The Smoke Room

by Earl Emerson

  The pavement along the beach ran for a total of four miles and at this time of the morning attracted a meager assortment of walkers, bikers, and women pushing strollers. I skated whenever the weather allowed, and some days when even the walkers bailed out. For variety, I skated the Cedar River Trail out of Renton, the three-mile path around Green Lake, the Burke-Gilman Trail out of Gas Works Park, and downtown at Myrtle Edwards Park, but most times I came here. On Thursday nights during the summer a loose group of us got together and skated at midnight through downtown Seattle, up sidewalks and down hills nobody in his right mind would attempt. When the weather was bad, I skated in parking garages with friends, in local pedestrian tunnels, and, when we got desperate, at local indoor rinks.

  My skates of choice were a pair of Solomon TR Magnesiums with 80 millimeter racing wheels I’d hopped up with ABEC-8 bearings, lighter axles, and a superlight oil I’d discovered. Although they were four-wheel skates as opposed to the five-wheelers racers used, they were almost as fast as my five-wheeled Miller Pros. I hadn’t been born with many gifts, but one of them was a pair of lungs equal to a quarter horse and quadriceps like steel. The guys at work could lift more than I could in the weight room, and in drill school I’d had some bad days carrying ladders, but on skates I was headed for mythic territory.

  This was where I retreated when I was frustrated or worried, where I felt most at home with the universe.

  With my legs hanging out the driver’s side of my WRX, I laced and buckled my skates, then locked the Subaru and took off, zipping around four women walking side by side. I would do the first eight miles at cruising speed and then start blasting.

  The temperature was in the low sixties, perfect for hard exercise. On the beach side of the street, sunshine poured down, while across the road morning shadows swallowed the houses and condominiums along the hillside.

  Two years before, when I signed up with the department, I had no clue how much of my identity would be tied up in being a firefighter. I had no relatives who were firefighters. One day I simply decided it was the right career move and began taking entrance tests for various departments.

  Until I was twenty-one I lived at home, attending Bellevue Community College after high school. After receiving my AA, I found temporary work at a janitorial firm, cleaning office buildings between eight at night and four in the morning, polishing floors, scrubbing out crappers, plunking ice cakes into urinals—not a profession I yearned to revisit.

  I’d come to think of Station 29 as a second home, the people who worked there as brothers and sisters, and the job as inextricable from my life as a lung or a kidney was inextricable from my body. I’d joined a community, a select and special community.

  Firefighting was a job that made you tense. You never knew what was going to happen on an alarm, and you never knew when you were going to get one. Although the last firefighter death in Seattle had occurred four years earlier, the department had scraped through several close calls since then, and each gave me pause for thought. Somewhere in the country a firefighter got killed every day.

  For weeks I’d been trying to push the deaths of Fred and Susan Rankler out of my mind. Skating helped. Much as I hated to say it, climbing into the sack with Iola Pederson helped, too. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing with Iola. It was possible our relationship might grow into something more than just a sex-fest, but it was equally possible she would simply fail to show up one day and that would be the end of it.

  It was surprising how much I still didn’t know about Iola. I didn’t know where she was born, where she worked, or anything about her past or present life other than her appetite for sex. I didn’t know her religious or political persuasion or her taste in music. I’d told her everything there was to know about me, but all I knew about her was she’d been married once and worked part time in a office somewhere south of Qwest Field, the Seahawks’ stadium.

  I’d managed to glean a few facts about her education, probably because she was vain about it: that she had a master’s degree in art history, had attended the University of Heidelberg, spoke German and Dutch, and had traveled and lived in Italy and France. At times while we were making love she would murmur Teutonic ciphers to me, and each time I imagined she was saying something like, “Ride me, you big fireman stud,” but when she translated one it went more like, “Oh, little boy. You drive so fast, but you never go anywhere.” Not what I had in mind.

  I savored the sex enough to overlook everything that was wrong between us, which was just about everything, including the twenty-one-year age difference. I’d sneaked a peek at her driver’s license. She was forty-five. I was twenty-four and had more than once been pulled over in my Subie by cops who didn’t believe I was old enough to have a license, and here I was involved with a woman four years older than my mother. I didn’t know what to make of it.

  Skating in the early-morning sunshine, I thought about the three bags in the back of my Subaru. It was probably garbage, but on the off chance that it was not, I would be in real trouble. The question in my mind was, why would a pack rat like Ghanet have twelve million in bearer bonds lying around his house?

  People got terminated for theft. Tronstad could lose his job and might even go to jail. I could lose my job. Now that I thought about it, I could go to jail, too. I should have confessed to Sears back at the station.

  The thought occurred to me that even now I might drive downtown to the union office and wait for Sears to finish his safety meeting, tell him the whole story, turn over the garbage bags, and throw myself on the mercy of the court. If I turned the swag in now, there was good reason to believe I would be regarded as something other than a co-conspirator.

  But then, if I spoke to Sears, I’d be putting Robert Johnson in jeopardy as well. Tronstad had stolen the bags. Whatever came down on him was deserved, but Robert and I had been sucked into this by accident.

  Still, we’d lied to Sears. All of us.

  What it boiled down to was, I didn’t want to turn Johnson in and didn’t have the balls to send Ted Tronstad to jail, especially after he’d covered for me at Arch Place. I’d had weeks to think about Arch Place and now realized missing the rig on a call wasn’t the most egregious crime anybody ever committed. Over the years plenty of firefighters had missed the rig, albeit most likely not for the reason I did. But some of the blame would fall on Sears, who was supposed to make certain everybody was on board before the apparatus left the station. Odds were, I would have kept my job had I been forthright.

  If the truth came out now, however, it would look terrible, because I’d been lying for three weeks. I’d lied to Lieutenant Sears and Chief Abbott. I’d even lied to the chief of the department, who’d phoned to commiserate over the fire deaths. And now I’d lied to Sears about the bond.

  I kept telling myself that I didn’t have any choice, that Tronstad had blackmailed me with Arch Place, that it was out of my hands. But that was a lie, too. You always have a choice.

  After sixty minutes of skating I changed out of my skates, fired up the Subaru, and drove up the hill. I would put the bonds back where Tronstad found them. The drive took less than ten minutes, Ghanet’s neighborhood squatty and dry in the morning sunshine.

  My plan was scotched when I saw that Ghanet’s front door was open and there were two sedans and a Ford Expedition in front of the house. From their license plates I knew the cars belonged to the city, police detectives probably. I’d only been to Ghanet’s house once during daylight hours and was surprised at how shabby it looked.

  I drove past the house and kept going.

  I’d been hoping I might be able to stuff the bonds through the mail slot or toss them into the garage in back, but that wasn’t going to happen with all those people around. It was about then that I realized I was being followed. It was Tronstad, in the old pickup truck he’d inherited from his father. I knew he was following me so he could get the bonds back. It was going to cause a major blowout between him and Johnson, but more than th
at, if they turned out to be worth something, I would never be able to retrieve them to turn them in.

  Downshifting, I cornered hard and floored the accelerator. Let him try to follow me. Even a new truck wouldn’t have a chance. He was in my rearview mirror for a block and a half and then he was gone.

  Once I was sure I’d lost him, I drove back down the hill to the water and past the lighthouse at Alki Point, following the route I’d skated earlier. I couldn’t go home with the bags in the car: Tronstad knew where I lived and would be waiting for me. I had to hide them. I detoured off of Alki, knowing Tronstad could reappear in my rearview mirror at any moment on this long strip of road. Driving up the hill, I found myself in Iola Pederson’s neighborhood and slowed to a crawl in front of her house. This was the first time I’d been there since the pig plunged through her roof, and the house looked as good as new.

  There were no cars on the premises and no signs of life. Off to the right of the house, a detached garage served as a storage shed for lawn mowers, bicycles, and ski equipment. If I hid the bags there I could pick them up in a few days and return them—sometime when I knew Tronstad wasn’t on my tail and official interest had died off at Ghanet’s house.

  I parked in the driveway, popped the rear hatch, grabbed all three bags, closed the lid with my elbow, walked over to the outbuilding, and pushed open the unlocked door with my shoulder. Inside, I found an old black sixties-era Volvo. Beside the car was an upside-down canoe. I opened the rear door of the Volvo without difficulty. Depositing the three black garbage bags on the floor in the back, I closed the door and peered through the windows, finding the bags nearly invisible.

  When Iola Pederson pulled up, I was in the driveway.

  “Hey, dumbbell,” she said, leaving the motor of the Land Cruiser running as she ran toward me. “What did I specifically say to you about coming here?”

  “Nice to see you, too.”

  She wore an old sweatshirt and sweatpants, and although she’d put on at least one layer of makeup, under the oblique precision of the September sunshine she looked older today. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by to see how the house looked,” I lied.

  “Christ. You didn’t talk to anybody, did you? My God, you’re a moron.” She moved close and kissed my cheek coldly. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “When am I going to see you?”

  “When do you normally see me?”

  “When I see you.”

  “That hasn’t changed.”

  She stared at me, peeking out from under a mop of auburn hair. “Get out of here before one of the neighbors tells Daddy. My life is complicated enough. Go. Shoo!”

  “I wouldn’t want your dad mad at you,” I said, walking toward my car. When I looked back, I thought I saw an apology lurking behind her blue eyes, but I’d waited in vain for apologies from her before and wasn’t about to waste my time.

  I roared up the hill, the sound of the boxer engine echoing against the hillside. It would piss her off, but I wanted to piss her off. No woman in my life had ever treated me as shabbily as Iola. Mind-bending sex or no, I was starting to get fed up.

  10. WHAT DID THE SEVEN DWARFS DO AFTER SNOW WHITE WOKE UP?

  I PARKED IN the sunshine outside my duplex, but before I got through the door, Ted Tronstad emerged from behind the honeysuckle bush next to the garage and poked his nose up against my face. I started laughing.

  “The fuck’s so funny?”

  “What were you doing in the bushes?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “I just saw you at work. And you were following me, weren’t you?”

  “Why’d you go past Ghanet’s?”

  “I was going to put the bags back.”

  “You little bastard. I knew you couldn’t be trusted, Mr. Goody Two-shoes.” He walked over to my car, and after trying two of the doors and the rear hatch, cupped his hands to his face and looked into the rear window. “Jesus, Spearmint. Get over here and open this up. For Christ’s sake, I ain’t got all day.”

  “We had a deal. I was going to hold them.”

  “I’m canceling the deal.”

  “Does Johnson know about this?”

  “Fuck Johnson. This is my shit. Hand it over.”

  “Fuck who?” I hadn’t seen him show up, but Johnson was sitting in his car in the middle of Genesee, driver’s window rolled down. He drove over to the curb and jumped out.”Fuck Johnson? Fuck you, too, Tronstad,” Johnson said.

  “Hold on, you two,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” said Tronstad, addressing me. He turned back to Johnson. “And stay away from me. I’ll fuck you up.”

  “I’ll fuck you up,” said Johnson.

  “Fuck you, Robert.”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “Fuck you. Those bags belong to me,” said Tronstad. “Fuck you both. Hand them the fuck over, or you’ll wish you had.”

  “You threatening me?” I asked.

  Johnson said, “Fuck you, too, Ted. Fuck you and fuck your . . . your . . . grandmother.”

  “Fuck your sister,” said Tronstad.

  “Fuck your . . .”

  “Aunt’s hairdresser,” I said, laughing.

  “Yeah,” said Johnson. “Fuck your aunt’s hairdresser.”

  “Fuck your cat,” said Tronstad.

  By now I was laughing so hard, I could no longer contribute to the insanity. Johnson was spluttering, unable to come up with any more pets or relatives to have intercourse with, and then, seeing me, he began laughing, too.

  Finally, Tronstad broke down and chuckled. “Ah, hell. Let’s just take it inside and divvy it up. There should be plenty for each of us.”

  “You didn’t come here to divvy up anything,” said Johnson. “You came here to screw me out of my share.”

  Tronstad turned to me with a folded Buck knife in his fist. “Open the car, or I swear I’ll break the window.”

  I used the remote key fob in my hand and unlocked the doors. In an instant they’d pulled open the rear hatch.

  “They’re gone,” said Johnson.

  “No shit.” Tronstad strode toward me. “Where did you put them?”

  “I hid ’em. If we have to turn them in, I want it all accounted for.”

  “Well, crap,” said Tronstad. “Fuck this shit.” He turned on his heel and walked ten feet. “What if something happens to you? What if you hit your goddamn head and forget where you put them?”

  “Then you’re shit out of luck, aren’t you?”

  Moments later he came roaring out of Twenty-fifth in his truck and passed us without a glance.

  “I knew he’d try to snatch it,” Johnson said.

  “You think he would really turn me in for Arch Place?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past him. Think about his first wedding. How many people you know left a bride standing at the altar?”

  Ten years before, when he was in the service, his wedding had been scheduled for one o’clock in San Diego. At ten o’clock, Tronstad got into his tuxedo and had another soldier drive him two hours into the desert while he sulked in the passenger seat swigging whiskey and thinking up excuses not to go through with it. By twelve-thirty they were 150 miles from the church, Tronstad was drunk off his ass, and it was too late to get back for the wedding. His actual first marriage, by Tronstad’s own admission, had been a calamity of his own making. He’d started off by seducing one of the bridesmaids two weeks before the ceremony. He secretly videotaped himself having sex with his bride several times during their year and a half together, and after the breakup, in a fit of pique over the fact that she’d rejected him, he played the videotape repeatedly for his biker friends—and, rumor had it, for certain firefighters on duty. His third marriage was annulled after the bride’s father put a private detective on him and learned he was trying to sleep with the bride’s sister two weeks after the honeymoon, which, incidentally, the bride’s father had paid for. There was
another marriage in there somewhere, but it went sour so fast, we couldn’t get the details out of him.

  Tronstad was self-centered to a degree you saw only in a small child; fickle, and possessed of a need to avenge any perceived slight. Thinking about him in this light, it was hard to believe we were friends, although around the station he was personable and funnier than heck in a way that was hard to explain to somebody who’d not seen it in person. It was the way he moved and reacted to things, his herky-jerky body language. Until now, he’d always treated me like a brother. Not that any of us were going to buy land with him or let him babysit our kids.

  After they left, I went inside, took a shower, and packed. I grabbed a small pack, a sleeping bag, and the tent, though I’d allotted enough cash to buy a room for one or two nights. I packed the car, locked the front door to the house, and was walking around to the driver’s side of the WRX when a figure stepped across the parking strip and pushed me against the car, hands flat on my chest. It took me a few seconds to realize it was a woman.

  She was tall and slender and strong. She bounced me off the car, then pinned me against it by my collar. I could hear the material of my shirt tearing. I might have fought her off except for the surprise.

  “Your name Gum?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m asking the questions, pardner.”

  “My name is Gum. What is it—”

  “Just settle down. I’ll do the talking.” She was cute in a fierce sort of way, her hair in a pixie cut, her eyes pale blue. “You’re seeing a woman a couple times a week.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “It’s gonna stop, you hear?”

  “I don’t see how this can be any of your business.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” She threw me against the car again and stepped back onto the grass, where she took a moment to look me over. She was an inch or so taller than my five-eight, her wide, bony hips pushing at the denim material of her jeans, her small breasts barely making a bulge in her black T-shirt and white fleece vest. Her golden-brown hair looked almost blond in the sunshine, and her face was clean, its lines sculpted. She had a dimple in her left cheek, her only visible hint of vulnerability.