American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  Beall called the remaining fire chiefs on the scene over for an impromptu meeting in front of the dying building: “There’s not enough water on the shore to put this fire out,” he said.

  They needed a new plan and quickly devised one: the goal was no longer to put the fire out. The goal was to use enough water to contain the fire, boxing it in until it devoured everything flammable inside the box, exhausting itself and going out on its own.

  Beall sent Bryan Applegate around to the back of the property to monitor the spread. Flames weren’t traveling that way yet, but they could.

  “How you doing back there?” he radioed back to Bryan, and kept doing so every few minutes. “How’s it looking back there? Is it spreading to any other building?”

  “It’s burned all the way over to this last building,” Bryan said. “It still hasn’t made it to the roof.”

  “How you looking, Bryan?” Beall called a few minutes later.

  “It’s getting pretty hot.”

  “Make sure eleven knows I want them to stop on Tasley Road, and I want them to be in position so that if this jumps and goes in the woods, I want them to be our first line of defense.”

  “Let me know when it’s under control, for our records,” the dispatcher asked, when it became clear that there was nothing more that could be offered from the 911 Center where he was located.

  “It won’t be under control for several more hours,” Beall said.

  THE NIGHT that Whispering Pines burned down, the county came together. State police investigators Barnes and Neal had office space in the nearby Virginia Department of Forestry; if Neal had been in his office at the time, he would have been able to see flames from his desk. Local teachers and nursery owners and waitresses all heard the warnings on the radio to stay away because traffic was being diverted, and then they all got in their cars and drove precisely to the spot they had been instructed to avoid, just to see it. Pete Blackman, the DJ who had agreed to work Charlie and Tonya’s wedding, happened to be driving nearby and saw flames, and the way the whole landscape seemed to ooze with fire. “It looked,” he would later say, “like hell was coming up through the ground.”

  The fire happened, an article in the local news by reporter Carol Vaughn would later point out, “within yards of an electronic sign on Route 13 advertising a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the arsonists.” The sign was later changed, warning motorists about heavy smoke in the area.

  The news article offered other pieces of information: how one of the onlookers, Charlie Russell, watched the fire because in 1931 his grandfather had constructed the hotel dining room’s knotty pine walls that were, in 2013, the first thing to burn. How the grandfather, Charles F. Russell, had offered a prize of a ten-dollar gold piece to the area resident who came up with the winning name for the soon-to-open hotel. How the winner had been a girl named Pearl Bryan, a senior at Accomack High School, who suggested the name “Whispering Pines Tourist Camp.” A gala dinner and dance had celebrated the opening of what was the Delmarva peninsula’s first modern resort. The parking lot was always full, and the Russell family ran the resort until 1972 when they sold it to a man named Ralph Powers, who shortly thereafter died in front of the building when the truck he was fixing accidentally slipped into gear and ran over him.

  Some people were glad to see it go, knowing that it had been an unsafe eyesore. But it was still a sad thing. The fires were causing the county’s past to vanish: landmarks gone, horizons changed.

  The firefighters of Accomack County fought that fire with the same diligence and care that they fought every fire. Objectively, it wasn’t the worst fire of anyone’s career. Nobody’s life was in danger, nobody needed to fight their way up a burning stairwell, the way Beall and Charlie once did in that burning funeral home. But it was the essential fire. It was the fire they had dreaded and the fire they would talk about. It exhausted them.

  “We just did a walk around; everything’s clear,” said one firefighter into his radio, as March 12 slid into the dark hours of March 13.

  “We’re outta here,” said the chief from Wachapreague, as his volunteers finished up their assigned duties. “Good luck. Call us if you need us.”

  As time dragged on, radio updates became less frequent, there was nothing to do but wait as planned for the fire to wear itself down. The beginnings of fires were always filled with adrenaline and anticipation. The ends of them were soot and weariness and fire hoses that needed to be cleaned. The ground was hot and the wood wasn’t wood anymore. The parts of the hotel that hadn’t burned—the rooms with the blue furniture and gold-filigree wallpaper—would be so doused in water as to retain a permanent stench of mildew. Fire killed one part of the hotel, water killed another, and eventually, months later, the earth would snake up through the collapsed beams, saplings and vines snaking through the fallen architecture, and in this way the old hotel was completely given over to the elements, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  “We’re done. Let’s shut everything down, baby,” Beall finally said into his radio. It was 2:51 a.m.

  The Whispering Pines hotel took nearly six hours to burn down, causing $300,000 worth of damage. When it was finally under control, the news reporters, who had positioned their trucks around the perimeter, establishing their live shots and doing sound checks, began to approach the soot-covered volunteers, beckoning them to position themselves near the gutted-out front entrance of the hotel, where the devastation was the most severe and the shot was the most dramatic.

  A reporter from the Salisbury Fox affiliate latched herself onto Beall and asked if he would do an interview. He said okay. He was getting good at sound bites by this point; he’d given enough interviews. “We all have jobs. We all have families. We all have lives,” he told the camera. “This has cut into everything. Our fuel cost is tripled. We’re going through a lot of equipment. The biggest toll it’s taking is on personnel. We’re all volunteers, and it’s really taking its toll.”

  After the interview, the reporter, Cleo Greene, had to wait for her next live shot. Beall thought she looked cold and sleepy and he was right; she lived ninety minutes away and had driven down to the fire scene as soon as the scanner app went off on her own phone. Beall said if she had more interview questions, they could go sit in his truck where it was warmer. He must have drifted off midsentence, and the reporter must have followed suit soon after, because the next thing he knew, the news station’s cameraman was tapping on the glass and pointing at his watch. They had to get back up to Maryland to file their piece. “Is there a message you’d like to send to the arsonist?” Greene asked.

  “Take a break,” Beall said. “I need one.”

  The news reporter asked him what his plans were for the rest of the day, now that the Whispering Pines fire was put out.

  “I’m going to go home and take a shower and come right back,” he told her.

  “Why are you going to come back?” he remembered her asking.

  “Because this is my fucking fire.”

  FINALLY, IT HAD TO BE OVER. There could have been no better metaphor and no better final message for the arsonist than burning down Whispering Pines. If he had burned down Whispering Pines and then stopped, he would have burned down sixty-six buildings and he never would have been caught. That would have been a more appropriate end to the story, an unsolved mystery, a blaze of glory. But the pagers went off the next night, and it wasn’t over quite yet.

  CHAPTER 14

  TONYA AND CHARLIE

  THE WEDDING PLANNING was moving along.

  Tonya told friends she was envisioning a large affair, more than three hundred guests, the party of the year, since neither she nor Charlie had ever been married before. They had decided the reception would be at Shuckers, the place of their meeting, courtship, and engagement. “Announcement will be in paper in January,” they posted in October on their shared Facebook page, but they encouraged interested guests to RSVP right away, via e-mail. They
needed to be able to estimate food and drink costs, plus, “security will be tight,” they warned. Some folks were surprised that they would even have three hundred people to invite. In the 2010 census, the entire population of Tasley was three hundred people.

  Word also got around that the wedding would have a theme: “November Rain,” like the 1991 Guns N’ Roses power ballad, and that Tonya would be wearing a dress like model Stephanie Seymour had worn in the music video, short in the front but with a long train in the back. This, too, seemed a little odd—in the video, Seymour is an unhappy bride who dies at the end—but it was a first marriage for both of them, so they could be excused for being a little full of it. Still, security at a wedding? Who did Charlie and Tonya think they were?

  Jeff Beall heard Charlie was scrounging around for extra jobs, so he could afford the dress Tonya had in mind. Charlie told him it would run in the thousands. Beall had always tried to throw auto-repair work Charlie’s way, but he was horrified by the expense of the wedding. He tried to make his feelings known: he didn’t like Tonya. Something seemed weird about her. Something seemed weird about the whole situation. Charlie was upset at the suggestion that the wedding was an extravagantly delusional fantasy. The men’s friendship dissolved.

  WHEN THINGS FALL APART, it sometimes happens quickly, and it sometimes happens slowly, and it sometimes happens so that you find yourself in the middle of a big pile of shit that is so deep and all-encompassing that you don’t even realize you’re in it.

  The first thing that started to go wrong, Charlie thought later, when he would look back on it, had to do with Tonya’s older son. Charlie had fallen hard for those boys, just like he had for their mother. But it was apparent to him that the older boy, now thirteen, was troubled. He was acting out at school, he was acting out at home. He took a swing at Charlie once, with the sharp edge of a skateboard; it sliced Charlie’s back from shoulder to waist. He jumped out of their moving car one afternoon when he was being taken somewhere he didn’t want to go. Tonya was sick about it, and Charlie was sick about her, and neither one of them knew the best way to deal with the behavior. Out of desperation, Charlie tried calling his old friend with the state police, Glenn Neal. “Can you come over and scare the shit out of him?” he asked, “because this kid is acting up in school.”

  “I’m not going to do that—I don’t want him to be afraid of the police,” Neal said. “But I will come over and talk to him with you.” Neal went over and sat in the living room and tried to have a heart-to-heart with Tonya’s oldest boy. Neal told him to listen to the teachers, and if he didn’t agree with them, to come home and talk to Tonya so she could fight his battle for him. He thought the kid seemed a little more troubled than a typical kid, but hoped that it was still probably nothing he wouldn’t grow out of. “Don’t put your mama through this,” he finished. “She’s trying as hard as she can.”

  Doctors threw a storm of diagnoses at them, but nobody really knew for sure what was going on. The boy was a good kid, sick and apologetic about his own behavior. But it wore on them. When he acted out at school, Tonya or Charlie would be called to pick him up, and after they’d both missed too many shifts, they decided it would be better for Tonya to quit her job and dedicate herself full time to his care. After the problems got worse, they decided to remove him from school entirely and start a homeschooling program. That was the unspoken reason why they decided Tonya should open up her clothing shop. Working her own hours was the only way to guarantee that she’d be able to be around for her kids.

  Charlie’s relationship with his own daughter was disintegrating in a different way. Her once frequent visits to the house had slowed and then stopped; Charlie told himself it was because she was getting older and would rather hang out with her friends than her dad, but later he heard that the girl’s mother didn’t trust him, didn’t trust Tonya, and thought they were both on drugs.

  All of this might have been bearable except that in May of 2012, Charlie’s mother died. It was the same cancer that had already taken her sister and brother, Charlie’s favorite uncle. The blow was staggering. Charlie’s mother had not only been his unfailing supporter, but also the string that bound him to the rest of the family, his stepfather and half-siblings. Without them, Tonya was his only family. And because Tonya’s own mother had died, and her sister was estranged, he was hers.

  And all of this might have been bearable, or even solvable, if they’d had any money to put toward fixing it. But Tonya had quit her nursing job so she could be more available for her kids, and the clothing store wasn’t making any profits. The payments on the furniture sets they’d purchased in optimism were due now, and they didn’t have the money. Charlie was picking up the jobs he could, but Accomack’s perpetual recession left other people’s wallets thin, too, and there were only so many cars he could repaint. Charlie knew the deli counter guy at Food Lion. He sometimes passed Charlie recently expired meat, which Charlie used to feed their animals. The meat was perfectly fine, the guy had told Charlie—it was just government regulations that forced him to throw the food out. One night Charlie found himself picking through the dumpsters behind Food Lion looking for perfectly fine meat, not for the pets, but for his family.

  Even the house seemed to be turning against them. Tonya had always been fanatical about keeping up with cleaning—she’d holler if the forks were put in the knife tray or vice versa; she said her dad had been that way, too, which was one of the few things Charlie had ever heard her say about her father. But they’d acquired a Chihuahua that kept pooping on the floor, and it made the house stink, and the very space seemed like it was collapsing in on them.

  They couldn’t ask anyone for help. Charlie thought Tonya didn’t want to. She said that if they displayed any kind of weakness, other people were likely to use it against them. Their good friends Jay and Danielle were recently less a part of their lives. Danielle, after trying to match them together, had decided they weren’t good together and was trying to break them up. She said Charlie wasn’t good enough for Tonya. It made the couple furious.

  And all of that might have been bearable, except for this other Thing, this big Thing. This other, big, embarrassing Thing that Charlie didn’t know how to deal with. This Thing had started to make him feel like he wasn’t good enough for Tonya and afraid others would think so, too. He was afraid she would leave him any day.

  He needed to talk to somebody about the Thing, so one day he showed up at the office of John Burr, a local Baptist minister who had comforted Charlie’s family when his mother died. Burr didn’t know Charlie well, but he was a patient, unflappable listener. He encouraged Charlie to come to Bible study, which Charlie did, and also to bring Tonya into his office so they could all talk about the Thing together. At one of those meetings, Charlie and Tonya asked Burr if he would be the minister at their wedding. Burr thought about it and decided he couldn’t; it would go against his beliefs to marry two people who were already living together. In order for him to perform the ceremony, Charlie would need to first move out so they could recommit themselves to doing things the right way. Charlie was angry.

  “Calm down,” Tonya told him in the presence of the minister. “It’s okay.”

  It didn’t feel okay. None of it did. It felt like their world used to be beautiful and now it was shit.

  The strange, surreal aspect about all of this is that nobody else knew how bad it had gotten. Both Tonya and Charlie had told a few people that they were struggling with the kids, but others assumed it was just normal growing pains. People knew vaguely that there were money troubles—though they believed them to just be wedding related, the way weddings stretched many couple’s budgets. Only a few people seemed to start to see the cracks. An old friend noticed that Charlie seemed more withdrawn than usual. At work, Bryan Applegate thought his brother seemed sadder and sadder, for lack of a better way to describe it. He thought Charlie’s relationship might be to blame, but he never brought it up; it didn’t seem like the kind of thing a
younger brother should mention.

  Tonya and Charlie were still going out for dinners, and making it to the bar once or twice a week, because keeping up appearances seemed so deeply important to Tonya, Charlie thought, and because despite everything, neither of them was able to fully accept what was painfully obvious: in the span of six months, their lives had fallen apart.

  A respite from all of this was driving, out at night, after the kids were safely asleep. They drove to McDonalds or to Walmart, the place where Tonya had always been able to make Charlie laugh. Or they drove out to nowhere in particular. Miles of empty roads in Accomack meant hours of time to blow off steam.

  And then one night, they were driving around the county like they always did, trying to sort through their lives like they always did. Charlie remembered Tonya telling him how grateful she was that he was in her life. Maybe God had put him there for a reason, to help her with her son and to show her that it was possible for a troubled kid to grow up and be a good man. She knew it hadn’t been easy on Charlie, and she wanted him to know that he could leave if he needed to, no hard feelings. On this night, she said that just as they were driving past an old abandoned house on Dennis Drive. It was November 12, 2012.

  “I’m in it for the long haul,” Charlie said. “I’ll do whatever it takes for you to be happy.”

  Tonya said, as Charlie remembered, “Get out and set that house on fire.”

  Charlie looked up. It was such a non sequitur to anything they’d been discussing, he wondered if he’d misheard something.

  They’d already driven once past an old white house set back in the field, and now Tonya, who was driving, looped back again and had pulled to a stop.

  “I want you to set that house on fire,” she repeated. Charlie laughed. He realized he’d heard right, but now assumed it was some kind of joke, Tonya messing around, like she did at Walmart or McDonalds to put them in better moods.