by J. Thorn
“My buddy is on the camera crew in Tampa. I know it’s not South Beach, but it’s a lot closer than Pine Valley. I could give him a call, see what their staffing is like.”
Kelly laughed and rubbed her forehead with one hand. “Thanks, Robert but I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. I have doubts about my career, you know? Sometimes I think I should be doing something else completely.”
“You’re really good at what you do,” he replied. “You have the potential to be big.”
Kelly shrugged, and Robert felt her slipping off the line, the hook sliding from her mouth.
Episode 5
Thursday, September 5th
Doug heard his wife’s voice as clear as if she was sitting next to him in the engine rig: Stop fearing change, and get out while you can. We can live with my sister until you get the shop set up. The kids would love that.
He looked over at Frank. Judging from the old man’s expression, he was in no mood for conversation. The post-adrenaline fade was even worse when they found bodies or had to send them to the hospital as charred as a Fourth of July barbecue.
Doug turned away and revisited his thoughts while blocking out the background chatter coming from the two-way radio. He had let his tools sit in the garage for almost three years. He couldn’t be bothered with changing the brakes on his wife’s sedan, yet she kept pushing him on it. The shop was a dream, and if Doug never made a tangible effort to realize the dream, he’d never fail. That was fine with him.
He glanced out the window as Frank maneuvered the rig out of the deserted neighborhood and onto the two-lane stretch that would bring them back to the station. Doug noticed how the arthritis in Frank’s fingers made his knuckles look like knotted wood on an ancient tree. Frank remained silent even as the sunshine broke over the mountains, adding a little optimism to the day. Doug turned away and let his thoughts drift.
Taylor could not understand how it felt to be pushed when you weren’t ready. She was his wife, yet after all the time they had spent together, she still didn’t understand the pure pain of anxiety. Shortly after high school, Doug had checked into University General, where they kept him on the “seventh floor.” Everybody knew it was the loony bin, but even the hospital felt the shame of labeling it as such. The medications had helped for a while, as had the exercise, but Doug knew he’d struggle with the demons within for his entire life. He tried blocking out the negativity, all of the late-night infomercials and the empty promises peddled by lame, self-help gurus with a laptop. They sounded great, but they never brought relief.
The only thing that soothed his fear was work. He kept to the task at hand, managing the details of his job and refining the protocol at the station. That mental diversion helped keep him functioning and earned him enough pay to marry Taylor and start a family. Doug knew that change would be uncertain, and that was not something he could handle. The gauges on the engine and the stats on the rescue-wall pegboard—those were certain. The needle was in the red or it wasn’t. The crew made the time cutoff on a drill or they did not. Doug could live in that black and white world. Opening his own shop was not so simple. Taylor had pushed him several times on it, but his tools remained hanging in the garage, covered in dust and a thin layer of rust.
“What are you doing today?”
The question caught Doug by surprise. He gave Frank a slight smile and shrugged. “Taylor wants the summer furniture stored. I think it’s a bit early, but I know how she gets. First hint at frost and she’s ready to seal up the house until March.”
Frank nodded and turned the rig’s huge wheel. “You think they’ll all die?”
Doug shook his head and rubbed the soot from his chin. He turned to face Frank and then looked back out of the window as the local businesses began to awaken.
“Don’t you guys have that big glass table underneath the oak tree that you drag into the shed? I can give you a hand with it if you’d like,” Doug responded, unwilling to engage Frank.
“The one was pretty fucked up. But I think he’ll make it. At least I think it’s a he. Hard to tell with most of the skin burnt off.”
“What the fuck, Frank?” Doug shook his head again. Frank knew better. They never spoke of the people they helped or watched die at a call. The humanization made it too hard to function on the next one.
“Yeah, guess I could use an extra set of arms on that table, even if they are your sorry buggy whips.” He smiled back at Doug, the gesture hollow and empty.
“Can I ask you something else, Frank?”
The man kept his focus on the road, glancing in the mirror to make sure the rescue squad had not peeled off on a mutual-aid call. Frank knew they’d have to square up with East Fallowfield sometime. “Shoot.”
“You ever think about doing something else?”
“Like going on a cruise or taking up golf?”
“No, asshole,” Doug said with a snicker. “Like earning your living some other way.”
“I know what you mean. I was tweaking you,” Frank replied. His hand moved up to the end of his mustache, which appeared frayed after the night’s call. “There isn’t much a dumb ox like me can do other than put out fires and drag bodies to safety. Guess I never gave it much thought.”
“Taylor. You know, she keeps telling me I need to clean out the garage, that I need to get my tools online and sold because they’re taking up too much space.”
“That ain’t why she’s saying that.”
“I know, Frank. I know what she’s up to.”
“She doesn’t want to bury you beneath an American flag, son. No firefighter’s wife does.”
“I think it’s more than that, though. I think she wants me to prove to myself that I can open the auto-body shop and support the family without risking my life on a daily basis.”
“Yeah,” Frank said, laughing. “She obviously never had to work with an insurance company on a collision claim.”
Doug noticed the station at the end of the block. Frank brought the engine to a stop at the red light, giving the conversation another few minutes before they’d be pulling into the drive and cleaning up the gear. The talk had loosened Frank’s mood, and Doug felt better the closer they came to the station. Whatever had spooked Frank began to recede as the night faded away.
“You know about Mark Fisher?”
“Seen the plaque on the wall. Heard the boys talking about him now and then over the years,” replied Doug.
“That’s not what I mean. Do you know what happened to Mark?”
“KIA.”
“True. But there’s more to it than that. How about you brew up some of that fancy-pants coffee that costs us fifteen dollars a pound and we’ll talk in the kitchen before shift is up. If we get the tanks stored and the gear hung without fiddling around . . .”
“Okay, Frank. Okay.”
***
“Mark was a phenomenal firefighter. The best. We know the guys around here that are good and the ones that simply get the job done. No secret. Well, we all knew Mark was the best. He was strong and fit, but he was so fucking smart. The guy could look at a house fire and know where to drop the ladder. And sure enough, that would be the window where a little boy would be waiting for rescue. It was almost as if he could sense those in peril before he could see them.”
Doug took a sip of his Italian roast coffee and leaned back in his chair. Eddie and Sal had agreed to finish wiping down the rigs so that Frank and Doug could talk. They assumed it had something to do with chain of command and transitional responsibilities. Frank let his mug sit, a silent protest to the long-forgotten days of the ten-cent cup of joe.
“He spent years on the ladder, eventually working all of the rigs—even rescue. Mark could do any job in the station, including dispatch.”
“He was never captain?” Doug said, phrasing the statement as a weak question.
“No, he never was.”
Doug closed his eyes and shook his head, realizing that Frank was captain at that time. “Did he
want to be?” Doug asked.
“Nope. Never wanted to be nothing but a firefighter. Mark lived to put out fires and save lives. Until . . .”
“Until what?”
“Until his father passed. Mark’s old man was out chopping firewood one minute and dead on the gurney the next. He had a 90 percent blockage in one of his heart pipes that nobody had ever detected. The man liked his barbecue like the rest of us, but he was not overweight and was a pretty active guy. Anyway, his death hit Mark pretty hard. He went through the usual cycle of grieving and helped his mother through it. But he was never the same after that. It was like someone had snuffed out the spark inside.”
“But his dad was an old man by then, right?”
“Yes, he was. It wasn’t like Mark was a teenager or something. But that death broke him.”
Doug looked at the loose grounds at the bottom of his cup and the empty coffeepot on the table. “Where’re you going with this, Frank?”
The old man held up a finger and leaned back in his chair. “Mark started talking about doing something different. He mentioned taking his mom to Arizona, where she could live out her retirement in the warm sun while he opened a bass-fishing shop. At first it was just table talk, like a lot of the guys do. But then Mark started talking about it while he was on cook duty or doing the laundry. Eventually, he was talking about it in the station and with the other guys. Just before the house fire that took him, he was talking about it to me in the rig.”
Doug nodded and looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. Taylor would be expecting him home soon to help put the kids on the bus.
“Thanks for making the coffee, Frank. It’s pretty good for a guy that likes the pissy shit they serve at the diner.”
“Anytime, son. Happy to oblige.”
***
The ambulance raced through the early-morning streets with lights flashing and an occasional whoop of the siren as they approached the intersections. The East Fallowfield EMS had one, and the guy was a fighter. The rescue squad had cut what remained of his clothes off, the ones that had not melted into the flesh. They knew he was a man, but nothing more. The fire had scorched third-degree burns over eighty percent of his body, destroying what little humanity was left. Nevertheless, he had a weak pulse, and they would do everything possible to take him to the emergency room alive.
“ETA?” asked the tech in the back of the van.
“Three minutes or so,” replied the driver.
A series of beeps and clicks rattled the equipment in the back of the ambulance as the man on the gurney flatlined. The EMS tech shoved a needle into his chest and pushed the plunger, spiking the EKG back into a faint blip.
“Do it in two, or we’ll lose him.”
***
The Mountain Bluff EMS followed three car lengths behind the other ambulance. Neither rescue squad knew the roads as well as Pine Valley did, which was a consequence of the mutual-aid relationship. Given the current economic situation, mutual aid was becoming more the norm than the exception. While none of the companies were thrilled to be relying on rescue squads that were eight or nine minutes removed from a potential call, they really had no choice.
The driver glanced in the mirror to see his colleague hovering over the blackened, charred body of the other survivor. They had yet to determine the identity of the victim because of third-degree burns.
“Vitals?”
“Barely,” responded the medic as he grabbed more hoses and a syringe from their supply.
The ambulance turned the corner, forcing the medic to brace himself and keep from toppling over onto the victim.
“What’s the ETA?”
“Not sure,” replied the driver. “I’m following EF EMS, and they’re following Pine Valley’s lead. I’m guessing five or ten minutes, but it’s been a while since I’ve been on this stretch of road.”
The medic shook his head, shocked that they had two survivors and even more shocked that they had not died en route to the emergency room.
***
Doug dropped his keys on the counter as the kids blew past him to the car parked on the street. Taylor finished drying her hands on a dish towel. She smiled at Doug and then looked at the clock on the stove.
“I know,” he replied, following her eyes. “Frank and I had a rough night. Two deaths, probably going to be two more.”
Taylor walked over and placed a kiss on Doug’s cheek. She grabbed her purse as the car doors slammed. “I got it. Get cleaned up, and then lie down.”
Doug nodded and watched her push past the screen door and down the sidewalk toward the curb. He smiled, watching her ass sway back and forth. He had always found her irresistible, and, when he combined that with her unending reservoir of patience, he was not sure he could live without her. Taylor had aged better than most of the other moms on the block. Pushing thirty and with two kids, she still had the teenage lifeguards turning their heads when she visited Pine Valley community pool in a bikini. She had good genes, and along with a healthy diet and daily exercise, she made the other moms jealous.
Her father was an immigrant farm worker, and her mother a Midwestern librarian with Irish ancestry. She had inherited her father’s dark skin and smooth complexion while taking her long, silky hair from her mother. Doug used to call her “Taylo” when they were dating because she looked so much like Jennifer Lopez. Taylor had scolded him for that, but he could see the delight in her eyes. She pulled away and drove down the street toward the school, snapping Doug from his daydream. He thought about what she said and took that as an invitation to a little fun when she returned. Sex with Taylor was always enjoyable, but family life made it a less frequent occurrence.
He walked into the pantry and dropped his clothes on the floor beside the washing machine. No matter how he tried, Doug could never prevent the caustic odors from seeping into his clothing. Even his change of clothes at the station had the faint whiff of burnt wood. Doug walked down the hall and into the bathroom. He let the water warm up and stepped inside, replacing the odors of the charred house with Taylor’s conditioner. The aroma of her hair made him immediately hard and he resisted the urge to finish in the shower, knowing he’d be all the more excited to see her when she returned from dropping the kids off at school.
Doug dried off with a towel and used it to shake the excess water from his head. He swiped the fog from the mirror and looked at his own face in it. He paused, realizing that something wasn’t right. He was tired from fighting a fire all night long, but something else was off. He had the same feeling in the pit of his stomach as he did at the very moment a routine investigation turned into an arson investigation.
He blinked and the feeling dissipated, leaving Doug with another blank expression on his face. He shook his head and laughed, feeling silly to be spooked by his own imagination. Taylor would be home soon, and he was looking forward to falling asleep while inside her. The rest of the world would melt away, if only for a few hours.
The phone rang and jarred Doug from his thoughts. He stepped into the hallway and grabbed the receiver. The kids kept telling him to ditch the landline, that nobody used one anymore, but Doug could not let go. It felt like a generational gap he wasn’t ready to cross just yet.
“Hello?”
The static from the other end made Doug hold the phone away from his head. As if on cue, it subsided, replaced by the distant sound of an automobile and voices. He looked down at the phone and then remembered they didn’t have caller ID on this one.
“Hello?” Pocket dial, he thought. I’ll bet Taylor’s compact bumped the phone inside her purse.
But then the voices became louder, and Doug began to catch snippets of the conversation. This was not Taylor’s phone. He caught codes and EMS shorthand, realizing that he was eavesdropping on an occupied ambulance.
Doug held the phone in midair, unsure whether to hang up or try to scream at the owner of the phone in case they really needed his help. But then he remembered that nobody but Frank had his h
ome number in their address book and that the call was most likely an accident.
Then how in the hell did they pocket dial my exact number?
The sounds changed again, and this time Doug heard muted breathing coming from the other end. Before he could threaten or accuse the caller of a prank, he heard whispering.
“I’m hungry. So hungry.”
Doug slammed the phone down and began convincing himself that he had imagined the entire thing.
***
Robert pulled the van into the parking lot and killed the engine. He turned to face Kelly with as much of a smile as he could muster.
“I said I wanted to go home.”
Robert nodded and pushed fast food wrappers and empty Styrofoam cups to the floor.
“I know. We’ll make it a quick meal and I’ll have you home in time to fall asleep to Wake Up, Pine Valley.” He waited, staring at her face for some indication on how the situation would break.
“Fine. Let’s sit at the counter and order as soon as we do.”
“Great!” Robert slapped his hands together and hopped from the van. The morning sun hurt his eyes, and he could feel the late-summer mold count rising by the hour. An allergy attack would ruin his orgasm. He’d have to be aware of that. Kelly slammed the door and dragged her feet through the gravel lot toward the front door of a featureless greasy spoon in the middle of a decaying strip mall. Pine Valley took its name from an idealized past, much like the developers who would cut down a forest to build McMansions and then call the subdivision “Rolling Woods.” The hard economic times had turned the most bustling shopping centers into ratty hulks of Internet gambling parlors and thrift shops. Kelly could smell the buttery toast and scrambled eggs as they stepped inside, which lightened her mood slightly.
“Hi, Hazel,” Robert called out to the pear-shaped woman behind the counter. She wore her swirling locks of brown and gray in a frizzy bun atop her head. She cracked her gum and flipped the order book open while snagging a pencil from behind her right ear.
