Pyro (18 page)

41. THE SUMMER AFTER TENTH GRADE

         
Half a block from the Harvard Exit we encountered a beat-up old Chevy double-parked, motor running. A man in leather pants had a woman bent backward across the hood of the car, slapping her. I’d been beat up plenty of times as a kid, so I knew exactly what she was feeling.

They were drawing a crowd, all in all, maybe twenty leery witnesses. He was big and mean-looking, and it was clear nobody was going to step in.

Within seconds I found myself submersed in the feeling I got sometimes, the one that frightened me more than anything else on earth. It didn’t come often, but when it did I knew somebody was in trouble. As usual when the feeling came on, I tried to make my mind go blank.

“Oh, my God,” said Vanessa.

The only reason I hadn’t done anything yet was because my instinct wasn’t to stop the beating or to call the police. My instinct was to kill the guy. Also, Vanessa was beside me. Second dates were few and far between when you killed somebody the first time out.

Approaching at an angle, I stood in the blind spot behind his left shoulder, tapped his right shoulder so he turned away from me at first.

When he turned back his jaw met my fist.

His eyes rolled up into his skull and his knees sagged.

Amazingly, he reached inside his coat and fumbled for a small semiautomatic handgun. Before he could get a grip on the pistol, I hit him again, whereupon he flopped into a crumpled heap. Somebody on the sidewalk said, “God, is he dead?”

I kicked the weapon under the car, where it clinked into a street drain. The woman ran down the street.

Moments later Vanessa and I walked to the box office window at the Harvard Exit. “Aren’t you going to wait for the police?” Vanessa asked.

“They’ll find him without my help.”

I hadn’t been thinking about the police. I’d been thinking the assailant must have had a jaw like a sack of concrete. I had big bones and large knuckles, and I couldn’t remember the last time I got a clean shot at a man and had to hit him twice.

Inside the theater, the wooden floors creaked under our weight as we found our seats. Neither of us spoke.

At least I hadn’t beaten him to death.

Once in high school I’d been out drinking with some older guys when Rickie Morrison spit in my beer and called me a “fag.” Neither offense was much, but the alcohol laid bare what few mental defenses I had in those days, and in the space of two minutes, before the others could stop me, I beat him up so badly he went to the hospital. My grandmother got the best attorneys available and fought tooth and nail for me until eventually the charges were lost in the system and dropped. Otherwise I might have joined my brother in the juvenile justice system.

I’d always been a scrapper. In eighth grade I’d been the smallest boy in our gym class, yet in a single semester I had six fights, not counting the Jones brothers. You included them, I probably had twenty fights.

At Washington Middle School the Jones brothers made sport out of slapping me around. They were both tall and lanky, both on the basketball team, and either of them could have whipped me alone, though they worked together. They had a friend named Dinkins who they brought along as the court jester. Dinkins always took a turn slapping my face, especially if there were girls in the vicinity. I hated Dinkins most of all. Despite their overwhelming physical superiority, I always fought back, and despite my efforts, I always lost.

I switched schools and between eighth and tenth grades, grew five inches, put on forty-five pounds, and began lifting weights and studying karate from books and videos. I got smart. I got mean. I got my driver’s license. I borrowed my aunt’s car and drove back to the old neighborhood. Dinkins was the first one I caught. I thrashed him until two passersby pulled me off, then I thrashed them. I was out of control.

Two days later Merv Jones, the older of the two brothers, saw me coming and caught me in the jaw with a left hook I barely felt. It was the only decent blow he got in. He’d been playing softball with some friends who could only stand and gape as I proceeded to knock out two of his teeth and close both eyes, payback for a dozen beatings at his hands.

I never caught the second brother, but I used up my summer looking for him. Years later somebody told me he’d spent August with relatives in Detroit hiding from me.

That was the summer I decided something was wrong with me. I’d had that feeling a lot, that feeling of loss of control, but until I was sixteen I’d never been strong enough for it to make a difference. It was the summer I had my last drink too. Coming so close to killing Rickie Morrison put me off alcohol, if all those years watching my mother hadn’t already.

Rogue River Adventure
was about a woman living on the Oregon frontier. Her husband gets gold fever and all but abandons her and their two sons. One of the boys gets sick, there are outlaws after her, and in the end the mother and the remaining boy are forced to raft down the Rogue River for two days fleeing Indians and bad guys in order to get her youngest to a doctor. The father is played by Van Heflin. Barton MacLane injects a fair amount of sexual menace into the bad-guy part.

The flick wasn’t as good as I’d remembered, but then, they rarely were.

Afterward, Vanessa and I walked to the Broadway Market complex and found a stand that served pastries and coffee. It was a while before Vanessa spoke. “You really whacked that guy.”

“I hope it didn’t spoil the movie for you.”

“Well, yeah. It was all I could think about.”

“I wanted to kill him.”

“You’re a barely controlled volcano, aren’t you?”

There wasn’t anything I could say to that. It was something I tried to keep from the women in my life, what few women there’d been. Hell, I lost them soon enough. Not that my rage had ever been directed at a woman. Or ever would be.

“Your grandmother was terrific,” I said, changing the subject.

“Did you know the director hated her? They had all kinds of squabbles on the set. When they were filming that fake rafting scene they had to throw buckets of water on her to make it look like they were really running rapids. At first they used warm water, but after a while the director told them to use ice water. She actually got hit in the face with ice cubes. When she complained, he said he wanted her nipples to stand out under her blouse.”

“I don’t suppose she found that amusing.”

“No.”

“The night of the fire I saw you in the medic unit with my grandmother. It’s hard to reconcile what I saw that night with what you did to that guy in the street.”

“He had it coming.”

“I suppose he did, but I’ve never seen anyone do anything like that.”

I knew there would be no good-night kiss here. No return phone call. I’d lost another one.

Adios, baby.

42. SIC, SIC, SIC

         
When I got to the station on Saturday the twenty-first, the first thing I did after the 0800 roll call was dig through the back of my clothing locker, where I’d hidden the report Chief Eddings gave me.

Each shift, a Form 50 was written for probationary firefighters by their overseeing officers to document their performance. At the end of the month a lengthier report was penned, compiled from and reflecting the tenor of the daily reports. Every comment, pro or con, needed to be backed up with objective evidence, observations, or written accounts of the firefighter’s activities.

It wasn’t kosher to write that a probationary firefighter wasn’t strong enough when you hadn’t made note of specific weaknesses. Nor was it correct to claim your boot was good at helping with paperwork without noting any instances of that characteristic on the daily Form 50s.

Captain Galbraithe, Rideout’s officer on Engine 13, had written, “Rideout doesn’t meet department standards with regards to upper body strength. Rideout appears to have trouble carrying a hundred feet of 2
¹
⁄
₂
-inch hose by herself.” It was one thing to fail at a task. Failure was measurable and demonstrable. But to say someone “appears to have trouble“ was an opinion and not likely to stand up in court. A man could be asked to pick up a suitcase full of bricks and carry it across the room. He either accomplished the task or he did not. If he performed slowly, you could time him to document that. If he dragged it instead of carried it, you could note that. These were measurable actions. To say he picked it up and carried it across the room but seemed to have trouble doing it wasn’t going to work for the legal department.

In my experience, if somebody had trouble doing a task, you asked them to do it again. And again. At some reasonable point where your average firefighter would keep going, they would fail. Then you wrote, recruit so-and-so failed to perform task X a second or third time.

If Rideout wasn’t strong enough for the job, I’d seen no evidence of it.

Eddings had written:

Rideout came into the staton [sic] with high hopes but we quickly saw her true colars [sic]. She prances around the beanry [sic] acting like she’s better than the rest of us. She is slow to obye [sic] orders and displays a fear of fire. She has a [sic] infinite capacity to anger her superiors and does not fit in with the rest of the crew. Capt. Galbraith [sic] found her not strong enough to do the simplist [sic] tasks, such as a 2
¹
⁄
₂
” nozzle. We doubt she will ever be able to drive a rig or pump affectively [sic]. In short, this recruit will be a bad fit for the department and should be terminated with prejuedice [sic].

The paragraph said more about Eddings than it did about Rideout. In addition there was no documentation they’d ever had Rideout drive a rig or practice pumping, yet she’d been judged incapable of doing either. I’d fired two people in my time and had felt sympathy for both. I saw nothing but antipathy here.

As far as the claim that Rideout had an attitude? I had seen only a good-natured disposition; a recruit who was always ready to pitch in and help with any project; a young woman who maintained a sunny disposition under almost any circumstances; a woman who did what she was told at fires, knew how to listen, and worked as a team member.

I returned the copy of Rideout’s November report to my clothing locker and went out to the apparatus bay, where I noticed a fresh piece of tape down the center of the floor, Gliniewicz to mop on one side, Dolan on the other. In the beanery I found a piece of white masking tape running the length of the wooden table that dominated the room. Towbridge was washing one side of the table, Zeke the other. Gliniewicz wasn’t talking to any of us. Slaughter ignored me, while Towbridge and Dolan went out of their way to leave the room when Slaughter came in. Tension in the station had reached an all-time high. I knew there’d always been friction between these two crews, but the arsons and my arrival seemed to have accelerated things.

The engine fielded two or three times as many alarms as the truck, mostly aid calls, and its crew consequently got up more often at night. There were thirty-three engines in the city and they were sent on aid calls before trucks were. With only eleven trucks, the dispatchers needed to save them for fires, so trucks were sent on aid calls only when the nearest engine company was out of service. In a double house, the truckies might sleep all night, while the engine crew might get up two or three times. It couldn’t help but spur friction. In most double houses the truckies had learned not to gloat when the engine had a bad night, but that wasn’t the case at Station 6.

In retaliation, at night Slaughter kept his rig out of service until they were actually back in the barn, thus increasing the likelihood of the truck catching an aid call, a practice that was against department policy and infuriated Dolan.

The conflict had been further inflamed by Slaughter’s fear that Rideout would be assigned to Engine 6 after her truck work was completed.

When I found Slaughter and Gliniewicz, they were outside next to Slaughter’s truck, smoking cigarettes.

“Shhhh! Here he comes,” Gliniewicz said, enacting a familiar joke around the station.

“Yeah?” Slaughter said, looking in my direction. “What’s going on?”

“I thought we might talk. Alone.”

“Talk?” Slaughter laughed. “You had your chance for talk.”

“With all these fires, I don’t want our guys at each other’s throats.”

“You had your chance.”

The two of them began discussing the new tires on Slaughter’s truck as if I didn’t exist. I’d been aware since I was a recruit on Engine 13 that Slaughter used his size and tirades to intimidate people. I didn’t like the way he browbeat Zeke or the way he conspired against Rideout. Most of all, I didn’t like the way he ran hot or cold, depending upon whether you agreed with his position at the moment.