by Earl Emerson
“Still breathing.” Jackie’s cigarette voice erupted into a guttural laugh like a dog coughing up a fish bone. Everybody in the department, volunteers and paid both, had their fun kidding me about women. I didn’t mind.
The guy from the chicken truck was chasing chickens up and down the highway; he told me he didn’t need medical attention. His truck was facing backward on the freeway, the trailer on its flank, he had blood running down his face, but he said he didn’t need medical attention. Fine. I left him alone.
Somewhere on the long curve down the last of the foothills into North Bend, just after the point where the State Patrol liked to sit with their radar guns, the chicken truck had jackknifed into the middle lane, sideswiping the second truck and sweeping it down the icy highway like a push broom sweeping chestnuts. The driver of the chicken truck later said he thought everything was okay until he glanced out his window and noticed his own trailer passing him on the left. After that, all he remembered was screeching metal, squawking chickens, and feathers in his teeth.
Just to make the whole scene even more demented, some radical vegan activist appeared out of the line of idling cars and used a screwdriver to pry open a bunch of chicken cages. She released at least eighty birds to join those with their feet already frozen to the roadway before she was stopped by Jackie Feldbaum, who called her a chicken fucker. The Fire Plug had a mouth on her.
The second truck had skidded on the ice for several hundred yards, then, after spewing part of its load into the snow, came to rest on the edge of the field, the tractor upright, the trailer on its side, rear doors burst open.
Inside the cockeyed trailer, I found a young woman shouting at a trio of escaped chickens. There were the Bibles, several bales of comic books, some jeans that had spilled out of their boxes, and a tacky substance we later identified as Coca-Cola syrup. Most of the truck drivers we saw coming through North Bend could spit out the window and clear two lanes of traffic; Holly was different.
“You need help?” I asked, realizing that I’d gone from a scene of public cacophony to one of utmost intimacy, just the two of us in this echoing cubicle. My God, she had beautiful eyes.
“Yes, I need help.”
“You hurt?”
“No.”
“That blood on your knees?”
She looked down at her jeans and said, “I’m okay. There must be people who’re really hurt. Anybody killed?”
“No.”
“Thank God for that.”
“You driving this rig?”
“Yes.”
“You got an MSDS?”
She handed me the Material Safety Data Sheet. There was nothing dangerous on board.
When I got closer, she stuck out her hand and said, “Holly Riggs.”
“Jim Swope.” As we shook hands, our eyes met in the quivering light from our respective flashlights. I was wearing heavy firefighting gloves; hers were made of goatskin. Still, there was something provocative, almost sensual, about the handshake.
Holly Riggs had short strawberry-blond hair, an upturned nose with a wash of freckles across it, sparkly eyes she enhanced with green contacts, and a tiny waist that accentuated what Chief Newcastle later called her childbearing hips. At five-two, she was more than a foot shorter than me.
“I suppose you’re going to take her out and ruin her life,” Newcastle joked that night at the accident site, when he found out I’d gotten her phone number.
“I’ve never ruined anyone’s life,” I said. “Besides, I’m not even sure I’ll call. It just happened after we started talking that we have a lot in common.”
“I just bet you do,” Newcastle joked. “Have a lot in common. You have a lot in common with every good-looking woman you’ve ever met.” Newcastle laughed until he was sick with it. Sometimes I thought he was going to have a heart attack laughing at me. Nobody liked a joke more than Harry Newcastle. I didn’t mind the ribbing. I really didn’t.
He was wrong about me, though. To tell you the truth, I had the worst luck when it came to women. Think about this—three years ago my wife cleaned out our bank account and ran away with the mayor. To make it worse, everybody in town knew about it before I did.
3. A BRIEF AFFAIR OF ALMOST NO CONSEQUENCE
It took almost two hours that night to get traffic rolling.
Ambulances and extra aid units came from Issaquah and Bellevue, respectively fifteen miles and twenty miles up the icebound highway. We ended up with thirteen volunteers and four paid guys, seven ambulances, two aid cars, four tow trucks, six State Patrol vehicles, dozens of road flares, and two miles of irate drivers backed up toward Snoqualmie Pass. It was almost twelve-thirty before the last of the injured were on their way home or to a local hospital. I took Holly aside and bandaged her knees, rolling her pant legs up and taping four-by-fours neatly in place. She said the way I worked reminded her of her sister, who was a doctor.
Toward the end, I got the brilliant idea that when we finished with our patients we might all hop in the back of Holly’s truck and help straighten it out.
Shuffled into the mix of comic books, Bibles, Levi’s, and Coca-Cola canisters we found the occasional escaped or liberated fryer. Six of us assisted in the cleanup: myself, Stan Beebe, Chief Newcastle, Jackie Feldbaum, Karrie Haston, and Joel McCain.
Afterward I was surprised when Holly agreed to have coffee with me in a nearby Truck Town restaurant while the wreckers righted her truck. But I guess I’m always surprised when an attractive woman agrees to spend time with me.
As we walked across the frozen field toward my pickup, I couldn’t help thinking this was almost like a date, the two of us walking hand in hand, the moonlight, the crunch of snow under our boots, the dentist-drill sound of tires spinning on the icy highway behind us.
We tried to ignore all the dead or dying chickens, some already flattened in the eastbound lanes.
Holly was as pleasant as a tropical breeze. She was twenty-eight, six years younger than me, had never been married, and two years earlier had escaped a dead-end relationship and hitchhiked to Washington State from California to learn to drive a truck. She’d been doing short-haul mostly, but this trip, one of her longest, had originated in Tennessee.
I noticed when she took her parka off the sight of her strawberry-blond hair turned heads in the restaurant. I notice things like that.
Newcastle could joke all he wanted, but Holly and I did have a lot in common. We’d both immigrated to Washington from California—she originally from Ohio. I’d been raised here and then fled to San Diego, where I ended up in the army. We’d both come out of long-term relationships that ended when we were deserted. During an airport layover, her boyfriend ran away to New Jersey to join a religious cult. Like I already said, my ex ran away with the mayor, cleaning out our bank account and selling our car on her way out of town. Holly’s boyfriend had slipped her engagement ring off her finger while she slept. My wife had emptied our younger daughter’s piggy bank. Stealing from her own child was what convinced me she was back on drugs.
In the three years she’d been gone, I’d heard from Lorie only a handful of times, twice to ask for bail money and always on Christmas Eve, when she wanted to speak to the girls.
Neither of us had a backup chute. Holly’s parents had died in a traffic accident. My father was in a nursing home. The last time I heard from my mother, she was on a fly-through from Cape Horn to Japan with a flaxen-haired suitor twenty-five years her junior in tow. I had no brothers or sisters. Holly’s only sibling practiced medicine in Ohio and was so full of herself, Holly was lucky to get a phone call on her birthday.
“Gosh,” she said. “I can’t believe how much we have in common.”
“It is amazing.”
Holly and I spoke on the phone a few times in March and then got together in April, dating off and on for about a month and a half. She ended up with the funny notion we were going to get married somewhere down the line. Odd how two people who’d started out sharing so much
could have gotten their signals crossed like that.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by Earl Emerson
Excerpt from Into the Inferno copyright © 2003 by Earl Emerson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Into the Inferno by Earl Emerson. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
www.ballantinebooks.com
First Hardcover Edition: June 2002
First Mass Market Edition: February 2003
eISBN: 978-0-345-46672-3
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