Scorched

2:02 a.m., August 8th, 2001 — Park Manager’s Residence, Laughing Loon Lake State Park, Idaho

The hand radio on Pete’s nightstand sputtered, “Delta 3 to Alpha 1, come in! Delta 3 to Alpha 1 come in!”

“What now?” grumbled Pete waking from a fitful sleep. “Better not be another damn squirrel.”

. . .

Yesterday Pete, the park manager, had listened to Delta 3 call in to headquarters. He sat at his desk as the seasonal employees, a high school girl on summer break and a middle-aged woman, a wanderer from Alaska, rushed around behind the reception desk, checking in a steady stream of campers, assigning boat moorings, selling fishing licenses, and answering the phone lines. From the radio, Delta 3 called in. The new camp host’s voice buzzed into the reception area like an annoying fly.

“Delta 3 to base. Delta 3 to base, come in! Come in!”

“This is base,” responded Mona, the Alaskan who smelled of sardines and cigarettes. She interrupted a camper’s check-in in order to operate the radio. The nearly checked-in camper fidgeted with his paperwork and let out a sigh.

“I see a group of kids on bikes on the main road, over.”

“Okaaay?” Mona replied, raising one of her dark and finely drawn eyebrows as she scanned the growing line of customers queuing up for check-in, people in a hurry to start their vacations, hook up their RVs with power for air and TV, all the comforts of home in the middle of an Idaho State forest. The homes-on-wheels would insulate them from nature like cocoons.

Earl Plainright’s crackling and disembodied voice came back over the radio, “I’m goin’ to investigate, over.”

“Ahl right,” replied Mona with an eye roll. “Knock yourself out, Earl. Base out.”

The customer in front of Mona attempted to ask her a question before she’d finished with the radio. Mona held up her free hand vertically and with the palm flat and facing outward, the universal signal for halt or stop, known by some as talk to the hand. The customer snapped his lips together and bowed his head. Pete was pretty sure the man would wait quietly until Mona was ready for him. Nobody pushed Mona around. Her withering looks alone could induce a shiver like that of a northerly wind.

Mona and her co-worker worked as quickly as they could at reception, but the computer was slow and the check-in process was full of redundancies, reminding Pete of his army days. There wasn’t anything he could do about it, governmental bureaucracy. Occasionally Mona would look over at Pete working at his desk, her eyes narrowed and her lips a tight scarlet line. Pete knew the look. It was a Why are we working our butts off over here and you’re over there sitting on yours? look. Pete was used to it.

Mona could send poison-arrow-squints all she wanted. He wasn’t about to step behind that desk with “the girls.” He was the Park Manager, not a clerk. He’d been the manager of Laughing Loon Lake State Park for twenty-five years. Employees came and went, year after year. He wasn’t out to win a popularity contest, far from it.

Five minutes after Mona had signed off on the radio, Earl’s voice was whining through the reception area again, “Delta 3 to base, come in.”

“This is bassse,” Mona hissed as she looked up at the rotating ceiling fan.

“Dead squirrel, over.”

“Excuuuse me,” snapped Mona. The phone was ringing on multiple lines, and she was in the middle of inputting information into the fishing license computer. Mona shot a glare towards Pete. Pete ducked his head and frowned over his paperwork as if in deep concentration, but his body betrayed him with an involuntary shudder.

“The kids in the road, they were looking at a dead squirrel, over.”

“Sooo?”

“I’m gonna get a shovel and clean it up, over.”

“Terrific!” Mona said with upper lip curled.

Just then Pete decided Mona’s painted face in the throes of her pained expression reminded him of one of those maniacal dolls in the horror movies.

“Delta 3 out.”

“Base out!”

2:03 a.m., August 8th, 2001 — Park Manager’s Residence

Pete hoped this wasn’t another nuisance call about roadkill. It was Earl’s wife Pearl who was radioing this time and she sounded panicked. Suburbanites, he thought, always spooked in the woods.

“This is Alpha 1.”

“We got an emergency down by the boat dock, Pete.”

What did some drunk camper throw up in the lake? Pete thought. “Yeah, what is it?”

“Well, Earl is trying to fight it off with the garden hose we brung from home, but there’s not much water pressure from the spigot in the parking lot, over.”

“Fighting what off?” asked Pete. Bears and raccoons sprang to mind. Pete began to get an uneasy feeling in his stomach.

“The new restroom is on fire, over!”

“Shit!” shouted Pete, before pushing the speaker button. “I’ll contact the fire department. Tell Earl to keep people a safe distance from the fire, over.”

“Roger, that.”

“And Pearl that includes Earl. We don’t need any heroics, over.”

“10 4, Alpha 1”

“I’ll be there ASAP. Alpha 1 out.”

“Delta 3 out.”

After Pete radioed the sheriff’s dispatcher to notify the local volunteer fire department and then woke up his staff over the radio, he threw on his clothes and lizard skin cowboy boots, splashed some cold water on his face, and ran to his state park vehicle, a Bronco. Once in the vehicle, he sped towards the boat dock with lights flashing and a pine-scented air freshener bobbing from the rearview mirror.

“Damn, damn,” shouted Pete as he hit the steering wheel with both hands. My reputation is wrapped up in that stinkin’ compost toilet, he thought. I worked too damn hard on getting that pisser. All the time I spent on applying for grants and picking out the right tile, and the arguments with the contractors and the firing of that incompetent Ollie Schwartz with his sloppy grouting. That restroom, so close to the boat dock was an inspired idea! "How the hell did it catch fire?!" Pete wondered out loud.

Pete’s breath caught in his chest. At the back of his brain, a dark thought slithered like a rattler into his awareness. How could this be an accident? Compost toilets don’t’ just spontaneously combust. Smoker? Umm no, not likely that a stray butt would start a fire in that environment, Pete decided.

Damn, smokers anyhow, leaving butts laying around, like Mona and her scarlet ringed butts and smoke breaks that are out of control! Mona, he’d be glad to see the last of her at the end of summer.

Once Pete had tried to tell Mona that smokes were bad for her, “Those things can kill ya, you know?”

Mona looked him dead in the eye and said, “If certain people didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have to smoke.”

With her comment, Pete felt the tops of his ears redden. He said nothing more and walked away as if he’d suddenly remembered somewhere that he needed to be.

"Mona!" Pete's mind flashed the employee's maniacal doll face. Wait, nah, she wouldn’t. Would she? Pete asked himself. He knew so little about her, but because of her bad attitude, he'd made a note to start doing background checks again. Something he’d neglected to do this season because of a tight operating budget.

Out of the darkness the blazing building appeared down the road. With the sight of it, Pete’s internal monologue hushed. When the Bronco rolled to a stop in the parking lot, the roof of the restroom collapsed. Pete winced as if he’d taken a punch in the gut.

Pete got out of the Bronco and walked towards the crackling remains of the outhouse. Earl the camp host was still holding his garden hose. A trickle ran from the hose onto the asphalt, creating a glistening surface that reflected the fire. Earl talked to a camper, who by the look of him hadn’t been to bed yet. He clutched a beer can and swayed like a widowmaker as he stood listening to Earl.

“She’s a goner,” Earl said to the tilting camper. “She never had a chance.”

The camper nodded his head in an exaggerated manner as if he were working up to a bow. In the distance Pete could hear a siren along the lake road, about five minutes away, he judged. Earl turned abruptly as Pete walked up beside him, splashing water on the lizard-skin boots.

“Ah, sorry, Pete. Didn’t see you there.”

“Buck will be here with the water truck if the fire department doesn’t get here first.”

“Too bad about your john,” slurred the camper. “Your man here thinks it wasn’t an accident.”

Pete replied without looking at the camper, “I’ll wait to hear from the fire inspector before I come to any conclusions.”

“Well now, Pete, seems to me like an accelerant was used. She seemed to be a mighty hot fire, mighty hot,” said the new camp host.

“Like I said, we will wait to hear from the experts.” On the inside, Pete thought, Damn it! This idiot is probably right. No accident. But why? Who?

As if the camper had read Pete’s mind, he asked, “You got any enemies? I hear this here loo was your pet project. Maybe somebody is sendin' you a message.”

Pete flinched at the suggestion.

“Pete, ya think Shirley mighta done it? She was real mad at you when she left,” said Earl.

“Who’s Shirley?” asked the camper.

. . .

Shirley and her hen-pecked husband had been the camp hosts at the Frolicking Firs section of the park. Shirley had some health issues and often rode a mobility scooter. The couple was supposed to work through the summer, but a few days ago, one of the park store employees spied Shirley lifting a six-pack of cream soda. She'd stuffed it into her backpack. When she came to the counter, she laid down a handful of candy bars, saying nothing about the six-pack.

The cashier who had seen her put the pop in her pack asked, “Anything else?

“Nope,” replied Shirley.

“Ya sure?”

“Yep.”

What Shirley didn’t know at the time was that Pete had recently installed a new security camera in the store. She found out when Pete confronted her at her campsite and told her that she and hen-pecked would have to pack up and head out by the end of the day. Shirley was holding a can of cream soda which she threw down to the ground with surprising force. The liquid sloshed onto Pete’s boots and pant legs.

“That tears it!” Shirley shouted so loudly that the jays in nearby trees flew off a ways, screeching loudly. While the birds were in an uproar, Shirley began calling Pete every name in the book and a few he was pretty sure she’d invented on the spot. Pete got the impression as he listened to the blue jays cackling in the background that they were on her side and chiming in.

Shirley and her lesser half were gone within an hour. On the way out of the park, Hen-Pecked (under the direction of Shirley, Pete was sure) ran over the green space of Kentucky Bluegrass in front of the headquarters building, scared ground to Pete and everyone who worked there knew it. It was an area he groomed himself, keeping it as well-manicured as a putting green. Gallons of weed killer had been dispensed over the years to keep out anything that was naturally occurring.

It just so happened that the day of Shirley’s firing and eviction the ground was sodden from a morning downpour, so the tires of the Dodge Ram ½ ton and those of the attached Freedom Rider fifth wheel ripped deep and jagged ruts into the once pristine ground.

The employees call the tire impressions “The Trail of Tears,” being that “That tears it” was one of Shirley’s favorite expressions and the mangled grass was a symbol of her rift with Pete. Somebody on staff went so far as to erect a little sign carved out of wood — “The Trail of Tears.” It looked like Buck the maintenance ranger’s handiwork, but nobody took credit for it. Pete took it down immediately and threw it into a fire pit, to be used as kindling, starter wood.

So far, Pete hadn’t been able to convince the maintenance ranger to repair the damage. Pete had called Buck the day of the eviction. “I’ll get to it when I get to it, Pete. It may not look pretty but it’s not a high priority," Buck told him. "I could get to it faster if you’d like to get out from behind the desk and give me a hand with garbage pick up or pumpin' out toilets or clearing trails. But I imagine you're too busy pushing papers around your desk.”

When Pete hung up with Buck, told himself he was right to interfere with the junior ranger's promotions and transfer requests over the years.

2:12 a.m., August 8th, 2001 — South End Boat Launch Parking Lot

Earl pointed off into the darkness, “On my way running over here, I thought I saw a fresh scooter tire prints. Ya know? Like the kind Shirley made.”

“Probably an ATV,” replied Pete.

“Nah, pretty sure it was a mobility scooter. I got used to seeing her tracks on the path to the store.”

“Whoa, ya think someone riding a scooter torched your bogs?” asked the camper. His nearly closed eyelids opened wide with this new information.

“Earl, could I speak with you over by the Bronco?”

“Roger that, Captain.”

As Pete and Earl moved away, Pete weighed the likelihood of Shirley and her whipped husband performing arson. No, Shirley had a temper, but she wasn’t that crazy, was she? Just then Pete spotted a cigarette butt ringed in scarlet. Mona? What would she be doing down here?!

“Listen, Earl, you can’t speculate about the cause of the fire in front of the campers. You are the camp host not Sherlock Holmes so quit guessing at who done it. Have you ever seen Mona hanging around down here?”

“Mona? Nah, can’t say I have. Why? Ya, think she done it, boss?!”

“No, no! It’s something completely unrelated.”

“Well, Pete, just between you and me, I hear through the grapevine, she’s not a big fan of yours and she’s been spouting off about quittin' without notice and leavin' you all short-handed up there at headquarters so you’ll have to do customer service. Wants to teach you a lesson.”

“I don’t humor gossip, Earl.”

“Hate to tell ya but it’s common knowledge with the staff.”

My god! thought Pete. She could have done it! She could have torched the toilet!

A loud pop from the fire made Pete jump. The firetruck sirens were close, in the park. Bedraggled campers could be seen stumbling out of their RVs. Pete and Earl and the other staff showing up would need to keep them out of the firemen’s way.

Deep down Pete knew that Earl was right, this fire was personal, no accident. Later, he wasn’t surprised when members of the park maintenance crew informed him that Mona’s bunk and locker were empty when they got out of bed to assist with the fire. And her orange 1983 AMC Eagle Hatchback plastered with Wicca stickers was gone from the staff’s bunkhouse parking lot.

Tim, one of the seasonal college kids, came up to where Pete stood keeping a barrier between the campers and the fire.

“Where’s Buck?” Pete asked.

“He is having trouble starting the truck.”

“I’ll bet he is.”

“It’s a shame about your thunderbox, boss,” said Tim. “Buck said you put a lot of desk sweat into it and was your goin’ out project before the big brass push… ah I mean before you retire.” Tim immediately regretted his words, wished he’d had time for a cup of coffee, and wondered if he’d have a job tomorrow. Fortunately for Tim, the tension was broken by the arrival of the fire trucks.

Pete watched as water from fire hoses doused the dying flames. So, this is how it ends, Pete mused. When it all comes down to it, all my years with the parks department are as substantial as a wisp of smoke. Some disgruntled worker is getting the last word, I guess. Who knows who? Could be Mona. Could be Shirley. Could be Buck or any number of past employees out to get me. For all I know there is a “Get Pete Club.” For hell’s sake my marriage broke up because of this job and now the end of my career has literally turned into a shit show.

Pete started to chuckle at the absurdity of it all. Then he doubled over belly laughing.

“You okay, boss?” asked Earl.

“Never better,” Pete snorted.

“We better move. That smoke is headed right at us,” said Tim.

Earl and Tim went one way and Pete went the other. He was still laughing as the smoke enveloped him. He stumbled over onto the dock. Blinded by smoke, Pete made a misstep and fell into deep water at the end of the dock. Lake water filled his boots as he sank, and before he could get his wits about him, a searing pain hit his chest and his eyes opened wider than ever before. Pete knew with sudden clarity that he was a goner. And he was right.

2:37 a.m., August 8th, 2001 — South End Boat Launch Parking Lot

“Anybody seen, Pete?” asked Earl. “He clean vanished.”

“Probably scurried up to headquarters and left us with the dirty work. Lousy son of a bitch, be just like him,” replied Buck.

“Did ya hear that splash at the dock a while back? You don’t think he fell in do ya?" Tim asked. "It was when it was really smoky.”

“Probably just a trout jumpin',” snorted Buck. “Nobody would miss that bastard if he did fall in. Hell, there would be a celebration.”

And there was. A few days after Pete’s body drifted onto shore in a neighboring bay, an after-hours wake, of sorts, was held by the employees on the “Trail of Tears” rutted green space. The sign had been resurrected.

12:45 a.m., August 13, 2001 — Seasonal Employees’ Bunkhouse, Laughing Loon Lake State Park

After Pete’s so-called wake, Tim, a sociology major, wrote a quote in his journal to commemorate the event:

“Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?” ~ Confucius