The Tasley boys slept there a few nights, acquired more than a few bruises on their heads, and determined that instead of sleeping in the closet, they’d just bring sleeping bags into the main meeting space. It had mildewed blue carpeting and a heating system whose two settings were frigid or boiling, and whose walls were plastered, inch by inch, with photographs and placards of the firefighters who had been serving Tasley for eighty-five years.
They ran out of couch space and some of them started sleeping in chairs. The group would arrive together, and sleep together, and if they needed something to eat, they would try to do that together, too, so that when a call came through they would already be in the same car. Waitresses at Panzetti’s Pizza and Waffles got used to seeing large groups of tired men scramble away from the table, pies untouched, bill unpaid, promising to come back the next day to settle up. There were a few movies at the firehouse, stuffed in a filing cabinet. Someone brought over a copy of Backdraft, a movie about a serial arsonist and the firefighters trying to stop him, but it was decided that the 1991 Ron Howard film hadn’t held up so well. They really preferred Ladder 49, a 2004 film starring Joaquin Phoenix as a firefighter trapped in a burning building and John Travolta as the colleague trying to save him. Richie had a PlayStation that he brought in along with a selection of video games, mostly fighting related, or about war.
In the outside world, this was an era of forwarded viral videos. Particularly the Harlem Shake, in which a quiet room of people would suddenly, on a particular musical cue, erupt in Bacchanalian dancing. Versions of the Harlem Shake filmed in office buildings, swimming pools, and department stores flooded the Internet. One night the firefighters of Tasley set up a camera, put on their fire helmets, turned on all the sirens, and filmed a spirited rendition of the Tasley Shake, complete with a person wearing the company’s Dalmatian mascot suit, which was usually reserved for parades.
This, for a group of twentysomething men, became their own personal arson schedule: come to the fire house, play video games, get called for a fire, play more video games, post something on Facebook or YouTube, get called for another fire. It was easier not to sleep sometimes, to instead remain in a perpetual state of wiry adrenaline. They played video games in teams, in which the group of guys from Tasley could challenge a group of guys from somewhere else in the country. It got to the point where nobody wanted to play them because nobody could beat them because nobody else’s minds had melded like theirs. In war-themed games, Bryan Applegate became known for always carrying a Bouncing Betty, a landmine that launched into the air and detonated three feet off the ground, killing his adversaries. The other players would hear the telltale click and say, “GodDAMN it!”
So one offshoot of the arsons was that the firefighters in town came the closest they ever would to an exalted state of holy heroism; the other offshoot was that the men of Tasley became singularly good at playing Call of Duty.
IN THE MIDDLE OF ALL OF THIS, there were fires. There was the fire that was two fires, across the street from each other, one a raging beast that the firemen put out only to realize that the second had been quietly burning the whole time, too. There was the fire where the engine Jeff Beall was driving got there first and Beall, having a fire hose but no way to fill it with water, left the back end of the hose tied around the tree, awaiting a tanker for it to attach to. “I wrapped my hose around a tree!” he kept bellowing into the radio to the men from Onancock, who were a few miles behind and who broke into giggles when they got to the scene and saw the tree tied up like a birthday present. There was the fire where the chief from the Onley Department finished dinner with his family, looked at the clock, picked up his pager and jokingly declared, “Now’s the time!” and the pager went off in his hand.
The stockpiles of Gatorade got bigger, and the sense of community outrage and pride got larger, and the firefighters became intimately acquainted with the baking skills of every sympathetic household on the Eastern Shore. And an airplane hangar burned down, and a big pile of tires burned down, and an old empty restaurant burned down, and abandoned house after abandoned house, and there was always something burning.
There was only one thing to be grateful for, and that was that the arsonist hadn’t tried to burn down Whispering Pines. That old resort complex was just down the street from the Tasley Fire Department, and over the years it had gone from being an abandoned eyesore to a bona fide structural hazard and the ghost of Accomack’s past, symbolizing everything the county once had. The original owners had sold it in the early 1970s. It had changed hands several times until it closed, and the most recent owner had accrued more than $10,000 in back taxes. A church held services in one of the meeting halls, but the sewage system was declared unsafe. Finally, a few months before the arsons began, a small cluster of people had gathered near the steps of the courthouse. Two county employees set up a folding card table in the crisp early spring air. It was a public auction. Whispering Pines was the only item on the auction block. The place that had once hosted the Glenn Miller orchestra, where Diana Ross of the Supremes had once ordered a Chinese dish in the dining room, where a generation of Accomack teenagers earned their first paychecks as dishwashers in the back, now sold at auction for $28,000. The whole hotel, all of the land, sold for pennies on the dollar to a man who did not have an Eastern Shore name.
Now, the townspeople joked about Whispering Pines: “One of these days, they should burn down that shit heap.” Put it out of its misery. But the firefighters knew that the actuality of that fire would be monstrous. Bigger than anything any of them had ever seen, in all their combined years of work. Awesome and terrible and biblical, almost.
Christmas Eve came and there was a big fire in a garage that happened to have a propane tank in it, and that fire lit the sky. Christmas Day came, and Sheriff Todd Godwin had encouraged most of his deputies to take the day off. He spent the evening riding around with Scott Wade, a special agent with the Virginia State Police who normally worked with the drug task force. Godwin and Wade stopped at a Royal Farms gas station for a cup of coffee and when they got inside it was mostly empty but for a few people.
Two of the people were Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick. Godwin and Wade slid into the booth across from them, shooting the breeze, idling away a lonely Christmas. Godwin asked about Tonya’s boys and Wade asked about Charlie’s family, and they talked a little about the arsons.
“Y’all must be busy, with all the fires going on,” Charlie said.
“Yes,” Godwin and Wade said with weariness. They were busy and exhausted. The two pairs finished their coffee and went back out into the dark, empty county, but there was no fire that night and Christmas was, mercifully, quiet.
CHAPTER 8