Into the Inferno (2 page)

3. A BRIEF AFFAIR OF ALMOST NO CONSEQUENCE

It took almost two hours that night to get traffic rolling.

Ambulances and extra aid units came from Issaquah and Bellevue, respectively fifteen miles and twenty miles up the icebound highway. We ended up with thirteen volunteers and four paid guys, seven ambulances, two aid cars, four tow trucks, six State Patrol vehicles, dozens of road flares, and two miles of irate drivers backed up toward Snoqualmie Pass. It was almost twelve-thirty before the last of the injured were on their way home or to a local hospital. I took Holly aside and bandaged her knees, rolling her pant legs up and taping four-by-fours neatly in place. She said the way I worked reminded her of her sister, who was a doctor.

Toward the end, I got the brilliant idea that when we finished with our patients we might all hop in the back of Holly’s truck and help straighten it out.

Shuffled into the mix of comic books, Bibles, Levi’s, and Coca-Cola canisters we found the occasional escaped or liberated fryer. Six of us assisted in the cleanup: myself, Stan Beebe, Chief Newcastle, Jackie Feldbaum, Karrie Haston, and Joel McCain.

Afterward I was surprised when Holly agreed to have coffee with me in a nearby Truck Town restaurant while the wreckers righted her truck. But I guess I’m always surprised when an attractive woman agrees to spend time with me.

As we walked across the frozen field toward my pickup, I couldn’t help thinking this was almost like a date, the two of us walking hand in hand, the moonlight, the crunch of snow under our boots, the dentist-drill sound of tires spinning on the icy highway behind us.

We tried to ignore all the dead or dying chickens, some already flattened in the eastbound lanes.

Holly was as pleasant as a tropical breeze. She was twenty-eight, six years younger than me, had never been married, and two years earlier had escaped a dead-end relationship and hitchhiked to Washington State from California to learn to drive a truck. She’d been doing short-haul mostly, but this trip, one of her longest, had originated in Tennessee.

I noticed when she took her parka off the sight of her strawberry-blond hair turned heads in the restaurant. I notice things like that.

Newcastle could joke all he wanted, but Holly and I did have a lot in common. We’d both immigrated to Washington from California—she originally from Ohio. I’d been raised here and then fled to San Diego, where I ended up in the army. We’d both come out of long-term relationships that ended when we were deserted. During an airport layover, her boyfriend ran away to New Jersey to join a religious cult. Like I already said, my ex ran away with the mayor, cleaning out our bank account and selling our car on her way out of town. Holly’s boyfriend had slipped her engagement ring off her finger while she slept. My wife had emptied our younger daughter’s piggy bank. Stealing from her own child was what convinced me she was back on drugs.

In the three years she’d been gone, I’d heard from Lorie only a handful of times, twice to ask for bail money and always on Christmas Eve, when she wanted to speak to the girls.

Neither of us had a backup chute. Holly’s parents had died in a traffic accident. My father was in a nursing home. The last time I heard from my mother, she was on a fly-through from Cape Horn to Japan with a flaxen-haired suitor twenty-five years her junior in tow. I had no brothers or sisters. Holly’s only sibling practiced medicine in Ohio and was so full of herself, Holly was lucky to get a phone call on her birthday.

“Gosh,” she said. “I can’t believe how much we have in common.”

“It is amazing.”

Holly and I spoke on the phone a few times in March and then got together in April, dating off and on for about a month and a half. She ended up with the funny notion we were going to get married somewhere down the line. Odd how two people who’d started out sharing so much could have gotten their signals crossed like that.

DAY ONE

4. I’M A RAT BASTARD

Okay. I admit it.

I’m a bastard.

On Monday that day in June when people saw me sprinting through the fire station, they thought so, too. Everybody did. I’d spotted Holly’s red Pontiac in the bank parking lot catty-corner from the fire station. I hadn’t fled because I was a jerk. God knows I’m not a jerk. It was just that I didn’t like being stalked by a former girlfriend.

The truth of the matter was, Holly had a whole roster of psychological baggage she kept trying to push off on me, and even though I’d last seen her a month earlier, I didn’t have the nerve to face her.

Not today.

North Bend Fire and Rescue had been going through some tough times, and Holly was like a disease you thought you’d kicked, only to wake up in the morning with the symptoms back in place. I couldn’t suffer through another of those interminable conversations. The last had been a never-ending phone call during which I’d fallen asleep. Okay, I guess that sounds bad, but you had to be there. See, I was really just too nice. Maybe I should have told her to forget the
friends
thing, that we simply weren’t suited for each other, that I didn’t
ever
want to see her again. But, tell me, how could I do a thing like that?

If I’d been smart, I would have gone through the empty apparatus bay where we keep the station’s gym equipment, but I dashed past the watch office, blurting out instructions to Karrie Haston, the newest paid member of our rapidly shrinking department. “Tell her anything. Tell her I’m out of town for a week.”

“Tell who?”

“You’ll see.”

“No way I’m going to lie for you again, Jim,” said Karrie. Moments later I heard the two women’s voices and I knew that, despite her instincts, Karrie was following my directions.

Upstairs I concealed myself alongside a window in the station’s living quarters and waited for Holly to leave.

It was true. I was a bastard.

I didn’t learn about the literal aspect of my bastardy until I was twenty-seven and my father, or the man I thought was my father, returned from a ten-year sojourn in Arizona determined to patch up our relationship. You had to give him points for trying, even if he was the one who’d mucked up our relationship in the first place. He’d just buried his third wife. It was the last of four marriages, including two to my mother.

One of the benefits of having my father nearby after so many years was that he told me all sorts of things about our history I had forgotten or never knew. The biggest surprise was discovering he’d married my mother when she was eight and a half months pregnant—to save her soul and bring her to Jesus, who died on the cross to pay for her sins, my father said—and that he never knew who my actual father was, never cared, never asked.

Until then I’d had no reason not to believe James Swope, Sr., wasn’t my biological father; I’d lived with him until I was sixteen, and neither he nor my mother had ever given a hint we weren’t related. Despite the fact that we’d lived all those years in the commune at Six Points when I was growing up, my parents reiterated the nuclear family mantra ad nauseam, reminding me how lucky I was not to be the spawn of a divorce, how important it was to stick with the religion of my birth, how happy we all were.

Even though from my earliest days I’d suspected there was something wrong at the core of our little triumvirate, it wasn’t until I ran away from home and lied my way into Uncle Sam’s army that I began to realize the true strangeness of our family. My mother, who, by her own admission, had endured a misspent youth, had also, ironically, run away from home at age sixteen. Hidebound by a vague ambition that seemed to have fizzled in middle age, my father had taken a more traditional route and graduated from the University of Washington Engineering School.

After the news sank in, I was able to look back over my life and see a thousand little pinpricks of light where before there had been only confusion and darkness. I ended up tall and, some said, handsome, while James Swope, Sr., was medium height with knobby features that might have been chipped off the side of an old apple tree. That alone should have given me a clue. I’d always thought my father hated me—if truth be known, my mother, too—as much as any father could hate a son while telling him he loved him, and now I believed I knew why. Illegitimacy was the spark in the motor of that dislike. Illegitimacy propelled those late-night quarrels between my parents. Illegitimacy was the hoarfrost on our relationship from day one.

A few years ago, when my mother showed up at the airport on her way through the Northwest, dragging around her latest bleach-blond ex–surf bum, it became obvious from the far-off look in her eyes that she didn’t want to chew the fat with me over our history. The upshot of our conversation was that whatever had taken place in her life before she met my father was now locked away forever.

When I said I had a right to know who my real father was, Mother tossed a flag of dyed-black hair away from her face, sighed, and said, “They say a human body replaces all its cells every seven years. I’m not the woman I was then. I’m not even the woman I was when I left your father. You’re
my
son. That’s what matters. You know that, don’t you?”

“I just want to know who my father is.”

“God is your father.”

“So it was an immaculate conception?”

“Don’t be insolent. I told you all I’m going to tell.”

It was that simple.

I was a bastard.

Moreover, I got the queasy feeling had she dropped a hook into the waters of memory for a name, she wouldn’t be able to produce one, that I was the by-product of some impulsive heated liaison in the backseat of somebody’s father’s Chevrolet or the back room at a party. Mother had been wild in her youth. Everybody knew that. What nobody ever knew was how wild.

There were only three of us on duty that day late in June: myself; Karrie, who was downstairs telling lies for me; and Stan Beebe, who turned out was lurking in the shadows on a bunk not ten feet away. I hadn’t noticed him and jumped when he spoke. “Woman trouble?” he barked.

“No. Of course not. Why do you say that?”

“Because A: you
always
have woman trouble, and B: you look like you’re about to shit a brick.”

“I do not.”

“Do not what? Look like you’re about to shit a brick or always have woman trouble?”

“What makes you think it’s a woman?”

“What else would make you so nervous?”

“Come on, Stan.”

“I’m tellin’ the truth. You need to see yourself the way you are so you can change.”

When I looked down at my hands, I detected a slight tremor. It was the weirdest sensation, one I couldn’t remember feeling before. My hands had begun trembling the moment I spotted the Pontiac.

Jamming both fists into my uniform pants pockets to quiet them, I peered out the window. The Pontiac was still baking under the June sun in the bank parking lot.

“Who’s chasin’ you? Suzanne?”

“I told you I’m not going with her anymore.”

“The other Suzanne? The one you met at the river?”

“It’s the truck driver.”

“The short-hauler? Kelly?”

“Holly.”

“I liked Holly. You never should have dumped her.”

“I didn’t dump her. It was mutual. Or just about.”

“She carrying a pair of tin snips?”

“What would she need those for?”

Beebe laughed. “Sooner or later one of ’em’s going to take your family jewels. Call ’em spoils of war.”

A few minutes later I saw the Pontiac door closing. She’d walked from the station to the car while I was talking to Stan. Unable to see past the reflections on her windshield, I ducked back behind the window.

It was over, but she couldn’t accept that. I hoped she wasn’t here to tell me she was pregnant. Just when you think you’ve got your life straightened out, up jumps the devil with a dead rabbit in his hand. I already had two perfectly legitimate kids and, God knows, we certainly didn’t need any more bastards like me in the family.

“You think we’re jinxed?” Beebe asked from the bunk. He had his hands behind his head, legs crossed on top of the bedspread.

“I’m beginning to think
I’m
jinxed. At least where women are concerned.”

“No. I mean the fire department?”

“There’s no such thing as a jinx.”

“You just said
you
were jinxed.”

“Well, there’s no such thing.”

“I could make a case that we’re jinxed bad. That we’re going to die. All of us.”

“Everybody’s going to die.”

“No, I’m talking about here in this department. This summer.”

“You serious?”

“Within the next . . . say . . . few weeks. I mean you, me, Karrie, maybe even Click and Clack.”

“That’s crazy.”

“That’s what Marsha keeps telling me.”

“She’s right.”

“No she isn’t. I’m dying. I got a syndrome.”

I turned from the window. “You serious?”

“Serious as a heart attack.”

“You seen a doctor?”

“Three of ’em. Brashears and the two specialists he sent me to.”

“What did they say?”

“Said something’s going on. Some sort of syndrome. They don’t know what. They ran tests. I’ll get the results next week.”

“There you go.”

“There I don’t go. By next week I’ll be dead.”

“You can’t know that.”

“But I do know it. They told the Fire Plug she was all right, too.”

“Jackie had a car wreck.”

It was true that North Bend Fire and Rescue had been suffering a string of bad luck. A month ago Chief Newcastle had set out on a weeklong solo hike, trying to get in shape for an ascent of Mount Rainier he was planning with a group of volunteers. Eventually the rangers found his pickup at a trailhead in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. Four days after that, a quartet of hikers found Newcastle’s body facedown alongside a spur trail near Painter Creek, just below Icicle Ridge. Except for some small animal bites, there wasn’t a mark on him. He’d been fifty-six. The autopsy concluded he’d died of hypothermia. A close friend and coworker dies sudden like that, it scares you.

A few days after the funeral, Jackie Feldbaum managed to drive her Miata sports car under the rear of a tractor-trailer rig on I-90, where she missed being decapitated by inches. She was now living—if you could call it living—in room 107 at Alpine Estates Nursing Home.

Ten days after Newcastle’s funeral and seven days after Jackie’s accident, Joel McCain, one of our other permanent-position firefighters, fell off his roof while pressure-washing moss off his shingles. Joel’s family had been keeping him under wraps for the last month. I couldn’t fathom the reasoning, though Beebe, who was friendly with the family, explained they were Christian Scientists and didn’t want any “mortal thought” to keep them from a “demonstration.”

“Three down, three to go,” Beebe said. “Newcastle, Joel, and the Fire Plug. You, me, and Karrie. We’re next.”

“Ridiculous. Newcastle probably had a CVA. And Jackie . . . you know she drank more in a week than you or I ever put down in a year. She’s lucky she didn’t hurt somebody else. Joel never was good with heights. He’ll be back.”

“Joel’s not coming back.”

“His wife said he was.”

“One of the volunteers ran into his brother-in-law in the store. He said Joel can’t even follow cartoons on the TV. No way he’s coming back. Trust me.”

“That’s just a rumor.”

“Maybe.”

Beebe had a tendency to blow things out of proportion. On top of that, I’d noticed when things began to go wrong he tended to slip into a vortex of self-pity, his mood precipitating more problems than the events spurring it.

“I’m scared,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Of falling off a roof. Dying in the woods. Crashing my car. Drowning in the tub. Think about it. They all lost control. All three of them.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Damn right.”

Stan Beebe was one of the few African Americans in the valley. These days we had urban commuters coming out our ears, but not too many years ago the town had been primarily made up of forest workers and their families, many of whom migrated to the Northwest after the timber ran out in the Southeast, bringing their Southern redneck attitudes with them. Crackers, Newcastle called them. Beebe managed to win them over to a man.

Beebe was a big man, the color of dark chocolate, round through the chest, with biceps like ham hocks and forearms thicker than a peckerwood’s neck; he routinely did repeats on the bench press downstairs with four hundred pounds. Occasionally he overheard a rude comment or got a look from one of the local crackers, but he was so good-natured, if it bothered him he never let anyone know, although a year ago Chief Newcastle sent him to Dr. Brashears for what he described as clinical depression. Beebe came back with a prescription for Zoloft and seemed better after that.

As titular head of the fire department, it would be my duty to send him back for more treatment if this current depression he seemed to have fallen into became incapacitating. Even if you weren’t listening to what he said, you could hear it in his voice.

“Jim?” he said. “Anything happens, I want you to look after my wife and kids.”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

Before we could finish, the bell hit and the pagers on our belts fired. We jogged down the stairs to the apparatus floor. Normally there were five responders in the station, but the medic unit had driven to Overlake Hospital with a patient, so there were only three of us.

Although most of the other small towns in the area contracted their fire services from the county, North Bend still ran its own department, the mainstay of which had always been the volunteers. Currently there were only six paid members.

Beebe drove the aid car while I got behind the wheel of the pumper, Karrie, who was still in her probationary period, alongside me. Technically, with our two senior officers, Harry Newcastle and Joel McCain, out of the picture, the mayor and I were running the department, but the mayor seemed uninterested, so I was running things myself.

North Bend Fire and Rescue had always been shorthanded, but these days we were limping along like a three-legged dog, depending heavily on the cadre of volunteers Newcastle had recruited and nurtured during the five years he’d been in command.