Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [32]
I stormed out of the office.
Defying logic, tradition, and reason, the town council had agreed to let Steve Haston serve out the remainder of his wife’s mayoral term after she left town in the middle of the night, even though he’d shown no interest whatsoever in politics before that. When that broken first term ended, he was reelected. He’d run unopposed until the last minute, when a write-in candidate suddenly appeared, a man who claimed citizenship in North Bend because he lived in his van and parked it under the South Fork Bridge, which meant in our tiny democracy that if you were voting for him, you needed to borrow a pencil from the polling officials in order to write his name in. When Haston came to vote that day, we crossed paths—he saw me returning my pencil. I don’t think he ever forgot it.
I was still steamed at Haston when I got to my truck and found a Big Gulp container sitting on the roof. I stepped up into the cab and reached over to remove what I was sure was the latest installment in a series of jokes perpetuated by Ian Hjorth, who made a habit of decorating my truck with various and sundry geegaws. His favorite—a reservoir-tipped condom pulled tight over my trailer hitch.
The cup was glued down. I couldn’t get it off.
Clearly, Ian had done it before the accident, because nobody was in a joking mood now. The cup and the general air of camaraderie it represented—the first prank I could remember since Chief Newcastle’s death—was a spark of life in a deeply disturbed department.
It was a short drive to the Beebes’, the high-noon traffic thick with local workers dashing out to lunch. Jeeps creeping along North Bend Way with mountain bikes in racks. Isuzus gassing up at the Shell station, kayaks strapped on top. Scott’s Dairy Freeze was filled to capacity, the girls in bikini tops, guys bare-chested, their vehicles looking top-heavy with fat truck inner tubes strapped on for play in the river, everybody laughing and showing off, nothing to think about but the opposite sex and where to meet tonight. I would have given a lot to go back to that time.
But then, my teen years hadn’t been nearly that carefree. At fifteen I’d been pushing religion on the sidewalks of Seattle. By the time I was seventeen, I was in the army, cussing a blue streak and getting laid twice a month, after taking the San Diego trolley to a ten-dollar whorehouse in Tijuana, where I eventually caught the clap from a woman old enough to be my mother. There’d been nothing carefree about any of it.
Mount Si Road was a two-lane country road that ran along the base of the mountain next to the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River, which was low and boulder-strewn. At the bridge, fifty or sixty cars were parked along the roadway, hikers with kids and brightly colored day packs, looking for the Little Si trail.
Stan lived at the end of a long stone-and-gravel driveway just off the road, maybe two miles from the Little Si trailhead. I turned into the drive, proceeding slowly, the driveway shaded by fir trees and underbrush.
Near the house two brown-skinned children were clambering over a play set constructed of logs and pipes, a boy and a girl, maybe six and eight years old. The boy was a clone of Stan, except lighter-skinned. The children paid no attention to me when I parked behind a Ford Escort station wagon. After the two mongrel dogs were done sniffing my crotch, I walked to the front porch.
It was a single-story house made of logs, its long wooden porch decorated with children’s toys, four or five curious cats, and an array of thoroughly gnawed dog bones.
Marsha opened the door before I had a chance to gather my wits.
“Oh, God! What’s wrong?”
“May I come in?”
“Get your ass in here. Sit down. Something happened, didn’t it?”
In polite company Marsha Beebe used words I would never use in my worst nightmare. My army cussing had been scandalous by the standards of my upbringing, but battery acid and Arctic lightning came out of Marsha’s mouth on a regular basis. Like a thermonuclear