Sunsets and Silencers

THE FIREMAN

He stares back at me from the front page of our weekly paper, not a familiar face anymore, but the unique surname, and age, confirmed it had to be my little league teammate from 30 years ago. Back then, Tim had longish hair for a 10-year-old and liked to tell stories of kissing girls in movie theater balconies. He wasn't that good of a player, but he hit a home run once that won the game. I think it was his only hit of the season.

During a game, he told me he had just seen the movie The Towering Inferno and wanted to be a fireman because then he'd get kisses from all the girls for saving their lives. The last time I saw him was at the championship game, which concluded my little league career. I hadn't been playing much because I was making too many errors. It turned out I needed glasses but we didn't know it at the time. In the final inning, I struck out with the bases loaded to end the game. No one on the team would talk to me after that. They had all walked away to their parents' cars without saying a word.

A few days later I had called Tim to see if he wanted to go to a movie. He never called me back. Later, I silently wondered if it had something to do with Uncle Rick, who was our coach, but my mother told me that some friends only lasted a little while. He was a little league friend, she'd said, but I still had my neighborhood friends. Then she made me a peanut butter sandwich and put on Merv Griffin.

He was a volunteer fireman who died in a weekend fire at the movie theater I worked in as a teenager. In the paper is a picture of him with his family. After 30 years he still had that same I want to kiss all the girls smile. The article says that he owned a landscaping company and had been with the firehouse for many years. The firehouse was across the street from the plumbing supply store on Main Street that my father had owned with Uncle Rick. He wasn't my real uncle. He and my father were waiters in Gus', a Brooklyn bar, remained friends, and bought the store in the suburbs together. After my father died of a heart attack, Uncle Rick took over and said I had a job there if I ever wanted one.

I look out the store window at the firehouse, its two shiny red engines sleeping in their nest. Was it possible that our paths never crossed, or perhaps we just never recognized each other.

Uncle Rick walks in with Dunkin' Donuts coffee. His Sears brand clothes bleed cigarette smoke. I show him the article and mention the name and ask him if he remembers the fireman as a young boy from our team. He stares at the picture. I watch his face. Wasn't that the kid with the long hair, says Uncle Rick. He hit a big home run, didn't he?

I think so, I tell him.

Jeez, he was right across the street.

Did he ever come in here?

He could've. But, I mean, I wouldn't know who the hell he was, but if he did come in, he'd have to remember our store, and don't you think he'd say hello.
Unless he had no reason to come in, I say, or forgot about the connection.
Poor kid, says Uncle Rick. He puts the paper down and pays me for the paint I bought for him at Home Depot, using my employee discount.

You don't remember anything else about him, I ask.

Not particularly. It was a long time ago. I coached a lot of kids, Henry. Why?

No reason, I tell him. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, some sign of guilt perhaps, but there's nothing coming from him. Maybe he did it to so many kids that it was a blur.

I hadn't thought about him in years, I lie, I'm just trying to remember him better.
You know, Henry, when I was in Korea I had this buddy, and we were in a foxhole talking about our girlfriends back home. A sniper blew his head off. Just like that, he was gone. I spent weeks trying to remember everything he ever told me, but it was like I had no recollection of the guy. It was strange. Maybe I was in some kind of shock, wondering why it wasn't me, and it just blanked out my memory.

We drink coffee and gaze out the window at Main Street. Looks like a slow day, he says. What are your plans?

The grass needs cutting. And then I've got a shift at Home Depot.

We're having a barbeque, if you feel like stopping by tonight.

Thanks. I'll think about it.

At home, I cut the grass and think about the day I wandered into the store after baseball practice and heard Uncle Rick talking to Tim in his office. He'd told us at practice that he was giving him a ride home because his parents were unavailable to pick him up. I watched them from between some copper pipe fittings on a shelf. A naked women magazine was on the desk. Tim was still in his uniform. Uncle Rick told him that he had nice hair, and his hand moved around under his desk. Tim was looking down at the magazine, like it was an artifact from the past and he didn't know what to make of it.

To a ten-year-old, the gooey stuff that squirted up and onto Uncle Rick's desk could've been mayonnaise. It also reminded me of a magician I once saw who did a trick with his hand. Tim continued to look at the magazine and Uncle Rick quickly wiped away the stuff with some napkins. I remember thinking that I had to ask my mother about that, but she died soon after from leukemia, which she'd had for the past year.

A football bounces in front of the lawn mower. The neighborhood kids are at play. I don't know many of the neighbors anymore since most of them moved here within the last ten years. My parents bought our house 35 years ago. Sometimes I'll see a neighbor in Home Depot, and we'll talk about the weather, or what kind of patio furniture might last, or my suggestions for a healthy lawn. I usually tell them to install sod, and share a memory of how our lawn was just a bunch of weeds until my father put down this luscious green sod and our property underwent a magical transformation, kind of like when Dorothy steps out of her displaced house into the colorful Land of Oz.

But when they ask me more detailed questions about construction, I refer them to someone else. I'm really not very handy or mechanical. I only took the job there because the smell reminded me of my father's store.

I throw the ball back. My spiral is still tight. I point out the faded white bases in the street, and tell them that this was our baseball and football field. We'd be out here every day in the summer. I leave the mower and quarterback for both teams, three on three, and connect on a touchdown pass. The other team is eager to tie the score, but on a long bomb, the football loses its path in the branches of a maple tree. Do over, they scream. Childhood vernacular never changes.

George, who used to live across the street, liked to quarterback when we were younger. He'd drop back and pretend he was fending off an entire defensive line. He painted the bases when he came home from Vietnam and would watch us play from his stoop where he smoked a cigarette.

Sometimes, when we played baseball, my father would come out, cigar in his hand, and show us how to line up our knuckles on the bat when we swung. When he was young, he had a tryout for a semi-pro team. On the porch, my mother would read romance novels. Some kids played kick the can. There would be an orange glow behind the houses in the west, but it wasn't until I was in an art class in college, that I'd remember that moment and try to recreate it in a painting.
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I have a drink in our local topless bar. The dancers look tired. One smiles at me. I know she wants money tucked into her G-string. I recognize a guy from high school, the captain of the wrestling team. He never lost a match. He catches my eye and comes over. He says that he's in town for the reunion and asks if I'm going. I tell him that I didn't even know there was a reunion. I really don't care about seeing many people anyway, he says. I tell him that I'm working in Home Depot and still see some people from school, but they usually don't recognize me. I think the wrestling captain only knows me because our hall lockers were next to each other. Girls were always hanging around waiting for him to show up.

Didn't you work at that movie theater that burned down, he asks.

For a long time, I say. A volunteer fireman died there. It was in the paper. You know, that guy played little league with me. I hadn't seen him in 30 years, until his picture in the paper.

That theater brought back some memories, he tells me. You know, I felt up my
first girl there.

I stare at glitter on the dancer's breasts.

What are you doing at Home Depot, he asks me.

Waiting to figure things out.

You still in the house?

I nod. He buys me a drink and says that he went out to California to sell computers, got married, started a family, screwed up with a girlfriend and cocaine, lost his family, and is now involved with casting extras for movies.
Sounds exciting, I say.

Crazy business, egos, a lot of girls. Come out there and I'll set you up. You've got no ties here.

Acting?

It's extra work. You stand around, pretend you're doing something. It'll be steady, pay the bills, until you figure things out. He smiles, pats my knee, gives me his card, and turns toward the dancer, a bill between his fingers that he guides toward her hips.

The night is cool for the summer, good weather to have the windows down, the radio on. I drive by the burned down theater, located in a strip mall. There's nothing left of it. My first part time job as an usher. I was proud of the red velvet blazer I wore, ripping tickets. I remember how Jimmy, the school bully tried to get in for free once. He always kicked my chair in math class, saying wake up idiot, making the class laugh, because I wasn't paying attention when the teacher asked me a question, I was staring at the roses on the silk shirt of the boy in front of me and thinking about St. Theresa, who was associated with roses, because my mother was sick and my father said that if I prayed and saw a rose that day St. Theresa would hear me and make my mother better, but it didn't work out that way.

Jimmy said if I let him in he wouldn't bother me anymore. I told him I could lose my job if I got caught. He got back at me by burning down my tree fort in the woods. My father had built it, said it was so solid it would never come down. The firemen who showed up tramped through my backyard in their black rubber coats. It wasn't a serous fire, they were even laughing. They reminded me of the policemen in my favorite television show, Adam 12, all bigger than life, no problem they couldn't handle.

After the firemen left my backyard, I stared at the wet black ruins. The pictures of the naked women from the magazines that Uncle Rick had given me, hidden beneath the fort's worn carpet, were now a pile of ash.

Afterwards, I drive over to the plumbing store. Uncle Rick let me keep my father's keys and said the store could be a second home for me. The place smells of cigarettes. A copy of Hustler magazine sits on a stack of files in Uncle Rick's office.

I think about the topless dancer, and pick up the magazine. I start to masturbate but the coppery smell of the store brings back that scene from 30 years ago. You have nice hair. I put down the magazine and walk outside. The firehouse siren goes off. I watch the truck pull out and disappear into the darkness.
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I stand in the back of the funeral parlor during the fireman's wake. There's a display of pictures alongside the casket. When there's room I take a place in front of the casket, kneel, and pretend to pray. I touch his cold hand, the hand that he once used to shake with me when he said we'd be pals for life. There's a picture of him sitting atop a dozen arms, the glow from the sun creating a halo-like image above him. His hair floats in the air. The day he hit that home run. I can barely make out Uncle Rick off to the side. It's difficult to discern where I am in the photo.

It took a few years to realize what Uncle Rick had done and things started to add up, like those times when he and Tim would be late to a team picnic or something. I wanted the memory to fade, but like grass stains on blue jeans, it never really went away. And, sometimes, when I sat in the air conditioned darkness of the movie theater, I'd remember Tim's stories of giggling girls, and secret kisses and crunching popcorn.

Back home, I smoke a cigar next to the pool. I told the wrestler I was waiting to figure things out. But the truth was, I'd never really thought about it. One day you've got two parents, an ordinary life of comic books and building models, walking in the woods with your BB gun and shooting old soda cans, then your parents die, and you stay in their house and support yourself with some insurance money, maintain the property, and work.

My father once asked what I'd like to do after high school. I told him I didn't know. I liked jumping out of trees and rolling down hills, pretending I was shot, like the gangsters in those old movies I watched on television. My little Dan Duryea, my mother would yell to me from the porch. Maybe a stunt man in the movies, I told him, but he laughed, and the subject never came up again because he died right before high school graduation. Then my only thoughts were the house I would maintain, the lawn I would continue to mow, the porn tapes I would continue to masturbate to, and my job at the movie theater, where the same movies would play over and over.

I take out the wrestler's card. What the hell. Maybe there was a way to make a living, dying in the movies.
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When it's dark, I park my car in the train station parking lot and stare at the back of the plumbing store. The store was surrounded by noise, the train whistle behind us, the firehouse siren in front. Sometimes, when they'd both go off at the same time, Uncle Rick would go into his office and close the door. My father would say that it had to do with the war.

I take a can of gasoline from my trunk and walk through the hole in the fence that has been there my entire lifetime. Tree branches scratch my face. I used to sit in this tiny patch of woods and watch the commuters move along the platform and wind through the parking lot like a giant caterpillar. I pour gasoline around the store, set it on fire, and then walk back through the hole in the fence. This time I avoid the branches. I circle around until I come to Main Street.
I buy a slice of pizza and watch the store burn.

The fire department siren goes off. At least, they won't have to go far.
__________________________
Uncle Rick calls me in the morning, upset about the store, and says something about insurance and how maybe he'll move down to Florida. You don't like the heat, I remind him. He tells me he'll be in touch.

On my way to work, I pass by the baseball field where I struck out with the bases loaded. The last day that I ever saw Tim, until I touched his cold hand in the casket.

I make a quick turn into the parking lot, and walk across what was once a green outfield. Now a minefield of weeds. The sagging chain-link backstop is rusty. I approach home plate and assume my stance in the batter's box, an imaginary bat in my hand, my knuckles lined up like my father once showed me.

And I swing.

Peter DeMarco teaches high school English in New York City. His past careers include stints in acting, stand-up comedy, and book publishing. His writing has appeared in Cadillac Cicatrix, Pindeldyboz, and Verbsap. DeMarco lives in New Jersey with my wife Charmaine, and two boys, Dexter and Sam.