Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  “You were so wonderful that day,” she said. “There I was, covered in that god-awful . . . I don’t even want to think about it . . . and you were so cool and collected.”

  “That’s our boy,” Tronstad said, grinning.

  Iola said, “Gum, you promised me a tour of the station.”

  “Yeah, give her the tour, Jason,” said Johnson, his cheeks tightening into knots as he smiled.

  “Your first name’s Jason?” she asked.

  “Just call me Gum,” I said.

  “Juicy Fruit is what we call him,” Tronstad said, elbowing Johnson on his way out of the room with the plate of cookies Iola had brought.

  “Come on, Robert. Ms. Pederson wants to be alone with the boy wonder.”

  As Lieutenant Sears left to take a phone call, Iola Pederson’s fingernails dug into my arm like talons. You almost would have thought she was as nervous to be alone with me as I was to be with her.

  “Gum. That’s a funny name,” she said, her face so close, I was afraid to breathe, the combination of perfume, touch, and proximity intoxicating. For some reason I’d always been a sucker for older women.

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  “We’re related to Judy Garland, whose real name was Frances Gumm. Except they spelled it with two m’s. My mother’s family changed the spelling.”

  In the apparatus bay I told her about the firefighters on my shift, Ted Tronstad and Robert Johnson, as well as our officer, Lieutenant Sears. I explained that the battalion chief was also stationed here. Johnson was African American and the driver on Engine 29. He had a paunch now, but he’d played football in high school and nearly every day mentioned the glory years. A devoted family man, with a wife and daughter, he was also the station philosopher and had opinions on everything from how the department should be run to the snazziest Motown tunes of all time.

  Ted Tronstad had been working on Engine 29 for seven years and was, as Johnson had once declared in a moment of bitterness, “descended from a long line of poor white trash.” Tronstad had a reputation around the department for being funnier than a couple of toddlers giving each other haircuts. He was tall, wiry, and nervous, a man who lost weight at the drop of a hat, continually gobbling meat to keep flesh on his bones. He had black circles under his penetrating brown eyes, a result no doubt of his propensity for burning the candle at both ends, and he went through women at about the same rate he went through beer. He’d recently divorced for the third time. His life revolved around his HarleyDavidson motorcycle and talking women into the sack. He and Johnson amused themselves by playing an endless stream of practical jokes on each other.

  I found it ironic that behind his back Johnson accused Tronstad of being a lecher, while Tronstad was irritated that Johnson managed to coerce every female visitor to the station into a full-body hug. Tronstad believed Johnson had an unfair advantage, in that he could leverage women’s fear of being accused of racism into physical contact. To my way of thinking, Tronstad and Johnson were like an old married couple who’d assembled a long list of gripes about each other, which they each confided to the neighbor over the back fence—in this case, me. Lieutenant Sears had been with us for four months, and I still wasn’t completely comfortable working under him.

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  E A R L E M E R S O N

  “So,” Iola Pederson said, “you have the driver. You have the officer. But why do they call the two riding in the back the tailboard guys?”

  “There used to be a shelf on the back of fire engines called a tailboard. Firefighters rode back there, standing on the tailboard and holding on to a metal bar. About twenty years ago a woman firefighter in town fell off, cracked her head, and died. Now we sit in a crew cab behind the officer and driver, but we still call it riding the tailboard. Just like they still call it the hitch when the bell goes off at zero seven hundred, because that was when they used to size up the harnesses for that day’s team of horses.”

  Iola remained intensely focused on me in a way that made my skin flush with embarrassment. We’d only known each other ten minutes, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she had the hots for me. Tronstad could work that sort of magic with women, but I was a stumblebum when it came to the opposite sex.

  As it turned out, Iola Pederson’s forte was focus. Her attentions aligned on me like a searchlight that burned bright and hot and left me feeling cold and desperate when she turned away. Despite all the effort I invested in making myself immune to her ministrations, despite the fact that I told myself she was old enough to be my mother, I couldn’t get enough of her as we walked through the station.

  Surrounded by a tidy little lawn we mowed and watered every Saturday, Fire Station 29 sat on a small triangle of property between two residential streets in a quiet little neighborhood of single-family homes in West Seattle.

  Except for its small basement, Station 29 was built on one level, constructed around a barnlike apparatus bay with a single roll-up door in front and an identical door in back. We exited through the east door with red lights and siren blaring and came home quietly through the west door, which accounted for why homes on the east side sold for slightly less than homes on the west. We had a fifty-foot hose tower for hanging our cotton-jacketed fire hose to dry. In addition to Engine 29, our apparatus bay housed the Battalion 7 chief ’s buggy, as well as a spare engine. On the north side of the apparatus bay were bathrooms—male and female—a bunk room, and a small TV room. On the south side of the apparatus bay were the watch office and front door, our radio scanner, our

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  computer printer, and our watch book, into which everything of note concerning the rig and station was entered. At night, one crew member was assigned to “night watch” and slept on a rollout bunk in the middle of the room.

  Violating department protocol, I took Iola into the bunk room on the other side, showing her where we slept, showered, and changed. “Women sleep here, too?” she asked.

  “Sure. There’s a woman on the other shift.”

  “She sleeps here with the guys?”

  “With one other person.”

  “You mean it’s just her and him? Over here alone all night? Aren’t there ever any—you know—romantic complications? It would be so easy to slip into somebody else’s bunk.”

  “Stanislow’s gay.”

  “All the women in the department can’t be gay. There haven’t been any romances?”

  “Sure there have, but not here.”

  “I’ve always wondered about men and women working together in the fire station. It must be tempting.”

  “Not with Stanislow, it’s not.”

  “What if I worked here?” She gave me a long look. I could feel something beginning to happen here, and it frightened me almost as much as it excited me.

  A minute later on the apparatus floor, she had me strap her into one of our MSA backpacks, where it was a monumental struggle to ignore the way the shoulder straps accentuated her breasts. As we walked around the station, she kept finding excuses to touch me, and I found myself beginning to perspire. At one point she excused herself to use the “powder room” and returned with an additional button undone on her blouse, exposing the top of a lacy black bra. “This is just so charming. I’ve always wondered what the inside of a fire station looked like. It must be so sexy living here.”

  “I’ve never thought about it like that.”

  “How can you not? You can almost smell the sense of adventure in these walls. I’ve always loved adventures.”

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  E A R L E M E R S O N

  We descended the stairs to the windowless basement, where we kept the pinball machines, weight benches, and stationary bicycle. Iola tested the bicycle and then had me spot her on the weight bench, where she managed to bench-press sixty pounds. As she lay on the bench, recovering from her efforts and looking up at me past the weight bar, I began to get the feeling I was headed for trouble. Her skirt wa
s hiked up her thighs, and her auburn hair was splayed out and falling off the bench almost to the floor, and from above her where I stood, I had an unparalleled view down her blouse.

  Looking at her upside down, I got the crazy notion she wanted me to kiss her. It was cracked, I know, because I’d known her less than twenty minutes by then and she was much older than me, and I had enough trouble reading women right side up. It was hard to know what made me do it because I’d never done anything quite like it before, but I leaned over slowly, and as I attempted to kiss her, she raised herself up and kissed me back, our faces upside down against each other. It was funny, because I really thought I would get my face slapped, which was going to happen later, much later. Instead, I got an erection.

  “How’s your father? Was he okay?” I asked.

  “My father?” She lay back down, trying to suppress a smile, which was of course, from my point of view, a frown. People look outlandish upside down, their features all scrunched into this little space, their foreheads huge.

  “When we were at your house you called him Daddy. ”

  “He’s doing fine. He had a black eye for a week. Are you changing the subject? Have I embarrassed you? You’re not embarrassed, are you?

  Haven’t you ever kissed a woman before?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Come here.”

  She grabbed my fire-department belt buckle, pulled me down, and kissed me again, once again upside down. “I’m on duty. There are people here.”

  “That’s part of the fun of being naughty. Or haven’t you figured that out? I thought you guys were supposed to be brave.”

  “How about if I meet you tomorrow?”

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  “Tomorrow will be a different day. Tomorrow it won’t be naughty. In fact, tomorrow it won’t happen.”

  “But—” We kissed again.

  “Have you ever done it in a fire station?”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever fucked in a fire station?”

  “Uh, not recently.”

  “Well, then, here’s your chance.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow. What do you say?”

  “You’re not listening. I have this fantasy about doing it in a fire station. That’s why I came here.”

  “No, come on. Tomorrow night.”

  When she sat up and began rearranging her skirt, I realized I was facing an ultimatum. Say good-bye forever, or bow to this insane whimsy of hers. We looked at each other for a minute under the dim basement lights. I’d never been faced with a choice quite like this and had no reference points for making a decision. The proper course of action, obviously, was to take her upstairs and send her packing. I wasn’t sure if having sex on duty was an offense punishable by termination, but if not, it should be. On the other hand, it was almost ten o’clock at night, the chief was out, and he wouldn’t return until late. Lieutenant Sears had retired for the evening, and I’d seen Johnson heading for the bunk room earlier. Tronstad had the night watch and would be ratholed for hours in front of the television. I could most likely get away with this.

  In college I’d walked in on my roommate while he and a girl he picked up at a party were humping; she’d had the same listless look in her eyes Iola Pederson had right now. Tronstad called it the doggy-fuck look, because it was what you saw on a couple of rutting dogs, the look you’d see in your own eyes if you were to look at yourself in the mirror during sex.

  As compliant as a schoolboy, I let her unbuckle my pants and pull my shorts down, burying me in her face. For about one second it was clinical and weird, but then it turned into something only a major earthquake or another hog falling out of the sky could halt.

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  E A R L E M E R S O N

  “Hey, you two,” Tronstad called from the top of the stairs. “You going to be screwing around down there all night?”

  A frog in my voice, I said, “We’re just talking.” Iola’s mouth was full or she might have said something, too.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Doublemint,” he said, closing himself inside the beanery. One would think, after that wake-up call, that I would come to my senses, but it didn’t happen.

  Some minutes later when the bell hit, Iola and I were coupled like rabbits, my trousers bunched around my ankles, her dress pushed up to her waist, a pair of deflated panties on the floor. The station alerter was still going when Tronstad rushed out of the beanery, stopped at the head of the stairs, and yelled, “Hey, Gum! We’re rollin’.” I heard Lieutenant Sears emerge from his office above us, and it was at that point that I did exactly the wrong thing: I hesitated. The thing about being on a fire crew is that you have to be ready to jump on the rig and dash out the door at the spur of the moment. Without complaint or reluctance, we get up from meals, out of the shower, off the phone or the shitter, or out of bed, and onto the rig. Some crews are faster than others, but since Sears had come on board four months earlier, we’d become one of the fastest in the city. We raced to the rig and we raced to the locations. If we didn’t, we got chewed out by Sears. We’d begun to take pride in it, timing ourselves, looking down on crews who took even five seconds longer than we did.

  I heard the apparatus bay doors open. I heard the apparatus fire up. And I faltered again . . . still moving, still straining against the woman on the weight bench, as if it were possible to finish what Iola Pederson and I were doing and still make the rig before it pulled out of the station. As if the bell had caught me drinking a glass of water instead of copulating. I’d been abducted by the most primal of biological imperatives.

  “I gotta go,” I said finally, trying to extricate myself from her while she kept her legs wrapped around my waist. Her eyes still had that doggy look. She must have thought this was some sort of game, because she wasn’t going to let me go. We wrestled until we uncoupled with a horrible sucking sound. As I sprinted for the stairs, she lay flat on her back on the

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  weight bench, clothing in disarray, hair mussed, face flushed, bare breasts melting against her ribs, white thighs squashed on either side of the bench.

  Upstairs, I stomped down the narrow corridor to the apparatus bay and emerged into the garage just as the engine roared out of the building, leaving me in a cloud of diesel exhaust, Tronstad staring back at me from the darkness of the crew cab.

  They were gone and I was not.

  I felt like vomiting.

  I’d screwed up a couple of times in my short career, but I’d never come close to anything like this. I didn’t know the official punishment for a missed alarm, but numerous unpleasant possibilities sprang to mind. I’d heard stories about people in my predicament, and in those stories the miscreants were invariably the butt of crude firefighter parody and ridicule. My name would be forever appended to that sorry list. For the longest time I just stood there staring at the empty apparatus bay, and then, as the timed house lights went off, I got the dry heaves and rushed over to the slop sink. The radio in the watch office had been spewing information on the alarm, so I knew they were headed to a confirmed house fire. Fully involved. Flames showing. Trapped occupants. Fully involved.

  Engine 29 didn’t get a call like this but once every couple of years. Dashing into the watch office, I ripped the computer printout from the machine and scanned the response information. The fire was on Arch Place SW, only blocks from the station.

  It couldn’t get any worse. I was going to have charges written on me. I was going to get a month off without pay. Chief Abbott might even try to take my job.

  On the apparatus floor I spotted my bunking boots and trouser combination where I’d left them, and next to the boots, my coat and helmet—

  which I routinely left in the crew cab, but which Tronstad must have offloaded, along with my portable radio.

  A fierce glimmer of hope struck me as I realized what Tronstad had in mind. I could don my gear and drive to the fire
in my own car. It wouldn’t absolve my infraction, but it might diminish the punishment. 4. MAD DOG GUM BECOMES THE

  DEPARTMENT LAUGHINGSTOCK

  W AS I SCRAMBLE into my gear, Iola Pederson materializes from the basement, and although I don’t notice her until she speaks, she is furious.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” One of her breasts is hanging out of her blouse, and I notice her panties bunched in her hand. The fact that I’ve noticed any of this bothers me. It bothers me a lot. Even now I’m thinking about sex.

  I brush past her and flee the building through the personnel door next to the large roll-up apparatus door at the rear of the station, squeezing in my bulky turnout clothing into the Recaro seat, clumsily working the racing-style clutch and brake pedals of my Subaru WRX with my fat rubber boots.

  As I swing out of the driveway behind the station, I catch a glimpse of Iola watching me like an abandoned puppy. I pray she has the good sense to vacate the station before we get back. Things will be incomparably worse if Lieutenant Sears finds out I missed the call because I was banging some woman in the basement. With adrenaline and guilt saturating my bloodstream, none of this is easy. I am sweating and trembling and on the verge of messing my britches. I feel as if I’ve been punched in the stomach, as if my pounding heart is skipping every third beat.

  My WRX is basically a rally car, and I drive it that way now, running stop signs and red lights, zipping around what little traffic there is on the roads at this time of night, sliding through corners and working the short-throw shifter I’ve installed. Throughout it all, I am unable to catch my breath. More astonishing than anything else is the fact that my fall from grace had taken less than ten minutes. I’m thinking, This is the worst fuckup of my life.