The Smoke Room

by Earl Emerson

  Even if these two didn’t, I knew we’d never quite worked together as a unit until we found ourselves united against Sears, who liked to think he’d brought us together through his authority and unyielding leadership. In reality our unification was a rebellion against his inflexibility. Personally, I liked him as an individual, but I stood with the others in my dislike of his stubbornness. It was always his way or the highway.

  “What do you think, Gum?” Johnson was standing in the bathroom doorway watching me in the mirror, giving me the smile he used when he was furious. Lately, I was beginning to see the multiple layers of angst buried beneath his cheerful exterior. His gambling, for instance: he believed with a conviction equal to his belief in God that it was his destiny to win millions of dollars, that he would pick the right numbers and it would be handed to him, that every time he lost he was getting personally screwed out of what was rightfully his.

  “What?”

  “Gum? You and I have to take a stand on this. Ted needs to turn in those bags.”

  “Of course he does. What’s in them?”

  Johnson handed me a slip of official-looking paper about twice the size of a dollar bill, replete with intricate script and seals. The print on the front claimed it was worth a thousand dollars to the holder and that it had been authorized by the Bank of Alfalh.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Says it’s a bearer bond for a thousand bucks.”

  “What’s a bearer bond?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Johnson and I walked into the bunk room, where Tronstad was cramming the last of the three plastic garbage bags into his clothing locker, forcing the door shut, and locking it. They barely fit. “If they’re not worth anything, what do you need them for?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Johnson. “If they’re not worth anything, what do you need them for?”

  “I want to play a joke on my brother-in-law.”

  “You have to tell Sears you took them,” said Johnson. “Tell him it was an accident. We’ll back you up, but we have to get these back where they belong.”

  “It’s not like he’s got any relatives to inherit that junk. Some real estate speculator will buy his house from the government for a song, and then he’ll get a Dumpster and hire a crew of beaners and they’ll gut it. This stuff was headed for the scrap heap. I’m not going to hand it to Sears so he can write me up. No way, José.”

  “Gum, tell him he’s gotta give it back,” said Johnson. “You know I’m right.”

  “I’m beat. I have to go to bed.”

  “You’re not squirming out of this, Gum,” Johnson said. “And don’t think if you go over there and go to sleep, you won’t be making a decision. It’ll be the wrong decision, but it’ll be a decision.”

  I turned to Tronstad. “It says a thousand dollars. What if it’s real?”

  “The Bank of Alfalh? Gimme a break. It’s play money. Trust me, man. You want me to burn one? Will that prove it to you?”

  “Burn it all. That’ll prove something.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll hold it, and if his family shows up, I’ll turn it over to them. They’ll throw it away, but I’ll give it to them. Does that satisfy you?”

  “No way,” Johnson said. “You turn it in tonight.”

  “You want me to lose my job over a bunch of junk?” Tronstad turned to me. “You’re not going along with him after what I did for you at Arch Place?”

  Mention of Arch Place was like a blow to my solar plexus.

  Tronstad glowered at me. His hair was black and thick, pulled into a ponytail barely legal by department standards, and his bulky eyebrows and mustache were menacing under the best light. When his deep-set eyes fixed on you, the weight of his look was almost palpable.

  “We can take it back to the house in the morning,” I said. “I want to go to bed now.”

  “Hey, buddy. You ain’t voting against old Tronstad, are you? You and me have an arrangement. I don’t tell on you; you don’t tell on me.” He smiled and bobbled his eyebrows comically.

  “That’s dirty pool,” Johnson said. “You ain’t going to tell on Gum, and you know it. Anybody could miss a call.”

  “Not the way Gum missed it.”

  As far as Johnson knew, I’d been in the bathroom the night of Arch Place, but now, spurred by Tronstad’s remark, he looked at me curiously.

  “Okay,” I said. “We can’t take it back tonight because we don’t want to tell Sears. You’re right. He’ll try to fire you. But we have to take it back in the morning. The three of us.”

  It was disquieting that I seemed to have the power here. Of the three of us, I was the youngest by ten years and had only two years in the SFD, while Johnson had eleven and Tronstad eight. Robert Johnson had served in the Navy, where he’d once seen a man decapitated by an exploding truck tire. Ted Tronstad had done a tour in the Air Force, where he worked as a firefighter at various air fields around the world and had once witnessed a man incinerated in a jet fuel accident. I’d gone to community college. Next to theirs, my worldly experience was limited.

  We went to bed, and in the morning when I walked over to the bunk room, I found Tronstad making up his bunk. Johnson was in the TV room, in front of one of the station computers, a single bearer bond on the desk next to him. Across the apparatus bay Sears was making his bunk and Chief Abbott was brushing his teeth loudly in the officers’ washroom.

  “Hey, Gum,” Johnson said, smiling brightly. “There’s been a small modification to our plan.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I looked up bearer bonds on the Internet. Tronstad has bonds from the Bank of Sierre Leone. From Deutsche Bank. From companies in Europe I never heard of. Mostly from the United States government. There’s a lot of stuff in those sacks.”

  “A lot of stuff we’re going to give back.”

  “We should think this over before we do something we’ll regret.”

  “Robert . . .”

  “Here. Read this. Just read this part right here.” On the computer screen, he pointed the curser to an open page of text. “Bearer bonds and bearer certificates belong to the bearer. Possession is a hundred percent of the law with a bearer bond. Bearer bonds aren’t registered anywhere, but they can be stolen, which makes them ideal for anonymity. While the U.S. government no longer issues bearer bonds, they still honor bonds issued in earlier years. Millions of dollars’ worth of bearer bonds are outstanding.”

  As Tronstad would put it, Johnson was happier than a dead pig in the sun. “We got bearer bonds in there from all over the world, but the majority are from the U.S. government. There’s no way to trace them. Those sacks might be worth a million each, Gum.”

  “There’s no way a pack rat like Ghanet had that much money lying around. That’s junk paper.”

  “How about four million each?” Tronstad said, when he came into the room. “I stayed up last night and counted them. Just over twelve million total.”

  “Whoo-hoo,” Johnson said. “The beauty of it is that this ain’t money. It’s paper, and it ain’t stolen. I don’t know where Tronstad got those sacks. Do you?”

  “We were going to make him take it back,” I said, more convinced than ever the paper was worthless. If it had been worth a few thousand, I might have believed Ghanet had squirreled it away for a rainy day. But millions? The man lived on macaroni and cheese. His truck barely ran. His TV was fuzzy on every channel.

  Johnson gave me a long, slow look, as if trying to convince himself. “We were like family to Charles Scott. He would want us to have it.”

  I could see they’d closed ranks and become a team, the two of them against me. They knew that I knew if I turned them in, I would be turning myself in for missing the alarm on Arch Place—and for lying about it over the course of the past three weeks. How could I get them fired over three garbage sacks full of worthless paper they thought was Aztec gold?

  “You in?” Tronstad asked. “Or are you going to walk over there and co
st us our jobs? Your choice, pal.”

  “You just said it was worth—”

  “Nothing, probably. Your choice.”

  “What choice?” Lieutenant Sears opened the door from the apparatus bay in time to catch Tronstad’s last words. Despite our bad night, he looked military and shipshape.

  “The choice is ice cream,” Tronstad said. “Gum owes us ice cream for his first DOA in a tub.”

  Sears knew we’d been talking about something else—you could see it in the tilt of his head and his questioning brown eyes. “Is that what you guys were talking about?” Lieutenant Sears asked, looking at me.

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “We were talking about . . .” Tronstad’s veins began bulging. Johnson stood up. “. . . about a surprise gift for somebody when he gets promoted.”

  The lieutenant’s look softened. Rumors were flying around that he might soon be transferred to a captain’s position in the fire marshal’s office, so the lie had come easily.

  Before he left, Sears, striking like a snake, snatched the bearer bond out of Johnson’s hands, then examined the gaudy colored ink and toy-money look. “This smells like cats,” he said.

  You could have heard a pin hit the floor.

  “I sure hope this didn’t come from where I think it came from,” Sears said. “Any time a firefighter removes something from the scene of an alarm, it’s a crime. I hope you boys know that.” He stared at us each in turn.

  I could hear Johnson’s Timex ticking.

  “I’ve got a safety committee meeting this morning at zero eight-thirty, and then Heather and I are heading out of town. But . . .” He held up the bond. “I’m going to keep this, and if it came from where I think it came from, somebody’s in trouble. I mean that.”

  “Give it back,” said Tronstad. “You don’t have any right to take that.”

  “Is it yours?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Then I’ll keep it.” Pausing in the doorway, Sears said, “This is potentially a serious offense.” He sniffed it again. “Oh, boy.”

  “Hey,” Tronstad said. “Give it back. It’s mine. I brought it from home. Swear to God. It’s my sister’s. I gotta give it back to her this morning or she’ll be hot.” Tronstad held out his hand. They stared at each other for half a minute, and for at least part of that time I thought Sears was going to return it.

  “We’ve got a four-off. If your explanation holds up in four days, I’ll apologize. Otherwise . . . you’re in a heap of trouble, buster. All of you.”

  “At least keep it confidential,” said Tronstad.

  “Why should I?”

  “Because charges are supposed to be confidential. I ain’t saying we done anything, but if you’re thinking of writing charges . . .”

  “Confidential it is.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Sears had been on his way out the door, but when I spoke he stopped and looked at me. He had heart. I had to give him that. He was hoping I wasn’t part of this. I could see it in his eyes. He liked me more than the others, probably because I was young, moldable, listened to his lessons, and tried to learn from him. “You’re going to hang, too. You know that, don’t you? If you’re part of it.”

  “I’m not part of anything,” I said.

  “I said, you know that, don’t you?”

  “I know.”

  After he left, Tronstad turned to Johnson. “If we can get it out of his locker on this four-off, he’ll never know the difference.”

  “He’ll know the difference,” Johnson said.

  “Maybe, but he won’t be able to do anything about it.”

  “What makes you think he’s going to leave it in his locker?” I said.

  “How are you going to get in?” Johnson asked. “It’s got a padlock the size of an alarm clock.”

  “I can get into anything.” It was true. Tronstad routinely picked locks around the station for fun.

  We wiped down the chief’s buggy and Engine 29 without talking, and then one by one the members of the oncoming shift showed up and relieved us.

  Minutes later, when I went outside to the small parking area on the west side of the station, Tronstad and Johnson were waiting for me. The three black plastic bags sat at their feet. I clicked the remote key to unlock the doors on my WRX, then opened the rear hatch. I threw my gear bag inside next to my skates. “What?” I said.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Tronstad said.

  “It’s going to work unless you want to start throwing punches,” said Johnson, angrily. “You think one bond is bad, try to explain three sacks of them when Sears and Abbott come out to stop our fight.”

  Tronstad jumped as if on a pogo stick: small, comical movements, clenching his fists at his sides like a cartoon boxer. I had the feeling that in a fistfight he would be both hilarious and deadly, and I didn’t want to be around to see it. He was over six feet and wiry, while Johnson was five-ten and over two hundred pounds. They could probably make a fight last for a good long time. I closed the hatch on my Subaru and stepped between them.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “He wants to take them home,” said Johnson.

  “Three sacks of worthless paper, for God’s sake,” said Tronstad.

  “Oh, that’s funny,” Johnson said. “A few minutes ago they were worth twelve million, but now it’s three sacks of worthless paper. If it’s so worthless, let me have it.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, it’s mine.”

  “We’re in trouble, too. Me and Gum. And you’re not sandbagging me. Let Gum take it. I trust Gum. You trust Gum. Gum trusts Gum. Hell, he was going to turn himself in at Arch Place. Look at him. He’s a choirboy. He holds it, or we fight right here. I swear.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Johnson put his fists up and started advancing on Tronstad. I’d never seen him so angry or resolute.

  Tronstad looked me in the eye. “Okay, okay. You keep this for us?”

  “Why don’t we take it back to Ghanet’s right now?”

  “No way,” they said in unison.

  “Then I don’t want it.”

  “Then we’re fightin’,” said Johnson.

  “I’ll take it, but only because I don’t want to see you two fighting over garbage. If I find out it’s worth anything, I’m turning it in. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Johnson said.

  “Agreed,” Tronstad said.

  Even so, I had misgivings when I opened the rear hatch of my wagon once more and heaved the three plastic bags inside—Tronstad had secured each with a knot at the mouth of the bag. I fired up my ride and drove away, revving the engine so the throaty, turbocharged roar woke up any neighbors who hadn’t already left for work. Sears had warned me about making noise in the morning, but I wanted to show my wrath to Johnson and Tronstad for dragging me into this.

  When I peered into my rearview mirror, they were standing dismally on the sidewalk like a couple of freshmen who’d just been pantsed by an upperclassman.

  I thought about Sears as I drove away. Of the three of us, I was the only one who actually liked our new lieutenant. Don’t get me wrong. I wanted him to transfer out as much as the others, but I admired him as a person, and I had to admit some of the changes he’d instituted were for the better.

  It was common knowledge that Chief Abbott had shipped in Sears to flog us into shape. Before Sears’s arrival we’d had one stand-in officer after another, and none had tried to reform us, probably because they all knew they were temporary. During the first four weeks he worked with us, Sears drilled us three or four hours every shift and frequently had us doing some idiotic project until ten at night. Unable to stand the sitting-around part of being a firefighter, Sears filled the cracks in our days with busywork, piling nonsensical chores on top of our regular duties, alarms, equipment maintenance, station housework, and regular diet of fire department classes. He never seemed to fatigue and didn�
�t understand it when others did.

  Once, before Sears was officially appointed lieutenant, he ordered his crew outside to lay hose in the rain in the middle of a Seahawks playoff game. Despite their protests, he ran them through two and a half hours of wet hose evolutions and caused them to miss the entire game. The following morning, crew members threw a tarp over his head and tied his feet together. When the next shift arrived, they found Sears wrapped in a tarp, hanging upside down in the hose tower. He’d stopped screaming long before.

  9. SKATING

  CALIFORNIA AVENUE TOOK me down a steep, winding hill through a greenbelt of madronas to Harbor Avenue, where I headed north for half a mile along the west side of Elliott Bay before parking at the Duwamish Head, the northernmost point in West Seattle. From there a paved path ran south about a mile along Harbor Avenue, a second leg stretching three more miles southwest alongside Alki Avenue and what was arguably the best beach in the city—the closest thing to a tropical paradise Seattle had to offer.

  Alki Beach attracted volleyball players, sunbathers, beachcombers, joggers, in-line skaters, and all manner of showoffs. On summer afternoons traffic jams stretched for miles, though on this early September morning tranquillity reigned.

  The promontory didn’t have much in the way of amenities—some parking spaces and an expansive view across Elliott Bay, for which people in the condos across the street paid upward of a million dollars. Across the bay lay the entire vast panorama of downtown Seattle: skyscrapers, hospitals on the hill, the Space Needle, and as a backdrop, the Cascade Mountain Range running north and south as far as the eye could see. State ferries scudded across the Sound from the downtown terminal. On a nice day, which this was, you could see snowcapped Mount Rainier looming in the southeast.

  To the northwest you could look directly up the Sound until your eyes surrendered to the distant gray-blue haze between sky and water. Behind me at the foot of the treed hillside were condos, apartments, and here and there a small beach cottage, valiantly holding its own in the shadows of a steamroller economy that wanted to tear down the old and build anew everywhere. Iola Pederson lived above the first layer of housing on the steep hillside.