yet he is hooked on
Monday Night Football
. Introduced me to basement darts and the music of John Prine. Late one night in his kitchen, I told his wife, “Paula, if Gene was a woman I would marry him.” I believe she snorted.

Now it’s late April. Jed and Sarah are standing in my living room. Jed is hugging on Sarah tight, his head about even with her shoulder. When he speaks, it is in his usual matter-of-fact monotone.

“Ahh…yer probably gonna be hearin’ some stuff around town…”

Sarah giggles, and he smiles up at her, then turns back to me.

“Ahh…we’re gettin’ married.”

“Ah!” I did not see this coming. I hardly know the girl. I have a flurry of thoughts, chief among them, What is he
thinking?
“When’s the happy date?”

“Ahh…probably next Thursday. Or Friday.”

Very little time then, to intervene. It seems hasty. So I say, “Ah!” I keep hoping “Ah!” sounds neutral.

“Yah. We’re gettin’ married in a rush.” Now he looks me dead in the eye. “Not because we
have
to. Because we
want
to.”

I would prefer to watch him pack up and run into a burning barn.

I am not a marriage grinch. Growing up, my brothers and sisters and I had a front-row seat on one of the all-time great marriages. I understand my parents had to work at it behind the scenes, but what we saw was a gentle touch now and then, a kiss after supper and before chores, but above all, an abiding respect. The day arrives when you realize you have more past than future, and when you get it right from the beginning, as my parents did, you have this beautiful swath of time to look back on, right back to the youthful edge of adulthood. And so, when it comes to my marital phobias, let me exculpate my parents. My trepidation is more a function of the sheer odds against it going right. And the unbelievable ways it can all go wrong.

Mack Most runs a mobile slaughter service out of the meat market here on Main Street. He drives a rumbling big truck, and if I’m upstairs writing, the window will rattle and I’ll look up just in time to see him headed out of town. One day he waves me over behind the meat market and swings the big truck doors open. “Look what I got here!”

There are two huge bird carcasses hanging from the hooks. Turkeys, they look like, turkeys the size of pandas. Mack steps back, swings one door a little wider to give me a better view of the forbidding interior.

“Emu!” He beams a
top-that!
grin. “Guy who owned ’em is gettin’ divorced. They was at his mother-in-law’s, so he told me to go out there and butcher ’em. Yep. The in-laws weren’t too happy. Asked me to wait awhile so they could walk down the road, outta earshot.” He pauses to grin again. “Shot ’em in the head with a twelve-gauge.”

The meat is dark and glistening. “Good for your hands, emu fat,” Mack says. “Absorbs into your skin—ain’t greasy.”

But I’m hardly hearing him, because I’m standing there, peering into the square cavern of that rolling abattoir, at old oil barrels filled to the rim with hairy cow parts, at the dark streaks of dung and blood on the floor, at the two skinned birds, and I am thinking about the quest for love and how it triggers convolutions of sublimity or despair beyond our wildest reckonings. A girl looks left instead of right, and six weeks later, a boy’s heart is still broken. A man breaks his leg, and six months later, marries his orthopedist. A man buys a woman a drink, and six years later, a traveling butcher shotguns the hell out of a pair of emus.

The last time Jed and I fought a fire together, it was fall, and I saw the smoke from Chetek, where I was just finishing an ambulance shift. As the page was going off, I radioed the fire hall and told them to bring my gear to the scene. Then I drove the backroads, homing in on the growing column of smoke. When I came around the last corner, the pumper and brush rig were just pulling up. I parked well clear of the staging area and ran up the road. While I pulled my gear from the pumper and tugged it on, I sized up the fire. Two-story house, long and narrow, running north-south, with an attached garage at the north end. Flame showing in the southwest corner. Wind from the southwest, moderate. Shed pine needles carpeting the lawn, forming a slick rusty yellow carpet right to the woods—we’ll have to watch for ground spread.

Matt Jeffski and my brother John are the two “red hats” on scene, and since Matt is running the pump, John will be directing the attack. He sends Jed and one crew to the seat of the fire, at the southwest corner, where they can take advantage of the prevailing wind and attempt to throttle the throat of the fire. Then he tells Max and me to pull an inch-and-a-half Mattydale and swing around to the east side of the house. There is some danger in this, as we will be fighting into the wind and into the fire, but it is a calculated move. We aren’t just going in blind. We’re making some assessments and judgments. If we time everything just so, if we hit it just right, we can beat back the ballooning whorls of flame, knock the fire down to its basics, and then chase in after it, put it out at the roots. It’s also important that we stop it from advancing. Most of the house is a loss, but the garage is still intact. What little the family will save from this fire is in that garage.

There was this wonderful moment when I saw it all. The smoke was rolling and the flames were snapping, and the pumper throttle was open wide, and the people were gawking, and the firefighters were running, and suddenly I felt in possession of it all. I could see the house as a whole, and I could see the fire as a thing with tendencies and characteristics and predictability, and for that one instant, I realized that amateur as I am, I have learned something over these six years, and I turned to Max, and I grinned through my Scott mask, and I said, “You ready?” He nodded and in we went.

We charged in close and about ten feet out from the big picture window, I turned loose a straight stream of water the diameter of a pop can. It hit the hot glass with 120 pounds of pressure and just as we planned, the big pane disintegrated. I immediately kicked the nozzle over to fog stream and we charged even closer. Staying low, I reached up and stuffed the nozzle over the windowsill, fed in about three feet of hose, and then whipped the nozzle around and around.

This is a beautiful moment, where you’ve got a lot of things working for you, things you learned off a chalkboard one Wednesday evening years ago, only here they are in 3-D and thirty feet tall. First of all, you always have to think about backdraft, but when I did my size-up, the flames shooting from the roof told me the fire had already vented itself. When I looked through the picture window and saw the flames working through the black smoke, I knew the fire was hungry for oxygen, but it wasn’t starved for oxygen—another source of backdraft. You still have to think about things like flashover, and what’s gonna happen when you break that window and dump a load of fresh oxygen into the superheated interior. But you also know that if you act fast, if you snap that nozzle head around with a left twist and pump that fog stream straight into the heart of the inferno, the water is going to do something magic.

In fog stream position, the nozzle takes the soda-can-sized fire stream and cuts it into tiny droplets, sends them off the lip of the nozzle in a cone-shaped curtain. And here’s where the magic starts. When those droplets hit the superheated air, they explode into steam. Even as we’re crashing the window, I am visualizing the cartoony little water droplet in Figure 10.2, page 312,
Essentials of Firefighting, Third Edition
, with its caption: “Water expands to 1,700 times its original volume when it converts to steam.” In the cartoon, the droplet puffs into a bank of stippled gray steam. The expansion is so rapid it displaces smoke and gases, including oxygen, and many smaller flames are smothered. Almost immediately, the steam condenses, drawing cooler air into the room and dropping the temperature of available fuels below ignition temperature. In an instant, a roomful of flame becomes a dripping gray cavern. When it all works, it’s a tremendous trick.

You have to move fast, use that contained heat. Wait too long and the broken window will become a vent, drawing the fire toward you, disrupting the thermal balance, rendering your fog stream useless. And so Max and I tipped our faces away from the heat and fed that fire all the fog we could bring.

And it worked. Just like they said it would on page 312. The steam stomped that fire like a giant soggy slipper. You can’t sit around and admire your work, the fire starts right back at you, but me and Max, we allowed ourselves a little whoop, then went in through the door, to get at the base flames. I stopped at the sill, and checked the ceiling. It was sagging pretty bad. I turned and hollered to Max. “We’re gonna have to work from the door!” Your voice comes out all flat and compressed behind the mask, but I could see him nod. I twisted the nozzle back over to straight stream, and began picking off what flames I could. Over on the other side of the house, trying to get at the second-story flames, Jed had melted the top off his ladder. The ladder hangs in the fire hall now, and we have a rule: If the high end of your ladder melts, stay on the low end. At the banquet in February, he is presented with a commemorative miniature ladder.

After the ladder melted, Jed and his crew had to rethink their attack, but they slowly got the upper hand, and then we had the main fire pinned down between us. There was a lot of water pouring into the second story, and at one point, the sagging ceiling collapsed. Against my better judgment I had eased through the doorway a little, and when I heard the drywall loosening, I threw my butt in reverse, and the push of the hose drove me out the door, off the steps, and clear back to the second pumper. I nearly landed in the reservoir. I looked up at Dougie, the firefighter running the hoselines. “Man, I found the reverse in this thing!” I said.

“Never even heard yer backup beeper!” he said.

After we got the seat of the fire shut down, we made a three-man interior attack on a fire burning at the top of the stairs. I had a fresh bottle of air, so John and I and a firefighter from Chetek went in. The stairs had been burned through, so we had to wrestle a ladder over the soggy debris on the floor and stick it up through the landing. I grabbed the hose and started up the ladder, but every time I tipped my head back, a piercing pain shot deep into my left ear. I made three tries, but every time, the pain was the same. I was baffled. “I gotta get out,” I yelled to John. I went to the pumper and found Dougie. Gingerly peeling my Nomex hood from my head, I asked him to look in my ear. He reached up and pulled out a dry pine needle.

It was long past dark by the time we cut the last hoseline. Much of the house was a soggy, steaming heap, but we had kept the garage and its contents intact, and were able to salvage some baby clothes from an upstairs bedroom. It had been the usual long slog, digging, tugging, and shoveling through the debris, hunting down every hidden hot spot and soaking it down. You smell of damp smoke for two days. At the end I sat next to Jed on the tailboard of the brush buggy, eating a sandwich under the halogen scene lights. I told him how it went on our side, how those first five minutes were the best I’d ever had on a scene, how satisfying it was to realize in the thick of the whirl that Max and I were fighting fire not just with adrenaline, but with awareness. I told him about the pine needle. He told me about the ladder. He said they got him another ladder, and while he was climbing that one, the TV antenna fell off the roof and hit him on the head.

I went carp shooting the morning Jed and Sarah were married. It was perfect carping weather, clear and sunny, low wind. I lost track of time out there on my log, and had to hustle to make the ceremony, but I did. On the second floor of the Eau Claire County Courthouse, Sarah stood at the front of Chamber 3, country-girl beautiful in a calf-length pale green skirt and a white sleeveless top. Jed wore black jeans and a shirt he borrowed from me. Found a hole in it right before the ceremony. He looked scared and happy as the vows unfolded, and Sarah cried a little, but we all laughed later at the sight of them up there, Sarah tall and blond at five nine, Jed dark tan and half bald at five five, and the judge coming in at somewhere around five two, smiling up between them like an over-achieving altar boy. Sarah’s mom took some pictures out in front of the courthouse, and I popped the trunk and dug out my carp camera, a disposable job I bought on rebate at a Menard’s Home Improvement store. There were already a couple of pictures in there of me hoisting a channel buffalo, so I shot up the rest of the roll like some cut-rate hillbilly wedding photographer. I even got them to sit on a bench with their hands on Sarah’s knee so I could get the requisite ring fingers shot. While we were milling around, a man started yelling at his wife in the parking lot. She had a handful of papers and was trying to get into the courthouse. The man yelled louder and louder, until a bailiff appeared and escorted the woman into the courthouse. Left in the lot, the man slumped to the sidewalk and hung his head. Jed and Sarah took off for their weekend trip up north, and right at the end there I got a shot of them walking away in the courthouse crosswalk, hand in hand, and that picture is just so sweet.