Local News
The cold is killing in Cranston tonight — a homeless man, thirties, Caucasian, found huddled and frozen inside a Dumpster behind a convenience store. I drive over with Mario to film the EMTs carting him away. He's already in the ambulance by the time we get there, so the footage is just a shot of the Dumpster, rimmed by yellow police tape, and an interview with the clerk who found him.
“Threw in the trash and there he was,” the clerk, a twenty-year-old with a lip piercing, says. “His lips were all blue and stuff.”
The night air slashes my face. I want to ask him if his tongue ever sticks to the piercing when it's freezing cold, but I don't. Two years on the job have taught me to keep to the subject at hand. So instead I thank him, walk over to the cops, and ask the usual questions.
“Any ID?” I say.
When Jeff sees it's me, he turns his back and lets his partner Aurora handle it.
“Nothing so far,” she says. “We're going to ask around at the shelter. I'm thinking he was drunk and fell asleep in there. You keeping warm, Joanne?”
“Not at the moment,” I say.
“You too skinny, that's why.” Aurora, who's forty-five and has grown children, thinks of me maternally. She also thinks that if I just agreed to marry Jeff and started having babies, all our problems would be solved. He's already back at the patrol car, ignoring me.
“Go home and warm up,” she says.
“You take care too, Aurora.”
In front of the camera, I take off my hat, and my ears burn. No matter how cold it is, I still have to take off the hat. Behind the lens, Mario's wearing a sheepskin hat with earflaps, and earmuffs on top of that.
“Police are investigating the death of a homeless man due to bitter cold in Cranston tonight,” I say into the microphone. I wonder why cold is always bitter, never melancholy, never peeved or furious. The cold tonight feels whiny and pissed off — something about dampness in the air, about a lack of sparkle in the frozen brown slush. The cold is upset in the manner of someone who's been unhappily married for twenty years and just can't take it anymore. I talk into the mike about the weather forecast (still cold, getting colder), the crowded conditions at all the shelters, and the need for everybody to drive safely. Cold's a story we've covered a million times before, and I can tell Mario isn't even listening. I put my hat back on and we take the van back to the station. The heat of the vehicle makes me yawn. Then the scanner crackles. I hear the code for a fire, and tell Mario to turn the van around.
“Come on, man, really? It's ten-thirty.”
“News never sleeps,” I tell him, and he rolls his eyes and lights a cigarette, to get back at me, because he knows I hate smoke.
When we get there the fire's climbing up into the night, several stories of flame rising above the building itself. For a state surrounded by water, Rhode Island's terrible with fires. This one's in a dilapidated strip mall in Woonsocket, and it started late at night, which probably means no one was around. Although if no one was around, how did it start in the first place? I step out of the van and prepare to be investigative. The scene that greets me is painted in neon: the orange sizzle of the rising flames, the pulsating lights of the fire trucks, the bright jets of water arcing from the hoses. People from nearby neighborhoods are standing around, watching. A car pulls up, screeching to a stop, and a fat middle-aged man climbs out and runs up to the closest cop.
“What the hell happened?” I can hear him saying.
To my surprise I spot Jeff talking to another officer, their cars parked nose to nose. I go over and stand in front of him, where he can't act like he doesn't see me. “What are you doing here?” I say.
“Happened to be in the neighborhood. Aurora likes the soup at a place around the corner.”
“So what's the deal?”
“Portuguese kale, for two-ninety-five,” he says. And then he adds, because he's never sure I notice when he makes a joke, “That's the soup.”
“Yeah, I got it,” I say. “So what happened, exactly?”
“We're still trying to find out.” He looks at me critically. “Your nose is really red, you know. Watch out you don't get frostbite.”
“I'll work on it,” I say. His nose is red, too, but I don't point this out. I feel it isn't my place anymore. Two weeks ago he said that if we didn't start talking about marriage, he'd walk away; this week he's barely said anything to me at all. “You're wasting my time,” was the last thing he said to me on the subject. I didn't know how to tell him that time is exactly what I don't want to waste. I have plans that go beyond the local news, beyond the here and now. I never pictured myself as a policeman's wife, waiting up for him at three in the morning; in fact I never expected, when we first spent the night together, that it would go any further than that. When I think about my future, it takes place on a stage that's shiny and huge, in New York or L.A., with me on TV at six o'clock bantering with the middle-aged male anchor in the blue power suit. My future isn't in cruising around the Ocean State in the News Ten van all hours of the night. I have to admit, though, that I'll have a hard time forgetting Jeff's warm chest and the little scar above his right eye and the fact that he genuinely seems to like bringing me coffee in bed in the morning. When your real life collides with the one you've been dreaming of, it's hard to know which should win out.
The smell of the fire is dense and vicious — bitter, like the cold — and it singes my nostrils. The air is layered with toxic, plastic-scented fumes. Mario's filming and yawning at the same time. I scan the crowd, scouting for interviews. The fat guy who got out of the car earlier is trying to get into the store, apparently trying to get into the fire, and he's being held back, practically bear-hugged, by a cop I don't know. The fat guy squirms and wriggles like a child in his embrace. I wave at Mario and we go over.
“Sir, is this your store?”
The light of the camera calms him down, and the cop nods at me and lets go. Nobody goes anywhere while they're on film. He mutters in the guy's ear, “Everybody here needs to go stand on the other side of the parking lot, behind the fire trucks, understand?”
Another hose goes on, and the noise of the water and the fire together drowns out our voices. I motion to the guy to follow me back to the other side of the lot, then glance over my shoulder to make sure Mario's not spacing out, which he sometimes does when he feels I've kept him out too long.
“Is this your store?” I say again, pointing the microphone in his face. “What's your name?”
In the glare of the lights his eyes are tiny and black, set back in his face like raisins in a cinnamon roll. He looks bewildered and angry. I'm not sure he speaks English.
“What's your name?” I say again.
“Everything … everything's burning,” he finally says.
“In your store? Do you own the store, sir?”
“I never thought it could burn. All the inventory — how could a store like that burn?”