52stories

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The day after Christmas, the year I started shaving, my grandfather died.

He had been sick for a long time, a cancer that had started somewhere in his guts, that wasn’t discovered until it had invaded too many organs to count. He had been in bed for a month, eating less and less, talking less and less. What little he did say at the end made less and less sense, as well, as the cancer ravished his body and starved his mind. His lucid periods slipped away, until he sat in the medical bed with the rails, the bed that the hospice had set up around Thanksgiving, sat motionless and expressionless in my grandparent’s living room, as the family laughed and joked and tried not to show tears around him. There was plenty of crying, however it was all done around the corner in the kitchen for the women, or the men would come back from the bathroom with puffy eyes. It wouldn’t do to show fear in front of Pops.

The day before he died, Christmas day, the whole family gathered for Christmas dinner in my grandparent’s house, after we had dealt with our obligations elsewhere as quickly as possible. Pops didn’t eat, but he lay in the hospice bed that we had wheeled to the head of the table. The only thing he said the whole day was after my uncle had been relating some particularly bad jokes he had heard at work. After another one fell flat, my mom said, “Well, Pops, should Steve tell any more jokes?” Pops tilted his head to the side and let out a groan, then rasped, “No!” And that got a bigger laugh than anything that Uncle Steve had said all night.

Pops had always been a firecracker, a pistol, as he himself would say. It hurt to see him lain up, he had always seemed invincible. One of my first memories is getting a skateboard for my birthday, and him being the second person to try it out. When he inevitably fell off, the only thing wounded was his pride as his magnificent comb-over fell a-kilter. I ran to my parents, crying that Pops’s hair had fallen off. But he was the type to try anything once, especially if it was dangerous.

My family was living out of the state at the time, and for Christmas we were staying at my grandparent’s. After everyone else had gone home Christmas night, I lay awake in bed, two doors down from the living room with Pop’s bed. I listened to his breathing, assisted by an oxygen tube that snaked into his nose, regular in timing but ragged in tone. At midnight, finding myself unable to sleep, I got out of bed and tiptoed to his bedside, where a stool was set up, for people to sit and watch over him during the day, wet his forehead with a washcloth, spoon bits of ice into his mouth. I carefully sat on the stool, and looked down at my grandfather, his legs and arms sticks under the blankets, and his belly unnaturally swollen. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light provided by the blinking 12:00 on the VCR, I noticed that Pops’s eyes were open, and, rare for these past few days, focussed and looking at me.

He shakily took his hand out from under the knit cotton blanket and raised it to the oxygen tube in his nose. He pulled it out, dropped it beside his head, then cupped his hand to the side of his mouth and whispered to me, “Ask me… ask me a question.”

I was dumbfounded. Since my family had arrived in the house, I hadn’t heard Pops string together three lucid words. I blinked, then shook my head slightly to clear it. These might be Pops’s last words, I had to find something good to ask him.

“Tell me…” I suddenly realized that Pops and I had never really sat down and had a good conversation about his life. For all I knew, his life had begun when he fell off my skateboard, and had always been an old man. My time, his time, I had wasted it all before today- I had to find something great to ask him, this was too much pressure. It struck me then- I would let him decide, within a certain framework. “Tell me- from your life, what is the one thing you want me to learn?”

Pops drew a raggedy breath, a breath that ended with a gasp, a string of saliva connecting his top and bottom rows of teeth. The pain passed, and he looked at me again, and said, each word coming easier than the last, “Good question, good question Johnny. I’ll… I’ll tell you. When all looks lost. Never give up. Stay true.” His eyes glazed over, and he turned away. I looked down, and my eyes stung as I choked back tears. I couldn’t help but think those might be the last words I would hear from Pops. But he turned back to me, and seemed to draw on an inner source of strength. Color came back to his cheeks, his skin looked less like paper, and his eyes stopped resembling glass.

“I will tell you… I will tell you what happened that night. I haven’t told… I haven’t told anyone. But you will listen.” He drew another painful breath, and I put my hands on the railing of his bed, listening intently to his words, sometimes whispered, sometimes gasped, rarely said in anything close to the room-dominating voice he once had, as his story rolled out.

“Johnny… when I was only a little older than you, just out of high school… times were tough. I worked two jobs, I sold cars, I washed dishes, I did all I could to make enough… enough money to survive. But what I wanted to do, I was a volunteer fireman here before our town got a fulltime department. We only had two fulltime guys… about two dozen volunteers. The town had a siren, it would go off if there was a fire, we got in our own cars and drove to the firehouse. One night, I had spent all day in the sun, hocking Chryslers, couldn’t afford dinner, ate bites of food off the plates I washed at Luigi’s that night- people with light appetites I didn’t understand, but I blessed. Got home at eleven, needed to be up at six to get back to the dealership.

“Two in the morning, god blessed alarm starts wailing in town. I rush to the firehouse, thank the lord I slept in my clothes, too tired to take them off, and am third to arrive. Louis and Frankie there first, for the volunteers… huh, Louis and Frankie, bless ‘em. They lived close. Eventually a dozen guys there, maybe within two minutes. We get on the truck, siren running even though the streets were empty, cause forget them, civvies shouldn’t sleep through a fire anyway, we rush off to the blaze. Whole house up in flames. No- wait, not when we got there. Just half, started in the kitchen, pilot light, but woman screaming out of top floor somewhere. Frankie and I, we’re S and R, two in, Louis and Tim, they’re on the hose, Captain Richards helming the whole thing. Frankie and I axe down the door, rush upstairs, quick as Flynn, fire licking our boots. We don’t care, we’re teens, we’re invincible. You don’t know.

“The yelling upstairs has stopped, cut off. Smoke billowing. Frankie and I we search every room. Every room. Nothing. It’s hotting up. Frankie signals we should give up, go out, hose down this beast. I signal wait, I signal survivor. He shakes his head. He’s in the lead of the team, one month seniority. I signal forget you.” Pops grins at this, and extends one finger on his right hand. “He signals forget me right back, and he’s down the stairs. Not what we were taught. Should have followed him. But I had heard woman, I knew. I rush through rooms again, and suddenly, catch sight of her behind the bed. Don’t know how we missed before. I pick her up, her in night clothes, me in fire suit, completely inappropriate mismatch. I stagger to stairs, but they’re gone. Fire leaping up where they were. I stagger back to the bedroom, shut door. I open the window, but it sticks only two inches up. Air rushes out anyway, I feel fire leaping down the hall. Smoke flowing around door, poisonous snakes, treacherous ropes. Clogging my lungs, sapping strength. I lay girl on floor, put mouth and eyes to window. Captain bawling out Frankie. Louis and Tim, John and Greg, they’re trying to get in, fire pushing them back, building going up like tinder. I yell out window, Captain’s about to yell back, couple drown him out. ‘Is our daughter up there, did you find her?’

“I look at the woman I carried. Not a woman, a girl. Sixteen maybe. Unconscious. I turn back to call out the window, but smoke invades my lungs, I fall to my knees. I look up and things stopped. Time stopped. Flames like glass chandelier bursting around door. Bed halfway fallen through floor, what was floor, giant hole now. I’m the only thing moving. Girl still. I’m moving, and a man in a suit. Sharp dressed, oiled hair, clean fingernails. Briefcase.

“He looks at me, opens the briefcase, and takes out paper. Reads off it, bored.

“‘Jack Miles, age eighteen?’ I nod, still on floor, breathing what little clear air there is. ‘Jack, I’m prepared to offer you a deal. Deal of a lifetime. You get to live! Isn’t that grand?’

“I’m no dummy, didn’t just fall off rutabaga truck. ‘The catch is my soul, right?’ Slick guy just smiles and shakes his head.

“‘Not enough uptake on that one, buddy. Not enough resale value. You’d probably want riches and fame and your life for that, I can’t make that profitable for me, you know, you sell, right? Can I talk to you as a fellow salesman, cut through the bull hockey? My bottom line, for your life, which I can make a long one, and relatively happy, is…’ and the bastard paused, and looked over at girl.

“‘Hers?’ I ask.

“‘Bingo!’ he smiles a twenty dollar grin. Dentist polished teeth. Suddenly pushing a pen in my face, repeating something I said to sucker earlier that day, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t wait on this deal. Not going to last.’ ”

Pops took another raggedy breath, and suddenly his cold, dry hand clawed onto the back of mine on the railing. Veins stood out blue beneath the nearly translucent skin. Whites were visible all around the rim of his eyes. “He smiles and laughs. I grab the pen and the paper. I impale the paper on a spike of flame coming around door, break window with pen, throw oily man through first, clears out shards of glass. He never hits ground, suddenly it is very noisy. Wind flowing out window, flames leaping in door, parents rushing up to window. I lower girl out window by hand, they catch. Frankie and Louis spread blanket and catch me.

“Next day, I go down to YMCA, where family is staying while house rebuilt. I talk to girl, she is fine. Her name is Ruth. Never give up, Johnny.”

Pops lay back on his bed, folded his hands, closed his eyes and lay still. I put the oxygen tube back in his nose, and watched him until I fell asleep. When Grandma Ruth woke me up in the morning, Pops was gone.

I asked her, the next year, how Pops and she had met. She told me they met at a dance in high school, or maybe a dance organized in the firehall that was a fire company fundraiser, she couldn’t really remember.