Matthew Socia

 Matthew Socia

The Tire Fire

This is the only story I could have chosen for this exercise—and I’m committed to trying everything—so here’s the tire fire story, written best as I remember, as was recommended.

The tire fire burned from about Thanksgiving to mid-January. I was thirteen, oblivious to the news until I saw the fire myself from the top of a sledding hill. The thickness of the smoke was what struck me first, and then the way it leaned in the wind, unfurling like an endless curtain. I had come to the sledding hill with a friend named Travis, though if anyone were to read this I would want to conceal his name. Travis and I stared at the slow-rising smoke from the hilltop, holding our plastic sleds, no longer thinking about sledding. Soon my throat began to tingle when I breathed, as if some invisible rubber particulates were adhering to my insides. That sensation in my throat is what I remember most from the hilltop, and though the tingling was probably just from mouth-breathing northern Michigan’s icy, late-November air, I blamed the possible arsonist, I blamed the buffoons at the dump who couldn’t manage their own garbage, I blamed the firefighters for being unable to quell the flame.

“It’s near one of the trailer parks,” Travis said. “I bet the whole place burns down.”

The tire fire was in fact at a dump near the trailer park where Jacob and his family lived. Jacob wasn’t a friend, but I had been to his trailer a few times. Our dads were buddies from some job they’d both worked on years before. So Jacob was more like an acquaintance I had to be nice to out of consideration for our families. He was also in science class with Travis and me, and the day after the teacher explained why the tire fire burned so hot and so long, Jacob brought a snow sample from his trailer park to show everyone. His sample was in a mason jar and was of course just a few inches of water when he held it up to the class. Water, with a layer of black sediment: flakes of burned tire that had fallen with the snow. When he shook the jar, it became a hellish snow globe of swirling pollution. The flakes settled, the class watched, hating him for not being embarrassed by his poverty. 

That was the night Jacob and his family came to stay at our house until the fire subsided. The fire had consumed a week’s worth of rubber by then and was still intensifying as it delved deeper into the mountain of tires. The fire department had abandoned any strategy besides containment. The fire would burn until it was gone. 

My dad had set up two spare mattresses on the living room floor for Jacob’s family to sprawl across during the day and sleep on at night. For dinner, we ate spaghetti with Ragu, salads of iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing, every night until they left after the fight.

I hated having the extra family. There were six of them, including a baby, and our house was one floor with a simple layout. To go anywhere, I had to at least glimpse the living room, where there was always someone sitting on those mattresses. I could be alone only in my bedroom, where I liked to lie on my bed and stare at a discolored hole in my ceiling, and in the bathroom during long showers, where I’d use the running water to mask the sounds I was making. I took to climbing in and out of my bedroom window, sitting alone in one of the cars parked in the backyard. My dad was an odd-job mechanic, and our yard was full of car skeletons he’d plunder for parts. I’d visit Jacob’s Rottweilers outside, too—the only family members of his I liked. They were tied to a truck most of the day, and at night they would sleep closed off in the little front foyer where we kept our shoes.

I don’t remember the dogs’ names, or if they even had names. Jacob’s family was the type to just call them “the dogs.” But I remember them lying in the snow by the dead truck, their collars made of heavily-linked chains. They might scare me today, but I wasn’t cautious then: that sledding hill where Travis and I saw the smoke was a fast weave through pine trees that ended at a busy freeway—you’d have to fling yourself off the sled so you wouldn’t slide into traffic. I took stupid risks like that. I didn’t believe I could die on a sled. I thought all fires could be tamed and then put out. I didn’t consider that the Rottweilers might have been trained to maul me—I wasn’t afraid of them at all. I just remember the soft fur on their folded ears, how short their coats were in the cold, the way they let me touch them under their mouths with the back of my hand so I could feel the cool wetness of their drooping lips. 

I was sitting in the snow with the dogs one evening when Jacob, after a week of living with us, came out to talk to me. 

“They’re drunk,” Jacob said, meaning our dads. They had both been drinking regularly since the move-in, and had started laughing too loudly, or stress-yelling at each other after they’d had too much.

“That’s why I’m out with the dogs,” I said.

Jacob sat next to one of his Rottweilers. He was wearing his usual baggy, gray sweatpants, and his ears, beneath his buzz cut, were quickly reddening in the cold. The house brimmed with the drunken laughter of our dads. He touched the dog on its head. “I want to go home,” Jacob told me. “I need to get out of here.”

I reacted quickly. “Let’s go, then,” I said, standing up. I’m not sure what got into me—I think I was trying to shock him, but in truth I wanted to get away from the house as much as he wanted to get home. “A couple of these cars back here work.”

“They’ll see us leave.”

“And then what?”

I had been driving for a few years by then, in the yard when Dad needed help rearranging his car collection, and sometimes I drove to the nearby grocery store, two minutes away. I think my dad took some pride in getting me behind the wheel so young. 

I knew he kept the car keys in their glove boxes, and before long I found a grey Chevy Nova that worked when I turned the ignition switch. Jacob got in, and I drove in the yard with the lights off until we reached the road. 

“So this is stealing, right?” Jacob asked.

“How can you steal your own car?”

I drove fine, Jacob directing the way. I had stupidly forgotten about the tire fire—the whole reason Jacob was evacuated and pining for privacy—until we arrived at his park. I smelled the fire first, then saw the source of Jacob’s snow sample. Even without sunlight, I could make out the black layer of tire ash that had settled over the park. There were trailers with lights on, illuminating the people still inside, those who had refused to leave or had nowhere else to go. The falling ash was almost imperceptible, a poisoned mist that Jacob guided me through to his trailer in a back corner of the park. 

I used his bathroom. I remember looking into the shower as I peed. His shower was newer-looking than ours—a recently built trailer, I thought. Ours had lines of rust weeping from the base of the nozzle, and for years the temperature knob had been broken off, leaving a dangerous bar of metal that we turned with a wrench kept near the shampoo.

When I came out, Jacob was sitting on the couch, watching TV. I walked around his trailer instead of joining him. The fridge was nearly empty, just condiments, milk, bread. There was a Slurpee cup in the kitchen sink. I opened a cupboard: more Slurpee cups, packages of paper plates. I guess I’m emphasizing that he was very poor, which I already knew, but liked to reconfirm whenever I had to go there. But I noticed something new that evening. Beneath the sink were several twelve-packs of name-brand pop. Their TV was too nice, bigger and sleeker than ours. In Jacob’s bedroom he had his own smaller TV with a PlayStation, N64, and Sega Saturn, with boxes of games. His bed was a mattress with a comforter, no sheets. 

But my trailer inspection wasn’t the important part of that night, really. When I finished, I sat on the couch with him, watching TV, but not for long. What happened next wasn’t how it happens in teen movies, with hands inching and a closing to intimate distance. The couch was small, of course—all he had to do was lean on me, and then the natural progression followed. I was stunned at first, but then my thirteen-ness took over my impulses—I had never had any attention like that before—and I kept going with him. We were alone after a week of living on top of one another—what else would I have done? As much as I took care of myself in the shower, I would always need to again a few hours later, and I’ll now admit, because admitting is the heart of this exercise, that I went to the shower a few times after seeing Jacob’s dad drunk and shirtless, asleep on our La-Z-Boy sleeper sofa.

Not much happened, really, but when Jacob and I were done, we knew it was time to go back to my house. I didn’t feel shame yet, I felt that high buzz you feel when you access an outer capability of yourself, and you feel new worlds of living are possible. I felt the same thing earlier that night when I stole the Nova, and I would feel it a few days later when I set Jacob’s trailer on fire. 

And I felt a bit of that feeling too on the drive home after being pulled over by a cop. I lied to the cop. Or, more accurately, I gave him a long-winded explanation as to why a thirteen-year-old was driving, and I left out those few minutes of body-touching Jacob and I had shared on his couch. I surprised myself with the calmness of my excuse, even as the secret part of the story threatened to leap from my throat. Jacob was not enjoying the moment as much as I was—he was panicked and crying in the passenger seat. He didn’t need to be so scared: it turned out the cop knew my dad. The cop was probably going to let us off with just a scolding anyway, but once he knew who I was, he became amused with our rapscallion-ness. I laughed with him as he fake-admired the Nova, and thanked him adultly, with an ironic “sir,” after he offered to escort us home. 

He followed behind me as I drove, as I talked Jacob down from his hysteria. I don’t remember what I said to him, I just remember how much I pitied him, how childish and stupid he looked crying, how I could hardly stop myself from telling him he would never sleep in a bed with sheets. 

Jacob had mostly settled down by the time we got home with the cop. I was ready then to rush to my room to be alone. But that couldn’t happen, because our dads were in the yard, fighting in the snow. The cop rushed at them, shout- ing my dad’s name. My dad was on top of Jacob’s then, both men shirtless, both bleeding all over each other, their bellies pressed together, smearing the blood. That was all I saw of the fight, which was over after the cop knocked my dad to the ground, and Jacob’s dad stood, his hands to his bleeding face. I’ve never learned what started the fight, aside from the drunkenness, but after the night was over, after the cop talked with all the adults and left the two men to work out their issues on their own, after Jacob and his family left to live in a long-term motel and our house was back to normal, my dad finally said to me, “And where the fuck were you two?” 

“I don’t know,” I said. “We just had to get out of here.”

My answer must have been enough, whether or not our absence had anything to do with the fight. He wiped his face with a wet towel and went to his room where he slept until the next evening. 

But, again, that night is not the important part of the story, though I think it’s necessary to consider. Maybe it would have been better for this exercise to simply have started the night Travis and I accidentally set fire to Jacob’s trailer, to write exactly what happened, deed by deed. But what deed to start with? With the striking of the match? That would leave out the eagerness with which Travis and I drove to the trailer with that match. With the decision to follow through on our quickly compiled plan? That would leave out the way I coerced Travis into suggesting what I wanted him to suggest. With the fight in the snowy yard? The fight means nothing without the context of Jacob and my touching on the couch—the fight became the image of the men, body against bloody body, and would return to me again and again in the shower. But then isn’t context excuse-making, trying to rationalize what I did? Where could a story like this possibly begin? 

Perhaps nowhere. Or perhaps at birth, when Jacob and I were made the way we were. I still denied what that night revealed about me, if being willfully oblivious is an act of denial. That feeling I had on the couch was not part of me, nor was the image of the fighting dads I used in the shower—they were both bodily necessities as meaningful to me as peeing. 

So I suppose the story continues with Travis helping me to make meaning of my imagination. The weekend after Jacob’s family vacated, Travis came over to hang out and play PlayStation. We played sitting on the living room floor, where the mattresses had been. He hadn’t been over often, and he would be back only once more—ours was one of those ephemeral childhood friendships, a few months of intense interaction and then a parting of ways. We played two-player games—fighting, racing—and then he rooted through my game collection and found a single-player RPG he’d been wanting to try. I let him, of course, and sat on our couch, where I guided him through the opening scenario. He remained on the floor, his curved back to me, and I remember so distinctly a new feeling I had as I explained the game, of wanting to curl myself over his neck, of wanting to sink inside him like a ghost, of wanting him to set aside the controller and climb onto the couch with me. The longer he played, the more impatient and uncomfortable I became, until finally I just needed to get away, so I said, “Want to drive?” 

Travis was surprised, but took less convincing than Jacob had. We used the Nova again and drove around our ill-paved town. The feeling I had on the couch left as I turned my concentration to driving. I grew comfortable again, or at least not overwhelmed. We talked school, gaming, and, after seeing the column of smoke, the tire fire. I stopped the car, and we watched the far-away smoke rise and rise. 

“Why do they burn like that?” Travis said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Don’t you want to see?”

There was no way we could get into the dump itself. Instead, we found a nearby field and walked as close as we could to the cheap fencing. 

The fire itself was the size of a school and had an almost comic book vibrancy to its neon orange and red flame. There’s not much more to say than that—fire is fire—except the stench of the burning and the smoke caused us to first pull the collars of our shirts over our noses and then remove our shirts entirely and tie them around our faces. We watched, moving step by step toward the fence as our endurance against the heat improved. The heat became a visible wave in the winter air, which thickened as we approached. Travis dared get closer than me, and I waited behind as he moved toward the fence, the orange air dancing off his naked torso. I wanted him then, wanted to be on top of him in the heat, to feel the body I could see sweating before me, to bring to completion the novice experimentation Jacob and I had engaged in on his couch. 

That night I couldn’t sleep. I went outside in the cold, wandered our cluttered yard in the moonlight. In the back of the property, past the last junk car, were my dad’s tires, covered by snow. He kept them in several connected mounds—in haphazard organization like the rest of the yard. I would play on those mounds when I was young, before this story took place, sliding down them in winter, leaping from tire to tire in summer when they collected rainwater and bred mosquitoes.

There was an odd lump on top of one of the tire mounds. I wiped the snow away with my hand, revealing a thin sheet of black plastic. A garbage bag. I opened the bag, hoping to find something scandalous—porn mags or a body—but I knew what I would find inside, and I found it: actual garbage. My dad must have flung the bag to the back of the yard instead of taking it out. 

Maybe the story starts with that garbage bag. Maybe that garbage bag on the tires is where my life pivots. I remember focusing on the bag for what felt like hours, thinking—what type of people lived in trash like we did? What type of people had bloody fist fights in their yards? Poor people, I thought, people who let their kids play on tires, stupid people. People like Jacob and me. 

I wanted to set the mound of tires on fire. I had seen how well tires burn. Instead, I spent all night dumping my anger into that mound, an anger I hadn’t realized was in me—anger at Travis, at my family, at Jacob, at anyone I had ever known. As the night progressed, my anger became an abstraction, a fractal that grew arms upon arms the more I dwelt on the life that had been dealt to me. By sunrise I had constructed an intricate and intractable grudge against the world, a grudge I have never eased my grip on. It is who I am; it is who I will always be. That morning, I threw my cereal bowl against the wall after I was done eating. I felt an incredible relief witnessing the violence of the cheap plastic bowl clattering against the wall and floor. The spoon was plastic as well, and I snapped it in half before catching the bus to school. 

It was so easy to don my new personality—a day of affectation, and then it was no work at all. I stopped talking to people. I was neat and did my home- work. I listened to the teachers, took notes, cleaned my bedroom, put my video games away when I was done with them. Everyone must have mistook the change for a sudden studiousness, a bootstraps sort of self-reliance and personal improvement. It’s true that I did become studious and hardworking, although it didn’t feel to me like I was yanking up my bootstraps—it was more like I was rinsing the muck off my boots. All I saw anymore were people like me. I wanted to wash them away.

And I could—or ignore them at least—except for Jacob, who just by walking the halls of our little school reminded me who I was. I hated him for moving through life with his unearned confidence. I hated that he talked openly about the tire fire still burning so close to his trailer park. I hated that he hadn’t allowed himself to be silenced. 

Although I suppose it wasn’t hate, but jealousy that caused me to do what I did. After school let out the last Friday before Christmas break, I invited Travis over to my house. My parents were both out, working their night jobs. Travis and I ate cereal, then he picked up the RPG where he’d left off, and I took my place on the couch, doing my Christmas break homework. I watched him play, and the feeling returned again—how could it not? Jacob had ruined everything, I thought. I wanted him to suffer, and on the couch, I figured out how. 

I started by simply telling Travis false and embarrassing stories about Jacob’s stay at our house. I told him no one in Jacob’s family showered. I told him Jacob’s dad begged mine for money. I told him Jacob’s parents beat their children for the littlest infractions. He laughed along with these lies, but his amusement wasn’t my intention. I had to pull Travis into my anger, and I knew, with sudden clarity, what could bring him there. 

“And Jacob told me he loves you,” I said.

Travis set down the controller. “He what?”

“He asked me about you. He said he wants to kiss you.” I could feel myself getting carried away, but I couldn’t stop telling the lie. “He said he watches you all the time. He said he thought you might like him back. I said you weren’t like that, but he didn’t believe me.” 

“I’ll kill him,” Travis said.

I was shocked by how far I’d pushed him, but his suggestion did mean we were aligned against Jacob, as I’d wanted. Travis was stupid, and it would only take a bit more talking to get him to carry out my idea. 

“You can’t do that,” I said. “But you could scare him.”

He sat there, waiting.

“My dad keeps stacks of tires way back in the yard.”

“We could set one on fire.”

“Where?”

“Do you know where he lives?”

I didn’t tell Travis that Jacob and his family were gone. I thought it would be a safe, controlled prank—he could imagine the family cowering inside the trailer if he wanted. I thought setting a tire on fire in Jacob’s yard would be for my own benefit—a purging of the anger that had been filling me for the past weeks. In my imagination, Jacob’s family would find the burnt tire when they returned from the motel, interpret its blackened husk as a threat, then cram themselves fearfully into their trailer. Nothing more. 

We loaded a tire into the Nova’s back seat. I knew where my dad kept the spare canisters of gasoline. Matches are in every kitchen somewhere. I drove like a person who had been driving for decades. 

So here is the confession for this exercise, the crime I was never punished for. At first, all I did was write a sentence on an index card: I set fire to Jacob’s trailer. I held the index card, and the memory returned, that fire receding in the rearview mirror. But the memory was incomplete—there’s always more to a story than the fire at its end, or even the ashes it leaves behind. The story isn’t the fire, but the thirteen-year-old watching it burn. This confession is everything before the crime. The crime hardly matters, but here it is anyway, the story to its completion.

We rolled the tire behind the trailer and laid it down in the dirty snow. We doused the tire in gasoline, and then some more. We wanted to make sure the tire caught and burned, and we thought the snow would be barrier enough to contain the flames. We were wrong. When Travis tossed the lit match on the tire, the brief explosion was so wide and tall that it caught some nearby debris. From the debris, the fire quickly touched the trailer’s sagged siding. Up it went, a little strip of pastel light. It was so small at first that if I hadn’t known it was fire I might have overlooked it. But even building-sized fires can start small—it’s possible that the fire at the dump had smoldered small and quiet for hours, ready to be put out, but no one noticed, no one came, and the fire grew. Travis and I couldn’t stop the fire at Jacob’s trailer. There was no time to try. The roof soon lit, the trailer’s backside fully in flame. 

It was then I head the barking. The Rottweilers, I would later learn, weren’t allowed at the motel, and Jacob’s dad had been coming to the trailer to walk, water, and feed them. It was too late for the dogs. Or I should say, I was driving away already, the trailer burning behind me, before I realized I could have saved them.