Into the Inferno (15 page)

29. ALL THE WOMEN IN MY LIFE

We’d been pulling his trousers back on, were in the process of sitting him up, feats the diminutive nurse was ill-equipped to accomplish alone. Stephanie rushed in to help situate him in his wheelchair, then watched as the nurse left the room carrying a plastic sack. The odor of human shit lingered long after I found a citrus spray bottle in the bathroom and misted the room.

“I left messages, but you never got back to me.”

“I didn’t get them. I drove up, but I couldn’t find anybody in the station. Finally a volunteer who was hanging around said somebody saw you over here. He also said somebody died at a fire today? Not another firefighter I hope.”

“A civilian. By the way. Phone tag is something you play with people who have more than four days to live.”

“I was working on your problem. I didn’t think you needed the reassurance of knowing that.”

“It looks like I did.”

“I’m here now. I’m here for you. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear.”

I was annoyed that Max Caputo’s bizarre death had stolen so much time from my own impending finish. I was annoyed also that Stephanie hadn’t hooked up with me sooner, as promised. Or maybe I was just annoyed. “What did my tests show?” Stephanie took a deep breath and looked down at my father. It took me a minute to realize she wasn’t going to reply, at least not right away. “Dad, this is Stephanie Riggs. Stephanie, my father, James Swope, Sr.”

“CVA?”

“Little over two years ago.”

“Same condition as Holly.”

“The thought has occurred to me.”

“You’re a good son.”

“That’s one thing I’m not.”

“No, you are. I saw you working with the nurse before you knew I was here. And you’ve kept him close to home. A lot of people would just ship someone in his condition out and never think twice about it.”

That was exactly what I’d done and I felt lower than whale shit because of it, yet I could hardly point out my crimes to Stephanie. She already hated me.

“I’d rather be dead than have a stranger changing my diapers,” I said.

“Don’t say that.”

“You haven’t thought about that with Holly?”

“I don’t even want to talk about this.”

“Fine. Tell me about the tests.”

She moved past me to the window, folding her arms across her breasts and gazing out at the sunshine. I’d read once that in wartime people were like rabbits, the proximity to death heightening their sexual awareness, exponentially increasing their drive to mate. I was beginning to feel that way myself. Stephanie was wearing Holly’s perfume again, and that subtle aroma never failed to make me think of sex.

“The tests weren’t conclusive. So far everything looks normal, same as Holly. That’s what’s so baffling. It’s all so damn normal. Anything changed with you?”

“I’ve had a headache all day. I fell twice. It’s pretty much what Stan and your sister reported.”

She thought about that while I looked out the window over her shoulder. “You frightened?” she asked.

“Are you asking out of professional curiosity, or just for something to talk about?”

“I really want to know.”

“I’m thinking I’m going to be like him in four days.”

“No, you’re not. We’ll—”

“Find a cure?”

“Of course we will.”

“In four days? Get real.”

“You can’t give up hope.”

“I’m not giving up anything. I’m just being practical. The worst part is I don’t know what’s going to happen to my girls.”

“Your ex-wife still in the picture?”

“She’s wanted by the law.” Two years ago I might have outlined the details of Lorie’s misdemeanors ad nauseam; in the first years after our divorce I’d complained bitterly about Lorie to anybody who would listen and quite a few who didn’t want to but couldn’t get away from me. Ultimately, I ran out of listeners before I ran out of words. Now, more than anything else, she was a blot on my history. If she was a disgrace to parenthood, what did that make me for choosing her to be the mother of my children? She was just one more piece of evidence that I was an idiot.

I sat on the bed and picked up my father’s limp hands.

I thought about how over the years I’d blamed so many of my problems on him, how I’d measured, infantile as it seemed now, each woman I’d dated by the impression I thought she would make on him. About how badly I’d needed to impress him with my companions. He must have chosen my mother for a lot of the reasons I was choosing women now.

I was the young male expelled from the troupe, wanting to come back and conquer, if only psychologically, the alpha male. As religious as he was, my father had frequently betrayed himself with a lingering look at a slim ankle or a prolonged gaze into a pair of pretty eyes. At fifty-seven, and still turning heads, my mother was a testament to his need to be surrounded by beauty. She’d been twenty-four when they married. He’d been forty-four.

Within the limitations of his life, my father had been good to me. Later, when he needed me the most, I had abandoned him, just as the rest of the world would abandon me at the end of the week.

“You’re a good son,” Stephanie repeated.

“I’m hungry. How about you?”

“Driving over here I saw a little Italian place on the corner. Any good?”

“Sure. Trouble is, my daughters—” Just as I said the word
daughters
, Allyson and Britney burst into the room. Morgan remained in the doorway, eyeing Stephanie with a malevolent intensity I could never have predicted. The girls were each towing a gas-filled balloon on the end of a long yellow ribbon, raving about a clown they’d seen down the hall. Britney had a pink mustache. “Strawberry shake, little girl?”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Allyson? Britney? This is my friend Stephanie. Stephanie’s a doctor. And, Morgan? This is Stephanie.”

Morgan remained sullen. The girls immediately let me in on their plot: they wanted to go to E. J. Roberts Park, a small public park a few blocks from the fire station. If they’d been scarred by our brush with death that morning, they weren’t showing it.

“They’re adorable,” Stephanie said after they’d paraded out with Morgan. “You’ve done a wonderful job with them.”

“They’re great, but it’s not all my doing. Lorie was a good mother before she left. At least part of the time. You interested in seeing somebody else with the syndrome?”

“Where?”

“Right down the hall.”

In Jackie’s room the television was playing to an audience of one. I turned the volume down and let Stephanie make a quick examination of the patient while I read some of the notes and cards on the bulletin board, some for her, some for her roommate, who was out. There’d been two unsigned Christmas cards on my father’s bulletin board, both from the same insurance company. Somebody who felt sorry for him must have tacked them up. “She in an accident?”

“Crashed her car.”

“She a firefighter?”

“A volunteer. Aid calls only.”

“She’s got the hands.”

“Yup.”

We ended up walking to a restaurant a block away.

As we started to cross the railroad tracks, I looked up and suddenly realized I was sitting on the ground. I had been walking alongside Stephanie one moment—on my keister the next. It was embarrassing.

30. HERE COMES ONE NOW

The Italian restaurant was across from the mountaineering shop and just up the street from the bike store.

After we ordered, Stephanie leaned toward me, pressing her torso forward so that the table put a horizontal dent across her as if she were a foldout paper doll. She was pretty enough to be a paper doll, her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, her pale-blue eyes full of life, a slight swatch of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She was exactly the sort of woman who never would have had anything to do with me unless forced to. “I believe I may be on the verge of finding out what happened,” she said. “At least a good portion of it.”

“And?”

“I thought it would be something we found in the hospital, you know, the results of one of the tests we did on Holly, or on you, but your tests are all coming out normal. Just like hers. So last night I got on the Internet and began trying all sorts of things with various search engines. And there it was.”

I must have done something with my face, because she said, “I’m sorry. I guess you want the
Reader’s Digest
version and here I am giving you the unabridged version. I’ve found three cases in Tennessee that are almost identical to what we’re seeing here. All firefighters.”

“Chattanooga?”

“Yes. Did you find that, too? Happened after a fire in a shipping facility, which just happens to be where my sister’s cargo originated the night she had the accident. Same city, different shipping facility. When I called this morning, they told me to speak to their lawyers. Their lawyers said if I had a suit, to file it; if not, they couldn’t tell me anything. I’ve left a couple of calls with their fire department, but they’re having some sort of conference, and everybody from the chief on down is out of the office.”

“I spoke to a firefighter named Drago. I think we should call him back.” Stephanie handed me her cell phone and I dialed the number from memory. It was one o’clock in North Bend, three o’clock in Chattanooga.

Drago answered the phone himself this time. I reminded him of who I was and skipped the amenities. “Tell me why you warned me about a possible explosion.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. Who are you?”

I ran through it all again. “Somebody called me earlier, but how do I know it was you? Start from the top. Tell me exactly what you got and how you think you got it.”

The man was off his rocker. As I spoke, he interrupted repeatedly in an effort, apparently, to make sure I wasn’t with the media or a private drug company, or an insurance company. You could tell he was nuts, not so much by what he said, although there were plenty of clues there, but by the staccato sentences and the up-and-down tone of his voice. I’d never heard anyone talk quite like that.

I told him as plainly as I could who I was and what had been happening to the North Bend Fire Department. When I gave him a list of the symptoms, he made me go over it twice, just like Santy Claus.

After I told him I was on day three of the syndrome, that my doctor thought I would be a zombie by the end of the week, that we’d just come back from a trailer explosion that could have wiped out the entire department, he said, “Lookit. Three years ago we had a couple of rigs respond to a fire at a place called Southeast Travelers. A freight outfit. They’re still running trucks not two miles from here. What makes it so tragic is we could have pissed and put it out. It was just a silly little room fire. What we did was, we ran a line in with two guys on the pipe. Within two weeks those two guys plus one of our fire investigators were in the hospital. Pretty much the same symptoms you’re describing. Brain-dead by the end of the month.

“All three had been at Southeast, and all three had moved packages and freight around. Those little shits at Southeast tried to deny it, but there was only one place it could have happened. Doctors around here thought they might have gotten into some insecticide. But that storeroom didn’t have any insecticide in it.”

“You say it was only two weeks between the fire and when they came down with the symptoms? That makes me think we’re not talking about the same thing. It was longer up here.”

“Your guys are turning into zombies? Just layin’ there, nothing behind their eyes? Gotta feed ’em? White stuff on the backs of their hands?”

Rubbing one hand, I said, “How are your guys doing?”

“I hate to say it, but Vic is dead, and the other two are organ donors going to seed. Lost most of their weight. Their muscle tone. They got bedsores. The oldest is forty and looks like an embalming school has been using him for practice. They just started feeling sick, nothing earth-shattering, and then one day they either didn’t wake up or collapsed where they stood. Two of ’em are in nursing homes. The other one, Vic, died of a heart attack about six months ago. His wife had already divorced him so she could marry somebody else in the department. Tell me that wasn’t a scandal. I hope to Jesus cows are laying eggs and roosting in trees before anything like that happens to me.”

“Has there been an investigation?”

“Our mayor appointed a commission to study it, and the state’s working on it, too, but nothing’s happened. I think after our senator got into the mix, that’s when the investigation started going cow shit.”

“What makes you say that?”

“They decommissioned one of the groups studying it and then seeded the other one with people from the chemical industry. You know there’s politics in it when they actually put representatives from some of the companies we think caused it on the panel to investigate. After a year they put out a preliminary report which says basically diddly-squat. Then one of the guys on this eighteen-member commission has a heart attack and everything grinds to a halt while they spend four months scouring the countryside for a replacement. Four months!”

“Anybody narrowed down the cause?”

“Sure. Down to about, oh, twenty or thirty different companies. To about a hundred and fifty chemical agents, maybe ten thousand possible combinations. Southeast ships chemicals around the country. And every one of those companies wants to stall the investigation. There’s a million theories floating around out there, but nobody knows for sure. We got lawsuits out the yinyang. We lost three good men, and we should be moving heaven and earth to figure out why, not hiding behind attorneys.”

“Don’t you guys have a union?”

“Yeah, but the leadership is basically hanging our guys out to dry.”

“It doesn’t make sense. You’d think the city would want to find the cause. What if it happens again?”

“That’s just it. Everybody’s saying it could never happen again.”

“How can they know that if they haven’t pinned down the cause?”

“Thank you very much. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell them. The commission has identified over a hundred and fifty chemical compounds got spilled or opened at that fire. You mix one chemical with another, and all of a sudden you’ve got a substance nobody knows nothin’ about. Truth is, we might never know what caused this.”

“Nobody else caught the syndrome? None of the freight company employees or the truck drivers?”

“Nobody. Which makes us think it was a gaseous compound. The smoke goes away, so does the hazard.”

“Or maybe some mixture of chemicals that doesn’t remain stable very long.”

“Coulda been.”

“Anybody catch it and then shake it?”

“Not that I know of. You sure you got this?”

“I’ve had four coworkers go down.”

“Like our guys?”

“Two are that way. Two are dead.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry, buddy. I really am. You got your family stuff in order and all that?”

“Some of it.”

“Far as I know nothing has ever changed with these guys, until one died from a heart attack. Vic was my best friend, so it’s not like I ain’t been keeping tabs. I’d like to say yes, they’re getting better, but the truth is, these guys are zombies and always will be.”

“God.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you warn me about an explosion?”

“I can’t talk about that, man. I mean, I really can’t. They’re watching me. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re taping this phone call.”

“Who?”

“That’s just it. If I knew who, I could do something about it. It would take a month to tell you everything that’s happened around here. I will tell you this. I went back to Southeast Travelers one night to look around. They’ve kept the building pretty much the way it was, all taped off and everything. There was a man in there in the dark doing something. I couldn’t quite tell what. I could tell he didn’t work there. The bastard threatened to kill me.”

“What’d you do?”

“I got out of there, man.”

“Call the police?”

“What I did was, I started packing a gun.”

“You find out who he was?”

“No, man, we didn’t become friends or nothin’. Scared the hell out of me. I really thought for a minute he was going to kill me.”

I had some more questions for Drago, but I could hear the tremor in his voice. Charlie was coming close to losing his mind right there on the phone. I decided to change the subject and asked about the companies involved.

After much shuffling of papers and confusion on his end of the line, Drago told me he couldn’t locate the list of companies with products in the fire room at Southeast Travelers. Instead he told me all the company names he could remember off the top of his head and everything he knew about them. I wanted to compare the list from Holly’s truck with Drago’s list. It seemed to me that if we found products on both lists, we should concentrate on them.

“How about a company called Jane’s California Propulsion? Did they have anything at Southeast?”

“Jane’s? Maybe. I dunno. It’s a pretty long list. I can’t remember all the companies. Listen, I’ll get back to you when I find my complete list. And you get in touch anytime, day or night,” Drago said. “I mean that. You want something, it’s yours. I’ll fly out there and sit with you, man. I mean that. I’m there for you. Anything.”

“Thanks, Charlie.”

When I hung up, Stephanie looked at me and said, “Did they?”

“Did they what?”

“Recover?”

“No.”

We were still waiting for the meal when Mary Kay LeMonde approached our table with a look on her face that was half curiosity and half challenge. Through part of the winter and early spring, Mary and I had kept company, our time together overlapping Holly’s entrance and exit in my life, as well as the second Suzanne’s, the Suzanne whose existence had spurred my breakup with Holly. You can see how complicated things were.

I liked women, liked to be friends with them, liked to be lovers with them, and I especially liked to be friends with them
after
I had been lovers with them. I can’t tell you why it meant so much to me, because I didn’t know many other single men who were friendly with any of their exes, much less
all
of their exes. To me, it had always been pivotal that my lovers liked me after the heat of passion waned, which was ironic because Lorie barely spoke to me and certainly had not been back to visit since the night she left three years ago.

Joel McCain claimed it was almost as if I were forming a club of ladies I’d fucked.

Fucked.
That was the word Joel had used. Could any term be more degrading, more gauche, more unpolished, or, in this case, more apt? Until the past few days, I’d never used the word. Not even back in the army. Oddly, Joel, with religion oozing out his ears, had used it all the time.

“Hello, Jimmy.”

“Mary Kay. How nice to see you.”

As with the others, after we stopped sleeping together Mary Kay and I remained on speaking terms—the last phone call about two weeks ago.

Grasping the table for support, I stood up, realizing as I looked into her dark-brown eyes that even though we still spoke on the telephone from time to time, I had been doing my level best to avoid her. Two weeks ago at the QFC I’d raced out of the store after spotting her. Childish, yes. Vintage Swope? You bet.

Mary Kay was unquestionably the best-looking woman on the staff at Mount Si High School and had often gone on about how handsome I was and what a nice couple we made and so forth. We had been a matched pair, neither of us ever appearing in public with unflossed teeth, a hair out of place, or lint on our clothes, two mirror addicts temporarily in love with the thought of coupledom. For years I’d been as shallow as a puddle of melted ice cream, and now all I could think about was how shallow Mary Kay had been, still was, and how glad I was to be shed of her.

Mary Kay was too busy with her machine-gun chatter to notice the way I gripped the table for support. Talk, talk, talk. Mary Kay had even nattered while we made love, a proclivity that had kept me from completing the business at hand on at least one occasion. She’d gabbed our breakup to death in much the same way Holly had, analyzing the smallest details until I wanted to bay at the moon.

I introduced the women, telling Mary Kay that Stephanie was a doctor, that we were working on a fire department project together. Don’t ask me why I cared what she thought. Mary Kay and I would never see each other again. Before she left, Mary Kay ascertained that Stephanie was from out of state and would be leaving soon, all of this done in one polite exchange after another.

I couldn’t help thinking how much of my life had been frittered away on women I knew were only passing through. It seemed such a colossal waste of time. But then, I’d always been misguided about what it took to be a man. It was no accident I ran away from home and moved directly into an army barracks, no accident, either, that within two years of my exit from the service I’d become a firefighter. One macho trade after another. And of course, Lorie had been gorgeous. Demented, but gorgeous.

My years of standing around on street corners handing out Bible tracts alongside timid females and gawky men had polluted my entire adult life. I was still trying to be a man’s man. Anything but the sissy on a street corner.

After our waiter left, Stephanie said, “That must have been a tangled web.”

“What?”

“You and Mary Kay.”