"And then what?" I asked gently.
He scowled. "I'm tellin' you man." He said. "I've spent all this time working on my legs and my endurance because that's the main part of the test. But I never worked on my fucking arms. When I started pulling the hose up the rope I knew I was in trouble. I never realized how fucking heavy a forty-pound roll of hose is when you try to hoist it up hand over hand. By the time I got it halfway up my forearms were screaming. When I got it up to the ledge and tried to pull it in, they weren't working right. I dropped the rope and the hose fell back to the bottom." He sniffed a little. "Automatic disqualification."
I looked over at him, trying to think of something to say. Like Mike, I'd never considered there would be difficulty with this part of the test. When I'd taken it I hadn't worked my arms either. But I'd also spent the previous two years constantly lifting gurneys with human beings on them from floor level to loading position. Actions which had strengthened my arms to the point that a forty pound roll of hose was nothing. But Mike had never done such a thing. His arms were used to lifting nothing heavier than beer cans.
"I'm sorry Man." I told him. "I know how much you wanted this."
He nodded, pulling out a joint as we reached our standard smoking spot. "That kinda shit happens." He told me. "Oh well. There's always next year, I guess. I'll be sure to have my damn arms built up by then."
We smoked the joint together but it didn't improve his mood much. He was in the middle of a black depression. I hoped he would come out of it soon. I didn't like seeing him that way.
As June wound onward a good portion of my time was taken up by work. Other idle time was used in researching and filling out the complex paperwork involved in applying for the college of my choice; the University of Washington at Seattle. There was also the paperwork involved in applying for the academic scholarship I was shooting for. Nina's time was taken up by much of the same process.
But it was summer and these pursuits did leave time for other pursuits. One of them was my Dad's boat. It was a twenty-foot jet boat capable of seating eight and pulling a skier out of the water in nothing flat. He'd purchased it during the height of his financial irresponsibility stage and our family had enjoyed it for about three good years. Since then it had pretty much sat in disuse in our garage, it's engine broken, it's paint faded, it's hull being used as extensive storage space for household items.
I myself had owned a small boat in my own financial irresponsible period in my first life. I'd finally sold it to help pay off a few credit card debts.
But the fever to be out on the water had stayed with me. I'd gotten Dad's tacit permission to put the boat back into serviceable condition if I could.
I knew I was not capable of doing this on my own but I also knew that Mike knew a considerable amount about engines and mechanics thanks to his dad.
And so Mike became a constant fixture at my house during the latter part of June during the morning hours before I went to work and on the weekend. We unloaded all of the crap from the boat and stored it elsewhere. We cleaned up the hull. And finally we dove into the engine compartment to try to find the source of the "engine doesn't work" problem that my dad had described. The work seemed therapeutic for Mike in a way and it served to put us closer together. For the first time since my return I was seeing an actual maturity in my friend, actually feeling kinship with him instead of tired resignation.
He discovered the source of the problem quickly, shortly after we'd installed a fresh battery, changed the plugs, oil, and fluids, and attempted to fire up the Chevy engine for the first time. He listened with a practiced ear to the pathetic idling of the engine, looked into the compartment for a moment, and then told me to shut it down.
"Head gasket is blown." He told me happily.
"Okay." I said, not knowing what that meant. Like my old man I knew next to nothing about the internal combustion engine. "Can we fix it?"
"Are you serious?" He asked, shaking his head.
"What do you mean?"
"I can do it in a day for less than a hundred bucks." He told me. "The head gasket is the seal between the head and the engine block. If it's blown it fucks up the compression and lets oil and shit spray out. That keeps the engine from running or from cooling right. If that's all that's wrong, we'll have this thing up and running next weekend."
"No shit?" I asked, impressed.
"No shit." He answered happily.
So the next Saturday he came over at nine in the morning and we went to work. First we visited the auto parts store where he requested the appropriate parts and I paid for them. We took them back to my garage and he opened his toolbox. We went to work, me very much in the apprentice mode.
I had noticed that he was preoccupied with something else throughout the day but I didn't broach the subject. Mike was not the kind of person you tried to draw out. If he wanted to tell you what was wrong, he would do it. If he didn't, you weren't going to get it out of him.
It was after we'd removed the head and placed it on some newspapers on the garage floor along with all of the other parts, as he was scraping the old gasket off, that he finally spilled it. Our hands were grimy and greasy and both of us were dripping sweat from the high humidity. We were both drinking cans of beer that my Dad had supplied us with.
"I'm thinking about joining the Air Force." He told me, scraping away with a razor.
That one sentence sent chills through my body, even before my mind completely processed it. The Air Force? I could almost feel fate pulling at Mike, could almost sense it as a hostile, aware presence in the garage with us, a cloaked figure with a satisfied smile on it's face.
"What did you say?" I asked quietly, hoping I hadn't heard him right, or that he was merely joking with me.
"The Air Force." He repeated, grinding away at a stubborn piece of gasket. "I got a call from this recruiter guy the other day and I talked to him about twenty minutes. He was a really cool guy."
A really cool guy. Not surprising. Recruiters were, after all, salesmen. A good one would have gone out of his way to learn the lingo of his target group and would talk just like a teenager, even if he was a fifty year old man. They were paid to seduce the young and they were good at it.
"What did he say?" I asked, my mind in overdrive trying to think of a way to counter this situation.
"Well we talked for a little bit." He said. "And I told him that I was interested in firefighting. He says that every Air Force Base, everywhere in the world, has a fire department. They handle all of the medical aids and fires on the base housing. They also get extensive training in aircraft fires and rescue. If I spent four years in doing that it would almost guarantee me a job when I got out. Think of how that would look on my resume, being trained in aircraft suppression, HAZMAT, and with four years of practical experience doing it."
I realized two things as I listened to him. One, was that he was repeating, almost word for word, what the recruiter had thrown at him. Mike would never have said anything like "resume" or "practical experience". The second thing was that he was seeking my approval of his plan. Whether he was doing it unconsciously or consciously, he was running his idea by me hoping I'd say it was a great one. This gave me hope that I could divert him from what I was sure would be a destructive path. I had no illusions about what would happen if Mike joined the Air Force. But I needed to do it carefully. If I pushed too hard, my words would have the opposite effect that I intended.