Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 40

There’s a car coming down Hexagon Road full of high school girls, the kind who come to squeal at the firemen and the firemen wave back and say Show us your tits! and the girls scream and roar off and the firemen laugh like it’s the funniest thing in the world and their wives bite their lips and go inside. Sometimes high school boys come out here too, but at night, and to throw rocks and honk squeal their tires on a dare, but they always get trapped at the end of the street and then the firemen play with them, scaring them and taking their keys and making them walk home through the woods and bringing their vehicles back to their parents in the morning who fall all over themselves to say how sorry they are, and the firemen say it’s cool, kids are kids, but by themselves they say if I get the chance I’m letting that asshole’s house burn.

There are some people who hate the firemen, as bizarre to the boys as any life form drug up from the deep, deep sea, but they are rare – mostly the firemen are clapped on the back wherever they go, and if they try to take out their wallets when they eat or see a movie or stop to fill up on gas they are told to put that away. There isn’t a person in town who isn’t related in some way to the men saved from the ’58 fire at the Darlington Steel & Wire mill, and the man that saved them was your own father, just ten years old then.