The Fireman by Joe Hill Read Free Book Online

their shuffling way along the sidewalk, traveling a few paces more. She rested her head on his biceps and shut her eyes. A few steps later he tightened his arm around her. She had been drifting, half-asleep on her feet, and stumbled.
    “Hey,” he said. “No more of that. Look. We have to get you home. Get on.” He threw his leg over the saddle of the bike.
    “Get on where?”
    “The basket,” he said.
    “We can’t. I can’t.”
    “You can. You have before. I’ll ride you home.”
    “It’s a mile.”
    “It’s downhill the whole way. Get on.”
    This was something they had done in college, goofing, her up on the basket on the front of his bike. She was a slip of a girl then and was not much more now, five foot six and 115 pounds. She looked at the basket, resting between his handlebars, then at the long hill, banking down away from the hospital and around a curve.
    “You’ll kill me,” she said.
    “No. Not today. Get on.”
    She couldn’t resist him. There was a part of her that inclined naturally toward passivity, toward accommodation. She came around the front of the bike, put a leg over the wheel, and then scootched her butt up onto the basket.
    And all at once they were off, the trees on her right beginning to glide gently by. The ash fell around them in enormous feathery flakes, falling in her hair and onto the brim of his baseball cap. In no time at all, they were going fast enough to be killed.
    The spokes whirred. When she exhaled, the air was torn from her mouth.
    A person forgot that time and space were the same thing until they were moving quickly, until pine trees and telephone poles were snapping past them. Then, in the middle of all the rush, time expanded, so that the second it took to cross twenty feet lasted longer than other seconds. She felt that sense of acceleration in her temples and the pit of her stomach and she was glad for Jakob and glad to be away from the hospital and glad for speed. For a while she clutched the basket with both hands, but then, when the spokes began to hum—whirring so fast they made a kind of droning music—she let go, and held her arms out to either side, and soared, a gull sailing into the wind, while the world sped up, and sped up.

 
    UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
    ....................................
    6
    The night of the hospital fire, Jakob led her through the house, and she yawned over and over, like a child up past her bedtime. She felt lightly sedated, awake but thoughtless, so that she never knew what was going to happen to her next, even when what was going to happen next was entirely predictable. He walked her down to the bedroom, holding her little hand. That was all right. She was tired and the bedroom seemed like the right place to go. Then he peeled her out of her nurse greens while she stood there and let him. She had on pale pink old-lady underwear that came to her belly button. He tugged those down as well. She yawned hugely and put her hand over her mouth and he laughed because he had been leaning in to kiss her. She laughed, too. It was funny, yawning in his face that way.
    The night of the hospital fire, he drew her a bath in the deep claw-footed tub that she loved so. She didn’t know when he walked away from her to do it, because it seemed he never left her side, but when he led her in there, the tub was already full. The lights were off, but there were candles. She was happy to see the bath because she smelled like smoke and sweat and the hospital, but mostly smoke, and she had ash on her, and some of that ash was probably dead bodies.
    The night of the hospital fire, Jakob laved water over her back with a washcloth. He scrubbed her neck and ears, and then collected her hair on the top of her head and dunked her. She came up laughing. He laughed, too, and dunked her again, and when she came up, she opened her mouth to yawn, and it turned into a kiss instead. Then he told her to get up, and she stood in