Pyro (26 page)

60. PEOPLE SAY YOUR MOTHER WAS A WHORE

         
Katie Fryer was working a trade for Zeke on the tailboard of the engine. It was January 2.

“What did you say?”

“I asked if your mother was really a prostitute,” Katie said.

“Where did you hear that?”

“They’re talking about it in the beanery.”

“Who is?”

“Everybody. Haven’t you seen this morning’s papers?”

The irony was that until today I’d been relentlessly scouring every local newspaper for news of the arsonist, listening to news on a transistor radio as I walked to work, checking the wire services and the websites for the local papers four and five times a day. The arsons had been an enormous ongoing threat to the city, and each day the letters-to-the-editor columns and radio call-in shows were flooded with exhortations for more investigators, along with threats of renewed vigilante patrols, talk of recalling the fire chief and the mayor. It was unlikely any new angle would not be seized by the dogs of the local media. I began to get a sick feeling
I
was that new angle.

I knew whatever was in the papers was bad by the way the lieutenant I replaced that morning stared. Joe Williams wasn’t sensitive enough to have figured out on his own that I would be wounded by the articles; somebody must have told him, which meant they were all in the other room talking about my feelings. The idea made me cringe. “Hey,” Williams said cautiously.

“How’s it goin’?”

“Fine.”

Moving through the early morning routine on the apparatus floor, I could feel adrenaline pumping through me in amounts it never did on a fire alarm. Much as I wanted to dash into the beanery and read the newspapers, I’d learned long ago not to let anybody know I cared.

Eventually, I sequestered myself in my office with an armful of papers. There were two articles in
The Seattle Times,
one of which began on the front page. I recognized the author: Anthony R. Webber, the reporter who’d found me at the garage fire the other night.

Webber started by recapping the events of the past few weeks, the injuries to civilians and firefighters. He theorized freely that, because of the injuries and roof collapse, my crew was being targeted by the arsonist. When he asked Deputy Chief William Hertlein about it, Hertlein said, “No targeting, just inexperience. Some of our younger officers haven’t gained the skill to handle certain situations that come up.”

It was a public slap in the face from a man I’d KO’d in private.

Hertlein, who had burned Pickett and screwed us in Pennington’s mansion by turning off our fans, now claimed
I
lacked experience.

Further on, Webber drew a connection between my father’s death at the hands of an arsonist and the fact that his son was now a lieutenant in the SFD fighting a similar string of arson fires. “In 1978 Wollf’s father, who hadn’t been wearing an oxygen mask, was found dead in a burning basement.” Oxygen mask? Our tanks contained compressed air. Pure oxygen could make dirt burn.

The
Times
chronicled the fires my father fought twenty-five years ago, comparing that arson string to ours, comparing his career to mine. There were side-by-side photographs of my father and me. The head shots we’d each had taken for our fire department ID cards. We might have been twins in some sort of time-travel experiment.

Apparently the father-son-arsonist triangle wasn’t enough of a story, because there was also a sidebar about my mother’s fall from grace and her untimely death at the hands of Alfred T. Osbourne. About how, after my father’s death, she had turned to drink and ultimately to men to drown her sorrow. They made it seem as if she went from the funeral directly to the tavern, failing to mention the eighteen months when she didn’t leave her bedroom.

“Without Wollf’s calming influence, Emma Wollf soon became an habitué of the local tavern scene, sometimes bringing home paying customers to the cramped apartments where her two young boys were sleeping.”

Paying customers? I couldn’t help but wonder if this peculiar slant on the story hadn’t come about because I’d refused to give Webber an interview.

In another sidebar titled the brothers, the
Times
capsulized our school records, including my expulsion from three different high schools for fighting. They listed Neil’s incarcerations, beginning with the one for the murder of Alfred T. Osbourne. They chronicled my career in the fire department, inserting quotes about me from unnamed sources inside the department. “Few close friends,” said one. “One of the most aggressive firefighters I’ve fought fire with.” “Has problems with authority.”

My life had been lived in a shell, and now the media crows had broken it open on the rocks of journalistic integrity.

I sat in the chair for a long time trying to breathe. Deep, heavy inspirations. Purposeful expirations. It could have been worse. There were things nobody knew about, things that mercifully would never appear in any paper. For instance, nobody knew about my drunk mother passing out on the freeway with two boys in the car; nobody had witnessed Neil reach over her shoulder to steer the car to the shoulder until we could revive her.

All morning I hid out in my office futzing about with paperwork and rereading the articles. Just after nine I got a call from a columnist with the
King County Journal,
the major paper serving the growing population east of Lake Washington. “When can I come out and interview you? I want to ask about the arsonist.”

“You can’t.” I hung up.

Next came a television producer who wanted me to drive downtown and appear on the noon news. I refused that too. I was rude to them all. I couldn’t help it.

At ten I knocked on the office next door. “Steve?”

“Yeah.” He had a dressing on his right wrist, where the handcuffs had marked him a week ago.

“Your burns okay?”

“What d’ya want?”

“I spoke to Bill Kerrigan on Monday.”

“Who?”

“Kerrigan. Retired Fire Investigation.”

“Yeah, Bill. Sure. I used to know him. Hell of a fisherman.”

“He said you knew my father.”

“A lot of guys knew him.”

I was in the doorway, Slaughter at his desk about seven feet away. The thick glasses. The shock of hair. The Fuller brush mustache. That way of holding himself that told you he knew what the world was about and had licked most of it.

“Your dad meant a lot to me, Paul.” His eyes began watering over. “Your old man showed me the ropes. He took me up into my first attic fire.” Slaughter stared at his desk, his elbows looking like flesh-colored fudge as they pressed into the glass-covered desktop. “I always had a warm spot for you, Paul. Because of your father. I tried to look out for you.”

“The way I remember it, you were on your way to firing me.”

“I didn’t want you to get hurt like your old man.” He looked up at me. “Nobody even knew he was down there. That was the worst part.”

We looked at each other for a few moments before the bell hit. Aid tones. It was for Attack 6. Slaughter brushed past me, and I knew we would never speak of it again.

61. IT’S MY PARTY AND I CAN CRY IF I WANT TO

         
We parked Ladder 3 across the street from Station 10, a four-story concrete station on the corner of Second and Main in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square area. A gaggle of tourists traipsed down the sidewalk on their way to view what was left of the Seattle that had been buried after the great fire in 1889.

Parked in and around the intersection outside Ten’s were four or five television trucks with antenna dishes pointed at the sky.

Eddings greeted us in the lobby, her eyes as bright as hot marbles in grease. Her nostrils whistled when she breathed, and when she opened her mouth to speak, a foul smell hit me. It occurred to me that carrying all that extra weight couldn’t be healthy, not after you added in the stress she shouldered as a fire department battalion chief.

Gripping my arm tightly, Eddings escorted us to the elevator, which we took up to the second floor, where the firefighters’ living quarters were. She walked me past the beanery, the TV room, and the handball court, past the weight room and down the corridor to the large windowless meeting room clogged with reporters. A current of electricity buzzed through the room.

The chief of the department, Hiram Smith, was standing next to the podium at the far end of the room, as was Chief Hertlein, who caught my eye with a mixture of triumph and surly smugness.

The room grew hushed. Somebody whispered, “Here he is.” All heads turned. For a split second I was confused.

Eddings pulled me along to the front of the room, where I immediately slipped into a panic.

Chief Smith was a jovial man with dozens of dirty jokes at his disposal at any given moment and the W. C. Fields nose and spider face veins of a longtime drunkard. He was easygoing and the troops loved him, as did the press.

Chief Smith looked at me and said, “Thanks for coming.”

Hertlein knew enough about me to realize privacy was what I treasured most. If he hadn’t engineered this spectacle, he’d had a hand in it.

It took Smith a few moments to silence the room. “Excuse me? People? It has lately come to our attention that one of the four or five identifiable arsonists working in the past few weeks has a modus operandi nearly identical to an arsonist who, as far as we know, set his last fire in the late Seventies. We lost a good man back in the Seventies. His name was Neil Wollf. I knew him. He was a fine fire officer. His son is standing beside me today. Ladder Three’s own Lieutenant Paul Wollf.”

They began asking questions without prompting. “Lieutenant Wollf. How are you reacting to all this publicity?” For the first time, I realized what Eddings had dragged me into. They expected me to give a press conference!

“The publicity? I’m not sure how to take it,” I stammered.

“Is any of this bringing up old wounds?” The question came from Tony Webber, who was standing in front, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Do you believe this is the same arsonist who killed your father? And if so, in light of what happened to your crew the other night, do you think he’s trying to kill you too?”

I stared at Webber for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to reply, Chief Smith turned to me and said, “The man asked you a question, Lieutenant.”

Thirty seconds.

I could see where they were coming from. They’d been riding this story for weeks, and the news had been the same. There was a fire. The fire department put it out. There was another fire. There was X number of dollars of damage. A few injuries. The pyro was still out there. No suspects. Copycats were discovered and some were arrested, but the fires continued. Now suddenly there was a new angle. The pyro was being linked to the man who’d killed my father twenty-five years ago. And here I was, Paul Wollf, battling fires in the same part of town where my father had died. There was definitely a new twist to it. You almost couldn’t blame them for adding in all that crap about Alfred killing our mother and my brother killing Alfred. After all, the best headlines were always written in blood.

As the silence lengthened, other reporters began peppering me with questions. “Are you still in touch with your brother?” “What was the domestic disturbance on the police blotter at your address this past week?” The last question came from Tony Webber. As long as he had the protection of the pack, I could see
his
contributions getting nastier and nastier.

Flashbulbs had been going off in my face sporadically since I’d come into the room, and there were at least four video cameras focused on me. My throat was dry, my armpits wet. When it became clear that I was not going to answer, Webber shouted over a flurry of other questioners, “What do you remember about the morning your mother was murdered?”

His words muted the assembly like a cannon shot. The room grew so quiet I could actually hear the motor in one of the cameras. Eddings’s nostrils whistled with the inhalation and exhalation of each breath. I turned to her. “Chief, I’m taking emergency leave. I’ll be gone the rest of the shift.”

I walked to the back of the room and out the doorway, followed by Towbridge, Rideout, and Crapps, the detail. On the way down to the apparatus, Towbridge said, “I wouldn’t have answered any of that shit either.”

I found his comment strangely comforting.

At the station I signed myself off duty in the daybook, retrieved my lunch from the refrigerator, got my jacket, and left.

The phone was ringing when I got home. I picked it up, listened for a moment, and racked the receiver. It rang all morning and most of the afternoon. In a funk, I watched
Raintree County
with Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Eva Marie Saint, and Lee Marvin. I watched
National Velvet
with Mickey Rooney and a young Elizabeth Taylor. The latter movie never failed to move me to tears. I’d noticed that whenever I was depressed, I turned to early Elizabeth Taylor movies.

Vanessa called, and I hung up before I realized who she was. I thought about calling her back but didn’t.

At six Vanessa phoned again. “Paul? I called earlier, but we got disconnected.”

“I’m kind of in a bad mood right now. Maybe we could talk later.”

“Sure. I saw you on the news. I thought you might want somebody to talk to. Call if you change your mind.”

I wasn’t going to call.

I’d been on a John Wayne jag recently, so I watched
The Searchers, The Shootist,
then fell asleep in the middle of the black-and-white version of Patricia Pennington’s
Duel at Water Creek.
There was something soothing in the black-and-white moralizing of a B western. A little after nine
P.M.
the phone rang for maybe the fiftieth time since I’d come home. “Will you accept a collect call from—”

“Yes, operator.”

I’d just slipped my copy of
The Graduate
into the video recorder, thinking to myself I’d chosen that particular movie because it was about a young man journeying from a summer of numbness into a life of genuine feeling, while in my own life I seemed to be reversing that journey.

“Neil. How’re you doing?”

“I saw you on the news. How are
you
doing?”

“Fine.”

“Why aren’t you at work?”

“I made a trade.”

“You’re sitting in the dark watching old movies, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Don’t shit a shitter. Listen to me, Paul. This isn’t the end of the world. I know how private you are. But you can blow this off.”

“Did you read what they wrote? They practically called our mother a goddamn hooker!”

“You got two options here. Blow it off or let it eat your heart out. I say fuck ’em.”

“Don’t give me that prison psychology crap, Neil.”

“Listen to me. Nobody rents out space inside your brain but you.”

“You talk the talk, but look where you are.” The line was silent for a few moments. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“No. You’re right. Where I am is a direct result of thinking I didn’t have any control over my thoughts and feelings.”

“Neil, I had no business saying that. I know damn well it was an accident of fate that you’re where you are and I’m where I am. I think about it every day.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it could just as easily have been me going to Echo Glen for what we did to Alfred.”

“Don’t ever say that! I did the time and it’s over. You understand?”

“Neil—”

“Hey. This is what I’m going to tell you, and then I’m going to hang up. Listen close. Somebody says something about our family, tell ’em to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Around here people are already wiping their butts with that newspaper.”