Pyro

by Earl Emerson

  It was starting to drizzle when I walked through the front door and checked my messages—none; my e-mail—none. I took a shower, then put Patricia Pennington’s River of Dust into the VCR, turned the sound low, and dragged my father’s large black trunk out from its hallowed spot in the back of the coat closet.

  On the TV a seventeen-year-old Patricia Pennington was being given her first horse by her on-screen grandfather, Charles Coburn. I watched her ride up and down green fields and jump over a fence. It was strange to realize the young woman on film was now the elderly pill-popper I’d rescued last night.

  The top portion of my father’s trunk was filled with letters and some of my father’s fire department paraphernalia. A half-melted firefighter’s helmet—the one he died in.

  I set the helmet aside lovingly and sorted through the newspaper clippings, picking one out more or less at random.

  The yellowed clipping was dated by hand in blue ink. November 3, 1978. I never knew for certain, but I thought my father had penned the dates on these articles himself before he died.

  RAMPAGE OF BLAZES CONTINUE

  SEATTLE—Areas of Capitol Hill and the Central District were struck again last night by a series of arson fires that continue to baffle fire investigators and are thought to be part of a string of arsons stretching back to last summer. Fire department Chief Frank Hanson says, “We believe the same person is responsible for most of the arsons we’ve been getting since August.”

  Last night during a two-hour period firefighters fought five blazes, the largest outside a Safeway on East John, which was started in a garbage bin and quickly spread to the outside of the building.

  All of the fires have occurred between eleven P.M. and six A.M.

  Fire department officials refused to confirm or deny reports that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has plans to assist in the investigation. Total losses last night were estimated at $15,000.

  I picked up a pair of family photos from the time period. There were a couple of curly-haired boys roughhousing with their father. There was a mother so beautiful you could actually see a young man in the park turning his head to look at her just as my father snapped the picture, her auburn hair flashing in the sunlight.

  13. BANANA SNATCHERS AND RAT SKINNERS

  On Sunday I walked to the station, taking the long route down along the lake and up Madrona to Thirty-second and then to Cherry, carrying a rucksack and hiking the uphills almost at a running pace.

  I’d spent two days flopped in front of one Patricia Pennington movie after another, a marathon of B movies in the sequence they were made, watching the celluloid woman age before my eyes. It was like sitting next to God.

  When I walked into Six’s, the beanery was filled with A-shifters mingling with our shift. Having arrived with half an hour to spare, Zeke was standing along a wall, quiet and smiling in that sleepy way he has. Everybody liked Zeke. He was a gentle soul and meant well. Even his officer, Slaughter—when he wasn’t yelling at him—liked him.

  Gliniewicz was swapping gossip with the driver on A-shift. Slaughter was talking to their officer on the engine.

  There were four shifts working in the station, which meant four officers: three lieutenants and a captain for each rig. On Ladder 3 our captain was a man I’d worked with in the past, Frank Keesling. We shook hands and he congratulated me on my transfer to Ladder 3. We both knew I wasn’t likely to stay here. Keesling was in his fifties, balding, a grandfatherly sort who didn’t take too many things seriously outside of deer hunting and raising thoroughbred house cats.

  “There’s this rat-catcher thing going on,” Keesling said. “I told your chief, Eddings, it was one of those in-house squabbles, but she had to come down the other day and get mixed up in it. Now it looks like it might be headed downtown.”

  “Rats?”

  Gliniewicz and the A-shift driver were making so much noise it was hard to concentrate. In addition, there were at least two other conversations going on, and the television was broadcasting a women’s tennis match. I wanted to hear what Katie Fryer was saying to Rideout because it sounded like a pretty good yarn, something about a GSW they’d responded to yesterday. Gunshot wound.

  I turned back to Keesling, who said, “We had a rat problem out back. A couple of them got into the station, so I told the guys I’d buy a half gallon of ice cream for every rat they caught. B-shift told us they killed two, but some of our guys accused them of making it up. You know how that goes. They were just having fun.

  “So my crew told their crew they had to prove they caught a rat to get the ice cream. The next shift we found a tanned rat hide pinned to a piece of plywood downstairs. That’s when you-know-who”—he made a gesture at Katie Fryer and continued in a lower voice—“complained to her officer that there’s a state law against trapping animals with steel traps. I thought she was kidding. Next thing I know your chief is up here reading us the riot act. Now I’m writing letters. Katie’s writing letters. Who knows where it’s going to end?”

  “Heard anything more about the arsons?”

  “Last night the cops arrested a coupl’a homeless guys lighting a Dumpster fire down by the Market. That was probably the end of that.” Keesling had a way of drifting off on you, losing interest in the middle of a conversation. “If you’re ready, I could scoot out and get home in time for church.”

  “I’ll have your stuff off the rig in a minute.”

  Even Slaughter, who’d spent years as an investigator with Marshal 5, thought the two guys they’d arrested downtown had started our fires.

  Not me. I knew few pyros worked in tandem, and my vision of our pyro didn’t include a partner. Our guy was still out there.

  That morning before we went out to drill Rideout, I walked into the beanery to eat one of the bananas I’d brought and found they’d vanished off the chrome island in the kitchen.

  “What happened to my bananas?” I asked.

  Slaughter, Rideout, Dolan, and Boles all stared at me guilelessly. It was the sort of practical joke Dolan might pull, eating four bananas just to get a yuk out of it. Gliniewicz strutted into the room from the watch office and said, “What’s going on?”

  “Where’s my bananas?”

  Gliniewicz sat down and picked up the sports section of the Sunday paper. “You leave stuff out, it’s fair game.”

  “You ate them?”

  “It’s out, it’s fair game. Ask anybody.” Without looking up from the paper, Gliniewicz patted his stomach. “I was hungry.”

  Dolan started laughing.

  Slaughter joined in when he saw my face. “Next time you better nail those bananas down.”

  “I’d put a padlock on ’em,” Dolan said.

  They laughed even louder when I began searching the beanery and found them in the back of the refrigerator.

  Banana snatchers. Rat skinners. I guess it was funny when you thought about it.

  14. SOMETHING VERY WICKED INDEED

  Cynthia Rideout

  DECEMBER 8, SUNDAY, 1345 HOURS

  News of Patricia Pennington’s rescue was in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Everybody got it wrong, including the local televised news, who interviewed Zeke on camera and made it sound as if he made the save. We saw one of those reports before we left the station Friday morning, and boy did that give everybody a hoot. Zeke was embarrassed, but you could tell he liked it too.

  I met Towbridge today. He’s a tall black guy around thirty; drop-dead handsome. He carries himself with a princely bearing, lifts weights at a gym five times a week, plays basketball at almost a professional level on about three different teams, and doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him. I’ve actually seen black women around here whistle at him.

  For that matter, our driver, Jeff Dolan, is pretty cute too. He’s the oldest on the crew—in his late forties. He’s got streaks of gray in his hair and spends all summer working on his tan. He’s not as tall as the others, but he’s still taller than me. They’re all talle
r than me. Pickett has dark eyes and dark hair, a mustache to match.

  The whole crew could be on a firefighter calendar, all except Wollf, not unless he was half naked. He’s got a great body. Although he’s not handsome, there is something interesting about the way he looks, sort of like a boy who knows he’s about to get away with something very wicked. Something very wicked indeed.

  He doesn’t talk much, but I find myself watching him for his subtle reactions to the things people say.

  Ordinarily there are four people working on Ladder 3, but because I’ve been sent here to do my ladder drills, each shift one of the regular people here has to take a detail to another station. The officer never gets detailed out and neither does the driver, so the traveling falls on Towbridge and Pickett. One of them works here one shift, then packs up all his gear and works the next shift at another station. Today Pickett is gone and Towbridge is here.

  Towbridge speaks in a kind of an inner-city patois that is hard to understand. His first name is Harlan, but everybody calls him Tow. Or Bridge. As a sign of affection, Gliniewicz and Dolan, the drivers respectively of the engine and Ladder 3, call him Slowbridge.

  This morning Towbridge took me aside and said, “The lieutenant’s going to take you out there, have you put on full bunkers and a bottle. Then he’s going to have you put up every ladder we got from smallest to biggest. Flat raise. Beam raise. Everything you can imagine. We’ll work with you on the larger ladders, of course. He’s trying to see how strong you are and if you have any endurance. If you want to keep from bruising your shoulder from having those ladders on it for two hours, pin a sock inside the shoulder of your bunking coat. Trust me. I worked with Wollf up at Ladder Eleven when he was drilling that gal they ended up firing.” Towbridge let out a carefree laugh at the look on my face. “Don’t worry. She deserved it. I don’t even know how she got through drill school. You’ll do fine.”

  Ladder 3 carries a fifty-five-foot ladder that weighs 250 pounds and takes four people to handle. The drill I’m most worried about is putting that up and then climbing it with a roof ladder slung over my shoulder. Roof ladders can get heavy, and if you take one all the way to the top of the fifty-five, you’re four stories high and all by yourself. Then you raise it hand over hand and lay it on the roof. It was the worst thing in drill school, not counting the smoke.

  At ten o’clock we went out and did the ladder drills almost exactly the way Towbridge described them. Afterward Wollf said I’d done a good job and then showed me what he wrote on my Form 50 for the last shift. His report never even mentioned the fan shutting down. He also said I assisted him with the rescue. It was a good report. Yaaaay!

  15. THE INCIDENT AT THE RED APPLE

  Cynthia Rideout

  DECEMBER 8, SUNDAY, 1645 HOURS

  We just got back from an aid call to an older gentleman with stomach pain; we sent him to the hospital in an ambulance. Earlier we’d gone to the store to get dinner. Also, I bought ice cream. When you’re a recruit, they want you to buy ice cream for every little thing, which is probably why Gliniewicz looks like an overstuffed toy pig. He’s not in very good shape for a firefighter. This morning I saw him and Katie Fryer outside the apparatus doors smoking cigars.

  Katie Fryer tells me not to act like a man and then does something like that.

  So we’re in the Red Apple, Dolan, me, Towbridge, and the lieutenant, all of us in the vegetable aisle, when who should show up but the caretaker for that movie star.

  She’s maybe twenty-six. She’s blond, of course, and she’s wearing this tacky denim jeans jacket with fur on it. Somewhere in there you could see her bare stomach too, which was just a little stupid in this weather. Dolan had trouble taking his eyes off her. I think she has fat thighs, but guys see what they want.

  She spots Wollf, lets out this yelp, skips over, and starts hanging all over him. Ignores me. Ignores Dolan. Ignores Towbridge.

  None of the women around here ignore Towbridge.

  She proceeds to flirt up a storm with Wollf. Hanging on him. Touching him. Following him around the store, walking backward in front of him, bumping into people, laughing.

  He answered her questions, which she would ask every time it looked as if his interest was flagging—questions about the fire and how he’d found the old lady and who he thought started it and what were the chances of having another fire and on and on. Why is the gift of gab always squandered on half-wits?

  I was the only one who noticed her slipping a piece of paper into the pocket of Wollf’s foul-weather jacket.

  And this is the evil part, I’m ashamed to admit. After we got back to the station and the lieutenant was downstairs lifting weights, I went into his office and pretended to be cleaning. I looked in the lieutenant’s coat pockets, but the note was in the trash. Torn up.

  When I pieced it together, it read: “Lt. Wolf [sic], I can’t stop thinking about you. Please come and see me. Call 323-3308. You won’t be sorry. xxxxooooo—J.”

  Aren’t I terrible?

  This is what else happened at the Red Apple.

  We’re standing in line. The lines in that place are pretty long. Wollf is in front and about two people from the checker when I notice a middle-aged woman in front of Wollf. She’s diaphoretic. I mean really sweating. She’s got a hat with a veil and a purple dress and rumpled nylons and these low heels the size of sampans. My God, her feet are huge.

  And the sweat’s running out of her black wig like somebody’s squeezing a sponge on her head. But more than that, she’s staring at Wollf. It’s almost as if Wollf is holding a gun on her. I’m not exaggerating. This woman is terrified.

  There are four firefighters in line, but she’s fixated on Wollf.

  When her turn comes, she pushes her six-pack of soda pop at the cashier and then doesn’t even buy it. She runs out of the store. I mean—runs.

  “You know her?” Jeff Dolan asked Wollf.

  “Hell, no.”

  “You sure?”

  “God, she was ugly,” Towbridge said, chuckling.

  “An old girlfriend, right?” Dolan asked.

  It wasn’t what he said, but the way he said it. We all burst into laughter.

  We’ve been working together two shifts and already we’re a family.

  About ten minutes after we got back to the station, Attack 6 went out on a single to a Dumpster fire behind the Red Apple. I can’t help but think it was that blonde who set it. In fact, I can’t help but think the blonde set those fires at the movie star’s house on Friday night too. I’m no detective, but you think about it, they were the only fires all night that were started inside a structure. And who else had access to the inside of those structures besides her?

  16. A SLY SILLY BITCH

  According to Earl Ward

  If you want to be with a woman, you better know some of the tricks. That kind of tomfoolery is just what you don’t acquire in a godderned correctional facility—no sir—not a single one of those profoundly important tricks you need for impressing the feminine mystique.

  You especially don’t learn about the bitch type.

  And Jaclyn is definitely the bitch type.

  Maybe that sounds rough, but hey, I’m trying to change my stripes here, and she ain’t helping any.

  I’ve only got a couple of hours in this part of town while Mom screws around playing bingo with the blue-hairs, so I drive over here and spot her walking up the street.

  Now I’m in the grocery store and I’m following her and she doesn’t even know. She looks right at me and doesn’t know.

  That’s how good I am.

  You’d be surprised what you learn in the joint. I can walk right up to her, look her in the eye, and she still won’t know. I’m that good. Period.

  I’m so godderned invisible it’s almost laughable.

  What’s really laughable is I can do all these things, yet I am still no closer to my goal. It’s hard to believe. You want to be with a woman, you can want it all day and all night, but t
hat don’t mean it’s going to happen.

  So I’m following J, and she don’t know it. I’m following her around when in they walk. The bastards in uniform. It’s the same jackasses from Thursday night. Jackie sees them and sneaks off and writes herself a note and then runs back to the produce area at the end of the store, where she’s all over the tall one.

  I mean all over him. It was embarrassing.

  I observe the bastard up close, and for the first time they all pass me and I think for a second I know him and then I do know him and it’s all of a sudden all I can do to keep from crapping my pants. I mean FILLING MY PANTIES, brother . . . I’m shivering. And sweating. Cold and hot at the same time. I’ve never felt anything like this before. All I can think about is that night years ago when I almost fell into the fire. I can feel the heat. I can feel the heat everywhere.

  Even when they arrested me in Portland it wasn’t like this.

  These minutes in the store are the spookiest since I’ve been outside.

  Because this guy is the spitting image—the spitting image, I’m telling you—of the fireman they say I killed back in ’78.

  Bigger maybe. Taller for sure. But other than that, he’s the guy. Period.

  I thought somebody was playing a goddern joke on me. Here I was playing a joke on Jackie, and these idiot firemen with their fire bitch come in and all of a sudden the joke is on yours truly.

  I recognize the name of course. Any retard can see the tag on his coat.

  Wollf. W-O-L-L-F.

  WOLLF!

  Maybe it’s his son. Or his grandson. Man, I was in the slammer for a long time. I come out and people are driving these trucks where the bumpers come right up against the driver’s window of my mother’s car, and talking on little phones they carry around, talking in the grocery line, walking down the street, driving, it’s nuts—who are they talking to? And everybody’s got one, even the kids, and I think everything’s different, and then he shows up and now everything’s the same.