I heard her. I promised. And for the first five months, August through December, I kept it.
I want to say I broke it for a good reason. I didn't, really. I broke it because I was eleven, and because the house was very quiet, and because my grandfather slept every afternoon from four o'clock until five-thirty or six like he'd been switched off, and because the front room smelled like Ben-Gay and the plastic sheet on the hospital bed, and because the television only got four channels and one of them was snow. I broke it because my father was in Wyoming and my mother was at the hospital and nobody in that house had laughed out loud since June. And I broke it because, across the alley from our back gate, close enough to hit with a rock, there was a firehouse full of men who did laugh out loud, and a dog.
I'd been going to Station 4 since I was seven. All the kids on Spruce Street had, at some point. The firemen let you sit in the driver's seat of the engine if you asked, and they let you ring the bell on the front of it once, only once, and they had a Coke machine in the bay that still sold bottles for a quarter. I could tell you the gallons per minute of the pump on Engine 4, which was a 1974 American LaFrance with an open cab and a chrome bell on the front bumper, and I could tell you how many feet of hose were packed in the bed, and I knew what every hook and coupling and bar on the side of it was for.
Captain Salvador Ulibarri had come up in the department with my grandfather's cousin, and he had known my grandfather since before I was born. He was a short wide man with a gray crew cut and a mustache he trimmed every morning with a pair of tiny scissors in the station bathroom, and he did the Rocky Mountain News crossword every day in ink and never, that I saw, got one wrong. He talked slowly and not much. When the firemen were horsing around he'd say "Gentlemen," and they would stop, not because he raised his voice but because he never had to.
Hank Dolezal was the engineer, which meant he drove the engine and ran the pump. He was the oldest man on the crew, older than the captain, a big pink-faced Bohemian whose father had worked the coke ovens, and he complained about everything, the coffee and the city and the Denver Broncos and his knees and the youth of today, and he was the kindest person in the building. He kept a box of Milk-Bones in his locker and a box of Lemonheads for kids, and he never once let a kid leave the station without one or the other, sometimes both.
Chuy Romero was twenty-four, the rookie, though he'd been on the job two years. He had a Walkman, a silver Sony with orange foam on the headphones, and he wore it around his neck even when it wasn't playing, the way some men wear a cross. He was always trying to get the other men to listen to Men at Work or the Clash. And there was Bert Brosky, the fourth man, a quiet man with a Fu Manchu who worked a second job laying carpet and fell asleep in the recliner every day by four.
That was B shift, twenty-four hours on and forty-eight off, and B shift was mine.