Into the Inferno (6 page)

10. TAKING IN THE BIG PICTURE

It was not quite dark when I got onto I-5 and began driving north. Beyond the water park I took Highway 18 and headed east by northeast, the Douglas firs on either side of the narrow highway opening up to an occasional view of a housing development or shopping mall.

It occurred to me that had Holly been considering suicide, she would have used the threat during our last phone conversation to lever concessions from me.

But she hadn’t.

At least not while I was awake.

I’d made the mistake of telling someone at the firehouse I’d drifted off during that last phone call, and now whenever I got a call at work Click or Clack would announce over the station intercom, “Telephone for Jim Swope. Lieutenant Swope? Nap time.”

I felt enough guilt over that call without finding out I was the last person Holly spoke to.

She deserved better than me. Better than that bed in the hospital. Better than her angry sister even. When you thought about it, most of the women I’d been seeing in the past couple of years deserved better than me. Maybe Stephanie Riggs was right. Maybe her sister tried to kill herself because of the way I’d treated her.

It was mind-boggling, because underneath I was basically a pretty decent guy.

Today had been a double whammy. Joel’s predicament had been a jolt for us all. Joel and I, at fifteen years and twelve years of time in the department respectively, had known each other longer than any of the other full-timers. Having made lieutenant a year before I did, he often joked that he was my superior, though in fact we’d worked as equals until he was obligated to take over the department’s administrative duties following Newcastle’s death.

Never one to volunteer for extra paperwork or meetings, Joel hadn’t been happy holding the reins of the fire department. When he fell off his roof, I’d made a bad joke that he’d done it on purpose in order to get out of running the department.

Now the whole enchilada rested on my shoulders.

After our call to Joel’s house, Karrie had wept openly. Stan Beebe had gone home sick. I might have done either or both, but at the time I was too upset about my meeting with the cannibal to think straight. You meet a man-eater like that, it disturbs you.

What happened to Joel and Holly was the type of thing you could put off thinking about if you were thirty-four like I was. You could tell yourself you didn’t need to think about it for another forty years. I didn’t even have a corner of my brain where I kept problems like that.

Three years earlier when my father had a stroke, I’d calculated that I had forty-six years before I needed to worry about it myself. Now I faced the inescapable fact that people my age were not exempt—were, in fact, dropping like flies.

I
was not exempt.

It was something you always knew but tried not to face, in the same way teenagers knew they could die if they drove recklessly but, nonetheless, still drove as if they were invincible, which of course was why so many teenagers died in automobile accidents.

None of us knew for certain whether Joel McCain’s brain was still functioning. Or Holly’s. To be able to think but not speak. To be able to itch but not scratch.

You got like that, it had to be hell on earth.

Stan Beebe had told me he’d rather be dead.

I
would rather be dead.

Life was such a simple thing when you sat down and thought about it. You were conceived, born, lived for a few years, mated, had children, grew old, and then you died and fed the worms. Afterward, your offspring duplicated the process.

Same as any animal.

Same as a kernel of corn.

My life was no different from anybody else’s. My days passed pretty much like everybody else’s. I got up in the morning and looked in the cupboard for a box of cereal. Thought about the fact that I needed to take the girls shopping for school clothes, that I’d forgotten to write a check for the phone bill. That the car needed gas. I found my wallet empty and went to the cash machine. Like those around me, I was consumed with the minutiae of daily life, by the fact that the driver in the next lane cut me off, by how much of a raise the fire department might expect from the city next year. Crap, all of it. Absolute crap.

Rarely did anything that mattered touch my thoughts.

The downpour of daily trifles was so constant and so steady I rarely had time to look up at the sky.

It sounds foolish to say it, but the feeling of my own impending death seemed to fill the pickup truck. Some philosopher said that when we feel sad for somebody else’s death, we are actually mourning our own. He might have been writing about me.

When I rolled down the window, the cool night air tossed around some papers on the seat beside me right before it brought tears to my eyes.

DAY TWO

11. WEAK LEGS, MILD HEADACHE,
THE HANDS TAKE ON A WAXY APPEARANCE

I woke up unable to breathe.

When I opened my eyes, a seven-year-old was sitting on my chest, a nine-year-old alongside straddling my pillow as if it were a horse. Britney was skinny as a pencil. She’d been bugging me to cut her hair, which was the same shade of red her mother’s had been as a child. Her older sister, Allyson, had black hair that fell just beyond her shoulders, almost the same color as mine; she thought she wanted to keep hers long. Or short. Alternating opinions by the hour. Allyson was already beginning to stretch out into the elegant young woman she would become.

Even though I discouraged it, Allyson had taken up the unofficial mantle of mother in the family, striving to be the voice of reason in any familial endeavor or discussion. Allyson had become the sober one, taking after my father and myself, Britney the free spirit, as Lorie had been, as my mother had been in her youth and now was again.

The three of us had stayed up late playing Monopoly and listening to a Britney Spears CD. “Come on, Dad,” Britney said. “Your alarm’s been going off for hours. You have to wake up. Time to go to work.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I’d slept like a rock, which was unusual because I was generally a light sleeper, especially after a day as fraught with emotional scenes as yesterday. Now I had a headache. I wondered if I’d picked up a bug at Tacoma General. But then, I doubted a bug I’d picked up last night could strike so quickly.

“It’s ten after seven,” Britney said. “You’re not going to have time for breakfast.”

“The alarm go off? I didn’t hear it.”

“Been buzzing for hours,” said Allyson, as if already bored with the day, rearranging my hair with one hand.

“Your alarm woke us up, and we were all the way in the other room,” said Britney. “We’re just little. We’re supposed to sleep through anything.”

“Know what else?” Allyson asked.

“What?”

“If you’re going to find a really good stepmother for us, you’re going to have to stop wasting your time on bimbos.”

“What makes you think I was with a bimbo last night?”

“You said yourself she was foxy.”

“I meant foxlike. As in sharp teeth.” I gnashed my teeth. They laughed.

“You always say we’d sleep through a
nuclear saster
,” said Britney.

“Nuclear disaster, honey. And I didn’t hear my alarm.”

“Buzzing for
hours
,” said Allyson.

“Yup,” confirmed Britney, sighing. “I don’t know what you’re going to do about breakfast.”

“I’ll grab a bite at the station.”

“Dad, what happened to your hands?” Allyson picked up my right hand and showed it Britney.

“Oh, ick,” said Britney as the front doorbell rang. “Looks like you got into the Elmer’s Glue.” She rolled off the bed and sprinted for the front door. “That’s Morgan.”

“Don’t open up to strangers,” I said.

“You know who it is, Dad,” Allyson said.

Morgan was sixteen and lived next door. Baby-sitting for me was an easy-money summer job for her and a pleasant experience for my girls, partly because she looked on them as contemporaries and shared her secrets about boys and high school, partly because she brought over makeup and showed them how to apply it. Seven and nine, going on seventeen and nineteen, my girls shared a thousand little confidences with Morgan that I wasn’t supposed to know about, including the fact that Morgan had a crush on me.

We were in the same house the girls and I had lived in with Lorie, a rambler on two and a half acres just north of the main section of town. A fixer-upper that had taken five years to bang into shape. When the girls came along, Lorie quit work and our budget became strained at about the same pace as our relationship.

We’d never had water in the basement, but for the last three years during the spring or early winter the Snoqualmie River, normally two hundred yards distant, flooded the road in front of our house. Three years ago when it flooded, I bunked at the firehouse, Lorie and the girls at the mayor’s place on the other side of town. That was when I should have guessed about the mayor and Lorie.

We lived at the end of a short dirt road. Morgan Neumann and her mother lived next door on five acres, a well-worn path between the houses. A vacant field buffered us from the two-lane paved road. To the south there were horses on leased land, untended apple trees squatting here and there in the surrounding fields, a few alders, and at least one tall pine.

Our most recent topic of conversation around the dinner table was whether or not Allyson could have a horse. At nine, I didn’t feel she was old enough to take care of it, and with two girls and Eustace, our cat, under my wing already, I didn’t need the extra chores. Still, the folks at work had a pool going that there’d be a horse in our pasture before the year was out. Sometimes I thought the guys at work knew me better than I knew myself.

When I climbed out of bed, my legs felt weak and jittery, as if I’d been running uphill all night, but then after I got moving my thighs began to regain some of their strength. My head was throbbing.

Standing over the toilet bowl, I saw that the backs of both hands were scaly, as if they’d been sunburned and were peeling, except they weren’t. I washed and dried my hands, but the waxy-looking substance wouldn’t come off. Hand lotion didn’t help.

“Morning, Mr. Swope,” said Morgan Neumann when I went downstairs, still rubbing my hands.

“Morning, Morgan. There’s twenty dollars on the fridge if you need groceries. I’ll be at the station if you want to get hold of me. Unemployment Beach is not okay, but a video from Blockbuster is. G or PG.”

“Daddy, I want to go to the beach,” Allyson said.

“Not without me. That current’s faster than it looks. It’ll sweep you away like a bug on a rug.”

“We don’t need no video, Daddy,” Britney said.

“You don’t need
a
video.”

“That’s what I said. We’re going to play house.”

“No, we aren’t,” Allyson said. “We’re going to mop the kitchen floor, and then I’m going to read my book. Morgan’s going to surf the Internet.”

“I am not,” Morgan protested.

“It’s okay, Morgan. Just don’t let the house burn down.”

“Thank you, Mr. Swope. You’re the greatest.” Knowing Morgan had a pinch of Eddie Haskell in her, I was always a little leery when she turned on the applause spigot.

At the station I had Click and Karrie working with me, plus the two medics the city contracted from Bellevue.

Stan Beebe, who was still on disability leave, showed up in civilian clothes around ten o’clock, eyes bloodshot, unsteady on his feet, reeking of alcohol.

We sat him down in the kitchen and poured him a mug of black coffee. Normally Stan drank coffee by the bucketful, but this morning he only sipped it and played with the handle of the mug.

Click stood in the corner with his arms across his chest.

Wearing jeans and an open-necked shirt, Stan Beebe cupped the coffee mug in his thick hands and stared at the surface of the liquid. His hair was cropped short and peppered with lint. There was animal hair on his pant leg, food stains on his shirt.

Ordinarily, Stan was as meticulous as a parson’s cat.

I had never seen him drunk.

In fact, I couldn’t recall ever seeing Stan do anything more than hold a paper cup of malt liquor, not even at the wildest department party ever, which we’d had last year at Joel McCain’s place. Click and Clack had gotten into a playful tousle and ended up smashing Mary McCain’s tea table. Jackie had gotten so juiced, she took a leak in the corner of the spare bedroom and fell asleep on the floor by the dog dish. I spent an hour in the dark on the sofa downstairs with Karrie. The volunteers yukked it up and tossed horseshoes over parked cars, my pickup included.

Mary McCain grew so disgusted with the drunken antics that she made her husband break up the party early.

“You look like you’ve had a couple, Stan,” I said.

“A couple? Man, I’m smashed.”

“We all feel bad about Joel.”

“It’s not about Joel. Tell me something, Jim. What’s the worst thing you can imagine? How about you’re here, but you’re not here. You’re dead, or close enough that only a few people can tell the difference. You’re miserable to the nth degree, plus your existence makes your loved ones miserable, too. What I don’t understand is why they don’t have the best medical care for Joel. I know they have that religion, but when somebody’s life is at stake, you’d think—Would you? Jim? Back when you were religious, would you have been willing to die for your beliefs?”

“Probably. When I was a kid, I almost drowned in Lake Washington stepping off a dock. Went down like a piece of angle iron. I had just turned eight, and I’d been told if I had enough faith, I could walk on water. Some big kids pulled me out.”

Beebe placed his lips on the rim of the coffee mug and inhaled the aroma. He set the mug down on the table and slowly spun it around in his hands. “Mary McCain’s just like you were stepping off that dock. I called her last night. She thinks Joel’s going to be healed. Jesus healed, and Christian Scientists think they can heal, too. See, they feel the majority of world thought is against them—”

“It is.”

“—that the majority of thought on this earth is causing the problem. Joel once said if everybody believed the way he did, there would be no sickness or evil. ’Course Joel told me there wasn’t any matter, either.” Stan pinched himself. “No matter. We’re all spiritual beings. Everything else is false.”

“You mean we’re really floating around in ether like ghosts?”

“Something like that. Joel said you had to demonstrate these things a step at a time. You wake up from the dream one step at a time.”

“Look, Stan, I’ve been around zealots all my life, and if there’s anything a religious freak is good at, it’s seeing what he wants to see and ignoring everything else.”

“Don’t call Joel a freak.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Or maybe I did. His mother-in-law stuffed half an apple down his gullet because she thought he was healed. You think she’s tuned in to reality?”

Stan’s eyes met mine for the first time in over a minute. We broke into simultaneous laughter as we thought about the apple sliding across the floor. His mood quickly grew dark again.

“You going to be all right, Stan?”

“Yesterday I told you I was dying. Now you ask if I’m going to be all right. That’s the trouble with you, Jim. We have to spell everything out for you. Let me say it one more time—I’m dying. Just like Joel. But I’m not going to end up choking on apples. Not this buckaroo. No sirree. Not in
my
future.”

“I guess you’re right. I guess you do have to spell it out. What are you saying, Stan?”

“I’m saying I have twenty-four hours to kill myself.”

“You’re not thinking about suicide?”

“No, I’m not thinking about it. I’m going to do it.”

“This is silly. Joel fell off a roof. He doesn’t have any disease. He hit his head.”

Beebe looked at my hands, grabbed one of them, then dropped it. “Christ! You got it, too!”

“Got what?”

“You have the shakes yesterday?”

“That woman chasing me all over town made me nervous.”

“Newcastle had the shakes. He goes out by himself on a seven-day hike. Dies of exposure. They figured he was on his way back when he went down. Day seven.”

“What do you mean, when he went down?”

“Same way Joel went down. Same way Jackie went down. It’s a syndrome, man.”

“I don’t see a syndrome. All I’m seeing is a whole lot of bad luck.”

“Newcastle . . . I figure it took about two days for him to die. They said from the look of him, he was on the ground the whole time. Some animal bit half his ear off, and he didn’t do anything about it.”

“I hadn’t heard that. Stan, you’re not really thinking about killing yourself?”

“I got a copy of the autopsy report. He had the hands, too. Like yours.”

“We’ve probably been using some bad detergent around here.”

“It’s not no soap. We been poisoned.”

“Is that what your doctor’s testing you for, poison?”

Beebe’s laugh had a hysterical component to it. He turned and looked into my eyes. “I’m going to be just like the Fire Plug over there in Alpine Estates.”

“Jackie got drunk and crashed her car.”

“Well, I’m drunk. Maybe I’ll do a better job of crashing my car than she did.”

“Joel slipped and fell off his roof.”

“Not how that happened, either.”

“Newcastle had a heart attack. He shouldn’t have been out in the woods alone.”

“My guess is we were all exposed to it on an alarm. Chemical or biological. It doesn’t matter. Once it’s through with you, you’re helpless. You want to end up like Joel, fine. But it ain’t for me.”