The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass Page B

tunes issued forth as the rubble shifted, settled, and burned: and still the shots kept firing.
    No casualties. All of them went home to their families that night.
    ***
    One year Rhonda tells Kirby that she is going to Paris with her new fiancé for two weeks and asks if Kirby can keep Jenna. His eyes sting with happiness. Two weeks of clean air, a gift from out of nowhere. A thing that was his and taken away, now brought back.
This must be what it feels like to be rescued,
he thinks.
    Mary Ann thinks often of how hard it is for him—she thinks of it almost every time she sees him with Jenna, reading to her, or helping her with something—and they discuss it often, but even at that, even in Mary Ann’s great lovingness, she underestimates it. She thinks she wants to know the full weight of it, but she has no true idea. It transcends words—spills over into his actions—and still she, Mary Ann, cannot know the whole of it.
    Kirby dreams ahead to when Jenna is eighteen; he dreams of reuniting. He continues to take catnaps on the roof by her chimney. The separation from her betrays and belies his training; it is greater than an arm’s length distance.
    The counselors tell him never to let Jenna see this franticness—this gutted, hollow, gasping feeling.
    As if wearing blinders—unsure of whether the counselors are right or not—he does as they suggest. He thinks that they are probably right. He knows the horrible dangers of panic.
    And in the meantime, the marriage strengthens, becomes more resilient than ever. Arguments cease to be even arguments, anymore, merely differences of opinion; the marriage is reinforced by the innumerable fires and by the weave of his comings and goings. It becomes a marriage as strong as a galloping horse. His frantic attempts to keep drawing clean air are good for the body of the marriage.
    Mary Ann worries about the fifteen or twenty years she’s heard get cut off the back end of all firefighters’ lives: all those years of sucking in chemicals—burning rags, burning asbestos, burning formaldehyde—but still she does not ask him to stop.
    The cinders continuing to fall across his back like meteors; twenty-four scars, twenty-five, twenty-six. She knows she could lose him. But she knows he will be lost for sure without the fires.
    She prays in church for his safety. Sometimes she forgets to listen to the service and instead gets lost in her prayers. It’s as if she’s being led out of a burning building herself; as if she’s trying to remain calm, as someone—her rescuer, perhaps—has instructed her to do.
    She forgets to listen to the service. She finds herself instead thinking of the secrets he has told her: the things she knows about fires that no one else around her knows.
    The way light bulbs melt and lean or point toward a fire’s origin—the gases in incandescent bulbs seeking, sensing that heat, so that you can often use them to tell where a fire started: the direction in which the light bulbs first began to lean.
    A baby is getting baptized up at the altar, but Mary Ann is still in some other zone—she’s still praying for Kirby’s safety, his survival. The water being sprinkled on the baby’s head reminds her of the men’s water shields: of the umbrella-mist of spray that buys them extra time.
    ***
    As he travels through town to and from his day job, he begins to define the space around him by the fires that have visited it, which he has engaged and battled.
I rescued that one, there, and that one,
he thinks.
That one.
The city becomes a tapestry, a weave of that which he has saved and that which he has not—with the rest of the city becoming simply all that which is between points, waiting to burn.
    He glides through his work at the office. If he were hollow inside, the work would suck something out of him—but he is not hollow, only asleep or resting, like some cast-iron statue