This is the second installment of the Cloyne series. You can read the first installment here: Part 1.
“It’s been awhile.” Officer Ruiz said with a nod.
“Yeah, I guess it has.” I scanned the faces of the Clones collected around the picnic tables. They were looking at each other, trying to figure out how we knew each other. I could see the wild speculation in their eyes.
“You wanna tell me what happened?” Officer Ruiz asked.
“They didn’t tell you?”
“They told me.” Everyone laughed again. “But I need to hear it from you.”
“We had a bonfire, that’s all.”
“Oh that’s all?”
“Yeah, we have them all the time.” The Clones gawked at me, like I’d given away a state secret or something. “Can I ask you a question?” My head was still very fuzzy on a lot of little details.
“Shoot,” he said.
“Why are you here?” More shocked looks from the Clones. “I mean, we have bonfires all the time. It’s not like anyone got hurt or anything.”
“We got a call from someone complaining of noxious fumes in the area.”
“Noxious fumes? That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”
“How can you NOT smell that?!” Finally, my girlfriend Kate spoke up. Kate had only lived in Cloyne since the beginning of January. The previous semester, she lived in a small, more militant co-op that didn’t have a backyard. Bonfires were a curious and annoying novelty to her. They were never organized or pre-planned and when they happened the smoke drifted into her third-floor window. On more than one occasion I watched her pester drunk Clones about why they liked to burn things so much. She never got a good answer from them in all her time at Cloyne because, in part, no one really understood the question. I mean, why WOULDN’T we like to burn things so much?! Kate didn’t get it. And, to this point at least, it hadn’t bothered her enough to raise a stink.
Our relationship was very young when I tried, it would seem, to burn down the world. We had only been dating since February, but Kate had already become my most reliable supporter. She stood up for me on a number of occasions when she probably shouldn’t have and she defended me valiantly to her mother; a miserable, thrice-divorced MILF who hated that I was dating her daughter. Still, she had a threshold for my ridiculous bullshit, and my behavior during this blossoming abortion of an interrogation very clearly crossed that line. I think it was my nonchalance that really bothered her. “Nils,” her big brown eyes darkening perceptibly as she held my attention, “it smells like you burned a bunch of Barbie Dolls and put them out with bleach.”
That sounded bad.
I wanted to believe she was overstating things in order to make a point, but when I broke away from her gaze and looked closer at the stained asphalt, I realized just how oddly discolored it was. There were the typical blacks and grays associated with smoke and ash, but there were also hues of brown and red and blue that I had never seen in the natural world.
“Do you remember what you used to start the fire?” Officer Ruiz asked. It was my turn to scoff. Three hours earlier I could barely remember my name, now he wants me to recall what I used as an accelerant?
“No.” I said plainly.
“Do you remember what you burned?”
“Everything.” That much I knew. “It was all broken stuff, though, or stuff we’d stole—“ I stopped myself. “Stuff we’d found. It didn’t, like, BELONG to anybody or anything.” While true, in a sense, this explanation did not sit well with anyone.
“So that fire hose mounted to the wall inside was what? Up for grabs?” Officer Ruiz gestured to the long white canvas hose that snaked from the door behind us, between the picnic tables, and out onto the charred asphalt. The hose turned grayer as it approached the “site of the blaze” (that’s how it was described in the incident report) and anchored itself in a puddle of melted red plastic.
“What’s that red stuff?” I asked. But I knew the answer before I’d finished the question. It was all starting to come back to me. At some point in the night, CV and I decided our next best move was to get in my truck and drive to Jack in the Box for monster tacos. Unfortunately, the bonfire was still going and the only way we could leave the house–in good conscience–was to put out the fire. So, we went into the main hallway off the courtyard and un-spooled the two emergency fire hoses that flanked the entryway. We dragged them into the courtyard, braced ourselves, and played Ghostbusters.
The kick from an industrial fire hose is not unlike the kick from a large caliber handgun. No matter how much you brace yourself, you will never be fully prepared for its power. And, like a large caliber handgun, once you get used to it, all you want to do is spray everything in sight. After hosing down everything BUT the bonfire, CV left me with the two hoses while he went up to his room to put on a shirt. (He’d thrown his into the fire.) In a fit of multi-tasking genius, I decided the most efficient way to put out the fire would be to lay one hose on the ground with its nozzle IN THE FIRE while I used the other from a distance. This way, I figured, I would extinguish the fire from the outside AND the inside. Twice the…umm…firepower, half the time.
I was, in a word, unsuccessful. Sure, the hoses put out the fire temporarily, but CV and I easily rekindled it when we returned from Jack in the Box covered in taco grease. It was in this post-taco window, I think, that CV burned the skate ramp. More importantly, it was also the period in which the ashen, lifeless hose laying between us on the courtyard asphalt went from fire stopper to fire victim. The hose hadn’t put out the fire. The fire had put out the hose.
“That’s the nozzle.” Officer Ruiz said. “Do you have any idea how hot a fire has to be in order for it to MELT the nozzle of an industrial fire hose?”
While incredulous, Officer Ruiz never actually got mad at me. He was young and attractive, probably in his late 20s. He was fit and carried himself like someone who came to police work from a non-traditional route. He didn’t act like the son or grandson of a cop. He wasn’t hard ass ex-military and he didn’t hold a grudge like the shlubby nerds who became cops to exact revenge on the kinds of people who made their lives hell in high school. Officer Ruiz engaged me like I was a harmless idiot kid who got into some run-of-the-mill juvenile delinquency that he had not only seen before, but perhaps, had done himself.
He took my information, told me to expect a phone call in the next few weeks, and left me with a carbon copy of the incident report. As the possibility of a perp walk disappeared, most of the Clones at the picnic tables got up and went about their Sunday morning.
Kate and I looked over my mess one more time before going inside. Trudging up the dingy, carpeted stairs to my second-floor room, Kate finally asked the question everyone else in the courtyard had been thinking.
“How do you know him?”
“Know who? Officer Ruiz?” It was a stupid question. I knew who she meant. I just needed more time to come up with a good answer.
“Yeah. How do you know him?” She repeated her question, the anxiety and fear building in her voice. She knew the answer couldn’t be good. I thought about spooling out some convoluted, serendipitous yarn before saying fuck it and going with The Truth.
“He arrested me last semester.”
“What?! Why? You’ve been arrested before?! What for?!”
“It’s a long story.”
holy hell. a good evening giggle. nicely done.