Fire Season

by Jon Loomis

“Uh-oh.”

  “Your mom’s had a stroke, Frank. About an hour ago, they said. I’m really sorry.”

  “How bad is she?” Coffin said.

  “She’s conscious, but right now she can’t talk, and can’t move her left side.”

  Coffin said nothing for a long moment. Lola glanced at him, glanced back at the road.

  “Frank?” Jamie said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Coffin said. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  “The nurse said you might want to come see her,” Jamie said. “You know. Soon.”

  Coffin nodded. “Okay. We’ll be there in a few minutes. I’ll have Lola drop me off.”

  “Bad news?” Lola said, when Coffin had stuffed his phone back into his pocket.

  Coffin leaned back. The Crown Vic was just cresting the hill at High Head, the view opening up dramatically: the silver mirror of Pilgrim Lake on the right; North Truro, Provincetown Harbor, and the curve of waterfront on the left. “Yeah. My mother had a stroke. About an hour ago.”

  “Oh, Frank,” Lola said. She reached over, put a hand on his shoulder. “How is she?”

  Coffin shook his head. “Not good. The nurse said I’d better hurry and come in.”

  Lola turned on the flashers and stepped on the gas. The Crown Vic surged forward, the g-force pressing Coffin back in his seat. The Days cottages whipped by, thin, blue slices of harbor flashing between them. He watched the speedometer rise: by the time they passed the first Provincetown exit at Snail Road they were doing 110. They reached the Conwell Street exit a few seconds later, and Lola whipped the Crown Vic around a dump truck, roared through the red light, passed two Tall Ships on bicycles, and took the left onto Conwell at just under 70. Four seconds later she took a hard, sliding right onto the crushed oyster-shell surface of Cemetery Road. There was a quick blur of gravestones, and by the time Coffin could take a breath and let it out they’d pulled up in front of Valley View, trailed by a rolling cloud of dust.

  “Holy shit,” Coffin said, gripping the armrest, heart pounding. “Where’d you learn to drive like that?”

  Lola shrugged. “The army,” she said. “It was part of the MP training.”

  Coffin climbed out of the passenger seat. “Put the department on alert. I’m pretty sure Maurice is in town, and he sounded like a man with a plan. We want to talk to every short, stocky guy in Provincetown who’s wearing a red wig.”

  “Any other week, that’d only be three or four guys,” Lola said.

  Coffin straightened, took a deep breath, let it out. “This is going to suck,” he said.

  Lola leaned over, looked up at him through the open passenger door, blue eyes bright in the Crown Vic’s dim interior. “We take care of the family, Frank,” she said.

  Coffin nodded. “Yep,” he said. “That’s what we do.”

  * * *

  Coffin’s mother was gaunt and pale. The left side of her face was locked in a snarling grimace; the right side seemed composed, at rest. Her right eye tracked Coffin as he walked into the room and sat down by her bedside; the left eye stared straight ahead. Kimberly, the fat nurse, was making some notes on a chart. A portable heart monitor beeped from its tall stand. An IV bag hung from another stand, behind the head of the bed. The two prongs of a slim oxygen hose were fitted into Coffin’s mother’s nostrils. Her right eyebrow arched; her right eye stared at Coffin, glinting. She gripped a ballpoint pen in the claw of her right hand—a pad of Post-it notes lay on her lap.

  “We’re not taking heroic measures, per your mother’s orders when she was admitted,” the nurse said. “We’re giving her oxygen and saline, as you can see, and we may start her on IV blood thinners to try to prevent a recurrence once we’ve determined whether the stroke was the result of a clot or a hemorrhage. Otherwise we’re just letting her rest, poor thing.”

  “How is she?” Coffin said. “I heard about the paralysis.”

  “Well, yes, the initial paralysis is quite severe. We don’t know the full effects yet—she seems alert, and she’s been writing us notes, as you can see.”

  Coffin’s mother had stuck a Post-it note onto the edge of a rolling tray at her bedside. The note was written in a spidery, barely legible hand. It said, Fuck off. Coffin’s mother pointed at the note with her pen, then pointed at the nurse, then pointed back at the note, her good eye glinting ferociously.

  “Maybe she wants you to leave,” Coffin said.

  “Gee,” said the nurse. “You think?”

  When the nurse was gone, Coffin patted his mother’s good hand. “I came as fast as I could, Ma,” he said.

  His mother nodded, picked up the pad of Post-its. She wrote slowly, laboriously. She peeled the Post-it from the pad and stuck it to Coffin’s sleeve. Kill me, it said.

  Coffin closed his eyes, opened them again. “Ma, you know I can’t do that. This is awful, what’s happened to you—but I can’t kill you.”

  His mother stared at him for a long, unblinking ten seconds, then scribbled another Post-it, writing more quickly this time. She peeled it off the pad, stuck it to his shirtfront. Pussy, it said.

  * * *

  On his way out, Coffin stopped by Branstool’s office. It was empty—the furniture was gone, the carpet appeared to have been freshly shampooed. He passed the nurse’s station on the way to the front door. He dug his phone out of his pocket, about to call Lola.

  A beeping alarm sounded behind him, coming from his mother’s hallway. Two aides appeared from the dining room and walked swiftly toward the noise. The nurse at the station turned and trotted after them. Coffin followed them down the hallway at a half-run. By the time he got to his mother’s room, it was over. Her face looked frozen—head thrown back, mouth wide-open, eyes already starting to haze. The aides and nurses stood around her bed. One of the aides turned off the heart monitor, and the alarm stopped its shrieking. The ballpoint pen lay on the floor. Coffin felt a wave of dizziness; his peripheral vision narrowed. One of the nurses was holding his mother’s hand.

  Chapter 20

  Coffin walked home through the graveyard, the last bright leaves drifting down around him, into the silver-green grass. He passed the Coffin family plot: his father’s gravestone, his brother’s, his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s. His father had been lost at sea, his brother was MIA in Vietnam and was presumed dead. Now his mother was gone. They were all gone.

  The sunset was putting on its usual light show, the sky streaked in lurid shades of magenta and gold. Ten feet away, a crow perched on an alabaster headstone. It stared at Coffin with a bright, malicious eye.

  “Ma?” Coffin said. “That you?”

  The crow tilted its head and made a low chuckling sound. Coffin could see its black tongue moving inside its beak. Then it hopped from the gravestone and flew over his head, wings beating, pushing its feathered weight into the wind.

  “Happy trails, Ma,” Coffin said, watching the crow dwindle and disappear over the treetops. “Happy trails.”

  * * *

  Coffin paused outside his house. There was a new Toyota minivan parked at the curb. It was tomato red, and very shiny. Its grille curved upward in a cartoonish smile. Coffin sighed. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It’s a happy minivan.”

  Jamie sprawled in a lawn chair in the empty living room, her little bookshelf stereo on the floor. She was listening to Etta James sing “Li’l Red Rooster”—an acoustic arrangement that always made the hair on Coffin’s arms stand on end. The goat stared down from the mantel, left eye catching the slanted light through the window.

  Jamie stood, hugged him. “I’m so sorry, Frank,” she said.

  Coffin shook his head. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but it was … sudden. She was sick for so long, but then she was just gone.”

  Jamie patted his back, kissed his cheek. She was warm and round. She felt good. “It makes total sense. You can absolutely get that someone is sick, that sooner or later they’re going to die, but that doesn’t really prepare you for when it finally ha
ppens. It’s still a shock.”

  “She was there, and then she was gone,” Coffin said. “I sat with her for a long time—she was conscious, seemed to know what was going on, sort of. Then she dozed off, so I figured I should check in at work. I didn’t even make it to the front door.”

  Jamie held him tight. Pregnant, her skin smelled faintly of bread. She looked up at Coffin, her wide-set eyes a little misty. “Now I feel bad about getting rid of her furniture,” she said.

  “Don’t,” Coffin said. “She wasn’t in those chairs—she turned into a crow.”

  “A crow?”

  He told her about the crow he’d seen in the graveyard. “It had this look in its eye,” Coffin said. “And it almost said something. You know how crows sound like they’re talking sometimes?”

  “A crow. She could have done a lot worse.” Jamie squeezed Coffin again, kissed his cheek. “How are you, Frank? Can I get you a drink?”

  “I’m tired,” Coffin said, following her into the kitchen. “And sad. You would have really liked her, before the Alzheimer’s.”

  Jamie opened the liquor cabinet, revealing its array of bottles, looked at Coffin over her shoulder, eyebrow raised.

  “Maybe one of each,” Coffin said.

  “Don’t go overboard,” Jamie said. “I’m going to give you a healthy, life-affirming blow job as soon as you’ve had a chance to relax a little. I owe you.”

  “Great!” Coffin said. “But you don’t owe me.”

  “Oh, yes I do,” Jamie said. “Check this out.” She handed Coffin a four-inch square of slick paper. It had a dark background with a truncated cone of light in the middle, Jamie’s name and the date along the top in computer type. Lying at the bottom of the light cone was the outline of a baby—its head disproportionally large, its arms and legs slightly blurred, one hand clear and exact, cupped below the chin. The umbilical coiled from its belly like the cord from an electric guitar to an amplifier. The baby was looking out at Coffin, as though it could hear the ultrasound wand passing back and forth over Jamie’s belly. The spinal column, ribs, and skull glowed in sharp relief against the dark background—the baby grinned out at Coffin, all cheekbones and eye sockets.

  “Yah!” Coffin said, laying the printout on the counter. “Ghost baby!”

  “I know, right?” Jamie said, dropping ice into a rocks glass. “Is that not the creepiest thing ever? But it’s our ghost baby, Frank. And for that you get a blow job. Maybe two. Maker’s Mark, Stoli, or Walker Red?”

  “Maker’s,” Coffin said. He tapped the printout. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”

  Jamie glugged three fingers of bourbon into the glass, handed it to Coffin. “Yep. If you think you’re seeing girl parts.”

  “Whoa,” Coffin said. “Ghost baby is a girl.”

  “We should be thinking about names,” Jamie said.

  “How about Spooketta?”

  “How about Sarah, after your mother?”

  “Almost the same thing,” Coffin said.

  “Come on,” Jamie said. “It’s the great circle of life! The old pass on, the new generation takes their place. That’s totally what’s going on here, Frank.”

  Coffin took a long sip of bourbon, then another. “I’m not such a fan of those strict old Yankee names,” he said. “There’s a lot of them in my family—Sarah, Abigail, Elizabeth, Hannah—they sound like straight-backed chairs. How about Lucinda?”

  “As in Lucinda Williams?”

  “Sure. Or maybe Etta. Etta James Coffin. It’s got a nice ring to it.”

  Jamie looked at him, gray eyes slightly narrowed. “Here, or upstairs?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Do you want it here, or upstairs on the bed? I’m happy either way, but I’m not sure how long I can kneel on this hard floor in my present condition.”

  “Upstairs,” Coffin said. “Definitely.”

  * * *

  Rudy and Loverboy arrived at the Herring Cove parking lot early—to scout, Rudy said. He knew the location like the back of his hand—the long, narrow lot, closed to automobile traffic at its far end where the dunes took over, the only entrance a narrow opening that turned hard left, past a park service booth where summer tourists could purchase a day pass for parking, and then out to a larger lot, and then the Province Lands Road, that ran through the dunes and scrub pines, connecting Herring Cove with Race Point to the west, and the end of Commercial Street to the east. It was as good a place as any, Rudy figured, to sell almost three million dollars’ worth of smack back to the people it belonged to.

  As usual for October, the few scattered sunset watchers had gotten back in their cars and split the moment the sun had disappeared into the bay. There were a couple of parked Winnebagos (one containing four people, the other five), and a couple of bonfires (National Seashore permit required) maybe a hundred yards apart, about as distant from each other as it was possible to get without being too far from the comforts of the RV—a bathroom, a few cold beers in the fridge. Rudy had observed both groups for twenty minutes or so through a pair of binoculars as he and Loverboy pretended to watch the sunset: The group at the east end of the lot was comprised of two overweight, late middle-aged couples. The men were trying to surf cast, hoping, Rudy guessed, to get lucky and land a late-running bluefish. The women were drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and laughing at the men. The group at the west end was comprised of a somewhat younger couple—in their forties, as opposed to their sixties—and three skinny, sulky teenaged girls. No Chechens.

  Rudy checked his watch—about twenty minutes to nine. “They’ll get here early,” he said. “They’ll want to check it out before they expose themselves. Make sure there’s no cops. Make sure it’s not a setup.”

  “Just like us,” Loverboy said, drumming his fingers slowly on the Town Car’s steering wheel.

  “Exactly. Except these Chechen motherfuckers have no intention of just doing the deal and going home with their smack. You can bet your Tongan ass they’re planning to leave here with the smack and the money.”

  “Just like us.”

  “Exactly. But we wouldn’t cut a guy’s head off with a table saw, even for two million bucks.”

  Loverboy pursed his lips, nodded. “True,” he said. “We take the high road.”

  “Of course we do,” Rudy said. “It goes without saying.”

  “Company,” Loverboy said. A car was making the turn at the mouth of the lot. At first Rudy could only see the headlights—they were bright, and seemed to be on high beam. The car moved slowly. After a minute or so, when the headlights were no longer pointing directly at them, Rudy could see that it was an SUV; a big Cadillac Escalade, fully pimped with underlighting and fancy rims. Even at a range of seventy yards or so, Rudy could hear the bass thumping out of the Escalade’s subwoofers.

  “Two thousand and five called,” Loverboy said. “It wants its automotive aesthetic back.”

  “Why not just hire a fucking marching band?” Rudy said. “People got no discretion.”

  Loverboy had parked near the middle of the lot—roughly halfway between the two RVs. The Escalade swung in beside them. Its headlights went dark, and the music stopped. Then all four doors swung open at once, and four skinny young men jumped out. They all appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties. They all had pistols jammed into the waistbands of their jeans.

  “Here we go,” Rudy said, touching the butt of the Glock 21 in his coat pocket. The two men climbed out of the Town Car.

  “Yo,” said the first Chechen. He had tattoos up and down both arms. He stuck out a hand—Cyrillic lettering tattooed across his knuckles—and Rudy shook it.

  “I am Ygor,” the Chechen said.

  “Where’s Dr. Frankenstein?” Rudy said.

  Ygor nodded, lit a cigarette. “You said you were coming alone, homes.”

  Rudy shrugged. “So did you. Call it a misunderstanding.”

  The second Chechen pulled up his pants, which had been dragged dangerously low by
the weight of his gun. He pointed at Loverboy with his first two fingers, thumb extended. “Where’d you get the fucking Wookiee, man?”

  Loverboy made a low rumbling sound in his chest: a lion annoyed by a fly.

  Rudy sighed. “You don’t want to call him that. He doesn’t like it.”

  A third Chechen, taller and even skinnier than the rest, smacked the second Chechen’s skinny chest with the back of his hand. “Vladi,” he said. “For fuck’s sake. Show some respect. Is business.”

  “You gents got the cash?” Rudy said. “Let’s get this done.”

  “What’s with fucking family hour?” Vladi said, pointing his two fingers at the bonfires. “We said we should meet in secluded location. You call this secluded?”

  “I call it insurance,” Rudy said. “After what happened to Branstool, I thought, why take unnecessary chances?”

  “That was Vladi,” Ygor said. “He gets little bit excited sometimes.”

  “That beige-wearing motherfucker was ripping us off,” Vladi said. “Are you ripping us off, old man?”

  “Look,” Rudy said. “We’re out of earshot. We’re in the shadows. What’s the problem?”

  “No problem,” Ygor said. He pushed a button on his key fob and the Escalade’s lift gate opened with a faint hydraulic whoosh. He reached inside and pulled out a large aluminum briefcase.

  “Here is money,” he said. “One million dollars finder’s fee. Let’s see the jones.”

  Rudy reached into the Town Car’s backseat and pulled out the gym bag. “It’s all here,” he said. “Five kilos.”

  “Five kilos?” Ygor said. He had a tattoo of a black widow spider on his neck. “You said six.”

  “You said a million two,” Rudy said. “You say potato, I say potahto.”

  “Potahto?” Vladi said, squinting like Gary Cooper about to go for his gun. “What the fuck is potahto?”

  “It’s a song,” Loverboy said. “Gershwin. ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.’ It’s very famous.”

  Vladi scowled. “Potahto. That’s some fucked-up shit. Who is this Gershwin? Some kind of faggot?”

  Loverboy growled. A deep rumbling. A temblor.