Firetrap

by Earl Emerson

  She had six or eight studs or rings of various sizes and shapes in each ear, a square stud in the tip of her tongue and probably more metal in places I didn’t want to think about, tattoos on her slim stomach, and a large blue-and-red devil ran down her left ankle like a dripping candle. Saturday night her hair had been a calculated mess, but since then she’d shaved half her head and colored what was left blue and orange. There were a lot of ways to conceal the fact that you had slipped into the bowels of the lower middle class, but playing at being an artist was one of the most time-honored. Echo had fallen almost as far from her family’s social rung as I had from mine. It was hard to imagine she’d at one time attended private schools with an annual tuition greater than my yearly salary.

  On India’s recommendation I’d looked her up on the Internet and found Echo had been mentioned on numerous websites devoted to performance artists around the world. She’d put out several CDs and had traveled to England and Australia, where she performed in clubs, playing flute, tambourine, bongos, and tenor sax, and putting on shows with slides, nude dancers of both sexes, magicians, fire-eaters, and other assorted gimmicks, including a trio of shaved dogs. I’d read about a contest where a private concert by the World Famous Echo Armstrong was awarded as a prize. The winner wrote a narrative on the Web explaining how Echo Armstrong had sung down his throat for twenty minutes, a new form of music she’d invented that she called a “kiss from another galaxy,” wherein she fitted her lips around the lucky winner’s mouth and sang music into his lungs and diaphragm. It was, I was fairly certain, an experience one probably had to endure in order to fully appreciate. The Echo I remembered had been timid, easily amused, and remarkably insecure, and the thought of blowing songs down a stranger’s throat would have sent her fleeing.

  “Tea? Beer? You want a joint? We have some dynamite grass.”

  “Uh, no, thanks.”

  “It was interesting to see you Saturday night, Trey. We heard a rumor you played football, and then we heard another one that you were a bouncer in a nightclub in New Orleans. Later somebody said you were in Angola for killing a pimp in a fight.”

  “Never been to New Orleans. Never been to jail, either.”

  “We, uh…” For the first time since my arrival I realized my presence was making her jittery. “We don’t really have the money to attend a party like the one Saturday night. We got in free.”

  “So did I.”

  “I mean, most of those people paid five thousand dollars to get through the door, as if that was even possible on our budget. I wore one of India’s old dresses. She only wears stuff once.” She looked around the room, trying to see it through my eyes.

  “John at work?”

  “He has a friend who owns a security company, and he subs when people call in sick. He’s usually back by midnight so he can get up at six and plan his day with the paint crews. The worst part on Saturday night for John was how bad you made him look in front of the family.”

  “I tried not to hurt him.”

  “I noticed that and I appreciate it.”

  “I never hurt you either, Echo.”

  “Okay. Sure. Great. If you came here to talk about that, I guess I’ll come right out and say what I have to say. I could have looked you up to tell you this, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. You and I both know you never hurt me. I admit that. I should have admitted it a long time ago. I don’t know why I ever said you did, and I’ve felt ashamed for blaming you ever since the words were out of my mouth. I came so close to retracting them that night. But I didn’t. We both know you didn’t hurt me. I just wish the whole thing had never happened. Any of it.” She started crying and then grew quiet, and for the first time since I arrived, her soft blue eyes, which had been flitting about, fixed themselves on mine, as if begging me to stare into her soul and recognize the need for absolution. “Can you ever forgive me?”

  “You weren’t raped?”

  “No, I was. But it was somebody else.”

  “Why did you lie?”

  “It’s a long story, and to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure why.”

  “Because I’m black?”

  “No, no. It was never anything like that. I am just so sorry.”

  “Sorry enough to tell everyone it wasn’t me?”

  “I’d like to, but I can’t. There are considerations you don’t know about.”

  “Tell me about them. Help me understand.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Considerations such as who really attacked you, and what he has over you that made you lie in the first place?” When she didn’t respond, I continued, “I don’t expect you to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times or anything, but it would be decent of you to tell a few specific people. I don’t expect to see her again, but it would ease my mind to know your mother didn’t hate me. And my father.”

  “And my father?”

  “I don’t give a damn about him.”

  “It must have been so awful for you to be alone for all these years.”

  “I wasn’t alone. I found my real mother. And a brother I didn’t know I had. And then I joined the fire department, where I have nine hundred and fifty brothers and sisters.” Before either of us could say anything else, two small boys came screaming into the living room, the smallest diving into his mother’s lap, the second boy hot on his brother’s heels. They looked remarkably similar to Echo’s husband. The boy in her lap sat up and ran a plump hand across the shaved portion of his mother’s skull wonderingly, and then she took them back into the bedroom while I waited.

  The mantel was thick with photos and awards. She’d won awards in college for playing the violin. There were photos of Echo performing in small clubs, two trophies for pistol marksmanship bestowed to John Armstrong, and a ribbon one of her sons had earned in first grade—trophies that proved these people had lived and had passions and cared enough to collect the residue of their days.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Echo said, returning to the room, where she sat in the same chair, wrapping her legs together again in the same manner. “It’s bedtime and they’re getting cranky. It’s…my life has gone in directions I didn’t think it would, but by and large I’m pleased with it. I hope you are with yours, too. I hope I didn’t ruin too much of it.”

  “What you did mostly was demolish my faith in human nature.”

  “Yes. Well, human nature’s never been much.”

  “Are you going to tell my father I’m not guilty?”

  “I have to think about it. This isn’t easy for me, you know.”

  “If it was, you would have come to me before I came to you.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what really happened that night, are you?”

  “It’s too embarrassing. And it would hurt other people.”

  As I drove toward Seattle on the freeway, I found myself in a kind of time warp. Seeing Echo so far removed from the past, where she’d been stuck in my brain all these years, was bizarre to say the least. She had a story to tell but wasn’t telling it, just as she hadn’t told it nineteen years ago.

  38. DOWNSTAIRS UPSTAIRS

  COOPER HENDRICKSON, Z CLUB SURVIVOR>

  We’re in the Z Club maybe an hour when Limogene decides to go outside and have a smoke. I don’t use tobacco products, but she does, so we’re headed down the stairs when Limo meets these two chicks she knows from beautician school. We start rapping, and then the cat who was guarding the door and collecting tickets comes running up past us. I told all this to the cops a million times already.

  I’m standing with my back to the stairs when he runs past and we hear the sound of glass breaking. The girls start waving at me to turn around, and when I do there’s smoke flowing up the stairs. They’re telling me to go down and see what’s happenin’, so I walk over to the stairs and peek around, and just about the time I get there this big ball of flame starts rising up the stairwell, burning up all these old posters and billboa
rd sheets on the walls. I can feel the heat on my face. I still got no eyebrows. Check it out.

  So I turn around to run, and that’s when I realize I’m having a hard time outrunning it. This shit is just roaring up the stairs at me, flames coming around my ears and black smoke racing in front of me until I almost can’t see where I’m going. I didn’t know fire could move that fast. Faster than I was running. Burns all the hair on the back of my neck and melts my jacket to my shirt. I race past Limogene and her friends so fast I’m ashamed.

  Anyway, they catch me up, and the four of us are running into the main hall shouting “Fire!” and there’s a bunch of cats standing there looking at us like we’re nuts. One of them saunters toward the stairwell to see for himself, you know, like he’s going to make me look bad by going back the way I came, even though you can already see this black smoke coming through the doorway. For some reason I can’t explain to this day we stop to watch him. Maybe because his reaction is so cool and he’s so certain we’re dumb shits that for just a few seconds there, I am beginning to doubt my own sanity, you know, like, maybe there really isn’t any fire. Or maybe I just want to see him get his ass burned. So this cat gets maybe five feet past the doorway toward the stairs, and the next thing I know he’s running to save his ass, too. Runs clean across the dance floor, past us, past the DJ, and into the back behind the stage. Leaves all his friends. Turns out later he was one of the dead cats they found at the bottom of the stairs.

  Limogene and I don’t know what to do. You can see this big orange ball of flame poking out the top of the stairs, the whole place filling up with smoke. Limo’s girlfriends split, so we didn’t have them to think about. They both make it out, too. We kind of run around looking for somebody who knows what’s what, but there isn’t nobody. Everybody coughing. The girls screaming. A couple of guys shouting orders that don’t make sense.

  It doesn’t take but a minute for the hall to fill up with this black smoke. In less than a minute—I think it was less than a minute—it’s banking down so we are breathing it. And then it starts to get real hard to see.

  Limogene says, “Let’s follow him,” meaning the guy who ran behind the stage. So we follow the cat onto the stage, both of us thinking there must be an exit behind the curtains, else in the old days how would the actors get in and out? It’s smoky up on the stage, but we end up going down this dark flight of stairs. Go down so far I’m afraid we’re going into the basement. It’s pitch-black, and the only lights we have are from cigarette lighters, and this guy has an Indiglo watch he’s using to see his way. Somebody says careful with that cigarette lighter, bud, you don’t want to start a fire. Everybody laughs, and we all feel like we know each other after that. Not too much smoke down there at first. When we get to the bottom there are about ten of us. The doors are locked.

  We think we’re going to have time to figure it out, but after a couple of minutes nobody is figuring out shit. A couple of people call out on their cells, man, but what good does that do? This girl talking to her grandmother, telling her to call 911 when she could have called it her own-self.

  Then the smoke starts banking down the stairs. Somebody who works there—one of the owners, I think—says the door is locked because people used to sneak in without paying. A couple of people go back up the stairs to try their luck, and we start to do that, too, but it’s smokier than shit, and halfway up, Limo—well, she has asthma from when she was a kid and she’s a little heavy and I suppose her tobacco use doesn’t help—so her getting back up them stairs is about impossible. I tell her to stay there and I’ll go look for another way out.

  So I go back up them stairs with Limo telling me not to leave her and me telling her it’s going to be okay, and we’re both knowing I’m talking out my butt. If I could live anything over in my life it would be the moment I decided to leave her.

  I go up them stairs, and it is so smoky on the main floor now I can barely tell where I’m walking, and it’s starting to get real hot. There is nobody around. I mean, nobody. It’s spooky. We go down and there is a shitload of people, and when I get back up, I’m alone. After a while I hear some people moving and coughing, but they were a long way off and they sound like they’re crawling or something.

  I go across the back of the stage, and there is this door which I figure is a closet or a dressing room or something, and I try to open it but somebody is pushing on it from the other side. Finally I jack it open, get my leg in there and force it, and there are like six or eight people in this tiny room, and they are all yelling out this window for the fire department to come and get them, and somebody slams the door behind me because they don’t want all the smoke to come in.

  After a while the fire department puts a ladder up and starts helping us down. Some girl firefighter up there helping us onto the ladder one at a time, everybody pushing and shit. For some reason I’m the last one out. After I get to the street, I start telling them about Limogene, and they ask me where the stairs are, but by that time I’m so turned around I don’t have a fuckin’ clue.

  So they take me to some chief, and he tells these two firefighters to take me around the building to look for the stairs. Big crowd at this point, talking shit to the firefighters, grabbing at the two guys I’m with. I have to tell cats to leave them alone, these guys were trying to help me find Limogene.

  So we go to the back side of the building, and there’s firefighters and ladders and people with broken legs laying on top of cars. And there’s Limogene’s friends from beautician school, and I ask if they’ve seen Limo, but one of them’s got a bone poking out of her leg and doesn’t want to do anything but wail. I can’t blame her.

  When we find the stairs, the doors are open, and Limogene and everybody else is gone. So now I’m thinking she got out and she’s looking for me while I’m looking for her and we’re in this circle-jerk thing. So I go around the building the opposite of the way we came, and I see a couple of chicks who got out, but I don’t see her. I remember where we parked, and I go look at the car to see if maybe she’s been there, but nothing seems disturbed. I’m starting to get frantic. Limogene is the person who kept me sane when I was in Lompoc.

  After about a half hour of watching the fire and using my cell to call her home and her mom’s home, I call the hospital, where they say they won’t give out names. So I’m talking to some fire officer, and he tells me a couple of the people they found at the bottom of the stairs are dead. He don’t know which ones, but a couple. By that point I’m starting to go nuts, so I get with my friend Jarvis and we head down to the hospital. They tell us, yeah, there’s some dead folk ain’t been identified, and we can look at ’em if we think we know them. So we do. These are the first dead people I ever saw. Limogene’s the last one. It’s like she’s asleep or something, just laying there in her blue dress with her eyes closed, a little bit of soot around her nostrils.

  39. HAND TO MOUTH

  JAMIE ESTEVEZ>

  Trey has been so pleasant and easy to get along with all morning, I’m beginning to wonder why I lost sleep last night worrying about him. It’s my turn to drive, so I’ve been ferrying us from one firehouse to another as we interview firefighters. I’m hoping my nervousness will go away and that I don’t snap at him as I have so many times over the past few days, because I’m beginning to get concerned at what he could perceive only as my unremitting foul humor.

  Today we’ve managed to talk to four firefighters who were at the Z Club, but we covered mostly old ground. They were all working as hard as they could fighting the fire and none had been involved in any rescues or seen any civilians inside. After finishing with the firefighters, we spoke to Cooper Hendrickson, who told us how his girlfriend died. Cooper is twenty-eight but still lives with his mother, along with two grown brothers and a sister and her two children, in a falling-down house between Rainier Avenue and Lake Washington—a house just far enough down the wrong side of the hill to depress its real estate value. Judging by the way his mother and sister wer
e dressed, cash was in short supply. When we showed up mid-morning, Hendrickson and his sister had been glued to the TV watching The Price Is Right.

  Hendrickson’s grief over his girlfriend seemed genuine. He had the attitude of someone with less education than street time and the mien of a man who’d spent some years in stir: a man determined not to let society co-opt any more years of his life. From his testimony I got a hint of the panic and hopelessness of those inside the Z Club, and I realized it was a miracle more people didn’t die. Unless some court deemed the fire department negligent, it was unlikely, I thought, that he would collect any money from the city for his girlfriend’s death.

  Now we were on our way to Mercer Island, where the housing prices were as elevated as they were depressed in Hendrickson’s neighborhood.

  As Trey sat beside me in the passenger seat, he appeared almost as relaxed as I was tense, a contrast that for some reason made me see red. I didn’t enjoy the constant tension between us. It made me furious that he didn’t seem affected by it while I could barely squeeze an intelligent word out of my mouth and that he was casually commenting on the traffic around us while I had a death grip on the steering wheel.

  “What did you think of Hendrickson?” I asked.

  “I used to play ball with him at the Garfield Gym.”

  “He didn’t mention it.”

  “He gave me a little head nod when we came in. A couple of years ago he stopped playing, and a little later he and his brother knocked off a couple of grocery stores for drug money and got caught. I don’t think he’s been out long.”