Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 55

The pillar of grey smoke climbing into the summer afternoon sky is your beacon, and as the three of you zero in on it, passing town stragglers either standing on their porches with their eyes shaded looking up or those who have finally started towards the fire, unable to resist. With a sinking in your guts you realize the fire is what you suspected, the only building on this block it could be, Joe’s Market where Mr. Joe sells gum and milk and cigarettes and Halloween masks and back to school supplies. Every window of the cube brick building is full of fire, the inside drowning in it, its gutters boiling over it, its tar shingles taking flight and falling back down as glowing cinders. When the water cannons hit the superheated walls, fog explodes in wall of smoke that hides the firemen, the tethers of their hoses disappearing in the dragons den while the police push the people back, the noon made night around them and their faces turning red and blue and back again. The heat is enormous: you hold your hands out to feel the waves of it on your skin, your face, your eyes tearing up, everybody’s eyes tearing up and running down their faces, and then there’s a crash as something inside the house gives way and the second floor folds in on itself, rafters and supports falling like any old campfire. And someone is running out, everything burning from the feet up, their face three screaming black holes covered in a mask of fire; they make it halfway down the walk and simply collapse on their face before being sprayed with foam by the firemen. Oh my god, the women in the crowd say, biting their fingers; the men are clenching their jaws and nodding at each other, passing some secret kind of information.

You find the fire kids in their own circle and force your way in. It was fireworks, says Ruben Ortiz, Juan Ortiz’s son and who’s kind of in charge when you’re not around. Both the main and substation crews are present, you see, with no less than three hoses spraying cascades down the smoldering walls, steam sizzling into misty clouds that somersaulted away, and that’s because of how much everybody likes Mr. Joe; not everybody would get three hoses. Ashes are snowing in your hair and smearing on your cheeks. Two of the firemen, whose stencils on the back of their coats say they are Andy Anderson and Carl Sedarski, come out of the Market’s side door followed by an opening umbrella of black smoke holding a smoking bundle between them, laying it down on the wet street, cutting open its shirt: there’s no hair, no face, its face and chest skin peeling off in sheets. They breathe into his mouth and pound on his chest, opening packets of needles and injecting him. You can see its shoes, bright green sneakers with Velcro straps. No one in town but Mr. Joe has shoes like that. He’s a goner, Jason says, and as the fire wind blows against you by reflex you say what you always do when smoke gets in your face, what all the fire kids say though nobody, not even their fathers, knows where it came from. I don’t like white rabbits, Tim says, and Jason repeats it and so does Ruben Lopez and Thad Stroup and Jerry Bathcat and Ryan Oetting and every other fire kid around you. It works every time; the smoke always shifts away.