Into the Inferno (17 page)

33. THE HEATHEN UNDER GOD’S BED

“Damn it, Stephanie. You didn’t pull any punches that first day I met you. I didn’t like it, but I admired you for it. Tell me what you really think.”

“I’m not God. I can’t see the future.”

“I can.”

She sighed and wrapped both arms around my waist. I dropped my arm over her shoulders. The sky was pale blue except for a wispy pink-tinged cloud crowning the foothills to the south. The sun still hadn’t come over Mount Si. “What an extraordinarily beautiful place,” she said.

“I don’t know if I ever truly appreciated it until now.”

“You religious, Jim?”

“I used to be. These days I’m what you might call a heathen and proud of it.”

“It seems to me religion has a place in life, especially a place for people who are in the situation you’re in. Do you think it might help if you had some counseling—I don’t know, a pastor or a priest to talk to?”

“ ‘And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’? That sort of mumbo jumbo? Or how about: ‘Let the God of my salvation be exalted’—Psalms Eighteen, verse forty-six? Or: ‘Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou are the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day’—Psalms Twenty-five, verse five. Or: ‘Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.’ Let’s try Hebrews: ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ ”

“So you know the Bible?”

“I still remember about half of it.”

“So you must have prayed in the past. Your prayers were never answered?”

“I figure if there’s a God, he keeps pretty busy arranging natural disasters and destroying nations, maybe figuring out how to manipulate one population into cutting off the hands of another. What he does is a lot more fun than answering prayers from a nitwit like me. I spent sixteen years of my life hiding under God’s bed. My parents thought they had the revelation of the absolute truth of the universe through the prophet William P. Markham; he was the con artist who founded the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ. We kids got Bible assignments each morning. I think I had most of the New Testament memorized before I could read, before I could think, really, because when you’re living in a cult, thinking is pretty much discouraged. We bragged about being freethinkers, but come up with anything not strictly approved by William P. Markham and whoa. We weren’t even allowed to
read
about another religion. Maybe that’s why wherever I’ve lived, I ended up spending half my time in the public library.”

“Who’s going to be with you through this? You need somebody.”

“I was hoping you would stick around.”

Stephanie slipped her arms under my shirt, her bare hands hot against my flesh. “I’ll stick around as long as you want me to.”

“Just till I’m eating mush. After that I won’t know who’s here and who’s not.”

“I’ll be here.”

When we went back inside, arm in arm, the girls gave each other knowing looks. They’d set the table as formally as a wedding banquet, had come up with the idea of cooking breakfast, dollar pancakes, Allyson’s favorite. Stephanie and I added juice and scrambled eggs to the menu.

I surrounded more than my fair portion of pancakes, feeling invincible the way Bill Murray felt invincible in
Groundhog Day
. Clog up my arteries? That would take years.

“So?” Britney asked at the conclusion of our breakfast. “Are you two getting engaged?”

“Brit!” Allyson shouted. “I told you not to say that.”

Stephanie could see as painfully as I could the irony of my daughters trying to plot out the rest of our lives at a time when our family was on a countdown timer.

“What makes you think we might get married?” I asked.

“She stayed overnight,” Allyson said.

“That was only to save her from a long drive. Honey, we’re working on a project.”

“You don’t like her?” Britney asked. “Isn’t she pretty?”

“Of course I like her. And she’s very pretty. But there are other considerations.”

“Like what?” Allyson asked.

“Ally,” Britney said. “You’re going to spoil everything.”

“
You
started it.”

Filled with emotion, Britney looked around the table and said, “Daddy never lets anybody stay over. This is a millstone.”

“A milestone,” said Stephanie softly. “I think you mean it’s a milestone.”

“Yeah, right, whatever. The second Suzanne never stayed over once, and he really liked her. Mrs. LeMonde never even came in the house. Holly was nice, but . . .”

“What about Holly?” Stephanie asked.

“Morgan saw them kissing in the car.”

“I’m sure your father’s kissed a lot of women in the car.”

“No, he hasn’t really,” Britney said. “Just Holly, and the second Suzanne, and maybe Mrs. LeMonde.”

The breakfast was sitting foully in my stomach, but I didn’t heed the warning.

I barely made it to the bathroom, dropping to my knees in front of the commode and retching until there was no more to bring up. I couldn’t remember ever vomiting so violently, or feeling my stomach walls actually connect with my spine. For a few moments in the middle of it, I thought I was going to choke to death, or die of heart failure.

From the doorway behind me, Stephanie said, “You all right?”

“I don’t know why I don’t read the symptoms for the next day before I go to bed.” I’d barely gotten the words out when another round shook me. And then a minute later, as I was washing up, the wave of nausea vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

Day 4: Headache goes away, cannot keep food down.

Stan Beebe had been through this. So had Holly, Newcastle, Joel McCain, Jackie, and those three in Tennessee. I was joining a select brotherhood.

I must have looked ashen when I came out of the bathroom, because Allyson took my hand and said, “You all right, Daddy?”

“Fine.”

“Did we leave eggshells in the pancakes? You get shell shock?” It was a longtime family joke.

“No. Everything was wonderful. I just have a bug in my stomach, that’s all.” I found myself kneeling in the living room, clutching my eldest.

Britney, who had been obsessed with death and abandonment issues since her mother left, rushed over and said, “You’re not going to die, are you?”

“No, of course not.” I caught Stephanie’s eye from the other room. “We all die eventually. You know that.”

“I know that. I’m not a baby,” Britney said. “But I want Ally and me to be at least twenty-one before you die.”

“I’ll be twenty-three. You’ll be twenty-one,” Allyson said. “I’m two years older.”

“And how could I forget that? You only remind me every hour.”

34. TWO-DOLLAR MAP, TWO-DOLLAR WHORE

Morgan had left a message on the machine saying she felt under the weather and could not baby-sit today. I could tell from her voice she was trying on a fit of pique over Stephanie. She’d done the same after seeing me with Suzanne.

With the help of Karrie Haston, Ben Arden, and Ian Hjorth, the three paid firefighters on duty that day, Stephanie and I set up a base camp in the officers’ room. In the end we had a computer with an Internet connection, three landlines, plus two cell phones. Karrie and Ben set up the office while Ian kept watch in the station and entertained Allyson and Britney with cartoon drawings on the blackboard. In a matter of minutes, Stephanie and I were fielding calls, Stephanie logging outgoing and incoming so that we didn’t duplicate our efforts.

There was still no sign of anybody from Jane’s. When I called them in San Jose, I couldn’t get through to anybody. It was as if the plant had closed down.

Stephanie contacted two doctors, one in California and a second in New York, both specialists in diseases transmitted by poultry, while I tried to get hold of someone else affiliated with the Chattanooga Fire Department. What I wanted was the down and gritty, a confirmation or confutation of Charlie Drago’s tale. Also, I wanted a confirmation that Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc., had had packages at Southeast Travelers Freight. I didn’t know that they’d had anything there, but I strongly suspected it.

Trouble was, the Chattanooga Fire Department was hosting a conference in town, and none of the administration or union people were in their offices.

Stephanie tried her aunt’s condo in Bellevue and then her office in Redmond. Marge DiMaggio was in a meeting and had left instructions not to be disturbed.

It was just about then that Karrie showed up at the door to the office. “Two suits to see you at the front door,” she said.

Stephanie followed me to the tiny watch office at the front of the station, where I met two short bald men who looked uncomfortable in their sport coats and brown slacks. Both men kept their hands in their pockets, although each had brought along a bulky briefcase and one had a laptop computer in a black bag. Their names were Hillburn and Dobson. They were pudgy and soft the way people who’d been indoors all their lives were.

“Morning,” said Hillburn genially. He was bright as a button, and I had the feeling he had as many years in universities as I had in the fire department. They both claimed they were already full of coffee but drank more after Karrie offered it.

Out the window across the street I could see what looked like a rental car. These were the two from Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc.

“Mr. Stuart said you guys would be here in three hours. That was yesterday.”

“Did he?” Hillburn and Dobson looked at each other. “Did he say that? Odd. He knew we had to be in Denver yesterday.”

“It
is
odd,” added Dobson.

“Now let’s get down to cases,” Hillburn said. “First off. How many people have been affected?”

“Here?” I said. “Here in Washington? Five that we know of. One more with symptoms.”

“And what are the symptoms? Exactly.”

I listed them while Dobson opened his laptop and typed them into a document. He kept typing after he was finished with the list, as if recording our meeting. In fact, he did a lot more typing than we did talking, filling up all the empty spaces with his tap-tap-tapping.

“Okay,” Hillburn said. “Now. I need to see the manifest.”

I walked to the other room and brought it back. After he’d studied it a minute, he handed it to Dobson, who studied it also, then entered the complete list of materials and involved companies into his computer, typing like a high school speed champ.

I said, “Were you shipping a product that could have caused any of our symptoms?”

Without looking up, Dobson said, “No.”

“No,” repeated Hillburn reflexively.

“How can you assure us of that?” Stephanie said.

“And you are?” Hillburn said.

“Stephanie Riggs. I’m his doctor.”

“A doctor of medicine?”

“Yes.”

Hillburn and Dobson looked at each other for a second, and then Hillburn looked at Stephanie for a long while as Dobson directed his attention back to his laptop. Finally, Dobson looked up from his typing again and said, “We’ve never had anything even remotely like this.”

“What
have
you had?” I asked.

“Well, unfortunately, company policy prohibits us from discussing that.”

“Company policy,” said Hillburn.

“And company policy would also preclude you from admitting you had something like this even if you did, wouldn’t it?” I said.

“More than likely,” Hillburn admitted.

“So what sorts of previous health concerns are you prepared to admit to? And did you have any products in a fire at Southeast Travelers’ shipping facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, three years ago?”

“Before we answer any of your questions, we’ll need to see the materials,” Hillburn said. “The actual materials from the crash site.”

“You’ve got the shipping manifest in front of you.”

“We know that. We need to look at the materials. The truck trailer and so forth.”

“We don’t have the truck trailer. I told you the accident was last winter.”

“What do you mean, you don’t have the trailer?”

“I mean all that stuff got hauled off months ago.”

“So how do you know the accident had anything to do with these health problems you’re talking about?”

“We don’t. Not for sure.”

“You sure you don’t have any of the materials?” Hillburn asked.

“Just that manifest.”

Hillburn and Dobson looked at each other; Dobson was already folding up his laptop. They were out the door before I could stop them. As the door closed behind them, Dobson said, “I guess that’s all we need then.”

“What the hell were you shipping?” I yelled at the closed door. I followed them outside.

“You have any more problems with this, give us a call,” Hillburn said as if he were being helpful.

“Wait a minute!” I screamed at their backsides, but neither of them slowed, not until they’d reached their rental. “We’ve got people who are going brain-dead here. I’m one of them. You’ve gotta damn well tell me what you think is happening!”

For half a minute they looked at me like two owls in a thunderstorm, neither willing to concede anything. Then they quickly got into their car and drove away.

“Sons of bitches!” I said.

Stephanie was waiting for me at the front of the station.

I said, “They’re assuming because we can’t pin them down on it they can skate in a court of law.”

“I’m not so sure they knew
exactly
what we were talking about,” Stephanie said.

“They seemed like nice guys,” Karrie said as we went back into the station. “I mean, they came all this way to help.”

“They came all this way to cover their butts. When they found out they weren’t in trouble, they packed up and left. They weren’t here to help.”

We went back to the office at the rear of the station, where Stephanie called her aunt, again without result.

Last night she’d updated me on Marge DiMaggio. After her husband died, DiMaggio took over the running of Canyon View Systems in Redmond, Washington, and put everything she had into it. Now the company was on the verge of being sold for a “staggering amount of money.” I recalled Marge had tried to talk Holly into investing in their stock, telling her that in a matter of months the value would skyrocket.

Ben and Karrie went to the other computer to look up anything they could find on chicken-related illnesses, a channel of investigation for which Stephanie still held out hope. Karrie seemed along for the ride, which was strange considering she’d been in Holly’s truck with the rest of us. I kept thinking about how abruptly Hillburn and Dobson had lost interest in us. Stephanie called an expert on industrial poisons and gathered more information on toluene. Nobody had any brainstorms.

At ten-thirty I took a call from Ms. Mulherin, the environmental chemist from the University of Washington, her voice sounding unoiled over the phone. “I understand the committee’s being disbanded,” she said.

“What?”

“I heard the committee’s been canceled.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I had a message on my machine when I got in this morning. Your mayor told me there’d been a mistake.”

“Mayor Haston?”

“He told me he was sorry for the imposition, but we were to discontinue any work we’d started. Don’t tell me there was never anything wrong with you people?”

“Nothing’s been canceled, Ms. Mulherin. We’re still as sick as ever.”

“Good. Well, no, not good that you have this, but . . . Do
you
have this?”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“I’m sorry. Well, I’m still gathering a preliminary team of graduate students. I won’t be out to your station until early next week.”

“I guess you’ll see me then,” I said, savoring the irony.

How many others had Steve Haston contacted, and why would he disband the committee?

Before I could give the news to Stephanie, a voice on the station intercom paged me to the watch office. I was barely out the door when my girls ambushed me in the corridor.

“Daddy, Daddy. Look what we got,” Britney said, leaping into my arms. She had a stuffed animal, a grisly-looking creature that could only have been designed by someone on PCP. Allyson held a similar toy at arm’s length, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before Allyson’s distaste would poison Britney’s feelings for her own gift.

“Where’d you get these?”

“Grandma and Grandpa,” Allyson said. “Grandma said you forgot to pick them up at the airport. Grandpa’s mad, but he’s pretending he’s not. Grandma already pinched my face. She says I look like Natalie Wood in
Miracle on 34th Street
.”

“You do look a little like Natalie Wood.”

“Really is he mad?” Britney asked, squirming out of my arms. “I’m gonna go see.”

“Don’t say anything, Brit!” Allyson called out as her sister disappeared. “Blabbermouth.”

I said, “I forgot all about them.”

“They’re so boring.”

“They love you, even if they are a little—”

“Don’t say they’re different, Dad, ’cause they’re a lot more than different. I didn’t want to see them last summer, and now it’s already
this
summer, and here they are again. Omigod. My life is just draaaaaggging on. If it weren’t for Stephanie and Morgan, this would be the longest of the nine summers I’ve had to live through. I suppose they’re going to stay at our house again? Daddy. Can’t you tell them we’re contagious or something?”

“They’ve come a long way to see you.”

“Grampa smells like BO.”

“Let me put it this way: We can pick our friends. We can’t pick our relatives.”

“You picked Mommy.”

“Allyson, you’re getting too smart for me.”

Wesley Tindale was retired from Alcoa Aluminum, and Lillian from retail sales. They had only the two grandchildren and doted on them, insisted on speaking to them on the phone once a week, an ongoing ordeal both girls had to be coached through. The Tindales saw Allyson and Britney as their second chance. They’d had two daughters themselves, my ex, Lorie, and Elaine. Elaine was doing drugs somewhere in New York, and Lorie, also involved in drugs, was wanted by the law. It was hard to tell which of Lorie’s offenses was worse in their minds, the drugs, the forged checks, or the lesbianism. It drove me to distraction that they blamed Lorie’s conversion to homosexuality on me.

Wesley was almost as tall as I was, saturnine, invariably in baggy slacks and today sandals with black dress socks worn so thin his toenails showed through. His long sideburns were left over from the seventies—or was it the sixties?—and his eyebrows were so overgrown, both my girls were frightened by them. He had severe dark eyes that were always a little blurry, yet he spoke in a commanding voice, his best feature.

Coming from a family of teetotalers, it had taken me years to realize Wesley was drinking before breakfast. He did most of his driving drunk, did most everything drunk. Lillian, on the other hand, was arguably the worst driver in the Western Hemisphere, drunk or not. The irony was that, with over a century of driving between the two of them, neither had a mark on their driving records. Go figure.

At less than five feet, Lillian was short enough she looked like a joke walking alongside Wesley, her torso round as a ball. Today she wore madras pants and a large loose-fitting blouse in a color I couldn’t describe—a garish purple-mauve-yellow ensemble. They both wore straw hats. Each year it was a different
fun
gimmick. Last year for the entire week they’d worn matching bow ties with battery-powered blinking lights.

Britney and I found the blinking lights oddly amusing, but Allyson had not been happy about the extra attention while out in public.

“Sorry about the airport,” I said, shaking hands with Wesley, holding it until he gave up. He trotted out the marine-sergeant death grip every time we met. “One of the men in the department died this week, so I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

Putting on a false joviality that Karrie, always fascinated with the specter of bad relatives, was quickly picking up on, they mentioned the airport fiasco several more times, reassuring me after each reference that being old and abandoned in a strange airport hadn’t bothered them at all, that they’d rather enjoyed the long line at the car rental place, and that being independent with their own vehicle would be a pleasant change from having me cart them around as in years past, that neither of them minded getting lost in Federal Way, and that they were finally learning how to read their two-dollar map.

I would be reminded of the two-dollar map again and again the way a sailor’s wife reminded him he’d gotten the clap from a two-dollar whore. Had Lorie been here, the guilt factor would have whittled her down to nothing, but I had no time for it.

“Look,” I said as Mayor Haston walked through the front door and greeted Karrie. “I understand you want to see the girls today. Fine. Take them out to lunch. Go to Snoqualmie Falls, whatever. Just have them back in time for dinner at five. We’re going to eat at my place. Can you be there?”