Four of a Kind by Philip Soletsky

Author:Philip Soletsky [Soletsky, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781729043813
Published: 2018-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Dirty Little Secrets

by

Philip Soletsky

One

Funerals. Damn but I’ve been going to a lot of these recently.

I stood with the other Dunboro firefighters, twenty-seven of us in three rows of nine facing the open grave. The white-enameled, flag-draped coffin was suspended above it on heavy canvas straps. We stood at attention; spiffy in our class A uniforms with brass buttons gleaming, as the strains of Amazing Grace from the bagpipe corps floated through the air. My dress blues were fresh from the cleaners, the seams sharp and crisp. The department insignia and my rank medallions were polished and perfectly aligned on my collars. My name tag, Jack Fallon, Firefighter, was exactly square to the line of the breast shirt pocket. We all took great pride in our appearance, and in full regalia the Dunboro Volunteer Fire Department made quite a sight.

The rest of the mourners sat on the other side of the grave on folding chairs. They were civilians here, apart from us. We were burying Ellis Banks, one of our own, a retired Chief no less. Dunboro is a small town in New Hampshire and we have a small fire department. Each death, even of an elderly and long retired member, is an emotional blow.

The widow and her two sons sat under a tent between the two groups at the head of the grave, physically and psychologically belonging to neither.

The town cemetery had an unreal quality about it, the white picket fence too perfect, the grass mown recently and almost too evenly emerald green. The graves lay, not in orderly rows, but in circles and whorls, clustered together by ancient clans and old blood. The physicist half of my brain began to play connect-the-dots, the positions of the markers forming segments which joined and spread creating fractals, molecules, and strands of DNA.

Perhaps the heat was getting to me.

The air was a suffocating blanket of humidity and we were tormented by swarms of mosquitoes. Both were due to an exceptionally rainy spring, one that had burst a dam in our sleepy little town, destroying seven houses and a section of roadway in downtown. Brookline to our south had had even more damage, and Townsend, Massachusetts south of that had been declared a disaster area. I had my own personal reminders of the flood, I thought as I leaned uncomfortably on my cane. I had been caught behind the dam when it blew and was lucky I wasn’t dead. My injuries, as bad as they were, could and probably should have been much worse.

Beyond the fact that I sometimes used a cane and often walked with a limp, outwardly my face was the worst of it. What had started as a short line of stitches up near my hairline had become infected. To drain the accumulated pus the cut had been elongated. It now meandered like a strip of N-gauge model railroad track across my forehead and down my right cheek. The antibiotics were still having a hard time getting a handle on it, and the wound felt hot, swollen, and angry.

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