One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

  No, the Burning Angel was going to have to find another way to satisfy his burning needs, a way that would not jeopardize his career in any way, a way the world would never know about.

  He would have to keep it within the walls of his house, the place where he thought of himself as more than a captain, or even a commissioner.

  He was king.

  It began after he moved into the basement. Lynn first sensed it through his long, prolonged stares. She told herself she was imagining things.

  Then one night the Captain came up from the basement to have a chat in the kitchen with his only daughter, moments after I’d dropped her off after a date.

  “Hey there, Princess.”

  His words shocked her. He was trying to speak with Lynn as if they had a close relationship. She’d have been more comfortable with the approach of a stranger in a bus station.

  “Dad. What are you doing up?”

  “Couldn’t sleep….”

  Her mother and Brendan were sound asleep. It was past midnight. She smelled whiskey on her father’s breath but he didn’t seem drunk, standing at the top of the basement steps in his stocking feet, red suspenders off his shoulders and dangling down to his knees. He always wore red suspenders, on or off duty.

  “So. How’s the DeFalco kid?”

  Lynn was wary. “Since when do you care about Mickey, Dad?”

  “I care about you. That’s why I ask.”

  Lynn could have laughed out loud when he said he cared about her, but she didn’t.

  “We’re doing fine, thanks,” Lynn finally said.

  “Main thing is that you’re being careful. You are being careful, aren’t you?”

  “Dad. I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Just please tell your poor old gray-haired father that you’re being careful, so I can sleep soundly.”

  Lynn thought about it. We hadn’t had sex (thanks largely to the night of the flaming ropes), so caution wasn’t an issue. But if she told him there was nothing to be careful about, he probably wouldn’t believe it, and he’d badger her for more information. Lynn decided to take the easy way out.

  “Yes, Dad.” She sighed. “We’re being careful.”

  A relieved look came to his glazed eyes, and a faint smile came to his lips.

  “Young people are different today,” he said. “In my day you didn’t have sex until you got married.”

  “Dad. Please.”

  “All right, we won’t talk about it. What do you want to talk about?”

  “With you? Nothing.”

  “All right, then, I’ll talk. I’m going to tell you a story about the Burning Angel, but you can’t tell a soul. Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

  He went down to the basement and came back with the framed Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of himself carrying that small black child to safety. It truly was an extraordinary photograph, the child’s mouth wide open in a wail of terror, Mahoney’s wide-open eyes blazing with hope and determination. And of course, the flames that licked at his shoulders and coat-sleeves….

  “Some picture, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “There’s an amazing story behind this photo.”

  “What’s that?”

  The Captain chuckled. “It’s a setup.”

  Lynn was stunned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, I saved the kid, all right. It was a good rescue. But we kinda helped that picture along, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  The Captain sighed. “I was good friends with that photographer. Saw him outside the building before I went in. Told him I had a feelin’ I was gonna make a good rescue that night.”

  “Dad, don’t tell me—”

  “Just listen. Lotta times when a colored guy’s house is on fire, the kitchen is fulla grease. They like their greasy food, the colored, you know? So you got all these little grease fires going.”

  The Captain seemed to blush, either with shame or covert pride. “I smeared a little burning grease on my shoulders before I grabbed that kid. Knew it’d make a good picture.” He muffled a laugh. “Didn’t know it’d make that good a picture, though.”

  Lynn couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Daddy. Good God!”

  The Captain’s face softened. “Don’t be mad at me, sweetie. I was young and I was ambitious. Also, the guy who took the picture won a Pulitzer Prize for it. A goddamn Pulitzer!”

  Lynn stood and stared at him, amazed, appalled, and almost nauseated. Her father had wasted precious seconds inside a burning home to phony himself up for a photograph! What if those seconds had cost that kid his life?

  It was as if she’d spoken the question aloud.

  “I knew what I was doing, Lynn,” the Captain said. “Nobody got hurt, and a hero was born.” He chuckled. “World needs heroes, doesn’t it? So I figured, why not me?”

  Lynn said nothing. She stood rock-still, waiting for her father to go away. But he lingered, as if he were even prouder of his scam than he would have been over the real thing.

  “Anyway, the photographer just died, so now you’re the only one who knows, besides me. Just you and me. Even your mother doesn’t know.”

  “Dad. Why are you telling me this?”

  “Why?” He chuckled as he approached Lynn and stroked her cheek. “Because I want us to be close. Very close. As close as a man and a woman can be. Not tonight, but soon. Very soon. Do you know what I’m saying, baby?”

  All she could do was stare at him in disbelief.

  He kissed her on the forehead. “Your mother’s going away next weekend. ’Night, sweetheart.” He winked at her, and then he receded down the cellar steps like a vampire at the first rays of dawn.

  Where was Lynn supposed to turn? Her three older brothers were out of the question. They wouldn’t have believed her. She couldn’t tell her mother. She couldn’t tell me. She couldn’t tell Brendan.

  She could barely tell herself it was happening even as it was happening, in the broad daylight of a beautiful morning in August, the day Lynn and I went to Jones Beach together for the very last time.

  Lynn was getting her beach stuff together in the kitchen when the Captain sidled up and embraced her from behind. She felt his hardness against her back. She turned and shoved him away, an act that seemed to amuse him.

  “Daddy!”

  He spread his hands, innocence personified. “I’m just hugging my daughter! Can’t I be nice to my own daughter?”

  “Daddy, don’t do that!”

  “You don’t understand, Princess.”

  “I think I do.”

  They had squared off against each other. The Captain—neatly dressed in his uniform, clean-shaven, doused with a sharp cologne—was the very picture of a leader, an important man among men. He casually poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot his wife had made before leaving for an overnight trip to her sister’s in Scranton.

  The only other person in the house was twelve-year-old Brendan, sound asleep in his room. The Captain had timed it just right.

  Lynn made a gun of her hand and pointed her index finger straight at her father’s heart. “Don’t you ever, ever touch me again. Do you hear me?”

  He sipped his coffee, shrugged, shook his head. “Is that any way to talk to your father?”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  The Captain gulped the rest of his coffee, rinsed the cup, and set it in the drying rack.

  “Princess—”

  “And do not call me ‘Princess.’ I never could stand that.”

  He seemed genuinely surprised. “Really? Even when you were a little girl, riding up on my shoulders?”

  Lynn grabbed her beach bag and headed for the door. The Captain blocked the way. She smacked his face. He grabbed her by the wrists. The beach bag fell to the floor as the Captain dragged his daughter to the kitchen table and forced her to sit. Then he eased himself into the chair directly across from Lynn
, still gripping her wrists.

  “Let go of me!”

  “Will you sit still if I do? Will you?”

  She nodded. He released her wrists. She remained seated.

  “I want you to stay with me in the basement tonight.”

  “Jesus, Daddy. Jesus!”

  “Take it easy. I’m not a bad man. I’m human, like everybody else.”

  A Good Humor ice cream truck went down the block, bells jingling. Lynn felt dizzy. It seemed impossible that sweet, gooey ice cream sandwiches and fathers who wanted to fuck their daughters could exist in the same world, on the same street.

  The Captain leaned across the table.

  “I can’t be alone down there tonight. I just…can’t.”

  Lynn hugged herself, as if the temperature in the kitchen had plummeted to the freezing point.

  “Dad. Listen to me. I cannot do this thing. Please don’t ask me to do this thing.”

  “You do it with that DeFalco boy.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Oh, come on, now. Don’t lie to your father.”

  “It’s not a lie!”

  He pulled out his pocket watch, checked the time, slipped it back into its pocket.

  “Listen, I’ve got to get to work. I’ll see you later.”

  As if they’d been having an ordinary, everyday conversation!

  “You will not see me later.”

  “Yes, Lynn, I will.” His sudden smile was chilling. “Because if it isn’t you, it’ll be Brendan.”

  For an instant, she didn’t understand. Then it hit her like a meteor from the farthest reaches of space. She looked into his blazing eyes and at last saw the full scope of his plan, the dark brilliance that made him the man he was.

  Firefighters make the best arsonists. Walter Mahoney understood that if he set fires in three corners of a room, whoever was hiding in there would have to run to that fourth corner…right into his arms. It was all about giving a person no other choice.

  Walter Mahoney had a dark genius for giving people no other choice.

  At last Lynn was crying, something she’d vowed she would never do in front of this man. She hung her head, shut her eyes, wished it all to be a bad dream, willed it all to be a bad dream. She felt his hand stroking her hair, as gently as if she were a kitten.

  “Don’t cry, baby girl.”

  She lifted her head, opened her eyes and stared into the eerily calm face of her father.

  “Dad. You don’t mean it.”

  “I mean everything I say. You know that.”

  “Daddy, please…”

  “Brendan is practically a girl anyway, isn’t he?” The Captain chuckled. “I’ll just do it, no problems. He’s not like you. He’s not a fighter.”

  He winked at Lynn again, smiling as broadly as he’d ever smiled. “What the hell, the little fairy would probably enjoy it. I’ll be home late. Have a good time at the beach, Princess.”

  He left the house whistling.

  That was what Lynn Mahoney was carrying around on our very last day together at Jones Beach, the day that inspired my song. I was wondering if she’d stopped loving me, and she was wondering whether or not to let her father fuck her so he’d keep his hands off her kid brother.

  Was he bluffing about Brendan, or would he actually go through with it if she didn’t give in to him?

  She had a good long time to think it through at the beach. She could report him to the police, but then what? They probably wouldn’t believe her. It would be the word of a hormone-ridden teenage girl against that of the greatest hero in the history of the New York City Fire Department. She’d probably wind up being sent to a shrink.

  She already knew that telling anyone in her family was out—but what about me? Lynn and I told each other everything, but this was different. Knowing something like this would change me forever, the way it had already changed her forever. She could never feel the same way about herself, knowing her own father wanted her. Her innocence was gone, a precious thing to lose so early in life.

  And she didn’t want me to lose mine.

  So she kept it all to herself, knowing that the lower the sun sank on the horizon, the closer she was coming to the biggest, darkest decision of her life. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but one thing she did know—that bastard wasn’t going to get his hands on Brendan.

  She phoned Brendan from a pay phone at the beach and told him to see if he could stay the night at the house of his good friend, a kid named Jeffrey. As it turned out, Brendan had already been invited to Jeffrey’s for the night, so it was all set.

  The only two people in the house that night would be Lynn and the Captain.

  The Captain did not get home until nearly midnight. There had been an all-day conference in Manhattan about cutting-edge firefighting techniques, followed by a banquet at a hotel attended by top fire officials from the tristate area.

  Lynn sat waiting for him in the kitchen. She wore jeans and a sweater, though the night was warm. The Captain entered the house quietly, as he always did, even when he’d been boozing.

  “Hello, Princess.”

  She could smell the whiskey on his breath. He smiled at her almost shyly as he loosened his tie.

  “Brendan asleep?”

  “He’s at Jeffrey’s for the night.”

  She saw the gleam of triumph in his eyes. It was working out just as he’d planned it. He held out his hand, like a boy at a party asking a girl to dance.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  And she meant it. She was going to have sex with her father, to spare her brother. She’d get through it somehow. She’d shut her eyes and grit her teeth and pretend it wasn’t happening.

  Would he wear a condom? This was what she was thinking as she took his hand and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet.

  “I won’t hurt you, Princess. I promise.”

  She nodded. What bullshit. Whatever happened next, the worst of the hurting had already happened.

  He led the way to the door leading to the basement. Lynn hadn’t been down there in years. Even when she was a little girl, the place frightened her. It was as if she’d always known this day was coming.

  The Captain opened the door and pulled the light cord, illuminating the bare cinder block walls within.

  And that’s when Lynn’s plan changed, in the blink of an eye.

  “You watch these steps, baby girl, they’re steep.”

  They were the last words she ever heard him speak. Lynn pulled her hand free from his before shoving her father down the stairs with every ounce of strength she had.

  They were indeed steep steps, twenty wooden rungs that led sharply down to a cement floor, pretty much at the same angle a firefighter would lean his ladder against a burning building. The Captain actually completed the better part of a flip in midair before his back slammed against the bottom few steps with a crash that shook the house. But he made no sound as he rolled onto the floor and lay on his back, gazing blindly at the ceiling.

  Lynn’s heart was pounding as she studied him from up at the doorway. He wasn’t moving. He might have been dead, but she couldn’t be sure. And she wasn’t about to descend the steps and find out.

  Bad things live in cellars. Spiders. Mice. Ghosts. And fathers who want to fuck their daughters.

  She took a last look at her father, pulled the light cord, and went up to her room, where she rapidly packed her bags. Then Lynn Mahoney vanished into the night for what she was sure would be the rest of her life, believing herself to be a murderer on the run.

  But she wasn’t.

  Lynn’s mother got home late the next morning. She heard the moans of pain the Captain had been making since he’d regained consciousness sometime in the middle of the night. She called for an ambulance and within minutes they were there, strapping the Captain to a gurney after first immobilizing his neck to prevent spinal damage.

  It was too late for that. Several of the vertebrae in his lowe
r back had shattered. He would never walk again.

  But he was able to talk all right, and the story he stuck to was a simple one—he’d had too much to drink, lost his balance, and fallen down the stairs. Everybody who’d ever known Walter Mahoney found that a little hard to believe. The man had the balance of a cat. Nobody had ever seen him stumble or trip.

  “I lost my balance,” he insisted. The only other person who knew the truth was on a Greyhound bus headed far, far from home.

  It was nearly nightfall before anyone noticed that Lynn was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t at work and she wasn’t with me. These were the only places anyone thought to look. She wasn’t a worldly person. She was a small-town girl who’d suddenly vanished like a puff of smoke. A runaway, for no damn good reason.

  The Captain never got his promotion. The city would sooner have embraced an adulterous fire commissioner than a paraplegic one.

  But it was a big story in the papers (FALLEN ANGEL was the headline in the New York Post). And the city did build him that ramp to the door of his house, and wished him the very best in a well-earned retirement.

  Little Brendan never knew what his father would have been willing to do to him, never knew why his sister had taken off like that. He promised his father that when he grew up he’d become a fireman, just like all the other Mahoney males. It was a promise that got him killed in that Bronx blaze, along with his three brothers.

  Lynn lived her life from city to city, state to state. She rarely stayed anywhere longer than a year. She had glancing relationships with men that never lasted more than a few months.

  She was a moving target, both physically and emotionally.

  When she was twenty-one she had her tubes tied. She did not want to bring any of that man’s grandchildren into the world, ever. A bloodline like that had to be stopped, or so she told herself.

  Lost in the decision was the fact that her father had also sired Brendan, the sweetest child she’d ever known. She was only twenty-one, all alone in the world, making a choice propelled by grief and despair. She was sorry about it later, but what was done was done.