and told Jake to go to his room. He watched out his window as the volunteer firemen came in their massive vehicles, followed closely by the van of the volunteer ambulance. There were no sirens. Then the cars came to the trailer court—the onlookers. It was as if every person who lived in town had heard the dispatch on the police scanner. Jake snuck out of his window and found Misty on the street. Even in the freezing cold, Bert lay drunkenly in the yard, tangled up in a lawn chair, but the crowd paid no attention. Misty and Jake hid in the alley, behind a Dumpster that was missing a wheel, and Misty smoked a cigarette as the volunteer fire department surrounded the stretcher.
Jake and Misty watched as they brought out Frank’s body.
“I bet it was suicide,” pronounced Misty. “That’s fucking hard-core.”
“He never told me he was sad,” said Jake.
“I wonder if he used a gun,” said Misty.
They watched until they were spotted by Krystal. “You shouldn’t be seeing this!” she yelled at them as they tried to cower behind the Dumpster.
The winter grew thicker and darker, and Jake still thought of Frank. He kept the harmonica under his bed. Every morning, Jake shoved open the back door, kicked at the snow that had piled upon the cinder blocks of the back steps, and trudged in his slippers to the storage shed. He thought of Frank as he picked out his clothes for the day. Krystal would not speak of Frank’s death, would not declare it a suicide. Bert claimed that the cats had eaten him.
For a few weeks, Jake bought cat food and stood in Frank’s backyard. The cats came, but Jake could only hum. Jake hung his glass rosary on Frank’s doorknob. The last week of January, Bert caught him and gave him a split lip for trespassing.
After that, Jake watched from the roof as the cats came around for a few more days, mewling and licking at the empty cans. Eventually, they found somewhere else to go. Jake hoped they were welcomed and serenaded, hoped they had found a new home.
By the time Jake’s lip healed, there were no more cats. Bert had trapped them all, Frank was gone, and only the harmonica remained. Frank’s yard and trailer stayed untouched, the snow piling in deeper drifts around the front door.
Fireman’s Ball, 1991
Rachel Flood clutched her can of diet soda, flinched at the acid in her mouth, and counted the men in the fire hall she had slept with, all before she had turned seventeen. Not for romance, not in courtship; these had been numbed things, animal rutting. At the time, she hadn’t cared that some were married. There were eight in this room. Or eight and a half, because she had once given a blow job to the fireman who was currently pumping the keg for her mother.
Nine years had passed since she had left town, and these men had become beasts: Phil Faciana, fifty pounds heavier, a beard that crept up just below his eyes, a werewolf face. Doug Applehaus, still handsome, but now with a crazy look in his eyes, wearing a long black trench coat, like an assassin or a sex offender. The Hagerman brothers, separated by three years but balding at the same rate, built like sasquatches then and now. Standing beside one of the barrels were two firemen she sort of recognized, but she knew she had screwed each individually at the drive-in theater in Ellis. She remembered their cars—an AMC Pacer and a Chrysler Cordoba, the former with no backseat at all, and the latter with a backseat as big as a couch. And there was Bud Neilson, in the shadows of the flickering light. He had been her first, old back then and even older now, face gray from chain-smoking or organ failure. He stood as still as a mummy, a taxidermied version of the man with whom she had lost her virginity, although Rachel hated to think of it as something lost—she had been eager to discard it, like people born with a tail. She had been fourteen, a firehouse groupie, skidding on her cheap heels, slipping on the oil slicks from the fire engines, desperately offering up cases of beer stolen from her mother’s bar.
Rachel was here to make amends, to show up and be a productive and helpful member of the community. Normally, her amends consisted of letters mailed to old lovers, police officers, women she