by Earl Emerson
She laughed nervously.
“I just wonder about these arsons. What if it’s a terrorist?”
“If terrorists were setting fires, they’d do a better job than these piddly-ass calls. This is just some dingbat.”
At that moment Lieutenant Slaughter poked his head in my door, smiled warmly, and said, “Hey, cocksucker.”
“What’s up, gramps?”
“So you finally decided to come where the action is?” It wasn’t until he pushed the door open that Slaughter realized Rideout was in the room. “Sorry. I didn’t see you. Excuse my French. Paul and I go way back.”
“Steve was my first officer,” I said. “He tried to can me.”
“Bullshit. I was keeping you on your toes.”
Slaughter stepped into the room, making it even smaller, and we all three looked at one another for an uneasy moment. I had the feeling from a fleeting look I saw behind his heavy glasses that Slaughter thought there was something illegitimate about my closed-door meeting with Rideout. There’d been male officers in the past who’d harassed female recruits, and I knew of at least one woman who got her job by sleeping with an officer. There’d been women on the receiving end of bad reports who claimed the officers evaluating them tried to pressure them into having sex. These were by no means common problems, but we’d all heard the stories.
“You’ll both like this station,” Slaughter said. “We’re busy. We do our work, but we have a lot of fun too. We call it the God Bless America Firehouse and Lounge.”
Rideout laughed. I said, “We heard you’ve been having some arson fires.”
“Nuisance crap. It’s not like when Paul Keller was running around. Or the other one, the one we never caught.”
Slaughter was a big man, imposing, six feet, 250 pounds, with thick, black-framed glasses, a shock of brown hair, bushy eyebrows, and a walrus mustache he let creep over his lip. He was a firefighter’s firefighter and had the kind of face advertisers slapped on fire appliance calendars.
Before we could continue our conversation, the station alerter went off. At Six’s the engine got more calls than the truck, but this one was for us.
It was a water job.
3. FIRST SHIFT AT SIX’S
Cynthia Rideout
DECEMBER 5, THURSDAY, 2331 HOURS
As far as I know, everybody else in the station is asleep. I can hear Zeke Boles snoring on the other side of the lockers. Poor Zeke. Slaughter and Gliniewicz had worked themselves into a lather by the time Zeke finally walked in at 0835, almost an hour late. Apparently this isn’t the first time they had to call Zeke at home.
After he got here, some chiefs from downtown showed up and they all went back in the engine office. He ended up working the shift and getting disciplinary charges for a failure to report. Zeke seems to be a gentle, kindhearted man. People say he has a drug problem, but I think they’re just saying that because he’s always late and he’s black.
When they all went into the office, Mike Pickett, my partner on Ladder 3, griped that we were going to catch some of their aid alarms because the engine wouldn’t be in service to take them. I never dreamed there were firemen who didn’t want alarms.
The unofficial department policy is that firefighters can go to bed after ten at night, but Jeff Dolan, our driver, was asleep by nine-thirty. He’s the hardest worker on the crew and pretty much does what he wants. Pickett was on the phone all evening, so I have no idea when he turned in. Pickett seems to be Ladder 3’s resident complainer. He and Bill Gliniewicz, the driver on Engine 6, bitch for hours on end.
I can’t sleep. I’m in the bunk room tucked up in the corner of my bunk against the wall. I can hear the wind in the bushes outside my window. It’s a cozy little walk-in cubicle about the size of a jail cell. I never would have thought a shift with no fires and only two alarms could wear me out, but being a probie is no picnic.
This morning when I got here at a quarter to seven, I ran into Katie Fryer in the beanery. I knew there were women working in the station, but I didn’t expect a giant. She’s six-three or -four, and I hate to think how much she weighs. After she left this morning, I heard a couple of men on our shift making jokes about her breasts. My guess is they’ve been making those same jokes the entire eight years she’s been here.
Katie has this affected way of speaking that almost makes her seem retarded. It’s tricky to describe. She reminds me of someone who’s been raised by very old grandparents and has adopted their speech patterns.
“Listen,” she whispered. “We’ve got fifteen minutes before the night watch opens that door, so I’m going to fill you in. This is a man’s world, but you can fit in if you take into account a few basics. The first thing you have to remember is you’re not a man. I know that sounds moronic, but we’ve had women here who thought they had to undress in front of men. Thought they had to curse like the men. Always keep your dignity. The second thing—they sent you down here to fire you.”
Her last statement shocked me. My first monthly report at the end of November hadn’t exactly been glowing, but nobody’d mentioned termination.
Now that I’ve been moved to Six’s, the December report is going to be written by Lieutenant Wollf, and I figured things would get better.
I stared into Katie Fryer’s eyes and said, “Everybody in my class is doing three months on a truck company.”
“Listen, honey. Wollf never worked here before you showed up. They brought him in to terminate your sweet ass. That’s what he does. Wollf fired a woman recruit last year. They sent you here so he could fire you too.”
“But the union. The civil service regulations. They have to be fair.”
“That’s right. There are rules, and trust me when I tell you they know them a hell of a lot better than you do. You got a bad report from Galbraithe, right?”
“Those reports were supposed to be confidential.”
“Nothing’s confidential in the fire department. Last year one of the deputy chiefs went to bed with a secretary in the FMO. Wanna know what they had for breakfast? Honey, this is a fire department. It’s a gossip factory. I haven’t even come to Wollf yet. Paul Wollf is a bad-ass right out of . . . who was that bozo who wrote The Three Musketeers?”
“Alexandre Dumas.”
“Right. He’s right out of one of those comic books. You never met anybody like him. His father burned up in a house fire right here in our district. When Paul Wollf was a boot out at Thirteen’s, he saved three lives in a furniture warehouse factory. About the biggest hero we ever had. He beat up a chief last summer and got away scot-free. All you need to know is Wollf eats recruits raw and spits ’em out before breakfast. Hey, listen. I’m not telling you this to scare you. What you have to do here is go out and do the best job you’re capable of. That’s what’ll get you through. And remember. Don’t make excuses when you screw up. Somebody asks you to do something, do it. Pitch in whenever there’s any work to be done. Be aggressive at fires. Push people out of the way if you have to. I mean that. This is one place where polite’ll get you fired. They’re looking for aggression. People who can prove they’re not afraid of anything. Elbows and assholes.”
“But if this guy’s here to fire me, what chance do I have?”
“Like I said. The two things they’re worried about with women is strength and fear. Pretend you’re fearless even when you’re staring the Antichrist in the eye. Hey. That’s not bad. I think I’ll write that one down. And trust me, sweetie, that’s who you’ve got for a lieutenant—the Antichrist. You get in trouble, call me. Us girls have to back each other up.”
“Thanks, Katie.”
Despite what Fryer told me, everybody on C-shift treated me well all day, including Lieutenant Wollf. Then again, they treated me well up at Thirteen’s and that didn’t stop them from writing a nasty report on me.
Lieutenant Wollf has a direct quality, a way of staring at you with those blue eyes that’s almost like a movie star. I mean, he’s that self-assured. He’s not
a pretty boy, but with that curly black hair and those eyes, he has some charm in spite of never showing his emotions. He’s six-four or -five and has a large, open face. You can tell exactly what he looked like as a little boy.
The lieutenant on the engine, Slaughter, has twenty-five years in the department, has been to all the big fires, and says things like, “He doesn’t show up in a few minutes, I’m going to my locker and get a can of whup-ass.”
Station 6 is a small cream-colored firehouse built around a double apparatus bay. On one side of the apparatus bay you have the watch office and the kitchen, which in the Seattle Fire Department they always call the beanery. There’s a chrome island with a gas range. Two refrigerators. A TV mounted on the wall.
Crammed into the apparatus bay behind the engine there’s a workbench area, the officers’ rest room, a storage room for our bunking boots, the two officers’ rooms, the hose tower, and a small inspection room with a computer, a printer, and file cabinets.
On the south side of the app bay is a long, narrow bunk room split up into little cubicles without doors. The bunks are separated by tall lockers. My bunk is directly across from the women’s head at the front of the station. Bill Gliniewicz is in the corner bunk next to the door to the apparatus bay. On the other side of me is Zeke Boles. He’s a whole chapter.
Downstairs is, believe it or not, a handball court. There’s a study room with a second computer, a laundry room, and a carpeted weight room with weight benches, dumbbells, exercise bikes, a StairMaster, you name it. I went down there this afternoon and found Lieutenant Wollf working out. The amount of weight he was bench-pressing was obscene.
We only had two alarms today: a water job this morning, where we used the water vacs to suck dry the carpets in an apartment house after a pipe broke, and an aid call this afternoon. Meanwhile, despite being out of service for a couple of hours this morning over the Zeke fiasco, the engine went out nine times, every one either an aid or a medic run. Gliniewicz tells me that’s a typical day around here.
Jeff Dolan and Mike Pickett like to say they’re saving the truck for the important stuff.
4. TIPS ON APPROPRIATE CONDUCT AFTER YOU GET CAUGHT MASTURBATING IN TIMES SQUARE
According to Earl Ward
You want to be famous, it’s simple, all you need is a book of matches and the willingness to spend the rest of your life in prison. Period.
I tell you this, but it’s not the way I landed in the Powder River Correctional Facility and then later at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.
I will tell you this: If I never spend another second in the august state of Oregon, it will be too soon.
Fire is what I know and fire is what I love, but fire is not why I spent the majority of my sorry life being Nelson’s bitch; I almost wish it had been. On the other hand, had I gone into the joint as a firefly, they might have treated me worse.
What I got now, if you stop and think this through clearly, is my mother’s 1976 Dodge Dart when she’s not at work or out playing bingo or driving her idiot friends to doctors’ appointments, a criminal record that keeps employers at bay, and a girlfriend named Jaclyn.
In some ways losing the right to vote is the worst. I think the Republicans are having a hard time, and every vote counts.
If things had worked out the way our dear Lord Jesus intended, I’d be riding one of those big red engines and nobody would have to worry about me walking up a dark alley with a book of matches. It’s their fault, not mine. What I really wanted to be, from the time I was two, and what I should have been, was first and foremost—a firefighter. You look at things from that perspective, it’s their fault. Everything. Period.
Seems like nobody’s ever been fair with me.
And now this hassle with Jaclyn.
We were in the caretaker’s house, Jaclyn and me, behind the main house, at the back of the garden. It was wet outside but it wasn’t raining. From time to time you could see the moon poking through the clouds. Eight days I’d been free. Each day a small miracle.
“Get out of my house,” said Jaclyn. “Who told you to come sniffing around here at midnight?”
“It’s not midnight. It’s eleven-thirty.”
“Okay. Who told you to come at eleven-thirty?”
It would be the third time she’d thrown me out of her place in a week.
Jaclyn Dahlstrom. Late twenties, blond from a bottle, sexy like a cheap porno mag you find alongside the road. Likes to write prisoners. Hell, I was the one who got her this job, taking care of the old woman. Mom told me about it and I told her. Then when I showed up last week, all she did was laugh and throw me out.
“You come here at eleven-thirty and bother me when Leno’s about to come on. And God help your sorry ass if you woke up Mrs. Pennington. You didn’t ring her bell, did you?”
“I didn’t wake up anybody.”
“Jesus Christ. Look at that. You made me miss the monologue. Now he’s going to a commercial.”
“I thought we were going to have something between us. You and me. Something—”
“What we had was a bunch of letters. And you lied in those letters. You said you were in for murder.”
“I was in for murder.”
“What? You run over a chipmunk with your mother’s car? Listen, punky. There’s nothing between us. So get out.”
“I don’t get it. You were flirting with me before.”
“I get so tired of people saying I’m a flirt. What did I do that you interpreted as flirting?”
“For one thing, you asked me how much I would pay to see you naked.”
“And you said you didn’t have any money. That wasn’t flirting. That, my friend, was an aborted business transaction.”
“Jaclyn.” She went over to the dark window where light from the courtyard fell on her hair and about took my breath away. “I didn’t have any money. But I do now.”
“I’m not going out with somebody who doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. How much do you have?”
“Jesus, Jaclyn. How much does a guy need? What if I were to ask my mother for money?”
She tapped her bare foot on the floor and stared a hole through me. Even her feet were pretty, the toenails painted crimson. “How old are you, Earl?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not a trick question. Just answer.”
“Forty-four.”
“You’re forty-four years old, and you still have to ask your mother for money?”
“I—”
“Do you realize how pathetic that is?”
“Jaclyn . . .”
A minute later I was in the Pennington garden looking up at the lighted window in the caretaker’s house.
That’s the thing with beautiful women. Their lives are too damn easy. She wouldn’t have it too easy if I went back up there and fucked her. I could do that. I could stomp back up those stairs and kick the door in. I know how to fuck somebody. That’s one thing you learn in prison. Boy, wouldn’t she be sorry? I could wear a mask. I could put a hood over my face. Maybe a paper bag. They’d never prove it was me.
Except I don’t have a paper bag.
I walk over to the shadows by the side of the house and wait under Jaclyn’s window, the big house behind me dark and quiet.
I’m where I’ve been many times before, alone, in the shadows, crying.
After a while it starts to sprinkle.
Getting spotted lighting a fire—it’s a little like getting caught masturbating in public. You know you were doing it and they know you were doing it, but when you get hauled up in front of the judge, you’re going to say you weren’t and they know you’re going to say you weren’t. It’s the nature of the beast.
It’s always so simple.
A book of matches and the willingness to light something. That’s all I ever had.
Period.
I got a whole scrapbook from my merrymaking. A scrapbook and then some. ’Course, I was famous and anonymous at the same time,
and that last part hurt. I never wanted to be anonymous. For a while there I had the fire department running around like the Easter bunny with a dog after it. It was funny, though. Not ha-ha funny but funny in a way that makes you put your hands in your pockets and smile.
From my point of view lighting things always makes everything better. Been doing it since I was a tyke.
I look down at my Bic lighter. I flick it open and stare. Amazing. There isn’t anything like it. I mean, take water. You can’t start out with a drop of water and end up with an ocean, now can you?
There is a newspaper recycle bin next to the big house, and from this bin I remove last Sunday’s paper. I tear a strip off and light it. Then another. The flames are comforting. In the drizzle I feel the heat on my face.
The house behind me is two stories plus, with basement window wells. I step into one of the wells and push the window open with my foot.
The room beyond the pane is dark. I tear off a strip of newspaper, light it, and let it drop inside.
I pull the basement window shut. Looking back at the cottage, I watch the blue light from a television set and wait.
5. NOTHING VISIBLE
It was half past midnight when the house bells and lights woke me. At the front of the apparatus Rideout was getting into her bunking coat when I squeezed past.
It was a “reported Dumpster fire—possibly spreading to the building.” Twenty-third and Cherry.
Gliniewicz pulled Engine 6 out of the station and raced down the street while Jeff Dolan held Ladder 3 close behind, bitching that Gliniewicz was driving too fast. At Twenty-third and Cherry we found nothing but wet streets and a minimart on the corner. No smoke or fire. By the look of the streets, it had been raining hard, water puddling in the ripples in the roadway.
Slaughter gave a brief radio report. “Attack Six at Twenty-three Avenue and East Cherry Street. Nothing visible. Investigating. Let’s code yellow all incoming units until we find out what’s going on.”