I didn't answer. I didn't have to.
"I've known your grandfather since I was nineteen years old," the captain said. "He pulled my cousin Albino out of a slag pit in 1953 with his own two hands, did you know that? Burned both hands doing it. That's what those scars are. He never told you. He wouldn't." He turned his helmet over in his hands and looked into it. "I'm not going to tell you what you did was all right. It wasn't. I'm going to tell you something else and you can do what you want with it. Every man on that crew today did his job, and the dog did hers, and you did yours. You heard it. You heard it and you said so out loud, and you didn't hide it, even though it meant everybody was going to find out what you'd been doing. That's the job, Eloy. That's the whole job. The rest of it is just hose."
My mother came home at eight o'clock, three and three-quarter hours early, still in her white uniform and her white shoes under her coat, and I was waiting for her in the kitchen. I'd thought all evening about what I was going to say, and when she came in the back door I didn't say any of it. She stood in the doorway and looked at me, and I looked at her, and she put her purse down on the counter very carefully, and she said, "Eloy," in a voice I had never heard her use, and I started to cry, and so did she. She did not hit me. She did not yell, then. She held onto me so hard my face got squashed against the name tag on her uniform, SOCORRO A., LPN, and it left a mark on my cheek that was still there in the morning.
She yelled later. She yelled plenty, over the next week. I was not allowed at the firehouse for a month. I was not allowed to watch television for a month, which was a hard thing, that particular night, with the whole country watching the same show. And I want to say it was fair, and it was.
But that first night, the night of the twenty-eighth, she didn't make me stay home. Captain Ulibarri asked her, standing in our kitchen with his helmet under his arm, if she and her father and her son would come across the alley at eight-thirty and watch the end of M*A*S*H on Hank Dolezal's nineteen-inch Zenith, because Hank had already turned it on and he said it was a sin to watch the last of anything alone. My mother looked at him a long time. Then she looked at me. Then she went and got my grandfather's coat.
So I watched the last episode of M*A*S*H in the kitchen of Station 4, with an hour of my month of no television suspended by special order of a fire captain, with my grandfather in a wheelchair we'd borrowed from the hospital closet and pushed across the alley over the ice with Chuy and Bert each holding a side, and my mother in a station chair still in her uniform, holding a cup of coffee she never drank. Ingot lay on the floor across my grandfather's feet, the whole length of her, leaning, and every so often he'd reach down with his good hand and rub her black ear, and she'd groan. The bell went off once, at a quarter to ten, a car fire on the interstate, and the men ran, and my mother and my grandfather and I sat there and watched Hawkeye in the hospital with the psychiatrist and waited, and when they came back smelling like rubber and burnt upholstery, Chuy said, "What'd we miss," and my grandfather said, "Mucho," clear as a bell, and the whole kitchen laughed.