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through it, saying, The bastard drills us enough without us drilling us.
It s like asking a kid to go out to the woodshed and paddle himself.
In the back of my mind was the thought that I might end up in prison
over this. I didn t think so, but it was possible. Going to prison would
keep me separated from my mother during her last year of life. After the
way she d dedicated her life to me, I couldn t do that to her.
Finding herself pregnant at seventeen, my mother left Spokane and
centered her life around me. I never met my father. The official story is
that my mother divorced him before I was born, but by the time I was ten
I knew that was bogus.
Her parents were hard-line Christians and never forgave her for her
out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Mother was the youngest of five siblings,
T HE S MOK E R O OM 87
raised after the others had left home, so she wasn t close to my aunts and
uncles. My grandparents are in their eighties and now live in Spokane, a
six-hour drive from Seattle, a couple of cold fish who for twenty-five
years have treated my mother like an outcast. We rarely saw them when I
was growing up, though I now visit on my own once or twice a year.
My mother has good days, as the last four had been, days where you
almost wouldn t know she was sick, and then she has days where she gulps
painkillers and gets a distant look in her eyes. All along she s been de-
sirous of the same privacy in death she enjoyed in life and has refused to
inform anybody in the family she s sick.
Thinking of my mother made me even angrier that Johnson and
Tronstad had splurged on new cars. We might have given the money back
anonymously, but our chances of that were dwindling by the minute. I
had assumed that under all their silly pranks they were mature individu-
als, but now as I viewed them through the clarifying prism of their greed,
I knew I couldn t have been more wrong.
I saw how weak Johnson was, how flighty and vain Tronstad was.
Johnson, who didn t know his district and refused to study it, should
never have been the driver on Engine 29. Anybody with a smidgeon of
pride would have either learned his district or given up the post, yet he
did neither. The department might have turned him out of the spot, but
that wasn t how things worked. Johnson liked to palaver about the fact
that he was a small cog in a big machine, that he didn t have control over
his life, philosophizing endlessly without ever coming to any useful con-
clusions. Outwardly, he was jolly and always in a pleasant mood, but
under the surface there was a layer of brooding most people didn t notice.
Tronstad was a different cat altogether; no deep thought there.
Nobody who worked with Ted Tronstad ever forgot the impromptu
stand-up comedy routines he put on at the drop of a hat. He was funny in
a Robin Williams way. Everybody said he should audition for Saturday
Night Live. He was gregarious and championed his friends, as he had me
after the incident at Arch Place, yet on the downside, he had money prob-
lems, women problems, and a bunch of long-haired, tattooed, Harley-
riding buddies who d spent more of their lives in taverns and prisons than
I cared to think about.
88 E A R L E ME R S ON
One thing Tronstad didn t have that Johnson did was a kind heart.
Johnson rarely spoke ill of anyone, while Tronstad rarely missed a chance
to mock or denigrate just about everyone he met: every client, patient,
and fellow firefighter he came into contact with. I d always dismissed it as
some sort of slanted attempt at black humor, but it was more; it was a
cover-up of his basic insecurity. He had a negative outlook on life, and
that outlook made him see the worst in people.
Even though he choked up when we were around injured kids and
could be as empathetic as anyone with certain adult patients, there were
times when I believed Tronstad s heart was made of chilled titanium. Per-
haps the callousness came about because his father beat him when he was
a child. Or because his mother did, too. Or because he d left home at sev-
enteen to join the Army, where he had a rough go of it, switching to the
Air Force three years later.
After lunch Johnson came into the beanery stealthily, closing the
door behind him with exaggerated care. Tronstad was reading the sports
page and I was rereading the article on Charles Scott Ghanet, or whatever
his name really was. The chief had been gone for hours.
Oleson s on the other side sawing the z s in front of Butch Cassidy
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