Free The Smoke Room by Earl Emerson Page A

because I don’t want to see you two fighting over garbage. If I find out it’s worth anything, I’m turning it in. Agreed?”
    “Agreed,” Johnson said.
    “Agreed,” Tronstad said.
    Even so, I had misgivings when I opened the rear hatch of my wagon once more and heaved the three plastic bags inside—Tronstad had secured each with a knot at the mouth of the bag. I fired up my ride and drove away, revving the engine so the throaty, turbocharged roar woke up any neighbors who hadn’t already left for work. Sears had warned me about making noise in the morning, but I wanted to show my wrath to Johnson and Tronstad for dragging me into this.
    When I peered into my rearview mirror, they were standing dismally on the sidewalk like a couple of freshmen who’d just been pantsed by an upperclassman.
    I thought about Sears as I drove away. Of the three of us, I was the only one who actually liked our new lieutenant. Don’t get me wrong. I wanted him to transfer out as much as the others, but I admired him as a person, and I had to admit some of the changes he’d instituted were for the better.
    It was common knowledge that Chief Abbott had shipped in Sears to flog us into shape. Before Sears’s arrival we’d had one stand-in officer after another, and none had tried to reform us, probably because they all knew they were temporary. During the first four weeks he worked with us, Sears drilled us three or four hours every shift and frequently had us doing some idiotic project until ten at night. Unable to stand the sitting-around part of being a firefighter, Sears filled the cracks in our days with busywork, piling nonsensical chores on top of our regular duties, alarms, equipment maintenance, station housework, and regular diet of fire department classes. He never seemed to fatigue and didn’t understand it when others did.
    Once, before Sears was officially appointed lieutenant, he ordered his crew outside to lay hose in the rain in the middle of a Seahawks playoff game. Despite their protests, he ran them through two and a half hours of wet hose evolutions and caused them to miss the entire game. The following morning, crew members threw a tarp over his head and tied his feet together. When the next shift arrived, they found Sears wrapped in a tarp, hanging upside down in the hose tower. He’d stopped screaming long before.

9. SKATING
    CALIFORNIA AVENUE TOOK me down a steep, winding hill through a greenbelt of madronas to Harbor Avenue, where I headed north for half a mile along the west side of Elliott Bay before parking at the Duwamish Head, the northernmost point in West Seattle. From there a paved path ran south about a mile along Harbor Avenue, a second leg stretching three more miles southwest alongside Alki Avenue and what was arguably the best beach in the city—the closest thing to a tropical paradise Seattle had to offer.
    Alki Beach attracted volleyball players, sunbathers, beachcombers, joggers, in-line skaters, and all manner of showoffs. On summer afternoons traffic jams stretched for miles, though on this early September morning tranquillity reigned.
    The promontory didn’t have much in the way of amenities—some parking spaces and an expansive view across Elliott Bay, for which people in the condos across the street paid upward of a million dollars. Across the bay lay the entire vast panorama of downtown Seattle: skyscrapers, hospitals on the hill, the Space Needle, and as a backdrop, the Cascade Mountain Range running north and south as far as the eye could see. State ferries scudded across the Sound from the downtown terminal. On a nice day, which this was, you could see snowcapped Mount Rainier looming in the southeast.
    To the northwest you could look directly up the Sound until your eyes surrendered to the distant gray-blue haze between sky and water. Behind me at the foot of the treed hillside were condos, apartments, and here and there a small beach cottage, valiantly holding its own in the