punish me.
Dorcas had seemed to be a perfectly decent human being until she woke up married to me. Once the rice was tossed and she figured she’d hooked me for life, she grew a pretty impressive set of horns. Suddenly, I spent too many hours at work. I didn’t make enough money. I never touched her. I groped her nonstop. I didn’t love her. I smothered her with love. She accused me of bedding every female from Westerly to Woonsocket, and those I hadn’t conquered were on my list: the dental hygienist, the supermarket bagger, her friends, her sisters, the Channel 10 weather girl, the mayor’s daughter, the models in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. I had boinked or was planning to boink them all.
After a year of it, I dragged her to a marriage counselor, who wasted several sessions listening to her tales of my rampant infidelity. When he finally caught on and suggested she might have jealousy issues, she branded him an idiot and refused to go anymore. The last six months of our marriage settled into a familiar pattern: Dorcas would say I thought she was an unattractive shrew and must be cheating on her, and I would tell her she was wrong.
Until she wasn’t wrong anymore.
I had just turned onto Pocasset Avenue when the police scanner crackled. Someone had pulled a fire alarm in Mount Hope. I slowed, ignoring the honking behind me on the two-lane street, and waited for the first engine on the scene to broadcast the code. “Code Yellow” would mean false alarm. “Code Red” would mean no dog story this morning.
It came in four minutes, by the digital clock on the dash.
6
I made an illegal U-turn in front of a boarded-up Del’s Lemonade stand and headed back at forty, a reckless speed on a frigid day that had turned yesterday’s slush into icy ruts. I held the wheel tight as Secretariat, his suspension beaten to mush by too many Rhode Island pothole seasons, bounced hard enough to loosen my fillings. At the intersection of Dyer and Farmington, I blasted my horn at a stooped old man painting a snowbank yellow with his dachshund.
Turning onto Doyle Avenue in Mount Hope, I pulled over to let an ambulance race past, its siren screaming. Bitter tendrils of smoke stung my nostrils, even with the windows up. Ahead, a dozen red emergency lights flashed. I pulled to the curb, climbed out, flashed my press pass, and talked my way past the police line.
Firemen had knocked down most of the flames, but smoke still seeped from the rafters of the ruined triple- decker. The dirty, crusted snow in the front yard was peppered with evidence of lives lived. A melted plastic kitchen chair, a smoldering yellow blanket, a Tickle Me Elmo streaked with soot. On the top floor, a fluttering lace curtain caught on a jagged piece of glass, all that was left of a window.
Smoke from house fires used to smell like burning wood, but that was a long time ago. Now, house fires stink of burning vinyl, polyester fabrics, chipboard, wood glues, electric appliances, hazardous cleaning products, and polyurethane foam that generates poisonous gases, including hydrogen cyanide. This fire smelled like an exploding petrochemical plant.
The world turned eerily silent as I stared at the scarred frame of the collapsing building, mesmerized by what the fire had done. But as soon as I pulled my gaze away, sound flooded in—the insistent wail of sirens, the hoarse shouts of the firemen, Rosie screeching orders into a walkie-talkie. The usual assortment of gawkers leered at the destruction, hoping the flames might come back for an encore. Everyone was talking at once, dishing out useless advice to the firemen and the cops in a version of the English language spoken only in little RowDIElin.
“Y doan dey spray moah wahduh awn duh ruf?” (Why don’t they spray more water on the roof?)
“Dey orda.” (They ought to.)
“Ats wut I bin sayin.” (That’s what I’ve been saying.)
“Shut up, daboatayuz.” (Shut up, the both of you.)
“Jeet yet?” (Did you eat yet?)
“Gnaw.” (No.)
“We kin take my cah tuh Caserduz if I kin fine my kahkis.” (We can take my car to Casserta’s if I can find my car keys.)
“Wicked pissa!” (Good idea!)
I spotted Roselli by the police lines, snapping pictures of his gloved thumb with a digital camera. He saw me and threw me the finger. I flashed him a thumbs-up.
An old woman, unkempt silver hair a halo around her face, saw my notepad and dug her fingers into my arm. “I banged on all the doors,” she said, her eyes bright with panic. “I think everybody got out. If somebody’s still in there, God help ’em.”
I pumped her for a few more details, thanked her, and started to turn away.
“You’re Louisa’s boy, aren’t you?”
“That I am.”
“She’d have been so proud, seeing your name in the paper on all them stories.”
“Thanks. I’d like to think so.”
I turned and skidded across a patch of ice to the battalion chief’s car.
“I don’t have time for you right now,” Rosie said, her gray eyes locked on the smoking building as she cinched her air-pack strap tight. Flanked by five firemen hefting axes, she strode toward the blackened front entry. At six foot five, an inch taller than when she was ripping down rebounds for a Final Four team at Rutgers, she towered over all five of them.
I glanced at a fireman who slumped against the chief’s car as a paramedic cut the insulated gloves from his frostbitten fingers. His cheeks were blistered scarlet, and his breath rasped in short bursts. The perils of firefighting in subzero temperatures: You freeze while you burn.
“The chief’s going in after DePrisco,” the fireman volunteered. “The poor bastard was inside with a hose when the first floor collapsed into the cellar.”
“Tony DePrisco?”
“Yeah.”
“Aw, shit.” Now the fire had a face. Tony had gone through Hope High School with Rosie and me. Ten years ago, I was an usher at his wedding. He was a family man and I wasn’t, so we hadn’t seen all that much of each other the last few years, but last week at Hopes he’d shown me pictures of his three little kids. The girl was still in diapers. What was her name? Michelle? Mikaila?
I stood in the cold with the gawkers, pretending a professional detachment I didn’t feel. Together we gulped the acrid, frigid air and waited to see what Rosie would be carrying when she came back out.
When the chief finally strode from the building into the light, cradling something blackened and broken in her arms, sound seemed to stop again. I squeezed my eyes shut, but that didn’t prevent me from seeing the toothless grin of a baby girl waiting for her daddy to come home.
* * *
I dashed off a quick news brief for our online edition, but it was late afternoon by the time I filed the full story for the paper. My computer flashed with a message from Lomax. It didn’t say “Good job.” It said:
DOG STORY.
He glared as I shrugged on my jacket and walked to the elevator. As soon as the door slid shut, I tugged off the jacket and punched the button for the second floor, which housed the cafeteria, mailroom, and photo lab.
“Everything or just what we published?” said Gloria Costa, the photo lab tech.
“Everything,” I said. “Especially crowd shots.”
Gloria pecked at her keyboard, and a menu of Mount Hope fire photos filled the screen of her Apple monitor. We stood close, our shoulders touching as we bent toward the screen. Her skin smelled of something spicy and sweet. She was a little pudgy, but subtract twenty pounds, give her a makeup lesson, squeeze her into something by Emilio Pucci, and you’ve got a young Sharon Stone. Add twenty pounds, dump her into a shapeless shift, and you’ve got my almost-ex.
It took us nearly an hour to examine every frame and pick out about seventy crowd shots—at least a few
