The Fireman: A Novel Part 27

"I didn't know you were musical. What instrument did you play?"

"Oh, I never got around to learning an instrument. Seemed like too much work. Also, as my mother was deaf and my father a bully, musical education wasn't a priority in my family. The closest I ever got to the rock-star life was selling drugs."

"You were a drug dealer? I don't think I like that. What drugs?"

"Hallucinogenic mushrooms. Seemed a sensible way to turn a profit on my degree in botany. Mycology had always been my field of study. I sold a form of psilocybin called Smurfp.e.c.k.e.r that was quite blue, quite popular, and quite delicious with eggs. Do you want to split a Smurfp.e.c.k.e.r omelet with me sometime, Nurse Willowes?"

She turned her back on him, to give him privacy so he could pull on his pants. "The Dragonscale-that's a kind of spore. A fungus. You must know a lot about it."

He didn't reply. She glanced back and his face was composed into a look of benign innocence. He wasn't even trying to pick up his pants. They were still snarled around his feet. It irritated her that he wouldn't get dressed. It made him more of a creep than she had hoped he would be. She looked away once more.

"Is that why you can control it? Use it? Keep from burning alive like you're coated in asbestos? Is it because you understand something about it other people don't understand?"

He made a soft humming sound and said, "I'm not sure I understand the 'scale so much as I've helped it to understand me. The pans are in the box under the furnace."

"Why do I need a pan?"

"Aren't you going to make us eggs?"

"You have eggs?"

"No. Don't you? In that grocery bag of yours? For G.o.d's sake, Nurse Willowes, you must've brought me some goodies!"

"I am sorry to say I did not bring you eggs or French roast or morphine. Instead I hiked three miles and nearly walked right into a Cremation Crew to get a brace for your elbow and tape for your wrist. My ex-husband among them." She felt an unexpected p.r.i.c.kle in the back of her eyes that she refused to let become anything more. "I also brought you some great loose tea because I'm nice and I thought it would cheer you up and I haven't even asked for thanks. All I've asked is for you to put on your pants, but you won't even do that, because I a.s.sume you get off on being naked and seeing if it rattles me."

"I can't."

"Can't what? Can't say thanks? Can't apologize? Can't show basic human courtesy?"

"I can't put on my pants. I can't bend over and pick them up. It hurts too much. And you've been very kind and of course I should've said thanks. I'm saying it now. Thank you, Nurse Willowes."

The contrition in his voice deflated her in some way. She was coming down off her adrenaline buzz now, a tide receding to reveal the fatigue beneath.

"I'm sorry. It has been a long couple of days. And I just got through the worst part of it. I went back home to salvage some supplies and Jakob turned up, with a crowd of new friends. One of them was that bully on the radio, the Marlboro Man, the one who's always bragging about all the burners he's executed. I had to hide. For a long time."

"You went home? Alone? Why didn't you send someone?"

"Who? The Lookouts are all kids. Starved, overtired kids. I didn't feel like putting one of them at risk. I couldn't send you, not with your ribs like they are. Besides, I knew where to look for the things I wanted. It just seemed to make more sense to go myself. You didn't tell me what happened to my house."

"That your ex decided to remodel with a two-ton snowplow? I felt like you had lost enough for one week. Why pile on? Are you all right?"

"I was . . . scared. I heard them talking about me. They talked about you, too."

"You don't say!" he said. He sounded pleased.

"Yes. They talked about a man with weaponized Dragonscale, someone who can throw flame, and who goes around dressed as a fireman. They couldn't decide if you were real or an urban legend."

"Ah! Halfway to being a rock star at last!"

"Mostly they talked about things they've done to people who are sick. The Marlboro Man keeps track of the numbers for the whole Cremation Crew, was talking about who's killed the most overall, who's murdered the most in one day, who killed the ugliest girl, who killed the hottest girl. It was like he was talking about the stats for his fantasy baseball team."

The Marlboro Man had praised Jakob for "busting his nut" on New Year's Day. It was several minutes before Harper realized the Marlboro Man was not talking about s.e.x, but murder. Jakob had used his Freightliner to T-bone a Nissan with a sick family in it, a man, a woman, and their two children. The car had been pancaked. The bodies came squeezing out of the wreckage like toothpaste, or so the Marlboro Man said. Jakob had accepted the Marlboro Man's praise without comment, expressing neither pride nor horror.

What a curious thing: to think the man she had married, a man she had loved and been devoted to, had gone on to commit murders. Had killed and meant to kill again. Eighteen months ago, they had spent their nights cuddled on the couch, watching Master of None.

"I was scared I'd start shaking and they'd hear me. They'd hear my teeth chattering. Then they left, and when I knew I was okay-that I was going to leave the house alive-I-I felt-like someone threw a grenade at me and then for some reason it didn't explode. I walked out of there with my head full of cotton fluff and my legs all rubber. Aren't you going to give me a talking-to?"

"For being an idiot and blithely walking right into trouble?"

"Yes."

"Naw. I can't think of two qualities I admire more in a person. Glad you came back, though. I haven't had coffee in days."

When she turned around, the Fireman was yawning, a fist covering his mouth and his eyes squeezed shut, and the sheet had dropped to show the line of his hip. Harper was surprised by her own reaction to the sight of his scrawny, hairy self, the dense pelt of hair on his sunken and battered chest. She felt an immediate twitch of physical want, florid and absurd, where there had been none a minute before.

She marched to the bed, feeling there was safety in briskness. "Raise your legs."

He lifted his feet. She tugged his fireman pants up to the knees, then sat down beside him and slipped an arm under his armpits.

"On three, lift your skinny a.s.s." But she did most of the lifting and when she scooped him up, she heard it: the whistling inhalation, the shuddering start of a gasp, quickly bitten off. What little color was in his face drained away.

"The worst bit isn't the pain when I move. It's the itch in my chest. After every breath. Can't sleep the way it itches."

"Itch is good. We like itch, Mr. Rookwood. Bones itch when they're knitting back together."

"I suppose it will feel better after you tape up my chest."

"Mm, no, I'm sorry, that isn't done anymore. We don't want to constrict lungs that need to breathe. But I would like to strap up that wrist of yours and slip this brace on your elbow."

She inched the elastic brace up his forearm, s.h.i.+fted it into place, then went to work on his swollen, hideously bruised wrist. Harper pressed cotton pads to either side of the wrist, then wound medical tape around and around, up the wrist and down it, creating an almost stiff but comfortable cast around the joint. After, she lifted the right arm for a look at his discolored side. Harper traced her fingers over his ribs, carefully seeking out each fracture. She tried not to take any pleasure at all in the knuckles of his spine or the scrollwork of Dragonscale on his skin. He looked like an ill.u.s.trated man from a carnival. There was no guessing how many people the Dragonscale had killed, but for all that, she could not help thinking it was very beautiful. Of course she was desperately h.o.r.n.y. That didn't help.

"You might be in for worse than a tongue-las.h.i.+ng from Ben Patchett," the Fireman said. "And you might receive a very unhappy look and some great sad sighs from Tom Storey. Nothing makes a person feel more low and ashamed than disappointing the old man. It's like telling a department-store Santa you know his beard is fake."

"I don't think I'll be in trouble with Father Storey."

He gave her a sharp, searching look and all the humor dropped from his expression. "Better let me have it, then."

She told him about trepanning Father Storey's skull with a power drill and disinfecting it with port. She told him about Ben in the meat locker and the handcuffed prisoners and the dish towel full of rocks. Then she had to go back in time to tell him about her last talk with Father Storey, in the canoe.

The Fireman did not ask many questions . . . not until she recounted her final conversation with the old man.

"He was going to exile some poor girl for stealing a teacup and cans of Spam?"

"And a locket. And the Portable Mother."

He shook his head. "Still. That doesn't seem like Tom."

"He wasn't going to exile her because she stole. He was going to exile her because she was dangerous."

"And he knew this because he had confronted her over her thefts and she-what? Threatened him?"

"Something like that," Harper said.

But she frowned. It was hard to remember now precisely what Tom had said and how he had said it. It seemed like a conversation that had happened months, not days, ago. She found it maddeningly difficult to recall what he had told her about the thief; there were moments when it seemed to her he had never mentioned theft at all.

"And for some reason he decided he needed to go into exile with this thief?"

"To look after her. He was going to search for Martha Quinn's island."

"Ah, Martha Quinn's island. I like to imagine it's crowded with refugees from the eighties, wandering about in spandex and leopard fur. I hope Tawny Kitaen is there. She was at the center of all my earliest s.e.xual fantasies. Who was Tom going to leave in charge of camp?"

"You."

"Me!" He laughed. "Are you sure he didn't say all this after getting conked in the head? I can't imagine anyone worse for the job."

"How about Carol?"

He had been smiling, but at this his look became unhappy again. "I like Carol for high holy priest about as much as I'd like another kick in the ribs."

"You don't think she means well?"

"I'm certain she means well. When your government was waterboarding poor sods to find bin Laden, they meant well. Carol's father was a moderating influence on her, a calming force on a brittle personality. Without him, well. Carol has Quarantine Patrols, the police, and Cremation Crews threatening her from the outside. She has the thief and those two prisoners to create pressure from the inside. Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics. Especially not people like Carol."

"I don't know. She didn't even want the job. She turned it down three times before she accepted."

"So did Caesar. I only wish Sarah-" He broke off and cast a frustrated look toward the furnace. Then he dropped his gaze and tried again. "It's not that Sarah would've kept Carol in check, or tried to wrest the camp from her, or any of that. But she would've tried to throw her little sister a line if she saw her drowning. That's what I'm worried about, you know. Bad enough that Carol might drown in her own paranoia. But what's worse is that drowning victims will pull others down with them, and right now she has her arms around the entire camp."

A knot snapped in the furnace with a dry, roasted crack.

"What was Sarah like? Not like Carol, I guess. More like Tom?"

"She had Tom's sense of humor. She also had more steel than anyone I've ever met. She threw herself at things like a bowling ball. You see some of that in Allie, you know. Sarah always made me feel like one of the ten pins." He cast a long, slow, considering look at the flames leaping in the furnace . . . then turned his head and gave Harper a sweet, almost boyish smile. "Which I guess is a fairly accurate description of a certain kind of love, innit?"

7.

"What is there to say about Sarah before she met me? Pregnant at seventeen by her piano instructor, an angelically beautiful Lithuanian only a few years older than her. Cast out of the private academy where her father was a professor. Tom, her best friend in the entire world, and the most forgiving man she knows, says terrible things to her and sends her off to live with relatives. Finishes her senior year in disgrace at a public high school, baby b.u.mp under her sweaters. She gets married in a town office the day after she accepts her diploma. Her Lithuanian, humiliated and unable to get a job teaching, returns to private lessons, which is when Sarah discovers that s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his students is one of his nervous tics. No matter-she stays married because if she left him she'd have to go home, and she's promised herself she'll never ask her father for another single thing in her life. Instead she decides the only way to save the relations.h.i.+p is to have another baby. Am I going too quickly? I promise we'll get to the interesting part in a moment."

"Which part is that?" Harper asked.

"The part where I come into the story. Nick is born. Nick is deaf. The father suggests putting him up for adoption, since he can never have a relations.h.i.+p with a defective brat who can't appreciate his music. Sarah suggests her husband find a new place to live and throws him out. He kicks through the screen door at four A.M. one October night and threatens the whole family with a badminton racquet. Sarah has a restraining order leveled against him. He responds by showing up at Allie's elementary school, supposedly to take his daughter to a dental appointment, and promptly disappears with the kid."

"Jesus."

"He was arrested four long days later, in a motel near the Canadian border, where he was trying to figure out how to reach Toronto without a pa.s.sport for his daughter. I gather he had notions of getting to the Lithuanian emba.s.sy and trying to scuttle back to Europe with her. He was out on bail when he hung himself."

"Sounds like Sarah and me both picked our husbands in the same shop," Harper said.

"There was one good thing to come out of the piano tutor's last waltz. In those terrible days when Sarah didn't know where Allie was, her father showed up on her doorstep to do what he could for her. He made sure Sarah ate and slept, held her when she cried, saw to Nick's needs. It was his chance, you see-to be the father she wanted, the father Sarah had believed he was before he so completely, colossally failed her. I know Tom, and I doubt he ever completely forgave himself for turning away from her when she was a frightened pregnant kid.

"Tom stayed with her for months. Later Sarah moved closer to home, and he helped with the kids while she returned to school to study social work. Outreach to the disabled, that was her field.

"Now, as it happens, Tom Storey had supervised wors.h.i.+p at Camp Wyndham since the 1980s, and was made camp director a decade later. The spring that Nick turned seven, Sarah suggested the camp host a two-week program for the deaf, and Tom made it happen.

"They went looking for counselors who knew how to sign, and I fit the bill. I learned sign language as a lad from my deaf Irish mother . . . which, I add, charmed quite a few of the kids, who liked to say my hands had an Irish accent. I was in the States to collect a master's degree and was glad to get a decent-paying summer job. A man just can't earn a living wage selling Smurfp.e.c.k.e.r in this blighted nation. I have to tell you, heroin dealers and meth slingers have made your country a wretched place to be a simple, honest drug dealer who wants to give his customers a lovingly curated experience.

"Tom hired me to teach outdoorsy stuff-what berries you could eat, what leaves not to wipe with, how to make fire without matches. I was always especially good at that last trick. On arrival we were each a.s.signed a cute name. I was dubbed Woody John. Sarah got to be Ranger Sarah.

"We had a few days of orientation and training before the kids arrived, and I wasn't there long before I could see being named Woody was going to be a problem. On the very first day, Sarah greeted me by saying, 'Morning, Wood,' with a darling look of sweet innocence on her face. The other counselors heard her and fell all over the place laughing. Pretty soon everyone was saying it. 'Who's got Wood?' 'Hey, guys, don't be so hard on Wood.' 'I've been walking around all morning with Wood.' You get the idea.

"Well, the night before the kids were due to show up, we were all having some beers together, and I told her maybe one day if she was lucky and played her cards right, she might wake up with Wood. That got some laughs. She said it would be more like waking up with a splinter in an awkward place, and that got more.

"I asked her how come she got to be Ranger Sarah, and she said since she was program director she was allowed to pick her own name. So I announced by ancient English law I had the right to challenge her authority with trial by combat. I told her we'd settle it on the dartboard. We'd each get one throw. If I hit closer to the center, I could rename both her and myself. And I warned her ahead of time that I would be choosing Bushmaster for me and the Camp Beaver for her. She said I was going to lose, and she'd let me know my new name after the game, and that soon enough I'd be longing for the days when I was plain old Woody.

"By now everyone was deadly serious. And by 'deadly serious' I mean 'crying on the ground.' Of course I liked my odds. When I was an undergrad I spent more time in pubs throwing darts than I did in cla.s.srooms taking notes. I stood well back and nearly hit bull's-eye without so much as a warm-up. Suddenly everyone went completely silent. Awestruck by my powers.

"Sarah didn't so much as blink. She pulled this little hatchet out of her belt, walked to the line, and chucked it. She didn't just hit bull's-eye, she split the board in half. She told me, 'You never said I had to throw a dart.' Well, that was how I became t.o.s.s.e.r John. On account of how well I could toss a dart.

"And I suppose that's where it started-the feeling like we belonged together.

"At the time camp officially got going, Allie and her mother were hardly speaking. Allie, who was all of fourteen, had been dropped by her third therapist after throwing a paperweight at his b.a.l.l.s. She had wrecked her mother's car after taking some boys for a spin in it. Older boys. I couldn't tell you how much of her behavior was a result of being kidnapped by a parent when she was in third grade, but certainly her anger went well beyond the ordinary teenage stuff. She hated her mother for exerting any control over her at all, and was furious she had been forced to work as a counselor-in-training. Those first few days were ugly. Allie would wander away from the kids to do things with her cell phone. If she didn't like what they were serving in the cafeteria, she'd walk out of camp and hitch a ride into town to meet up with friends. And so on.

"Sarah decided Allie was going to join her on an overnight backpacking trip to the Jade Well-a pool of icy water beneath an eighteen-foot cliff. Perhaps she had decided to strangle her and figured it would be easiest to hide the body out in the deep dark woods. They needed a third grown-up and drafted me. Off we went with twelve little kids on a ten-mile hike, walking in a cloud of mosquitoes. All I can say is thank G.o.d the children were deaf. Allie and Sarah cursed each other the whole way. When Allie glanced at her phone once, Sarah confiscated it. Allie would let branches snap back into her mother's face. The kids knew something was wrong and were getting more and more rattled.

"By the time we reached the Jade Well, the two of them were screaming at each other. Everyone was sunburnt and chewed to pieces. Sarah was furious at Allie for forgetting the bug spray back at the bus, and Allie was angry at Sarah for blaming the mistake on her, and I was ready to quit. They were standing near the edge of the cliff and I just couldn't help myself. I took them both by the arm and dropped them over the side, right in their boots. And do you know what? They both came up laughing . . . laughing and spitting water at each other.

"The two of them were after me the rest of the hike. When they served out hot dogs they pa.s.sed me a nice fresh tampon in a roll. They opened the roof of my tent at two A.M. and doused me with cold water. They spritzed me with hair spray instead of suntan lotion. And you know what? It was good. The hike out was as happy as the hike in had been miserable. The kids took to protecting me from Ranger Sarah and Muskrat-in-Training Allie. Nick especially. I think Nick decided it was his special responsibility to protect me from the madwomen in his family. He was my bodyguard for the rest of the summer.

"There was one more overnight hike on the last weekend of camp. That was the night Sarah unzipped my tent. She only said one thing. 'Did I play my cards right?'

"We had almost exactly a year together as a couple after that. She wanted to swim the Great Barrier Reef. I wish we had gone. I wish we had read books to each other. We had one weekend of s.e.xy-times in New York City while her father looked after the kids. I wish we'd had more. I wish we'd walked more. I wish we hadn't sat in front of the TV so much. It was nice, we cuddled, we laughed at Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, but it didn't make much in the way of memories. We did such ordinary, ba.n.a.l things. Ordered pizza and played Trivial Pursuit with her sister and her dad. Helped the kids with homework. We did dishes together more than we ever made love. What kind of life is that?"

"Real life," Harper said.

He had not looked at her once while he recounted the story of his courts.h.i.+p. Instead he stared at his own shadow, which rose and fell in an almost tidal motion as the firelight pulsed in the open furnace. "I spend more time thinking about the things I wish we had done than I do thinking about the things we did do. It was like we opened the perfect bottle of wine and each shared a sip . . . and then a clumsy waiter knocked the bottle to the floor before we got to have any more.

"The first time I saw the spore was at a luncheon presentation at the Boston Mycology Society, three months before Seattle." He didn't need to explain what he meant by Seattle. She knew he was talking about the s.p.a.ce Needle. "A fellow named Hawkins who'd just returned from Russia gave a forty-minute PowerPoint on it. I don't know what scared me more, the photos or Hawkins himself. His mouth kept drying out. He drank half a pitcher of water while he was standing behind the podium. And he spoke in such a low voice you had to strain to hear what he was saying. We were all just catching little bits: 'disease vectors,' 'contagion points,' 'cellular combustion.' Meanwhile he's flas.h.i.+ng these horror-movie pictures of charred corpses, all teeth and blackened meat. I can tell you, no one went back to the buffet for seconds, but the bar sure was busy. This guy, Hawkins, said in closing that while there were only seventy-six known deaths in Kamchatka as a direct result of the spore, this had resulted in wildfires that had ended the lives of 530 other people. There had been almost eighty million dollars of damage to urban areas and the Russians had lost forty-three hundred acres of the richest timberland in the world. Hawkins said that three recent cases in Alaska suggested the pathogen might have a mode of transmission different than traditional viruses and that further study was urgently required. Based on his math, a quarter million sick in the United States would easily lead to the deaths of more than twenty million people and would turn over six million acres into an ashtray."

"How much is that?"

"About the size of Ma.s.sachusetts. I have to say, he scared the h.e.l.l out of us at the time, but in retrospect, he was far too conservative. I suppose his calculations didn't consider a social breakdown so severe there would be no one left to fight the fires.