The Smoke Room (14 page)

19. WEARING YOUR ASS FOR A HATBAND

SITTING IN THE
crew cab facing backward, it was hard to see what was going on, but every time we caught a glimpse to the north, the thermal column was thicker, the smoke rising faster. It was hard to worry too much about the fire when I knew I was probably headed for jail, that at the very least I would soon be out of a job. Still, you see a fire that large and know you’re about to tackle it, there’s a lump in your throat. Anybody who says there isn’t is lying. The bigger the fire, the greater the chance of getting killed.

As we got closer and the smoke thickened, we gradually came to a crawl behind Ladder 3, which was headed the same place we were. Stationed in the Central District, where they got a lot of fires, Ladder 3 was probably taking this in stride, while in our crew even Sears was jacked up, having all but forgotten he was riding with three villains.

Drifting smoke in the street slowed us to five miles an hour. We’d smelled the toxic smoke a mile earlier, but as we drew closer, it began to take on a hellish taste. Eyes watering, we proceeded in tandem with Ladder 3 until we both parked behind a long line of fire rigs.

When Sears turned around and spoke through the open window into our crew cab, he sounded angry, an emotion I’d noticed some fire officers using to displace fear. “Okay, men. Get your masks on and report to staging with spare bottles. I’m going to talk to the IC. I’ll meet you in staging. And carry a spare bottle up there for me.”

“Oh, and carry a bottle for me, would you?”
Tronstad mocked after Sears departed. “He’s such a goddamn kiss-butt. ‘
I’m
going to talk to the incident commander. Everybody else reports to staging, but
I’ll
go straight to the head of the line.’ Shit! I don’t even know why we’re here. We’d be better off hailing a cab. Get our money and a good head start.”

What I found odd was that Sears was calling us
men
for the first time in memory. Ironic that we were
men
now that he was sending us off to the slammer. Maybe that was his way of distancing us, or of setting it firmly in his mind that we were the masters of our own fate, that
we’d
chosen our downward path, not him. I’d been nuts to tell him. I still didn’t know quite why I did. Maybe it came from having a mother who’d raised me to believe there was nothing more dear than a clear conscience.

We began walking north alongside a long line of parked fire apparatus, and as we got closer I could see 40-foot-high flames leaping from the roof of a wooden building maybe 150 feet wide and two stories tall. Every once in a while a barrage of smoke rolled down the street into our faces.

There were over a hundred firefighters, even more civilians, and scads of newspeople present. Many of the firefighters were visibly nervous, faces pale, glances fleeting and edgy. The fire building occupied half a city block, and a good third of the middle part of the structure was alight. It was more than hellish, I thought, as an interior wall collapsed and the implosion ushered a flurry of sparks toward the sky. It was also astonishingly beautiful.

“Jesus, we’re in some deep shit,” Tronstad sputtered.

“I wouldn’t be worried,” Johnson said. “A fire like this, all you do is squirt water from the sidewalk. We might not even get out of staging.”

“I’m not talking about the fire. I’m talking about jail.”

“Jail? You said yourself, we keep quiet and there’s not a thing anybody can do.”

“Nice plan,” Tronstad said. “Except for
big mouth
here.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Johnson asked, grinning at me. “What? You accidentally let something out? He guessed? What?”

“Tell him, Dubble Bubble. Go ahead. Tell him how you fucked us.”

We’d stopped in the dark in the middle of the closed-off street, so Johnson couldn’t see me clearly. Even though they’d initiated the crime, I felt as if I were solely to blame for our predicament.

“My Lord, Gum. Tell me you didn’t tell Sears the three of us are sitting on all them bearer bonds. Jesus, Lord, have mercy on my poor black ass. Why the fuck did you go and do a fool thing like that? What were you thinking?”

“I honestly thought he would help us.”

“You mean you thought he would help
you,
” Tronstad said, punching me in the shoulder. “Jesus, you friggin’ idiot.” His blow didn’t hurt through the thick bunking coat, but it was the first time he’d ever hit me, even in jest, and I took note of it. “You’re a fuckin’ squealer, is what you are. Nobody would have known if you’d kept your mouth shut.”

“He was going for the cops before I said a word.”

“Sure he was.”

“He was.”

Johnson put his hand on my shoulder where Ted had socked me. “We’re in this together, but lordy, Gum, that was a dumb move. That was just plain dumb.”

“Maybe if we get an attorney, we could make a deal. They don’t prosecute and we keep our jobs.”

“Dream on, peckerwood,” Tronstad said.

Johnson’s eyes were locked on the flames a block away. “We’re not going to get the money, and we’re going to lose our jobs. I didn’t have anything to do with it, but I’m still going to have to explain why I bought that Cadillac SRX.”

“I know this.” Tronstad faced Johnson squarely as if I weren’t there. “Somebody besides Sears, maybe we could cut him in. Split it four ways instead of three. But you can’t reason with Sears.”

Tronstad turned to me. “And you . . . I oughta wring your fucking neck.”

“We’re going to be here a couple of hours,” Johnson said. “We’ve got that long to plan.”

“I don’t know about you guys,” said Tronstad, “but I’m going to bug out of here.”

“Like hell,” Johnson said. “You leave, and we’re no longer a crew. He’ll have us arrested the minute he sees you’re gone. I see you make a move, I’m yelling for a cop.”

“Then let’s
all
go.”

“No. We need to think it through.”

“This is bullshit! We should all go!”

“And how long before Sears notices all three of us are missing?” Johnson asked. “If you weren’t wearing your ass for a hatband you might be able to help us puzzle our way out of this.”

“Sears is going to hang us,” Tronstad said.

“He’s doing what he has to do,” I said.

“You’re a dumbass if you believe that. He’s been trying to bone us from the first day.”

We were in staging now, an area set aside in a parking lot two hundred yards south of the fire building, where incoming crews reported while waiting for assignments. Including us, there were maybe thirty-five extra firefighters milling about. Most of the smoke boiled over our heads, but every once in a while a cloud rumbled down the street like a herd of black elephants through the massed firefighters.

As always, I was struck by how large the average firefighter was, most well over six feet, many over 250 pounds. This was before adding the 45 to 50 pounds of protective gear, MSA backpacks, and the compressed air bottles we all wore. I always tried to make up for my lack of bulk by working twice as hard as the next man, and I wanted to be especially diligent tonight, for this would be my last fire.

The mood in staging was subdued. If they weren’t thinking about the fire in front of us, people were thinking about Abbott’s funeral eight hours earlier. Across the street behind Battalion 2’s Suburban, a cluster of chiefs in white helmets conferred. Every other company officer had followed protocol and gone to staging with his or her men, while Sears waited beside the chiefs like a lapdog expecting treats.

“We should make that fucker disappear,” Tronstad said. “This would be the perfect place to make him disappear.”

“You say another word, I’m going for a cop,” I said. “I’d rather spend the rest of my life in a box of dirt than see somebody else get hurt.”

Tronstad stared daggers at me. “You didn’t tell him about Abbott, did you?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“It didn’t even come up. I’m not telling anybody about that.”

“He make any calls after you spilled your guts?”

“To the dispatcher. They told him we were coming here.”

“There’s a coupla deputy chiefs over there,” said Johnson. “Maybe he’s telling them right now.”

Tronstad looked across the street. “Not bloody likely. He tells them, they tap us out of service. He’s not going to do anything to get shuffled out of here. He sees a fire like this, he gets a woody. We either get rid of him or we split and grab the bonds, divide them, and blow town. Those are our choices. Maybe you should tell us where you hid the merchandise, Gum.” Tronstad bobbled his black eyebrows as if this were a joke, as if he were my friend again, as if I hadn’t ratted him out and he hadn’t hit me. “Your mother’s place?”

“No way I would hide anything at my mother’s.”

“I can’t blow town.” Johnson looked at me beseechingly. “I’ve got a wife and a little girl.”

“They’re bearer bonds, Robert. Use your noggin.” Amazed at our lack of imagination, Tronstad’s brown eyes were large and wet now, cow eyes. “They’re good anywhere. Take your family to Brazil and live like a king. In Brazil you could have a girlfriend on the side, put her up in a condo, buy her a little convertible, get her a boob job, all for just pennies a day. Hell, you could go ten years and barely touch those bonds. You could have
two
girlfriends on the side, one on each end of town. The women are beautiful down there, and they’re all poor as church mice. Fuck you for a smile and a used bus ticket.”

“You know I’m not like that,” Johnson said.

“Goddamn it, Gum! Tell us where they are!”

Johnson looked at me. “We get there first, we’ll only take our share, right, Tronstad?”

“Right as rain.”

Now that I’d given up my next few years of freedom, I was even more reluctant to abandon the single piece of leverage I had. Or maybe I was sick of seeing people around me doing the wrong thing. I knew this much: I didn’t want the two of them blundering through Iola’s property in the middle of the night. If Iola or her father came out and confronted them, I couldn’t be sure what Tronstad might do.

“So where’s the booty?” Tronstad asked, feigning gaiety. “Tell us so we’ll all know. That’s only fair.”

“Not tonight.”

Tronstad’s lugubrious mien morphed into a vision of pure evil. From the moment I took possession of those bonds, our relationship had changed. I’d felt it that morning and again when he showed up at my house and every minute since. In the past we’d been mentor and student, seasoned firefighter and tyro, but now we were antagonists. I’d seen the sea change in some of Tronstad’s other relationships; Tronstad tended to love you or hate you, never a lot of ground in between.

“Know what Sears told me tonight after we prayed?” Johnson said. “He said Abbott brought him in to clean house.”

“Motherfucker,” said Tronstad, staring across the road at Sears.

“What do you mean by ‘clean house’?” I said.

“Abbott didn’t want us at Twenty-nine’s. He told Sears to find some excuse to transfer us.”

“That can’t be right,” I said. “Sears told us he was going to turn us into the best crew in the city.”

“What he actually said was that I was worthless as a driver and didn’t have the brainpower to learn my district. He said Tronstad took drugs off shift and had more than once come to work doped up, although he couldn’t prove it.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Robert
was
the worst driver I’d ever worked with. And whatever the reason, he did not know his district. We all knew his wrong turns and zigzag routes would eventually cost a life, if they hadn’t already. And from things Tronstad said, I was fairly certain he
was
taking drugs. As far as I was concerned, Sears had portrayed the two of them with uncanny accuracy.

“Know what he said about you?” Johnson asked.

“Me?”

“He said you were a natural-born fuckup. Said you could fuck up a wet dream. That he thought you should have been terminated in drill school. He said his goal from the first was to get rid of all three of us and bring in a crew that could do the job, but once he got there, he decided you would be first.”

“He’s an asshole,” Tronstad muttered.

I was a fuckup? Sure, I’d made some mistakes, a few more when Abbott or Sears happened to be watching, but they made me nervous and I was new.

“You thought that dickhead was your friend?” Tronstad said. “I can see now we weren’t doing you any favors holding this back. You want to know what he said about you? He was asking if we knew anybody who wanted your spot after he bumped you to another station. Isn’t that right, Robert?”

“He mentioned it a
couple
of times.”

None of this was fair. I hadn’t stolen anything. I wasn’t a thief. I hadn’t bought a new car, nor had I made plans to move to Rio de Janeiro and take a string of mistresses. At least now I knew, perhaps, the reason Sears had turned against me so quickly: it wasn’t a novel posture he’d adopted today, but rather an attitude he’d been entertaining and concealing from me for months. All along I thought Sears had favored me above the others. When he approached a few minutes later, I was still stunned by the revelations.