I was still holding the receiver. I don't know how I came to have it. The captain must have handed it back to me at some point on the porch and I'd never noticed. I looked down at it. The red light on top was dark. Then it flickered, and came on, weak, and through the hiss I heard my grandfather. He wasn't snoring. He was awake, in the front room across the alley, a hundred and twenty steps away, and he was singing. Yippie-yi-ay. Yippie-yi-oh. Ghost riders in the sky.
I ran. A hundred and twenty steps, across Evans behind the engine and down the side of the station and across the alley and through our back gate, and it took me a lot longer than forty-four seconds because I fell on the ice in the alley and tore the knee out of my corduroys, and I didn't feel it until later.
Bert was sitting on the couch in his unlaced boots with his hands between his knees. My grandfather had gotten out of the recliner. I don't know how. He couldn't stand up without someone holding his belt, he hadn't stood up by himself since June, but he was standing at the side window with his good hand flat against the wall and his bad hand curled up against his chest, and he was looking out, up the alley, at the red lights going around and around on the houses along Evans. Bert said he'd been there when he came in. Bert said he'd been afraid to touch him in case he fell.
"Grandpa," I said.
He turned his head. His face came up the way it did and got stuck, and then it didn't. "Cold," he said. He took his hand off the wall and pointed out the window, toward Evans, toward the roofs. "Cold. The. Casa. No humo." No smoke. "Two days. Three. No humo, mijo."
I went and stood next to him and looked where he was pointing. You couldn't see much from that window. The back of the firehouse, and a slice of Evans Avenue between the firehouse and the Lovatos' garage, and over the top of everything, the roofs and the chimneys of the houses across the street. Every one of them had smoke coming out of it, white and torn in the wind. Except one. The green one. The Gurulé house. My grandfather had stood thirty-eight years in front of a blast furnace, and he knew what a fire was supposed to look like and what it meant when there wasn't one, and he'd been sitting in that recliner watching the chimneys for days. He'd been trying to tell me since the minute I walked in. He'd taken my wrist and tried to tell me, and I'd thought he was being sad, and I'd waited for him to fall asleep so I could leave.
I put my arms around him from the side, careful of his bad arm, the way the therapist had shown us, and held onto his belt with one hand so he wouldn't fall, and we stood there at the window together and watched the red lights go around. He was trembling. So was I.