Pyro (8 page)

17. THE NIGHT SOME OF US POSED FOR PICTURES

Cynthia Rideout

D
ECEMBER 8,
S
UNDAY, 2010 HOURS

         
The caterers showed up with steak and lobster, potatoes that were whipped and then fried with herbs and a butter sauce. They served us at the beanery table as if we were royalty.

Vanessa Pennington was the picture of grace and civility even though you could tell she was nervous. “I’m sorry my grandmother can’t be here,” she said. “She’s still under a doctor’s care and won’t be up and around for a week or so. She asked me to give her sincere thanks to each of you.”

“It was good of you to take the time to do this,” said Slaughter. The food was elegant, but as usual we were eating off our mismatched plates and drinking out of an assortment of jugs and canning jars that looked as if they’d been scrounged from the city dump.

“You were all so wonderful,” Pennington said. “We’re very grateful.”

We answered with a host of demurrals.

In most situations Wollf is his own man, but once Pennington and the caterers entered the station, he barely said a word. When the union photographer came in with a camera to take pictures for the weekly newsletter, he bolted. No kidding. He bolted.

She ended up taking pictures without him.

Somewhere in the middle of our dinner Chief Eddings walked in. When she saw the caterers and the photographer, she was visibly upset, but it was the sight of Vanessa Pennington that really set her off. “What’s this? A stag dinner?” The room grew deathly silent. I’d seen Eddings do things like this before. “Are you the entertainment?” she asked, staring at Pennington. Eddings was a bad combination of a sharp tongue and no governor on her mouth.

After moments of stunned silence, Lieutenant Slaughter tried to smooth things over. “Chief Eddings,” he said, “Vanessa Pennington. Ladder Three rescued her grandmother at a house fire Thursday night while you were off duty. She was nice enough to buy dinner for the station.”

“My grandmother bought it, actually,” Pennington said.

“How come I wasn’t invited?” Eddings asked.

“I apologize. It was my oversight,” Pennington said gamely. “We’d love to have you join us now. There’s plenty.”

“Your grandmother’s that actress lady?”

“Yes. Patricia Pennington.”

“She must have a lot of money.”

“Right now she has a lot of gratitude. These people saved her life.” Pennington hadn’t lost her composure for a second.

Eddings glanced around the room. “So where’s our new lieutenant? Wollf?”

Dolan spoke through a mouthful of lobster. “Probably hiding in his office.”

“He got scared of the camera,” Towbridge said, dashing my belief that I was the only one who’d noticed.

“So, Rideout. How’re you doing here at Six’s?”

“Fine.”

“Good. You listen to these lieutenants. They’ll straighten you out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t think she
needs
straightening out,” said Towbridge. “She’s doing just fine.”

But Chief Eddings was already halfway through the swinging door into the apparatus bay. One couldn’t help noticing her thighs were so fat she couldn’t keep her legs together when she walked.

I can’t believe I accidentally called her “sir.”

18. THE WEAK SISTER

         
Eddings pushed my office door open with a thunk and stared into the room for several seconds, giving her eyes time to adjust to the light. I’d met her twice and had heard as many stories about her as she’d probably heard about me. It was said she got excited at fires. I didn’t know about that, but I’d heard her over the radio yelling so shrilly into the radio mike that she was almost impossible to understand.

One thing firefighters took pride in was presenting a calm demeanor at emergency situations no matter what was happening in front of them. Anxiety on the fire ground and particularly over the airwaves was fodder for long-running jokes and cruel parodies.

It was said Eddings didn’t have many friends inside the department. I thought it sad, but then I realized I didn’t have many friends either. Come to think of it, I didn’t have any.

“Sorry I couldn’t meet you last shift. I was in California at a fire chiefs’ conference. How are you liking this station?”

“Good evening, Chief. So far I like it fine.”

“Good. Let me give you the short report on these guys. I’ll save you some time.”

“I don’t need—”

“Towbridge is lazy. I don’t know how he got in. You’ll have to stay on top of him. Pickett is accident-prone. Don’t put a chain saw in his hands, and be sure and keep him off the roof. Dolan is hardheaded. I’ve had a coupl’a run-ins with him.”

“We’re all getting along fine.”

“Yeah?” She leaned against the army-gray file cabinet inside the doorway. “Wollf. I want a team I can count on here in the Fifth. I figured this spot on Ladder Three was perfect for you. You
do
want a truck company?”

“A lot of people want this slot.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“If I had my druthers, I’d take a truck.”

“Well, you play ball, I can keep you here.”

We stared at each other for a couple of beats. She was a pasty-faced woman who wore stark eyeliner as her only concession to makeup. Her limp black hair was molded into a crooked pageboy, as if she’d cut it herself. Tonight static electricity glued it to her head like a skullcap. Looking into her faded gray eyes, you could see she might have been a cute kid, but somewhere along the line her personality had begun to put its stamp on her features. Mostly what I saw in her face now was bitterness. That she called herself a bull dyke—not a lesbian or even a dyke, but a bull dyke—was common knowledge. They said she’d been strong as a horse when she first came in, but it looked as though she’d mostly gone to fat now.

“How’s Rideout doing?”

“Fine. She—”

“Yeah, I didn’t think she’d have an easy time on a truck. Hooking up to that fifty-five and making your presence felt is something damn few women can do. She’s probably afraid of heights too. Check it out. Listen, Wollf. I’m going to tell you this straight, because that’s how I am. You and I are going to fire Rideout.”

“I don’t see how—”

“Oh, yeeeeaaaah. She’s already had one bad monthly report, which I wrote personally. That’s when those dickbrains in the administration thought she should get evaluated by at least one other officer. Fortunately, I was able to make
you
that officer. I talked to Hertlein on the phone but he wouldn’t give you to me, so I went straight to Chief Smith. I want you to evaluate her the same way you evaluated Martinet up at Thirty-two’s.”

“
Martinez.
Her name was Trina Martinez. And all I did was document what she could and could not do.”

“Hell, you fired her. You do the same
documenting
on Rideout, and you and I will be copacetic till the cows come thundering home. Catch my drift? She’s a weak sister, and she’s going to make the other women in the department look bad. Last month I wrote one hellacious Form fifty on how fucked up her work was. So now you come in and you’re an unbiased newcomer. You write another report that parrots mine and we’ll shitcan her.”

I’d never heard a firefighter conspired against in this way. I’d taught drill school where we evaluated recruits once a week for twelve weeks, and the rule—
never
deviated from, not once to my knowledge—was that each officer made his or her own evaluation of each candidate without help from any other officer. Collusion was not part of a fair evaluation. Chief Eddings had worked at training. She knew the rules.

I said, “This conversation is not fair to Rideout. She deserves the same shot at the job you and I had.”

“Oh, bullshit. You think they weren’t all talking about us when we came in?” Eddings passed me a large manila envelope of the type the department used for interdepartmental mail. “Technically you’re not supposed to see this.”

“I’m telling you right now, I’m not going to give her a poor evaluation unless she earns it. And I’m
not
going to read this.” I handed the envelope back, irked that she thought I was against all women in the department because I’d fired one individual, that she thought I was willing to cheat this young woman out of a career on nothing more than her say-so.

She tossed the envelope onto my desk.

“We both know I’m not supposed to look at earlier reports.”

“Sure. Sure. Sure. Nobody’s suggesting you aren’t going to be decent here.”

I tried to hand her the envelope a second time, but she opened the door and backed through the doorway, where she bumped into Vanessa Pennington.

I don’t know who was more stunned. Eddings. Pennington. Or me.

Pennington was four or five inches taller, but because of the chief’s girth and Pennington’s slimness, the disparity in height seemed more dramatic. They faced each other for a few seconds before Eddings said, “What are
you
doing here?”

“I came to thank Lieutenant Wollf.”

“Then go ahead and thank him.” Eddings waited, arms folded across her chest.

Pennington looked at me for some sort of signal on how to handle this.

“Come in,” I said. In many ways she resembled her grandmother at the same age, particularly her gray-blue eyes and shoulder-length hair, light brown in some lights, dishwater blond in others.

Eddings walked away without saying goodbye, but not before surveying Pennington from top to bottom. Pennington pretended not to notice.

I offered Pennington the swivel chair at my desk and took the straight-backed chair across the room as the door swung closed. The only illumination in the room was from the small fluorescent lights over my desk.

“The dinner was terrific,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. You didn’t stay long.”

“I had some work to do.”

“I wanted to thank you personally, since you’re the one who carried her out.”

“I was only doing my job.”

There were a lot of questions I might ask the granddaughter of Patricia Pennington, yet as we sat across from each other I found chitchat, polite conversation, or even the pretense of either almost impossible to squeeze past a tongue that felt like a piece of dried leather.

19. THE SHYEST MAN IN TOWN

Vanessa Pennington

         
“It’s not much of an office,” he said lamely. He was so nervous. “Do you sleep here? I guess that’s a silly thing to ask. Everyone knows firemen sleep in the firehouse.” I don’t know why I was having such a difficult time having a simple conversation with this man. Maybe it was because he was embarrassed about the way his chief had been rude to me. Or I was. I hadn’t thought it disturbed me, but maybe it had. It surprised me that she was a battalion chief in the fire department. I would think she’d have scuttled her own ship long ago, but maybe the fire department didn’t work like that.

In spite of being tongue-tied, Wollf was working hard to make me feel at home. I couldn’t figure him out. He’d been so capable and gentle with Nanna. The other firefighters around here seem to view him with respect, yet all that silly flirting with Jackie the other night made me wonder what was going on inside his brain. And now he didn’t seem able to string two words together.

“So do you people work a couple of days at a time?” I asked.

It took him a long time to reply, “Twenty-four hours.” Eventually he added, “We work twenty-four hours, and then we get two days off. We work another twenty-four and get four days off.”

“That must be hard to get used to.”

“At first it was.”

Another long silence.

“So why did you become a firefighter?”

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

More silence. He couldn’t hold my eyes, looking around the room instead.

“Cindy tells me you knew my grandmother once had a chaperoned date with Howard Hughes.”

“Cindy?”

“Cindy Rideout?”

He shrugged.

I had the feeling he was going to jump up from his chair and run out of the room, but just then the good-looking black firefighter on his crew named Towbridge stuck his head inside the door and said, “I thought you might want to know that lady who ran out of the grocery store just came in for a BP.” He made little quote marks in the air with his fingers and wiggled his eyebrows when he said the word “lady.”

“Did you get a look at her, Tow?” Wollf asked, clearly happy to see a face he knew.

“Zeke took her blood pressure. I didn’t see her until she was leaving.” Towbridge didn’t laugh outright, but I could see there was some sort of inside joke going on here.

“So she’s gone?”

“Yeah.”

“The chief leave?”

The door had closed, but Towbridge opened it back up and grinned. “She’s gone, all right. I wanted to offer her some lobster, but she eats so fast I was afraid she’d swallow the shell and choke. I wasn’t sure we could get our arms around her to do the Heimlich thing.” He left laughing.

“Who was the woman from the store?” I asked.

“It was a woman we saw at the Red Apple, who looked like she might have been a man in drag. She looked at me and then for some reason ran out of the store in a panic. The guys have been kidding me about it, but I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

Telling me about the incident at the grocery store seemed to loosen him up. When he finished, I said, “So how is it that you know so much about my grandmother?”

“I’m a film buff. Your grandmother had five marriages and performed in sixty-three movies. She was in a hundred fifty TV shows. She was on
Laugh-in.
She was a staple on
Hollywood Squares.
I was trying to figure out which of her two daughters was your mother.”

“Adrienne.”

“Your grandfather was the California real estate magnate?”

“Wow.” Cindy Rideout had warned me, but this guy really did have an encyclopedic knowledge of my grandmother’s life.

“I just recently watched some of her earlier movies.
Blood Harvest. Duel at Water Creek. Pirates of the Blue Seas.
And the Robin Hood movie with Errol Flynn. She had a bit part. I’m not counting the two movies where she did walk-ons before that. One where she was a carhop. And the other where she was the hatcheck girl in the Dick Powell movie.”

“She would love to talk to you sometime. When she’s up to it, I’ll see if I can arrange a—” We were interrupted by the station alerter. “Is that for you?”

He listened for a few moments and said, “It’s for the engine.” Which told me absolutely nothing. There were two large fire trucks in the garage outside his office door. I had no idea one was called an engine or which it was. “I’m on the truck,” he said. “The big one. With the ladders. The truck is an aerial ladder company. The engine is a hose company.”

The alarm was for a Dumpster fire behind the Douglass-Truth Library across the street from the station. After the dispatcher stopped talking, I said, “Actually, the fire department’s been there to see my grandmother a couple of times. Wine and pills. I think it’s a leftover Hollywood thing. I was sure scared when I saw her in that medic unit.”

“How is she doing?”

“She’s going to be okay.”

“I bet it’s tough to be that famous and then have it all disappear.”

“I have this theory people get addicted to fame and when they lose it they go through withdrawal. In this country it seems as though everybody wants to be famous. Even the woman taking care of her wants to be an actress.”

“Do you?” he asked. “Want to be famous?”

I laughed. It was the first really personal thing he’d asked. “Not on your life. What about you?”

“I’ve had my name in the papers. I didn’t care for it.”

As we spoke we heard the sounds of the engine firing up, the men yelling to each other, the bay doors cranking open. The engine roared out of the station, and a moment later we heard them slowing across the street at the library.

“So how many of my grandmother’s movies do you have?” I asked.

“All of them.”

“Even the film libraries don’t have
Rio Cantina.
”

“I bought it from the estate of a collector two years ago.”

“You know, that’s the one movie of my grandmother’s I’ve never seen.”

Silence. I’d given him an opening, but he either wasn’t interested or couldn’t summon the gumption to say anything. My money was on the latter. It was intriguing that this man, who in the night in his firefighting armor seemed to be afraid of absolutely nothing, was so afraid of me now.

I decided to give it one more shot. “I have an idea. There’s a retrospective at the Harvard Exit. They’re playing a couple of Nanna’s movies. I’ve been trying to find somebody to go with. Would you like to come with me?”

Before he could reply, another alarm went off, the overhead lights came on all over the station, a bell clanged, and within seconds he was gone. As were the others. It was just me, the caterers, and a garage full of diesel smoke.