The Fireman

by Joe Hill

  The basement was crowded with a lot of cheap steel shelving, plastic jugs of vegetable oil and sacks of flour packed onto them. Set into one wall was a walk-in freezer, the thick metal door open about half a foot and light shining out. She called “Hello,” but didn’t manage much more than a croak, had a throat full of dry biscuit. Harper crept to the massive door and poked her head inside.

  The convicts were on tiptoes against the far wall. They were handcuffed together, the chain looped over a length of pipe located almost seven feet off the floor, so they had to stand there, each with an arm raised, like students trying to get teacher’s attention.

  She had seen one of the prisoners before—the big man with the queer yellow eyes—but the other was new to her. The second man could’ve been as young as thirty or as old as fifty, rangy and awkwardly built, with a high forehead that brought to mind Frankenstein’s monster and a close-cropped cap of black hair, threaded with strands of silver. Both men wore thick woolen socks and the school-bus-colored jumpsuits.

  The man Harper had met the night before grinned to show pink teeth. His upper lip was split open in a nasty gash and still drooling blood. The room had a rank stink of meat gone bad. Pools of gore had dried on the concrete, beneath rusted chains that had once suspended sides of beef.

  Ben Patchett sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, his head between his knees. He looked like someone trying not to be sick. A battery-powered lamp sat on the floor next to a lumpy dish towel.

  “What’s going on here?” Harper asked.

  Ben lifted his head and stared at her as if he had never seen her before.

  “What are you doing here? You ought to be tucked into bed.”

  “But here I am.” She was surprised at the mixture of aloofness and calm she heard in her own voice. It was not a tone she used with friends, but the one she reserved for irksome patients. “These men are suffering from exposure. Hanging them from a pipe wouldn’t be my recommended course of treatment.”

  “Oh, Harp. Harper, you have no idea what—this guy. This guy here—” Ben said and gestured with his gun. Harper hadn’t noticed until now he was holding it.

  “Me?” said the prisoner with the bloody mouth. “Oh, yeah, me. I might as well ’fess up. I got sick and tired of dangling from this fuckin’ pipe while shithead here shouts at me. I let my bad mood get the better of me and tried to attack his gun with my face. It’s a shame you had to interrupt us. I was just getting ready to assault his boot with my nuts.”

  Ben glared. “I didn’t do a thing to you wasn’t self-defense.” He looked at Harper. “He kicked me to the ground. Tried to stomp my head in, too.”

  “Self-defense, huh? Is that why you brought the towel full of rocks down here? You anticipated you’d have to defend yourself with ’em and your thirty-eight wasn’t good enough?” said the bleeding man.

  Ben blushed. Harper had never seen a grown man blush so hard.

  She sank to one knee, folded back a corner of the towel on the floor. It was full of white rocks. She looked up, but Ben wouldn’t meet her eyes. She peered over at the man with the busted mouth.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mazzucchelli. Mark Mazzucchelli. Lot of guys call me the Mazz. Lady, no offense, but if I had known this was what you meant when you said you were going to rescue us, I think I would’ve said thanks but no thanks. I was dying just fine where I was.”

  “I’m sorry. None of this should’ve happened.”

  “You got that right, Harper,” Ben said. “Starting with the moment this fella decided to bash in Father Storey’s head and run. Couple of guys found him trying to boost one of our cars, blood all over him.”

  “Old blood. Christ, it was old blood. Anyone could see it was old blood. Why would I attack this Father of yours anyway? Dude just saved my life. What would I get out of killing him?”

  “His boots,” Ben said. “The ones you had on when we caught you running. His boots and his coat.”

  The Mazz looked at Harper with aggrieved, pleading eyes. “The guy, this Father of yours, he gave me his boots when he saw I didn’t have any. Coat, too. He gave ’em to me because I couldn’t feel my feet what for the cold. Is that the kind of guy you pay back with a rock to the head? Look, I’ve been tellin’ this dude, I told him. The holy Father and I came back ahead of the other two boats. He was nothing but good to me. He gave me his boots and coat, ’cause he saw I couldn’t stop shivering. When we got to shore, he led me into the woods. We walked, I don’t know, couple hundred feet. Then he pointed at the church steeple and said stay on the path and in another minute or two I’d come to the chapel and there would be people to help me. He said he wanted to go back and make sure everyone else got to shore okay. I offered to give him his boots back but he wouldn’t take them. And . . . all right. Look. I don’t know none of you. I saw the chapel, but I also saw a perfectly good Buick parked around behind it, and I thought, Shit, maybe I ought to go someplace where I do know people. I didn’t mean anything by it. I didn’t know the car belonged to anyone.”

  “That’s right. You didn’t know it belonged to anyone. And the world is just full of free cars. They’re like picking daisies at the side of the road,” Ben said.

  “The world is fulla free cars now,” said the Mazz. “On account of a person relinquishes ownership of their wheels after goin’ up in fuckin’ smoke. There’s probably a thousand cars in this state ain’t no one ever gonna claim.”

  Harper stepped toward the convicts. Ben leaped up and caught her wrist.

  “Don’t. I don’t want you near him. Stay behind me. This guy—”

  “Is in need of medical treatment. My arm, please, Mr. Patchett.”

  He seemed almost to flinch from the formal use of his name. Or maybe he was flinching from her tone: calm, patient, but impersonal, quietly in charge. He let go of her arm, and if there was unhappy surprise in his face, perhaps it was because he understood he was letting go of his control over the situation as well. He could argue with Harper, but not with Nurse Willowes.

  He looked past her to the prisoners. “You touch her—either one of you—I won’t be using the butt of the gun on you, understand?”

  Harper came close enough to the Mazz to smell his breath: a metallic odor of fresh blood. She leaned in to inspect his pink teeth.

  “You won’t need stitches,” she said. “But I’d like to get a cold compress against your mouth. How are your feet?”

  “Been a while since I could feel them. Gilbert is worse. Gil can hardly stand.” He gestured with his head toward the other convict, who had not spoken yet. “And my hands . . . the cuffs . . . I got no circulation.”

  “We’ll get those right off. Mr. Patchett?”

  “No. They stay on.”

  “You can cuff them to something else if you think it’s necessary, but you can’t keep them like this, in a stress position. That has to stop. Whatever you think they’ve done, it doesn’t justify abuse.”

  “I’ll tell you about abuse!” cried the Mazz. “Keepin’ us strung up here is the least of it! You ought to hear how I wound up with a busted mouth. See, I could take being locked up with my arm coming out of the socket, and I could take no food, nothing to drink, and no rest. What made me lose my composure is the feeling like maybe I need to have a crap. This one says he’d be glad to help me with that, soon as I start answering his questions the way he wants ’em answered. He said the next thing to come out of my mouth better be something good. I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I spat in his fat cop face. Then he smashes me one. He would’ve hit me again, but I put my knee in his stomach and dropped him on the floor, which just goes to show I can whip his ass with one hand cuffed behind my back. Literally.”

  Ben said, “Why don’t you shut up before—”

  “Before you give a handcuffed man another pistol whipping, Mr. Patchett?” Harper asked quietly.

  Ben shot a startled, embarrassed glance at Harper, an expression that made her think of a sixth grader caught
looking at a dirty picture.

  “Shoot,” he whispered. It was obvious he didn’t want the convicts to hear him, but the acoustics of the bare metal room made a private conversation impossible. “Now, Harper. Come on. It wasn’t anything like that. I cuffed ’em there because it was the easiest place, not to cause suffering. The towel full of rocks—that was just to scare them. And this guy tried to stomp my head in, same as he stomped in Father Storey’s skull. I was lucky to get clear. I can’t believe you’d take his word over mine. I have to think that’s hormones talking.”

  “I don’t care which of you is telling the truth,” she said. It was an effort to keep the anger out of her voice. Hormones. “My concern is medical. This man is injured and can’t remain hung up like he is. Get him down.”

  “I’ll let him down. But he can wear the cuffs right into the crapper.”

  The Mazz said, “Fine by me. Long as you promise to wipe my ass when I’m finished. And I better warn you, brother, this one feels like it’s going to be wet.”

  “That’s not helpful,” Harper said.

  “Copy that. Sorry, ma’am.” The Mazz cast his gaze downward, but a smile teased the corners of his mouth.

  “What about you?” Harper asked, turning to the man who hadn’t spoken. “Gilbert. Do you need to use the facilities?”

  “No, thank you, ma’am. I’m fairly constipated. I’ve been buttoned up for several days now.”

  This was met by a moment of silence and then Harper laughed. She couldn’t help it. She could not even say why it was so funny.

  “Gilbert. What’s your last name?”

  “Cline, but you can call me Gil. I don’t need the bathroom, but I’d commit any number of crimes for a bite to eat.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Renée Gilmonton. “We won’t let you go hungry, Mr. Cline. No felonies required.”

  Harper wheeled and saw Renée standing in the open locker door. Renée went on, “I don’t know how you can maintain an appetite in here, though. Whoo, it smells bad. Is this the best we can do for them?”

  “Jesus,” Ben muttered. “First her, now you. I’m sorry the frickin’ Hilton didn’t have any rooms available for an attempted murderer and his accomplice. What the heck are you doing here? You ought to be asleep. No one should be out during the daytime. We have rules for a reason.”

  “The girls wanted an update on Father Storey and when I checked the infirmary, Harper wasn’t there. I figured the cafeteria was the next best bet. Anything I can do to help?”

  “No,” Ben said.

  “Yes,” Harper told her. “This man needs a cold compress for his face, a cup of hot tea, and a visit to the bathroom, although probably not in that order. Both of them ought to have breakfast. And you’re right, this is a filthy place for them. There’s two unused beds in the infirmary. We ought to—”

  “Out of the question,” Ben said. “They stay here.”

  “Both of them? Right. I was meaning to get to that. You said Mr. Mazzucchelli assaulted Father Storey. I’m not clear why Mr. Cline is also locked up.”

  “Because they’re in it together, these two. They already partnered up to break out of one place.”

  “But I take it Mr. Cline was nowhere near the scene of the attack on Father Storey?”

  Ben’s eyes were dull, expressionless. “No. He was in the boat with me. Father Storey and Mazzucchelli arrived back at camp first. Then Allie and Mike. Cline and me got lost paddling around in the mist and for a while I couldn’t find the bay. Finally I spotted a flashing light and we rowed toward it. It was Allie, signaling us from the beach. She stayed on the beach to be sure we found our way back, while Michael went on ahead. We had barely pulled the canoe onto shore when we heard Mike screaming for help. We proceeded to the scene”—Harper noted the way Ben had unconsciously begun to tell the story as if he were giving a deposition to a hostile lawyer—“and found Mike sitting in the snow with Father Storey and blood everywhere. Mike said someone had killed him. But when Allie checked his pulse, we determined he was still with us. Michael carried Father Storey into camp, which was where we found a few men holding Mr. Mazzucchelli. Allie observed that Mazzucchelli was wearing Father Storey’s boots and coat. After that the situation turned hostile. Both these men are lucky they weren’t killed.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why Mr. Cline is being treated as a threat,” Renée said.

  Gilbert said, “When things turned ugly, my partner shouted for help. I gave it.”

  “He broke three fingers in Frank Pendergrast’s right hand,” Ben said. “And punched Jamie Close in the throat so hard I thought he crushed her windpipe. Jamie is nineteen, by the way, barely more than a kid.”

  “A kid who was holding a broken bottle,” Gilbert said, almost apologetically.

  “I’ll need to see them both,” Harper said. “I should’ve seen Mr. Pendergrast before now.”

  “He didn’t want to distract you from Father Storey,” Ben said. “Don bandaged him up pretty good with some rags we had laying around.”

  “Goddamn it,” she said.

  The injuries she couldn’t adequately treat because she didn’t have the supplies kept piling up: subdural hematoma, facial contusion, advanced exposure, John’s sprains and smashed ribs and dislocations, now a badly shattered hand. She had iodine, Band-Aids, and Alka-Seltzer. She had sealed the hole in Father Storey’s skull with cork and candle wax, like a doctor from the seventeenth century. It was the seventeenth century out here in the woods.

  Ben went on, “Whatever Cline did and whyever he did it, let’s be clear. We all knew who bashed in Father Storey’s head, Cline as well as us. He chose his side.”

  “He chose not to watch his friend be killed by a lynch mob,” Renée said. “That’s understandable.”

  Ben looked at Gilbert Cline and said, “What I understand is he ought to pick better friends. His buddy nearly killed a man. Cline knew it. He could’ve stayed out of it. He chose to commit some life-endangering assaults of his own. You want to dispute any part of this story, Cline, you go on and speak right up.”

  “No, sir,” Gilbert Cline said, but he was looking at Renée. “That’s how it happened. The Mazz is the only reason I didn’t die in the lockup. And I never would’ve made it through the smoke and down to the canoes if not for him. I could barely move my legs. He just about carried me. I felt obliged not to stand back and watch him get killed.”

  “And did you think he bashed in Father Storey’s head?” Ben asked.

  Cline looked at Mazzucchelli and back to Ben. His face was a calm, composed blank. “It didn’t cross my mind it mattered one way or another. I owed him.”

  Harper had, until now, been concerned with injury and exposure. She had not paused to think about what it meant if Mark Mazzucchelli had really done it . . . really taken a rock to the back of Father Storey’s head, all for a pair of boots.

  The rock.

  “Was the weapon on Mr. Mazzucchelli when you discovered him trying to get away?” Harper asked.

  “No,” the Mazz said. “’Cause it’s all bullshit. I never had no weapon.”

  “We haven’t found what he used to crush Father Storey’s head in,” Ben said, his voice stiff. “Not so far. We may turn it up yet.”

  “So what you have is an assault with no witnesses, no weapon, and a man who professes his innocence even after you hung him up in a stress position and struck him with your gun.”

  “It wasn’t even a little like—”

  Harper held up a hand. “You’re not in court and I’m not a judge. I don’t have any authority to go casting judgments. And neither do you. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have proof of anything, and until you do, these men ought to be treated as well as anyone in camp.”

  Renée continued, “And without any evidence of wrongdoing, I’m curious how long you plan to keep them locked up and on what basis. There needs to be some kind of fair process. They have a right to a defense. They have a right to rights.”

&n
bsp; “I’d love to take that dump now,” said the Mazz, but no one listened to him.

  “I don’t know if you heard, Renée,” Ben said, “but the Constitution went up in flames, along with the rest of Washington D.C. The people in this camp would like very much not to wind up in cinders as well, Ms. ACLU.”

  “I used to donate to them every year, in fact,” Renée said. “Never mind that, though. I’m trying to make a point. We don’t just need to decide whether or not this man tried to kill Tom Storey. We need to decide how we decide, and who does the deciding. And if Mr. Mazzucchelli here is found guilty, we have to make a choice, as a community, about what to do with him . . . about what we can live with. That’s the hard part.”

  “I don’t think it’s that hard. I think this community has already made a choice. You would know that if you’d been there when they started throwing rocks. I don’t know what you were doing all night, but you missed all kinds of fun.”

  “Maybe I spent my night hiding in the woods,” Renée said, “waiting for a chance to kill Father Storey.”

  Ben stared, his mouth open and his brow furrowed, as if she had just posed a particularly irritating riddle. He shook his head.

  “You shouldn’t make cracks. You don’t have any idea what Carol and Allie and that crowd would do to you if they thought . . .” His voice trailed off, and then he started again, with a hard smile on his face. “Thing about you, Renée, you’re a good-intentions person. With your tea and your books and your story sessions for the kids, you’re just as harmless as they come. And like most really harmless people, you don’t have the faintest idea what other people are capable of doing.”

  “But don’t you see, Ben? That’s precisely my point. We don’t know what other people are capable of doing. None of us does. Who could say for certain Father Storey wasn’t surprised by someone in this camp who wants to do him harm? For all you know, I might have a reason to want him dead, and it might’ve been me waiting in the trees with a rock. It could’ve been anyone, and without certainty we can’t publicly execute a man. We ought not to even lock him up indefinitely.”