Into the Inferno

by Earl Emerson

  “I guess we’ll find out.”

  As we huddled, I began to have misgivings. In my twelve-year career, I’d never seen anybody pull everyone out of a fire building. I was going to look either prescient or remarkably stupid. It was possible I’d misread the evidence. After all, what had I uncovered? An injured dog, some empty sacks, a couple of oil barrels.

  And why would Caputo turn his trailer into a makeshift bomb?

  Stump blasting. Of course. He’d been blasting stumps. Why hadn’t I thought of that sooner? Now that I thought about it, stump blasting made a whole lot more sense than anything else. Whether or not the materials were inside the trailer was another story.

  Beside us now, Ian Hjorth said, “Did I hear you say bomb?”

  Ben Arden unbuckled his backpack and dropped his self-contained breathing apparatus into the grass. “We could have had it out in another few minutes.”

  “I’m going with my gut here,” I said.

  Ben and Ian exchanged glances. I knew they were both wondering whether I’d lost my mind.

  The radio traffic was atwitter, both from the dispatcher and from the units waiting half a mile down the road. Everybody wanted details.

  It was at this point that Mayor Haston stormed over to us. I had a feeling if not for the fact that my girls were with me, he would have thrown a punch. He was that angry. I’d heard a rumor that when Newcastle fired him from the volunteers, they’d nearly come to blows, that Haston had a hair-trigger temper. This was the first time I’d faced it. I knew he blamed me for the fact that our wives had run off together.

  “I don’t know much,” Haston said, standing over me, his helmet akimbo, “but I know that trailer’s burning like a box of kindling. It kind of makes me wonder about you, Swope.”

  “You’re right, Steve. You don’t know much.”

  “You got everybody into a lather at the meeting. Could be you’re just one of those people likes to run around crying wolf.”

  It had been more than three minutes since we’d evacuated the property. “Steve, the way I figure it, this is a no-brainer for you. I’m right, you get to live. I’m wrong, you’ll look good for wanting to go back in.”

  “Don’t hand me any of your bullshit. I want your people back in there. Now.”

  “You’re not going to make much of a chief if you don’t know what ammonium nitrate and fuel oil do,” Ian said.

  At that moment, in the midst of the withering look Haston gave Hjorth, the world around us altered in a manner that few people ever experience.

  The ground rocked. The air pressure all around loaded down in an instant. Our ears popped. A great gust of hot air rocked the motor home, nearly tipping it. The tops of nearby trees bowed to the ground and then flew back up like whips. Half a dozen birds came crashing to the earth around us, as if they’d been shot.

  Mayor Haston, who hadn’t been sheltered by the motor home with the rest of us, actually flew backward eight or ten feet and landed on his back.

  In the eerie stillness immediately following the explosion, burning debris began sprinkling out of the sky. His face impregnated with tiny bits of blackened material resembling sand, Steve Haston slowly sat up on his elbows.

  “That,” Ian Hjorth said, “is a cheap lesson in what happens when ammonium nitrate mixes with fuel oil.”

  “What?” Haston was deaf now, at least temporarily.

  “It means you just tried to murder about fifteen people,” Arden said. “It’s a good goddamned thing you weren’t in charge. You dumb bastard.”

  “What?”

  “He said you’re a dumbass because you’re on your keister while we’re all safe here behind this motor home,” Hjorth said, smiling. “Shit-fer-brains.”

  “Why don’t you stand back up?” Arden said. “When the secondary blast comes you can do that little puppet dance again. Like Pinocchio jacking off. I kind of liked that.”

  Karrie stepped over to her father and said, “Shut up, you two.”

  I couldn’t help recalling that Ben had been on the pipe back at the trailer, Karrie’s rump wedged firmly in the doorway while Ben had been inside. It should have been the other way about, Karrie on the pipe, Ben backing her up. She needed to prove herself in the same manner as every other firefighter since time immemorial. And she needed to be aggressive about doing so.

  27. FARTING NICKELS

  “You okay?”

  Allyson and Britney craned their necks up at me and nodded, their eyes like half dollars. I’d never seen them so frightened. Morgan had instinctively twined her arms around my neck when the blast hit, her body knocking us all up against the side of the motor home, and now she clung to me long after the danger was over. Embarrassed over our cheek-to-cheek position, she stood up and gave me a smile that was part chagrin and part conspiracy, as if we might have moved to a new level in our relationship. As if we had a relationship.

  “You guys stay here,” I said. “There could be another blast.”

  Morgan wiped her teary eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t think I like fires.”

  “Trust me, this was a freak deal.”

  I’d watched the blast send Haston’s helmet flying a hundred feet across the yard like a lost prayer. Saw a crow with a broken wing on the roof of a house, having fallen out of the sky. Later, the doctors found particles of aluminum from the outer walls of Caputo’s trailer embedded in Haston’s face. They removed several small pieces of insulation from under his scalp.

  Pieces of Engine 1 had become projectiles. Strips of metal and burning debris had rocketed over our heads across the yard, striking the house or landing in the woods beyond the house. Twenty seconds after the blast, heavy metal parts were still dropping all around us.

  A large chunk shook the ground when it landed forty feet away. A second later a sliver of metal knifed into the ground where the four of us had been moments earlier, burying itself eighteen inches in the turf.

  Morgan began crying. Britney and Allyson looked out from under the motor home where they were hiding, their eyes huge and round and curious, just a little bit pleased with the whole thing. They didn’t want to miss any of this. I winked at them. Allyson winked back, but all Britney could do was scrunch up her face. In other circumstances it would have been hilarious watching her efforts.

  When I figured everything that could fall out of the sky had fallen, I buttoned my coat, straightened my helmet, and stepped out onto the lawn to survey the situation.

  Two of our volunteers dragged Haston back behind the motor home to protect him from a secondary blast, should there be one. On the radio, the Snoqualmie unit warned about the possibility of more blasts. We all knew from the antiterrorism classes we’d taken that planned terrorism events often came in pairs, the second explosion designed to catch the police and first-in rescuers off guard.

  Trouble was, this wasn’t an act of terrorism. At least I didn’t think it was.

  This was the work of a moron.

  Except for Haston, whose face was almost as black as his truck, all the survivors on this side of the motor home looked pale.

  Haston was shaking his head and repeatedly screwing his fingers into his ears, his temporary deafness a situation Hjorth and Arden were determined to exploit to the limit. “Trying to put another nickel in the meter?” Arden asked.

  “Maybe it would work better if you shoved it up your ass,” Hjorth said. “A guy like you should always keep a pile of nickels up his ass. That way whenever you need change you can fart nickels.”

  Hjorth and Arden laughed uproariously at the thought. Either they had gotten over the explosion more quickly than anybody else or they hadn’t gotten over it at all and abusing the mayor was their way of coping. It was hard to know with them.

  A quick survey of the fire-ground personnel told me that except for an assortment of ringing eardrums and a few minor cuts, Mayor Haston had sustained the only real injuries.

  We’d started out with five civilians—Haston, Caputo’s mother, my
girls, and Morgan—along with eight firefighters, four paid and four volunteer, so it was a relief nobody had been killed. North Bend could easily have lost thirteen people.

  Fourteen, depending on where Caputo was.

  We waited five minutes. During that time the officer on the Snoqualmie rig got on the air to ask if we were all right. I gave a status report and added that they’d better start searching for spot fires, because from our vantage point we could already see at least one off in the trees. Nothing burned faster than a dry Douglas fir, and the area was well populated with them.

  When I got off the radio, Caputo’s mother confronted me, eyes empty, lips quivering. “What does this mean? Where’s my son?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am. I don’t know where your son is.”

  “What’s this?” She gestured at a large chunk of pink insulation from the trailer’s walls that had drifted out of the sky like a piece of cotton candy. “Tell me about this. Can anybody tell me what this means?”

  Ian gave me a beleaguered look and draped his arm around the old woman’s shoulders, walking her to one side and speaking softly. In twenty seconds he’d gone from mocker to grief counselor.

  After I set up a perimeter to keep out neighbors and passersby, who were already showing up on foot, after I had assigned a team to check nearby residences for casualties and damage, Ben Arden and I walked across the road.

  Aside from burning brush and two large maples that had been knocked half over so that their branches were knuckling the ground like football players waiting for the snap, the first thing we spotted was the still-burning hulk of the maroon Chevrolet. On the far side of it sat Engine 1, stripped down to the frame and six metal wheels, most of the rubber vaporized or blown off: no hose, no tank, no motor, no cab. The engine had been in a perfect line with Caputo’s now-vaporized trailer, as well as with the motor home two hundred yards away. Combined with the small hillock, it had probably saved our lives.

  On the far side of the decimated engine, Caputo’s double-wide trailer had been replaced by a giant hole in the ground. As if a bulldozer had flattened them, the brush and trees surrounding the trailer were leveled for a distance of sixty feet in all directions. The oil drums and paper sacks I’d seen behind the trailer were gone. As were the blackberries. Not even the dog collar remained to convince me I had seen a dog.

  Spot fires continued to smolder in the trees and brush around us.

  After Snoqualmie and our second engine from the Wilderness Rim satellite station arrived and began lobbing water high into the firs, the Snoqualmie officer sent a runner to tell me they’d found an object wedged into the fork of a tree approximately a quarter mile from ground zero, that they’d tentatively identified the object as a human head.

  Everybody at the scene remained on pins and needles, looking for more body parts, but all we found was a mangled hand—Caputo’s—the hospital dressing still in place. Just as I thought, they hadn’t sewn his fingers back on.

  It took an hour to get loose of the scene. I fielded questions, gave orders, explained what had happened to at least twenty different individuals, all the while promising my girls we would have lunch soon.

  Morgan seemed more distraught than anyone, and after a while I began to suspect she might be overreacting to garner attention from me.

  Just after the media arrived, two Eastside Fire and Rescue investigators showed up and began snapping pictures, focusing their questions on Ian, Ben, myself, and Karrie—the four who’d gotten closest to the trailer.

  They were particularly curious about the fact that we’d visited Caputo yesterday.

  My personal theory was that, under the influence of prescription medication and alcohol, Caputo had left food burning on the stove. After all, his mother had been in the process of bringing over part of a meal. I figured the dog had gotten into rat poison or eaten some tainted roadkill. The ammonium nitrate, which Caputo probably kept around for removing stumps, had been stored inside and premixed with the fuel oil, although I didn’t recall seeing it yesterday when we were cleaning up. The fire set it off. My theory held water until Caputo’s mother insisted Max had never blasted a stump in his life.

  Oddly enough, a volunteer had parked his extended-cab pickup truck in front of my new Lexus, so that the Lexus received no damage whatsoever, while the volunteer’s truck lost three windows, a tire, and most of the grille. I put my bunking clothes in the trunk and left my knee-high rubber boots on. My civilian shoes had disappeared along with everything else on Engine 1. Either that or they were in a tree with Caputo’s head.

  28. GOING TO THE BANK IN A DIAPER

  As I drove the four of us back into town, I couldn’t help thinking about Charlie Drago’s warning that we would be blown to smithereens. Had to be a coincidence. Charlie Drago was paranoid. Our explosion had been caused by Caputo, who’d been one of our resident nutcases ever since I was in the department. The only thing that bothered me was the dog. Caputo loved those dogs. He would never have hurt one of them, much less throw one into the blackberries. Even harder to believe that the mutt just happened to get into rat poison the day Caputo blew himself to hell. That part bothered me. It bothered me a lot. Everything about the explosion bothered me.

  Sure, fire departments handled explosions, along with fires, car wrecks, first-aid calls, broken water heaters, you name it, but the last time North Bend had faced an explosion had been . . . I couldn’t even remember the last time. Probably never. Certainly never during my tenure. They weren’t that common.

  “You girls like to see your grandfather?” I said as we drove back to town.

  Britney was sitting beside me, Allyson and Morgan in back. “I’m hungry,” Britney said.

  Allyson leaned forward and looked at me suspiciously. “Which grampa?”

  “Swope. Grandpa Swope. My father.”

  “I thought he moved away.”

  “He’s living a few blocks from here. You want to see him?”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I thought I would.”

  “I want to see Grampa,” Britney said. “I want to see him!”

  Allyson nodded. I didn’t know how to prepare them. After the explosion I didn’t have the mental energy to come up with anything.

  “Grandpa’s been experiencing poor health,” I said lamely.

  “What’s poor health?” Britney asked.

  “Means he’s sick,” Allyson said.

  “He’s in a nursing home,” I added. “He won’t be able to talk, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.”

  “If he can’t say it, how do we know he loves us?” Britney asked.

  “ ’Cause we’re little girls,” Allyson said sarcastically. “We’re adorable. Everybody loves little girls.”

  “He’s always loved you,” I said. “Nothing has come along to change that.”

  My girls were adorable and funny and smart and always buzzing with plans. I would miss watching them grow up. Thinking about it brought a wave of sorrow over me as powerful as anything I’d felt since Lorie left. It hit me like the shock wave back at the trailer. I came close to bursting into tears right there in the car.

  We parked outside Alpine Estates, and as we got out, Britney said, “I’m hungry.”

  “We won’t be long, sweetie.”

  “But I’m hungry.”

  “Quiet up, Brit,” Allyson said. “I want to see Grandpa.”

  “You don’t mind, do you?” I asked Morgan.

  “I’ll wait out here if that’s all right.” I tossed her the keys so she could listen to the radio.

  “Try that Andy Williams CD,” Britney said. “It’s smooth.”

  As I opened the door for them, I realized everything I felt toward my girls had been amplified a thousand times by the near miss up the hill. My health situation had already been having that effect, but the fire and explosion had magnified it even more. I wanted every minute to stretch into a week, found myself memorizing every move they made. It was as if I were s
eeing them for the first time, as if I’d been blind.

  Or would be soon.

  I’d been feeling it since I got home the night before, that my senses were sharpening. That I was saving up images and feelings to take with me into diaperland.

  As we walked into the nursing home, I knew these were my last days with my daughters, my last hours to enjoy their innocence and spontaneity, their quick-witted banter. What hurt was that I couldn’t give them all of my time, that I simply didn’t dare stop searching for a cure, not while there was the least chance I might beat this monkey. I’d been deserted by Stephanie Riggs, trivialized and politicized by the committee, lied to by Jane’s California Propulsion, outmaneuvered by Mayor Haston, and essentially left to face this alone.

  Moving to North Bend after the death of his third wife, my father had been an immediate hit with the girls, two and four years old then. They’d adored him, and at this late date I could admit their adoration had bothered me. Grandpa had poured all the affection he’d never given me onto them, and they’d reveled in it.

  It had been petty beyond reason to keep them from their grandfather, to withhold my own visits because of slights or things not done twenty-six years ago, to hold my mother’s actions and his reaction to them against him for so long, as if it were somehow his fault she had left when I was eight. Oddly, now that I thought about it, both of us had been abandoned and left with small children. I knew my father was a decent man who wanted above all to do right. Or at least that’s what he’d wanted when he had a will.

  We found him in a wheelchair in the hallway outside his room, head lolled to one side.

  Exuding the brutal honesty of the very young, Britney let out an “Ugghh!” Her sister elbowed her and put her index finger to her lips. Both girls looked to me for signals.

  I took a breath and said, “It’s a little like he’s asleep. You would still love me if I was asleep, wouldn’t you?”