Into the Inferno Page 10

  Even though they were almost 100 percent ineffectual, our annual hours on the streets were pie-charted and color-coded on a wall near the front door and were a source of great pride and discussion among the members.

  This ritual, done without complaint or question by all the followers of Markham, annoyed and humiliated me more than anything else. What particularly galled me were the jeers, whispered criticisms, sour looks, and outright squabbles with other street Bible scholars, of which there seemed a limitless supply. My father loved debate, and the arguments pitched him into his element.

  My mother’s good looks were a net for the weak and profligate, the lustful and fallen, the needy and the spiritually barren—usually geeky males who would attend one or two of our services and then, when my mother no longer showed any interest in them, would vanish forever. Shy by nature, I never got used to parading my faith before strangers, though from my earliest years I was expected to be a participant, and even though it cut across the basic grain of my personality, as a youngster I’d been fairly effective. As I grew older I became sullen and rebellious and manufactured a hundred small tricks to sabotage recruitment efforts or to be elsewhere when my father debated Scripture in public.

  The most embarrassing moment of my life up until the day Lorie left me was when Marcie Birkenheimer and her mother walked past us on a corner of Tenth Avenue East as my father regaled indifferent passersby with quotations from the Scriptures and from Dreams of the Afterlife. I was in eighth grade and had nursed a crush on Marcie all term. The look of abject pity she bestowed on me humbled me down to the fillings in my teeth.

  The Saints’ children went to public schools and were expected to be at the top of the class in all academic subjects, a goal I never achieved. Because of my faltering grades I was perpetually in hot water with Markham and was tutored by one aspiring Saint after another. During my early teens my tutor was a woman named Constance Desmond, sweet-natured and unaffected, a body to kill for, with a complete absence of pretense. She had a way of leaning against my arm as we looked over one of my papers so that the heat of her breast sent a fever straight to my brain. Under the table I would invariably achieve an erection. Except for the boners, Constance’s tutelage served no purpose, and my grades grew worse. We were both punished for this, she by being repeatedly reassigned as my tutor, me with additional hours on the street.

  I was in love with Constance, and since by then virtually all of my assigned proselytizing time was secretly spent at the downtown public library, where I habitually broke Markham’s injunction against reading literature about other religions, I took the punishment stoically.

  Several times during this period, one of the elders ordered me to wear a cardboard sign around my neck: IF I TRIED HARDER, I’D BE SMARTER, or, MY GRADES ARE BAD, I AM SAD. There was a synagogue down the street that had dozens of my signs hidden behind it.

  These were long miserable months laced with exhilarating minutes with Constance, whose beautiful brown eyes flooded with tears whenever she saw a cardboard sign around my neck. In later years, I realized Constance had been struggling with her own demons, that the accidental pressure of her breast against my arm might not have been so accidental after all. Her husband, a huge, greasy, balding man, would have done almost anything to reach Sainthood, including, I often speculated, cutting off his own pecker, though Markham did not have a basketful of peckers in the back room.

  That I knew of.

  In later years, I came to the realization that Constance had been as lonely as I was.

  And perhaps almost as horny.

  Nothing ever happened between us. The emotional fallout from such a liaison would have destroyed Constance and certainly would have paralyzed me.

  My affiliation with Six Points left me feeling like an oddball, as if there were constant parties and friendships going on around me to which I not only wasn’t invited, but which I didn’t even know about. It wasn’t until I’d been in the fire department in North Bend for a good ten years and had two daughters that I truly overcame the sense of being an outsider.

  My father, a natural-born lackey and former engineer, quickly became an indispensable cog of the inner circle. Mother was a tad too candid in recounting her wilding years during our weekly Confessions, a recounting that probably kept her from attaining the inner circle with my father. Their disparity of status as Saints was a source of much friction between them, as were the misspent years of my mother’s youth.

  Then, abruptly and without warning, when I was eight, my mother disappeared from Six Points and from my life.

  My father was not normally a cruel man, but one night he told me my mother had left because I wasn’t following the tenets of the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ to her standards, that my malfeasance had sparked her desertion. Even at eight, I found the story unlikely and barely credible, but after he repeated it enough, part of me believed him. It might have been that I was a symbol of her sexual congress with other men. It might have been that he was trying to shift the blame for her departure onto someone else. Or maybe he was merely trying to make me a better Saint.

  Whatever the reason for his cruelty, for years I strove to be a better Saint in the hopes it would bring my mother back. I even tried to walk on water. Can you imagine a more pathetic kid?

  Four years later, almost to the week, my mother reappeared as suddenly and as inexplicably as she’d vanished, taking up the space in our lives she’d filled previously as if she’d never been gone. Nobody talked about it except Constance, who once intimated that while my mother was physically a strong woman, there was some moral weakness she needed to overcome. I never learned where my mother spent those four years, or what she’d done, or who she’d done it with. I don’t believe my father ever found out, either. Were I to hazard a guess, I would say she ran off with a man—a practice that became a habit later in life—perhaps someone she’d met on the street while hawking religion.

  My first sixteen years we lived in rooms on the third floor at Six Points, sharing a bath down the hall and eating downstairs with the others in a communal dining hall. Three weeks after my sixteenth birthday, I ran away and spoke to an army recruiter in San Diego. I hadn’t done well in school, but I must have learned something in the public library, because after they tested me, they decided I was army material. A forged parental signature and a fake ID with a backdated birth date completed my induction. I spent four years in the army, during which my only contact with my past was an infrequent exchange of letters with Constance Desmond. Years after she left Six Points and remarried, she sent me a photo of herself with three small children, all of them looking happier than crooked politicians. It made me feel good to know she’d finally found her place in the world.

  My mother left my father again, this time for good. The church eventually disintegrated, and my father moved to the Southwest. When his third wife died in a car accident, he moved from Arizona to North Bend. Later, I failed to tell Allyson and Britney he’d had a stroke. It was only one of my bad decisions in the past few years.

  I couldn’t help wondering who might visit if I were in 111. My girls, of course. But children grew bored easily, and were I in the same state as Joel McCain or Holly, they wouldn’t come back often. The guys from work might show up, but their stopovers would be perfunctory and less frequent as time wore on. Karrie would visit once or twice, no doubt thinking about the Christmas party at McCain’s, when we’d had too many drinks and ended up on the sofa in the basement.

  Aside from my girls, there was really no one who cared.

  My friends in the department were mostly gone. And as far as women went . . . I’d buzzed from one to another like a wasp moving from plate to plate at a picnic. Newcastle said I was searching for the mother I never had. “Men with abandonment issues,” he said, “like to dump women before the women dump them.” At the time, I’d thought his pronouncement ridiculous.

  Until she ran out on me, Lorie had been the only woman in my life, but this year
alone there’d been Karrie, Suzanne, Holly, Heather, Mary Kay, the other Suzanne, Tricia, and Tina, still friends all. Except for Karrie, I’d made love with all of them and then dumped them. Karrie and I had not consummated the relationship, though we’d come as close as you could without actually having intercourse.

  At the time I’d had my reasons for dumping all those women, but right now I couldn’t think what they were.

  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 s
ome 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.