Into the Inferno (10 page)

20. FIELD & STREAM, LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL,
ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST

It was tougher finding a parking spot near Tacoma General during the day. On the third floor I asked about Holly. A practical nurse with dark eyes looked at me and said, “Your name Swope?”

“That’s right.”

“We have instructions. You’re not to visit any patient on this floor.”

“Dr. Riggs in the hospital? I’d like to speak to her.”

The nurse turned abruptly and went through a door behind the counter, where I could hear her speaking to someone. When she returned, she said, “Dr. Riggs is not available.”

“Tell her I drove an hour to see her.”

After a moment a second nurse emerged from the back room, closing the door behind her. The first nurse began shuffling paperwork on the desk. The other one turned her back to me. When an Asian man with the look of a lifelong menial worker came down the hallway and stepped behind the counter, I said, “Excuse me. Can you please go back there and tell Dr. Riggs I’m going to wait out here until hell freezes over?”

He glanced at the two nurses quizzically.

That was when I began singing. At the top of my lungs. “Peggy Sue. Peggy Sue. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty Peggy Sue. Oh, Pegggggy, my Peggy Sue-ue-ue-ue-ue . . .” Under ordinary circumstances I was a credible singer, but today my screeching was horribly off-key.

Stephanie Riggs popped out of the door like a cork out of a bottle, face compressed in anger, strawberry-blond hair down around her shoulders. Several more nurses and aides showed up behind her at the counter.

“You’re making a scene,” Riggs said.

“I can make a bigger one.”

“Call Security.”

“I know what’s wrong with your sister.”

“Bullshit. Call Security.”

I thrust out my hands. “She have this?”

“Hold up,” Stephanie said to the nurse who was dialing Security. Stephanie stepped around the counter, took one of my hands in hers, turned it over, then walked brusquely down the corridor in the direction of Holly’s room.

When I followed, the nurse with the phone said, “You still want me to call?” Stephanie didn’t hear her.

As soon as we got to the room, I lost all my zip. Holly was in a wheelchair, head sagging at an angle that looked painful. Nothing else in the room had changed. Her eyes were open and unfocused. Her sister leaned over and kissed Holly’s brow, a move that provoked no reaction from my former girlfriend.

Stephanie Riggs reached under the blankets and brought her sister’s right hand out.

It was pale and waxy-looking, just like mine.

“Was it like that from the beginning?” I asked.

“From a few days before she went down. At least according to this.” Stephanie produced a small black journal from the pocket of her lab coat. I found it touching that she carried her sister’s diary on her person. God only knew what was written about me in there.

I handed her the card I’d been carrying.

She sat down, the three-by-five card in one hand, her sister’s diary in the other, comparing the itinerary of Stan Beebe’s last few days with that of her sister’s. Brahms played in the background.

“Where’d you get this?” Stephanie asked, looking up with a new openness and sincerity in her dusty-blue eyes. In a heartbeat we’d gone from squabbling like archenemies to whispering like lovers. “These symptoms are almost exactly what my sister reported. Where’d you get it?”

It took ten minutes to explain about Stan Beebe, Joel McCain, Chief Newcastle, and Jackie Feldbaum.

When I finished, Stephanie caressed her sister’s hair and pocketed the journal, my list of symptoms tucked into the pages. She took both my hands in hers. “They weren’t like this yesterday, were they? Your hands didn’t have this crust yesterday.”

“No. But Stan Beebe’s did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about your friends?”

“I did.”

“Do you know what this means?”

“It means my life is over.”

“Yes. That. And I’m sorry. But it means my sister didn’t try to kill herself. That probably doesn’t seem important to you, but our father killed himself. I thought . . .”

“It might be a family thing?”

“Yes. You have any other symptoms?”

“Yesterday I had the shakes.”

“Bad?”

I held out one hand and demonstrated.

“And today?”

“A headache. My legs feel weak.”

“You’re describing the symptoms my sister documented in her diary. You mind if we run some blood tests? I’d like a dermatologist to take a look at your hands. He said he’d never encountered anything like Holly’s before. If yours are the same . . .”

“Back in late May we found a methamphetamine lab in the woods. Most of those meth cooks don’t live past their midforties. We tried to be careful—even had a private company come in and do the cleanup—but most of the people who’ve had this thing were there. Maybe all of them. I’d have to go back and check the daybook.”

“Did you see Holly around that time?”

“No. We were only speaking on the phone by then. What we’re looking for, I guess, is some event that connects Joel McCain; our chief, who went down like Holly; and Jackie Feldbaum. And of course, Stan.”

“Jackie? What happened to him?”

“Her. Slammed into the rear of an eighteen-wheeler in her sports car.”

“She was a firefighter?”

“A volunteer. I just can’t believe we didn’t all incur this together. We had to have. Don’t you think?”

“I do think. Is there any place where you all were at the same time?”

“Only that truck accident in February, where Holly and I met.”

“All of you?”

“I think so. That would make the truck accident the most likely source, wouldn’t it?”

“I’ve spoken at length to a neurologist in San Francisco, a doctor named Parker. He thinks Holly went down as a result of exposure to an insecticide. He said the pathophysiology of it affects the CNS, causing euphoria, dizziness, confusion, CNS depression, headache, vertigo, hallucinations, seizures, ataxia, tinnitus, stupor, and ultimately coma. That’s not exactly the way it happened with Holly, but close enough. The way I’m thinking about this, if it were just people from your fire department, it could have been anything. But you cross-reference it with the fact that Holly got it, too, and nobody else in Washington or even on the West Coast has it, it narrows down the possibilities.”

“The truck accident. That’s the hypothesis I should work from.”

“I agree. But you’re off by one pronoun. It’s the hypothesis
we
should work from. I’m in on this, too.”

“Trouble is, there wasn’t anything hazardous in either of those trucks.”

“That you recall.”

“One truck had nothing but chickens. The other truck was the one Holly drove, and as I remember, it had a pretty standard array of items. Lots of cartons and packages. Some comic books. Bibles. Coca-Cola extract. It was a sticky mess.”

“The chickens interest me. H5N1. That was the Hong Kong virus. Birds have spread disease to humans before. I’ll do some research. The trouble is, these aren’t flu symptoms you guys are coming down with, and that’s what H5N1 presents as. Flu symptoms.” She looked at me and I saw flickers of the compassion that must have originally attracted Stephanie Riggs to medicine. Maybe she wasn’t such a bitch after all. “You ready to run some tests?”

“Now?”

“We don’t have a whole lot of time.”

I felt like a man being dragged down the corridor to the gas chamber. I could only hope Stephanie couldn’t sense my terror. In fact, I was almost more afraid of her finding out how afraid I was than I was of the syndrome. For reasons I had trouble explaining to myself, I wanted her to like me more than I’d ever wanted any woman to like me. Jesus, I thought. I still had the steely taste of vanity in my mouth even when they were hauling me to the boneyard. Maybe I
was
a prick like everybody said.

“As far as I’m concerned, and until we find out otherwise, you and my sister have the same thing.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t have a clue. Neither does any doctor I’ve consulted. I’m hoping, because you’re still up and walking around, you’ll present differently. If you’ll let me test you, it just might be enough to give us the missing parts to the puzzle. You all right? You look a little pale.”

“You find out what it is, you think you’ll be able to reverse it?”

“Maybe for you. Holly had a brain aneurysm. I’m afraid there’s no going back.”

“But you told your aunt you were still hoping for a miracle.”

“You’re a patient. I have to tell you the truth, even if I don’t want to face it myself.”

“Run the tests.”

The rest of my day was spent on an examining table or in a waiting room flipping through magazines:
Field & Stream, Ladies’ Home Journal, Architectural Digest.
Stephanie Riggs drew blood, and then in a back room a technician drew more; a few hours later, Dr. Riggs drew blood again. The probing was the worst, umpteen feet of coil with a miniature camera on the end of it shoved up my rectum like a plumber’s snake. I was X-rayed, given CT scans. Nothing is more exhausting than lounging around a hospital all day with your heart in your mouth. Samples of my hair, urine, sputum, stool, fingernails, and skin were taken away.

Just before eight that evening, Stephanie came into the lounge area where I was waiting and told me I was free to go home.

“What’d you find?” I asked, trying on a smile I knew was a little tight.

“Too soon for most of it. Your X rays and CT scan were fine. The blood workups haven’t told us a thing. You’re slightly anemic, but that may be normal for you. The dermatologist says the growth on your hands is the same as Holly has on her hands. I’ll be here most of the night. I want to hand-carry some of these samples through the lab, watch the tests myself. You take care of yourself. Stay hydrated. Get lots of rest. If anything changes tonight or tomorrow morning, call me. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll be in touch tomorrow morning.” She gave me a slip of paper with her cell phone number on it. “You have somebody who can watch out for you?”

“My girls.”

“I mean an adult.”

“They’ll do.”

“Okay.”

I’d been feeling anxious in North Bend, but the dramatic change in Stephanie Riggs was bothersome to say the least. I’d driven down here thinking I
might
have some contagion, but now a knowledgeable doctor thought I was going to be a vegetable. She hadn’t said it outright, but you could see it in her face.

She thought I was headed for the same fate as her sister.

I’d been hopeful on the drive down, but that was before we found out my symptoms and those on Stan’s list correlated with what Holly had documented in her diary. Odds were if Stan hadn’t died on I-90, he would have ended up in the brain ward—just as he feared. Odds were I would be forced to make the same decision Stan had: turn into a vegetable or commit suicide. Trouble was, I didn’t know if I had the guts to kill myself. Would you? I mean, one day I’m walking around worried about weeds in the yard; the next I’m trying to figure out if I should kill myself. It was too weird.

I was trying to figure out which option was better for my daughters. Which did I
not
want to put them through?

“I’m sorry about your sister,” I said. “I wish things had turned out differently.”

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“I’m a firefighter. I signed up for a bad ending. I didn’t think anything was going to happen, but in the back of my mind I always knew it might. Holly didn’t sign up for anything more than sweetness and light. That’s what she deserved.”

When tears began creeping down Stephanie’s face, I said good-bye and got out of Dodge.

DAY THREE

21. BAD HEADACHE, DIZZINESS, FALLING DOWN

Disoriented and somewhat confused, I came fully awake on the floor next to the bed. I was clad in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, my usual nighttime attire, but it was morning, the sky bright and blue outside my bedroom window.

Wednesday.

Day three.

I knew I hadn’t stumbled or tripped but had simply lost my balance on the way to the pissoir, and not with a topsy-turvy feeling of light-headedness as in a faint, but as if I’d been caught by a trip wire.

I’d gone down like a sack of shit falling off the back of a manure truck.

The on-again off-again headache from yesterday had returned with a vengeance. Headache, dizziness, falling down—it occurred to me with a jolt that I had all of the symptoms for day three.

When I spotted the cotton ball taped to the inside of my arm, the events of the previous day flooded my consciousness.

Arriving back in North Bend the night before, I’d driven straight to the mayor’s house. Haston lived on the eastern edge of town, three hundred feet down the road from the ranger station, in a small yellow house with a modest yard. A neighbor’s dog barked at me from inside a chain-link fence. Two desolate wooden planters sat on the concrete stoop but contained only weeds. They must have been Gloria’s.

Aside from a single phone call when we initially discovered the extent of our joint betrayal, Steve Haston and I never sat down and discussed what had happened between our former wives. Though neither of us had said it aloud, Steve thought I was responsible for the mess, while I thought he was.

When Lorie and Gloria decided to leave town together, Gloria stripped Steve of his spare cash, emptied their bank account, cashed out their certificates of deposit, stole the Land Cruiser, and sold their schnauzer. The dog was the only thing he got back.

On our side of town, Lorie swiped Britney’s piggy bank—Britney had been four at the time. I managed to replace it before she figured out what happened. When I accused her on the phone, Lorie claimed Gloria must have taken it. I hated the thought that Gloria Haston had been prowling my house and making love to my wife while I was a mile away at work.

For some reason the two women had filled themselves with enough venom to justify anything. Maybe it was the rain. North Bend was a beautiful town, green as hell, but it rained more than a hundred inches a year, and the clouds and moisture drove people mad. Later, somebody from the FBI called my home trying to get a line on Lorie, told me she was kiting checks all over the Midwest.

“Mind if I come in?” I asked Haston. It wasn’t that I was afraid people would overhear us on the stoop; it was more that my legs needed a rest.

“The place is a mess. Sit down anywhere.” Despite his demurrals, Haston’s housekeeping was impeccable. He told a lot of little lies like that, falsehoods designed to make you doubt your own eyes. I confess I hate people who do that. I took the sofa, while he perched across from me in a leather armchair that looked as if he’d taken furniture polish to it. “Terrible about Stan. Just terrible.”

“Especially in light of how easily it could have been avoided.”

Haston ignored my sarcasm. “Everyone in town’s talking about it. They’re starting to call it the Bad Luck Fire Department.”

“There’s more coming.”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard Joel McCain’s a vegetable?”

“Karrie told me about him.”

“Jackie Feldbaum’s a vegetable, too.”

“Well, yes. We knew that. The accident.”

“Stan thought they all had the same disease. He thought Newcastle died out in the woods as a vegetable. I’ve been with a doctor in Tacoma all day and she thinks they were part of an epidemic.”

“Good God!”

Without telling him about my own symptoms or about Holly, I filled him in on Stan Beebe’s theories, adding facts I’d gleaned on my own. By failing to mention Holly I’d left out a lot, including the truck accident in February. There hadn’t been much up there but snowballs, chickens, and Coca-Cola extract. I didn’t want to have to admit that to Haston.

In presenting my case as a fire department issue, I’d left it in a neat little package, stressing my concern for the families of Stan, Joel, Jackie, and Chief Newcastle. I had another rationale for not talking about my own symptoms. Like a child hiding under the blankets, for some nonsensical reason I felt as if not talking about my involvement would somehow make the symptoms less real. But this wasn’t like a cold, where I could resign myself to riding out the symptoms and knew I would be better in a week.

“You think all these people have arsenic poisoning or something?”

“Nobody’s exhibiting the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Or cyanide or anything else the doctors are familiar with. This is a whole lot more exotic.”

“How can the accidents be an epidemic?”

“These people had accidents because they were sick.”

“As mayor I’ve never been faced with anything—”

“None of us have.”

“I only took over the job to help out after Gloria left town. The biggest problem I’ve had so far is that squabble with the Army Corps of Engineers over our dikes. I wouldn’t know where to start with something this complex.”

Steve Haston had been timid in his day-to-day decision making, his leadership at the monthly council meetings alternately limp-wristed and carping.

His sole contributions to handling the fire department’s problems were a single phone call to the station one day to ask if I was “okay” and then letting Stan out of his sight. Essentially, I was running the fire department by myself.

“We should have a meeting,” I said. “Start with Brashears. He treated Jackie and Stan both. Bring in McCain’s doctors. Get Eastside Fire and Rescue involved. It could just as easily be them next time. If it’s a chemical hazard passing through our district, it’s moving by truck, which means it’s going through their district, too. The State Department of Transportation should be involved. The State Patrol.”

“You believe this was something you folks got on the job?”

“I do.”

“The city is self-insured. This is going to destroy our cash flow. Look, Jim, I’ll clear the docket and we’ll work on this full-time. I’ll call the King County Executive. One of us will have to speak with the governor. Maybe we can get disaster relief from the feds.”

“Who’s there? Anybody home?” Karrie Haston walked into the room and stood awkwardly beside her father when she saw me.

It was easy to see the family resemblance. They were both tall, Steve around six-seven, Karrie five-ten. They both had long arms and lantern jaws. Although most people would have said Karrie was attractive, her father’s face was just this side of ungainly, and the only thing you could say about his normal expression was that it resembled that of a man about to fall off a donkey.

Even though Karrie and I had been on a businesslike basis since the Christmas party, she flushed when she saw me in her father’s living room.

At this late date, it was easy to see how improvident it had been to fool around with the daughter of the mayor. To trifle with the feelings of a probationary firefighter. For all I knew, she’d been on the couch because she thought it would further her career. Get her past McCain’s critical reports. But more than that, attempting to seduce the daughter of the woman who’d seduced my wife had enough Freudian implications to keep a psych class writing papers for years. I didn’t even want to think about it.

“Jim was just leaving,” Steve said, flashing his bird-shit gray eyes at me as a signal that he didn’t want Karrie to know what we’d been discussing.

I knew what he was thinking. If Stan had been sick, if Joel and Jackie were sick, Karrie might have contracted it, too.

As far as accepting this on a personal level, Steve was on the same page I was.

When I got home that night, the girls and I lit candles, set out the Monopoly board, and fell into a freewheeling discussion about life and our lives in particular, talking about why their mother wasn’t with us anymore, a frequent conversation in our household and one I generally avoided. I answered Allyson’s and Britney’s questions more candidly than ever. None of us had laid eyes on Lorie since she left town three years earlier.

I felt I owed it to the girls to be as honest as I could. It wasn’t as if they’d be able to ask later.

There wasn’t going to be any later.