Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 57

The house phone rings a few times while your mother is giving the baby a bath upstairs: it’s always people looking for details who forget that firemen work twenty four hours on shift and don’t come home after a fire like some normal job. You don’t answer it; your mother is the only one allowed when your father isn’t here, and even then she’s only allowed to take messages, not tell anybody where he is, even if he’s standing right next to her listening, which he does a lot. You’re not supposed to go anywhere – she’s threatened to keep you from going to the junkyard in the morning like you do every weekend so your father can look for spare parts while you and your brother pretend to race each other in whatever still mostly intact cars are lying around – but when Jason sees you in the window he whistles and waves you over to his yard and into his garage, where you’re surprised to find Tim already there, since his mother barely lets him go anywhere when his father is on duty. She’s in Chicago with my aunt, Tim tells you.

Jason goes to the corner of his father’s garage, behind a row of greasy boxes that haven’t been unpacked, and returns with a handful of magazines. Look at his, he says, spreading the Playboys on the garage floor.

Oh, wow, Tim says. Where’d you get that?

My dad’s got a whole box, Jason says. You open up one of them to the centerfold and the three of you lean forward, eyes tracing all the parts of her body down to between her legs, where there is hair and a pink skin that makes you feel nervous and sick all at the same time. She’s got a big pussy, Jason says. My sister said they got three holes, one to piss out of, one to shit out of, and the big one that babies come out of.

That’s gross, Tim says; he puts his finger on the crotch, rubbing some of the ink off the paper, and flips through all the pussies and tits. After a couple you don’t look anymore.

I hear my parents doing it sometimes, Tim says. Their bedroom’s right under mine. It’s just the bed squeaking. After a while my dad goes Oh-Oh-Oh. Tim shrugs.

I’m going to stick it to lots of girls, Jason says and he humps the cement, showing just how he’s going to go about it, and just then your mother comes into the open garage door with a look on her face that tells you she’s been listening for some time. She sends you home to your room and takes Jason and Tim inside to talk to Rosa.

One entire wall of your bedroom is covered with pictures of fire engines and firemen, ones you copied out of newspapers; your father asked you if anybody did them for you, and he took them to the station to hang up. There are ones he asked you to put in away and not let your mother see, ones of robots tearing off the heads of teachers and space ships blowing up people like Margaret Bacon. Your father says that you must be the milkman’s kid to be able to do stuff like that, and everybody but you thinks it’s funny. You’re grateful when your brother comes in wanting to play as the sun sets and the dark fills your windows, mindlessly smashing your space ships into each other and you not liking those magazine, not liking the way things keep trying to change every day.