The Smoke Room (5 page)

“Jesus, you didn’t tell anybody what happened?”

“I—”

“Because nobody knows you weren’t on the rig when it left the station. Nobody but you and me and Robert.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when you fuck up, you keep your lips zipped. That’s the first rule of fucking up. What did you tell them?”

“I’m not sure.”

Tronstad looks across the yard at Lieutenant Sears. “I know you didn’t tell
him.
He’d be dancing a jig.”

“He’s not that way.”

“Oh, yes, he is.”

“How could he
not
know I wasn’t on the rig?”

“Sears had his head up his ass the moment he heard ‘trapped victims.’ He doesn’t know about you. Trust me. Did he say he was going to write disciplinary charges?”

“No.”

“Trust me. He was scared shitless.”

“So was I.”

“You? Jesus, kid, you were ferocious. You ran over me like I was roadkill.”

The more I think about it, the more Tronstad’s words make sense. When I bumped into him on the porch, Lieutenant Sears said, “Don’t come up here without a line. And where’s your partner?” It hadn’t made sense to me at the time, because our line had been underfoot, but he’d been talking about a
second
line. A second line would only come in with a second unit. Despite the big E-29 designator on the front of my helmet, he thought that the firefighter who bumped into him on the porch was from another unit and that I was inside.

Tronstad says, “I know and Robert knows, and
we
ain’t talkin’. You know, and
you
ain’t talkin’. Nobody else has a clue, least of all our firefighter-of-the-year lieutenant. Keep your yap zipped, and it’ll stay that way.”

“What are you going to do if they ask?”

Tronstad makes an exaggerated gesture that implies he’d rather die than blab. I look across the yard to where Robert Johnson is talking to one of the other drivers, and Johnson gives me a twinkly smile and a thumbs-up signal.

“I should confess.”

“Don’t be an asshole. You going to miss another alarm?”

“No.”

“There you go. What would be the point of getting punished for something that’s never going to happen again?”

“I owe you, Tronstad.”

“Let’s go pick up some hose. And by the way?”

“What?”

“You got enough guts to hang on a fence, kid. I never thought you had particularly big balls, but between rattling that woman in the basement and what you did inside the house here . . . you’re my hero.”

“Shut up.”

6. THE PERFECT SETUP

THE NEXT MORNING
the front page of the
Seattle PI
sported an article about our victims, Fred and Susan Rankler.

Fred had been sixty-two, formerly an attorney with a prestigious law firm in downtown Seattle; Susan, fifty-eight, a flight attendant with Delta and the mother of three grown children. Fred Rankler had run for city council; Susan had been homecoming queen at Central Washington University. One of their daughters was living in Hollywood, studying to become a movie actress. One son worked for a Chicago law firm, the other for Microsoft.

Fred had been retired almost a year when another driver mangled him in a car accident and put him in a wheelchair. Susan retired soon thereafter to care for him.

I was thinking about the family as I was leaving for home the morning after the fire. I’d just bumped into Robert Johnson in back of the station, next to his black BMW 3 Series sedan, a car he washed and vacuumed each shift. “Robert?”

“Eh?”

“About last night.”

“Hey, that was a nice rescue. You pulled two people out. Even if they didn’t make it, a save like that will cancel a hell of a lot of other dirt.” He gave me a meaningful look.

“Robert—”

“Have a nice four-off.”

“Thanks.”

Half expecting my car to be staked out by the police, I walked the eight blocks to where I’d parked my Subaru on Arch Place and drove home without incident.

I lived in a single-story, side-by-side duplex on Genesee, directly across the street from the Delridge Playfield. I rented the east unit, which included a garage just large enough to accommodate my WRX. The whole place was maybe eight hundred square feet: two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, with electric wall heaters you could stand in front of on a cold winter morning, toasting your backside—1960s kitsch. Out back was a covered patio, along with a patch of lawn that was mostly brown because we’d been admonished to conserve water during the drought.

The previous night had been one freak show after another. Iola Pederson with blue eyes as big as hen’s eggs. Her unbuttoned blouse and the enormous ice floes she called breasts. Our hijinks in the basement, the feel of her silky skin under my hands, the warmth of her soft naked belly against my hard stomach. Her rigid nipples. Her sharp, ratlike teeth gnawing my lower lip.

I almost wished I’d been caught. At least the matter would be concluded. The way things stood, I would forever carry the vague unease that I would be unmasked at some future date. I read once that a secret can only truly remain a secret when it’s known by only one person. Tronstad and Johnson were friends, but neither had the same investment in this I did.

I would never break another department rule. Ever.

I wasn’t sure why Ted Tronstad and Robert Johnson had remained silent on my behalf, whether it was esprit de corps among mates or the desire to put something over on Sweeney Sears, but I was thankful.

After we got back to the station that night I slept like a drunk, my narcosis fueled by the release of tension. The effect was transient, because the next few nights I was wracked with insomnia, and when I did manage to snag rack time, I found myself battling through a series of degenerate sex dreams involving Iola Pederson and the dead woman, the two females I’d seen bare-breasted that night. Nothing was more perverse than dreaming about sex with a corpse.

What made it almost unbearable was the very real possibility that the Ranklers would have survived had I not missed the rig. During the next few days I thought about it every waking minute.

I thought about transferring to another station. About confessing. About resigning from the fire department.

After I’d tortured myself enough, I began to look at it from a different angle. If you were a veterinarian and fed the wrong medication to a prize horse and the horse died, it didn’t mean you were going to kill a nag a week for the rest of your career, did it? In fact, it didn’t mean you would ever kill another nag. The truth was, you’d take particular care
not
to kill another horse, wouldn’t you? And if the animal’s owners didn’t realize why the beast was dead, it would be pointless to tell them.

Still, no matter how much I rationalized, I continued to feel physically ill for the first twenty-four hours, weak and listless thereafter. I knew I was going to have to wear my guilt for the rest of my life. What I didn’t know was how I would accomplish that—for I didn’t have Tronstad’s capacity to blow off setbacks and blame things on other people, or Johnson’s ability to rely on the Lord Jesus Christ.

I was raised by a single mother who always treated me like an adult, spoke to me as an adult, and had me call her
Judy
as well as
Mommy.
I suppose I’d been trying to act the part of a self-possessed adult since I was six, and more than once I’d been told I talk and act older than my years; but now I was feeling more like an incompetent, clueless little boy than when I actually was one.

The evening after the fire I took my mother to the Seattle Aquarium, and we spent an hour watching the new sea otter pups. I could tell she knew something was wrong, but she didn’t press me. As was her habit, she took dozens of pictures with her digital camera and then had bystanders take photos of us together. I did my best to look carefree, but I don’t think I pulled it off.

Two days after the fire my doorbell rang.

When I answered the door, Iola Pederson breezed into my small duplex without invitation.

“How did you know where I live?”

“The other night I found your address on the desk, under the glass.”

“I wish you’d called first.”

“I do things on the spur of the moment. It’s the kind of girl I am. How have you been?”

“Surviving.”

“That good, huh?”

It was late afternoon. I was in sweatpants and a fire department T-shirt, my hair mussed. Looking at her, all I could think about was the sex dreams I’d been having. There’d been a lot of TV footage from the fire, and this morning’s paper carried another piece on the grieving family, so I figured that was why she’d shown up. If my crew wasn’t going to rat me out, perhaps she was.

“Well, well, well,” she said. “So this is where my little boy toy lives.”

She did a walk-through of the kitchen, eating area, and living room and then sat heavily on my couch. Much of my paycheck went to the car out in the garage, so my furniture was mostly castoffs and hand-me-downs. Iola gave me that look—the same one that started things back at the fire station. She picked up a pair of my mother’s walking sandals from the floor next to the coffee table. “Girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Tiny feet, whoever she is.”

“About the other night—”

“I’ve always fantasized about making love to a fireman in a fire station. I still get goose bumps when I think about it. The thing is, in the fantasy my partner doesn’t get up and run out before we’re finished.”

“The bell hit.”

“I don’t see any bell here.”

She got up, walked to the end of the hallway, pushed my bedroom door open, and strolled in. Articles of clothing began dropping off her limbs like autumn leaves. Nude, she jumped between my sheets and pulled the covers up until only her head and auburn hair peeked out.

I went into the bathroom, half closed the door, and brushed my teeth, staring at myself in the mirror. Just looking at her brought back all the trauma of the night of the fire, and for a moment I considered tossing her out. On the other hand, there would be no consequences this time. And maybe being with her would erase some of the earlier memories.

“What’d you do the other night after we left?” I asked from the bathroom.

“Went home. Watched TV.”

“You watch the news?”

“I never watch the news.”

“You read the papers?”

“I read memoirs.” She didn’t have an inkling of what had happened at the fire.

Tronstad called it
DSB:
deadly sperm buildup. I’d been thinking about her all day—when I wasn’t thinking about dead people—and the tantalizing glimpse of her backside and heavy, swinging breasts as she leaned over to peel back the covers on my bed moments earlier had aroused me, just as she knew it would.

I slipped off my shirt, my sweatpants, and my socks and climbed under the covers.

It was nearly five o’clock when she gathered up her clothing and scurried into the bathroom. When she emerged, I was at the kitchen sink washing lettuce for a salad.

“See you later, darling.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Got to.”

“I’m fixing dinner. Enchilada soup.”

“I have to get home. I’ve got something going on tonight.” Uncertain of the etiquette involved, I stood facing her in the kitchen, mute and embarrassed. Kissing her good-bye seemed redundant, probably because we’d already done so much kissing that my lips were sore.

“Can I have your phone number?”

“I’ll be in touch,” she said.

“What if I want to call you?”

“Oh, don’t look so pitiful, honey. I just prefer you not to call.”

“Could I drop by? Would that—”

“Don’t
ever
come to my house!”

I must have looked sadder than a broke-dick dog, because she closed the distance between us and kissed me on each cheek, my forehead, and the tip of my nose. “Don’t take everything so seriously. You really need to lighten up, sweetie. Anybody ever tell you that? Look, I’m in between phones now and we’ve got workmen in the house all day, so you don’t want to show up there. You really don’t.”

“Okay.”

“You
do
want to see me again?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t sound too sure.”

“I’m sure.”

I watched her drive away in a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser that cost easily twice what my car had.

After that we saw each other several times a week, and each time she left me feeling physically trashed and mentally bewildered. She quickly became verbally abusive, which I ascribed to her personality, assuming she was like that with all men. Perhaps because of the age difference, I tolerated it. As the number of our meetings increased, the manner of our first sexual encounter in the basement of Station 29 receded further from my thoughts and more into the forefront of hers. She never tired of talking about it, using the story almost as an aphrodisiac at each of our liaisons. It seemed to be the high point of her autumn, that evening in the station.

We fell into a disturbing pattern.

She showed up unannounced, parked out of sight around the corner on the potholed side street, blew in as if I were expecting her, and within minutes swept me into the bedroom, where we tore each other’s clothes off and went at it. After a while we started having sex on the sofa, on the floor, in the shower, or parked in her Land Cruiser in various locations around West Seattle. She was as randy as I was. She’d show up at lunchtime, or midafternoon. Only once did she arrive after supper.

When I suggested we take in a movie or go out to eat, she invariably declined. What she wanted was sex, pure and simple, and she made no bones about it. She called me her
boy toy,
her
little fireman,
and
the nonstop sex machine.
I didn’t much care for the way our relationship was evolving, but her visits were spaced far enough apart that any notions I had about talking her into a real date dissolved by the time she showed up: DSB. Tronstad called it the perfect setup, sex with no entanglements. “Unload your nut sack without having to take her out in public.” Aside from him and Johnson, I told no one.

We never discussed the fire or the deaths, and I hardly thought it possible she didn’t know about them, yet she didn’t seem to.

A week after Arch Place, the battalion held a post-fire review, where talk circulated among the troops that I deserved an award for dragging the two civilians out. Chief Abbott dismissed the idea out of hand, creating general outrage, but I told everyone I didn’t want an award. What I wanted was to replay that night and get it right. Probably because it was heartfelt, the sentiment endeared me to all who heard it.