Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [58]
“What? You have a bad shift at Twenty-six’s?” The TV remote in one hand, an issue of Kayaker magazine in the other, Gil Finney turned and looked at his son. His steel-gray, ball-bearing eyes squinted out from under caterpillar eyebrows. “Hey, you know what I just realized the other day? Reese was one of my boots. I remember him now. He used to walk around like he had his underwear on backwards.” He laughed, and the phlegm danced deep in his lungs.
“I know. I came in with him.”
“Thought I was going to have to pink-slip the little bastard, but then he had his first fire and didn’t stain his shorts too bad, so I let him alone. Hey, somebody said they saw you with Diana Moore.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d stay away from women in the department. Women are genetic cowards. I told you that, didn’t I?”
“I’ve heard your theory.”
Gil Finney’s bigotry had grown worse since his retirement. Finney guessed that all those years of being forced to pretend he was fair made him feel as if he had decades of hypocrisy to make up for. These days he rarely spoke of the department without bad-mouthing minorities, his most virulent harangues reserved for women.
“They aren’t tough enough,” he said. “They can’t help it. They’re bred to protect the nest. They hide with the young. God made ’em that way. It’s the rooster who’s out there fighting. It takes a cock to be a firefighter. And not a strap-on plastic cock.”
Before his retirement, the old man had followed all the political dictates of a fire department in one of the most liberal cities on the coast, but privately he’d always believed the department of forty years ago was the only department worth saving—all white, all male.
“Maybe I should go down and rattle little Charlie’s cage for you. There’s no reason you couldn’t be a lieutenant before the day is out.”
Finney tried to sound casual. “I’d rather you didn’t, Dad.”
“You know I want to see this happen before it’s too late.”
“I know you do.”
“By God, both you boys are going to end up battalion chiefs. Didja know Tony’s already studying for the chief’s test?” Finney knew it was another of Tony’s falsehoods, but he had no intention of exposing him. “You’re number one on the list. You’ll be number one on the captain’s list when you take that. This is what I’ve dreamed for you, John. You and Tony both. Ever since you were little. Remember when I used to take you down to Ten’s and you used to scramble over Ladder One? ‘Daddy, I be fireman.’ ” He sat back on the couch and reminisced silently for a few moments. “Believe me, John, a straight-arrow like you will fly through the ranks.”
Fire department culture was odd, Finney thought. Getting in, they called it, an expression that typified how most firefighters felt about the job.
They were in.
Everybody else was out.
As a child, he’d been fascinated by the sense of danger, the sirens, the smell of smoke off his father’s hair and clothing when he came home from work, the soot in his ears, the stories he told, the rough-and-tumble men who joked with him when his father took him to the station, the absurd confidence and astonishing resourcefulness with which they and his father attacked anything even remotely resembling an emergency.
Finney had been a sensitive boy, easily offended by his father’s careless remarks. He’d tried college; his grades had been good but he’d lacked a goal. He’d worked on the assembly line at Boeing and then at Puget Sound Paint, where he was bumped from one of the road crews to the front office after only nine months. He wanted to think of it as a lark when he applied for the SFD, but it turned out to be more.
“I got something for you off the news last night,” his father said, holding a videotape aloft. “You know a man named Patterson Cole?”
“He owned Leary Way.”
“Check it out.”
A cheesy local gossip program had done a piece on Patterson Cole’s ongoing divorce proceedings. The eighty-three-year-old Cole had been entangled in a much-publicized breakup with a woman forty-eight years his junior who’d been a waitress at Hooters when they met. She was disputing