The Fireman

by Hill,Joe

  “Tom told me his daughter would never hurt him. I can’t believe he was so wrong about that,” Harper said.

  Harper was surprised to see blotches of color break out on Michael’s cheeks. He touched a finger to his lips, almost as if he was shushing her. “Oh, I kinda done that on my own. Carol told me Father Storey knew about how we took care of Harold, but she thought when he had time to think about it, he’d accept it had to be done. Only then I met up with all of you to go rescue the convicts. And on the walk to the water, Father Storey pulled me aside and warned me we were going to have to lock Mama Carol up when we got back. Lock her up and send her into exile. He was pretty upset. I figured maybe it would just be easiest if he died for the camp. Tell you what. That son of a gun had a hell of a hard head, though. I hit him with my nightstick hard enough to smash a watermelon into slush and he didn’t even go down for almost ten seconds. Just stood there swaying, lookin at me with a puzzled kinda smile on his face.”

  “When Carol finds out what you did to her father, she’ll have you killed. She’ll kill you herself.”

  “She won’t find out.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “It’ll be a lie. Everything you say will be a lie. And I’ll make sure Nick and Allie die with you. Or die later. Whatever. Your only chance to protect those kids is to throw yourself on your sword.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Done talkin’,” Michael said, and looked at Nick. “One more word out of you, one more, and I swear to God, I will spray the little deaf boy’s empty head all over his fuckin’ pillow. Stick yourself. Do it.”

  Harper stuck herself.

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  2

  Someone slapped her, turned her head halfway around.

  “I’n slurry,” Harper said, trying to apologize, sure she had done something wrong but unable to remember what it was.

  Jamie Close slapped her again. “You aren’t yet, but you’re going to be. Stand the fuck up. I’m not carrying your fat ass, bitch.”

  There was someone on either side of her, pulling her to her feet by her arms, but every time they let go, her legs went boneless and folded under her and they’d have to grab her again.

  “Be careful,” Carol said. “The baby. The baby is an innocent in this. If the baby is harmed, someone will answer for it.”

  The world was a bad Picasso. Carol’s eyes were both on the left side of her face and her mouth was turned sideways. Harper was in the waiting area now, but the room was different, the geometry no longer made sense. The left wall was only about the size of a cupboard, while the right-hand wall was as large as a drive-in movie screen. The floor was so tilted, Harper was surprised anyone could stand upright.

  Ben Patchett stood behind Carol. Ben had a mouthful of little ferret teeth and little ferret eyes set in his round, smooth face. Those eyes flashed yellow with fear and fascination.

  “Give me four hours with her,” Ben said. “She’ll tell me everyone who was in it with her. She’ll give up the whole conspiracy. I know I can make her talk.”

  “You can also make her miscarry. Didn’t you hear what I just said about the baby?”

  “I wouldn’t hurt her. I just want to talk to her. I want to give her a chance to do the right thing.”

  “I loved Father Storey,” Harper tried to say to Carol—this seemed an important fact to establish. What came out, though, was, “I luffed other stories.”

  “No, Ben. I don’t want you to question her. I don’t want her help and I don’t want her information. I don’t want to hear her side of the story. I don’t want to hear another word out of her lying mouth.”

  Harper swung her gaze to Ben and for a moment her vision sharpened and things came into focus. Her voice came into focus, too, and she spoke six words, enunciating them with the care and precision of the profoundly drunk. “She and Michael set Harold up.”

  But reality was too much effort to maintain. When Carol replied, her mouth was on the wrong side of her face again.

  “Make her be quiet, Jamie. Please.”

  Jamie Close grabbed Harper’s jaw and forced her mouth open and rammed in a stone. It was too big. It felt like it was the size of a fist. Jamie held her mouth shut while someone else wrapped duct tape around and around her head.

  “Everything you want to know you can find out from Renée Gilmonton or Don Lewiston later,” Carol said. “We know they were in it, anyway. We’ve got Gilmonton’s notebook. We know they were both candidates to run the show. Only five votes for Gilmonton, that must’ve hurt her pride.”

  “And four votes for Allie,” Michael said, from somewhere off to Harper’s right. “What about that?”

  Carol bowed her head. Her features floated around her face like flakes of snow drifting dreamily through a snow globe, an effect Harper found nauseating.

  “We’ll give her a chance,” Carol said. “We’ll give her a chance once and for all to do the right thing. To show she’s with us. If she doesn’t take it, then there’s no helping her. She gets whatever Renée Gilmonton and Don Lewiston get.”

  A girl spoke from somewhere behind Harper. “Mother Carol, Chuck Cargill is outside. He’s got something to tell you about Don Lewiston. I think it’s bad.”

  Harper was queasy and the thought crossed her mind if she vomited, she would probably choke to death on it. Rough stone scraped the roof of her mouth and flattened her tongue. Yet something about it—the cold of it, the rough texture—was so real, so concrete, so there, she felt it pulling her out of her foggy-headed daze.

  The waiting room was crowded: Ben, Carol, Jamie, four or five others, Lookouts with guns. Michael stood in the doorway to the ward. Torchlight flickered—but not within the room, which was lit only by a pair of oil lamps. Harper had, for a long time, been aware of what she thought was a murmur of wind in the trees, a restless sigh and woosh, but now she determined that sound was the noise of an agitated, restless crowd. She wondered if the whole camp was out there. Probably.

  You are going to be killed in the next few minutes, she thought. This was her first clear notion since being slapped awake, and no sooner had the idea passed through her mind than she shook her head. No. She wasn’t. John was. They would kill her later, after they yanked the baby out of her.

  “Send him in,” Ben Patchett said. “Let’s have it.”

  Soft, nervous voices. The door creaked open on its spring, banged shut. Chuck Cargill stepped around Harper and presented himself to Carol. He looked ill, as if he had just had the wind knocked out of him, his pale face framed by bushy sideburns. His jeans were soaked to the thighs.

  “I’m so sorry, Mother Carol,” he said. He was shaking, from the cold, or nervousness, or most likely a combination of the two.

  “I’m sure you have no reason to be, Cargill,” Carol told him, her voice thin with strain.

  “I went over to the Fireman’s island with Hud Loory, just like Mr. Patchett told us, to get Mr. Lewiston. He had the tarp off the boat and some sails hung over the sides to air them out or something. We thought he was belowdecks. We thought he didn’t know we were there. We thought we had the drop on him. There was a rope ladder hanging off the side of the boat and we started climbing up it, quiet as anything. But we had to put our rifles over our shoulders to climb. Hud was up front, and when he pulled himself over the side of the boat, that old—that old basstid thwacked him with an oar. Next thing I knew I was looking up into the barrel of Hud’s rifle.”

  No one spoke and Cargill seemed to have momentarily lost his capacity to continue. The pieces of Carol’s face had stopped drifting around, and her features finally stuck more or less where they belonged. Harper could keep them from floating loose through an intense act of concentration, although the effort was giving her a headache. Carol’s l
ips were white.

  “Then what happened?” she asked at last.

  “We had to do it. We had to,” Cargill said, and he sank to one knee and took Carol’s hand and began to sob. A green bubble of snot swelled in his right nostril. “I’m so sorry, Mother Carol. I’ll take a rock. I’ll take a rock for a week!”

  “Are you saying he’s gone?” Carol asked.

  Cargill nodded and rubbed his tears and snot on the back of her hand, held her knuckles to his cheek. “We put the boat in the water. He made us. When Hud came around he made us help him launch the boat at gunpoint. He took our guns and—and he went. He just went. There was nothing we could do. He got the sails up like there was nothing to it and we—we threw some rocks, you know, we told him—we told him he’d be sorry—we—we—” Another sob broke forth and he shut his eyes. “Mother Carol, I swear to you, I’ll take a rock for as long as you want, just don’t make me go away!”

  Carol let him blot his tears against her hand for another moment, but when he began to kiss her knuckles, she looked sidelong at Ben Patchett. The big cop stepped forward and gripped the boy by the shoulders, prying him free and standing him up.

  He said, “You can go over what happened with me another time, Chuck. Mother Carol lost her father tonight. This isn’t the moment to blubber all over her. You don’t have anything to blubber about anyway. This is a place of mercy, son.”

  “For some,” Jamie Close said, in a low voice.

  Harper, though, felt a relief—an easing of pain—not unlike the passing of a contraction. Don was away. Ben wasn’t going to use pliers or a dish towel full of rocks on him to make him talk. Jamie Close wasn’t going to force a stone in his mouth and stick a noose around his neck. The thought of Don on a boat with the icy breeze whipping his hair back from his brow, and the sail straining and full of wind, made Harper feel a little better. Don would be angry, maybe, cursing and trembling, furious with himself for leaving behind so many good people. She hoped he would make his peace with it. It was stay and die or run while he had a chance. She was glad at least one of them was going to survive the evening.

  “Mother Carol,” Michael said, from over by the door into the ward. For the first time, Harper heard it: the soft tone of reverence in his voice that suggested not just affection but obsession. “What do you want to do with the Fireman? I can’t keep him drugged forever. We’re already out of the Versed. I used the last of it.”

  Carol lowered her head. The flame light of the oil lamp turned the sharp angles of her bare skull to bronze. “It can’t be up to me. I can’t think. My father always said when you can’t think you have to be quiet and still and listen for God’s small voice, but the only voice I hear is the one saying make this not true over and over. Make this not true. Make my daddy alive. My father wanted me to love and look after people, and I don’t know how to do that now. Whatever we do with the Fireman, it can’t be up to me.”

  “Then it should be up to the camp,” Ben said. “You have to say something to them, Carol. They’re all out there and half them are witless with fear. People are crying. People are saying this is it, this is the end of us. You need to talk to them. Tell them what you know. Put the story in front of them. If you can’t hear God’s small voice, you can at least hear theirs. All those voices got us through the last nine months and they can get us through tonight.”

  Carol swayed, staring at the floor. Michael put his hand on her bare arm—she wore a silky pink pajama top with short sleeves, too thin for the cold night—and for a moment his thumb slid gently up her shoulder, a lover’s caress that no one seemed to observe but Harper herself.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll bring them before the camp.”

  “In church?” Ben asked.

  “No!” Carol cried, as if this were a somehow obscene suggestion. “I don’t want either of them ever going in there again. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

  “What about Memorial Park?” Michael asked, his thumb moving gently up and down along the back of her arm again.

  “Yes,” Carol said, her eyes wide and unblinking and unfocused, as if she had had a little hit of Versed herself. “That’s where we’ll gather. That’s where we’ll decide.”

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  3

  In all the time they were talking, Harper felt awfully like she was climbing an endless flight of steps—climbing the steps up into the bell tower above the church, perhaps—rising steadily toward light and fresh air. Only those thousands of steps were in her head, and she was climbing back toward awareness and certainty. It was weary work and it gave her a headache. Her temples were full of splinters and needles. Her mouth was full of rock.

  What came to her now was the necessity of holding on to her calm and saving whoever could be saved. Nick and Allie came first; then she would try to protect the rest of them, Renée and everyone else who had put their trust and hopes in the Fireman and Nurse Willowes. She would tell whatever lies made the most sense to limit their suffering. If she was allowed the chance to speak at all, that is.

  It was worse, in some ways, knowing that she was going to have to watch John die and she would not be allowed to die with him. They would keep her alive long enough to cut open her stomach and pull her baby slithering and red from her uterus. She would die then. They would let her bleed to death while her baby squalled.

  The two Lookouts holding Harper’s arm turned her around to face the screen door.

  People stood together along the muddy track that led past the cafeteria to the chapel and Memorial Park. Some of them held torches. Harper saw suddenly that the walk across the camp was going to be very bad. She had never been a praying woman—Jakob had ruined God for her—but she said something like a prayer to herself now. She wasn’t sure who it was directed to: Father Storey, perhaps. When she closed her eyes for a moment she saw his frowning, creased, loving face. She prayed for the strength to hold on to the best parts of herself, here at the end.

  “Get a move on, bitch,” Jamie Close said, grabbing the nape of Harper’s neck and forcing her forward.

  Harper’s legs were still loose and wobbling under her, and the Lookouts who clutched her arms half marched, half dragged her out into the crispness of the night. Gail and Gillian Neighbors, Harper saw. They looked as frightened as she felt. Harper wanted to tell them not to be afraid, they were doing fine, but of course she had the stone in her mouth and duct tape wrapped around her head.

  The crowd shrank from her, as if she carried some contamination worse than Dragonscale. Children with dirty faces watched with a kind of wondering horror. A silver-haired woman in modish cat eye glasses was weeping and shaking her head.

  Norma Heald was the first to lunge forward, out of the mass of onlookers, and spit on her.

  “Killer’s whore!” she screamed in a raggedy voice.

  Harper flinched, staggered, and Gail squeezed her arm hard, steadying her. Harper shook her head, reflexively—no, not me, I didn’t—then made herself stop. For the next half hour she had to be a killer’s whore. She didn’t know what would happen to Nick after she was dead, but while she was alive, she had to do what she could.

  “How could you do it!” screamed a beautiful young woman with a blotchy face. Ruth something? She wore a nightgown with little blue flowers on it, under a puffy orange parka. “How could you! He loved you! He would’ve died for you!”

  Another thick, curded wad of spit landed in Harper’s short hair.

  Ahead, Harper saw the massive, rude stones and that rough granite bench that she had thought looked like a place of sacrifice—a place where a white queen would slaughter a holy lion. The rest of the camp waited there.

  As they came into the outer ring of the circle, Harper’s right leg gave completely and she went down on her knees. Gillian leaned over her
, as if to whisper some encouragement.

  “I don’t care if you are pregnant,” she said. “I hope you die here.” She squeezed Harper’s nose, shutting her nostrils. “Far as I’m concerned, you and the baby can both die.”

  For one terrible moment Harper had no air. Her head was as empty as her lungs. Gillian could kill her as easily as she could flip a light switch. Then Jamie had Harper by the back of the neck again, hoisted her to her feet and shoved her on, smacked her across the ass to get her moving, and Harper could breathe again.

  “Giddy-up!” she shouted, and some men cheered.

  She looked back and saw Michael walking between Ben and Carol. Michael had the Fireman over his shoulder, carrying him the way he might’ve carried a sack of oats. The Fireman had always seemed an adult and Michael had always seemed a child, but now Harper could see the redheaded boy was bigger than John, broader through the shoulders. It looked like there was something—burlap sacking, perhaps—pulled over the Fireman’s head.

  Harper was marched to one of those tall, crooked stone plinths. A boy—the kid Harper thought of as Bowie—came forward carrying a yellow mop handle, and Harper wondered if she was about to take a clubbing. No. The Neighbors sisters yanked Harper’s arms straight back. The mop handle went across the far side of the stone column, and the girls used more of the duct tape to bind her wrists to it. When they were done, she was trapped, with her back to the jagged stone and her arms wrenched behind her.

  Chuck Cargill and some other boys stood the Fireman up against one of the standing stones ten feet away. They pulled his arms back and used the tape to bind his wrists to a shovel braced against the far side of the rock. As soon as they let go his legs gave out—he wasn’t conscious—and he sat down, his feet splayed apart and his chin resting against his chest.