Into the Inferno Page 8

  As firefighters, we’re used to the uproar of extrications, but it usually rattles the patients. Our primary tool, after the ten- and fifteen-pound pry bars, is the hydraulic unit we’d purchased from Hurst—the Jaws of Life.

  The unit consisted of a heavy gasoline-powered pump with twenty feet of double hydraulic hoses coming off it, each set of hoses powering a single handheld unit.

  We have a pair of spreaders, a huge, plierlike tool we insert into crevices on a wreck to pry the surfaces apart. It also squeezes like pliers and can compact or crush jagged flanges. Along with the cutting unit resembling crab claws, it was the extension used most often. With these tools we can take a car down until it’s only a pile of tin.

  Unless circumstances dictated otherwise, the strategy we’d been using the past couple of years with trapped occupants was this: We laid a hose line in case of fire. We calmed the patients as best we could and explained what we were doing. We treated them through the openings if necessary and put blankets or tarps around them to protect them from glass and flying sparks. We stabilized the vehicle so it wouldn’t roll, usually by flattening the tires. We removed the windshield, cut the posts that held the roof on, and either folded the roof back or cut it completely off. We put notches in the outer frame at the base of the dashboard and pulled the dash away with our hydraulic tools. Often that was the point at which a firefighter climbed into the backseat to stabilize the head and neck of a patient in the front seat. We cut the doors off, cut the seat loose, pulled the steering wheel out of the way, and at this point, if not before, we were generally able to extricate the patient and slide him onto a backboard.

  The driver of the rolled pickup, who had alcohol on his breath, was removed without much hassle, especially after the crew from Snoqualmie arrived to help; but the passenger had a broken femur, was pinned in the wreckage. He screamed every time our tools touched the truck. It took twenty-five minutes to extricate him.

  “Dirtbags,” Ian Hjorth said. “Drunk as skunks. They killed that guy up in the trees. I hope they go to jail forever.”

  We’d packed both patients from the truck into transport units and were walking up the slope to the third vehicle in the woods. Ian and I had been carrying the heavy Hurst power unit between us, Snoqualmie firefighters picking up the cables and tools and following like a wedding train. The medics had already confirmed our next patient was dead. The State Patrol had finished taking photographs and measurements. The medical examiner’s people were on scene. Our job now was to pull out the body.

  “Shit,” Ian said as we set the power unit on the ground. “This looks like Stan’s truck.”

  What had I been thinking? Stan talks about death all week. Stan comes to the station drunk. An hour and a half later we get a call to an MVA, and there’s a truck that looks like Stan’s with an IAFF union sticker in the window.

  And yours truly doesn’t connect the dots.

  I put my head and shoulders through the window until I could see his hands in the shadows on the floor. The skin was dark, the backs of the fingers covered in a waxy-looking substance.

  Just like mine.

  Just exactly like mine. It was Stan all right.

  I couldn’t help thinking we might have saved him. We couldn’t have, but the idea wouldn’t go away. It proved to be hogwash after we dismantled the truck, because Stan’s chest and head had been crushed when the impact pushed the motor back through the fire wall. Stan was dead before we left the station.

  Weeping, Karrie said, “We were just talking to him.”

  We were all in shock. It hit us, as Stan would have said, like five knuckles to the snot locker. The firefighters from Snoqualmie. Even the state troopers, when they found out who it was. What made it worse was the guilt I felt over not having taken Stan under my wing earlier. I should have tapped us out of service the minute the word suicide came out of his mouth. We could have driven him to the hospital ourselves in the aid wagon.

  Had I taken his truck ignition key, an option that hadn’t even occurred to me until now, he might be alive still.

  The lieutenant riding the rig from Snoqualmie, a man named Meyers, came over while Ian and I were carrying Stan to the medical examiner’s gurney, and said, “This is going to be a hard one. Telling his wife.”

  I placed one of Stan’s shoes next to him on the gurney, thinking that stray misshapen shoe was about the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

  “It’s going to be tough telling her,” Meyers repeated.

  My brain seemed to be lagging behind everyone else’s. As the senior officer of North Bend Fire and Rescue, it fell on me to inform Stan’s wife. In another town the chief or the mayor might do it, but we didn’t have a chief and our mayor was pretty much worthless for that sort of thing—had in fact already proved himself useless in regard to Stan today. There’d been a lot of bad news doled out in North Bend the past few months, and Steve Haston had done even more ducking and weaving than I had when it came time to appoint bearers of bad news. The Mountain Rescue Team had pulled the short straw after they found Harold Newcastle’s body. When Jackie Feldbaum nearly decapitated herself in her Miata, Joel McCain bit the bullet and told Jackie’s old man at the lumber mill.

  Yesterday Stephanie Riggs told me about her sister, but if I used her methodology, I would be dragging the stretcher into Marsha Beebe’s living room and saying, “Hey, take a look under the blanket.”

  Before we left the site, I located the state trooper in charge of the investigation and asked how it had happened.

  “To tell you the truth,” said the trooper, “your friend caused it. Veering all across the freeway, from one side to another. All our witnesses are in agreement.”

  “The truck in the woods caused the accident?”

  “These guys over here have been drinking, but it was your friend. Witnesses say it looked like he purposely tangled with one of those eighteen-wheelers. Knocked him to one side. That’s when he bumped into all these other people.”

  16. WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE ZOMBIES

  My intention was to dither around the station and solicit opinions on how to do this, to recruit an aide-de-camp with experience in dispensing bad news or maybe even to find someone who would volunteer to take the load off my shoulders, but the longer I delayed, the more likely it was that Marsha would learn of her husband’s death through the grapevine.

  And that was not going to happen. Not on my watch.

  Three years ago, when I learned my wife was having an affair, everybody else in town knew it before I did. The grapevine had been hot with the electricity of someone else’s misfortune. Mine. Nothing was uglier than realizing the whole town had worn out your bad news before you even got to try it on.

  Fearing I would ask him to tag along, Ian had been avoiding me since we got back to the station. I told him to find a replacement to fill my slot for a few hours. Then I signed out of the daybook and walked around the corner in the sunshine, pushing open the tall glass door to the mayor’s office. Shirtsleeves rolled up, Steven Haston was leaning on a countertop, having returned once again from his tax and accounting business on North Bend Way to catch up on city obligations.

  Haston was almost six feet, seven inches, lantern-jawed and lugubrious, born in Norway, a catch for any woman who didn’t mind a man who never laughed.

  I mean never.

  Despite the dilemmas confronting the fire department these past few weeks, until this morning nobody in the department had seen or heard from Haston since Harold Newcastle’s funeral. It was okay with me. He and I made a point of avoiding each other.

  “Steve,” I said. “Wonder if you have a minute?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Stan Beebe has just been killed out on I-90. I’m driving over to tell his wife.”

  The secretary in the back of the room gasped. Haston said, “What?”

  “You were supposed to be baby-sitting him.”

  “I didn’t know how to stop him.”

  “Well, he
’s dead now.”

  “She home? His wife?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not going to call to find out if she’s there and end up having to say hold up that trip to the QFC; I’m coming over with some bad news.”

  “I know what you mean. Thing is, I’ve got some meetings and there’s no way I can get out of them. People are coming in from Seattle.”

  “Seattle,” I said, surprised at the indignation in my voice. “My God, Seattle! We wouldn’t want to put someone from Seattle out because one of our friends is dead, would we?”

  I stormed out of the office.

  Defying logic, tradition, and reason, the town council had agreed to let Steve Haston serve out the remainder of his wife’s mayoral term after she left town in the middle of the night, even though he’d shown no interest whatsoever in politics before that. When that broken first term ended, he was reelected. He’d run unopposed until the last minute, when a write-in candidate suddenly appeared, a man who claimed citizenship in North Bend because he lived in his van and parked it under the South Fork Bridge, which meant in our tiny democracy that if you were voting for him, you needed to borrow a pencil from the polling officials in order to write his name in. When Haston came to vote that day, we crossed paths—he saw me returning my pencil. I don’t think he ever forgot it.

  I was still steamed at Haston when I got to my truck and found a Big Gulp container sitting on the roof. I stepped up into the cab and reached over to remove what I was sure was the latest installment in a series of jokes perpetuated by Ian Hjorth, who made a habit of decorating my truck with various and sundry geegaws. His favorite—a reservoir-tipped condom pulled tight over my trailer hitch.

  The cup was glued down. I couldn’t get it off.

  Clearly, Ian had done it before the accident, because nobody was in a joking mood now. The cup and the general air of camaraderie it represented—the first prank I could remember since Chief Newcastle’s death—was a spark of life in a deeply disturbed department.

  It was a short drive to the Beebes’, the high-noon traffic thick with local workers dashing out to lunch. Jeeps creeping along North Bend Way with mountain bikes in racks. Isuzus gassing up at the Shell station, kayaks strapped on top. Scott’s Dairy Freeze was filled to capacity, the girls in bikini tops, guys bare-chested, their vehicles looking top-heavy with fat truck inner tubes strapped on for play in the river, everybody laughing and showing off, nothing to think about but the opposite sex and where to meet tonight. I would have given a lot to go back to that time.

  But then, my teen years hadn’t been nearly that carefree. At fifteen I’d been pushing religion on the sidewalks of Seattle. By the time I was seventeen, I was in the army, cussing a blue streak and getting laid twice a month, after taking the San Diego trolley to a ten-dollar whorehouse in Tijuana, where I eventually caught the clap from a woman old enough to be my mother. There’d been nothing carefree about any of it.

  Mount Si Road was a two-lane country road that ran along the base of the mountain next to the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River, which was low and boulder-strewn. At the bridge, fifty or sixty cars were parked along the roadway, hikers with kids and brightly colored day packs, looking for the Little Si trail.

  Stan lived at the end of a long stone-and-gravel driveway just off the road, maybe two miles from the Little Si trailhead. I turned into the drive, proceeding slowly, the driveway shaded by fir trees and underbrush.

  Near the house two brown-skinned children were clambering over a play set constructed of logs and pipes, a boy and a girl, maybe six and eight years old. The boy was a clone of Stan, except lighter-skinned. The children paid no attention to me when I parked behind a Ford Escort station wagon. After the two mongrel dogs were done sniffing my crotch, I walked to the front porch.

  It was a single-story house made of logs, its long wooden porch decorated with children’s toys, four or five curious cats, and an array of thoroughly gnawed dog bones.

  Marsha opened the door before I had a chance to gather my wits.

  “Oh, God! What’s wrong?”

  “May I come in?”

  “Get your ass in here. Sit down. Something happened, didn’t it?”

  In polite company Marsha Beebe used words I would never use in my worst nightmare. My army cussing had been scandalous by the standards of my upbringing, but battery acid and Arctic lightning came out of Marsha’s mouth on a regular basis. Like a thermonuclear blast, her cussing could melt your eyeballs from ten miles away.

  At department social functions I found myself calculating where she was going to spend the majority of her time so I might spend mine elsewhere. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her—it was more that I didn’t understand her, or trust her willingness to treat me with civility or respect. Stan was the nicest guy in the world, but Marsha took the current of good-natured ribbing the guys around the station bathed me in and turned it into abuse, especially after she’d downed a few drinks.

  Short, stout, white, and downright ugly, as opposed to merely homely, she was the last woman you’d pick up at a bar, if you went to bars, and probably had been the last woman in the bar thirteen years ago, when she and Stan met there. Her hair was short and curly, her skin anemic-looking, her dark eyes fierce and determined. She wore a ring on every finger, several necklaces, ornate earrings that dangled alongside her jaw and made her head look about the size of an orange. Okay, so these were not particularly generous observations to be making about the wife of a coworker who’d died less than an hour ago, but I couldn’t help it. Marsha terrified me.

  As soon as the door closed behind us and I was certain we were alone, I said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Marsha, but Stan is dead.”

  Having watched a fair number of individuals receive this kind of news over the years, I knew this was not only the quickest but also the kindest way to say it. No equivocating, no stalling, no euphemisms. The last thing you wanted was to be forced to deliver news like this twice because you said something like “we lost him,” or “he’s passed on,” or worse, “he’s no longer with us.”

  Hands at her sides, Marsha sat heavily on the sofa.

  I gave her the particulars as I knew them and told her how sorry I was. “Marsha, if there’s anything I can do, tell me. I mean that. Stan was one of my favorite people. We’re all going to miss him. Terribly.”

  “Was it suicide?”

  “I don’t know for sure. He was talking about it earlier.”

  “He was so afraid people would think it was suicide and we wouldn’t get his policy. He kept saying the life insurance doesn’t pay off in the event of a suicide.”

  Her dark-blue eyes remained unfocused. Marsha tucked her arms between her thick legs—she was wearing black leggings and a loose-fitting white blouse that concealed most of her figure. “Stan thought there was something going on with the department. Then one day he got the shakes and told me he was dying. I said he was full of shit up to his eyebrows. A few days later he got dizzy and told me he had a headache—join the club—and thought he was doomed. I tried to convince him he was a whadoyacallit . . . ?”

  “Hypochondriac?”

  “Yeah. He spent so much time at the nursing home with Jackie, I thought he was laying pipe with a nurse there. God. I can’t believe he’s dead.”

  It was at that moment, sitting in Stan’s living room listening to his wife, that I began to believe all of Stan’s theories.

  Stan had had the shakes, same as me. He’d had the waxy hands, same as me. And then he’d died on the freeway the way Jackie Feldbaum had almost died. The question was: If he hadn’t died, would he have ended up like Joel?

  “Well,” Marsha said, standing. “Thanks for telling me. I’ll get the kids together and go over to my brother’s.”

  “Do me a favor, Marsha. Call the fire station and leave a number where we can reach you.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll find out what the city and state owe him. Get his package together. I’ll call t
he pension office in Olympia. Get out his insurance policies from work. And I’ll collect his stuff from the station.”

  “Thank you, Jim.” I certainly didn’t want to hug her, but if there was ever a time, this was it. I opened my arms and she stepped into them. She hadn’t shed a tear. A minute later I was almost out the door when she said, “Wait.”

  She left the room and moments later reappeared with a small white envelope, my name across it in Stan’s crabby printing.

  “What’s this?”

  “I don’t know. Stan said you’d be here today and I was to give it to you. He said it was the most important thing.”

  “He told you I would be here today?”

  “Said sometime after lunch.”

  Outside in my truck, I opened the envelope with a deliberation verging on dread.

  Inside I found a small sheet of paper torn off a stationery pad. The note said: Jim, my friend. Your turn to carry the torch. A three-by-five card fell out of the envelope, one side blank. The other side had a hand-printed list:

  Day 1: Tingly hands that shake.

  Day 2: Waxy hands, weak legs, and mild headache.

  Day 3: Worse headache, dizziness, falling down.

  Day 4: Headache goes away, cannot keep food down.

  Day 5: Stomach problems disappear. Blurred vision, ringing in ears, syncope.

  Day 6: Everything seems fine except the ringing in ears is louder.

  Day 7: Now you a zombie.

  Good luck, my friend.

  It was signed: Stan.

  I said, “Good luck to you, too, my friend.”

  17. SEVEN SACRED DAYS INSIDE STAN’S LOCKER

  Somebody convinces you you’re going to be brain-dead in a week, believe me, it gets the gears whirring. They can get to whirring pretty fast. For a few seconds there on the drive home, I thought I was going crazy.

  A million courses of action raced through my mind. I wanted to call Jackie Feldbaum’s common-law husband and ask whether in the days immediately preceding her car accident Jackie had experienced any of the symptoms from Stan’s list. I wanted to ask Mary McCain about the circumstances of Joel’s fall.