The Volunteer

Milton Renner stood in the parking lot of the North Haven Courier building and stared at the flyer taped to the window. VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS NEEDED. NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED. He read it three times.

Six weeks earlier, Milton had burned down a toolshed. He hadn't meant to. He had been trying to get rid of a wasp nest with a can of hairspray and a lighter, a method he found on a forum, and the wasp nest was fine but the shed was not. Detective Smitty and Detective Daryl had come out to look at it, mostly because the shed belonged to Bill Halloran, and Bill Halloran did not believe in accidents.

"You're telling me you set your own shed on fire," Smitty had said.

"I'm telling you the wasps started it," Milton said.

Daryl had crouched next to the char marks and looked up at Milton with an expression that could have meant anything. "Wasps don't use lighters, Milton."

The case got closed as an accident. Nobody could think of a motive. Milton had spent the following month being the punchline at Judd's Tavern. Somebody had started calling him Smoky. It was not affectionate.

Now he stood in the parking lot and thought about the flyer. He thought about redemption. He thought specifically about walking into Judd's Tavern as a volunteer firefighter instead of as the guy who burned down a shed with hairspray. He took the flyer off the window and folded it into his jacket pocket.

He signed up the next morning.

The North Haven Volunteer Fire Department trained out of a metal building behind the marina, and the captain was a woman named Dorothy Voss who had been doing this for twenty-two years and had, by her own count, pulled four people and one goat out of burning structures. She looked at Milton's application and then at Milton.

"You're the shed guy," she said.

"I prefer volunteer," Milton said.

"I bet you do."

She signed him up anyway, because the department was short two members and because, as she told her husband Walter that night, everybody deserved a second chance, even if the first chance had involved hairspray as an accelerant.

Milton's first training session was on Tuesday. There were four other recruits: a teenager named Kyle Sutter who wanted it for his college applications, a retired schoolteacher named Phyllis Wexler who wanted something to do, a young man named Wade Prescott who worked the ferry dock, and a woman named Bev Colby who worked the counter at Baxter's Bakery and had joined because her cousin died in a fire in Ohio and she never wanted to feel that helpless again.

Dorothy started with equipment. She held up a heavy canvas coat and explained the weight distribution, the reflective striping, the reason it went on before the boots and not after. Milton put his coat on backward. Nobody noticed until he tried to zip it and couldn't find the zipper.

"It's in the back," Kyle said.

"I know that," Milton said, and turned the coat around while everyone watched.

Dorothy moved on to the hoses. She explained water pressure, how a charged line could knock a grown man flat if he wasn't braced, how two people were supposed to hold it, not one. She demonstrated the stance. She had Phyllis and Wade try it first, and they held the hose steady while Dorothy opened the valve halfway.

Then it was Milton's turn. He stood the way Dorothy had shown him and gripped the hose the same way. Dorothy opened the valve, and the hose came alive, knocking Milton backward into a stack of orange traffic cones, which fell over and rolled in four directions across the parking lot.

"You're supposed to brace," Dorothy said.

"I braced," Milton said, from the ground.

"You braced for a garden hose. This isn't a garden hose."

Bev helped him up. She had flour on her sleeve from the bakery, and it got on Milton's jacket, and he didn't notice until later, when he looked like he'd been dusted for a crime scene.

The second week covered ladders. Milton was afraid of heights, though he hadn't mentioned this on the application. The application hadn't asked. He found this out about himself at the top of a twenty-four-foot extension ladder propped against the side of the training building. Dorothy had asked him to simulate a window rescue using a mannequin named Gary that the department kept for this purpose.

Milton got to the twelfth rung and stopped.

"Keep going," Dorothy called up.

"I'm going," Milton said, without moving.

"You're not going. You're standing there."

"I'm assessing."

"Assess faster."

Milton looked down. The ground seemed farther away than twelve rungs should account for. His stomach disagreed with the logic. He looked at Gary the mannequin, propped in the window above him, waiting to be rescued by a man who could not move.

"Somebody's going to have to rescue Gary," Milton said.

"Milton."

"I think I need a minute."

Below him, Kyle turned to Wade. "Is he stuck?"

"He's stuck," Wade said.

Dorothy climbed a second ladder to a spot just below Milton and talked him down one rung at a time, using the same calm voice she used on actual civilians. Milton had gotten himself into this situation voluntarily, having signed up for it himself, a fact Dorothy repeated to him twice during the descent.

At the bottom, Milton sat on the curb and put his head between his knees. Phyllis brought him a cup of water from the cooler.

"First day I climbed that ladder, I got sick in my helmet," Phyllis told him. "Nobody's perfect."

"Did you keep going?"

"I did."

"Why?"

Phyllis considered this. "Because the alternative was going home and telling my husband I quit the fire department because of a ladder, and that felt worse than the ladder."

"I thought you lived alone," Milton said.

"I do now," Phyllis said. "Point still stands."

Milton thought about Judd's Tavern. He thought about Smoky. He drank the water and stood up.

Word got around town, as it did in North Haven, that Milton Renner was training to be a firefighter. Jack Bardo, editor of the Courier, heard about it from his assistant and decided it merited a small item in the community section, because everyone in town already knew Milton as the shed guy, and a man who burned down a shed with hairspray joining the fire department was too good to leave out of the paper.

He called Milton for a quote.

"How do you feel about the training so far?" Jack asked.

"Good," Milton said. "Really good."

"Anything specific you want people to know?"

Milton thought about the ladder. He thought about the cones. He thought about the fact that during a search-and-rescue drill the week before, he had gotten his own air tank tangled in a folding chair and had to be extracted by Wade, who did not let him forget it.

"Tell them I'm learning a lot," Milton said.

The item ran under the headline LOCAL MAN TRADES ACCIDENTAL ARSON FOR FIRE TRAINING, which Milton felt was uncharitable, although Jack maintained it was factually accurate, and the Courier did not print anything that wasn't true.

Smitty read the item over coffee at the diner. He showed it to Daryl.

"Milton Renner's joining the fire department," Smitty said.

Daryl read the headline. "That's either the best idea anyone's had this year or the worst one."

"I want to see this."

"Me too."

They started stopping by the training sessions on their lunch breaks, ostensibly because they were friendly with Dorothy, actually because Milton in fire gear was entertaining to watch. Linda Asher came along twice, once bringing donuts, which Milton appreciated until Bev pointed out the department had a strict no-food-near-equipment rule that Milton had apparently forgotten, and he ended up eating a donut standing six feet from the ladder truck, watched by everyone, like a man on parole.

The final week of basic training covered live fire, using a controlled burn set up in a steel container behind the building. Dorothy explained that this was the test, the thing that separated people who thought they could do this from people who actually could. She explained flashover, the point at which a room got hot enough that everything in it ignited at once, and she explained why they trained for it in a controlled setting instead of finding out about it during an actual house fire.

"Everybody goes in pairs," Dorothy said. "Nobody goes in alone."

She paired Milton with Wade. Wade was the calmest person in the group, and Dorothy figured he could compensate for whatever Milton brought to the situation. Which by that point in the training had included two dropped hoses, one ladder incident, and a moment during CPR practice on a dummy where Milton had gotten so into the compressions that he broke the clicker inside its chest, the little mechanism that told you when you'd pushed hard enough.

They suited up. Milton's hands were shaking, though he tried to hide it by keeping them in fists.

"You good?" Wade asked.

"I'm good."

"You don't look good."

"I'm good, Wade."

Dorothy briefed them one more time. Stay together. Feel the door before opening it. Crawl, don't walk. Milton nodded at each instruction, and by the time they reached the container door, he had, in fact, absorbed most of it, because fear turned out to be an excellent teacher.

Inside, the smoke was thick. The training fire burned low and controlled in a metal drum in the corner, set up just as Dorothy had done it a hundred times before. Milton crawled behind Wade, one hand on the wall, the position he'd been taught to hold. He felt the heat build as they got closer to the drum. He felt and heard his own breathing get loud inside the mask.

Wade swept his flashlight across the floor and found Gary the mannequin, positioned near a fake window for the day's exercise.

"There," Wade said, muffled through his mask.

They got Gary between them and started back toward the door, and that was when Milton's foot caught on a support beam that had not been there during the walkthrough — a piece of scaffolding Dorothy had added that morning to complicate things, because real fires complicated things — and Milton went down.

He didn't panic. This surprised him more than anyone.

He'd gone down before, on the ladder, in the parking lot with the hose, and each time some part of his brain had gone somewhere else, somewhere unhelpful. This time, on the floor of a smoke-filled steel container, with Wade's boots six inches from his face, Milton thought: get up, and got up.

He grabbed Gary's other arm. They finished the drag to the door.

Outside, Dorothy pulled her stopwatch and looked at it, then looked at Milton.

"You fell," she said.

"I fell," Milton agreed.

"And?"

"And I got back up."

Dorothy nodded. It was the nod she gave when something met a standard she'd never said out loud. "That's the job, Milton. Half of it is falling in a smoke-filled room and getting back up anyway."

"What's the other half?"

"Paperwork," Wade said, pulling off his mask, and Kyle, who'd been watching from outside with Phyllis and Bev, laughed hard enough that he had to sit down on the curb.

Milton graduated from basic training on a Saturday in October, along with Kyle, Phyllis, Wade, and Bev. The ceremony took place in the metal building behind the marina, with folding chairs set up in rows and a sheet cake from Baxter's Bakery that said CONGRATULATIONS VOLUNTEERS in blue icing, slightly crooked, because Bev had iced it herself at five that morning before her shift, since Stanley Baxter didn't do the decorating.

Half the town showed up. Smitty and Daryl sat in the back row. Jack Bardo brought a photographer for the Courier. Linda Asher sat next to Milton's aunt, who had driven up from downstate and cried through the entire thing, which embarrassed Milton until he noticed Phyllis's neighbor crying too, and decided it was probably normal.

Dorothy handed out certificates one at a time. When she got to Milton, she paused.

"Milton Renner," she said. "Six weeks ago this man told two detectives that wasps started a fire using a lighter."

The room laughed. Smitty put his face in his hands.

"Today he's a certified volunteer firefighter for the North Haven Fire Department," Dorothy said. "I don't know what that says about second chances. I don't know what it says about wasps either. But he showed up every week, and he fell more than anyone I've trained in twenty-two years, and he got back up every single time. That's the only qualification that matters."

She handed him the certificate. Milton took it with both hands because his hands were shaking again, though this time it wasn't fear.

Afterward, at the cake table, Jack Bardo asked him for one more quote for a follow-up piece.

"What's next for you, Milton?"

Milton thought about it. He thought about the ladder, and the hose, and Gary's broken clicker, and the scaffolding on the floor of the container, and Dorothy's stopwatch, and the six weeks that had turned him from a punchline into a person who could drag a mannequin out of a burning room without losing his nerve.

"I'm going to buy a new lighter," Milton said. "For candles. Only candles."

Jack wrote it down, verbatim, and it ran in the Courier the following Thursday, right under a photo of Milton in his volunteer gear, holding a certificate, grinning like a man who had, against every available piece of evidence, figured something out.

At Judd's Tavern that Friday, nobody called him Smoky. Somebody bought him a beer and asked him what a flashover was. Milton set the beer down and used both hands to show the shape of it, how the smoke banked along the ceiling, and the entire room went up at once. He was still explaining it twenty minutes later when Dorothy walked in, ordered a round, and told him to let the man finish his drink.