Into the Inferno

by Earl Emerson

  DAY FOUR

  32. THE CURVE OF HER THIGH

  With all that was happening, you’d think insomnia would have robbed me of my ability to sleep, but you’d be wrong. Once again I slept like the dead. No tossing or turning. No tottering trips to the loo in the wee hours. No memory even of having gone to bed. Just a blissful sleep that seemed to last forever. Maybe my nights were a foretaste of brain death. Maybe I was going to be happier than I’d ever been.

  Thursday. By Sunday it would be over.

  It occurred to me as I contemplated these things that going to sleep at night couldn’t be too different from death. Suddenly a great calm descended upon me.

  I began to wonder why any of us feared death.

  Last night had been a stretch in heaven.

  I yawned lazily and glanced over at the clock. It was eight. I hadn’t slept this late in years.

  Although it would be an hour before we got any direct sunlight, the rooms in our small house were slowly filling with the early morning June dawn. The house was quiet, motes of dust drifting in the dead air. I was filled with the sheer wonder of being alive.

  Because we were almost directly underneath the west face of Mount Si, the morning sun didn’t reach us until ten-thirty or eleven in winter and not until nine-ish on the longest day of the year, which would be next week. In our stronghold under the mountain it was always a little cooler than the rest of the township, a little dewier, and in winter a little frostier.

  I had slept in a pair of rumpled sleeping drawers and an oversize North Bend Fire and Rescue T-shirt, was now padding around the hardwood floors of our house barefoot wondering where everybody was. It was a small house with a living room, two bedrooms, and a dayroom that served as our family room just off the open kitchen.

  They were on the futon in the family room, Britney, Allyson, and Stephanie Riggs, who’d spent the remainder of the day with us. We’d taken turns calling the companies that had been involved in the Chattanooga incident from the list Charlie Drago had provided and then on the manifest from Holly’s truck last February, calling until anybody who could answer a phone had gone home for the day. If Charlie Drago was to be trusted, and I wasn’t sure that he could be, there were dozens of suspects in the Tennessee incident, many more than on the list he was able to give me. Judging from what they might have been carrying, there were only three logical choices in our accident: DuPont Chemical, Pacific Northwest Paint Contractors, and Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc. None of the three were on Charlie’s incomplete list, but that didn’t mean much.

  DuPont was being as intractable as any large corporation could be. So far I had yet to talk to a single person in authority there. At lunchtime Jane’s had promised to send a couple of people up in three hours, but as of that night they still hadn’t arrived. I’d called Jane’s five or six times since then, but neither of the two parties I’d spoken to earlier were in and nobody else seemed to have heard of me or a junket to North Bend. Pacific Northwest Paint Contractors had been shipping, among other items, toluene, which Stephanie looked up yesterday. The pathophysiology included effects to the CNS, euphoria, dizziness, confusion, CNS depression, headache, vertigo, hallucinations, seizures, ataxia, tinnitus, stupor, and coma. It was very close to the list of symptoms from exposure to organophosphates.

  The list wasn’t exactly in line with what I was going through, but it was close enough. It occurred to me that the reason Joel had fallen off the roof and Jackie had crashed her car might have had to do with some of those symptoms in combination with one another. Hallucinations and dizziness. Euphoria and stupor. It was scary thinking about it. Pacific Northwest Paint had promised to check to see whether their shipment had been damaged and whether any of their containers had been opened.

  In addition, Stephanie made a half-dozen discreet calls to physicians and personnel at Tacoma General. We discussed and analyzed Charlie Drago and the situation in Chattanooga, agreeing it would be good to get a second perspective from Tennessee.

  Allyson and I had prepared dinner together while Stephanie and Britney played Candy Land, and then, at Allyson’s insistence, we set up candles on the table for dinner. The girls continued to treat Stephanie like visiting royalty. After dinner Stephanie and I were dragooned into a game of Monopoly, which we abandoned before it officially ended, when Allyson got so far ahead of the rest of us that Britney started to cry.

  It was almost eleven when we unfolded the futon in the family room, insisting, all of us, that Stephanie forgo the motel and stay here. When the girls begged to watch a late-night movie with her, The Whole Town’s Talking, with Edward G. Robinson and Jean Arthur, I objected, knowing Stephanie had been up late the night before, but Stephanie said a girl party would be fun, that I should go to bed and get my beauty sleep. Britney cackled, never having heard the phrase beauty sleep before.

  As I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the family room watching them, I felt so much love for my girls it almost hurt. Characteristically separated by half a body width, Britney slept by herself, while the other two were snuggled up together. It was ironic because during the day Britney was the clingy one and Allyson the slightly more standoffish of my daughters. When sick or asleep, they reversed roles, Allyson clutching, Britney off to one side. Britney had a whisper of perspiration on her brow, both feet sticking out from the blankets.

  Mixed with Allyson’s darker, heavier-looking mop, Stephanie Riggs’s hair was so silky and lustrous, it seemed from another world.

  Too bad Stephanie hated me. Had circumstances been different, I would have been thinking about the curve of her thigh under the sheet, the gentle jut of her jawline, her hair splayed across the futon. But Stephanie had pegged me like a lepidopterist pinning down a butterfly: conquer and abandon. A small-time prick working big-time hustles on unsuspecting females all over the valley. The supreme cad. A self-involved jerk.

  That had been my unspoken, underhanded, and unacknowledged modus operandi for the past three years. Funny how knowing it was your last week on earth could open your eyes to things that should have been obvious all along.

  Before the syndrome, I’d had little time for real life. I’d been chasing the perfect woman, the one who would look good on my arm, the one other men would envy me for, the woman who wouldn’t leave me or get sick or go crazy or be anything but beautiful, the woman you could always count on with absolute certainty, the woman who existed nowhere on earth but in the deepest recesses of my brain.

  After seducing each candidate with a sincerity that was believable primarily because I believed it myself, after earnestly convincing her of my fitness as a father, as a potential husband, as a lifelong friend, partner, and confidant, I would begin to discover minor aspects of her character that didn’t suit me. Eventually these token flaws would pile up and grow in importance until, after some days or weeks of torturing myself with indecision, I would make the inevitable announcement that we were getting too close; I would tell her I needed space. In other words, as several women had told me, I’d had my fun and it was time to move on.

  Convincing them we were still friends was my own sick little mischief, which in my own mind managed to lessen the injury delivered but in fact only prolonged their pain.

  Sincerity was the key, I’d found, when dealing with women. If you could fake sincerity, you didn’t have to fake anything else. My only defense was that I faked it so well that even I believed it was genuine. I was and always had been a genuine dope! As only a former Christian and a true idiot could, I believed my own patter.

  Everybody has the capacity for self-deception, but I was the king.

  Yesterday Stephanie made my jaw drop when she asked what woman had injured me so badly I felt the need to hurt all women. When you’re playing the kind of games I’d been playing and found yourself in the presence of a woman with that sort of quick insight, you ran like a scalded cat. I would have, too, if I hadn’t needed her help so desperately.

  My mother had abandoned me at
age eight. When she returned four years later, a meager two postcards and one belated birthday present in between, she became so self-conscious about relating once again to the religious rigmarole of the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ, about fitting back into the hierarchy at Six Points, about being taken back by her husband, James, Sr., that she all but forgot me. I was twelve by then and not nearly the cute little button-nosed imp she’d left. In fact, I’d turned into something of a sullen brat. But then, even when her plate was almost empty, Mother had too much on it for me. By the time she returned, I was old enough to be bitter but proud enough to hide it, resentful enough not to forget but alienated enough to make sure it never happened again. I would die before I would put my trust in her.

  Despite her cutting insights into my flawed psyche, I was surprised at how comfortable I’d been spending time yesterday with Stephanie. Not that I wasn’t still scared of her, mind you.

  Not wanting to disturb their slumber, I stepped into a pair of sandals and went out back to the pasture. The morning air was clear and crisp. Intent on making each moment last as long as possible, I stood in the field under Mount Si, which rose to forty-one hundred feet over our house in a steep wall on the far side of the Middle Fork, firs clinging to the south end of the mountain, ragged rock screes and crags spanning the north end. Nobody ever visited our place without expressing wonder at how close the mountain was, at how majestic and awe-inspiring and downright frightening it was. Like Yosemite, people said.

  On summer evenings hang gliders launched off the top, taking advantage of the warm air currents that raced up the steep face, and each year thousands of hikers and tourists labored up the four-mile trail on the side of the mountain, scrambling to a lookout just out of view of our property. From the top you could see Seattle thirty miles away, the snowcapped Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound, and, directly below, the entire town of North Bend.

  I could hear the river a hundred yards in front of me as well as the breeze in the trees.

  After some minutes, I heard footsteps in the tall grass behind me. I’d been out long enough to be thoroughly chilled in my T-shirt and sleeping shorts, long enough to start feeling sorry for myself.

  “We slept in,” Stephanie said, coming alongside me and staring up at the mountain. “You have a good night?”

  “Slept like the dead.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use expressions like that.” She touched my hand.

  “Realistically, what do you think the odds are of stopping this before I end up like your sister?”

  “Realistically?”

  “You’re stalling.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t—”

  “You don’t think it’s going to happen, do you?”

  “I do and I don’t. We basically know what’s going on, which is an advantage Holly and the others didn’t have. Except for your friend Stan, none of them suspected what this was. I’m speaking to consultants and specialists all over the country. You’ve got those people from California coming up. They might know what this is. And since Canyon View was helpful in the investigation in Tennessee, my aunt or someone working for her might know something.”

  “In other words, the odds of stopping this before I end up like your sister are slim to none.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I know. I said it for you.”

  33. THE HEATHEN UNDER GOD’S BED

  “Damn it, Stephanie. You didn’t pull any punches that first day I met you. I didn’t like it, but I admired you for it. Tell me what you really think.”

  “I’m not God. I can’t see the future.”

  “I can.”

  She sighed and wrapped both arms around my waist. I dropped my arm over her shoulders. The sky was pale blue except for a wispy pink-tinged cloud crowning the foothills to the south. The sun still hadn’t come over Mount Si. “What an extraordinarily beautiful place,” she said.

  “I don’t know if I ever truly appreciated it until now.”

  “You religious, Jim?”

  “I used to be. These days I’m what you might call a heathen and proud of it.”

  “It seems to me religion has a place in life, especially a place for people who are in the situation you’re in. Do you think it might help if you had some counseling—I don’t know, a pastor or a priest to talk to?”

  “ ‘And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’? That sort of mumbo jumbo? Or how about: ‘Let the God of my salvation be exalted’—Psalms Eighteen, verse forty-six? Or: ‘Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou are the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day’—Psalms Twenty-five, verse five. Or: ‘Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.’ Let’s try Hebrews: ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ ”

  “So you know the Bible?”

  “I still remember about half of it.”

  “So you must have prayed in the past. Your prayers were never answered?”

  “I figure if there’s a God, he keeps pretty busy arranging natural disasters and destroying nations, maybe figuring out how to manipulate one population into cutting off the hands of another. What he does is a lot more fun than answering prayers from a nitwit like me. I spent sixteen years of my life hiding under God’s bed. My parents thought they had the revelation of the absolute truth of the universe through the prophet William P. Markham; he was the con artist who founded the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ. We kids got Bible assignments each morning. I think I had most of the New Testament memorized before I could read, before I could think, really, because when you’re living in a cult, thinking is pretty much discouraged. We bragged about being freethinkers, but come up with anything not strictly approved by William P. Markham and whoa. We weren’t even allowed to read about another religion. Maybe that’s why wherever I’ve lived, I ended up spending half my time in the public library.”

  “Who’s going to be with you through this? You need somebody.”

  “I was hoping you would stick around.”

  Stephanie slipped her arms under my shirt, her bare hands hot against my flesh. “I’ll stick around as long as you want me to.”

  “Just till I’m eating mush. After that I won’t know who’s here and who’s not.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  When we went back inside, arm in arm, the girls gave each other knowing looks. They’d set the table as formally as a wedding banquet, had come up with the idea of cooking breakfast, dollar pancakes, Allyson’s favorite. Stephanie and I added juice and scrambled eggs to the menu.

  I surrounded more than my fair portion of pancakes, feeling invincible the way Bill Murray felt invincible in Groundhog Day. Clog up my arteries? That would take years.

  “So?” Britney asked at the conclusion of our breakfast. “Are you two getting engaged?”

  “Brit!” Allyson shouted. “I told you not to say that.”

  Stephanie could see as painfully as I could the irony of my daughters trying to plot out the rest of our lives at a time when our family was on a countdown timer.

  “What makes you think we might get married?” I asked.

  “She stayed overnight,” Allyson said.

  “That was only to save her from a long drive. Honey, we’re working on a project.”

  “You don’t like her?” Britney asked. “Isn’t she pretty?”

  “Of course I like her. And she’s very pretty. But there are other considerations.”

  “Like what?” Allyson asked.

  “Ally,” Britney said. “You’re going to spoil everything.”

  “You started it.”

  Filled with emotion, Britney looked around the table and said, “Daddy never lets anybody stay over. This is a millstone.”

  “A milestone,” said Stephanie softly. “I think you mean it’s a milestone.”

  “Yeah, right, whatever. The second Suzanne never staye
d over once, and he really liked her. Mrs. LeMonde never even came in the house. Holly was nice, but . . .”

  “What about Holly?” Stephanie asked.

  “Morgan saw them kissing in the car.”

  “I’m sure your father’s kissed a lot of women in the car.”

  “No, he hasn’t really,” Britney said. “Just Holly, and the second Suzanne, and maybe Mrs. LeMonde.”

  The breakfast was sitting foully in my stomach, but I didn’t heed the warning.

  I barely made it to the bathroom, dropping to my knees in front of the commode and retching until there was no more to bring up. I couldn’t remember ever vomiting so violently, or feeling my stomach walls actually connect with my spine. For a few moments in the middle of it, I thought I was going to choke to death, or die of heart failure.

  From the doorway behind me, Stephanie said, “You all right?”

  “I don’t know why I don’t read the symptoms for the next day before I go to bed.” I’d barely gotten the words out when another round shook me. And then a minute later, as I was washing up, the wave of nausea vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

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

  Stan Beebe had been through this. So had Holly, Newcastle, Joel McCain, Jackie, and those three in Tennessee. I was joining a select brotherhood.

  I must have looked ashen when I came out of the bathroom, because Allyson took my hand and said, “You all right, Daddy?”

  “Fine.”

  “Did we leave eggshells in the pancakes? You get shell shock?” It was a longtime family joke.

  “No. Everything was wonderful. I just have a bug in my stomach, that’s all.” I found myself kneeling in the living room, clutching my eldest.

  Britney, who had been obsessed with death and abandonment issues since her mother left, rushed over and said, “You’re not going to die, are you?”

  “No, of course not.” I caught Stephanie’s eye from the other room. “We all die eventually. You know that.”