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ditch somewhere, or packing up to head into a burning barn, and you recognize the person helping you as the same guy that blew a shoe rounding third, or who lent you his glove in the outfield. It gives you a little human common ground. The chiefs and government representatives hash out the specifics of the mutual aid contract at big tables during long meetings. The spirit of the contract works itself out on the softball field.
    The real softball tournament kicks off at eight A.M . on Saturday, runs ’til dark, and picks up again Sunday morning. Teams come from all over. The softball field is directly adjacent to the beer tent, which is no accident—amateur softball players are your prime suds demographic. We always hope for hot weather. When it rains, the teams still show up, but beer sales tank.
    The Beagle feels he is past his softball prime, so he spends most of the weekend tending the beer-tent bar. He’ll usually punch out early Saturday night so he can drink and dance some, but the rest of the weekend, you can find him behind the plywood stand, filling pitchers. Last year the Beagle and I got down to the park early Sunday morning to do a little cleanup before the crowds arrived. It wasn’t even nine A.M . and the first softball game of the day was already under way. We were picking up plastic cups and straightening tables when this guy walked into the tent and asked if he could get a beer. “I guess there’s no law against it,” said the Beagle. He went behind the bar and got a clean cup. The guy propped his elbows on the plywood. I didn’t recognize him, but he wasn’t dressed for softball. Bob took his money and passed him the beer. The guy raised the cup, and just when it was at his lips, someone smacked a long fly ball. At the crack of the bat, the man’s head snapped to the right. His beer stayed right where it was, fixed in midair. He scanned the field for a minute, watched the outfielder make the catch, then brought his lips back in line with the cup, which hadn’t moved. Ducking forward to take a pull at the foam, he rolled his eyes at the Beagle and shook his head.
    “Little early in the mornin’ for softball!”

    The only equipment some of your early colonial firefighters had were leather buckets made by Dutch shoemakers. The firefighters worked in pairs, the buckets suspended between them on two parallel poles. A good team could hustle eighteen buckets. This being prior to the age of personalized license plates, many of the firefighters gussied up their buckets with embroidery and gold leaf. Without a pickup window in which to strategically hang their helmet and turnout gear, you probably had your guys who ran around town with their personalized bucket dangling off their mule. Operative theory being, chicks dig firefighters, and why should colonial chicks be any different?
    Before I moved back and joined the department, someone out in the county called in a garage fire. Bryan Swanson and my brother Jed were working in that neck of the woods, and got there first. The flames were just taking hold. Bryan grabbed a plastic bucket, filled it in the ditch, and handed it up to Jed. Jed flung the water on the flames. It was touch and go for a while, but when the fire trucks rolled up, Bryan and Jed were standing there in their gear with their buckets and the flames were flat. “Get the wet stuff on the red stuff,” the old-timers say, and sometimes the old ways will do.

    Right now, the Beagle needs a little extra cash. Wife Number Two hit the road a while back, but it will take a thousand bucks to do the divorce and make it official. He’ll get the money in November, he says, off all the overtime he accumulates butchering during deer season. The deer come in nonstop then, stiff in the back of pickups, slung over trunks, stacked in trailers. The Beagle will cut up fifteen, twenty deer a day. He is at work by four A.M ., and he leaves for home, bone-tired and nicked up, at eight P.M . It goes on like