Into the Inferno Read online

  Now that I thought about it, Joel’s roof was practically flat. How do you fall off a flat roof?

  I’d scoffed at Stan’s theories, but now I knew why. From the first there had been a strain of truth to what he’d proposed. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall kill you.

  If Stan’s theory was correct, I was on day two of my last week as a recognizable human being.

  Apprehension and dread were beginning to make my stomach queasy.

  I wanted to convene a presidential commission to investigate. I wanted to call the FBI, the CIA. I wanted the Vatican in on it. I wanted somebody important to tell me this was all a mistake.

  Whether Stan’s end had been a self-fulfilling prophecy or an inescapable bullet of destiny I could not say. Stan obviously felt getting crushed under the wheels of an eighteen-wheeler was preferable to years with a brain that functioned below the level of that of your common house cat. But was that really where his brain had been headed? On the other hand, maybe he’d turned into a zombie out there on the highway. Maybe losing his mind had caused the accident.

  If Stan’s hypothesis did nothing else, it introduced a comprehensive theory of what had been happening to North Bend Fire and Rescue in the past weeks. The only comprehensive theory I’d heard.

  Parking across the street from the station, I got out of my truck just as one of the volunteers showed up, a community college student named Jeb Parker, a happy-go-lucky young man who reveled in the camaraderie of our little fire department.

  “Forgot your Big Gulp?” he said, laughing at the large cup still glued to my roof.

  I went into the station, jogged up the stairs past Ian and Karrie, who both asked, “How’d it go?,” and found Stan’s clothing locker in the bunk room. Padlocked. I jogged back downstairs to the apparatus bay and retrieved a pair of bolt cutters from a side compartment on the engine.

  “Pretty bad?” Ian asked, having followed me upstairs the second time.

  “He’s been telling her something was going to happen all week.”

  “What do you mean, ‘something was going to happen’? Like what?”

  “Like what happened.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  Squeezing the bolt cutters, I watched the shackle on the lock split in half and fall to the floor. All of Stan’s clothing had been removed from the locker, the remaining articles arranged neatly: two cans of soup on the top shelf, a pair of sunglasses, a pencil, several three-by-five cards, and a manila envelope labeled in Stan’s cramped lettering: HAROLD LEVY NEWCASTLE AUTOPSY REPORT. Poor Stan had squandered a portion of his last week making certain nobody had to clean up after him.

  The cards appeared to be earlier drafts of the list Marsha had given me. Most were labeled Seven Sacred Days, no doubt Stan’s idea of a joke, but he’d inadvertently transposed a couple of letters and wrote Seven Scared Days on one. In either case, I knew what he meant. The closer I got to the details of Stan’s final hours, the more I realized they might also be the details of my last hours.

  If Stan was wrong about a syndrome, there were a hell of a lot of coincidences operating in North Bend. Chief Newcastle. Joel McCain. Jackie Feldbaum. Stan. My own symptoms. One might even include Holly in the list.

  Poring over the various cards, I could see how he’d rearranged the order of the symptoms as his information base and his own condition altered. On two of the cards the list was six days instead of seven. The more I read, the more I became convinced the list I’d received from his wife was the final compendium. For starters, it was the only one that had the first two days precisely as I’d experienced them.

  Ian Hjorth peered around my shoulder into the locker. “Don’t you think he was traveling a little light?”

  “Look, Ian. I’m checking out for the day. Keep Jeb on for the rest of the shift.”

  “He can only stay a couple of hours.”

  “Then find somebody else. I’m outa here.”

  “Sure. Of course. None of us feel much like working.”

  Brushing past Ian on my way out of the station, I said, “Thanks for the Big Gulp. That was actually pretty funny.”

  He was chasing me across the street to my car as I left. “Oh, Jesus. I forgot. I put it up there before our alarm. You don’t think I ran out there and put it on your roof after we came back from the freeway, do you? Oh, shit. You had to drive around like that? I’m sorry. I’ll take it off right now.”

  I ignored him, was already turning the key in the ignition and buckling the seat belt.

  “Come on, Lieut,” Ian said. “Let me get that off there. You don’t want to be driving around like that. At least let me take the straw out. It’s got juice in it. Ben thought it would be funnier with juice in it. Look, I’ll climb up—”

  I shot gravel out from my rear tires peeling out of the parking area. It wasn’t often one of Ian’s gags backfired on him. Leaving the Big Gulp container on my roof and pretending to be pissed might be the last joke I ever played.

  Alpine Estates Nursing Home was a white single-story concrete-block building three blocks from the fire station. I parked and went inside, found myself being chased down the hallway by a short Hispanic woman in white pants and one of those kiddie-print smocklike tops nurses wear these days that look more suited to a nursery school than a medical facility. This one was all teddy bears or lollipops or some such thing.

  “Can we help you?” she asked for about the fourth time. “You want to visit a patient?” I must have been daydreaming.

  “Jackie Feldbaum.”

  She went back to her cubicle and picked up several sheets of paper stapled together. “Not here. Nope. No. Wait. Rolanda Feldbaum. Could that be her?” I nodded. “One-oh-seven. Down at the end of this hall. Turn left.”

  The room was what you’d expect. Two patients, two beds, a curtain between them, photos and personal touches on the nightstand alongside each bed, and next to the sink a TV that looked as if it’d been underwater for about a year. Jackie’s roommate, a small humpbacked, masculine-looking woman with close-cropped hair and no teeth, looked to be about a hundred fifty and was absorbed in a Spanish-language game show I had the feeling she didn’t understand a word of.

  Jackie was in bed on her back, her hair cut with straight Moe Howard bangs. Both hands were above the blankets, both covered in a waxy-looking patina.

  “Jackie?”

  “She don’t talk,” said the roommate.

  “Ever?”

  “Not since I been here.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She farts.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s about all. Yes sirree. They don’t smell so great, neither.”

  Tuning out the racket from the television, I sat in the only free chair in the room and tried to ignore the stench of ammonia pervading the room. I opened the manila envelope I’d been carrying and scanned Harold Newcastle’s autopsy report. It took a while to pinpoint what I was looking for. The palms appear to be normal, but the backs of both hands extending from the fingernails to the ulnar styloid process are spotted with a whitish substance of indeterminate origin.

  When I tried to push myself up out of the chair, my legs felt weak.

  “You leaving?” the hundred-year-old woman asked.

  I nodded.

  “Whatsa matter? She do a pooper?”

  “No. She’s okay. Just time to go.”

  “Have a good day, mister.”

  “I can’t see it getting any worse.”

  18. WANNA BET?

  Room 111 was just down the corridor. I couldn’t tell you what made me stop there. It wasn’t proximity, because during the past three years I’d been proximate plenty of times without stopping in.

  On the wall next to the door were two easily disposable paper labels: FUJIMOTO—SWOPE.

  I pushed the door open.

  Again, two beds, minimal personal effects, some newspaper clippings on the walls, a few photos cut out of maga
zines. Your basic jailhouse decor.

  My father was slumped in a wheelchair next to the window at the foot of the second bed. His roommate was out playing paddleball or racing wheelchairs up the halls, chasing the nurses. Whatever.

  My father’s back was to the window, his face squared up with the heat register. The window behind him afforded an awkward view of some shrubbery. A few tall shafts of June sunlight penetrated the thicket and lit up the windowpane. There was little difference between my father and Jackie. Thirty years was all.

  I squatted until we were at eye level. I don’t know what scared me more, the possibility that he would look at me or the possibility that he couldn’t look at me.

  “Dad? It’s me: Jim. It’s been awhile.”

  After a minute it became clear that he wasn’t going to reply.

  Not long after moving to North Bend to be near his granddaughters, my father had suffered a CVA and had, after a brief hospital stay, been incarcerated here. As far as I knew, during his entire three-year tenure he’d never received a visitor. I’d certainly not been here before.

  After a few minutes of silence, the day began caving in on me. I thought about how insubstantial were my reasons for not visiting sooner, about Stan’s death, Joel McCain’s condition, Holly’s coma, about my own future or lack of same. If my worst fears came true, I’d end up staring at a wall, too. Except it wouldn’t happen when I was seventy-six; it would happen at the end of the week. At age thirty-four.

  Somebody had taped a clipping from the local newspaper to the wall over the heat register. It was this article my father was facing, as if studying it, which of course, he was not. It included a black-and-white photo of me in my fire-fighting gear kneeling alongside two toddlers; there was a second photo of a burned-out Ford Explorer.

  I’d forgotten about the article. About the incident. There had been a clipping in the fire station for a while, but eventually it had been thrown out with the trash. It was one of those embarrassing moments when the newspapers proclaimed you a hero for doing your job. I’d been driving my private vehicle, spotted a car fire on North Bend Way, and did nothing more than open the back door and remove two toddlers while their mother and a bunch of bystanders ran around in a panic. Because I’d received some minor burns, they called me a hero. It was bullshit, the result of a small-town newspaper reporter jacked up on caffeine with nothing to write about.

  Kneeling on the floor beside my father’s wheelchair, I said, “ ‘Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness: thou has enlarged me when I was in distress: have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer.’ ”

  I thought about what I was doing and began to laugh. How many prayers had I uttered during my first sixteen years of life? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? And how many times during those years had I prayed alongside my father? A better question was how many of those prayers had been answered? Certainly fewer than the laws of probability would suggest—which had caused me to conclude long ago that if I needed something, I was actually better off not informing God about it.

  I reached out and put my hand on my father’s knee. “In the name of Jesus Christ and William P. Markham, rise up and walk. Leave this wheelchair. Reclaim your senses. Bid good riddance to this institution of despair. In the name of William P. Markham, rise up and be a man again.”

  I’d like to be able to tell you that my father stood up and said, “Thank you, Son. I needed that little three-year rest. Thanks for bringing me around. Now I can go get a fine potato salad lunch with crab legs and French mustard and a cream soda and be on about the Lord’s work.”

  But you and I both know my father didn’t budge. My father wasn’t getting out of his wheelchair on his own steam because I’d knelt on the floor beside him and uttered words from Psalms. My father was never getting out of that chair on his own steam.

  Faith was what made prayers work. At least that was the conclusion I’d reached over the years. Religion needed to be backed up with faith, and the remnants of my faith had eroded eighteen years earlier.

  From the day I was old enough to talk, I’d said prayers over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’d prayed next to my father. I’d prayed next to my mother. At bedtime. Upon rising. We’d prayed aloud on the street, and we’d prayed while strangers gawked. Even if I hadn’t dodged a life of belief eighteen years earlier, the past few years would have shaken my faith.

  How could I pray to a God who let Lorie abandon our two beautiful children? Or a God who’d allowed my father, surely the most righteous of individuals, to end up staring at a heat register for ten hours at a pop? How could I pray to a God who would let Joel McCain and Holly Riggs live out their lives as vegetables? Or who’d let Stan Beebe’s four kids become fatherless in the blink of an eye. Maybe you could believe in God if all that had happened, but I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t drum up a thimbleful of faith to save my life.

  19. THE SIXTH ELEMENT OF THE SAINTS OF CHRIST; OR,

  HOW TO PRAY FOR ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING AND NOT GET IT

  My mind was racing as I climbed into my truck and headed for Tacoma, the visit to my father igniting the wildfires of memory.

  Until I ran away from home at sixteen, we’d lived on Capitol Hill in a huge, rambling showplace initially owned and built by one of the Mercers, an early pioneer family who now had a traffic-clogged Seattle street named after them.

  A doctor owned the mansion today, but when we lived there it was called Six Points and was the official residence of the staff and founder of the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ, the minimalist cult religion my father had adopted in his late twenties and clung to until the church virtually disintegrated around him like a cheap suit in the jungle. In those days the neighborhood was riddled with Saints, eight or ten families—the cognoscenti—living in the mansion at any given time, additional acolytes in nearby houses.

  It was only a week after my father met my mother that he quit his engineering job at Boeing, sold his house, his car, his personal belongings down to his Boy Scout knife, and signed the proceeds over to William P. Markham, simultaneously becoming a pauper and a board member of the church. As with many religions, the engine of the Sixth Element was fueled by cold, hard cash.

  My father had been toying with the notion for months, maybe years. For reasons that were never clear, my mother embraced the religion, too, and they moved into Six Points.

  It took decades for me to figure out my father’s interest in religion was predicated on a fear of death, on an unwillingness to believe death would be the end for him, his initial donation part of a long religious tradition of paying now for a cushy spot in the afterlife. Nobody feared death more than my father, and Markham had convinced his followers he knew the secret of everlasting life.

  Being raised around Markham was like living with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and one of the apostles all rolled into one. Until I was sixteen, my stolen glimpses into the real world had been sporadic and taken with much guilt and little stealth.

  It was only years later that I found out William P. Markham had been a functionary in a tent revival show in his youth, a religious circus of sorts that toured the Deep South fleecing suckers who felt in need of salvation. Markham had been a child healer and an infant prodigy who knew how to fire up a crowd of religious enthusiasts the way a pyro knew how to fire up a warehouse.

  In his teens, he left his uncle’s revival group under cloudy circumstances and attended UCLA on a scholarship that was later discovered to have belonged to another student. He majored in economics there and at times alluded to spending his middle years drifting from town to town working elaborate con games. He also alluded to living off a succession of wealthy widows. Why these confessions should have endeared him to his followers baffled me, for even as a child I believed they were closer to the bone of his character than the charade he put on as a saint.

  The religion’s primary textbook was penned by Markham: Dreams of the Afterlife with the Lord Jesus Christ. Even as an old man, long after th
e church’s demise, my father could, and frequently did, quote long passages verbatim from this tome.

  Members of the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ were encouraged to be model citizens. We talked about the devil, but the evil in people’s hearts was implied more than spelled out, as was the end product of that evil, which of course included punishment after death, punishment that we as adherents of the real truth would not suffer.

  Just as we were destined for a heaven beyond comprehension if we conscientiously followed William P. Markham’s interpretation of the Bible and obeyed his tenets, everybody else on earth was headed for hell, of which there were, according to Markham, twenty-seven degrees. My father harped on the twenty-seven degrees endlessly and believed Catholics and Democrats would occupy the lowest rungs in Hades.

  In many ways, ours had been the most comfortable view of the universe possible. We were God’s chosen. The elite of the elite. We were going to embrace everlasting life and grace. Nobody else was. Imagine a world of billions where only a few hundred are destined to escape the fires of hell. Later I realized virtually no religion was immune from the conceit that they had The Truth and no one else did.

  My father often announced his belief that only a few dozen true believers would end up in heaven with us. I never could figure out why he wanted heaven to be so exclusive. Sounded boring as hell.

  Typically, we spent two or three hours a day in prayer meetings, although at times of church or world crisis a decree from Markham might double or treble that. One hour before breakfast; Bible lessons after school; a prayer meeting each evening. Saturdays and Wednesdays were relegated to recruitment. Until I was twelve, I followed either my father or my mother as they went door-to-door or positioned themselves in some public place where they could proselytize. Virtually nobody but the dimwits, the mentally ill, or people trying to convert us to their religion stopped to listen.