Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [4]
Not today.
North Bend Fire and Rescue had been going through some tough times, and Holly was like a disease you thought you’d kicked, only to wake up in the morning with the symptoms back in place. I couldn’t suffer through another of those interminable conversations. The last had been a never-ending phone call during which I’d fallen asleep. Okay, I guess that sounds bad, but you had to be there. See, I was really just too nice. Maybe I should have told her to forget the friends thing, that we simply weren’t suited for each other, that I didn’t ever want to see her again. But, tell me, how could I do a thing like that?
If I’d been smart, I would have gone through the empty apparatus bay where we keep the station’s gym equipment, but I dashed past the watch office, blurting out instructions to Karrie Haston, the newest paid member of our rapidly shrinking department. “Tell her anything. Tell her I’m out of town for a week.”
“Tell who?”
“You’ll see.”
“No way I’m going to lie for you again, Jim,” said Karrie. Moments later I heard the two women’s voices and I knew that, despite her instincts, Karrie was following my directions.
Upstairs I concealed myself alongside a window in the station’s living quarters and waited for Holly to leave.
It was true. I was a bastard.
I didn’t learn about the literal aspect of my bastardy until I was twenty-seven and my father, or the man I thought was my father, returned from a ten-year sojourn in Arizona determined to patch up our relationship. You had to give him points for trying, even if he was the one who’d mucked up our relationship in the first place. He’d just buried his third wife. It was the last of four marriages, including two to my mother.
One of the benefits of having my father nearby after so many years was that he told me all sorts of things about our history I had forgotten or never knew. The biggest surprise was discovering he’d married my mother when she was eight and a half months pregnant—to save her soul and bring her to Jesus, who died on the cross to pay for her sins, my father said—and that he never knew who my actual father was, never cared, never asked.
Until then I’d had no reason not to believe James Swope, Sr., wasn’t my biological father; I’d lived with him until I was sixteen, and neither he nor my mother had ever given a hint we weren’t related. Despite the fact that we’d lived all those years in the commune at Six Points when I was growing up, my parents reiterated the nuclear family mantra ad nauseam, reminding me how lucky I was not to be the spawn of a divorce, how important it was to stick with the religion of my birth, how happy we all were.
Even though from my earliest days I’d suspected there was something wrong at the core of our little triumvirate, it wasn’t until I ran away from home and lied my way into Uncle Sam’s army that I began to realize the true strangeness of our family. My mother, who, by her own admission, had endured a misspent youth, had also, ironically, run away from home at age sixteen. Hidebound by a vague ambition that seemed to have fizzled in middle age, my father had taken a more traditional route and graduated from the University of Washington Engineering School.
After the news sank in, I was able to look back over my life and see a thousand little pinpricks of light where before there had been only confusion and darkness. I ended up tall and, some said, handsome, while James Swope, Sr., was medium height with knobby features that might have been chipped off the side of an old apple tree. That alone should have given me a clue. I’d always thought my father hated me—if truth be known, my mother, too—as much as any father could hate a son while telling him he loved him, and now I believed I knew why. Illegitimacy was the spark in the motor of that dislike. Illegitimacy propelled those late-night quarrels between my parents. Illegitimacy was the hoarfrost