They should teach you that in school.’

I looked at the men around me. Most of them were not dressed warmly enough and were shifting from foot to foot. They looked like men used to work, though they did not seem glad to be going to fight a fire at night. None of them looked like my father, who seemed eager.

‘What will you do out there?’ I said.

‘Work on a fire line,’ my father said. ‘They dig trenches the fire won’t cross. I don’t know much more, to tell you the truth.’ He put his hands in his jacket pockets and blew down into his shirt. ‘I’ve got this hum in my head now. I need to do something about it.’

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘Tell your mother I didn’t mean to make her mad.’

‘I will,’ I said.

‘We don’t want to wake up in our coffins, though, do we? That’d be a rude surprise.’ He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me close to him and squeezed me and laughed an odd little laugh, as if the idea had actually given him a scare. He looked across Central Avenue at the Pheasant Lounge, the place I had seen him go into the week before. On the red neon sign over the door a big cock pheasant was busting up into the night air, its wings stretched into the darkness–escaping. Some men waiting at the Masonic Temple had begun to go across the street into the bar. ‘I’m only thinking about right this minute now,’ he said. He squeezed my shoulder again, then put his hands back into his jacket pockets. ‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘I’m a little cold,’ I said.

‘Then go back home,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to watch me get on a bus. It might be a long time. Your mother’s probably thinking about you.’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘She doesn’t need to get mad at you. She’s mad enough at me.’

I looked at my father. I tried to see his face in the streetlight. He was smiling and looking at me, and I think he was happy for that moment, happy for me to be with him, happy that he was going to a fire now to risk whatever he cared about risking. It seemed strange to me, though, that he could be a man who played golf for a living and then one day become a man who fought forest fires. But it’s what was happening, and I thought I would get used to it.

‘Are you too old now to give your old dad a kiss?’ my father said. ‘Men love each other, too. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. And he took my cheeks in his hands and kissed me on the mouth, and squeezed my face. His breath smelled sweet to me and his face was rough.

‘Don’t let what your parents do disappoint you,’ he said.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I won’t.’ I felt afraid then for some reason, and I thought if I stayed there I would show him that I was, so I turned around and started back up Central in the dark and the growing cold. When I got to the corner I turned to wave good-bye. But my father was not in sight, and I thought that he had already gotten onto the bus and was waiting in his seat among the Indians.

Chapter 3

When I got home the lights were still on in our house. My mother was watching television in her bedroom, still dressed, and drinking a glass of beer. When I came in the door she looked at me as if I was my father and whatever she thought about him she thought about me, too.

‘Is he gone off to fight the big fire now?’ she said.