Death has come for an old man, and he is ready! No more could be asked of his weary mortal being. But Divine Providence decides otherwise and so in his last mortal days a small, lost girl is sent to him. She hands him more time on Earth. His heroic nature has no choice but to accept; and so death takes a seat in a red velvet chair, crosses his leg and patiently waits.
THE RED FIRE ENGINE
By Timothy Jayne Sr.AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 Timothy Jayne Sr.
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4490-4567-8 Chapter One
The Old Man
The small girl's name was Sarah and she sat unobtrusively, very tiny, deep in the back seat of the large comfortable car her father was driving. The fallen leaves of the October evening blew across the road in dried, paralyzed shapes and confused patterns, like frightened mice with legs too small to see. The late evening sky was so deep a blue that the orange streak left by the setting sun mixed it into unnatural colors and patterns blotted by the slow moving clouds. It was a confused sky. Sarah, at the age of thirteen, did not understand why she felt lonely and confused about her thoughts. Perhaps it was the sudden move to Breeze Point - the newness of it all. One might have guessed the coming of womanhood. But it was not these, for this was Sarah's third school, and third town, and as to womanhood, it was way off in the future. The cause of the confusion and loneliness was a mental dimension that was not being nourished. Her body was nourished and her physical needs were well cared for. However her mother, father and teachers, who unlike Sarah did not have this mental dimension, had not the slightest idea how to enter into it, or bring her out of it, or even to bring nourishment to this special part of her mind. Her teachers were busy teaching the practical disciplines of Structure and Form to the normal children, and structure and form were Sarah's greatest source of confusion, a confusion for which she had no name. She had hardened a protective shield to guard her sanity against the blunt assaults of her peers, teachers and parents. The shield was an escape into her imagination. Sarah had finally learned to read in the fifth grade. From that moment on, she became a voracious reader; not fast, but steady. She read constantly, to the point of being forbidden from the library for one month, because the addiction consumed all her attention. Her teachers considered her reading habits impolite. It disrupted even their stubborn efforts to educate her. It was a time of too few teachers, and too many students. Standards relaxed to allow a free flow. Even if the students were not quite educated, they stumbled by while the administrators sighed and looked the other way. So Sarah had made it to the sixth grade. No one had looked out for her. It was too busy a world, too busy a time. Sarah's parents were thirty six years old, and they spoke of what they would do when they retired in twenty years. They could see clearly that the rest of their working days would be the usual monotonous performance of the same tasks. They would speak belligerently about their jobs but, when challenged, they were quick to defend the security, consistency of the paychecks, medical benefits and finally, the greatest goal of all, the retirement pension. The company provided housing, cared for them, and did a majority of their thinking for them. It even gave them a small country club for status. All the great textile company asked in return was that they stand and perform exactly the same task, every minute of every working day, for forty years. For this sacrifice the company fulfilled all their hopes and expectations. It gave them comfort, security, and status, but it did not give them imagination or spirit. In fact true imagination, even seeing such things as the incongruities in patterns of living, or intellectual nuances, (not to mention creativity,) belonged to areas of the mind that they had purposely blinded in order to have commonplace comfort in a world created from store-bought imagination.
Sarah's mind was yet an embryo of an enemy. An enemy to the sameness produced by a happy, unthinking, comfortable society. After all, in a free society, whose right was it to disturb a comfortable way of life? Sarah's mind was a virus to this world of complacency, but it was yet too small to be realized openly. It was just sensed by her teachers, who stamped on it as best they could when they were not powdering their noses. As the gradual reality that their daughter was not to be the center of proud attention, or lacked the popular charisma of the prom beauty, reached her parents Sarah slowly drifted into the back of her parent's mind. They never saw any reason to overcome their inertia, or mental indolence, to explore Sarah's mental facilities. To her parents Sarah had become something like a small, old family dog that made no effort to be noticed. They in turn responded with no attention, beyond regular feedings and lettings out. Sarah was simply there and that was all. Perhaps they would actually have been happier if she had merely been a pet. For after all, they did not see or realize, from the shallow exterior's survey, that there was an inner depth, in her, boiling with imagination, and it was being fed by the great storytellers of the past. She could imitate the ingenuity of the writer's methods for introducing characters. Using devices to hide some elements at the beginning of the story while withholding others, Sarah could allow the suspense to build, before the unexpected events unfolded. She was fascinated with new twists and turns of the plot. Sarah had a small circle of friends who delighted in her stories, especially the scary stories. Poe was her hero, Hamlet her prince, darting out of the madness of darkness with clear precise sanity only to hide in vague confusing shadows once again. Most of her friends had never heard of these authors and characters. Only her friends alone were awed by or even saw this great flame of creativeness, and Sarah would never dare to have shown anyone else for fear of chastisement. In the sixth grade, Sarah could not hold herself back. Her compositions began to disturb her teachers. If they had been clearly written, and directly and quickly readable, she might not have caused so much stir. But Sarah had developed her own punctuation and sentence structure, and at times her handwriting seemed gibberish. To the teachers, she was merely wrong and a sloppy, a fresh brat. Had her teachers taken the time they might have deciphered an interesting and complex study of characters that she had played carefully, with adroit accuracy from those around her.
The mental makeup of her characters often had sinister and murderous motives, cloaked within innocent exteriors. She thought of her characters as her puppets, in a world in which they would bow and scrape, or have gestures of bravado. At times she would pick up a thread of truth about her teacher, and work it into a play of characters. This ability charmed her small group of listeners. Yet to her teachers, this was not normal for a young girl. They conspired to watch gossip and warn the next year's teachers about her. Yet the amazing thing about Sarah's realistic fantasies was that they were not controlled by the subconscious desires of a young girl. She understood this, and her beautiful princes could be vain, with egotism that drove them into quite novel predicaments. Like a sculptor, Sarah fashioned her characters in the round, so that they were multi-faceted-both good and evil as well as complacent and revolutionary, and in that way realistic. She played heavily on tightly fitted contradictions taken from reality by studying carefully the people around her.
Sarah had almost given up writing, because of her inability to communicate in sentence structure form. At times, she wished she could simply write, without mixing up everything. A simple clich composition with cream puff clouds, and motherly mothers, and kind grandparents, like other children wrote. She could not. She became so frustrated with her confusion and unsympathetic teachers, that she would go on strike, and simply not participate. She could not understand what it was that they expected from her, because whatever she did, it always seemed wrong.
Sarah had not wanted to go to Breeze Point Firehouse this night, or in fact, any night. There was a resentful, furious knot of feeling inside her that made her even less socially accessible and all outward affability had disappeared.
"I go to school at eight in the morning and come home at two-thirty in the afternoon to an empty house. I let myself in, and I'm alone until Mom comes home at quarter of five. When there's no school I'm home all day by myself. Now, because it's dark, I have to be with Dad at a stupid firehouse because they worry about me being alone!" The car slowed and pulled up to the curb. A man the age of her father was standing there, dressed casually, just as an ordinary working man would be.
He jerked open the door to the car and her father said, "You look really ripe Jack, how's your head?" Jack got into the car and slumped down, spreading his legs slovenly. He played a colored toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. "I got a buzz, whatcha expect afta workin all day at da mill". Sarah's father said nothing, and after a slight pause the man continued "Yeah Rod, it's a real hick town, this Breeze Point. Let's hope this firehouse has some kick to it. Tell ya one thing, I'm gonna miss Raleigh, old reliant brigade had the stuff to keepa man upright. Those pretty little trinkets that hung around and cheered us doing our tournament chases. Makes a man 'preciate all his parts. Sure was fun. Gettin' to old for that good stuff though. Just gonna retire with my pool cue and slug some beers." Jack spoke with mock self pity. Rod gestured with his thumb to the back seat, and cautioned his friend. "Hey, cool the language, Sarah's back there. What! You brought her?" Jack asked incredulously, as if his buddy had done something stupid, ruining their evening.
"Had ta", said the driver. "It's shift night for Marge. Besides its just introduction night, some fella's gonna fill us in on what goes, be outta there by eight, unless your up to some eight ball?" The passenger answered the challenge, "Just try me, I got your number, and it ain't a winnin one."
Jack changed the subject "Maybe we can teach these creepy hicks a thing or two about fire fightin'- besides I like bein' a big frog in a little puddle for a change. They say these old Jersey barns burn bright and real hot at night. I need a few hot, bright ones once in awhile. Add the smell of cooked cow and what more could you ask for?"
Rod replied with a note of questioning caution, "Yeah, keep that kinda talk up and you'll be a candidate for arson."
The car wound its way to the gravel parking lot of the fire- house and the occupants got out. The men pulled their sleek wind breakers, and the small girl huddled into her camel hair coat until her oval face was hardly visible.
Rod opened the side door of the multi-door garage. The fire engines were all quietly at rest. Once inside, the two men shivered off the chilly night air as if it were snow by stamping and exhaling as they turned their bodies about. Sarah just stood coldly, still wishing she had not had come along. Jack looked around and was surprised by what he saw. "Not half bad, those are pretty fine pieces of equipment", he said as he perused each of the five engines, identifying them in the knowing manner of armature expert.
The night lights lit the great hall, like a structure giving the massive mechanical Behemoths an ominous presence that sent a thrill up their spines.
"Sure is bigger in here than you'd ever guess from the outside," said Rod. Both men's sense of arrogance had suddenly disappeared. They seemed a bit awed as they walked down the front of the building and started around the side of the last engine, and made a turn to walk down toward the engines rear. Now these two men had the usual common prejudices and presumptions that far overshadowed their senses of curiosity or adventure. Intellectualizing, or anything impractical, was not masculine. Showing tender emotion instead of jeering, was not in their character. But what the three onlookers came upon in the back of the garage left them abruptly and deeply confused. All other thoughts were eclipsed as they tried to sort out suddenly fractured
feelings of what they saw before them. If others had been around they might have tried to hide their emotions. They might have pretended not to have seen it, or simply treated the vision as something they were used to and had encountered many times. They had come upon this site too unprepared and too suddenly, to hide their feelings. "My God, the thing's all melted!" The voice had an echo in the great chamber. The other voice drew his sentence out, with an unbelieving gaze he said, "That was a fire engine once? Unbelievable!" There before them in a specially built alcove thirty feet long and ten feet deep, lay a great scorched fire engine, twisted and melted to the point that it's chassis was ridiculously askew. As one's eye traveled over the engine, its morbid curiosity was rewarded by what were, unmistakably, asbestos gloves melted into the grips of the fire cannon, as if some invisible man still held his station. A vague rusted shape of what looked like a partially rotted pumpkin had been blown into the area once occupied by the pressure gauges. Only a faded, flattened insignia told it had been a helmet.
Just under the gauges on the blackened steel running board, were the remains of a carbonized fireman's costume, as if some human being had fallen and remained as only a cremated ash. The steering wheel was gone and the spokes stood out, silhouetted on the alcove wall by the light. The great relic the onlookers had come upon so unexpectedly seemed to be hallowed in this sanctuary - almost like a tomb, where pharaohs might have been interred. The three shuddered inwardly at the sight they would never forget.
Silently and emotionally naked, the three onlookers moved away from the alcove and edged their way toward a vestibule separating the garage from the social hall. Once inside the vestibule, they curiously and quietly studied photographs, trophies and citations until Jack came to a glazed gilded frame, incasing a letter. "Gees, this one's from the White House. From President Eisenhower, something about bravery beyond the call of duty." At this point both men felt very confused. They were caught between their former prejudices and bravado toward the hick town, and actualities of what this evening had so far brought them. It was disconcerting enough for them to almost have abandoned the idea of joining, but neither knew the other's reactions, and each felt he must save face. The awkwardness of the two men was not shared by Sarah. For her, the incongruities and surprises fueled her imagination to the point of bursting. Although she had hated the idea of coming to the firehouse her imagination now flooded with thoughts of glory and went wild with speculation.
Rod broke the pervading silence with a challenge of eight ball and both men, followed by Sarah, went toward a sign that read "Day Room"
The dayroom, as it was called from an old army term, was actually used mostly at night by members of the fire company who were off duty or on night watch. It was a partially subterranean room, sixty feet long and twenty five feet wide. A slight dampness pervaded the atmosphere. The trio made their way down the steps and entered the room from the stairwell. They saw a succession of playing tables including pool, table tennis, and shuffle board. There were four smaller oval tables with chairs. These occupied two-thirds of the room. The last third was furnished with comfortable couches and stuffed chairs upholstered in a tasteless but durable fabric. Immediately the pool table captured the two men's attention. Almost frenzied they began setting up the game only to regress into a slow motion of exaggerated gestures. The carefully angled the long sticks then repositioned them. They called out numbers crisply before each shot. At intervals, they cursed and jeered challenges back and forth. For whatever the purpose was that these men came to the fire house was now lost, the game had taken over. Sarah, on the other hand was exploring this almost forbidden male environment with the curiosity of a ferret. She ran her fingers about the inlaid instrument rack, fumbling with the puck and bounced the ping-pong balls about until her attention was interrupted by the sound of rustling papers coming from behind the couch. Sarah could not see whoever or whatever created the noise. The table lamp on the right side did not diffuse much light because the shade was pulled askew, as if for reading
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE RED FIRE ENGINEby Timothy Jayne Sr. Copyright © 2009 by Timothy Jayne Sr.. Excerpted by permission.
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