Into the Inferno Read Online Free Page A

developers working duplicitous schemes they’d already honed to perfection on other communities, schemes designed to pull the wool over the eyes of planning boards and all those small-town politicians willing to dabble with the devil to expand their tax base. Controlled growth, they called it. Nobody ever had the nerve or the brains to ask for or think about zero growth. Developers knew they could wear down the protest groups with endless “dialogues.” Talk was good. Keep ’em talking. Eventually each new project broke ground before we all realized we’d lost another battle.
    Along with the fairly recent blight of suburban sprawl, our town was pockmarked with oases of backwardness from the days when everyone was a logger or the offspring of a logger and locals felt their birthright was to park on their front lawns, burn unseasoned wood in their woodstoves until the town was murky with the stink, and shoot their neighbor’s dog with .22 shorts if he barked too much.
    In the piecemeal central business area, we had a Bavarian motif on a Chinese restaurant and across from that a condemned building. We had a gas station converted into a coffeehouse across from a car dealership on the main drag. There was a minimart service station proudly displaying a hundred feet of blank wall to the main street, even more proudly approved by the planning board. We had planters in the middle of North Bend Way, designed years ago, but not built until traffic was already so bad the loss of the center lane jammed all the intersections.
    Half a mile away on the floodplain of the South Fork was the Nintendo factory and the South Fork interchange with an outlet factory mall, McDonald’s, Taco Time, Arby’s, gas stations, and minimarts sucking in skiers, hikers, and rock climbers off the freeway. The outlet mall brought ten thousand cars a day. Busloads of old gummers showed up every day at eleven to shop for bargains. Local burglaries and car break-ins had skyrocketed.
    “It’s Joel’s house, all right,” Karrie said as we pulled up.
    We’d been here before. It was a house Joel could ill afford on a firefighter’s salary, though he managed with the extra money from his wife’s job as a legal secretary in Seattle. More money came in from his wife’s retired mother, who had moved in with them after her husband died. I knew this house. At the fire station Christmas party this past year, Karrie and I spent an hour downstairs on the couch in the dark, an episode we were both trying to forget. I never knew why I did things like that.
    “You think it’s Joel?” Karrie asked. “The radio report said man choking.”
    “Gotta be somebody else. Joel likes to chew his food.”
    Joel’s mother-in-law, a slightly more rickety version of his slender wife, answered the door in a faded housedress and sturdy black shoes with thick soles of the type I hadn’t seen since the last time I was in Sunday school. Wringing her hands, she led us under high ceilings and past an open staircase that led up to the second story. The McCains didn’t have children, so the furniture was clean, not a stick out of place, three lazy cats lounging about.
    The old woman’s hands fluttered about her head as she spoke. “All I did was give him a little slice of apple. A Braeburn. When I came back in the room, he was like this. I thought he would like the taste. They’re from New Zealand.”
    Our old compadre was in a motorized hospital bed, the section under his knees and back elevated, though he looked a whole lot less than comfortable. He was thinner than the last time I’d seen him, his face a blue-black color, mottled with beard growth, eyes bulging, neck veins distended. His jaw was open and he was gasping for air. When I shone a light down his throat, I could just make out a foreign object next to his tonsils.
    He was barely getting enough air to support life.
    I put my finger down his throat and did a finger sweep the way we’d been taught. “He was okay