Firewoman

The old house wanted to burn.

It was fully on fire when the Markee Volunteer Fire Department’s only truck, driven by Eb Peters, pulled up on the road in front of it. The truck was twenty-years-old, and we could use a new one, but we couldn’t afford it. The Markee city budget no longer runs to new fire trucks—it doesn’t even run to a paid fire department. We’re all volunteers except  Timbo, the chief. The city pays for training, though, and your equipment. And your life insurance.

I got the call out in time to meet Eb at the station, so I rode in the truck, sirens blaring. In minutes we turned onto the Rock Creek Road, which leads out of town, and pulled up at the house, behind a line of  beat-up pickup trucks with men hopping around, putting on their gear.

The house sat behind a narrow strip of front yard, and behind it a creek hugged against the foot of the hill. Cut into the hillside above was the train track, still in use, although the coal trains are fewer now, and it’s been years since any miners washed the dust off their face in the house. The porch stretched the length of the house, and I imagined women sitting there, breaking beans, children running in the dirt yard, men leaned back in two-legged chairs.

But not for a long time. The dry old house burned gleefully.

It resisted every stream of water we threw at it, beams popping and cackling in defiance. As we sweated in our fireproof suits and aimed our hoses at its corners, it just kept burning. We beat back a flame in one place and it danced out in another. Beautiful reds and oranges leapt against the night sky.

The whole business was loud, like the house was shouting. The crack of the wood, the thrum of the flames, the hiss of the water. It was dramatic, celebratory, a little crazed. It reminded me of a Pentecostal service.

Finally the roof collapsed in an operatic whoosh, the house taking its final bow.

Timbo pulled off his helmet and told the crew to make sure it didn’t get away from us and set the woods on fire. Then we’d have a real problem.

Truthfully, we hadn’t tried too hard to put it out. We all knew the house was abandoned, given over to the mice and mud daubers’ nests years ago. There was no one to rescue, nothing to save. It was a peeling, slanting eyesore.

That’s why I’d set it on fire to start with.

Well, one of the reasons. But it’s the one I like to focus on, where I’m doing Markee a favor. I don’t do it too often. Just enough to trim the ragged edges off the town, spruce things up.

When the embers stopped pulsing and we’d soaked the smoking timbers and all the yard around it, Timbo declared us done. Eb and I took the truck back to the station. Timbo beat us there and was shucking off his suit when we hopped out of the truck. We pulled beers out of the minifridge and settled into the lawn chairs out front. 

Timbo leaned his chair back against the station wall.

“I think that fire was funny,” he said.

I took a sip of my beer. “Did it tell you a joke we couldn’t hear?”

“Nobody likes a smartass, Dulcie,” he said. “Funny suspicious, I mean.”

“Like how?”

Timbo set his beer down so he could talk with his hands. He held them up, fingers wide, and I knew he was picturing the burning house. I pictured it too.

“Did you watch how it was burning? It wasn’t just coming from one source. It looked like it had caught fire in different places at once.”

“I didn’t see that,” I said. “Too busy aiming a hose at it.”

“I’m going to go back in there tomorrow and have a look,” Timbo said. “Too many fires around here for them all to be natural.”

“What else would they be?” I said, hoping I didn’t sound defensive. “No one even has insurance on these old places, so no one’s trying to collect. There’s just no point to it.”

“That’s what worries me,” Timbo said, and threw his beer bottle at the trash can, hitting it perfectly.

■■■

Like I said, the house wanted to burn. They always do. They’re done. Once they were full of working men and shouting children and worn-out women. Even if everyone was poor and everyone was tired, Markee had hummed.

I wasn’t alive for its heyday, but I’ve heard stories. At one time, Markee had five bars, two movie theaters, and you could barely move on the streets on a Saturday, for all the holler folks come to town for the day.

When I was young, two of the bars and one of the theaters were still open. Now one bar is a diner, serving a passable breakfast and lunch, and the other gets the law called in every weekend to bust up fights.

And on streets all over town, some of the houses have been torn down—or burned, yes, and not all by me—and the street is like a set of broken teeth.

I figure, that’s just the way it goes. I grew up on coal, but coal’s dead. We all know it. Folks like to plaster black vinyl “Coal Keeps the Lights On” stickers across the backs of their trucks, but if some wind turbine company was to come offer them jobs with good pay and benefits, they’d be out in the yard with a paint scraper to get that vinyl off. Maybe they could stop holding their breath for the next downturn.

That’s the ones that stayed, anyway. I can count up the high school classmates who left and didn’t come back. I left too, for college, for a while. The guidance counselor helped me apply, told me that with an education, I could go anywhere I wanted. Charleston, even.

But I didn’t like it out there. I didn’t even leave West Virginia but nothing felt the same. The seasons didn’t sit right on the land. Nothing felt familiar, and I didn’t know it like I did Markee. It’s not that I don’t care to see the world. I just don’t like to stay out there too long. Plus Dad had his heart attack, and I don’t trust him to do his exercise, so I came on home. 

I work at the diner, the one I said does a decent breakfast. A gravel-voiced chain smoker named Lucille has been the breakfast waitress there since before I was born, and I come in right after and see us through the lunch rush, such as it is.

I live with Dad, who’s retired from hauling coal and mostly raises his garden and watches sports on TV, when he’s not at the diner with his buddies telling lies. They’re done running their mouths by the time I come in. His gang goes in for artery-clogging breakfast platters. I tell him that’s how he got the heart attack in the first place. He tells me he takes the walk his doctor said to do every day. I guess we’ll see.

Anyway, it leaves me plenty of time to fight fires.

I didn’t really join the Markee Volunteer Fire Department on purpose. Eb and Timbo were having lunch at the diner one day and saying how they were short on crew members because Gene Hawkins had died, of a heart attack in his own bed, which is how we’d all like to go. Something just grabbed me, and I heard myself say, “What do you have to do to be in the fire department?”

Eb probed a back molar with a toothpick and Timbo looked at me and said, “Well, you can come ride along and try it out next time we have a fire. Just don’t get in the way.”

“Ok,” I said. “And that’s it?”

Timbo picked up the check off the table, looked at the total, and pulled out his wallet. 

“If you like it, we’ll talk about training.”

So that’s what I did. I shadowed Eb and he put me in a fire suit, and I rode with him to the fire—a kitchen fire, somebody had put a Hungry Man in the oven and then got into watching the race on TV and forgot it. I smelled the smoke and watched those orange flames dance around and for the first time in a long time I didn’t know what would happen next. We put it out pretty fast, but it could have gone another way. It was just about the best thing I’d done in I don’t know how long. I told Timbo to train me on whatever I needed to know, that I wanted to be a fireman. Or a firewoman. And I’ve never been sorry.

■■■

Learning how to fight fires didn’t directly tell me how to set them.

But it’s not hard to work backward and connect the dots. I learned how to watch the flames move. I learned what kind of material burns fastest and hottest, and what burns slow. I learned a little bit about accelerants.

And I learned the Markee fire department—Eb and Timbo, and the others. I already knew Markee itself—which houses were abandoned, what hours people were out on the roads, what would look suspicious and what wouldn’t.

I wouldn’t say I’ve set a lot of fires. A shed on the Miller Creek road outside town was the first, just for practice. Then a falling-down house on Curtis Lane, then one on French Road. A shack on River Road, and now this one. That was over three years. I’m not crazy. They were all abandoned. Empty lots are better to look at.

How could I tell you what it’s like? All the control and none of it at the same time. My choice of building, my plan, my match. Then the house takes over, runs the show, and anything could happen. We never got called out to the shed, it burned itself out. On French Road the sparks jumped to a tree behind the house, and we had to scramble to stop it from racing up the hillside. You just don’t know what’s going to happen. Unlike everything else.

Most days I know I’m going into the diner from ten till three. I’ll go home, where Dad will be in his recliner, or in his garden. Every day follows the same track like a mule in harness, patiently trudging up and down the rows.

Fire doesn’t do that. Fire jumps the track.

■■■

We had a weekly training session—that’s what Timbo calls it, but mostly we just check the hoses and shine the truck. A couple of guys showed up that hadn’t been there Saturday, so we retold it for their benefit.

“Somebody drove by and called it in, already fully engaged,” Timbo said. “Burned fast, didn’t it Dulcie?”

“Like a candle,” I said. “It was determined to burn, no matter how much water we sprayed.”

“You go back and look at it, Timbo?” said Eb. My stomach tightened.

“Yeah,” Timbo said. “Some funny things about that fire. Burned too fast, burning from different spots on the house. Went back out there yesterday. I’d say it’d be hard to prove if it was set on purpose or not. But I think it was.”

“What would someone set it on fire for?” said Carl, who’d only been with the fire department a year, and had missed Saturday night because he had a job interview in Ohio.

“Dunno,” Timbo said. “No trace of meth in there, so I don’t think anyone was cooking in the house. No gas line. The power lines weren’t live. I don’t see how it could have set off accidentally. So if it wasn’t an accident, why would someone want to burn it on purpose?”

“I had an aunt burned down her house for the insurance,” Carl said. “Well, that’s what I heard. They couldn’t prove it, so she got the money. Built it back with a pool in it.”

“Insurance fires I can understand,” Timbo said. “Somebody benefits. Any time you got a crime, you got to look at who benefits. The motivation.”

Timbo watches too many cop shows on TV.

“But who benefits from burning down an empty, falling-down house?” I asked, feeling like I’d been too quiet.

“Someone who likes it,” Timbo said. “That’s what worries me.”

Carl said he’d let us know what he heard from the job in Ohio, but I knew if he got it he’d be gone. He’d meet a girl there, settle down, and he’d only come back for a weekend every now and then, although he would always call it coming home. I’m glad I don’t have such a divided heart for where home is.

■■■

Timbo wasn’t wrong. I did like it.

But I knew I’d been careful. I had waited for early evening, just enough light left to see my way inside. I’d packed my whole burning kit into a bag—rags, a lighter, some wicker and foam, a little can of kerosene. The ashes of an old rag could easily be found in an abandoned house. The kerosene would burn off, but if not, maybe somebody had just left some old kerosene in there. The wicker and foam, my accelerants, would burn fast. You can’t prove there wasn’t an old chair in there. All my evidence would burn.

I like to light the fire inside. I like to go in, connect with the place, let it know I’m setting it free. In the Rock Creek house, old wallpaper still hung, peeling, on the walls. The floors were cracked linoleum, and the carpeting that was so old you couldn’t tell if it had a pattern, or even a color. A single curtain fluttered in a broken window. It could have felt like a horror story, but even in the gloom, it just felt sad. I set two little fires, one in the living room near the stairs, and one in the kitchen. And then I went home to wait for the call. You know the rest.

Timbo had said he didn’t see anything he could prove. I hoped it stayed that way.

■■■

I kept my head down for a while. On Thursdays we trained, and Timbo didn’t bring up his worries. Summer brought us brush fires, so it was something to do, although a brush fire isn’t anything like a house fire. There’s nothing interesting about a brush fire—just figuring out where it’s going and trying to stop it from getting there. We had a fire in a garage, where a spark hit some solvent, and we got called out to a couple of car accidents. All routine.

I just worked and helped Dad in his garden. He always planted too much, but I didn’t want to say plant less. It seemed like a concession to age—if he planted less, I was afraid that next thing he’d do less, and then he’d just sit in that recliner and wait to die. I’d seen enough men wither like that, going from hale and hearty to shuffling behind a walker once they stopped moving. The only way to outrun age, I figured, was to not slow down enough for it to catch up.

But he did tire more easily since the heart attack. At night I washed the dishes, while Dad fell asleep in his recliner, TV blaring. I sat out on the porch in the dark, clammy night, and wondered when it would be safe to think about my next fire.

■■■

“I found it,” Timbo said the next Thursday, after we’d watched a training video on putting out fires with foam. “Knew if I looked hard enough, I’d find it.”

“Find what?” said Carl, who was moving to Ohio that weekend.

“Proof,” Timbo said. “Proof that Rock Creek fire was set.”

I felt like the bottom was gone from my stomach.

“It was a flash burn,” Timbo said. “Found a scorch pattern in two places. Stairwell and kitchen, or thereabouts.”

“What are you going to do?” Carl asked.

“Not sure,” Timbo said. “Gotta think on that one.”

■■■

It was coming on spring. We’d weathered the cold winter, me and Dad and his TV, and finally it was time to think about planting, just as much as last year. Time to go outside and see what the winter had done. Time to prune things back so they could grow again.

I’d had my eye on the old store for awhile. Two stories, wooden, paint peeling off the RC Cola logo on its side. It had been a general store, then a feed store, then a thrift store slash Christian bookstore, before it finally wasn’t anything at all. The apartment above hadn’t had a renter in ten years. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere. Time had moved on and left it sitting there. Waiting for me.

I picked an afternoon in late March, double-checked my supplies, and slipped in through the back, away from the street.

Inside, a few old bookshelves stood at crazy angles. The ceiling was pressed tin, rusting. Dust motes floated in a late beam of sunlight. I checked upstairs, just so I’d know no living thing was up there, not even a bird. All I saw was a soulless place, cheaply renovated, peeling Formica and cracked plaster.

I laid my fires and backed out of the house, satisfied. I was already thinking about how it would look an hour from now from behind the firehose, when I heard a footstep behind me. 

“I don’t know if I’m surprised or not,” Timbo said.

The shock jolted a scream out of me.

“Back in,” Timbo said, spinning his finger in a circle. “Let’s put out your fires, and then we’ll talk.”

He pulled a fire extinguisher from a backpack and drowned my fledgling fires. Then he turned a bookcase over on its side and sat down on one end, gesturing me to the other.

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“Know it was you, or know where to find you?”

“Both.”

“I got to thinking about that fire. And the one before that, on River Road. The one on French Road. The one up in the Clarke subdivision.”

“That one wasn’t me.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Well. We’ve had more fires since you joined the fire department. That’s the first thing I thought about. And then I thought about why. When nobody benefits, what’s the motive? Someone’s getting something out of setting that fire. And I figured, if they’re not getting money, and they’re not getting revenge on somebody, then they’re getting kicks out of it. They enjoy it. And that means they either enjoy watching it burn, or they enjoy fighting it. Setting themselves a challenge.”

He scuffed at the dust on the floor with the toe of his work boot.

“You’re a smart girl, Dulcie. I know you want to be like all the other guys in the department, and you hang out and drink beer and everybody’s buddies. But you’re not like the other guys. You’re smarter. You don’t have to be here working at the diner. And that’s your choice, I know how it is. But I’ve known people like you, who need a challenge. I figure you joined the fire department because you were bored. And I can see when we’re out at fires, you’re not bored. You’re into it. So I put two and two together. I know everybody in this town, and I only know one person bored enough to set buildings on fire.”

He looked at me, like it was my turn. My turn to tell him he was right, or make excuses, or explain that yes, it was that, but it was other things too. I was restless in this town, and I loved this town, and it was all tied up together.

I couldn’t explain all that. So I asked the easier question.

“How’d you know I’d be here?”

“Followed you.”

Maybe I should watch more of Timbo’s cop shows. I couldn’t even spot a tail in a town of 600.

“What are you gonna do?”

Timbo sighed.

“You know, I went to college too. I ever tell you that? No? Well, I did. Three years, anyway. Studied forestry. Then my dad died. No more college money, no more money period unless Mom or I one got a job. Plus there was Charla, you know, still in high school.”

Timbo and his sister Charla were both years older than me, and I only knew her as a character in his stories and a minivan with North Carolina tags that appeared on holidays and for a week in the summer. Timbo took off work to go fishing with nephews whose whole idea of what it meant to be mountain boys was what Timbo taught them. I imagined them swaggering back to their flatland schools with tales of trout and bears and copperheads, mountain caves and haints and grapevine swings. That’s the sort of thing he’d show them, in a week. You’d have to stay longer to know more.

“But you stayed,” I said. “Even after Charla was gone.”

“Time passed,” he said. “Pretty soon it felt too late to go back. Plus I’d settled in. I’m like you in a way. Comfortable and restless here, both. I just finally decided on comfortable. Markee’s my home, and I reckon I’ll stay put. Besides, these old coal towns, they start losing people, then they lose services, and before you know it, they’re not even towns, they’re just houses that happen to sit in a row. I don’t want that for Markee.”

“I don’t either,” I said.

“What do you want, then?”

I didn’t know what I wanted. Excitement. Challenge. To cut off the dying parts of the town and hope it saved the good parts. When I’d been out in the world, I’d been homesick for the place I now rubbed up against, trying to smooth it and me down so we could fit together.

“I reckon I want to stay,” I said.

“Then you’ve got to quit burning shit down,” Timbo said. “Arson’s a felony, you know. I ought to turn you in.”

A felony seemed unfair. “But nobody was hurt,” I said. “I was careful.”

“But it’s wrong,” Timbo said. “It’s not healthy for you either. What would you do if you were me?”

The question hung in the gloom, and I didn’t know what to tell him. Nothing he could do would fix a thing. He couldn’t cure me being bored or Markee fading away. What would punishment serve? I’d just be bored in prison.

“I’ll stop,” I said. “I promise. No more fires.”

“I wonder,” Timbo said. “I wonder if you can stick to it. I wonder if you can be a firefighter and squash the arsonist in you.”

“I can,” I said, not sure at all.

“It’s getting dark, we better get on out of here while we can see our feet,” he said. 

He checked my fires to make sure they were out. We went out the back, same as we’d come in.

In the street, he turned to me. “My advice to you, Dulcie, is get comfortable, or get gone. That’s not a threat. But I care about this town too, and I can’t let you burn it down. And you can’t live torn up like this. You want to stay? Good. I hope it sticks. Make up your mind to be satisfied or move on.”

He walked down the street toward his truck. And I started the walk home, as the sunset died over the hills above town. ■