The Smoke Room (7 page)

Tronstad jumped as if on a pogo stick: small, comical movements, clenching his fists at his sides like a cartoon boxer. I had the feeling that in a fistfight he would be both hilarious and deadly, and I didn’t want to be around to see it. He was over six feet and wiry, while Johnson was five-ten and over two hundred pounds. They could probably make a fight last for a good long time. I closed the hatch on my Subaru and stepped between them.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“He wants to take them home,” said Johnson.

“Three sacks of worthless paper, for God’s sake,” said Tronstad.

“Oh, that’s funny,” Johnson said. “A few minutes ago they were worth twelve million, but now it’s three sacks of worthless paper. If it’s so worthless, let me have it.”

“Not on your life.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, it’s mine.”

“We’re in trouble, too. Me and Gum. And you’re not sandbagging me. Let Gum take it. I trust Gum.
You
trust Gum.
Gum
trusts Gum. Hell, he was going to turn himself in at Arch Place. Look at him. He’s a choirboy. He holds it, or we fight right here. I swear.”

“Bullshit!”

Johnson put his fists up and started advancing on Tronstad. I’d never seen him so angry or resolute.

Tronstad looked me in the eye. “Okay, okay. You keep this for us?”

“Why don’t we take it back to Ghanet’s right now?”

“No way,” they said in unison.

“Then I don’t want it.”

“Then we’re fightin’,” said Johnson.

“I’ll take it, but only because I don’t want to see you two fighting over garbage. If I find out it’s worth anything, I’m turning it in. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Johnson said.

“Agreed,” Tronstad said.

Even so, I had misgivings when I opened the rear hatch of my wagon once more and heaved the three plastic bags inside—Tronstad had secured each with a knot at the mouth of the bag. I fired up my ride and drove away, revving the engine so the throaty, turbocharged roar woke up any neighbors who hadn’t already left for work. Sears had warned me about making noise in the morning, but I wanted to show my wrath to Johnson and Tronstad for dragging me into this.

When I peered into my rearview mirror, they were standing dismally on the sidewalk like a couple of freshmen who’d just been pantsed by an upperclassman.

I thought about Sears as I drove away. Of the three of us, I was the only one who actually liked our new lieutenant. Don’t get me wrong. I wanted him to transfer out as much as the others, but I admired him as a person, and I had to admit some of the changes he’d instituted were for the better.

It was common knowledge that Chief Abbott had shipped in Sears to flog us into shape. Before Sears’s arrival we’d had one stand-in officer after another, and none had tried to reform us, probably because they all knew they were temporary. During the first four weeks he worked with us, Sears drilled us three or four hours every shift and frequently had us doing some idiotic project until ten at night. Unable to stand the sitting-around part of being a firefighter, Sears filled the cracks in our days with busywork, piling nonsensical chores on top of our regular duties, alarms, equipment maintenance, station housework, and regular diet of fire department classes. He never seemed to fatigue and didn’t understand it when others did.

Once, before Sears was officially appointed lieutenant, he ordered his crew outside to lay hose in the rain in the middle of a Seahawks playoff game. Despite their protests, he ran them through two and a half hours of wet hose evolutions and caused them to miss the entire game. The following morning, crew members threw a tarp over his head and tied his feet together. When the next shift arrived, they found Sears wrapped in a tarp, hanging upside down in the hose tower. He’d stopped screaming long before.

9. SKATING

CALIFORNIA AVENUE TOOK
me down a steep, winding hill through a greenbelt of madronas to Harbor Avenue, where I headed north for half a mile along the west side of Elliott Bay before parking at the Duwamish Head, the northernmost point in West Seattle. From there a paved path ran south about a mile along Harbor Avenue, a second leg stretching three more miles southwest alongside Alki Avenue and what was arguably the best beach in the city—the closest thing to a tropical paradise Seattle had to offer.

Alki Beach attracted volleyball players, sunbathers, beachcombers, joggers, in-line skaters, and all manner of showoffs. On summer afternoons traffic jams stretched for miles, though on this early September morning tranquillity reigned.

The promontory didn’t have much in the way of amenities—some parking spaces and an expansive view across Elliott Bay, for which people in the condos across the street paid upward of a million dollars. Across the bay lay the entire vast panorama of downtown Seattle: skyscrapers, hospitals on the hill, the Space Needle, and as a backdrop, the Cascade Mountain Range running north and south as far as the eye could see. State ferries scudded across the Sound from the downtown terminal. On a nice day, which this was, you could see snowcapped Mount Rainier looming in the southeast.

To the northwest you could look directly up the Sound until your eyes surrendered to the distant gray-blue haze between sky and water. Behind me at the foot of the treed hillside were condos, apartments, and here and there a small beach cottage, valiantly holding its own in the shadows of a steamroller economy that wanted to tear down the old and build anew everywhere. Iola Pederson lived above the first layer of housing on the steep hillside.

The pavement along the beach ran for a total of four miles and at this time of the morning attracted a meager assortment of walkers, bikers, and women pushing strollers. I skated whenever the weather allowed, and some days when even the walkers bailed out. For variety, I skated the Cedar River Trail out of Renton, the three-mile path around Green Lake, the Burke-Gilman Trail out of Gas Works Park, and downtown at Myrtle Edwards Park, but most times I came here. On Thursday nights during the summer a loose group of us got together and skated at midnight through downtown Seattle, up sidewalks and down hills nobody in his right mind would attempt. When the weather was bad, I skated in parking garages with friends, in local pedestrian tunnels, and, when we got desperate, at local indoor rinks.

My skates of choice were a pair of Solomon TR Magnesiums with 80 millimeter racing wheels I’d hopped up with ABEC-8 bearings, lighter axles, and a superlight oil I’d discovered. Although they were four-wheel skates as opposed to the five-wheelers racers used, they were almost as fast as my five-wheeled Miller Pros. I hadn’t been born with many gifts, but one of them was a pair of lungs equal to a quarter horse and quadriceps like steel. The guys at work could lift more than I could in the weight room, and in drill school I’d had some bad days carrying ladders, but on skates I was headed for mythic territory.

This was where I retreated when I was frustrated or worried, where I felt most at home with the universe.

With my legs hanging out the driver’s side of my WRX, I laced and buckled my skates, then locked the Subaru and took off, zipping around four women walking side by side. I would do the first eight miles at cruising speed and then start blasting.

The temperature was in the low sixties, perfect for hard exercise. On the beach side of the street, sunshine poured down, while across the road morning shadows swallowed the houses and condominiums along the hillside.

Two years before, when I signed up with the department, I had no clue how much of my identity would be tied up in being a firefighter. I had no relatives who were firefighters. One day I simply decided it was the right career move and began taking entrance tests for various departments.

Until I was twenty-one I lived at home, attending Bellevue Community College after high school. After receiving my AA, I found temporary work at a janitorial firm, cleaning office buildings between eight at night and four in the morning, polishing floors, scrubbing out crappers, plunking ice cakes into urinals—not a profession I yearned to revisit.

I’d come to think of Station 29 as a second home, the people who worked there as brothers and sisters, and the job as inextricable from my life as a lung or a kidney was inextricable from my body. I’d joined a community, a select and special community.

Firefighting was a job that made you tense. You never knew what was going to happen on an alarm, and you never knew when you were going to get one. Although the last firefighter death in Seattle had occurred four years earlier, the department had scraped through several close calls since then, and each gave me pause for thought. Somewhere in the country a firefighter got killed every day.

For weeks I’d been trying to push the deaths of Fred and Susan Rankler out of my mind. Skating helped. Much as I hated to say it, climbing into the sack with Iola Pederson helped, too. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing with Iola. It was possible our relationship might grow into something more than just a sex-fest, but it was equally possible she would simply fail to show up one day and that would be the end of it.

It was surprising how much I still didn’t know about Iola. I didn’t know where she was born, where she worked, or anything about her past or present life other than her appetite for sex. I didn’t know her religious or political persuasion or her taste in music. I’d told her everything there was to know about me, but all I knew about her was she’d been married once and worked part time in a office somewhere south of Qwest Field, the Seahawks’ stadium.

I’d managed to glean a few facts about her education, probably because she was vain about it: that she had a master’s degree in art history, had attended the University of Heidelberg, spoke German and Dutch, and had traveled and lived in Italy and France. At times while we were making love she would murmur Teutonic ciphers to me, and each time I imagined she was saying something like, “Ride me, you big fireman stud,” but when she translated one it went more like, “Oh, little boy. You drive so fast, but you never go anywhere.” Not what I had in mind.

I savored the sex enough to overlook everything that was wrong between us, which was just about everything, including the twenty-one-year age difference. I’d sneaked a peek at her driver’s license. She was forty-five. I was twenty-four and had more than once been pulled over in my Subie by cops who didn’t believe I was old enough to have a license, and here I was involved with a woman four years older than my mother. I didn’t know what to make of it.

Skating in the early-morning sunshine, I thought about the three bags in the back of my Subaru. It was probably garbage, but on the off chance that it was not, I would be in real trouble. The question in my mind was, why would a pack rat like Ghanet have twelve million in bearer bonds lying around his house?

People got terminated for theft. Tronstad could lose his job and might even go to jail.
I
could lose my job. Now that I thought about it, I could go to jail, too. I should have confessed to Sears back at the station.

The thought occurred to me that even now I might drive downtown to the union office and wait for Sears to finish his safety meeting, tell him the whole story, turn over the garbage bags, and throw myself on the mercy of the court. If I turned the swag in now, there was good reason to believe I would be regarded as something other than a co-conspirator.

But then, if I spoke to Sears, I’d be putting Robert Johnson in jeopardy as well. Tronstad had stolen the bags. Whatever came down on him was deserved, but Robert and I had been sucked into this by accident.

Still, we’d lied to Sears. All of us.

What it boiled down to was, I didn’t want to turn Johnson in and didn’t have the balls to send Ted Tronstad to jail, especially after he’d covered for me at Arch Place. I’d had weeks to think about Arch Place and now realized missing the rig on a call wasn’t the most egregious crime anybody ever committed. Over the years plenty of firefighters had missed the rig, albeit most likely not for the reason I did. But some of the blame would fall on Sears, who was supposed to make certain everybody was on board before the apparatus left the station. Odds were, I would have kept my job had I been forthright.

If the truth came out now, however, it would look terrible, because I’d been lying for three weeks. I’d lied to Lieutenant Sears and Chief Abbott. I’d even lied to the chief of the department, who’d phoned to commiserate over the fire deaths. And now I’d lied to Sears about the bond.

I kept telling myself that I didn’t have any choice, that Tronstad had blackmailed me with Arch Place, that it was out of my hands. But that was a lie, too. You always have a choice.

After sixty minutes of skating I changed out of my skates, fired up the Subaru, and drove up the hill. I would put the bonds back where Tronstad found them. The drive took less than ten minutes, Ghanet’s neighborhood squatty and dry in the morning sunshine.

My plan was scotched when I saw that Ghanet’s front door was open and there were two sedans and a Ford Expedition in front of the house. From their license plates I knew the cars belonged to the city, police detectives probably. I’d only been to Ghanet’s house once during daylight hours and was surprised at how shabby it looked.

I drove past the house and kept going.

I’d been hoping I might be able to stuff the bonds through the mail slot or toss them into the garage in back, but that wasn’t going to happen with all those people around. It was about then that I realized I was being followed. It was Tronstad, in the old pickup truck he’d inherited from his father. I knew he was following me so he could get the bonds back. It was going to cause a major blowout between him and Johnson, but more than that, if they turned out to be worth something, I would never be able to retrieve them to turn them in.

Downshifting, I cornered hard and floored the accelerator. Let him try to follow me. Even a new truck wouldn’t have a chance. He was in my rearview mirror for a block and a half and then he was gone.

Once I was sure I’d lost him, I drove back down the hill to the water and past the lighthouse at Alki Point, following the route I’d skated earlier. I couldn’t go home with the bags in the car: Tronstad knew where I lived and would be waiting for me. I had to hide them. I detoured off of Alki, knowing Tronstad could reappear in my rearview mirror at any moment on this long strip of road. Driving up the hill, I found myself in Iola Pederson’s neighborhood and slowed to a crawl in front of her house. This was the first time I’d been there since the pig plunged through her roof, and the house looked as good as new.

There were no cars on the premises and no signs of life. Off to the right of the house, a detached garage served as a storage shed for lawn mowers, bicycles, and ski equipment. If I hid the bags there I could pick them up in a few days and return them—sometime when I knew Tronstad wasn’t on my tail and official interest had died off at Ghanet’s house.

I parked in the driveway, popped the rear hatch, grabbed all three bags, closed the lid with my elbow, walked over to the outbuilding, and pushed open the unlocked door with my shoulder. Inside, I found an old black sixties-era Volvo. Beside the car was an upside-down canoe. I opened the rear door of the Volvo without difficulty. Depositing the three black garbage bags on the floor in the back, I closed the door and peered through the windows, finding the bags nearly invisible.

When Iola Pederson pulled up, I was in the driveway.

“Hey, dumbbell,” she said, leaving the motor of the Land Cruiser running as she ran toward me. “What did I specifically say to you about coming here?”

“Nice to see you, too.”

She wore an old sweatshirt and sweatpants, and although she’d put on at least one layer of makeup, under the oblique precision of the September sunshine she looked older today. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by to see how the house looked,” I lied.

“Christ. You didn’t talk to anybody, did you? My God, you’re a moron.” She moved close and kissed my cheek coldly. “Get the hell out of here.”

“When am I going to see you?”

“When do you normally see me?”

“When I see you.”

“That hasn’t changed.”

She stared at me, peeking out from under a mop of auburn hair. “Get out of here before one of the neighbors tells Daddy. My life is complicated enough. Go. Shoo!”

“I wouldn’t want your dad mad at you,” I said, walking toward my car. When I looked back, I thought I saw an apology lurking behind her blue eyes, but I’d waited in vain for apologies from her before and wasn’t about to waste my time.

I roared up the hill, the sound of the boxer engine echoing against the hillside. It would piss her off, but I
wanted
to piss her off. No woman in my life had ever treated me as shabbily as Iola. Mind-bending sex or no, I was starting to get fed up.