Report from a Place of Burning by George Looney

Author:George Looney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2018-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

The Mother Gets Back Her Tragic Intuition

I was the first to be able to say what had happened, how it had started, at the Heinz plant. The fire that gutted so much of it and closed it down.

Arson was the suspicion. It’s what we started with, the assumption someone had been pissed off enough to set fire to the plant. Heinz, of course, didn’t want it to be arson. They needed the report to read accident so they could just write off the plant as a loss and save a bundle on taxes.

For days my team and I made our way from one part of the plant to another, while outside the chain-link fence the men and women who had worked at the plant milled about, even those who had been on shift when the fire started and had had to file out through the smoke and the blaring of the alarms and the almost-recognizable-as-human voice booming over the alarm telling everyone to Leave the building immediately. Some looked as if they hadn’t slept since that panicked waltz through the smoke and the sirens. Some held babies or the hands of small children dancing beside them. Some held onto the fence as they watched us moving among the still-smoking ruin of the plant with our notebooks and our tape recorders and our video cameras. They were all waiting to learn what would happen to them.

I couldn’t tell them anything. Certainly not anything they needed to hear. What Heinz would decide to do wasn’t what I was there for. I was there looking for the cause. I was there to trace the fire back to its beginning and there to find either motive or faulty equipment, malice or random chance.

This was not the first time I’d been in charge. I had come up fast in the company. Seems I had a flair for the work, an intuitive grasp of details in and around tragic events that helped me to focus the attention of others in ways that almost always bore fruit. Guess you could say I was a bit of a phenom. And my team knew it. They had already, by the Heinz plant fire, come to trust my intuition, even more than I did.

The suspicion was arson, but my intuition was telling me something else. We combed each of the buildings the fire had gutted while men and women suddenly left without jobs made an event out of watching us. They picnicked on the lawn just outside the chain-link fence their children would climb on till they yelled at them to get down off that fence and come over and eat their egg or tuna salad sandwiches. Outside that fence was the feel of a festival mixed with the scent of desperation. Children of varying ages were running around loudly engaged in games my intuition had no feel for, and their parents stood at the fence or sat on the lawn facing the fence and their eyes stayed focused on my team with an almost religious fervor.

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