by Earl Emerson
I never caught the second brother, but I used up my summer looking for him. Years later somebody told me he’d spent August with relatives in Detroit hiding from me.
That was the summer I decided something was wrong with me. I’d had that feeling a lot, that feeling of loss of control, but until I was sixteen I’d never been strong enough for it to make a difference. It was the summer I had my last drink too. Coming so close to killing Rickie Morrison put me off alcohol, if all those years watching my mother hadn’t already.
Rogue River Adventure was about a woman living on the Oregon frontier. Her husband gets gold fever and all but abandons her and their two sons. One of the boys gets sick, there are outlaws after her, and in the end the mother and the remaining boy are forced to raft down the Rogue River for two days fleeing Indians and bad guys in order to get her youngest to a doctor. The father is played by Van Heflin. Barton MacLane injects a fair amount of sexual menace into the bad-guy part.
The flick wasn’t as good as I’d remembered, but then, they rarely were.
Afterward, Vanessa and I walked to the Broadway Market complex and found a stand that served pastries and coffee. It was a while before Vanessa spoke. “You really whacked that guy.”
“I hope it didn’t spoil the movie for you.”
“Well, yeah. It was all I could think about.”
“I wanted to kill him.”
“You’re a barely controlled volcano, aren’t you?”
There wasn’t anything I could say to that. It was something I tried to keep from the women in my life, what few women there’d been. Hell, I lost them soon enough. Not that my rage had ever been directed at a woman. Or ever would be.
“Your grandmother was terrific,” I said, changing the subject.
“Did you know the director hated her? They had all kinds of squabbles on the set. When they were filming that fake rafting scene they had to throw buckets of water on her to make it look like they were really running rapids. At first they used warm water, but after a while the director told them to use ice water. She actually got hit in the face with ice cubes. When she complained, he said he wanted her nipples to stand out under her blouse.”
“I don’t suppose she found that amusing.”
“No.”
“The night of the fire I saw you in the medic unit with my grandmother. It’s hard to reconcile what I saw that night with what you did to that guy in the street.”
“He had it coming.”
“I suppose he did, but I’ve never seen anyone do anything like that.”
I knew there would be no good-night kiss here. No return phone call. I’d lost another one.
Adios, baby.
42. SIC, SIC, SIC
When I got to the station on Saturday the twenty-first, the first thing I did after the 0800 roll call was dig through the back of my clothing locker, where I’d hidden the report Chief Eddings gave me.
Each shift, a Form 50 was written for probationary firefighters by their overseeing officers to document their performance. At the end of the month a lengthier report was penned, compiled from and reflecting the tenor of the daily reports. Every comment, pro or con, needed to be backed up with objective evidence, observations, or written accounts of the firefighter’s activities.
It wasn’t kosher to write that a probationary firefighter wasn’t strong enough when you hadn’t made note of specific weaknesses. Nor was it correct to claim your boot was good at helping with paperwork without noting any instances of that characteristic on the daily Form 50s.
Captain Galbraithe, Rideout’s officer on Engine 13, had written, “Rideout doesn’t meet department standards with regards to upper body strength. Rideout appears to have trouble carrying a hundred feet of 21⁄2-inch hose by herself.” It was one thing to fail at a task. Failure was measurable and demonstrable. But to say someone “appears to have trouble“ was an opinion and not likely to stand up in court. A man could be asked to pick up a suitcase full of bricks and carry it across the room. He either accomplished the task or he did not. If he performed slowly, you could time him to document that. If he dragged it instead of carried it, you could note that. These were measurable actions. To say he picked it up and carried it across the room but seemed to have trouble doing it wasn’t going to work for the legal department.
In my experience, if somebody had trouble doing a task, you asked them to do it again. And again. At some reasonable point where your average firefighter would keep going, they would fail. Then you wrote, recruit so-and-so failed to perform task X a second or third time.
If Rideout wasn’t strong enough for the job, I’d seen no evidence of it.
Eddings had written:
Rideout came into the staton [sic] with high hopes but we quickly saw her true colars [sic]. She prances around the beanry [sic] acting like she’s better than the rest of us. She is slow to obye [sic] orders and displays a fear of fire. She has a [sic] infinite capacity to anger her superiors and does not fit in with the rest of the crew. Capt. Galbraith [sic] found her not strong enough to do the simplist [sic] tasks, such as a 2 1⁄2” nozzle. We doubt she will ever be able to drive a rig or pump affectively [sic]. In short, this recruit will be a bad fit for the department and should be terminated with prejuedice [sic].
The paragraph said more about Eddings than it did about Rideout. In addition there was no documentation they’d ever had Rideout drive a rig or practice pumping, yet she’d been judged incapable of doing either. I’d fired two people in my time and had felt sympathy for both. I saw nothing but antipathy here.
As far as the claim that Rideout had an attitude? I had seen only a good-natured disposition; a recruit who was always ready to pitch in and help with any project; a young woman who maintained a sunny disposition under almost any circumstances; a woman who did what she was told at fires, knew how to listen, and worked as a team member.
I returned the copy of Rideout’s November report to my clothing locker and went out to the apparatus bay, where I noticed a fresh piece of tape down the center of the floor, Gliniewicz to mop on one side, Dolan on the other. In the beanery I found a piece of white masking tape running the length of the wooden table that dominated the room. Towbridge was washing one side of the table, Zeke the other. Gliniewicz wasn’t talking to any of us. Slaughter ignored me, while Towbridge and Dolan went out of their way to leave the room when Slaughter came in. Tension in the station had reached an all-time high. I knew there’d always been friction between these two crews, but the arsons and my arrival seemed to have accelerated things.
The engine fielded two or three times as many alarms as the truck, mostly aid calls, and its crew consequently got up more often at night. There were thirty-three engines in the city and they were sent on aid calls before trucks were. With only eleven trucks, the dispatchers needed to save them for fires, so trucks were sent on aid calls only when the nearest engine company was out of service. In a double house, the truckies might sleep all night, while the engine crew might get up two or three times. It couldn’t help but spur friction. In most double houses the truckies had learned not to gloat when the engine had a bad night, but that wasn’t the case at Station 6.
In retaliation, at night Slaughter kept his rig out of service until they were actually back in the barn, thus increasing the likelihood of the truck catching an aid call, a practice that was against department policy and infuriated Dolan.
The conflict had been further inflamed by Slaughter’s fear that Rideout would be assigned to Engine 6 after her truck work was completed.
When I found Slaughter and Gliniewicz, they were outside next to Slaughter’s truck, smoking cigarettes.
“Shhhh! Here he comes,” Gliniewicz said, enacting a familiar joke around the station.
“Yeah?” Slaughter said, looking in my direction. “What’s going on?”
“I thought we might talk. Alone.”
“Talk?” Slaughter laughed. “You had your chance for talk.”
“With all
these fires, I don’t want our guys at each other’s throats.”
“You had your chance.”
The two of them began discussing the new tires on Slaughter’s truck as if I didn’t exist. I’d been aware since I was a recruit on Engine 13 that Slaughter used his size and tirades to intimidate people. I didn’t like the way he browbeat Zeke or the way he conspired against Rideout. Most of all, I didn’t like the way he ran hot or cold, depending upon whether you agreed with his position at the moment.
43. I AM THE KING OF FLAME
According to Earl Ward
They think they’re hot stuff because they caught fire burners in different parts of the city. Retards and drunks. That’s who they’re catching. Kids, retards, and drunks.
For anybody with half a brain this thing is like stealing coins out of a blind man’s hat.
I hate this holiday season, I’m telling you. First, there’s Mom. Nothing turns her upside down like Xmas. All she can talk about is how miserable her childhood was and how I always had it so much better and how lousy this Xmas is going to be compared to last Xmas because I ain’t bringin’ in any money. What I’ve wanted to know all along, even when I was a kid, is how could Xmas be any lousier than having a mother who sits around all day croaking about it?
Anyways, I got the money thing halfway figured out. You think about it, there’s lots of money in my profession. I read where that place I lit on Dose Terrace a couple weeks ago is being rebuilt with $300,000 in insurance money. That’s where the dough is. Insurance.
I just haven’t quite figured out how to tap into it. I will, though.
One thought was that I could burn down Mom’s house and we could collect the insurance, but when I called the agent to ask about the policy, the half-wit practically accused me of wanting to burn it down. Maybe I asked the wrong questions. I mighta. There are times when I get a little excited thinking about lighting a match.
Anyways, the gist is there’s gotta be a way to make money off my specialty. I seen this all on TV. There are different ways to go about finding a profession. One is to adapt yourself to whatever job pays good money. Another is—and I prefer this—to find something you love doing and figure out how to make it pay. An example would be a whore. Some babe likes to screw, so she goes about making a living at it. Like that.
Now maybe I hire myself out and burn down other people’s property, help them collect insurance and take a portion of the proceeds. Sound good? Sounds good to me too. Or maybe there’s somebody out there who likes fires but doesn’t know how to start ’em. They hire me.
The trick in all this would be the advertising, because I can’t exactly use the yellow pages. Maybe an ad in the back of The Stranger. I bet the cops don’t read that.
Another way to make money would be to set up a bank account somewheres and tell people you’re going to torch their property if they don’t put money in. You don’t have to hold anybody up. Maybe two hundred bucks a pop. Enough to pay for Xmas for Mom. The trouble is, you’d need one of them offshore accounts, and I don’t know how to do that.
All this aside, I’m pissed. For starters, it’s Saturday night, so Mom takes her Dodge and doesn’t come back until almost one in the morning. Bingo and beer. Old ladies shouldn’t be driving drunk. Now I’m getting a late start. Know what else tweaks me? Them newspaper writers never get it straight.
I mean, I am the most accomplished arsonist in the history of this city. Maybe the world. I’m an expert to end all experts. Period.
I am the king of flame.
Yet all they talk about is the copycats. The papers are so concerned with numbers. A guy sets eight Dumpster fires gets almost the same coverage I do setting one flamer that burns a husband and wife and two dogs out of their house. It’s not right.
Tonight is the night I make them forget the copycats.
The night the whole West Coast learns I am the master.
What I gotta do tonight is listen to the scanner and make sure Ladder 3 is in quarters before I set this baby. No way I want to go to all this trouble and not nail the bastard. This was waaaay too much work. It’s gotta go perfect. Which is part of the problem with fire. You want to change something after it starts, you better hold your horses, because once it gets goin’, you’re stuck with what you got.
That’s the scary aspect to my profession—how all these accidents happen.
What gets me is everybody knows they’re accidents, yet the papers are always trying to say I’m to blame. An accident is an accident. I mean, that’s why they call them accidents, right? I give these guys plenty of opportunities to put my fires out, and if they don’t, it ain’t on my head. They’re the hotshots getting paid all that money, driving all those fancy vehicles out behind the firehouse. I’m just driving Mom’s old Dodge Dart with the clunking transmission.
This house I found is perfect. To start off with, it looks like somebody lives there. That always gets firemen worked up. Plus there’s another house next door that’s going to confuse the issue. The best thing about the house next door is that those guys never get home until after the bars close. That’s why they never heard me banging inside the first place.
I got the interior filled with boards and old furniture and you name it. I start the fire in the basement, it comes up the stairs, reaches the pile of combustibles right about the time the trucks get there. The fire reaches the middle of the house, it’s going to FLARE! I mean FLARE! The hose line will go in the front door, and my guys’ll go to the roof with chain saws. That’s when the fun begins.
Because I am the king of flame.
After this maybe the papers won’t be so full of copycats. Although I do have to say this. Them copycats have kept some of the pressure off me. I mean, as long as they’re stumbling around West Seattle and Ballard looking for retards, they can’t be in the CD looking for me, now can they?
I drive down along the lake and cruise Lakeside Avenue.
I light a fence. I light some brush, but it’s wet and goes out.
I drive to Cheasty Boulevard and I find some garbage in the woods, stuff people’ve dumped. I light that.
I go to the house on Twenty-first and Stevens. The house I’ve been prepping. The people next door are home early, but they don’t notice me.
I go inside, and I think, This is what happens when you piss me off.
44. NEXT THING I KNOW, I’M RUNNING FOR MY LIFE
According to Earl Ward
I poke through the house one last time, wiping my prints off everything. I’m nervous.
I go downstairs to the basement and wad up two Sunday papers, especially the color advertisements, which give off those beautiful blues and purples when they’re hot. I pack the paper under everything in the room, wad it up and stuff it under old chairs, boxes, a rack of clothing.
I light one wad of papers and watch. There’s nothing as sweet as a tiny little flame the size of your pinkie turning into a big flame the size of King Kong’s ass. Now a single flame licks up the leg of a chair like a rattlesnake, slowly gets the wicker bottom on the chair going with a snap, crackle, and pop. More newspaper wads are igniting. It begins slower than I’d anticipated. I’m getting a hard-on under the dress. One after the other the newspaper stashes catch fire. I should be leaving, but I cannot go just yet. Something this beautiful, it’s hard to tear your eyes away from.
The basement fills with smoke. It rises to the ceiling and banks down. Some of it flows up the basement stairs following the draft I’ve created by leaving the doors open.
There is a sense of luxury in this indoor fire, a feeling that I’m no longer in a hurry. This isn’t like outside, where somebody might spot you, where you set it and leave. Nobody’s going to spot me here. I sit near the double-bolted basement door and watch my handiwork.
Pretty soon the flame has spread into a series of stacked cardboard boxes. One of the boxes is full of jars somebody has lovingly stored. When the first box gets to burning, a jar slides out onto the floor with a dull pop, j
uice and broken glass everywhere. Moments later I smell peaches. Smells just like peach pie cooking. And then, almost without warning, the fire makes a big whoosh as it reaches the clothing rack, and the synthetic material on the hangers starts to go up like gasoline.
Godderned, I think, maybe I stayed too long. I tuck my dick into my panty hose and run for the door.
It is only by holding my coat over my face that I get past the flames. I head up the stairs, coughing and choking on the smoke. The air in the stairs is hotter than I thought it would be. It burns my eyes.
Upstairs the place is filling with smoke.
I sit by the back door, one leg of my chair in the kitchen, the other in the hallway, waiting for the rest of it to come roaring up, this creature I’ve created. My eyes fill with tears. I don’t know if the tears are from the smoke or from the gorgeousness of the whole thing. My work is filling the rooms, making its way upstairs to the second floor, from there to the attic, where I hope everything goes according to plan.
At the top of the stairs, I’ve piled clothing and bedding and mattresses.
These dumb-ass firefighters aren’t going to know what hit them.
Quicker than I thought it would, the smoke compresses down from the ceiling.
Knowing discretion is the better part of valor, I leave through the back door, making sure the lock clicks into place behind me.
In the dark in the backyard I finish my soda, wipe it clean of prints, and set it on the neighbor’s porch.
Then alongside the wall of that house I light the pile of clothespins, rope, and garbage. Fire will climb the vinyl siding like ferrets. No need to wait for this one.
I walk back to Mom’s car.
I drive down the hill on McClellan and park in the drugstore parking lot. It is late, and Rainier Avenue is practically deserted.
After a bit, I hear sirens. It is torture waiting, but I am a professional and I keep still.
Later, after the fire units have driven past me, I drive back up the hill and park just off Twenty-third. I walk toward the commotion two blocks away. I walk like it’s my prerogative. I stand near the fire trucks with the gawkers, cradling a can of soda in my coat pocket.