by Jack Riggs
I can tell she's nearly in shock, maybe drunk too, so I yell to J.D. to radio for an ambulance and that gets him interested. I let him take my place and then help Partee throttle up the pumper. Behind the trailer sits a propane tank. It's far enough away from the burning structure that I think it will be okay. But I remember the radiating heat and that car back in Clio and make a choice at that moment not to try and fight the fire. We're out here alone and there's only five hundred gallons of water in the pumper and lots of people I can't get rid of by myself. I make the decision to cool down the propane, let the fire burn itself out. Partee concurs and we move in, fog the nozzle, and watch the tank sizzle and steam when the water hits it hard. I look at my partner when he says, “Good call, Chief.”
“Lucky call,” I say.
The air burns my face through the mask while we cool the propane. I'm starting to think we got lucky on this one, that we can handle it alone, when J.D. walks up and tells me the girl's mumbling something about her boyfriend still being inside. “Jesus, get some backup down here,” I tell him. Then I yell at Partee to keep on the tank. I need to go talk to this girl.
Teddy pulls up, an ambulance right on his tail. The girl is hysterical now trying to get up and run toward the fire. I'm holding her, wanting her to sit back down. There are people coming out of the woods from God knows where to stand too close. “We need to get a perimeter,” I tell Teddy.
“Everybody out of that thing?” he asks.
“I don't know,” I say. “She says her boyfriend might still be in there.”
“Holy shit.” Teddy walks toward the gathering crowd and begins to push them back. He's a big guy. It makes his job easier, but these people are curious and the sand is deep, so it's like trying to chase them down in low tide creek mud.
J.D. comes back over, tells me Lori is radioing Surfside for backup. He goes into another gear then, getting an IV bag ready for the girl, making sure he's saving one life out here today. I try talking to her again, asking her questions. This time I smell the alcohol on her breath, see a dark bruise under a swollen eye. She looks familiar, but I don't know why, and I don't have any time to think about it. “Where's the last place you saw him?” I ask.
There's a chilling moment when everything goes silent. I look into her eyes, trying to draw an answer out of her. I don't hear the sirens of other emergency vehicles arriving on scene or the fire eating away at what's left of the trailer. It all falls into the background as I watch the woman's face recognize my question, register its full intent, the understanding of what has occurred exploding so deep inside her soul that it can only pour out in some kind of animal- like scream. “Inside the trailer,” she screams. “He's inside the trailer.” She collapses onto the ground, J.D. over her with the ambulance attendants at his side.
I go to Partee, tell him what's up, and ask what he thinks about trying to put the rest of the fire out. He's still hosing down the propane tank, chasing small runners that try to spread fire along the ground. “We ain't looking at a rescue, are we, Chief?”
I look at the burning trailer, now nothing more than a red- hot skeleton crackling and hissing in the cooked air. “No, it's not a rescue,” I say.
“Then let's keep this tank cool so nothing else gets burned.”
I don't say anything more. I just pat him on his broad shoulders and leave him to his job.
When Surfside arrives, they throttle their pumper and hit the trailer hard. I help Partee turn our hose from the Pirsch now and we hit the trailer too with what little water we have left. Before it's over there are five fire engines and two ambulances on scene. Teddy has half the Horry County Sheriff's Department helping keep the perimeter clear. A news truck from Channel 5 is talking to Surfside because I told Strachen I had nothing to say to anyone about this tragedy. J.D. is with the girl. She's beat up, talking about a fight inside the trailer last night. None of it looks good. There'll be a full- blown investigation, a line of officers already waiting to talk to her.
Where there was fire, there remains smoldering ash, remnants of a home, and no doubt now, a life. Remains of the boyfriend are found in what used to be the hallway from the bedroom, where he must have been overcome with smoke, suffocated, and then eaten by the flames. The initial investigation suggests the fire started in the kitchen. It's a bad design when a stove and oven are built into the same wall that someone sleeps against on the other side, a wall filled with foam insulation and other materials primed and ready to burn if given the slightest chance to ignite.
The preliminary report, the one we talk about on scene, is pitiful. After the fire got going real good, the boy inside woke up, then tried to get out. He knew he was in trouble. We're talking about it while we wait for the coroner to finish up, wonder what he thought when it occurred to him that he wasn't going to make it out. Everyone's smoking cigarettes, trying to relax, when Partee walks right up to me and asks if I see anything familiar. “It's like Clio,” I tell him, but he just says, “No, that's not what I'm talking about.”
We walk over by the burned- out trailer, and then I see it—the car. It's the Roadrunner. The side nearest the fire is all bubbled up and black. The spoiler on the back end is melted and leaning toward the remnants of the trailer. The windows are blown out, the Confederate flag barely recognizable. “Jesus Christ,” I say, and then I remember the girl's face.
“Ain't that many Roadrunners around here with rebel flags in the back window,” Partee says. He nods toward what's left of the trailer. “That boy in there was driving.”
“The girl was in the backseat,” I say, but it's something Partee already knows.
He nods. “I figured that out too.”
We stand together watching the coroner do his work, the girlfriend gone in an ambulance. If she was still here, I'd try and get a name from her, find out who the boy was that died, but that will come with time. We'll know soon enough.
When the coroner is finished, I have no choice but to take Partee into the burned- out remains of the trailer to retrieve what's left of the body. “You okay with this?” I ask.
Partee nods quietly. “He ain't the one who spit,” he says. “He was the driver.”
I stop him there. “What if he was?” I ask.
Partee looks at me, his eyes tired, worn out like the rest of us. “You mean the one who spit?”
“Yeah,” I say, “that's what I'm asking.” I don't take my eyes off Partee because I want him to think about this, to know I'm asking a serious question about being a fireman. We don't have many moments around here where life and work collide and choices have to be made. “What do you think?” I say.
“Well,” Partee says, the word pulled long and hard from his mouth, “maybe I'd move a bit slower getting in there. That's about it, Chief.” He looks at me when he says this, and I can see in his face he's being honest.
“Don't matter what he did in life,” I say, “he's not apt to do that anymore.” My hand touches Partee on the shoulder.
“Then let's go, get this over,” he says.
We work with silent respect, but goddamn, it's the hardest part of the job that I have to do. If somebody walked up to me right this minute and said I could leave, I'd do it and not look back. I didn't join the force to put remains in bags. It's something that sticks deep inside your gut, something that wakes you up at night, makes it hard to breathe.
I can't begin to tell you what human beings are all about, there're just too many different kinds, and we all have our weaknesses, frailties that can get us in trouble if we don't work at minding our own business. But what I can tell you is this, we're not invincible. We die like anything else that lives and breathes. And sometimes you have to clean up death to understand that. It keeps us humble, reminds us just who we are.
After the body is removed, there's no more recovery or salvaging to be done. This particular cleanup is hard because of what the fire leaves behind, the way plastic and fiberglass materials burn. It takes us the better part of the day to finish this
out; a trailer fire with a death inside is about as bad as it gets. Everybody hears about Partee's story, pisses them off for the most part and makes the work that much more difficult. We're at it until early evening, finally off the call by six when I help J.D. guide the Pirsch back into the station.
Teddy drops by with word that the boy who died was some bigwig's kid over in Columbia, says the fire might have been set by that girl. We look at Partee, who just shrugs like Teddy's news isn't really news at all. “The coroner's got his ass all tied up in knots over this one,” Teddy says.
Even though the news is tragic, we have to laugh at Teddy— he's a mess after being out in the sun and sand all day his body drooping, sweat and ash ruining his uniform shirt. He looks like he could use a drink. But before I can offer, Lori informs me I have a visitor.
“Who?” I ask.
“I'll let that be a surprise,” she says, “but she's on the beach. Said she was bored waiting for you.”
“Is it Cassie?” Though I know as soon as the words are out of my mouth that the beach is the last place Cassie would ever go.
“No, but you're close,” Lori says.
Teddy volunteers to drive me down, so we get into his patrol car and follow Atlantic Avenue until it dead-ends into South Wac-camaw. When I get to the beach I find Kelly in the water on her board, she and Ellen Thomas trying to ride waves on a flat ocean.
“Jesus,” Teddy says. “I thought she was with Cassie.”
“She was,” I say. And then I walk down to the water's edge, my finger pointing toward Kelly until she sees me. I draw her in, pull my hand toward shore as if I am grabbing her through the hot air. I'm tired and angry because I have been around fire and waste and death today. Tomorrow I'll be glad she's home, and I'll ask her why she left camp after only four days. But right now, I tell Teddy to watch me because I'm not sure what I might do to this girl when she gets within my reach. I stand there waiting, wanting to know how in the hell she got home. Wondering if her mother knows she has run away.
Cassie
MOMMA SITS IN THE CHAISE LOUNGE. Wisps of evening air sweep beneath the awning rich with the fragrance of the cove, magnolia and rhododendron, the light scent of honeysuckle. Her azaleas are still in bloom. I close my eyes and imagine I'm young again, the weight of my life yet to draw down on me. The land below the cove is not cut and scarred or ripped away for things so unnatural as an Arnold Palmer golf course, of all things. It angers me to think what is coming, and I want to do whatever I can to stop it, to stop John Boyd, but I'm afraid it's already too late.
I have made small efforts to look for the deed, sifting through drawers when Momma was out of the room. Out in the shed behind the house are boxes from the church, but nothing is there either, just a few old hymnals and fading bulletins from long-ago Sundays. I found Momma's prayer shawl, knitted by women in the congregation when my father died, moth- eaten and full of dirt. Momma said it was nothing she wanted to wear on her shoulders. It wouldn't bring my father back. There are needlepoint pillows and flyers advertising my father's tent revivals, but there is nothing as official as a deed. I have not told Momma about John Boyd. How can I tell her that the land is not hers, has never been hers, and that now, though she never had a clue, time is about to run out?
I watch her in the deepening shadows of the front porch. She sits quietly in the length of this evening, her eyes closed. Toes push against worn wood planks until her head nods with sleep. What will happen to her if she loses the land? She has struggled all her life, one of a dozen children who grew up on a farm outside Waynesville until the Depression scattered them all so far apart that she has never reconnected, never found anyone to reclaim as family. She stayed in Waynesville, lived with her mother until she died, then with a distant cousin, then with others, strangers who would take her in as long as she earned her keep. Washing, sewing, cooking meals was the full extent of her life, simply a means to survive. That is the one thing I can say about Momma— she always survived.
In her late twenties, she met my father at a camp meeting and was so taken by him that he became her world. After they married, Momma never once strayed from her duty to him, except when I was pregnant and she tried to repair the relationship between us. In the end, she even backed away from that, held steadfast to her place here in Whiteside Cove alongside him. When I look at her and think about my life, sometimes I just have to ask, am I really any different from her?
It's incredibly similar, I think, that in her sixty years, Momma never lived more than thirty miles from where she was born. And though fifteen years ago I traveled hours away to live along the flat salt marshes of the low country, I never really left either, haunted over a life unfulfilled. I remind myself that I have come here to change that. I cannot, in the end, judge my life by what I did not do. I have regretted too much already.
Inside, the phone rings, the shrill bell startling Momma awake. I tell her to let it go, but she won't do any such a thing. She hurries off the porch fixing the bun in her hair, the bottom of her dress wrinkled and sticking to her legs. I listen to her answer the phone, recognize the banter, the other man in both our lives. Her voice lifts when she calls out to me that Peck is on the line.
The coolness of the dark hallway makes me shiver when I enter the house, goose bumps along my arms as I take the phone from Momma's hand. My first thought is that it is the note that he is calling about, and I am here to take the call, not at Clay's like I was supposed to be. “Hello, Peck,” I say, and then wait for his voice. I place my finger into my ear to hear more clearly. “Hello,” I say again.
“Hey, Momma, it's Kelly.”
To hear my daughter's voice is like waking up in an unfamiliar place. I look at Momma. “I thought you said it was Peck.”
“It is,” she says.
“No,” I say, “it's not.” And then we are both confused.
“Kelly?”
“Yes, Momma.”
“Are you all right, honey? How's camp?”
Peck's voice is behind her. I can hear him coaxing, demanding, really, for her to tell me more. “Tell her,” he says. “You tell her what you've done.”
“Kelly? Where are you?” I say, though I know exactly where she is now. There is more silence than I can hardly stand, pressure building in my chest. I look at Momma, her hand to her mouth like she has had the breath knocked out of her. “Let me talk to your daddy,” I say.
“She wants to talk to you,” says Kelly, her voice off the phone, even more distant when she speaks to Peck.
“You're not finished yet,” Peck says. “I'll talk to her in a minute.”
Then silence as I wait for whatever is happening back at home to play out, my mind spinning, trying to find my daughter's path in the last four days.
“Momma,” Kelly says. “I'm at home. Ellen came and picked me up. I came home, Momma.”
I stand in the hallway frozen by what I have just heard. I can hear Peck interrupt. He takes the phone from her hand. “That's enough,” he says. “Now go to your room and stay there.”
Somewhere in what becomes the rest of this conversation, Peck tells me the story, that Kelly called Ellen Thomas and the girl drove all the way up there and back in her Volkswagen “in the middle of the goddamn night,” he says. “She's not doing shit like this. We'll be up there sometime tomorrow.”
“Is she all right?” I ask.
“She's all right,” Peck says, “but I could've about killed her when I found out. She was down on the beach surfing like there wasn't a goddamn thing wrong.”
“Did she say why she did it?”
“Well she's keeping a tight lip about it all,” Peck says. “Just said she wanted to spend her summer at the beach, not in the mountains. I told her she was full of shit.”
“Be easy on her, Peck. It's me she's doing this to, not you.” I pause then, twisting the phone line around my finger like a schoolgirl waiting to be asked out on a date, knowing that I won't go.
“You took more things this t
ime than you did before,” he says. “Was that on purpose?”
“Peck,” I whisper into the phone. “Don't do this.”
“All right,” he says. “I just expected something more, I don't know. A note that said you would call. That was it. When, Cassie, when were you going to call?”
“It's only been a few days, Peck.”
“It's Thursday night, Cassie. You left on Saturday. Now our daughter is back at home and you don't even know a goddamn thing about it. I don't know what's going on here. Where the hell are you?”
“Peck, you know I'm at Momma's,” I say, trying to keep this conversation from becoming more than I want it to be. “I can't believe she would do something like this.”
“Well she did,” he says. “Look, we'll leave soon as we can tomorrow, try to be up there before dark. You plan on being around?”
“Of course I'll be here,” I say.
“All right then. I got lots to do before we head out. There are fires inland that are being watched. I got to make sure we're ready.”
When he says this, it stops me. “What kind of fires?” I ask.
“Brush fires over near the paper- mill land. Nothing big yet, but everyone's getting worried. I'll have to bring her up there and then get right back.”
“Just let her stay then,” I say. “That's where she wants to be, and you don't need to be driving up here and back like that.”
“No way,” Peck says. “There's another whole week of this camp. We'll be there tomorrow. She's not getting away with something like this.” And then he's gone, the phone line dead in my ear.
I look at Momma, know she is waiting for answers. “She's at home,” I say. “Kelly got one of her friends to drive up to Cullowhee and get her.”
“My lord, why on earth would she do that?” Momma asks.
“I have no idea,” I say, the lying so much easier when I'm tired. I tell Momma I want to go to bed, that I have no more information than she does for the time being until Peck arrives with Kelly tomorrow.