Bullet Park   ::   Cheever John

He like to buy food, cook food, eat food, and he very likely dreamed of joints of meat and buckets of shellfish. His wife was, predictably, a spare woman devoted to a diet of blackstrap molasses and wheat germ. He seemed, as a firehouse cook, to enjoy a sense of reality that he did not enjoy either with his wife or his used cars and he stirred, basted, seasoned, tasted and served the dinner with absolute absorption and like most amateur cooks he was incurably premature, getting the meal onto the table a half hour before anyone was ready. Nailles went upstairs to the meeting room.

There were thirty members of the fire department at that time. About twenty had gathered. Some part of the atmosphere of the place was that it had been the firemen themselves who had converted it from a loft into a habitable club room. They had, on Saturdays and Sundays, put down the Vinylite floor, nailed and painted the wall-board and wired the fluorescent lights. They were understandably proud of their work. The meeting was, of course, stag but it was, excepting the locker room at the club, the last stag gathering in the village and its exclusiveness had been challenged. Some members of the ladies' auxiliary had wanted to attend the monthly meeting if only to supervise the cooking. They felt that Charlie Maddux was a usurper and that his grocery bills were probably scandalous. They had been forestalled but the sense that the maleness of the place was embattled gave it the snugness of a tree house. The atmosphere of a tree house extended to the ceremoniousness that followed. The chief called the meeting to order with a memorial gavel and the secretary then uncovered an American flag made of stiff silk with a thick fringe of gold. The secretary read the minutes of the last meeting, which were approved, and the treasurer reported that there was eighty-three dollars and fourteen cents in the treasury. All of this and all that followed was performed with an immutable solemnity that could not have been explained by the few facts and figures involved. There was a somber discussion reproaching those firemen who came to the car wash and did nothing but drink beer. Had anyone spoken humorously it would have been a misunderstanding of the gravity of these rites. "We have a new application for membership," said the secretary. "Mr. Hammer, will you leave the room please while we discuss your application?"

Nailles turned and saw that Hammer was in the back row. Hammer left the room. "Mr.