American Fire Read online

  AMERICAN

  FIRE

  LOVE, ARSON, AND LIFE

  IN A VANISHING LAND

  MONICA HESSE

  For firefighters and lovers everywhere,

  but especially the ones in Tasley.

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  1. “CHARGE THAT LINE!”

  2. “THE SOUTH STARTS HERE”

  3. “ORANGE IN THE SKY”

  4. CHARLIE

  5. MONOMANIE INCENDIAIRE

  6. TONYA

  7. “LIKE A GHOST”

  8. “TELL US WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT”

  9. CHARLIE AND TONYA

  10. SCHRÖDINGER’S EVIDENCE

  11. THE EASTERN SHORE ARSONIST HUNTERS

  12. “I’VE SEEN ENOUGH ASS TO KNOW”

  13. “LIKE HELL WAS COMING UP THROUGH THE GROUND”

  14. TONYA AND CHARLIE

  15. “THEY’RE NOT HUNTERS AT ALL”

  16. “I DIDN’T LIGHT THEM ALL”

  17. “SOMEDAY THEY’LL GO DOWN TOGETHER”

  18. “EVERYBODY HAS A REASON FOR WHY THEY DO THINGS IN LIFE”

  19. “I CAN’T TELL YOU SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW”

  20. “MIDNIGHT WITHOUT MAKEUP”

  21. THE BROKEN THINGS

  22. “TIME TO WAKE UP”

  23. BURNED

  24. “WE’D DONE IT BEFORE”

  25. “THEY CAME OUT OF EVERYWHERE”

  26. “MORAL TURPITUDE”

  27. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

  28. “IT’S OVER”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  I FIRST DROVE DOWN to Accomack County, Virginia, on Halloween weekend of 2013. There had been a bunch of fires there, two people had been arrested for setting them, and one of those people was now scheduled to submit his plea. At the time I was in the cruddiest place a journalist can be—between stories and out of ideas—and I’d asked my editor to send me to Accomack mostly because I was looking for an assignment that would get me out of the office for a day. Inside the courthouse, a red brick building that looked like a movie-set courthouse on a movie-set town square, the defendant in question admitted he was guilty, but didn’t say why he’d done it.

  I spent the next two years trying to understand why he did it. The answer, inasmuch as there is an answer for these things, involved hope, poverty, pride, Walmart, erectile dysfunction, Steak-umms (the chopped meat sold in the frozen foods aisle), intrigue, and America. America: the way it’s disappointing sometimes, the way it’s never what it used to be.

  But it also involved love. The kind of love that is vaguely crazy and then completely crazy and then collapses in on itself in a way that leaves the participants bewildered and telling very different stories about what actually happened. In this instance, the stories shared only one essential truth: When this string of fires began, the defendants were in love. By the time they finished, they weren’t.

  AMERICAN FIRE

  CHAPTER 1

  “CHARGE THAT LINE!”

  IT WAS COLD AND DRY, and Deborah Clark found herself wondering, briefly, whether the dryness was important. Fire had to come from somewhere, and if the dry ground had caused an electrostatic spark, then that would explain why, less than a hundred yards from her back steps, there were giant orange flames licking the night sky. A friend had seen them first; he’d pulled out of Deborah’s dirt drive after dinner and then frantically banged on her door a few minutes later, yelling, “Hey—the house across the field is on fire.” The field was small and rough and it had corn sometimes, with stalks that shook like paper, but it didn’t have corn this time of year. On the night of November 12, 2012, it had nothing but brown grass, the burning house, and the flames rolling in Clark’s direction.

  Clark’s niece lived next door, in a place that looked the same as Clark’s and most of the other homes on that stretch of Virginia road: a pastel double-wide, well maintained but sinking, each plunked along a tight squeeze of a two-lane route. Now Clark ran to warn her niece about the burning house, which had been different from the others: it was fancy, two stories, white paint, hardwoods, generations of the same family living and dying and moving in and out, until finally somebody moved out and nobody moved in. Clark couldn’t remember the last time anyone had lived in that house. She knew it didn’t have working power.

  Clark ran back to her own house and picked up the telephone. By the time the 911 dispatcher answered at 10:41 p.m., Clark had determined that electrostatic anomalies aside, there was really only one likely possibility for what had happened:

  “I’m just calling,” she began, flustered and out of breath. “Somebody done set the house on fire on Dennis Drive!”

  “Okay,” said the dispatcher at the Eastern Shore 911 Center, seven miles away. “What’s the address, ma’am?”

  “I’m on Dennis Drive—I don’t know the address.”

  “Is it your house?”

  “No—it’s a big house, an empty house.”

  “Nobody’s in the house, ma’am?”

  “No,” Clark said.

  “Is anybody around the house?”

  “No,” she said.

  Now the fire had lit the night like a flashbulb, causing the air around it to go bright and blurry and sending waves of heat onto her property line.

  “It’s blazing,” she begged the dispatcher. “It’s getting in the field. It’s about to get everywhere.”

  “We’ll go ahead and get the fire department on the way.”

  Before the call even ended, the dispatcher had already plugged Clark’s location into his dispatch system, which immediately began calculating the fire stations that were in the jurisdiction of the call. The current policy was to summon four stations in order to make sure enough bodies and enough pressurized water showed up at the scene. All of the fire stations in Accomack County were operated by volunteers. The manpower for any given fire was entirely dependent on who didn’t need to pull a double shift at the chicken factory, and who wasn’t stuck overnight on a crabbing boat in the Chesapeake Bay, and who didn’t have a baby teething at home, and who could stumble out of bed and race to the fire station in time, leaving pickup trucks askew in station parking lots, and jumping into fire engines that screamed at 130 decibels and shook off any remaining sleep.

  “Stations 7, 6, 8, and 18,” the dispatcher now said into his headset. The computer-aided system had finished its calculations and provided the closest fire stations, and now, from his cubicle, the dispatcher began to organize emergency response via radio. “Station 7—fire and EMS response. Residential structure fire, Dennis Drive, Parksley,” he said into his headset. “Caller has advised apparent abandoned structure, fully involved.”

  All around the county, heavy black pagers were going off in living rooms and bedrooms, first ringing with the two-noted tone reserved for each particular station, and then coming alive with static-filled instructions. At his home and preparing to eat a slice of cake for his fifty-first birthday, Phil Kelley, the chief of Station 7, the Parksley Fire Department, heard the request for his department to bring both a fire engine and an ambulance. He knew this signified that his station was “first due”: although three additional stations would arrive to assist, he would be in charge of controlling the scene. He heard the dispatcher describe the fire as “fully involved,” and he knew that, if the description was accurate, it would mean there were flames showing. Fully involved meant the fire was bad.

  “Chief 7, en route to station,” he radioed in at 10:44 p.m., three minutes after Deborah’s 911 call.

  “Six-seven, responding par two,” responded a truck from Bloxom. “Six” was their station number, “seven” the truck number, and “par two” indicated that the truck contained a pair of
firefighters. Bloxom’s truck was the first to arrive at the fire, even before Phil Kelley. The Bloxom firefighter holding the radio got out of the truck on Dennis Drive and assessed the situation. “Be advised,” he said into his radio, “structure is fully involved.”

  Kelley, a compact man with a ruddy face and parchment-pale eyebrows, got to the scene and immediately wondered if he might need more water. He was an experienced firefighter. When he wasn’t commandeering Parksley’s volunteer department, he’d obtained the only kind of paying fire work one could in Accomack County—on Wallops Island, the NASA facility off the Accomack coast in the northern part of the county. There, a team of federally employed firefighters with security clearances obsessively checked and rechecked launch equipment, NASA believing that the best rocket-related fire was one that never happened to begin with. Landing the NASA job had been a life goal for Kelley. He’d grown up in Accomack and had signed up as a support volunteer for the firehouse when he turned fourteen, helping to clean equipment and learning to pack and unpack hoses. Now he was middle-aged, he knew fires, and he sensed that the burning house on Dennis Drive would deplete the water resources on the scene before the fire could be put out. Most of the towns in Accomack County didn’t have a municipal water supply, which meant they didn’t have fire hydrants. Water was not an unlimited resource. “You pump what you brung” was an old fireman’s saying: the volunteer firefighters carried water to scenes in giant metal tankers that held twenty-five hundred gallons each. They pumped the water from their tankers using their engines, and hoped they had enough, or that they’d be close enough to a pond or stream to get more.

  “Central, what tankers do I have?” Kelley radioed into the dispatch center, asking for a list of all the trucks present. He listened to the roll call and made a decision. “I need another tanker.”

  Luckily, one was already on its way.

  “Eight-seven, responding par two,” said Richie Bridges, a captain with Station 8, the department from the town of Tasley, as he barreled down Lankford Highway in a massive tanker.

  Tasley was farther away from the fire than Parksley and Bloxom had been, located ten miles down the Eastern Shore. Tasley had the crummiest firehouse with some of the most lovingly cared-for trucks; members entered them into competitions where they won trophies for their high shine. Tonight, for the Dennis Drive fire, the Tasley company brought two of these vehicles: the tanker driven by Richie, whose sister Shannon Bridges sat in the passenger side, and an engine, driven by the Tasley chief, Jeff Beall. Beall was a tall man with a bristling mustache and a wit as dry as sandpaper. He’d drive thirty miles to loan a friend $20, but whether a person liked him depended on whether they understood that some people showed their love through exacting expectations and constant sarcasm. When Beall’s new volunteers told him they were ready to start driving the trucks, he liked to take the aspiring firefighter in a twenty-four-foot-long engine to an empty mansion with a complicated circular driveway and instruct the newbie to drive the engine around it, backward, without touching the grass. It was a little bit of a showboating move, but the Tasley crew were good drivers. Tonight both Bridges and Beall had made it from asleep in their beds to standing in front of a fire, ten miles away, fully suited in protective gear, in less than fifteen minutes.

  At Dennis Drive, Kelley saw that Beall’s engine had arrived. The two men were friends; they worked together on Wallops Island. They respected and trusted each other, and Kelley immediately ordered Beall’s team to fill a two-and-a-half-inch hose with water and start attacking the west side of the building. The plan, he’d decided, would be to put out the fire where it was most virulent, and then force the house to collapse to the ground while they doused the rest of the flames. “Eight-five,” he told Beall’s engine. “Charge that line!”

  Three tankers had arrived now, and three engines, and more than a dozen men and women had all come to fight the fire on Dennis Drive.

  “Central to Chief 7,” the dispatcher back at the 911 Center broke in with a time check. “You are now fifteen minutes into your incident.”

  “I copy, fifteen minutes,” Kelley responded from the front yard where he’d designated a makeshift command post. The air apparatus that each firefighter wore on his or her back carried only forty-five minutes worth of breathable oxygen. Dispatch made sure fire captains were aware of the time.

  But right now, Kelley had other considerations besides air supply. He had been right to worry about water: The first tanker to arrive on the scene, the one from Bloxom, was now almost out. So was the tanker that Tasley had brought to the fire. “I’m dry,” Beall said into his headset. The fire was cracking like a whip and roaring loudly enough that a headset was the easiest way for men standing just across the yard from each other to communicate.

  “I’m out,” another firefighter said into his headset, and then a third: “We’re out of water.”

  If the fire cleared the field, it would reach a cluster of houses that stood closer together, with trees that the flames could leap between. It couldn’t be allowed to clear the field. Kelley instructed an empty tanker to switch places with a fuller one, sending the empty one to find a place to refill, orchestrating a ballet of heavy equipment easing in and out of the gravel drive. Some fire chiefs didn’t mind socializing during fires; they liked when volunteers or neighbors stopped by to ask questions or lament the burning structure. Kelley wasn’t one of those chiefs. At a scene, his volunteers knew to give him a wide berth while he figured out the fire. He viewed each one like a puzzle with a unique set of pieces: which hoses to use and where, which access roads needed to stay clear and when. Holding all of those pieces in his head required concentration; he went still and silent while he figured things out.

  “Central to Chief 7,” the dispatcher interrupted. “You are now thirty minutes into your incident.”

  The dispatcher asked if they had enough lighting, and Kelley told him the lighting was fine, but the amount of smoke was becoming a problem. Fifteen minutes left on the air packs. If the smoke stayed black for longer than that, he would have to start sending in relief teams or request more backup.

  For now, he decided that the best thing to do was continue with what they were already doing: more water, more tankers, more water, putting out the fire in the way that, at its most elemental, was the only way to ever put out fires since the beginning of time.

  Communication between the dispatcher and the firefighters on the radio slowed, as Kelley requested face-to-face meetings with his deputies. “Surround and drown,” he instructed them, when they met him in the front yard. Get the fire out by attacking it from every direction.

  “Central to Chief 7,” said the dispatcher. “You are now forty-five minutes into your incident. I got one fresh body coming to you, that’s all I got.”

  The uniforms and equipment that each firefighter wore totaled more than one hundred pounds, and Kelley was starting to feel it. He hesitated before answering the dispatcher: “It’s under control.”

  The fire had finally reached its turning point. Kelley could tell that the mist rising from the house was no longer smoke, but water evaporating as it hit the hot parts of the wood. This was called “steam conversion,” and it was how a firefighter knew that he’d reached the seed of the fire and that the fire was almost dead. At any fire, one of the last puzzle pieces to click into place for Kelley was the moment when he stood in front of a house and watched smoke become steam. Now, on Dennis Drive, there was just smoldering embers, charred wood, and ash, and firefighters sweating in their gear, bone weary in a way that the joggers among them would say was closer to marathon exhaustion than wind sprints.

  The nice old house was gone. The owner, it would later turn out, had moved to a nursing home and died three years before. Her belongings had all been left behind. The house had been full of them, and they were now scattered in the grass. Papers, clothing, broken dolls, and hardcover books with titles like The World Since 1914, a 1933 edition.

  With the
fire put out, there was no light but the headlamps from the trucks. The firefighters walked the perimeter of the scene, as they did with all fires, making sure that there were no remaining embers, nothing to catch on the nearby trees or to send a fire to the houses across the field. Again, they saw nothing unusual, nothing suspicious. When all of that patrolling was done, Kelley, who never did end up eating his birthday cake, radioed in his last update from the scene at nearly one in the morning of November 13: “Terminating command.”

  MEANWHILE, around the county on the night of November 12:

  The sheriff was home with his pager resting on the nightstand, where he left it most nights so he could be awakened in case of emergencies.

  The Commonwealth’s attorney was at home, preparing for an odd case involving a drunk Navy SEAL.

  The ATF and the FBI and the other agencies whose personnel would eventually descend on the county were home, too, but their homes were far away and they were unaware, as of yet, that Accomack even existed.

  The regular citizens of the area were quietly doing regular things. Lois Gomez was asleep, preparing for another shift at Perdue, where she would package goose-bumped chicken thighs and wings from a fast-moving conveyor belt, thousands of chickens every day. Helen Hasty was awake, irritated that her dog kept barking, but chalking it up to his age and increasing senility.

  Charles Smith, a body shop owner who did precise work at fair prices, who had a self-effacing frankness that most people found endearing—Charlie had lit the fire. But nobody knew that yet, and they wouldn’t for a long time.

  The firefighters of Accomack County would be called out two more times that night. They would be called out eighty-six times total over the next five months.

  The county would grow used to hearing the wail of sirens in the middle of the night, the sound of engines and tankers crunching over gravel. The county would see landmarks go up in flames and neighbors eye one another with suspicion at the grocery store. At night, the roads would transform into a sea of checkpoints and cop cars; citizens trying to get home while Accomack turned into a police state and the county lit up around them. The county went about its business. The county burned down.