Into the Inferno Read online

  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.

  The report for our alarm came in as “man choking.”

  5. EVERYBODY KNOWS BRAIN DEATH FROM LACK OF OXYGEN OCCURS IN FOUR TO SIX MINUTES

  Chief Newcastle’s oft-repeated dictum on response speed through town was clear: “There’s no point in killing a carful of kids on your way to a Dumpster fire.” Everybody followed the precept except Click and Clack, who were usually too wired on caffeine, adrenaline, and do-goodism to slow down.

  Siren whirring, we lumbered through traffic as we headed for a small subdivision just east of town on property that, until ten years ago, had been a golf course. Bulldoze the flora and fauna and slap up houses, bring in new citizens by the busload, sell them a car and two trucks apiece, and pave any greenery that’s left. It was the standard urban recipe. No planning. Just cram us rats in until we’re all giving each other the bird at every four-way stop in town.

  As soon as the house number came across the radio from the dispatcher, I said, “Joel McCain lives in that cul-de-sac.”

  Karrie looked at me. “That his house number?”

  “Couldn’t tell you.”

  Karrie was a tall, slender young woman who had decided to become a firefighter when she was six years old, after taking a school field trip into downtown Seattle, where she’d spotted a woman riding a fire rig.

  “You realize your girlfriend is following us,” Karrie said.

  “What girlfriend?”

  “How many girlfriends do you have chasing you around town?” I glanced into the tall rearview mirrors on either side of the cab but couldn’t see beyond the boxy aid car behind us. “She’s back there.”

  “Don’t worry. She’ll go away.”

  “How much do you want to bet?”

  Watching the town slide past, I tried to let it go. What the heck did Holly want now? I decided she either was pregnant or had a bug. Not from me, though. Not a sexually transmitted disease, at any rate. I was clean on that score. However, it was just possible she was pregnant. On top of all my other bills, all I needed was a child support payment. Christ, maybe she’d come to tell me she had given me a bug.

  To my way of thinking, North Bend was one of the ugliest little towns in the state, a prime example of what happens in a municipality when what little vision there is becomes polluted with second and third and fourth opinions bought and paid for by developers working duplicitous schemes they’d already honed to perfection on other communities, schemes designed to pull the wool over the eyes of planning boards and all those small-town politicians willing to dabble with the devil to expand their tax base. Controlled growth, they called it. Nobo
dy ever had the nerve or the brains to ask for or think about zero growth. Developers knew they could wear down the protest groups with endless “dialogues.” Talk was good. Keep ’em talking. Eventually each new project broke ground before we all realized we’d lost another battle.

  Along with the fairly recent blight of suburban sprawl, our town was pockmarked with oases of backwardness from the days when everyone was a logger or the offspring of a logger and locals felt their birthright was to park on their front lawns, burn unseasoned wood in their woodstoves until the town was murky with the stink, and shoot their neighbor’s dog with .22 shorts if he barked too much.

  In the piecemeal central business area, we had a Bavarian motif on a Chinese restaurant and across from that a condemned building. We had a gas station converted into a coffeehouse across from a car dealership on the main drag. There was a minimart service station proudly displaying a hundred feet of blank wall to the main street, even more proudly approved by the planning board. We had planters in the middle of North Bend Way, designed years ago, but not built until traffic was already so bad the loss of the center lane jammed all the intersections.

  Half a mile away on the floodplain of the South Fork was the Nintendo factory and the South Fork interchange with an outlet factory mall, McDonald’s, Taco Time, Arby’s, gas stations, and minimarts sucking in skiers, hikers, and rock climbers off the freeway. The outlet mall brought ten thousand cars a day. Busloads of old gummers showed up every day at eleven to shop for bargains. Local burglaries and car break-ins had skyrocketed.

  “It’s Joel’s house, all right,” Karrie said as we pulled up.

  We’d been here before. It was a house Joel could ill afford on a firefighter’s salary, though he managed with the extra money from his wife’s job as a legal secretary in Seattle. More money came in from his wife’s retired mother, who had moved in with them after her husband died. I knew this house. At the fire station Christmas party this past year, Karrie and I spent an hour downstairs on the couch in the dark, an episode we were both trying to forget. I never knew why I did things like that.