Pyro

by Earl Emerson

  “You think there’s an Academy award lying around here somewhere?” I asked.

  “She never won an Academy award. She was on the list of top ten female performers three times in the early Forties. Then her career did a slow nosedive. Had a lot to do with the advent of television and the fact that they weren’t making B movies for double bills anymore. She never quite made it onto the A-movie list.”

  Wollf knew every movie she’d ever been in, her marriages, divorces, costars. The affairs she’d had. Then, right before he clammed up, he told me the first personal information I’d heard out of his mouth all day. He said he had over eight thousand videos of old movies. That he’d collected every movie Patricia Pennington ever made. That he had every movie Marilyn Monroe made. Jane Russell. Clark Gable. Paul Newman. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis. Lon Chaney, whoever he was.

  Remarkable. Under all that brawn and fire department professionalism there actually beats the heart of a human being.

  We were really starting to get chummy, I thought. Wollf must have thought so too, because he stopped talking.

  When we got back down to the first floor, a woman was waiting for us on the front porch. She’d obviously put herself together in a rush. She wore jeans and a white ski jacket and was a couple of years older than me.

  “Hi,” she said, looking at me instead of the lieutenant. Maybe she didn’t realize the red helmet was the boss; the yellow helmet with the big recruit number fifteen on the back was the flunky. “I’m Vanessa Pennington. This is my grandmother’s house. I just spoke to her in the medic unit. The chief said you might let me walk through the house?”

  “I’d have to escort you,” Wollf said.

  Looking at her, you automatically thought money. Later we saw her driving a BMW, white to match her ski jacket. She had dirty-blond hair that fell to her shoulders. I could see right away she’d never make it in the fire department. She was too skinny. But she was pretty.

  10. FIRE

  Vanessa Pennington

  It was just a good thing it was the middle of the night and there were no police cars around. The drive to Nanna’s normally takes ten minutes, twenty if traffic is heavy, but I made it tonight in under seven.

  I’ve been so worried about her lately, and then Jackie wakes me up to tell me Nanna’s garage is on fire and what should she do. What should she do? This is just the kind of thing that makes me want to get Jackie out of there. “Call nine one one,” I said. “I’m on my way.” Later I find out she never did call 911. The fire department discovered the fire on their own. Jackie is such an incompetent. I’ll never understand why Nanna doesn’t fire her and hire a housekeeper and companion who isn’t likely to get her killed.

  There were so many fire department vehicles in the street I ended up parking half a block away. I found Nanna’s front door broken open, the house full of firefighters and residual smoke. One of them told me I couldn’t go in, that the fire department hadn’t released the property back to the owners yet. When I asked where my grandmother was, a helpful black firefighter named Zeke told me she was in the medic unit with the man who’d rescued her.

  When I got there I told them who I was, and they were kind enough to let me sit with her for a few minutes before they took her up to Harborview. Everybody was so nice. But when I asked permission to go inside and secure Nanna’s things, I had to go through the chain of command, just like the army or something. They sent me to a lieutenant named Wollf, the same fire officer who’d been in the medic unit when I first got there. He’d been holding Nanna’s hand. Nanna was barely conscious, and he was talking to her as if she were his grandmother and not mine. The sight impressed me more than I can say.

  Later, he seemed inexplicably tense around me.

  “Pardon me,” I said. “I’m Patricia Pennington’s granddaughter. They said you might take me inside the house?”

  He seemed shy and tongue-tied. It was painful to watch—but cute too, especially for such a big, brawny guy. Finally he said if I could wait a minute he’d take me inside and show me what they’d broken. He must have seen the look on my face because he added, “Don’t worry. It’s not bad. The house is smoked up, but there’s no structural damage.”

  A few minutes later he walked me through the house and explained where they’d found Nanna. He told me they would secure the front door and told me how to get the smoke out of the draperies and clothes. Never once did he mention anything about Nanna being famous, although the woman firefighter told me he knew.

  I found myself drawn to him. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but he had an open, boyish face that didn’t hide what he was thinking. I like that in a man. I’ve always been attracted to shy men too. Perhaps because I used to be so shy.

  After we’d gone down to the basement to check out the damage, I said, “Look, Lieutenant. My grandmother is going to want to do something for all of you who helped her tonight. That’s how she is.”

  “We were just doing our job.”

  “It might be a job to you; it was my grandmother’s life. They told me nobody even knew there was a fire in the house until you discovered it.”

  Wollf looked at the female firefighter as if she were going to help him out—something he’d been doing all along—but she didn’t let out a peep. I think she enjoyed watching him bumble along. It was like watching King Kong trying to play checkers.

  “Just doing our job, lady.”

  “Vanessa. Call me Vanessa. I can tell you right now my grandmother isn’t going to give up until you let us do something. I was thinking about a catered dinner at the firehouse? We’ll supply everything.”

  “You know,” Wollf said, “this is my first day at the station. What you should do is, you should go around back and find Lieutenant Slaughter.”

  “But aren’t you the one who—”

  “Slaughter’s the guy you want.”

  Five minutes later I was behind the house talking to Lieutenant Slaughter when Jackie came out and began flirting with one and all. To my surprise, she homed in on Lieutenant Wollf, and to my even greater surprise, he flirted with her too. In fact, they were like a couple of drunks at a frat party. It was amazing. With me he’d barely been able to get a word out, yet here he was putting on a show with Jackie. I guess I misjudged him. Apparently what I mistook for shyness was actually a distaste for me.

  11. CANNONBALLS IN A PILLOWCASE

  Lt. Stephen Slaughter AU6/C-3

  All day I been watching Wollf and that new recruit of his, and here’s what it boils down to. No. This is really what it boils down to. Forget the ifs, ands, or buts. He’s going to fuck her. I’m sure of it.

  We can say whatever we want about her abilities as a firefighter—and I seen some stuff tonight makes me want to puke—but the truth is, there isn’t a man jack of us wouldn’t sit her on our lap if she asked.

  She just might be the single hottest female in the department. She’s got those perky little . . . If she wasn’t an Indian and twenty-five years younger than me, she’d be perfect. But here’s the deal—and I’m pretty sure about this part: If he doesn’t end up fucking her, he’s going to fire her.

  Oh, yeah. He’s going to give her the heave-ho so fast she won’t know whether to shit or go blind.

  Of course, after he gives her the axe, those namby-pambies in the administration will offer her the option of resigning, which they always do, which means she won’t take any of our negative assessments with her when she signs up at the next fire department. What a racket these bitches got going. We fired the chief of Tacoma when she was a recruit here. They fired our Battalion 4. Bellingham fired our training officer. We fired their newest lieutenant. They’re like dogshit on your boots. You can’t get rid of ’em.

  Good men line up by the thousands for a crack at the job. They fly in from Minnesota and New York just for the privilege of taking our test. Women go through a special door. No waiting. No fuss. Thank you, ma’am. I know you’re a little weak and a little scared, but would you like to be
a battalion chief tomorrow? No problem. Just shine up those bugles for your collar and show up on time.

  Disgusting ain’t even the word for it.

  ’Course, the chicks can’t get through a drill school on their own, so they get a coupl’a weeks coaching prior. Then they come out here to the stations and swish their little butts around, making the officers feel sorry for them, and they end up passing them through. We all know after the first year you can’t fire anybody. Take Zeke. Lazy bastard should have been shitcanned long ago.

  The only swinging dick downtown worth two cents is Billy Hertlein.

  He came out last night to watch a couple of our fires, then at the garage fire, he’s the first to realize the house next door is on fire. Sharp.

  I don’t know exactly what’s going on between him and Wollf, but Wollf would do himself a favor by making peace. One thing I can tell you about Billy, he’s got no forgiveness in his bones. I’ve never known him to forget anybody ever did him wrong.

  I made a big production of telling Wollf we were going to be a team, but the truth is, he keeps a little too much to himself for my taste. Also, he takes chances at fires.

  In addition, I heard he’s a whorehound, and a whorehound is always susceptible to the charms of a chick, especially one like Rideout.

  She made so many mistakes tonight I should have been taking notes. To start off with, why wasn’t she the one on the roof with the chain saw? You don’t have to think about that too hard. She was scared, scared to climb a ladder and scared to be on a roof over a fire.

  This morning I heard from one of the medics that when they came out of the house with the victim, she wasn’t even helping. Now I’m hearin’ talk she didn’t know how to run the fan.

  I mighta jumped her shit ’cept I had my hands full keeping Zeke and Gliniewicz in line. Gliniewicz has been smoking so long he gets winded doing a simple hydrant hookup. At that garage fire we stood around waiting for water seemed like five minutes. At the beginning of the shift I was waiting for Zeke. At the end I was waiting for Gliniewicz.

  God, if I could just get those two whipped into shape.

  The thing I noticed after the Pennington fire was Wollf practically ignored that Pennington granddaughter, even when she was trying to be nice to him. Lordy, but she was fine. I mean, she could have been an actress herself. And Wollf? When the slut who lives out back showed up, he was on her like white on rice.

  Ignored the fox, chased the pig.

  Now, why would he do that?

  You could tell the old lady’s housekeeper had been drinking, flouncing around making comments about how HOT firemen were. You know the kind, never passes up a wet T-shirt contest. Walking back and forth in front of the spotlight on our rig so’s we could see through that blouse. Enjoyin’ the way the guys on Engine 30 just about swallowed their tongues. Out in the cold dressed like summertime. When she walked, her ass end worked like two cannonballs in a pillowcase.

  Wollf was wasting way too much time with her. And check this out. He kicked in the front door. Not Rideout.

  If Rideout did a single blasted thing last night, I don’t know what it was.

  12. THE RESIDENT DICK

  The last thing I remembered about the shabby apartment near the Aurora tunnel in Belltown was my brother and me being picked up by two burly SPD officers and carried bodily from the house, probably to avoid the blood, our shoes confiscated, bagged, and classified as evidence. We never got them back.

  It had been a sunny morning, cold and crisp, blue skies. I still remember watching the exhaust fumes build up around the tailpipe on the police cars in the street. I remember trying to form mental pictures from the clouds of exhaust. Elephants. Zebras. The things kids do when they’ve just killed a man and their mother has just been murdered. We were still kids.

  After a bit of poking around, they decided Neil had killed Alfred in cold blood.

  They couldn’t have gotten it more wrong.

  We spent the next twenty-four hours shoeless. It was early spring, and what I remember most clearly was how cold my feet got.

  We’d been sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a room I’d always remembered as a small bedroom but which I later found out had been a closet. In the early days our mother would have given us the bed and taken the sofa, but she graduated from that and we’d been forced to make do with a mattress scrounged from a vacant apartment next door.

  We slept in our clothes, often in our shoes too, and that morning we wore identical PF Flyers our mother bought at Chubby and Tubby. We didn’t see new clothes often, and I remember being incredibly vain about those orange sneakers.

  Alfred T. Osbourne.

  I heard him quarreling with our mother that morning. Then suddenly their arguing was replaced by a silence I remember to this day.

  A few minutes later Alfred had Neil by the ankles and was dragging him around the room, cackling and laughing, making fun of Neil’s protestations, mocking his squeaky preteen voice. It could have been me. Alfred simply grabbed the first feet he saw. I’d seen him coming and pulled my feet up under the blankets.

  Bouncing across the floor like a rag doll, Neil couldn’t see Alfred’s deranged eyes the way I could. I was across the room wedged into a corner, trying to make myself invisible, wondering why our mother didn’t come out of the kitchen and put a stop to the insanity. It was only then that I noticed the bloodstained knife in Alfred’s free hand.

  “You little shit,” Alfred said. “You stinkin’ little shit. I’m finally gonna teach you some manners.” He threw me a bloodcurdling look. “And you’re next.”

  I think about the past more than I should. I think about our mother, about that morning with the piano mover from hell. People tell me I’m a candidate for psychotherapy, but I tried a counselor once and she only pissed me off. There are things people never recover from, and for Emma Grant Wollf it was the death of her fireman husband six years earlier. For me it was the loss of our mother and the rest of that morning with Alfred.

  Walking home on the wet streets on December 6, I could feel that old anger beginning to build in me. There had been random arsons before I got to Six’s, but last night we’d been hit by a true pyromaniac.

  There was nothing I hated more than a pyromaniac.

  I had no doubt our pyro had been watching for at least part of the time, watching our red lights and sirens drive past, watching as we stamped out his pitiful little fires, probably watching the Pennington house too. Pyros sometimes set fires just so they can see the firemen and trucks. The experience of watching the flames feeds a sexual appetite in some pyros, who might stand in the crowd and masturbate. Setting fires is almost never the work of a bold man as, too, it is almost never the work of a woman. Fire-setters are a breed apart—the lonely, the loony, the lost.

  I’d been feeling the rage grow all night and knew if I ever ran into this guy I wouldn’t be able to control myself.

  What made it worse for me was that this pattern of serial random nighttime nuisance ignitions was occurring in the same part of town as the fire that killed my father.

  While I have absolutely no recollection of our father’s funeral, I recall vividly the weeks and months afterward in the darkened house with our grieving mother, drapes pulled, dishes piling up, milk spoiled. I recall our mother’s endless bouts of weeping, the fact that she wouldn’t come out of her bedroom for days on end.

  Neil was seven. I was four.

  Neil pretty much took care of me after the neighbors and relatives stopped coming around.

  Mother stopped paying bills, and eventually, about a year and a half after my father’s death, we were evicted for the first time. After the eviction, she gathered her strength and moved us into an apartment, and for several weeks Neil and I thought things were going to be all right.

  Then, just as abruptly as she’d gathered her strength, she retreated back into her bedroom. On my first day of school Neil walked me to kindergarten. God only knows who signed me up.

 
; We lived two years like that.

  Then she started drinking. Wine at first, then gin, vodka, anything with a kick to it.

  In many ways her first year as a drinker was our best year with her. She began to regain some of her function. She cleaned the apartment and from time to time took us to movies, even shopped for Christmas presents.

  My brother and I often spoke about the pyromaniac. Even then, three years after our father’s death, after the hero’s funeral I had absolutely no recollection of, even then we both believed the pyro would be apprehended and punished. We believed that the appropriate officials would arrest and convict the man who’d murdered our father.

  As it was, nobody ever heard from the pyro again.

  I know I made a fool of myself last night with the housekeeper.

  I don’t know why. If I had to guess, I would say it was because I felt a spark between myself and Pennington’s granddaughter, and it scared me. The more I felt the younger Pennington trying to relate to me, the more I had to show off with the housekeeper.

  I’m not cruel by nature. At least I try not to be.

  The housekeeper kept asking what we wore underneath our bunking pants, and I told her there was only one way to find out. Good God. It was as if we were both in heat.

  When we first ran into the Pennington woman on the front porch, my mouth went dry; I could barely get any words out.

  The housekeeper was different. She and I are two of a kind.

  Neil is the same as me. All his women have been lowlifes too.

  There were so many things I might have said to the younger Pennington. I thought of every one of them on the walk home that morning to my condo on Lake Washington.

  On Lakeside Avenue, I retrieved yesterday’s mail and went inside the Water’s Edge. In every apartment building there’s a guy who never says hi. Who never looks at you. Who you always think is a dick. I guess you could say I’m the resident dick at the Water’s Edge.