Might Really Limit Your Future Options

Super Troopers bounces off the corrugated aluminum walls. I’m holding a faulty flight helmet in my lap and I’m prying out the Styrofoam lining. I almost have the edge. The clock on the wall tells me that it’s five minutes until quitting time and I can’t stop now. Hold this, I say to Ashley. I tug on the Styrofoam and listen to the glue crack. The foam slips out like the meat from a coconut. Two minutes to spare. 

At eighteen-hundred sharp, Chris yells that it’s time to start not remembering this weekend and all of us rush out of the side door towards the barracks. The TV blares you boys like Mexico and the sound of screams and shrieking tires. 

Normally we take our weekend after returning to our barracks from a fourteen-day roll, but there’s a severe weather warning; maybe dry lightning. We got home on Wednesday, refurbed yesterday and today we watched DVDs all day and hoped that we wouldn’t get a fire call. It’s early September. We’ve got money burning holes through our pockets. We want haircuts and paper bags full of burgers from the Arctic Circle. I spent the afternoon on the couch wedged between Kyle and Ashley, until I got sick of them and started to refurb the old helmets. Kyle and Ashley keep coming up with excuses to touch each other. Ashley throws her legs over me and rests her boots on Kyle’s lap. Kyle dates some girl from Central who I’ve never met. That’s probably for the best. I can’t keep a secret. Ashley is Kyle’s contingency. It’s reasonable, given this line of work. Most of us put LCES and 10-and-18 stickers on our water bottles to remind us to always have multiple contingencies. Have a backup plan for your backup plan. Expect things to go sideways. Nothing ever goes as planned. Base all actions on the current and expected behavior of the fire. An escape route must be traversable by the slowest person on the crew. A safety zone must separate every firefighter from the fire by a factor four times the longest flame length. The only certainty in wildfire is uncertainty. That’s why I’m exchanging postcards and texts with three girls from college. You just never know.

I stack the Styrofoam cores on the shelf next to five other skull shaped white forms. 

This weekend we’re partying at Danny’s parents’ vacation house in the Wenas, about 30 minutes outside of Ellensburg. Danny’s parents aren’t there. We’ve got the run of the place and we feel like we’re in a music video. It’s pushing triple digits in the late afternoon and from the pool’s edge you can look down into the valley and watch cars wind up and down the dirt road. A few hundred yards up canyon an A-frame juts up from the hillside. I have my feet in the pool. I’m talking to Wegner’s girlfriend, Misty, about the Lady Gaga concert she went to last weekend at the Tacoma Dome. She tells me that it was a totally spiritual fucking experience. The jewel in her belly button flashes the sun into my eyes. She rolls over on her towel. I’m trying not to stare. I’m trying not to ash my cigarette into the swimming pool. 

Kid, yells someone.

Kyle and Ashley walk from the house towards me. Ashley sits down next to Misty and Kyle stands over us. You won’t believe this, Chris bet Garrett that he couldn’t drink a thirty bomb in a day. Garrett’s retarded so he said yes. He’s on beer five. 

Kyle takes a picture of the three of us. He says that he promised his girlfriend that he’d show her what he does during the summer. I hold my hand over my face. We’re so fucked up looking by this point in the season, pale, scraggy hair and beards, stripes of acne and rash over our shoulders and backs. I haven’t shaved for two weeks. My beard is blond and red and almost invisible except on fires when it collects sweat and dirt. The guys look like shit, the girls look like shit, except for people’s girlfriends, who are girls, and who show up spray-tanned and made up, with shiny acrylics and smooth, clean skin. 

Ashley sticks out her tongue and flips off the camera. She’s wearing her fire boots and bikini. Later I get the photo from Kyle and post it to Facebook and a handful of girls from college write that they like my look. This summer I’m mostly in love with a girl who’s studying abroad in Europe for the first half of the summer and then in Hawaii for the second half. In a way, this plays well with the crew. How’s your fancy girl, they ask. She sends me letters written on unlined cream-colored paper. Years later, I rediscover the letters stuffed into a Ziploc bag wedged in the bottom of a plastic bin between a tin of boot oil and my old gloves. I throw them all away. I don’t know why. My girlfriend at the time tells me to keep the letters or at least give them back, but I don’t like holding onto things.

Garrett floats in the center of the pool with a Keystone balanced on his belly. He waves and says looking’s free, but photos are going to cost you. Kyle snaps another. Garrett calls Kyle a queer and spins the floaty around. 

Misty sits up on the chaise lounge, stands, and slips into the pool. 

Kyle and Ashley play pool in the living room while Danny sits on the counter that divides the kitchen from the living room, pitching cans of Keystone to anyone in his line of sight. I lean against the wall by a poster of Travis Pastrana launching his Yamaha off a dirt ramp and duck as a can flies my way. I catch the can with both hands. Danny jumps off the counter and walks through the front door.

Danny has a soul patch. He crushes an empty can between his palms, yells Kobe and arcs it into recycling. Danny’s big dream is to work construction and inherit his parent’s money that they made at IBM engineering jobs. 

From the front lawn comes the shriek of a two-stroke. Danny pops a wheelie, ripping a divot in the yard, leaving a wake of shredded grass. Something sounds like it’s wrong with Danny’s bike. The engine gasps and revs up and down. It’s nearly twenty-two hundred and firing up a motorcycle seems like a great way to get a noise complaint. There’s only one house nearby but they seem like the type. We’ve got seven cars parked outside and earlier the neighbors stood on their porch and watched us.

Wenger sits on the patio while Danny and Chris mess around with the bike’s throttle cable. Wenger looks at me, smiles, and giggles while tobacco juice drips from the sides of his mouth. He’s holding a burger and a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos. Wenger uses a finger to pry a wad out from his bottom lip and tosses it into the yard. The smell of weed radiates around him. He rolls his chew can on the patio. Ever watch those alien shows, he asks. The ones where they try to prove that old places were built by aliens? Or that some mountain is actually hiding a pyramid? He tells me that there’s these pyramids in Bosnia, the biggest pyramids in the world, and who made them? No one knows! Maybe the Aztecs or Egyptians took a trip to Bosnia. Or maybe aliens. That’s cool, right? An archeologist did sonar mapping of the mountains and they’re hollow inside. A hollow mountain. Wegner pinches out black leaves and stuffs then in his lip.

Wegner asks if I’ve seen this movie, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He says that Johnny Depp is in it, and it’s about Hunter S. Thompson getting loaded and hallucinating all sorts of crazy shit. Wegner takes a bite of his burger and continues. It’s tough, this job, you can’t take drugs while you’re doing it, but sometimes I really want to, especially when we’re waiting around doing fuck all. Or sometimes on IA’s too, like what if we all dropped acid before doing a huge burn operation, how insane would that be?

Wegner opens his burger and piles on a handful of Cheetos. In the movie there’s a woman in the casino bar making sex noises while she eats nachos, he says, and another woman whose head turns into an eel. Wegner examines the beef patty on his sandwich. He tilts the sandwich into the porchlight. Orange Cheeto dust collects on his lips.

What do you think we’d see on a fire? Would it speak to us? Would the flames come alive? 

I tell Wegner that I have no idea about the flames or the acid but that I have seen Fear and Loathing, and that’s it’s not my favorite drug movie, which is Jesus’ Son. I like the seventies, I say, I like movies from the seventies, movies about the seventies. I’d like to grow a real moustache. This is your chance, says Wegner, during fire season almost anything goes. Grow a moustache, get a mohawk, do whatever you want to, it’s your face.

Danny and Chris rev Danny’s bike. It releases a violent pop, and then dies. 

Wegner forgets about Fear and Loathing and goes back to aliens, Wenger thinks that there’s a big spaceship that’ll blast off someday and the Bosnians will watch from their yards. He pauses, and snaps his chew can closed and opens it again and holds it out to me. Want some? You gonna become an alien researcher, Kid? Get on the History channel and expound on the mysteries of the galaxy?’ 

The bike revs again and Danny holds open the throttle to a deafening whine. 

Wenger stares at me and stuffs more tobacco into his lip. You could be like one of those guys they bring on for segments, he says, doctor-who-ever and then they talk about how no one really knows but it could have been aliens.

I’m trying to roll a cigarette and Wenger becomes obsessed with the tiny motions. 

Wegner asks if he can get a cigarette and then asks if I want to hear the story about the first time he had sex. I hand him the cigarette. It’s kinda about American Spirits, he says. Wegner lights the cigarette and exhales. There was this girl named Annie and she had American Spirits in the yellow pack. We went swimming in the Deschutes and then back to her house. I had my coloring box with me. Annie had short dark hair and bangs and looked like a classic Hollywood movie star; you know; like a black and white movie star from really old movies. She wore a gold swimsuit and she glowed when she stepped out of the water. We sat on the river’s edge and smoked American Spirits from the yellow pack and then we rode our bikes back to her house and colored pages from my coloring box and watched Blue Planet and that’s when the magic happened. Some of those fish look like aliens. 

I roll a second and Wegner snatches it from my hands. He takes it between his thumb and forefinger and holds it up to the patio light. Wenger lights the second cigarette, inhales deeply, and releases a cloud of smoke accompanied by a rumbling sound from deep in his throat: Vvrrrrrrrooooooom, back to the stars. A spaceship taking off from the pyramid mountain. He tosses the cigarette up at the patio light over the sliding glass door. And all the Bosnians watching from their yards saying to each other, did you know about this? 

Wenger stares directly into the patio light fixture while shielding his eyes with his hand before noticing that his cigarette fell through the open door and lies smoldering on the floor in the kitchen. He jumps up to retrieve the cigarette from the kitchen and in the process knocks over his beer can spitter, spilling it across the concrete. Oh shit, oh shit, gross, he says. Kid, help me find a hose. 

Danny and Chris continue to tinker with the bike. The bike pops to life for a minute and one of them rips around the yard before the engine sputters out. 

Wenger grabs my arm and holds a finger to his lips and whispers, look down on the road. A police cruiser pulls up at the base of the driveway.

Wenger turns to me. He says that he’s gonna go hide in the bushes—go inside and tell people to quiet down. 

Wenger rounds the corner to the back of the house. There’s no movement from the police cruiser. I walk to the patio to find Wenger standing with his back pressed up against the house’s exterior wall smiling. No good bushes to hide in, he says.

Danny stands over his bike about to kick it on again. Hey, I whisper, don’t do that, there’s a police car out front. Danny rolls the bike around back. I follow.

I sit down on the gravel behind the bike and look between the wheel spokes at Wenger standing stone-still against the house. The house and the yard have gone almost completely silent except for the mosquito buzzing in my ear. I can’t see into the living room. 

After a few minutes Danny remerges from the sliding glass door and waves at Chris who’s leaning against the bike. We’re all good, he says, they’re gone. 

Some guy I don’t recognize shoots pool with Ezekiel. Kyle sprawls on the couch petting Ashley’s hair. I sit on the floor below them.

The guy playing pool with Ezekiel keeps talking about how he’s making big money working county contracts repairing power lines and that dudes keep frying themselves on the transistors but they’re earning hella h-pay on the union contract, so it’s worth it. So much h-pay that today he bought two ARs and one-thousand rounds. They’re in his car, he says. He says he could go grab them they’re so fucking legit. Ezekiel says sweet dude, six left corner and sinks a ball. The guy laughs and says that he needs an AR to even out this game. 

Kyle squints in this guy’s direction, looking up and down from a text message. White trash, Kid, just trash, he says quietly. AR guy rounds the table to take a shot. He looks at me. People from outside the crew have a way of singling me out. Sometimes they say that I look like a deer. 

AR guy keeps looking at me. Ever shoot an M-16, he asks. Squeeze off a couple hundred rounds; my buddy wasted so many dogs from the window of his Hummer. Ashley interrupts AR guy and says he’s from westside, be nice and sits up on the couch. Kyle shakes his head and rededicates himself to his text message. 

AR guy rounds the pool table. That right? You a liberal? Go to Starbucks? I’m thinking of saying something about the one time that I shot an M1A, but the guy laughs and looks away. That’s okay, we’re pretty tolerant over here. 

Ezekiel and AR guy rack the billiard balls and Ezekiel says break my balls but no one laughs because AR guy has unearthed Danny’s collection of porn DVD’s from behind the TV while chasing the escaped cue ball. 

Some real greatest hits, says AR guy. How about Fire Extinguisher 3? 

It isn’t a question. 

Kyle glances up. AR guy flips through the options menu of Fire Extinguisher 3. Ashley opens her eyes. She tells me to go make her a gin tonic.

I find a bottle of gin on the counter, but no tonic. I fill three red Solo cups with ice. I mix the gin with 7-Up. Danny sits outside with Wenger and another guy named Patrick. I overhear Wenger through the screen door telling them about a Western he’s reading about a gang led by a large man with full-body alopecia. The gang kills Indians, says Wegner, then they collect the scalps of the dead and sell them as souvenirs; it’s back at the bunkhouse if anyone wants to read it. 

I collect the three cups and head back into the living room where Ezekiel and AR guy circle around the pool table. Kyle raises his phone to take a photo of Ezekiel and AR guy, their silhouettes framed in the glow of the television. 

Kyle says that he’s doing some ethnographic research as he takes one of the cups from me. I stand next to the couch and let condensation from the cups drip onto Ashley’s hands. She sits up.

I’m not sure what to do at this point. 

Kyle puts down his phone and waves in the direction of Ezekiel and AR guy. They’re blocking the TV and Kyle says hey, I’m trying to watch this movie. Ashley says my god and Ezekiel and AR pause for a moment, look in our direction and then turn to face the TV. There’s a woman on her knees talking to someone she calls fire daddy. AR guy and Ezekiel watch from across the table. On the couch Ashley looks up. She says that from now on we call Greg fire daddy. Kyle says Jesus Christ, no. Danny walks into the living room from the kitchen and looks at the TV. Oh wow, some good clean fun.

Wenger follows Danny into the living room and sits on the couch arm. He looks at the TV. Did you know that most porn stars don’t make very much money, asks Wegner. Not much more than us, like only maybe $500 for a shoot that could last for two days. That’s about double what we make on regular time, but it might really limit your future options. Like what if you’re a nice girl who wants to become a kindergarten teacher, but there’s hundreds of hours of online videos of you gobbling down dicks? Imagine the PTA meetings. All the dads hiding boners. And it’s the novelty contracts that make money. If a girl gets signed for a line of toys, it’s just like sports equipment or whatever, like Air Jordans, but it’s Jenna’s silicon pussy. 

Danny tells Wegner to shut the fuck up and enjoy the show. He hands Wenger a beer from the case that he’s still carrying around. Ashley says that she’s going to start doing porn in the off-season instead of going back to school. Kyle tells her that her boobs are too small and Ashley replies not as small as your dick. Wenger spits into a beer can and continues. First time shoots get more money. First time anal like maybe $4,000, first time with multiple guys $6,000, but the price goes down afterwards, like a used car or something. One asshole, good for one single use only. It’s stupid. I don’t why they don’t just lie about it. Maybe there’s some central porn registry of names and various things they’ve done or haven’t yet done. 

I slouch lower onto the floor below the couch. I take a drink. The cup is slippery in my hand. 

It’s 1:21 a.m. and I’m lying under the pool table with my jacket as a pillow. Almost everyone has retreated to find quiet corners or empty bedrooms. A few too drunk or too sober stragglers move around. Kyle and Ashley sleep on the couch. Across the room, Ezekiel loads another DVD. 

I’ve resigned myself to the situation. I could go sleep in my car, but it’s cold outside. Ezekiel snaps open a DVD case and says it’s another titty movie. Kyle awakens, sits up and looks around wide-eyed. We’re still watching porn, he asks. The TV glows blue. Kyle lays his head back onto the couch. I’m fumbling in my jacket attempting to find my phone. I think that I maybe haven’t called my parents for almost three weeks and that a friend’s birthday might be tomorrow. 

On the first day of summer Greg likes to tell the story about how his first wife left him. Let me be honest with you, Greg says, this summer your life is going to go to shit and you’re going to love every minute of it. If you have a girlfriend, get used to not having one. When we’re gone, we’re gone. On dispatch there are no personal days. You can’t just run home to get your balls tickled. Your wife will fuck your friends, your dog will fuck your cat, and your cat will fuck your goldfish. 

The TV goes black and then a collage of orange skin. Ezekiel laughs, yells swallow that, and kicks my feet. He says that he’d like to give that pussy a moustache ride down to Mexico and back. Ezekiel ducks under the pool table and puts his face down next to mine. Hey Kid, this won the academy award for sucking dick. I sit up, but I get the spins. The TV splits into three screens and six hands and thirty red-tipped nails going about their work.

Harrison F. Dietzman worked for six years as a wildland firefighter with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. He lives in western Oregon with his wife, the poet Alisha Dietzman, and their two rescue cats, Frank Stanford and Ishmael. His writing appears in The Point, Guernica, Soft Union, and elsewhere.