by Earl Emerson
One or two citizens shout at me angrily. When they get close and realize I’m a brother, it takes the wind out of their sails. There is talk of the fire department not caring about black lives. Talk that white firefighters are letting blacks die. I keep thinking about the man I left upstairs. I keep telling myself, Another five seconds in those blowtorch conditions and I wouldn’t have made it out either.
We soon have a team shooting water from a two-and-a-half-inch hose line through the open windows, but it’s like pissing into a hurricane. The water streams penetrate the window and disappear from sight. The ladders are removed, and later we learn ours was soldered to the wall by heat and will be retired from service.
Some of the citizens in the parking lot are screaming for their loved ones inside the building. One man tries to drive his car out of the lot, a feat which will involve running over charged hose lines, our equipment, and perhaps firefighters. Clyde stops him, removes the keys from his ignition, and throws them off into the darkness. The man wants to fight, but the police show up moments later. The car is now in everybody’s way.
Within minutes I have crews working monitors on this side of the building. At first they shoot through the two open windows, but then part of the roof burns through and they pour water into that gap. All the while civilians tell us we should be going inside, that there are people in there. No shit. I turn up the collar on my bunking coat, hoping to conceal my burns for as long as possible. I don’t want to go to the hospital until this is over.
Now I realize there is a door at the right-hand corner of the base of the building, black smoke pouring out. I walk over and examine an interior stairway and see several shoes and one lost purse. I pick up the purse and hand it to a nearby policeman, who is transfixed by the spectacle. It shocks me to find these doors. Like a lot of firefighters, I pride myself on remaining calm at emergencies, and it worries me that I may have missed them because of adrenaline.
Later I learn six people were removed from the stairs. Four alive and two stone dead. A third dies in the hospital. I feel nauseated. In a moment of relative quiet, I notice there are castoff shoes scattered all over the parking lot.
At midnight a meeting of the division commanders is called, and Chief Fish looks at me and says, “What happened to your ears?” I am driven to the hospital in the safety chief’s vehicle, the safety chief excitedly narrating what he saw of the fire as if I hadn’t been there. At Harborview a burned firefighter is always treated immediately—head of the line. I tell the doctor there must be more critical patients, but she keeps working on me anyway. The ER waiting area is flooded with the friends and relatives of victims from our fire. The place smells of antiseptic and smoke.
An hour later the safety chief drives me back to the Z Club, where much of the roof and walls have caved in, though the fire continues to rage.
At three in the morning the fire is declared tapped. At five in the morning we form body recovery teams and begin working our way into the mostly collapsed structure. Because of my burns, I am not allowed to take part. They begin finding bodies immediately, but Vernon Sweeting isn’t carried out until nine-thirty the next morning, after a crane is brought in to remove sections of the walls and after photographs are taken of his position and his equipment. Ironically, he is not far from the door he used to enter the building.
45. BEDROOM MUSINGS
STONE CARMICHAEL>
It was one of those talks that come out of the blue late at night while you’re both in bed trying to get to sleep after a party, and the buzz of the wine and the reverberations of a dozen conversations are keeping you awake: The type of lethal bedroom chatter that begins with a seemingly inconsequential question and builds like a thunderstorm until the very foundations of your marriage seem at issue. I could sense the thunder and lightning as soon as the first words crept out of her pretty mouth. She liked to sleep on her back, so when I glanced over I saw only part of her face in the darkness, the back of her head buried in the pillow.
“Stone?”
“What is it, honey?”
“You ever think about the time Echo got raped?”
A question like that required some consideration, though I was too tired to really think it over. “No.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“A lot of water under the bridge since then.”
“I think about it.”
“You shouldn’t. It’s not something you should be thinking about.”
“It was the last summer I was ever really good friends with my sister. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. We got to know Trey and Kendra pretty well while we were out there at the island, and I’m not sure Trey was guilty.”
“Your sister claimed otherwise.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Of course he was guilty. I saw him leaving the cottage. His watch was found out there. Echo said he was the one. He wouldn’t have left like he did if he wasn’t the one.”
“He left because he got thrown out. What if he wasn’t the one? What if Echo was lying?”
“If she was, she’s stuck to her story all these years. Why would she do something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I saw him leaving the cottage.”
“I know you did, but what if he left the cottage before she was attacked? What if he was never in the cottage with her? You never said you saw her leaving. You just said you saw him leaving. So you didn’t see them together, did you?”
“You know she’s been seeing a shrink practically forever.”
“Just bear with me.”
“I don’t know why you’re even thinking about this. He left the family and never came back. That was acknowledgment enough for me. Anybody who was innocent would have tried to come back. He didn’t try because he knew he was guilty. Besides, what difference does it make now—I mean, even if you are right?”
“That’s not the issue.”
“Okay. Who else could it have been?”
“What else did you see that night when you were out there?”
At that point we both knew we were talking about something much more involved than whether somebody committed a crime two decades ago. We were talking about the lies our marriage was built upon, the misconceptions and deceptions we’d laid brick on brick on both sides. I’ve never confronted India over the fact that Echo and I saw her having sex with my brother, never mentioned it, never brought it up even in the middle of our most phenomenal battles, and until now, as far as I knew, she wasn’t aware that I knew. But it seemed now as if she was working up her nerve to talk about it.
I hate it when these conversations start in bed. I hate it when they start on a night when I’ve been up late and have to get up early. I hate it that neither of us is going to get any sleep and that tomorrow I’ll be dragging through the day. I hate it that she has a habit of waiting until just before I fall asleep, when I am at my weakest and most exposed, to initiate these kinds of subtle but unrelenting onslaughts. The moment she wanted to talk I knew my night was ruined. Trying not to let my voice give anything away, I said, “Has your crazy sister said something?”
“I wish you wouldn’t call her crazy.”
“Her hair’s a different color every time I see her. She plays that weird jazz. She married a loser. What do you want me to call her?”
“Call her Echo, like everybody else does.”
“I don’t know why you would listen to her at all.”
“Maybe because she’s my sister. That night Trey said he didn’t do it. But nobody would listen. What if it was one of the Mexican gardeners? Weren’t they in the habit of staying the night when they’d worked late?”
“They didn’t stay over that night. We checked into that later. Trust me, it was Trey. Now, maybe he was drinking and that contributed to it, or maybe he had some other excuse, like she was teasing him or something, but it was him.”
“Echo told me she lied.”
“I talked to Echo, and she said it wasn’t Trey.”
“When?”
“After the ball.”
“Why on earth would she say a thing like that?”
“I assume because Trey showed up in our lives again and she felt guilty.”
There is a stillness in the bedroom, palpable, deadly, and heavier than air, and it is so relentless and chilling I have no doubt it can be measured by scientific instruments.
“She say anything else?”
“Just that it wasn’t him. She wouldn’t tell me who, though. I knew it couldn’t have been your father or Renfrow because they were accounted for all evening. Now you’re telling me the gardeners were off island. Who else was there? Nobody. And she swears it wasn’t Trey.”
I stilled my breathing and tried to think. I’d had too much wine and wanted to sleep almost as much as I wanted this to go away. Why do women have to analyze every little event? And why can’t they ever forget anything? “You know I didn’t do it.”
“Do I?”
“Are you saying your sister accused me?”
“She didn’t accuse anybody. She wouldn’t tell me who it was. All I’m saying is if it wasn’t Trey, and I’ve thought for a number of years it wasn’t, then it had to have been one of the gardeners. But you tell me all the gardeners left the island. That leaves one male in the vicinity and unaccounted for.”
“Are you accusing me of raping your sister?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
“I might be mistaken about the gardeners. It was a long time ago. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m pretty sure I am mistaken. I think they were there. Yes. They were there.”
“You said you saw Trey leaving the cottage. What else did you see?” When I didn’t reply, she waited a few beats and then answered for me. “You saw me leaving the cottage, didn’t you? You and Echo were spying on us.”
“Were we?”
“Oh, come now. Trey went down to the beach and I went to the big house, swam some laps, took a sauna and then a shower. I’d just gotten back upstairs in the living room when Echo showed up. It makes sense that the two of you saw us at the cottage. It’s the reason she lied. She didn’t want to put herself in the middle of our relationship by admitting she’d spied on me or that you hurt her. Once she lied, she was trapped. She’s kept this to herself all these years to preserve our marriage. But then when Trey showed up, she realized how badly she’s treated him and she had to speak up.”
“If you’re intimating that I had anything to do with what happened to your sister, you’re crazy.”
“First my sister’s crazy and then I am. Good. I’m glad to hear that. In the morning I’ll ask Echo who really did it. I’m sure she’ll be happy to clear your name.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. It was a long time ago. People’s memories don’t—”
“What? Don’t last that long? I remember how you came through the door right after Echo and how your face was flushed the way it gets when you’ve been running and how you put your arm around her, and I remember the way she flinched and looked at you as if you were a stranger. I remember all the times she didn’t want to come to our house for Christmas, how she didn’t want to let her boys stay overnight. She’s been protecting me all these years. Or thinks she has.”
“You’re so accusatory, and yet you and Trey were the ones who ruined everything. You and Trey.”
“So you did see us?”
“Yes! And don’t try to use my knowledge of your infidelity as proof that I’m some sort of criminal. I saw the two of you, and I’ve never forgotten it. You were out there screwing that bastard.”
“Then why did you marry me?”
“I’m beginning to wonder.”
“So you punished your own brother by framing him for something he didn’t do?”
“Don’t ever call him my brother. And what right do you have to criticize me?”
“We made a mistake. We got carried away. But what happened between you and my sister?”
“I didn’t rape her, if that’s what you mean.”
“What happened, then?”
“We had sex, that was all.”
“You had sex with a fifteen-year-old?”
“She wanted to.”
“That’s why she was all bloody? You were twenty-six years old! I don’t know a state in the union where that’s not rape.”
“It wasn’t rape. Your sister…We had sex, yeah. But it wasn’t rape. She wanted to. She—”
It was at that point that my lovely wife picked up her pillows and a robe and left the room. I was used to grand exits by the ice queen. She’d done it before. She would do it again. And she would get over this. I was sure of it.
46. PHONE CALL FROM ANOTHER WOMAN
JAMIE ESTEVEZ>
I’ve been working with Trey for six days and have grown to know his moods in a way I will never know the other subjects of our interviews, and his mood now is melancholy. It’s as if he has taken off his clothing for me, emotionally and spiritually, and laid bare his soul. It is oddly endearing and even a little erotic. Nobody else’s story has affected me in this way, but then, no other firefighter has affected me the way Trey Brown has, either.
We’ve circled the building and are standing where we started in the debris-laden parking lot on the north side of the Z Club. In front of us are four crushed cars that remain half buried under a crumbled wall. Trey has been calm while reciting his tale, and he struggles to appear unemotional. I am wrung out and feel as if I’ve lived through the fire with him. In the evening chill he wears his department foul-weather coat, and it makes him readily identifiable as a fire department official to passersby. A car with a single black male in it slows, and the driver gives Trey a hard look that I’ve seen often over the past few days. There is a lot of public disgruntlement directed at black firefighters, whom some in the community see as having been traitors to their race. A few minutes later though, another car passes and two African-American women give Trey smiles and big waves.
The community is breaking up. Last night two parked cars in mostly white neighborhoods were torched by a group of roving youths. A curfew has been instituted for all neighborhoods south of the canal. Anyone under eighteen caught on the streets after midnight will be subject to arrest. The governor and mayor have agreed on this action, and it has made national news, as have the arrests of fifty-seven young blacks over the past four nights. Although most have been released to their parents or guardians, eighteen have been charged with felony mischief and assorted misdemeanors. The local NAACP chapter vows to fight the curfew in court.
“Can you handle a few follow-up questions?” I ask.
“Go ahead.”
“Did anybody call out to you while you were in there, anybody you had to bypass?”
“Just the man by the window.”
“Do you recall his exact words?”
“ ‘Help me.’”
“Just like that? Just like the tape that was released?”
“ ‘Help me’ is all I remember.”
“So he might have been the person on the cell phone to the dispatcher?”
“I didn’t see a cell phone, but then, I didn’t see him in the smoke, either. I just felt him. I passed him several times, so it’s possible he thought he was being passed up by more than one firefighter. Are you going to write this in the report?”
“I’ll have to. People in the community are particularly upset about that cell phone call. You’ve known this all along, haven’t you, that you might be the firefighter the caller was complaining about?”
I expected him to snap at me again, to remind me once more that he wasn’t the right person to help with this investigation, but he looked at me with utter sadness in his eyes and said, “Of course I have. I’ve replayed it all a hundred times in my mind.”
“When you got around to the back of the building, you had nothing but a blank wall in front of you, but you put up a ladde
r. Did you hear or see something? Or is that standard operating procedure?”
“I saw those boarded-over windows and wanted to know what was inside. Also, the cars in the parking lot didn’t seem to match the Hispanics in the street who usually drive older cars or small trucks that serve double duty in their jobs. Yeah, I know that’s stereotyping, but sometimes stereotypes can be useful.”
“If you hadn’t had that intuition, a lot more people would have died, wouldn’t they?”
“Are you trying to be a cheerleader now?”
“I know you feel bad about what you failed to do, but think about what you accomplished.”
“I don’t need a cheerleader.”
“I’m not saying you do. All I’m saying is there were a lot of other people who might have spotted those doors and didn’t.”
“I think about it every day.”
“You didn’t want to tell me this, did you?”
“I thought I was through telling it, that’s all.”
“Okay. Sure. I’m sorry if I—”
“What else do you want to know?”
“Has that ever been taught to you in training, to drop people out windows?”
“Of course not. But right now I’m sorry I didn’t drop them all out.”
“Why?”
“Because every one I dropped lived. Every one I didn’t get to is dead now. There were ten who died up there. Three died at the bottom of the stairs, but besides the man who was just too heavy for me to move, there were nine more somewhere inside that I never got to.”
We were both in a somber frame of mind by the time we got to his car. As we drove, we listened to the local news on the car radio. Leaders of the African-American community were suggesting the city’s investigation was tainted and that the Z Club Citizens for Truth “special team,” meaning Trey Brown and myself, would tell an appreciably different story from the official one. I wasn’t so sure they weren’t going to be disappointed. From the beginning I’d been aware of the irony of the City of Seattle paying a citizens’ group to do a study the city had already done, when the point of the second study was to rebut the first. Commissioning this study had bought Stone Carmichael a great deal of cachet in the minority community. The police chief was in trouble. The fire chief was in trouble, but Mayor Carmichael was golden. Each of the warring groups—police, fire, civilian—believed Carmichael was on their side. It was quite a trick.
